Wrong on so many levels:

The National Automotive Council (NAC) is collaborating with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) to fine-tune the concept for a made-in-Nigeria car…

“Once the bill is passed and the budget proposal before the National Assembly is passed, we will come up with the concept of the made-in-Nigeria car with a road show,” [Aminu Jalal, the Director General of the Council] said.

The automobile needs of Nigeria can only be met when all the stakeholders in the industry work towards meeting international standard, Mr. Jalal said, adding that the agency’s main focus is to encourage local manufacture of auto components. The council is equally wooing Nigerians in the Diaspora, who have indicated interest in investing in the manufacturing of auto components and ancillaries.

Unlike other emerging economies, Nigeria is yet to witness a revolution in its automobile industrial sector. As at today, the dream to have a made-in-Nigeria car has remained exactly that – a dream.

Apparently, “the absence of local source of raw materials” has delayed progress to date. From the look of early designs, this obstacle has been solved through judicious use of Lego. Presumably, the full power of the UN system will now be thrown behind the project.

Today, Ban-Ki Moon, worried by fading prospects for a climate deal at Copenhagen, will try and knock heads (of state) together at his Summit on Climate Change. Here’s the list of speakers:

H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
H.E. Mr. Barack Obama, President of the United States of America
H.E. Mr. Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Republic of Maldives
H.E. Mr. Hu Jintao, President of the Peoples Republic of China
H.E. Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, Prime Minister of Japan
H.E. Mr. Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda
H.E. Mr. Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of Sweden
H.E. Mr. Óscar Arias Sánchez, President of Costa Rica
H.E. Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France
Professor Wangari Muta Maathai, Founder, Green Belt Movement, Kenya (Civil Society)
Ms. Yugratna Srivastava, Asia-Pacific UNEP/TUNZA Junior-Board representative, India, age 13 (Youth)
H.E. Mr. Tillman Joseph Thomas, Prime Minister of Grenada
H.E. Mr. Ahmad Babiker Nahar , Minister of Environment and Urban Development of Sudan
H.E. Mr. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark

It’s a pretty standard list – major powers (check), regional balance (check), soon-to-be-submerged-island-state (check), boffin (check), civil society (check), token youth (check). But then you hit the European problem. The Swedes hold the Presidency and thus speak for the EU. Rasmussen is there because he’s going to shoulder a lot of the blame if Copenhagen fails to deliver. But how on earth has Nicolas Sarkozy managed to clamber onto the platform?

It beggars belief that, just when Europeans most need to speak with a single voice, the French president is – once again – giving his ego free rein. Or have I missed something?

A few hours ago, Daniel Korski suggested on Global Dashboard that the United Nations lied about the shelling of one of its schools – with the UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, playing a part in disseminating the falsehood in a statement in which he condemned this and two similar attacks as ‘unacceptable’.

Like Daniel, I don’t fully understand what happened, or why – but have been trying to track how the story developed. It appears that re-investigation of the attack was conducted by Patrick Martin, from the Canadian Globe and Mail. His story was headlined “account of the Israeli story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

Martin interviewed eyewitnesses who told him that while “a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed.”  No shell landed in the schoolyard itself, he writes, but 43 people were killed by three shells in the street outside.

Martin’s report continues:

The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. “I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound],” he said. “I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help. But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”

The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.”

“Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”

Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.

“There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”

This account seems broadly consistent with the UN News Centre report that Daniel links to (and which contains Ban’s condemnation). In it John Ging is reported as saying that “some 30 people were killed and 55 others injured, five of them critically, when three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a school, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp.”

Martin argues that the United Nations’ description of the attack was ambiguous and that UN agencies failed to correct “widespread news reports of the deaths in the school.” Israeli reports also seem to have been confused, however, with Mark Regev, the Israeli PM’s spokesman telling the media that (i) there was hostile fire from the school; (ii) the explosion that resulted was “out of proportion to the ordnance we used.” (e.g. that the school had been booby trapped).

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One of the most disturbing stories to emerge during Israel’s recent incursion in Gaza was Israeli shelling of a UN school. This is how Reuters described it:

Israeli shelling killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said.

The BBC reported that

. . .at least 40 people were killed and 55 injured when Israeli artillery shells landed outside a United Nations-run school in Gaza, UN officials have said.

But though the BBC story placed the shell outside the school, UN officials have now set the record straight. As Haaretz reports, Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, clarified that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.

UNRWA said that the source of the mistaken story had originated “with a separate branch of the United Nations.” Unfortunately, this branch seems to have pretty good access to the UN Secretary-General’s office, because on 6 January 2009 Ban Ki-Moon himself spoke out against Israel’s “totally unacceptable” attacks against what the UN’s own News Centre called “three clearly-marked United Nations schools, where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing conflict in Gaza”.

Who knows what actually happened. The fog of war was deliberately made thicker by both the IDF and Hamas. It is clear many people, including civilians, died in Gaza. But the UN school story is beginning to look like the Jenin “massacre” story from 2002. Then the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the “massacre of the 21st century” in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. “Medical sources” informed Wafa of “hundreds of martyrs.” Reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin were spread by Palestinian sources on CNN and elsewhere.

But this turned out to be a lie. There was a battle in Jenin. But the “hundreds” of martyrs were an invention. The death toll was 56 Palestinians, the majority of them combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. By then, however, the story had served its purpose, much the same as the UN school story did.

In war, information is a weapon. But not one usually used by the UN.

News from Lebanon:

BEIRUT: Poland has said it may withdraw its troops from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), prompting fears of a “crunch” in international peacekeeping resources as governments slash spending in the face of the global financial crisis. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Saturday that his government would “certainly take a decision” this year on the continued presence of almost 500 troops that the country contributes to UNIFIL.

Last month Poland announced it would cut its contribution to a peacekeeping force in Chad in a bid to save money.  “We will consider whether it makes sense to continue certain foreign missions,” Tusk said.

His comments come as his government announced it is cutting spending by almost $5 billion as the global economic crisis deepens, and there are fears that other countries could follow suit and seek to save money by withdrawing troops from expensive overseas peacekeeping missions.

Last week France announced cuts in such missions around the world, including the withdrawal of two naval vessels from UNIFIL’s maritime contingent, which patrols Lebanese waters to prevent arms smuggling into the country by sea.

The problem stems from the way the countries are reimbursed for the peacekeepers they provide. The UN offers a fixed amount for each solider that a country contributes to a peacekeeping mission, regardless of how much it costs the country to pay the soldier.

The system means that poorer countries are able to contribute troops without cost to their domestic budget. But in richer countries, where soldiers earn more than the UN’s reimbursement, national governments are footing the bill for contributing troops to the missions.

On this reckoning, the financial crisis means that the West will increasingly demand that poor countries take on peacekeeping – more UN and AU missions, then, and less from NATO. Poor governments may well respond with enthusiasm, as UN subsidies will help keep their generals happy. Peace operations will remain low-tech and dogged by fights between “those who pay” and “those who play”… Not a happy picture.

This holiday I read Alpha Dogs, the story of the Sawyer Miller Group, a political consultancy firm that pioneered international electioneering. Long before Karl Rove and James Carville became household names, Scott Miller and David Sawyer were peddling the techniques and snake oil of American electioneering to dictators and reformers throughout the world. Before it dissolved in 1991, the company steered Corazon Aquino to power in the Philippines, helped Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, and backed Israel’s Shimon Peres.

What advice, I thought, would the Sawyer Miller Group give if it was hired by Hamid Karzai? How would it steer the career of this moderate, one-term president who is seeking re-election but is haemorrhaging both international and local support and has failed to deliver much of what his voters — especially his core Pashtun constituency in the south and east — expected?

In figuring out what Sawyer Miller would say, it may be worthwhile recalling what they told Kevin White, the Mayor of Boston, when he looked as though he was headed for defeat in the late 1970s: people don’t like you, but they trust you to get the job done. Make the election about competence, not charisma.

Voters don’t like Karzai anymore, but some still approve of his record. Unfortunately, they are concentrated in the northeastern, northwestern and eastern parts of the country.  In Karzai’s base, among Pashtuns in the  southeast, little more than half of respondents (56%) told the Asian Foundation the government is doing a good job. So Candidate Karzai, Sawyer Miller would probably say, needs to focus on southerners.

This means getting southerners to vote and then, doing more for them — even to the point of discrimination. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to be accused of favouring southern Pashtuns, the Sawyer Miller consultant might say. True, it might alienate Tajiks, and Uzbeks, the old Northern Alliance, but it is probably safe to assume that the U.S will ensure they do not try to break up the country, even if they make loud noises. So it should be smooth sailing.

But here’s the catch: southerners reveals a clear preference for resolving issues at the community level and are more distrustful of the Kabul government. That may not be surprising with two-thirds telling pollsters their elected representatives are unresponsive. So perhaps Candidate Karzai should launch initiatives aimed at greater decentralisation for the south and compel friendly MPs to organise weekly “town-hall meetings”. Karzai might also persuaded to float the idea of directly-elected governors too. (more…)

Flickr user aturkus

Over at (the truly excellent) Clusterstock, Jay Yarrow notes that US car-markers are complaining bitterly about being forced to cut their fleet’s emissions.

The crippled industry, which we’ve already pumped full of cash, just can’t support changing its production. Big beefy SUVs and light trucks are profitable, compact cars are not. Gasoline is oversupplied, the economy’s in a rut, fewer people are buying hybrids. General Motors just laid off 2,000 workers yesterday. The timing is not right for tougher emission standards.

“When exactly will the timing be right for a shift in fuel standards?” Yarrow asks. “When the economy is flying high? Like it was just a few years ago and nothing changed? Or when gas prices spike again and it’s too late?”

I made a similar point in last week’s talk at the United Nations University. In the boom years of 2000-2006, global emissions shot up by 2.6% a year – blowing to bits the figure of 1% that Stern used in his models. Reflecting on these trends, Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows argued that:

It is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650ppm.

But now we have that recession (not planned of course), falling energy demand, and a breathing space where global emissions are likely to decline. Will leaders use the opportunity to do a global climate deal? Or will they listen to their industrial lobbies and decide that tomorrow (or the day after that) will surely be a better time?

A year or so ago, I did a post wondering what had happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Well, something looking very like it now certainly seems to be reappearing in Iceland at least. Here’s Roger Boyes in the Times on Wednesday last week:

Icelanders all but stormed their Parliament last night. It was the first session of the chamber after what might appear to be an unusually long Christmas break. Ordinary islanders were determined to vent their fury at the way that the political class had allowed the country to slip towards bankruptcy. The building was splattered with paint and yoghurt, the crowd yelled and banged pans, fired rockets at the windows and lit a bonfire in front of the main door. Riot police moved in.

Eirikur Bergmann thinks this amounts to “at the very least, a revolution in political activism”.  And both writers are having a grand old time identifying the baddie.  (more…)

I’ve been in Japan today, speaking at ‘Reforming International Institutions – Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century’,  a seminar organized by the United Nations University and the British Embassy in Japan.

You can download my talk here (with pictures, references etc) – or the text only is available below the jump. There’s a webcast too.

Headlines:

• It’s going to be a tough year. The financial meltdown has a long way to go, and the downturn is risking turning into a global depression.
• Trade is a bell wether. Protectionist pressures are already on the rise. If they gain traction, take that as a warning of a wider loss of confidence in global institutions.
• The unravelling of global economic imbalances could prove corrosive to the international order. If countries start to devalue to protect exports, expect a tit-for-tat dynamic to kick in.
• Scarcity issues (energy, water, land, food, atmospheric space for emissions) remain the key medium term driver of global change. Commodity prices will spike again as soon as there’s recovery.
• The downturn has stemmed the uncontrolled growth of emissions, but also lessened the chance of a robust global deal on climate.
• Economic bad times could well drive increased conflict. A major new security threat might be the fabled black swan – hitting just when the global immune system is already overloaded.
• If we experience a long crisis (or a chain of interlinked crises), we are likely to see either a significant loss of trust in the system (globalization retreats), or a significant increase in trust (interdependence increases). 
• You need to stretch time horizons to get the latter – shared awareness (joint analysis of risks and challenges), as a basis for shared platforms (loose coalitions of leaders), which can lobby for a shared operating system (a new international institutional architecture).
• 2009 sets a challenging agenda for the G20 (financial reform and economic recovery – but framed by a broader vision on climate, resources, security etc.)…
• …the G8 (caucus of rich countries able to tee up Copenhagen and kick start development assistance if developing countries begin to teeter)…
• …the UN (especially Ban Ki-Moon’s proposed high level ‘friend’s group’ on climate, but also as a fora for getting to grips with scarcity issues)…
• and the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO (first of all ensuring they keep their heads above water, then looking to ’save globalization from itself’).
• Oh and be ready for the backlash – people are angry and rightfully so, but that may well lead us down some populist blind alleys.

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Paper by David Steven, presented to Reforming International Institutions – Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century, a conference organized by the United Nations University and the British Embassy in Tokyo

(21 January 2009)

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Former US Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman has a piece in the new edition of Foreign Affairs on the Great Crash of 2008, which takes the following as its opening premise:

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe. Over the medium term, Washington and European governments will have neither the resources nor the economic credibility to play the role in global affairs that they otherwise would have played. These weaknesses will eventually be repaired, but in the interim, they will accelerate trends that are shifting the world’s center of gravity away from the United States.

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