About as Juicy as Diplomacy Gets
International diplomacy got really interesting this week as celebrities, UN resolutions, Cold War espionage and diamonds splashed news headlines around the world.
A court room sketch of the spies
1. Running a close second place in the news cycle, only behind the Gulf oil spill relief effort, the US completed an intriguing round-up and swap with Moscow of 10 Russian spies living in America. Very swiftly after their capture, the 10 were traded for 4 individuals tied to western intelligence gathering efforts who sat in Russian jails. Facebook profiles, romantic encounters and disbelief from those who knew the deep-cover agents reignited Cold War nostalgia with a modern twist and increased online readership across many news outlets. Politico.com actually appears to have hit its monthly high right after the story broke. (source: Quantcast)
2. The island of Cyprus’ normally bland and now 36 year old smoldering civil war also got a celebrity spark this week, when Jennifer Lopez decided to cancel a concert in the Northern Turkish Republic of Cyprus due to public pressure. She was due to perform on July 24 for the opening of the Cratos Premium Hotel and Casino in Kyrenia, a beach resort town on the northern side of the island.
The beautiful harbor of Kyrenia, Cyprus won't be the newest exotic concert location for JLo
A statement posted on her website read, “Jennifer Lopez would never knowingly support any state, country, institution or regime that was associated with any form of human rights abuse…After a full review of the relevant circumstances in Cyprus, it was the decision of her advisors to withdraw from the appearance. This was a team decision that reflects our sensitivity to the political realities of the region.”
The conflict has spawned UN resolutions, peacekeeping missions and international court cases since the island split violently into a Greek-speaking south and Turkish-speaking north after a 1974 invasion by Turkey. In 1983, Turkish Cypriots declared the north’s independence, but Turkey is the only country that has recognized the region’s status. Meanwhile, the internationally recognized southern Greek Cypriot side of the island joined the European Union in 2004, further growing the economic development inequalities between the two sides. Remarkably, some saw J Lo’s planned performance as an endorsement of the breakaway state’s legitimacy – a bit of a stretch if you ask me. However, a week on the island in 2005 certainly taught me how seriously Cypriots, both southern and northern, take seemingly little things like this.
3. Lastly, the British supermodel Naomi Campbell announced through her PR firm this week that she will testify as a witness in the war crimes tribunal of Charles Taylor. Taylor, the former leader of Liberia, was captured while on the run by UN peacekeepers in Nigeria in March 2006. He is accused of mass murder, rape and mutilation, including financial support for rebels in Sierra Leone civil war that cut off the limbs of their civilian victims. Taylor, 62, is also accused of destabilizing Liberia and several neighboring countries while amassing a personal fortune from illicit trade in diamonds, guns and timber.
Charles Taylor, the former leader of Liberia, was captured while on the run by UN peacekeepers in Nigeria in March 2006. UN Photo/Mathew Elavanalthoduka
Campbell is being ordered to testify because, according to another celebrity, Mia Farrow, she accepted an enormous rough-cut diamond from Taylor when the two met at a house party hosted by Nelson Mandela in 1997. Farrow, who was also at the party, says Campbell told her about the gift soon after it was presented to her. The supermodel had previously avoided questions on the matter and said she did not want to be involved in the war crimes trial at The Hague, Netherlands. However, after the court issued a subpoena on July 1, ordering her appearance, she faced a prison term of up to seven years, a fine of about $500, or both, if she failed to appear.
International diplomacy probably won’t get this sensational again for a while.
Holbrooke and a Dam too Far
High in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan, a 55 year-old dam holds immense potential for the stability and development of Afghanistan’s second largest city. If only the Taliban would let the concrete delivery arrive.
Kajakai Dam
Built in 1953 by Morrison-Knudsen, the same American company that contributed to building the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Kajaki Dam suffers from decades of neglected maintenance and inefficient hydroelectric turbines. According to reporting by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Washington Post, “the dam produces about 33 megawatts of electricity with two rehabilitated turbines, of which only about 30 percent of the power reaches Kandahar. Along the route, as much as 40 percent of the electricity is lost to theft and transmission inefficiencies.
As a consequence, Kandahar residents fortunate enough to have their homes and shops connected to the city’s rickety network of electricity wires typically receive about six hours of power a day. But there are days and nights without a flicker of light, the whir of a fan, the distraction of television. Frequent blackouts have shut down factories and kept people locked indoors after sunset.”
On Wednesday, the Obama administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said the electric supply to Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold, is currently a central goal of the US’s strategy to win the war. He told PBS’s Gwenn Ifill that General David Petraeus, the new US commander in charge of the multi-national force in Afghanistan, raised this issue with him on a conference call last Saturday.
As much as 40% of the electricity is lost to theft and transmission inefficiencies.
However, the means and methods by which to provide this electricity differ greatly amongst the various departments and policy circles working on Afghanistan’s problems. Military leaders, eager to meet the draw down deadline next summer favor a short-term solution to purchase three huge diesel generators and thousands of gallons of fuel. US Embassy and State Department officials however, favor a more comprehensive plan to upgrade the Dam’s generators and finish installing a third turbine to boost long-term production. In 2008, an operation involving 5,000 British troops, attempted to deliver and install the third turbine to the Dam, but the Taliban fought furiously along the roads leading up the mountainside, making it impossible for trucks to haul cement in to install it. (You can read an excellent account of that mission by Lieutenant-Col Rufus McNeil here)
Herein lies the conundrum, restoring consistent power to Kandahar, a city of 450,000 is a necessary task, but the most effective and cost-efficient means of doing so is blocked by the Taliban. The Afghan government will never be able to afford the diesel fuel for the power generators after the American forces leave, once again plunging the city into darkness if the military’s short-term fix is implemented. That long term perspective however, seems rather wishful when one considers recently ousted US General Stanley McChrystal’s point, who was quoted by the Economist last week telling his staff: “While I think Kajaki is critical for a long-term solution, there ain’t no long-term if we don’t win short-term.”
A decision on the city’s electricity and the Dam’s future should come soon as General Petraeus is highly likely to receive full Senate confirmation on his new appointment today and depart for the region by the weekend. To fix a dam or not to fix a dam, that is the question.
The “DNT-R2P Connection:” Humanitarianism in the 21st Century?
Filed under: Democracy, Human Rights, Responsibility to Protect, Technology
By: Colette Mazzucelli
The trials and tribulations of humanitarianism in the past decade lead Columbia historian Mark Mazower to question the price of moral leadership in foreign affairs. Is there a local-global consciousness emerging to combat the atrocities states inflict arbitrarily on their citizens? The countries and their cultures differ. The abuse of human rights does not: post-election turmoil in Kenya, 2008; brutality against the protesters in Iran, 2009; longstanding sexual violence against women in war-torn Congo; mass starvation over time in North Korea. The list grows as globalization intensifies.
"Mobile applications, whether on the cell or smart phone, are evolving rapidly as millions acquire new means to communicate", says Mazzucelli.
Can digitally networked technology (DNT) make a difference by slowing the trends of abuse? Is the exponential growth of mobile phone use in the developing world a revolution that allows civil society to find its voice preventing the murder of innocents by state leaders? What does this transformation mean for the West with its interventionist ideals and its international norms, most notably, Responsibility to Protect (R2P)? Are we bearing witness to a sea change that makes “ordinary people” the world over a bulwark of protection against would be political entrepreneurs seeking power at any human price?
Experience taught us in Rwanda the speed with which genocide was carried out by extremists with a political agenda as the West chose selective indifference. Failures to prevent mass murder in Bosnia and Kosovo showed the limits of transatlantic power. If R2P is not to remain too closely linked with intervention, which is one of its main criticisms as a tool to facilitate Western neo-colonial adventures, citizens must assume the responsibility to protect the human rights of fellow citizens. Their actions can make a difference in regimes struggling to find their own way to the constitutional liberalism that checks excesses of state power against individuals.
Mobile applications, whether on the cell or smart phone, are evolving rapidly as millions acquire new means to communicate. The empirical data, which is still limited, informs us that technology can be used to incite ethnic conflict or to deter human rights abuses. Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich discuss the impact of digitally networked technology during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election crisis. Their research findings illustrate how text messages incited violence across Kenya. In comparison to Rwanda, however, where radio mobilized the 1994 genocide leaving moderate voices unable to respond, in Kenya, the use of SMS also circulated messages of a moderate nature.
Michael Joseph, the CEO of Safaricom, which is the largest mobile phone provider in Kenya, distributed SMS texts to the company’s 9 million customers to contradict the previous hate messages that had incited mob violence after the 2007 presidential election was believed to be rigged. His effort underlines the multi-directional nature of mobile technology. The Kenyan case also highlights the emerging role telecommunications leaders and visionary designers are playing as tensions between state and society escalate in contested elections. Violence in Kenya also sparked the design by David Kobia and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi, a revolutionary platform combining Google Maps with a tool allowing mobile users to report cases of abuse in precise detail, including images and written observations at the time and place of the incident.
The application of Ushahidi in other countries experiencing human rights abuses makes digitally networked technology, mobile use in combination with blogs, interactive maps, and satellite imagery, the people’s choice in developing countries to forge local-global interactions. There are policy and educational implications for the transatlantic area as we identify a DNT-R2P connection in polities where citizen initiatives redress the heavy footprint of the state. This civic dimension of the responsibility to protect, the agency to act on behalf of human security, must rely on the courage and conviction of local engagement not foreign interventions.
As Barbara Slavin writes, “Internet and cell phone technology have become to Iran’s current democracy movement what the telegraph and cassette tapes were to previous political upheavals.” This is why transatlantic support for public spending to help Iranians evade government Internet filters is a critical element in policymaking. The Iranian people have a right to communicate with each other and with the world through blogs, text messages, and video images. Digitally networked technology offers Iranian citizens a chance to construct alternative narratives, thereby nurturing the internal democracy building that challenges a brutal theocratic regime.
Another area where DNT can support human rights initiatives is in the protection of those working on behalf of NGOs like Peace Brigades International whose members accompany the human rights defenders protecting internally displaced persons (IDPs). Francis Deng observes that digital networked technology provides the “eyes and ears” for the world to make sure that the dangers facing humanitarian workers as well as the plight of the IDPs they defend are not forgotten.
As the use of the mobile increases around the world, another challenge for the transatlantic area is to develop educational initiatives that bring DNT right into our study of global affairs. Innovative curriculum development is evolving as a necessary component of humanitarianism in a model that President John Sexton has defined at NYU as the “global network university.” Its aim is to “maintain human community” as NYU classes, held simultaneously in Abu Dhabi and New York, and networked with other locations in Prague and Buenos Aires, “break the time-space continuum.” The perils and the promise using technology of a multi-directional nature are unprecedented. The policy and educational responses of the transatlantic may help establish a DNT-R2P connection aiding citizens in fragile polities as they protect themselves against oppressive regimes at home.
Colette Mazzucelli, WFI Fellow at Citizens for Global Solutions, is Adjunct Associate Professor, Center for Global Affairs at New York University and Department of Political Science at Hofstra University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Defection Watch: North Korea’s World Cup Team
The matches of this year’s World Cup have delivered many sensational moments, but behind the hum of the vuvuzelas and the bright stadium lights, North Korea’s soccer squad may indeed deliver the biggest surprise of all.
Always a curious sighting outside of their hermitage country, North Korean athletes are often assumed to be high defection risks, given their rare opportunity to escape the hard living conditions of their country, even despite their own privileged positions on the national team. However, their strictly controlled movement in South Africa during the games shows just how far the North Korean government will go to avoid any possible escape. The team is sequestered in a tightly secured hotel north of Johannesburg and has largely stayed out of the public eye. The entire team dines together and travels in a bus with its curtains firmly closed, always accompanied by government officials between their hotel and the training grounds.
When four players on the team failed to show up for the teams first game against Brazil last week, most speculated they had already made the jump. However, all four players we spotted again several days later on the team bus.
The players’ disappearance and reappearance however, was only the first strange occurrence before the Brazilian match. Just before Tuesday’s game began, a five-row block of seats on the second level at Ellis Park Stadium filled up with more than 40 men and a woman, all dressed in identical red shirts, jackets and scarves, wearing identical red caps and waving small North Korean flags. During the game, ESPN’s game announcer Martin Tyler commented that the group that appeared to be North Koreans, weren’t actually North Koreans, but rather “handpicked Chinese Actors,” recruited by a Chinese sports marketing company on behalf of North Korea. Wild speculation grew that North Korea was too scared to let their own citizens out of the country and had to outsource its supporters instead.
The North Korean team’s possible defection was given added fuel today after their 7-0 loss to Portugal. This defeat, which ranks as one of the worst all time losses in World Cup history, will definitely not win them praise or national recognition back home as their earlier 2-1 respectable loss to Brazil afforded them. Therefore, with their prospects of returning home as heroes now diminished, are we likely to see a few players sneak off?
US Team Identifies Trillion $ Mineral Deposits in Afghanistan
Monday’s New York Times leads with a blockbuster story and while its extraordinary news, its not surprising.
The mountains, valleys and high rock passes of Afghanistan have lured global powers and interests for centuries. The foreign parries and thrusts between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia’s Great Game throughout the 1800′s would absolutely have been fiercer had they known about this treasure. In modern terms however, this public revelation adds complexity to any continued US engagement in Afghanistan and its neighbor Pakistan, which offers the fastest land route for the minerals to the Indian Ocean and world markets. Both countries’ populations and governments are going to have cocked ears to this news and while President Karzai of Afghanistan has known for sometime, its unlikely to have spread far outside his inner circle.
US Geological Survey Mineral Map of Afghanistan, pre trillion $ find. USGS
As the world’s population grows up digitally and elements like copper and lithium continue to be highly valued, Afghanistan’s deposits set up a second Great Game scenario between China and the United States. Both countries already have small mining operations in Afghanistan, and the Chinese have already demonstrated their willingness to play outside the lines, accused of bribing an Afghan minister with $30 million while lobbying for more mining contracts. In economic development terms this extraction of wealth from the ground could spawn immensely proportional changes in one of the poorest regions of the world. However, the sophisticated technology needed to cultivate the rich veins of ore and “foot in the door” position of the US to identify and expose these deposits probably means little equity in the discoveries will belong to Afghans.
