Zimbabwe: Mugabe aides hold secret talks

Oh Robert, you should have taken my advice.

The Guardian is reporting that some of President Mugabe's top aides have held secret meetings with South African mediators trying to work out a power sharing deal between Mugabe's ZANU-PF party and his rival for the presidency Morgan Tsvangirai. What they apparently want is a promise that they won't be prosecuted if Tsvangirai's MDC party takes over power in Zimbabwe.

So far talks on sharing power haven't gone so well. Mugabe has been pushing a deal where he keeps the power in the government and sticks Tsvangirai with the thankless job of rebuilding the country's wrecked economy. Tsvangirai, for his part, is refusing to accept any deal where he doesn't have some real power, and the talks themselves seem like they're going nowhere fast.

And as I said in an earlier post, the fear of Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe seems to be evaporating, which is likely why some of his top aides look like they're searching for a Plan B. Mugabe's military and security services have kept him in power for nearly 30 years, he has relied on them much more in these past few years as popular support has built for new leadership in the country.

But above all, those responsible for keeping him in power want to save their own skins, whether that means by keeping Mugabe in power or by cutting a deal with the opposition. If Tsvangirai is willing to make a deal, and if he can convince them he means it, then this really could be the end for Mugabe.

Aid to Georgia

On his tour of Europe, Vice President Dick Cheney has backed a proposal to send $1 billion in aid to Georgia to help them rebuild after the recent conflict with Russia. Several members of Congress including Democratic VP candidate and US Senator Joe Biden are also supporting the aid package.

As someone whose tax dollars will be part of that aid package, I have to object. The idea for sending money to Georgia started floating around the same time that Hurricane Gustav took aim at the US Gulf Coast. The governors of both Louisiana and Mississippi were deeply concerned about the damage that Gustav would inflict, especially on houses and other structures still unrepaired from the impact of Hurricane Katrina three years ago. At the same time officials from the Army Corps of Engineers and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans both worried about the city's levee system, which in many areas still had not fully repaired from the pounding it took during Katrina.

Three years on and we still have thousands of structures unrepaired and a major city protected by a fragile levee system, yet we are being asked to send a billion dollars to Georgia not to help them rebuild from an unavoidable natural disaster, but rather a totally avoidable conflict - one that it seems they themselves started? Wouldn't it be more responsible to spend that billion at home?

Not that I am against foreign aid, far from it. But it's one thing to provide aid for development or disaster relief, it's another to hand it out as a reward for bad decisions.

(A little) Recognition for South Ossetia, Abkhazia

A second country has recognized the fledgling states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

That nation? Nicaragua.

Frankly, I’m still trying to figure this one out, why of all places Nicaragua would choose to take the plunge in recognizing the independence of the two former Georgian regions. I thought that maybe Iran and/or Venezuela might give their official recognition just to annoy the United States, but while they say they support Russia’s actions, they haven’t given their blessing to South Ossetia or Abkhazia. The same goes for Russia’s would-be union partner Belarus, which has talked about giving official recognition to the two states, but so far hasn’t.

So what’s the practical effect of Nicaragua’s decision? Basically, it does very little, though it at least gives Russia the ability to say that the nations of South Ossetia and Abkhazia aren’t solely a figment of their imagination.

Mr. Cheney goes to Kiev

Vice President Dick Cheney has given his support to Ukraine’s joining NATO, whether the Ukrainians want to join is another story…

Cheney had the misfortune to drop in on Kiev just as the government of President Viktor Yushchenko collapsed. Yushchenko and his coalition partner Yulia Tymoshenko’s already strained relationship fell apart over the recent conflict in Georgia. Yushchenko wanted to condemn Russia for their actions in Georgia, but Tymoshenko refused, which caused Yushchenko to accuse her of being an agent of Moscow and basically accuse her of treason.

Things went downhill from there.

I’ve written a number of times here about the feuding between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, the two heroes of Ukraine’s pro-democracy Orange Revolution in 2004, so I won’t go into it again now, other than to say when they formed this coalition back in January, I said it wouldn’t last, their competing egos wouldn’t allow it.

Yushchenko is really in a bind now; he has a few choices, all of them bad. He has about a week to form a new coalition that means either mending fences with Tymoshenko, which experts put at 50-50 odds, or forming a coalition with the country’s other political power, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. But since Yanukovich’s base of power is in the east of Ukraine, where much of the country’s Russian population lives, it’s pretty unlikely he’ll team up with the pro-Western Yushchenko. That means Yushchenko would have to call for new elections, and there is no enthusiasm in Ukraine for that.

Ukrainians are getting fed up with their whole political situation. After the Orange Revolution there were promises of closer ties with Europe that would boost the economy, and speedy entry into the European Union and NATO. But almost four years later, the economy is in the doldrums (inflation is among the highest in Europe), while membership in the EU is in the far future. And the population is getting fed up with power just shuffling among Tymoshenko, Yushchenko and Yanukovich.

Currently Tymoshenko is leading in the polls, with Yanukovich close behind (each have just over 20% support). In more bad news for Yushchenko, his party is polling in the single digits, down with the old Communist Party of Ukraine. This also means that NATO membership could be put on the back burner. Tymoshenko wants to be in the EU, but is cool on NATO membership; the pro-Russian Yanukovich is opposed to it outright.

As are a significant number of Ukraine’s citizens. In fact, the US Coast Guard Cutter Dallas, fresh from it’s mission to Georgia, had to cut short a call on the Crimean port city of Sevastopol after the ship was met by a large group of very vocal protestors. Sevastopol is the historic home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and the Crimea was a part of Russia until 1954, about half of Crimea’s residents are ethnic Russians. Reportedly a crowd gathered on the dock, played patriotic Russian songs from the Second World War and chanted anti-NATO slogans while Ukrainian officials visited the Dallas.

Afghan leader vows punishment for deadly US raid

Is the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan on the rocks?

That nation’s president, Hamid Karzai, is reported to be furious over the rising number of Afghani citizens being killed as a result of US and NATO military operations. The situation came to a head following a deadly air raid on the Afghani village of Azizabad late last month that left up to 90 civilians dead (the US military disputes this figure).

Now Karzai is promising to punish those responsible for killing Afghani civilians. Karzai said in a statement that “our relationship with foreigners got worse” after the raid. He also told an assembly of villagers outside Azizabad that he has been trying for five years to reduce the number of civilian casualties caused by coalition operations in the country.

It will be difficult for Karzai to follow through on his promise though if it involves punishing US troops. As with other countries where the United States military operates, we have a “Status of Force” agreement with Afghanistan, that essentially gives US troops immunity from prosecution under local laws (the logic behind the agreements is that if the US troops didn’t have immunity then they could become the target for politically-motivated prosecutions). So the only way to prosecute military personnel involved in the Azizabad operation would be if the US military decided that there had been some gross misconduct in their action that deserved of a court marshal.

The United States though disputes the number of people killed in Azizabad, and contends that the Taliban (and their supporters) regularly inflate casualty reports after coalition operations in an effort to turn the local population against the Western forces. A US report released on Tuesday said that a joint US/Afghan force came under attack outside Azizabad, and acted in self-defense. They claim that only seven civilians were killed in the fighting along with 30 or 35 militants. It doesn’t seem like a court marshal is in the future over this raid.

Karzai is now saying that he will review the rules that the US and NATO forces operate under, and that he wants to update the status of forces agreements. That’s unlikely to happen, so you have to wonder what Karzai’s next move will be.

New Features

I've been making some upgrades to the site, you can check them out along the right side of the page.

Below the post archive now is a feature that let's you view all posts tagged with a certain label - for example, click on "Canada" and you'll get all the post written about Canada. You can also still use the search box at the top left hand corner of the screen to look for specific terms.

I've also added two news features to the site. The first is a newsticker via Yahoo! that shows headlines and summaries of a few top stories from the major wire services. You can click on the links provided to open the full story. Below that is a cool feature called the News Map. Click on a country and you will get a news site from there (for example, click on Russia and you'll get The Moscow Times site).

I'm working on adding a couple of other cool things in the near future, stay tuned. Drop me a line and tell me what you think.

- E.

Tata suspends work on world's cheapest car

India's Tata Group was forced today to stop work on a factory meant to build the world's cheapest car.

Tata made a splash earlier in the year when they rolled out a prototype for the Nano, an ultra-compact car, with a price tag of just over $2,200, aimed at India's growing middle class. They planned to build a huge new factory in the Marxist-controlled state of West Bengal, but the people there apparently object to "the people's car".

Local activists are angry that the state allowed Tata to seize 1,000 acres from local farmers for the factory. They contend the factory only needs 600 acres and want the rest of the land returned to its owners. And while protests have been going on for two years around the site, they have gotten larger and more tense in recent days, finally prompting Tata to give up on the nearly-finished plant (which has cost over $350 million to build) over fears that the workers there would not be safe.

Tata is now looking at other Indian states to host the Nano's assembly plant.

The whole Nano project has not been without its critics. Environmentalists are worried that putting thousands of Nanos on the road will only worsen India’s air pollution. Part of the reason the car is so cheap is that it does not include any modern pollution-reduction devices. If fact, Tata will only be able to build the Nano for a few years until tighter air quality laws are expected to go into effect in India. Others wonder what effect adding thousands of cars will have on India's already over-crowded urban streets.

Venu Srinivasan, chairman of India's leading manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters TVS-Suzuki, in an interview with AFP also worried that Tata's decision to relocate the almost finished plant could scare foreign investors away from India's manufacturing sector.

Putin saves TV crew from tiger

File this one under strange but true…

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is being credited with saving a TV film crew from a wild Siberian tiger. Both Putin and the TV crew were in the wilds of Russia’s Far East to check on a conservation program aimed at saving the critically endangered Amur tiger (Amurs are a sub-species of the Siberian tiger that live in the Amur River region near the Chinese border and are the largest cats in the world).

The tiger was supposed to be caught in a trap, but when the TV crew approached, it got loose and headed straight for them. Reportedly, Putin grabbed a tranquilizer rifle from an aide and shot the tiger before it could attack. Putin then helped the scientists measure the sleeping tiger and attach a satellite-tracking collar. Rossiya television opened their national newscast with the report of Putin saving their crew.

Okay, passed the tiger, there are two other interesting elements to this story.

First is a quote from Putin: "First of all, we must thank our colleagues, Americans, European colleagues for being involved with this [the conservation program] during a difficult time for Russia when no-one was paying any attention to this," Putin said on TV. Now during the Cold War there was a skill called Kremlinology - basically it involved obsessively pouring over Russian media stories, official photographs and such to look for clues as to what the secretive Soviet leadership might be planning. So, putting on my Kremlinologist hat, could this statement, thanks to the Americans and Europeans, be an indication that Putin wants to repair relations with the West that have been strained by the whole Georgia conflict?

Second is the idea of Putin as an environmentalist. The Reuters story notes that Putin has in the past (unilaterally) redrawn the course of a pipeline that environmentalists felt passed too close to the environmentally-sensitive Lake Baikal and also moved the site of the Olympic village for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi away from a sensitive area. All that and saving tigers too…

(photo from pravda.ru)

Human Rights Watch: Georgia admits to dropping cluster bombs

Human Rights Watch says that the Georgian Defense Ministry has admitted to using cluster bombs in the recent conflict in South Ossetia. Cluster bombs are basically one large bomb that fractures in mid-air, releasing dozens, or hundreds of smaller bomblets over a wide area. Cluster bombs are considered an especially horrible weapon because the bomblets do not always explode on contact with the ground, and can remain lethal for months or even years after they're dropped, often killing innocent civilians long after a conflict ends. There has been a worldwide movement to stop their production or use with over 100 nations committing to the ban, though most notably Russia, the United States and Isreal have all refused to sign the ban.

Human Rights Watch accuses Russia of using cluster bombs as well during the conflict, a claim that Russia denies.

The same day the revelation about Georgia's use of cluster bombs came out, a controversy erupted over a story in a well-respected German news magazine that condemns Georgia's actions in the war.

In their Monday edition, Der Spiegel claims to have leaked documents from an Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe report on the war that accuses Georgian President Mikheil Sakaashvili of starting the conflict by ordering the all-out assault on Tskhinvali without provocation. Sakaashvili has claimed that he ordered Georgian forces into action only after a large force of Russian tanks entered South Ossetia. The same report also accuses Sakaashvili of lying to both the United States and Europe over the causes of the war, and formally condemns Georgia for the conflict.

Not so fast, says the OSCE. They say that the OSCE regularly reports to all member nations (inlcuding Russia) and that no such report like the one Der Spiegel cites has been circulated to them. The OSCE also says that the Der Spiegel contains information that the group does not have access to, like intercepted telephone calls.

We’ll see if Der Spiegel has a reply to the OSCE’s charges.

NATO on the hot seat for killing civilians

The NATO mission in Afghanistan is again facing criticism for killing civilians. In the latest mishap, three Afghani children were killed when a NATO patrol fired on a group of insurgents, but accidentally hit a nearby house.

This incident comes less than two weeks after the Afghani government accused NATO forces of killing up to 90 civilians. Last night 60 Minutes just happened to run a story on this earlier event, visiting the small village east of the capital, Kabul, that was the site of the attack and talking to the locals.

They claim that a group of insurgents, a group unknown to the villagers, fired a mortar in the direction of a nearby NATO outpost. The NATO outpost responded with mortar fire directed at the village, and by calling in an air strike from the U.S. Air Force. Aircraft dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on the small village of mud and brick walled houses, killing dozens in the process, even wiping out entire families.

60 Minutes also talked with officials from the U.S. military about the incident. The military does say that a battle happened, and that unfortunately some civilians were killed, though the military claims only five casualties were civilians, with 25 others being militant fighters. The U.S./NATO position is that casualty claims made by Afghanis are unreliable because Taliban insurgents, and villagers who support them, will regularly inflate casualty claims among civilians to try to undermine NATO's efforts in the country by painting them as gun-happy killers to turn the population at-large against them.

I have no way of knowing whether the villagers 60 Minutes talked to support the Taliban, the government of President Hamid Karzai, or neither. But I can say that their anger over the civilians killed in their village seemed both honest and deep. One older man went so far as to say that the Americans treated them worse than the Soviets ever did. The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan for nine years during the 1980s in an occupation noted for its brutality; so to say that the Americans are now acting worse than the Soviets is quite a claim. Meanwhile, President Karzai has recently called the US/NATO forces out several times for the increasing number of civilian deaths in his country.

All in all the war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, which looked like it was defeated a couple of years ago is back with a vengeance. Their forces are said to be operating near the outskirts of Kabul (which has been the seat of Western power in the country since their overthrow), and Taliban forces are operating in larger groups, rather than in the hit-and-run strikes they have preferred in the past. Last month a well coordinated, daylong Taliban attack left 10 French troops dead and another 21 wounded.