Doug Saunders

Ben Gardane, Tunisia

When the big men come crashing down, all manner of mysteries spill out on the sand. Here in this dusty and somewhat disreputable slice of the Sahara near the Libyan border, people fleeing Moammar Gadhafi’s fast-collapsing dictatorship gather at stuccoed hotel bars and make furtive deals in the night.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

But there’s a more elevated clientele, such as the Austrian diplomats who sat up drinking beer and making desperate phone calls to destroy their Tripoli embassy’s records. On the other side of the country, you can encounter hundreds of Canadians boarding flights to get out as quickly as possible, some leaving their own embarrassments behind.

Among these is the revelation that SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., the giant Montreal-based engineering firm, has been quietly building a prison, on a contract worth an estimated $275-million (U.S.), in Tripoli, the capital of the Libyan police state.

Surprised by the exposure of this heretofore unpublicized job (although SNC-Lavalin officials say the prison project is mentioned in the company’s coming annual report), a company spokeswoman said the jail would be the first Libyan one to conform to international human-rights standards – a claim made mute by headlines coming out of Benghazi that revealed acts of torture and deprivation in actually-existing Libyan prisons. Libya, as I knew it in its heyday, was always a peaceful place free from petty crime, such a powerful deterrent were the very words “Libyan prison.”

It’s possible that SNC-Lavalin took this job as a quid pro quo for its far larger projects, such as the Great Man Made River (whose name, in case it isn’t clear, means an underground river made by the Great Man). To do business with an autocrat, one often has to agree to side deals. But it’s possible the fee was simply too good.

Business deals with the Gadhafis were always very personal, and usually involved fixers and middlemen of colourful background and the exchange of huge sums of money.

When Petro-Canada (now Suncor Energy) got involved in Libya after U.S. sanctions ended in 2004, for example, it hired as its local agent Jack Richards, an Englishman whose Virgin Islands-based consulting company operated on the fact that he was personal friends with Colonel Gadhafi and his son and heir apparent, Saif.

Mr. Richards had met the Libyan in 1967 while selling him a military communications system and, after the 1969 coup, became a trusted confidant of the Gadhafis. If you were an oil company and you wanted to get a slice of Libya’s newly privatized oil field, then you paid Mr. Richards a truly enormous fee and retainer.

Mr. Richards, according to leaked Petro-Canada memos I’ve received, would cement such hard-to-get oil-exploration deals by taking Saif Gadhafi on shooting trips on Princess Anne’s estate, which adjoined his own farm in Gloucestershire, and make the pitch over lead shot and flying feathers. He approached the Libyan autocrat with the Canadian petroleum firm’s offers for blocks of undersea oil-drilling rights in the 2000s.

This sort of arrangement bore fruit for the boys from Calgary, turning Libya into one of Petro-Canada’s most important non-Canadian bases of operation. But to get it, they had to pay the Libyan government – and thus, rather directly, the Gadhafi family – a startling sum.

According to U.S. State Department reports obtained from the so-called Cablegate leaks, Petro-Canada paid the Libyan autocrats a $1-billion “signing bonus” straight off the bat, then invested $3.5-billion in the redevelopment of many of Libya’s existing oil fields. In exchange, the Canadians got a 12-per-cent share of oil revenues produced from their slice of the field, for 30 years. As the U.S. ambassador to Tripoli wrote in a 2008 cable, Petro-Canada “swallowed hard and signed up.”

We knew very well that was no good for the actual people of Libya, they are now proudly and vociferously reminding us. The greedy life at the wellhead diminished us all.

Original Article

After we took turns throwing raw meat through the cage bars to his hungry Bengal tigers, talk turned to democracy, and the activists who were pressing him for change.

“If they are accusing us of lacking democracy in Libya, I have no problem with this, I like this,” Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son and presumed heir to dictator Moammar Gadhafi, told me as we sat in the hot Saharan sun in his remote desert compound, overlooked by his pacing caged carnivores Freddo and Barney. “Even criticism of human rights in Libya is a positive thing, and I will support them, I will join them.”

Read full article in The Globe and Mail
See also my 2004 account of Libya’s looming internet-driven revolution
And my chronicle of Gadhafi’s all-female bodyguard training camp

It was the same hesitant, wandering, occasionally angry voice the world heard on Sunday night when the younger Mr. Gadhafi, 38, appeared on national television to threaten the lives of the thousands of protesters who had gathered in Libya’s cities, to warn that a civil war would ensue if people dared challenge his power, to declare that his father would “fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.”

But when Seif Gadhafi ushered me into the desert at the end of 2004 to deliver an angry message to Canada, and kept me around his high-security luxury compound for hours to talk about democracy and politics, he was a different, far more optimistic man.

As the most prominent son of Africa’s longest-reigning and most bizarre autocrat, Seif seemed a promising figure in Arab politics half a decade ago, having done much to undo the damage caused by his father’s extremism. He had negotiated an end to terrorism and to Libya’s nuclear program, and had personally apologized and paid compensation for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

He declared himself a reformist. The floor of his sprawling house was littered with half-read books on such fashionable liberal topics as “soft power,” multilateral diplomacy and globalization. He spoke of becoming a democratic leader.

Yet also visible in our three-hour conversation were the seeds of Sunday night’s speech, and the horrors that followed on Monday as the Libyan military reportedly opened fire from ground and air on protesters. In a cascade of defections, dozens of senior Libyan ambassadors and military officers turned against Seif and his father Monday night, denouncing them as war criminals as images of mass carnage filled TV screens.

Those who knew the Seif Gadhafi of 2004 say they were alarmed to see what he had become. His bold, reformist initiatives, after the breakthroughs of the early 2000s, had produced little change in Libya’s authoritarian, socialist-inspired governing structure, and the human-rights situation had only worsened. Seif, still using the rhetoric of democracy, had become extremely wealthy through corruption. (He controls a large part of Libya’s economy, from part of the oil to the Pepsi-Cola franchise.)

“Watching Seif give that speech – looking so exhausted, nervous and, frankly, terrible – was the stuff of Shakespeare and of Freud: a young man torn by a struggle between loyalty to his father and his family, and the beliefs he had come to hold for reform, democracy and the rule of law,” David Held, a London School of Economics professor who tutored Seif , told the Guardian newspaper Monday. “The man giving that speech wasn’t the Seif I had got to know well over those years.”

Seif finished his LSE doctorate on democracy and soft power in 2008, and later gave $2.4-million to the university to create a “virtual democracy centre.” The university returned that money Monday and said, in the wake of the massacres, that it wanted no more involvement with him.

Shortly after earning his doctorate, he announced that he would no longer have any role in the Libyan state, and would devote himself to his well-funded charitable foundation and to his business practices. Yet it appears that his father pushed the shy young man into the forefront of the regime this week – and that he sided decisively, if awkwardly, with his father’s authoritarianism.

That side of Seif was also visible on that day six years ago, as he lashed out against opposition parties and those who dared criticize his father’s infamous prisons and torture chambers.

“They are liars,” he said of Amnesty International. “They said, in Libya they are still conducting torture and executions and so on. Therefore this is my response: Human rights in Libya are very well protected and maintained, and I think Libya is a good example for the Middle East. And I say this very proudly.”

And he made it clear that when he advocated “democracy,” he wasn’t speaking of full-fledged multiparty representative democracy. His model, he told me, was Switzerland, for its use of referendums – he believes, like his father, in “direct democracy,” in the sort of government-by-plebiscite that Napoleon Bonaparte used to secure his authoritarian rule. Still, he recognized that even this weak form of democracy was far from what his family was delivering.

“We deviated from our principles a long time ago. We deviated. And now we have come back to stick to our ideology,” he said. “The ideology is talking about the rule of the people, the rule of the mass and direct democracy. And in the last years, we did maybe the opposite thing.”

Opposition political parties, he suggested, would never be allowed.

“Why do we have any need for parties?” he asked. “We have individuals. And we have tribes. Tribes are parties.”

And he made it clear, too, that his ultimate loyalties lie with his father – a priority that would cause him to abandon the Libyan people this week, with horrific consequences.

“We agree on the main issues: about democracy, about the economic reforms, about rapprochement with the West, with Americans, WMDs,” he said, before allowing himself a sly smile: “But sometimes we have disagreement about my tigers, because he doesn’t like my tigers, because he thinks animals are dangerous and one day maybe they will get out of the cage and then we will be in danger.”

Six years later, those words would seem eerily prescient. The uncaged threat, however, would be far more numerous and more challenging than Seif Gadhafi’s pets.

Original Article

Paris

In public, the world’s financial chiefs warn of a “two-speed recovery” in which some countries, especially China, are experiencing fast-growing economies while others, notably the United States and much of Europe, are mired in debt and unemployment and barely growing at all.

In private, though, the central bankers and finance ministers of the world’s 20 largest economies, gathered in Paris this weekend to confront looming global economic problems, almost all paint a picture of China’s surging economy as a powerful black hole whose inward draw is sucking up a huge share of the world’s debt, currency reserves, food, commodities and jobs.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

“That can’t go on too long,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, the host of the summit, said of China. “As is often the case with big imbalances, a system collapses.”

China’s growth, propelled by its cheap currency, is overheating dangerously and restricting the ability of other countries to compete and grow, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney warned in an interview.

“It is absolutely in our interests and the interests of everybody around the G20 table, that China grows at a sustainable pace,” he said. “And you can grow too fast in the short term and have it fall back in the medium term. And it’s not clear that the policy mix … in China is yet appropriate for medium-term balance.”

The International Monetary Fund issued a report Saturday warning of the consequences of a “two-speed recovery.”

“The global economic recovery is advancing. However the recovery remains uneven, with downside risks in advanced economies remaining elevated while overheating risks are growing in emerging economies,” it said.

But there is much evidence that Beijing is aware of the issue, which could jeopardize its own export markets by preventing consumer recovery in the West.

Chinese authorities surprised observers this weekend by agreeing to a monitoring mechanism designed to detect and prevent future out-of-control imbalances. The mechanism will measure China’s currency exchange rates and balance of payments, as well as its levels of public and private debt. It is a step toward setting up rules to forbid countries from accumulating overly large reserves of cash or debt, and triggering another 2008-style crisis.

Most governments – including those of other developing countries – want China to end its policy of pegging its currency, the renminbi, to the U.S. dollar and keeping it artificially low. Brazilian and Indian officials this weekend complained that this is causing a surge of investment in their own, free-floating currencies, pushing their value upward and choking off exports.

Indeed, among the most outspoken critics of China’s extreme growth were officials from other formerly poor countries, who said that by having non-floating, artificially low currencies, Asian countries including China were driving currency investors to other emerging-market currencies, pushing their value upward, and preventing them from competing for exports with China.

“All Asian countries need to stop devaluating their currencies, it is a set of responsibilities, it is not just China,” Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said.

The G20 countries, in their communiqué released on Saturday, expressed the problem diplomatically: “While most advanced economies are seeing modest growth and persisting high unemployment, emerging economies are experiencing more robust growth, some with signs of overheating.”

But officials warned that the consequences could be grave.

“We all need to keep in mind that we’re all going through a pretty amazing transformation of the global economy, it’s never happened in this order of magnitude,” said Mr. Carney. “Never have so many people been integrated so quickly, never have capital markets been as open as they are now, and this process creates the prospect of lifting billions out of poverty, creating tremendous wealth and improving prosperity for people - - but also in that process, creating real risks and vulnerabilities, so we have a collective responsibility to try to manage through this, and not lose those gains.”

Original Article

Paris

It’s an old story. On Friday, the United States and its allies declare that China should stop artificially holding down its currency. China calls for the end of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve. France demands a global banking tax. A group of countries propose a complex system to bring the world’s currencies together

On Saturday, none of it happens, except some small technical steps toward economic harmony. Everyone goes home. Six months later, it all starts again.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail

The G20, the meeting of major-economy leaders that played an important role in stabilizing the global economic crisis that began in 2008, has in recent years devolved into an endlessly reiterated squabble over currency and trade imbalances between the world’s great economies – in other words, worries that debt is piling up in some countries and excess currency reserves in others, and that China’s currency, the renminbi, (RMB) is being kept artificially low in order to keep its exports cheap to continue to stoke its high-growth economy.

This weekend will be a large-scale attempt, spearheaded by Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, to come up with a formal system to detect and fix imbalances, ideally to thwart another destructive debt crisis.

The meeting was given a dramatic impetus Friday with a rare speech by Ben Bernanke, the U.S. central-bank chief, who laid the blame for the financial crisis on U.S. policies, but argued that China’s cheap-currency policy could trigger another crisis.

“The maintenance of undervalued currencies by some countries [China] has contributed to a pattern of global spending that is unbalanced and unsustainable,” he said. “To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.”

But behind the scenes, there is a strong sense that the problem is taking care of itself: While the 20 wealthy nations debate the minutiae of the plan, China and the West are correcting their own imbalances at an aggressive pace.

On one hand, China’s currency is being driven down by the new economic realities within China: Wages and food prices are rising fast as Chinese workers quickly become consumers, thus pushing the RMB upward. China’s imports rose 51 per cent last year, compared with 38 per cent for exports, indicating a powerful boom in domestic consumption, while its inflation rate has risen to 4 per cent, outstripping most Western countries.

On the other hand, both the dollar and the euro are being driven downward – in the United States by policies of quantitative easing, which increase the money supply and push down the value of the currency, and by the paying down of deficits; in Europe by debt and fiscal crises that are turning investors away from the 17-nation currency.

Some feel that these economic forces may turn the international imbalance into a self-solving problem. An appreciating Chinese currency and a deflating dollar and euro will lead to the result that the G20 has been seeking for three years – possibly faster than G20 policies can manage.

Tim Geithner, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, has proposed that countries’ current-account surpluses should not exceed 4 per cent of their economic output (GDP). That may soon be a reality. While China’s surplus stood at 5.2 per cent of GDP last year – down from 10.6 per cent in 2007 – most analysts forecast it will fall to between 3.1 and 3.7 per cent by 2012, entirely as a result of inflation within China and the devaluation of the dollar.

Others feel that the economy is moving in the right direction, but not fast enough.

“Real RMB appreciation is substantial and the politics in China of faster nominal appreciation are probably as intense as the U.S. politics of fast deficit reduction,” Wendy Dobson, a former Canadian Finance Department official who now teaches at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said in an interview with Reuters.

“Each knows what it has to do and each is moving in the right direction, but much slower than the rest of the world would like.”

Mr. Flaherty said in Paris Friday, shortly before the G20 meetings began, that it’s possible that market forces could solve the problem but that he and other Western governments believe that an imbalance-identifying-and-correcting mechanism is still important.

“I suppose we’ll see over time, but I can tell you we’re still concerned about global imbalances, and this issue of foreign exchange will be one of the significant variables discussed this evening and tomorrow,” he said. “There are some differences of opinion on the topic. China has its own view, and there are some nuances of opinion after that.”

Even as the summit began, it appeared bogged down in the details of a mechanism for identifying imbalances. While the United States, Canada and others are seeking specific indices of debt, currency surplus, trade volumes and other measures, Germany and China both felt that broader economic and trade measures would do the trick.

“We think it is not appropriate to use real effective exchange rates and reserves,” Chinese Finance Minister Xie Xuren said Friday – a view that would render the monitoring plan unworkable unless China changed its mind.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country is chairing the G20 this year and who has been pushing to reach a broad-spectrum international agreement under his presidency, urged ministers yesterday not to get bogged down in the details.

“We do not have much time, and we will not succeed in everything,” he said Friday. “But the worst-case scenario would be to refuse to address the real subject – the international monetary order.”

Original Article

Paris

As the world’s finance ministers gather here in Paris for another G20 summit, the economy looks like an interlocking set of paradoxes: Simultaneous inflationary growth and deflationary collapse, ultra-low interest rates and nobody willing to lend.

But one paradox, mysterious and misunderstood, seems to be tormenting almost every country today: simultaneous large-scale unemployment and large-scale labour shortages. Almost every government, from Beijing to Ottawa, is nowadays forced to use immigration to fill job shortages, at the same time as it devotes expensive social programs to helping the jobless. This, to put it mildly, has been creating tensions.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

This is the case even though Canada now has a comparatively high unemployment rate of 7.8 per cent, which means that there are 1,449,600 Canadians over 15 years of age who are actively seeking work, officially. Several million more have simply stopped looking for work and have dropped out of the labour force.

But, despite years of effort, there’s no easy way to shift the ever-growing heap of workers into the bottomless pit of job opportunities. As a result, Canadian businesses, both large and small, are lobbying Ottawa hard to increase its immigration numbers above the current rate of more than 280,000 per year. The federal government, with one ear on these urgent business needs and another on a Conservative rank-and-file who aren’t keen on immigration, is striking a compromise by keeping the numbers more or less steady.

Canada is far from alone in this paradox. The German government recently concluded that its shortfall of immigrant workers is costing the economy 20 billion euros a year, leading to a strong push from business to push immigration above its current level of 600,000 per year, even though there are officially 3 million jobless Germans (or 6.6 per cent).

There are two popular ways of responding to this dilemma. A more left-wing perspective listens to the unemployed workers, who say companies are not willing to pay enough to provide a living, so they avoid taking the jobs.

“Raising pay in sectors with shortages would encourage people to get the needed education to work there, it would encourage older workers to stay on longer and it would encourage foreign workers with the right skills to move” to your country, the Swedish economist Stefan Karlsson recently noted. This is certainly true – especially since the last decade saw an enormous transfer of wealth from workers to shareholders through economic growth and wage stagnation – but it only takes care of part of the problem. Many low-skill industries are public sector and cannot raise wages, and above a certain level, minimum-wage hikes start killing job creation and driving up unemployment again. It only solves part of the problem.

More conservative governments listen to employers, who say job applicants are telling them that their welfare and unemployment-insurance payments are a better deal than a low-end job. Those governments respond by slashing those payments – by “ending welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton said when he pioneered this practice in the 1990s. Or they introduce a universal credit, which means you keep receiving welfare payments when you start working, so a job is an enticement rather than a punishment. The British government is rather interestingly doing both at once at the moment – using a universal credit along with a sharp cut in welfare payments for those who don’t take a job.

This also works, but it has its limits. Many of the unemployed have real or de facto disabilities, and really need their benefit payments. In many countries, including Canada, the high-unemployment regions are physically far from the labour-shortage regions, and poorer people tend to be rooted in the places they grew up. Welfare changes provide a one-time fix; after that, the shortages often return.

A study by the Marshall School of Business projects that the United States, despite its paltry welfare programs, will still be short 35 million workers by 2030; Europe, despite its generous decent minimum wages, will need 80 million. The most direct and politically feasible solution, the one most governments will continue to use to square the circle and fill the hole, will remain immigration.

Original Article

London

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, thousands have landed on a tiny island. The ripple effect reaches across Europe.

Lampedusa

The boats began arriving on the tiny rock-strewn island a week ago, their decks packed with young Arab men, most of them in hooded sweatshirts. At first there were hundreds, then a thousand every day, with no end in sight.

The joy of the Tunisian revolution, in which crowds of peaceful protesters had driven dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country on Jan. 14, has produced what Italy’s foreign minister Roberto Maroni, horrified by the human tide arriving on Italian soil, this weekend called a “biblical exodus.”

Read full article, with interactive graphics, in The Globe and Mail

For the moment, Italy is overwhelmed. On Saturday alone, around 1,100 refugees arrived; another 16 ships came the next day. By Monday night, at least 6,000 had arrived in total – more than the entire population of the rocky, isolated island, which is 20 kilometres end to end. Lampedusa sits far from Italy in the southern Mediterranean, close to the beaches of Libya and Tunisia.

Lampedusa’s refugee-reception centre quickly filled its 800 spaces, and for days the Tunisians were simply dumped in a fenced-in soccer field under the hot sun. On Monday, Italy re-opened a detention centre that can hold as many as 1,900 people, used during an earlier crisis of Libyan asylum seekers. Another 300 are being kept by parish volunteers.

“We have for the moment settled them,” Lampedusa councillor Giovanni Sparma told Italian news. “There will be problems if more immigrants should arrive.”

The journey is risky, and one Tunisian has already died, when a boat carrying 12 people sunk off the coast. Officials fear that more will die: Italy has witnessed hundreds of refugee deaths in the Mediterranean waters in recent years.

At least 10 boats are currently known to be plying the waters between north Africa and Lampedusa, and officials predict that the current 6,000 Tunisians will double in number – and 33 have already arrived in Sicily from Egypt, leaving open the possibility of greater numbers from Algeria, Syria and elsewhere.

Rome

The refugees have become a domestic crisis for Italy’s right-wing government, which has enforced a tough anti-immigrant position. United Nations rules, the refugees are being shipped by boat and plane to the Italian mainland, where their identification papers and eligibility for refugee status will be checked.

On Tuesday the government said it would send 200 soldiers to Sicily to deal with the influx, and requested €100-million (about $130-million Canadian) in aid from the European Union to help cope with the “humanitarian emergency” on Lampedusa. Foreign minister Franco Frattini suggested that other EU countries ought to receive a share of the Tunisians: “The protection that the fleeing Tunisians are seeking cannot come from one country alone.”

Italy’s treatment of the Tunisians alarmed United Nations Secretary-General ban Ki-moon, who used a press conference in Lima on Tuesday to remind Italy of its refugee rights (the UN obligations were originally created in response to large numbers of European refugees, including Italians, in the years after the Second World War). “There may be some domestic difficulties, and challenges, I know that… But even under such circumstances, their basic human rights should be fully guaranteed and respected.”

Over the weekend, Italy attempted to send hundreds of soldiers to Tunisia to enforce the beaches, provoking an angry diplomatic battle with its neighbour.

Tunis

Who are the young Tunisians risking their lives to reach an Italian outcrop, and why now?

Before, Tunisia’s authoritarian regime had maintained a tight guard over its beaches, ensuring that foreign tourists were welcome but that Tunisians were physically unable to reach the shore and flee. According to Italians, the exodus began when the Tunisian government collapsed after the revolution, and many police and soldiers simply stopped arriving for work, fearing for the future.

Suddenly, according to the International Organization for Migration, there is a huge market for human smuggling on the Mediterranean shore, and Tunisians are paying typically $1,800 to make it across.

This represents years of savings for a poor Tunisian’s family – but there are some suggestions that not all the émigrés are poor. Some are job-seekers, some are genuinely in danger of violence, and some are otherwise well-off people who are “close to the entourage” of Mr. Ben Ali and are seeking protection, according to Laura Boldrini, Italian spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Ironically it is these well-off, regime connected men, rather than those fleeing poverty, who are most likely to be received as legitimate refugees and asylum claimants under UN rules.

In any case, the refugee crisis has had an equally dramatic effect on Tunisia’s domestic politics. The suggestion by Mr. Maroni that Italy send troops to Tunisia was met with a furious response from Taieb Baccouche, the Tunisian government spokesman, who denounced the Italian Minister as a member of the “extreme, fascist, right wing.”

“The Tunisian people reject the deployment of foreign soldiers on our territory,” he said.

Mr. Baccouche claimed that beach security had been beefed up and that Tunisian officials have rounded up 1,500 people trying to use the country’s cast to flee, and 200 preparing to leave the island of Dherba.

But it may be difficult to stop the flow. Under Mr. Ben Ali, attempting to flee to Europe was a serious crime punishable with imprisonment. The post-revolutionary government is unlikely to fill its prisons as aggressively – but the country continues to suffer a soaring unemployment rate and a collapsing economy, inspiring thousands to leave.

Tripoli

This has led to what Italian officials call “a Libyan solution.” Two years ago, Italy dealt with a similar refugee influx from Italy by buying off the source country. Silvio Berlusconi’s government paid dictator Moammar Gadhafi large sums of money to round up and take back anyone who tried to flee, and to aggressively police his country’s beaches. It is the subject of angry complaints from the UN, who point out that it contravenes Italy’s refugee obligations. But it has been popular domestically.

On Tuesday, Italy appeared poised to do something similar with Tunisia.

Mr. Frattini announced that he had reached an agreement that “respects Tunisia’s sovereignty” by giving Tunisia €100-million in aid, a network of sophisticated radar installations and fast boats for the Tunisian military, and a deal that opens Tunisia to visa-free Italian tourism and allows larger numbers of Tunisians to immigrate legally to Italy.

Of course, another problem could arise if the Arab revolutions spread to Tripoli and unseat Mr. Gadhafi’s family – in which case Italy may have to pay even more money, or begin processing large numbers of refugees.

Berlin

Italy’s suggestion that other countries take a share of Tunisian refugees has infuriated European neighbours, especially Germany.

For one thing, German deputy interior minister Ole Schröder said in Berlin on Tuesday, Italy is being overly sensitive about he refugees: Germany takes in 48,000 asylum seekers every year, eight times the number who have reached Italy.

But the issue also raised the hackles of European leaders at a time when large scale immigration and asylum are unpopular at the ballot box – the leaders of Britain, France and Germany have all delivered speeches in recent months denouncing “multiculturalism.”

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, led calls for encouraging Tunisia to build a government capable of keeping people out. Europe, she said, should help “solve the problems in the home countries, to offer people there a perspective and a chance to live in their own country… not all people who do not want to be in Tunisia can now come to Europe.”

Original Article

The word “revolutionary” is so frequently used today, its coin debased by the easy currency of journalistic clichés and marketing slogans, that we’ve lost track of its true meaning. On Friday, we learned what the real thing feels like.

It’s a joyous moment, one we should never forget no matter what follows. The unstoppable force of human resilience met the immovable object of one of the world’s most entrenched autocrats and, after 18 days of obstinate determination, the pharaoh dissolved into the sand.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

Friday’s freedom-mad street dance in Cairo was watched by the world, but authorities in Beijing, Tripoli, Damascus and especially Tehran did everything they could to prevent their citizens from watching it: National TV in those countries was notably quiet; Iran scrambled the broadcast signal of the Persian-language BBC in advance of its own Monday demonstrations. And no wonder: If it can happen in Egypt, it can happen anywhere.

“To dare: That is the whole secret of revolutions.” The words of Antoine de Saint-Just, who was part of the crowd that drove another tyrant out of power, are becoming part of our currency again. But as the euphoria fades to exhausted self-scrutiny, it’s not those words we’ll remember but rather what Saint-Just was doing when he uttered them: making use, with fellow post-revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, of the policy instrument known as the guillotine – and following that other great revolutionary tradition in which the glorious popular uprising leads to chaos, extremism and, sometimes, more tyranny.

Revolutions tend to defy hopes and expectations, of both the men on the balcony and the people in the square.

Sometimes, the crowd’s grab for popular power is seized by ideologues or confiscated by those who control the military, or caught in a violent oscillation between the two. These scenarios, in their extreme versions, don’t appear likely in Egypt, but all possibilities are present.

The first modern revolution, in England in 1640, set the template: a joyous uprising against the king, the first popular trial and execution of an autocrat, but then Oliver Cromwell’s bloody republic, followed by the restoration of the monarchy. Then, after a surprisingly successful American example in 1776, came France in 1789: revolution, popular sovereignty, then the Terror, the authoritarianism of the Directory, then Napoleon’s coup.

Many of the multihued uprisings of recent decades have suffered this fate. In some cases, the seizure is lengthy. It’s been many decades since the liberal-democratic aspirations of Cuban and Iranian revolutions were hijacked by shallow autocrats; but, beneath the surface, their original aspirations remain frozen in amber.

And that’s what we must remember: Even when they’re sidetracked or seized, the seeds planted by a democratic revolution remain in the ground.

My favourite statement about revolutions is Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he looked back bitterly on the uprisings that swept across Europe in 1848. His followers, after all, were meant to have been the ones who’d seize those popular revolutions and use them to further their own ideological ends. Instead, the people wanted the old bad guys gone but weren’t so interested in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were just democrats, not utopians – much like the kids in Cairo on Friday.

Marx accused the peasants and merchants in the streets of misunderstanding themselves. But they understood themselves all too well. “Men make their own history,” Marx concluded, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.” And that’s just as well.

The joy of revolutions is that they make ordinary life interesting. Suddenly, the streets glow with importance; anything seems possible. But this is also their great flaw. For revolutions are about the state, and we generally don’t want the state to be interesting. We want our lives to be interesting, and the state to be the safe and neutral background against which our lives unfold. When revolutions really succeed, the state is able to fade into the background – perhaps governed by those who are weak or disagreeable or incompetent or somewhat corrupt, but in an ordinary and banal way, until the next election.

I’ve always thought that the great thinker of revolutions wasn’t Marx but his fellow German, Max Weber, who saw history not as a march toward utopia but as a succession of moments of “charismatic authority” – the exciting leader who seizes the day after the revolution, the bold new set of governing ideas – followed by periods of “routinization” and bureaucratic management of the formerly charismatic ideas.

The sooner that routinization of charismatic authority happens, the better. Egyptians will soon pass through a period of charisma, and its opposite, and possibly further struggles, but what they’ve won is the right to be quietly ordinary.

Original Article

London

This week, more than any other in recent history, the traditional strategic interests of the United States have veered toward collision with the country’s founding principles. President Barack Obama spent the week walking the narrow, dangerous gap between the crumbling edifice of Egyptian autocracy and the potent force of millions of people rallying for American-style democracy and rights – in other words, between the old Middle East policy of self-interested pragmatism and a new one born of principle, devoid of the certainties that had held force since the midst of the Cold War.

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Little more than a year ago, the U.S. President was praising the Egyptian autocrat: “He has been a stalwart ally,” he told reporters during a warm-hearted meeting with Mr. Mubarak. “I think he has been a force for stability.”

On Jan. 28, after hundreds of thousands of Egyptian protesters had filled the streets of Cairo for three days, Mr. Obama still seemed to be on Mr. Mubarak’s side, declaring that he must respond with “concrete steps and actions that deliver.”

Two days later, he strengthened his tone, calling for “a meaningful dialogue between government and citizens and the path of political change that lead to the future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the people of Egypt.”

Then the balance shifted, and a different language began emerging. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama seemed explicitly to have abandoned his former ally: “My belief is that an orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and it must begin now.” And then, after Wednesday’s violence in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, hammered in the final nail: “When we said ‘now,’ we meant ‘yesterday,’ ” he said, expressing the President’s new position. “That’s what the people of Egypt want to see.”

For Mr. Mubarak, this was a rather rapid journey from being America’s second-most-important military and political client in the Middle East to being an undesirable autocrat. But the transition has been equally abrupt for Mr. Obama, who has transformed from a pragmatic realist who brokered deals based on American interest into something that supporters would call an idealist and opponents have characterized as weak, spineless or confused.

The Obama ideology, for the past three years, has prided itself on a certain calculated practicality, in stark contrast to the regime-changing, change-imposing conservative idealism that defined the George W. Bush years.

The President’s Egyptian paradox is only a small part of a larger fissure in the fabric of history, a rupture in the logic that defined the Middle East, leaving him staring out across an empty gulf, devoid of landmarks or handholds, where the rusty scaffolding of foreign policy once stood – a sudden shift of the sort that has not been seen since the end of the Cold War.

This is Mr. Obama’s blank-slate moment.

The democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt – with more ruptures likely to follow – coincide with a complete breakdown in the Middle East peace process and the probable demise of America’s main Arab negotiating partners in Palestine. There, too, a whole new language will be needed.

An end point was reached two weeks ago when the “Palestine Papers,” a large package of peace-process-negotiation documents, was leaked to the al-Jazeera network and the Guardian newspaper.

Western governments have pursued a strategy in which Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank is given aid and political support, as well as the ever-extended carrot of a potential peace deal and independent Palestinian state, in order to isolate the radical-Islamist Hamas government in Gaza. In short, Mr. Abbas has served a role not unlike that of Mr. Mubarak. And with the leaks, Arabs suddenly saw Mr. Abbas in a very similar light.

They revealed how far Mr. Abbas’s negotiators had abased themselves in their effort to reach a deal, any deal, with Israel: They had conceded almost all of the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, a traditional Palestinian claim; they had agreed to restrict their long-demanded “right of return” for expelled Palestinians to a limit of 10,000 a year; and they had actively co-operated with Israeli security forces during the 2008 attack on Gaza – and then had been utterly betrayed when Israeli leaders were unwilling or unable, whether through democratic deadlock in their coalition governments or simple stubbornness, to agree to any of it.

Not only did the papers reveal how thoroughly the old logic of the peace process had collapsed – how absolutely everything had been attempted and failed – but they also revealed, and actually helped to accelerate, the end of the strategy of legitimizing Mr. Abbas’s movement and marginalizing Gaza’s Islamists. This occurred just as relations between the U.S. and Israel had reached a deadlock, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defying every effort of Mr. Obama to create an opening or even to halt the construction of new settlements in order to restart talks.

Given this, it may not be so much that Mr. Obama has made a sudden shift from pragmatism to idealism as that American national interests have changed. Republicans and many Democrats traditionally argued that having friendly, autocratic Arab regimes matched with an Israeli stalemate was valuable as a source of “stability.” But that structure, put into place when America’s chief fear in the Middle East was Soviet-backed communism rather than Islamic extremism, has not been yielding much stability lately. It has become all too apparent that the violent actions of al-Qaeda and other movements have been spurred and provoked, rather than quashed, by Arab authoritarian regimes.

Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt and its tacit understanding with Jordan, in this light, were not the first steps toward a wider peace, but the end points of a failed process. The sealed southern border with Egypt has turned the Palestinian refugees of Gaza into a desperate and increasingly radical community, isolated from the broader Arab world. The old “stability” was the root cause of the new instability.

So, while a few voices from the Republican Party (such as former United Nations ambassador John Bolton) have suggested that Mr. Obama is spineless or is selling out America’s best interests, the party’s mainstream generally has fallen in behind the Democratic President this week.

With good reason: What’s happening in the Middle East this year, an apparent cascade of popular-democratic revolutions, is almost exactly what George W. Bush was attempting to spur by invading Iraq. The neo-conservative thinkers who had his ear in his first term virtually spelled out this scenario in their Project for a New American Century manifesto: The only challenge, they said, would be to make the newly empowered Arab voters side with the U.S. for having inspired them. But Mr. Bush backed away, eventually, after Iraq failed and his modest push toward Arab democracy brought Islamists to power in Gaza.

While Mr. Obama appeared embarrassingly awkward in his tiptoe toward support for Egypt’s democracy movement this week, the hesitancy was understandable: Egypt marks the nadir of a certain path in U.S. foreign policy, beyond which is a blind step into the unknown.

There are two possible outcomes, and they may arrive quickly. The first is that the new Middle East becomes a bold symbol of America’s new irrelevance in world affairs and of the U.S. president’s impotence; the newly emboldened Arab publics, already harshly anti-American, turn even further from the United States, embracing new powers to the east or even Islamic parties; and Israel remains an American ally, but its old hope as an anchor of democracy in the region will be long forgotten, its fate in its own hands.

However, there is another option. The democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have not been explicitly anti-American: Burning Uncle Sams or stars of David have not been their icons, and those messages haven’t seemed to interest the protesters. This could be an opening for the U.S. to engage in a more realistic way with the people of the region, bypassing or abandoning the unrepresentative, autocratic leaders who have never had much legitimacy. The old “Cold War logic” never actually made sense: It was anti-democratic and it prevented the economic progress that might have ended the terrible impoverishment of the Arab people and, with it, their increasing radicalization.

Mr. Obama may have stumbled over Cairo, and he may yet trip over his feet into another, Afghan-style crisis of powerlessness – one that, given the symbolic importance of the Middle East to much of the world, could be terribly damaging.

But there is still an opening, one he created on his first presidential visit to Cairo almost two years ago. Most Arabs, rich and poor, remember his words in 2009: “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the Untied States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

It is not too late to turn that “new beginning” from a platitude into an international policy. His ability or failure to make that happen may turn out to be his ultimate test.

Original Article

It was not until the fourth day of Egypt’s mass protests, long after the then-peaceful crowds had swelled into the hundreds of thousands, that the Brothers at last marched into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. They kept to themselves, taking over an otherwise empty corner and not mixing with the other protesters. You could distinguish them easily, those in the square told me, by their propensity toward beards and headscarves, and by their chants of “Allahu Akbar.”

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The Muslim Brotherhood, surprisingly sluggish and inarticulate, had finally moved, and here they were. Not exactly a formidable bunch, but soon that vacuum in the pavement would become a vacuum in the presidential palace, wouldn’t it?

Or so we were told. The threat of the long-outlawed Brotherhood, the great-grandfather of every Jihadist and Islamic-fundamentalist movement in the Middle East, is the key reason why the United States, most European countries, Britain and Canada have continued to support Mr. Mubarak and his kind for decades. They are the reason, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman, why Canada rather shockingly continued to support Mr. Mubarak this week. Mr. Mubarak himself continued to warn, to the end, that after his demise would follow a deluge of Islamist “chaos,” somehow worse than the chaos and torture he himself had unleashed.

What happens when Islamist parties gain power? First, we should ask what happens when they are explicitly denied power: We know that outcome. When these popular movements are repressed, as Egypt has done brutally for six decades, the frustrated adherents have switched to non-political, violent means: all jihadist movements, including al Qaeda, were born as responses to this frustration. You can draw a very direct line between the crushing of the Brotherhood and the attacks of September 11.

When these parties are allowed a role in democratic government, there is a pattern. Remember, however alarming their ideas about women and Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood and its neighbouring parties represent the people who explicitly rejected the violent option (and were shunned and sometimes attacked for this by the jihadists) because they wanted a place in a legitimate government. There is zero chance of Egypt’s uprising of 2011 turning into the Iranian revolution of 1979 or the terrorist violence of Hamas: There are no parties, and no Egyptian constituency of any size, seeking a theocracy.

“These parties definitely reject the Iranian model,” Nathan J. Brown of George Washington University, one of the best-informed observers of current Islamist politics, told me. “First, the Muslim Brotherhood is against a theocratic state or any role for clerics — it’s led by a university professor of veterinary medicine. And second, they prefer to work within a pluralist system. Their slogan is ‘We seek participation, not domination.’ The idea of creating an Islamic state does not seem to be anywhere near their agenda.”

In modern Arab states like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or Morocco, Islamist movements do not command the support to gain a majority; if they were to take part in politics, they would likely have to share power with secular parties. Would the Muslim Brotherhood participate in a government that recognizes Israel and works with Western governments? Their leaders, and informed observers, say yes.

And the experience of fighting for an electoral share among voters generally has a galvanizing effect on these parties. In Algeria, the Movement of Society for Peace, a direct Brotherhood offshoot, plays a leading role in condemning violence and helping battle and denounce the region’s jihadist groups. Leading Islamist parties in Morocco, Kuwait and Bahrain have abandoned Islamic sharia law as a principle and replaced it with a loose notion of “Islamic policy guidelines.”

The most prominent example is Turkey, whose governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) began as an illegal Islamist movement but then, seeking electoral credibility, purged its sharia-law faction and won a majority. It has ruled for the past decade as an aggressively pro-European government that has supported and cooperated with Israel and has done more for women’s rights than its secularist predecessors. Its leaders tell me they are “Islamic in the same way that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party is Christian,” and their actions prove the point.

It was heartening this week to hear some Muslim Brotherhood grandees citing the AKP as their role model. They may represent religious and social views that are abhorrent and ought to be obsolete. But those views are far more dangerous if they are kept outside and left to fester in the darkness.

Original Article