The photo chosen to dominate the first page of the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung speaks volumes. Beneath a blazing headline – “Scharfe Töne zwischen Merkel und Putin (Sharp notes between Merkel and Putin)” – is a satisfied-looking couple. They are about the same height, the woman appears friendly and relatively self-assured, but she looks rather frumpy and certainly does not exude power. The man next to her, however, does. He is dressed in a perfect suit, his legs spread apart in the pose of a colossus, his eyes hidden by mysterious sunglasses, and behind him, in what the Süddeutsche calls “a beloved backdrop”, the Volga River flows down to the sea. We are in Samara, until 1942 the centre of German-Russia where the Volga Germans had their own republic in the Soviet Union. The Russians, represented by Wladimir Putin, are meeting with the European Union and his partner is German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel.
Putin and Merkel speak German together and don’t need an interpreter. In the past they have gotten along much better than any important European leader other than Tony Blair has been able to get along with George Bush. But the constellation of the new Europe, with Russia taking on an increadingly central and potentially threatening role as keeper of the natural resources that Europe so desperately needs, is no longer as comfortable as it was when Putin came to power seven years ago. The alpha male of Europe, with its black-belt leader, has concluded that it has reached the point in its return to economic stability where it can display its teeth and claws for the perusal of its much smaller European neighbours. So far it has been the smallest of them – Georgia, Latvia and especially Estonia – which have gotten the clearest signals that the wolf has left its lair, but Germany, the only other European power that could seriously imagine itself in the alpha male role, learned its lesson sixty years ago and is unlikely to put a male with sunglasses back in power. Tony Blair’s farcical attempt to fill the position by acting as Bush’s lackey in Iraq – Germany. France and Canada said no thanks – only confirmed the world view that the illusion of former power cripples the UK in all its foreign endeavours. The next in line, Nicolas Sarkozy, upon becoming French President said he was going to meditate in a monestary for a few days. He was then caught by the press vacationing on a yacht belonging to a millionaire friend near Malta, as the French suburbs once again erupted in violent protest Cynics are waiting with baited breath for the results of his first meeting with Putin, which will occur in June in Baltic Germany at the annual meeting of the eight leading industrial powers. No one is betting that the French will impress Russia with their latest entry into the Judo ring, where Putin holds that black belt.
The Air India Fiasco Turns Brutal
Before the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the single most deadly terrorist attack in North America happened when an Air India flight originating in Vancouver blew up over the Irish Sea killing all 321 people on board. Simultaneously a bomb blew up in the Tokyo Airport killing some baggage handlers It exploded at the wrong time and failed to bring down its target, another Air India flight. Both of these bombs had been placed on the planes at Vancouver Airport and the RCMP has spent many millions of dollars and more than a decade failing to convict the men who had planted them, Sikh proponents of an independent Sikh state in the Punjab. Police in India subsequently shot down one of them and another pleaded guilty to a minor charge in Vancouver, but the ringleaders continue to escape punishment.
Now evidence has been growing that the RCMP and CSIS, the Canadian security service, actually knew much more about these plans at the time than they have been willing to admit. The bombers had been followed, their conversations taped, and the RCMP ordered to send out a bomb-sniffing dog to the plane when it made a stop in Montreal. The Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario last week announced that at the time he was working on security matters and by chance came across a message warning of a plot to blow up an Air India flight on the weekend it really happened. When he drew it to the attention of the RCMP they dismissed him abruptly, informing him that they were on top of the case. When the officer with the sniff dog went to the Montreal airport he discovered that the plane had just left and the dog could only sniff 3 suitcases left behind. Such shocking revelations, coming to light so many years after the events, have left the large East Indian community, which provided most of the victims on the flight, in disbelief. The former premier of British Columbia, the moderate Sikh Ussal Dossingh, who himself had been beaten to a pulp decades before by Sikh extremists, wondered openly whether he didn’t have to conclude that they had discovered evidence of a cover-up by the RCMP, and that such lax handling of a deadly threat could only be explained when one considered that the plane was full of East Indians, most of whom were Canadian citizens, and that the RCMP simply didn’t consider a threat against such an Air India flight in the same manner it would have employed if it had been a bomb threat against an Air Canada flight. These are dark conclusions by a distinguished level-headed man, and suggest a very dark side of the Canadian mosaic, much different from the one normally displayed.
Iceland’s new guardians – Denmark and Norway
Since the end of World War Two, the USA has invaded a number of countries that were considered to be involved in threatening political developments – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq are only the most prominent – but there is one allied contry, and NATO member, that didn’t have to be invaded or occupied to have US troops in strength presnt on its soil for more than half a century – Iceland. After the war, and despite a great deal of opposition, Iceland agreed to have US troops stay on to protect a country without armed forces from aggression. In 2006, against the will of the Icelandic government, the US withdrew its troops from its substantial air force base in Keflavik, leaving the 300,000 Icelanders without a military presence. Now the lands from which Viking colonialists sailed forth to settle the uninhabited island more than a thousand years ago – Norway and Denmark – will sign a military agreement with Iceland in Oslo on Thursday. Norway will station military planes in Keflavik and Denmark will augment the civilian Icelandic Coast Guard – which defeated the UK in the famous Cod War – with Danish military ships. Only in case of a real invasion would the US get involved, as would all NATO countries according to the NATO Charter.
Ukraine 1 Russia 0
In Canada the only sport that counts is hockey, in the USA it is (increasingly) American football, but in Europe it is beyond a doubt, the other kind of football, actually played with the feet, which Americans call soccer. It is also the only sport taken seriously almost everywhere, although baseball has real strength in Latin America and Japan, and basketball has taken on an increasingly international flair. But there is no doubt that the major international soccer tournaments, along with the Olympics, are the most widely followed sports event, and that world and European soccer championships have an impassioned audience with real political clout in both the positive and negative sense. Thus the awarding of venues for the Olympics, the world soccer championships and the European soccer championships, all of which take place every fourth year, is a major economic, political and prestige event. Some of the decisions of late have been surprising and controversial. Beijing and Vancouver were awarded the next 2 Olympic venues after lengthy and expensive presentations. For China next summer’s Olympics are an event of the utmost political importance and a chance to display its economic, industrial and athletic power to the world. Last summer’s world soccer championship in Germany had the kind of success that China is hoping for. South Africa is the host of the next one, and billions of fans are hoping that the most prospering country in Africa will be able to provide the infrastructure and the splendidly serene month-long atmosphere that characterized the tournament in Germany.
The European soccer championships have traditionally been held in the large European soccer powerhouse countries, that were already equipped with more than adequate venues – Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK. On occasion, smaller soccer countries – the Netherlands and Belgium, for instance – would jointly sponsor the tournament. Since Italy, the reigning world champion, had applied to host the next available games, it was assumed that they were a shoo-in. But it didn’t happen that way. Heavily tarnished by proof of corruption, fixing and hooligan violence in the Italian league, the world champion was rejected by the venue panel, and suddenly a most unlikely joint partnership was named – Poland and Ukraine. The former is in the EU, a member of NATO, a neighbour of Germany, and a functioning, if somewhat erratic, democracy. The latter is not wanted in the EU, nor in NATO, shares a relatively short border with Poland and a very large one with Russia, and its attempts at democracy make operetta plots seem realistic. Its greatest fear is that the eastward expansion of the EU will draw down a new kind of iron curtain at the Ukrainian border and its dependance on its immense eastern neighbour will become overwhelming.
Now it seems that Ukraine had first approached Russia with the idea of a joint hosting proposal and this was summarily, and somehat arrogantly rejected by Moscow, who pointed out that they could do this on their own. Since Ukraine has a better soccer team than Russia in any case, it seems only appropriate that they have won this one in the backrooms of soccer power. Instead of staging an event that would inevitably have suggested to Europe that Russia and Ukraine are natural allies, Russian arrogance has given Ukraine the chance to convince Europe that its natural place in the world is west of the EU curtain, in the same general area, as its co-host, Slavic Poland. The announcement led to a universal cheer in Ukraine, welding together, for the only time in memory, the bitter enemies of eastern and western Ukraine. It also seems very likely that the games themselves will lead to a sense of unityin Ukraine that has been dramatically missing since 1990. An own-goal by Russia may save the day.
A Canadian weekend
Anyone under the delusion that Canada and the United States are really one very big country in North America, competely dominated by the latter, might have spent this Easter weekend in the larger one, Canada, to gain a more realistic perspective.
It was the last weekend for NHL regular-season hockey and virtually nobody in Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal wasn’t paying attention to the results. (The first three made it into the playoffs, the last two managed to knock each other out.) All of the Canadian teams will be playing against teams housed in US cities, which will, as a whole, be very uninterested (here we can except Detroit) in the next two months of the NHL playoffs while Canadians will have daily entertainment covered on the national tv network, the CBC. US hockey fans will have to turn their aerials to the north.
On Easter Saturday there was a 3-hour wait at the British Columbia-Washington border crossings as many thousand Canadians had their traditional Easter weekend visits to the gorgeous tulip fields of the Skagit Valley in Washington wrecked by the vigilent US defence forces dealing with terrorism. Apparently no terrorists were caught in the lineups, although the photographer on assignment for the Vancouver Province newspaper was convinced to not spend the rest of his day trying to get across the border for his annual tulip-field shot. There are no 3-hour border waits left in Europe – well, truckers entering Serbia or Ukraine claim they suffer such harassments – and it is hard to see what the US gains from convincing its neighbours to spend their money at home.
Then there is the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge in eastern France, where Canadian troops succeeded in overrunning German positions, after Brits and French had failed for years, losing many thousands of soldiers in the attempts. Military buffs are convinced that this operation, in which 3500 Canadian soldiers were killed in one day, is the glue around which the nation was formed. Others point out that the murderous war continued right on nonetheless.
On Easter Sunday, six Canadian soldiers were killed in the murderous fields around Kandahar, Aghanistan, where 2,500 of the 11,500 soldiers deployed are Canadian while most NATO countries continue to refuse to send their troops – apparently individual German soldiers can refuse to take part in operations they object to on ethical grounds. And on Easter Monday, the leaders of Canada, France and Great Britain gathered at the spectacular Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle. There, on soil deeded to Canada by France, the Queen of England, who is also still the Queen of Canada, demonstrated more power in her 80th year than the rest of her family combined will be able to do when the question of succession in Canada arrives. The Prime Minister of France was best-dressed and had the best hairdo while the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, a supposed lightweight who is beginning to punch above his weight, profited from his natural informality and the presence of his very pleasant family, whom most Canadians, to their approval, had never seen before. Back in Ottawa, the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative in Canada and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, presided over ceremonies at the War Memorial. Dressed in a long white coat and black fur hat to fend off a winter still hanging around in eastern Canada, Michelle Jean, the very attractive young black bilingual immigrant from Haiti who is now the Governor-General, would have caught the immediate attention of even the Prime Minister of France. Just a month ago she was in Kandahar, she noted, and in battle dress. It’s not the image the world – not to mention the United States – has of Canada, but they have simply failed to note the dramatic changes taking place in the world’s second-largest country, something most Canadians are not unhappy about. As the world’s second-largest source of both oil and water, Canadians are watching that southern border even more suspiciously than do the border guards wasting their (and out time) at Blaine, Washington.
Once again, Quebec goes to the polls
On Monday, Quebeckers once again have the opportunity to shake up the rest of Canada (ROC) by going to the polls. It seems very unlikely that the newly-elected government will be the same as the current one, that is run by a federalist Liberal party with a majority under the current premier Jean Charést. For the first time in 125 years, it seems inevitable that there will be a minority government in Quebec, as the traditional two-party federalist-separatist (Liberal-Parti Quebecois) voting pattern has been broken by the rise of a third party, Action Democratique du Quebec, under their young leader, conservative populist Mario Dumont. There seems to be general agreement that he has run the best campaign of the three party leaders, resulting in polls showing a virtual three way tie in popular votes and an absolutely unpredictable distribution of party numbers in parliament under the winner take all riding system.
But political junkies strongly suspect that M. Dumont’s spectacular rise in popularity and his potential role as kingmaker (if not king) on Tuesday may be mainly due to dissatisfaction with the other two leaders and their parties. In particular, Andre Boisclair, the young erratic leader of the Parti Quebecois, has managed to convince even many separatists to at least park their votes with Mario Dumont, who, unlike M. Boisclair, has pledged not to hold a referendum on separatism, which many separatists don’t want at this point, convinced they would once again lose. Dumont has also vowed not to go onto a coalition with the Parti Quebecois. Many separatists also look with favour on that, hoping that a leader of the Parti Quebecois may soon arrive who reminds them a lot more of party-founder René Levesque than does error-prone M. Boisclair. So it seems that the most likely result of Monday’s election will involve some kind of coalition brokered by Dumont and Charest, with a probable Liberal premier of a minority government and the Action Democratique holding the balance of power.
The Germans are coming, the Chinese are coming!
The demographics of Siberia are complex. Once the domain of nomadic tribes, gigantic Siberia came under Russian control in its march east at about the same time as the North American west became part of the British or US domain. Invading armies from France and Germany found out with horrible consequences that they couldn’t even conquer and occupy European Russia as far west as Moscow, never mind the overwhelming spaces of Asian Russia, where whole armies got swallowed up in the First World War. During the Stalinist period, Siberia became synonomous with the land of the Gulags, slave-worker camps whose domain actually extended far to the east of what the Russians call Siberia into the Russian Far East and maritime provinces. There the so-called (in English), 3-400 Siberian tigers (Amur tigers in Russian and German) make their last stand, and may actually prove to be the last great cats (and they are the largest anywhere) to survive in Asia. 10% of them still inhabit extreme northern China (with a few in North Korea), underlining the closeness of the two emerging (again) superpowers Russia and China.
If you are very lucky you may see tigers on either side of that border, but you will see very few Chinese in Russia and fewer Russians in China save along the border cities on the Amur river where the Russian markets are serviced by Chinese coming across for the day to sell Chinese goods or perhaps even to stay (in isolation) for some months or even years with no intention of remaining in Russia permanently. Meanwhile Siberia and the Russian Far East are losing population dramatically, as their Russian populations attempt to escape the poverty and unemployment that has overwhelmed the remote area since the fall of the Soviet Union, by moving to the big cities of the west. The paranoid Russian nightmare is that the Chinese will spill over into the emptiness of eastern Russia and attempt to recolonize areas of Russia that once in fact had Chinese populations.
In Siberia there are signs of this happening, but the Chinese are being preceded by a group whose presence noone could have predicted five years ago. 2.5 million so-called Russlanddeutsche (Russian-Germans), who had been living in European Russia for centuries before being expelled to Siberia and Kazakhstan during World War Two, took advantage of the strange German blood-based citizenship laws to return to Germany after 1990. Integration has been anything but easy for them as most had forgotten how to speak German and had become in many cultural ways competely Russified or Kazakhified. A few thousand have now returned to what has become booming Siberia, (or indeed decided never to leave for Germany despite valid papers) to take advantage of plentiful work opportunities in the oil and gas fields of Siberia without which western Europe would be in for very cold winters. The Russian government contributes 100000 Rubels (3000 Euros), travel costs and free luggage transport to lure them back to a place their former Russan neighbours have abandoned. The countryside north of Novosibirsk may not be the equal of Fort MacMurray, Alberta, where the largest oil fields outside of Saudi-Arabia are now coming into full swing and housing costs rival those of Manhattan, but housing developments are springing up in Siberia built by Germans for Germans. According to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the housing developer of one such settlement did not understand the question when asked whether the Russians resented the Germans, given the war and all that, and then pointed out that these Germans had Russian (and German) passports, spoke Russian and were appreciated in any case by the Russians for their hard work. Down the road were settlements for Chinese immigrants, he went on, who the Russians really don’t like, and whose spokesmen needed translators to deal with the Russian authorities. The future of Siberia could be interesting.
Vlad the Great Strides West
There are two kinds of reports coming out of contemporary Russia. One has to do with things like the brutal war in Chechyna, or the corruption and violence that is endemic to Russian life, and particularly dangerous for opposition politicians and muckracking journalists. The other has to do with the breathtaking display of exploding political and economic power that Russia has been able to sustain in the reign of Vladimir Putin. Putin may have taken on the powers of a czar, but by law his reign must end at about the same time as that of George W. Bush. The people of Russia seem to be in no mood to punish the ascetic, all-powerful former KGB agent for his strong-armed approach to maintaining order as they regain much of the confidence in the strength of the world’s largest country that had been lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact it can be argued that Putin is the most popular elected head of state in the world; polls show an approval rating that George Bush can’t imagine, even though there is little chance of an opposition getting a fair shake in an election in Putin’s Russia. Virtually noone can make sense of former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s claim that his pal Putin was “ein lupenreiner Demokrat” – a pure democrat – but the western European leaders, in their private moments, would probably all agree that they prefer to deal with a stable regime in Moscow than with the anarchy that preceded Putin.
With little time left in his reign (and there is much speculation about what the still young ex-chief will do, surely more than Bill Clinton has been able to muster in a similar situation), Putin is using his re-established power base to forge alliances with former enemies who themselves have trouble fathoming the US government. In the last week he has had a private meeting with the Pope in a tentative attempt to bring some conciliation between Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. This meeting took place without translators as Putin announced that he wished to talk to the Pope in his native German, which Putin speaks very well. (As an aside, wasn’t Condoleeza Rice, as an academic, supposed to be an expert on Russian affairs? Does she use a translator in Moscow? Is there any sign that she has any understanding of Russia?) He then had apparently fruitful meetings with the italian Prime Minister in Rome, signed an accord with the presidents of Greece and Bulgaria in Athens, establishing a pipeline for Russian oil on its way to western Europe that is 51% under Russian control, stopped the building of the Iranian nuclear plant, pending the payment of Iranian debts to Russia, announced that Aeroflot would be spending 4.4 billion dollars to buy 22 Airbusses made in western Europe, while shutting down any negotiations with Boeing, and stated that Russia was considering closing its air space to western European airlines. All in a week’s work, one might say, but it is also all proof that Russia has made clear to western Europe and the US that they no longer have the luxury of putting their heads in the sand when it comes to assessing Russia’s place in world politics.
A tale of two countries.
Condoleeza Rice made short hop up to Ottawa last week, perhaps to try to smooth ruffled feathers after George Bush once again failed to mention Canada in his discussion of countries contributing to the war effort in Afghanistan. But she was there long enough to be confronted by the unanimous verdict of the Canadian Supreme Court – 9-0 – that it was unconstitutional for the government to override the judicial system or the Canadian Charter of Rights in dealing with suspected terrorists. Shortly after that a solid majority in the House of Parliament voted to retire special legislation that had made circumvention of the usual legal practices in the wake of the attack on New York and Washington a possibility. The differences between the two countries five years after that attack could hardly be more startling.
While the US has allowed that terrible day to turn it into something of a rogue fortress state, demanding visas for citizens of the great majority of countries and passports for all visitors including soon neighbours travelling by car, Canada has changed very little other than by displaying increased vigilance by police authorities at border crossings and closer surveillance of suspicious groups in urban areas. A recent poll showing that almost 50% of foreign travellers considered the US (and not Russian or China) to be the most unwelcoming place to try to visit, while 2% chose Canada, shows one of the potential long-term consequences of these policies. According to a recent article in the NY Times, foreign business people are beginning to avoid travel to and meetings in the US. It may be that Canada will prove to have been a bit too naive in its mild response to terrorist threats, but it would be a hot winter day in the Yukon before you’ll find any Canadians who wish they were holed up behind the walls of a fortress.
Snow White, one dwarf, a giant and an oil rush
Up north above the top of Europe, a moment of history is slouching towards some kind of climax. Europe’s last untapped oil and gas fields are being readied for exploitation, and have become a source of irritation between two of Europe’s most unlikely neighbours. Norway and Russia share the most remote of all European borders, east and south of Nordkap, where Europe stops reaching north, and the cold Norwegian settlement of Kirkenes stands on guard at the point where western and eastern European cultures meet most dramatically. The Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre began 2007 with a visit to his most remote outpost as a singal for the importance of Kirkanes in Norway’s future ecoomic developments. For the last couple of decades, Norway has used its oil reserves in the North Sea to guarantee one of the world’s richest societies, and its pension fund is now big enough to buy the island of Manhattan. But the last Norwegian oil field is about to be tapped and soon Norway’s pension fund will have to run on its own. Norway’s main problem, however, is the ecological catastrophe threatening the Barent Sea by the decaying Russian nuclear submarine fleet west of Murmansk, and the general Russian disinterest in the ecology of the Arctic.
Snow White, the first natural gas field in the Barents Sea, is about to be developed by the Norwegians, and after that there are only the potential fields in the disputed waters north of the Russian-Norwegian border and the Shtokman gas field in Russian waters. The Russians so far have refused to co-operate with the Norwegians, who have the most experience in drilling in difficult Arctic waters. They also refused Norwegian aid in saving the crew of their sunken submarine the Karsk.
The Norwegians fear more ecological disasters will spill over into their waters. Norway has made it clear it would like help from the European Union, to which it does not belong, but whose members would certainly prefer to buy their energy from Norway than from Russia. Finally there is Svalbard, the island group that represnts the northernmost inhabited territory in Europe on the main island Spitzbergen. In 1920 Norway was granted territorial rights to the islands, but mineral rights were ceded to all the signers of the treaty, now numbering 40, as the probability of oil and gas reserves has arisen. The treaty was originally aimed at coal deposits, and both Russians and Norwegians have mined there, but it is now unclear whether offshore oil and gas are also covered.
As the ice in Arctic waters begins to melt and both Northwest and Northeast Passages open up, conflicts about Arctic waters are destined to keep growing. Norway and Russia, who have never been particularly friendly, are perhaps predictable, if uneven, rivals in this area, but the main event may play out between traditional friends Canada and the US, as the US government refuses to recognize Canada’s claims to the waters between its Arctic islands.