>> IRAN

IRAN:
Order Out of Chaos
Abbas William Samii
The mad, mad world of Iranian foreign policy.
Abbas William Samii is a Bernard M. Osher Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a regional analysis coordinator at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The views in this article are his own.
In recent months, the United States has repeatedly accused Iran of interfering in its neighbors' affairs--and Iran has repeatedly denied such claims. It might seem counterintuitive for Tehran to foment unrest on its eastern and western borders, but that is exactly what Washington accuses it of doing.
Some observers argue that because Iranian diplomats played a helpful role in the November-December 2001 meeting in Bonn that created a framework for a post-Taliban government, and because in April 2004 Iranian diplomats came to Iraq in an effort to reduce tensions there, it does not make sense for Iran to work against U.S. efforts now. If anything, the American elimination of the Taliban--with which Iran almost went to war in late 1998--and Saddam Hussein, whose 1980-88 war left some 200,000 Iranians dead, has greatly benefited Iran and contributed to its security.
In theory, Iran and the United States have similar interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. In practice, however, Iranian policy is based on a number of motives that are at odds with those of the United States, and, therefore, what is irrational from an American perspective is rational from an Iranian one. Furthermore, institutions and officials with sometimes conflicting interests have formal and informal roles in Iran's foreign policy process. The interaction of motives and actors seems chaotic, but understanding how this system works can help explain present Iranian actions and predict future ones.
Motives and Actors
Exporting its Islamic revolution was the dominant focus of Iranian foreign policy in the 1980s, with Tehran supporting Shia movements in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Revolutionary Islam continues to underpin the country's foreign policy; Article 3 of the Iranian constitution still states that in order to attain its objectives the country's foreign policy must be based on "Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unsparing support to the freedom fighters of the world." And, according to Article 154 of the constitution, "[Iran] supports the rightful struggle of the oppressed people against their oppressors anywhere in the world."
By 1988, Tehran had recognized that this attitude had alienated it from the international community. Radicalism slowly gave way to pragmatism, geopolitics, and economics; factors such as nationalism and ethnicity also influenced policy. This meant that in the 1990s Iran improved relations with its neighbors across the Persian Gulf, did not make a substantive effort to influence political developments in Central Asia, and sided with Moscow in the Chechen conflict.
An exception to this pragmatic attitude is Iran's continuing support for terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even this can be considered pragmatic, if only from an Iranian perspective, because by supporting these groups Iran demonstrates commitment to an issue that has a regional appeal, rather than a Shia-specific one. Moreover, this issue appears to concern only the United States and Israel--two countries with which Iran does not have diplomatic relations.
The top actor in the foreign policy process is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who under Article 110 of the constitution delineates state policies and is supreme commander of the armed forces. He appoints the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) commander, and the top commanders of the armed forces. The political-ideological bureaus in the military are linked with the leadership.
The 38-member Expediency Council advises the Supreme Leader and makes recommendations on state policies. Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who served as president from 1989 to 1997, heads this body.
The country's top foreign policy body is the Supreme National Security Council, which is chaired by the moderate president Mohammad Khatami. The IRGC and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) theoretically report to this council, but in reality they have a great deal of autonomy and deal with the more sensitive aspects of foreign policy. Their political rivals are the Foreign and Defense Ministries, which are more closely allied with the president.
It is noteworthy that when a delegation of Iraqi opposition figures, including Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, visited Iran in January 2003, it did not meet with anyone from President Khatami's office or from the Foreign Ministry. Brandeis University professor Kanan Makiya, who was in that delegation, told the New York Times, "We're not involved with the Khatami group. They have absolutely no say over Iraqi affairs."
Institutions that are not directly part of the government also sway the foreign policy process. Informally, the foundations that were created partly through the post-revolution expropriation of the assets of the monarchy and wealthy Iranians are influential. The foundations get many state benefits, but they are not accountable to the elected government. The Imam Reza Shrine Foundation (Astan-i Qods-i Razavi), based in the northeastern city of Mashhad, could affect Iran's relationship with Afghanistan. The foundation controls the most important religious shrine in Iran, from which it derives its power and wealth. Over the last 25 years the income from pilgrims and donors has turned the foundation into a multimillion dollar enterprise; it runs auto plants, agricultural businesses, and many other enterprises, and it is worth an estimated $15 billion. The head of the foundation, Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, is a member of the aforementioned Expediency Council, as well as the Assembly of Experts, which supervises the Supreme Leader's performance.
Individuals also influence the foreign policy process. In a February 2003 meeting with Afghan pilgrims to Mecca, Hojatoleslam Mohammad Mohammadi-Reyshahri said that the United States created the Taliban so it would have an excuse to enter Afghanistan. He urged Afghans to stand up to Western aggression and promised that Iran would help them regain control of their fates. Reyshahri is the Supreme Leader's representative and supervisor of hajj pilgrims to Saudi Arabia, serves on the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, and is head of the important Shahzadeh Abdolazim Shrine Foundation.
All these institutional factors are relatively easy to trace. It is more difficult to determine whether individuals like Vaez-Tabasi and Reyshahri are acting in an official capacity or as private citizens. Confusing the situation even more is the complicated network of intermarriage and seminary education that links the clerics who run the country. Such informal networks are not confined to Iran's clerical classes. Other networks are based on military service during the Iran-Iraq war, international university education, and regional origins.
Overshadowing this obscure mix of formal and informal institutional and individual connections is domestic factional politics, ranging from isolationist to interventionist. Traditional conservatives oppose exporting the revolution because it has the potential to harm trade and the bazaar. The left, on the other hand, initially identified the country's foreign policy interests with opposition to the United States. Centrists identified with Hashemi-Rafsanjani eschewed these approaches and hinted at the possibility of relations with the United States.
From Theory to Practice
The most important implication of the above is that the general direction of Iranian foreign policy can be determined by studying Supreme Leader Khamenei's statements, which means understanding that Iran's leadership fears the United States more than it had feared the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. On the eve of Operation Enduring Freedom (in September 2001), Supreme Leader Khamenei said, "We shall not offer any assistance to America and its allies in their attack on Afghanistan." As the crowd chanted "Death to America," Khamenei asked how the United States could seek Iranian assistance in attacking Afghanistan when "you [Americans] are the ones who have always inflicted blows on Iran's interests." And Khamenei warned, in a May 2004 discussion about events in Iraq, "America's threat today is not directed against just one or two countries in this region. The threat is directed against all of us. . . . They intend to devour the entire region."
It is possible that Tehran hopes to benefit from the difficult situation the United States faces in Iraq. Hashemi-Rafsanjani has used the "quagmire" metaphor often in this context. Even before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, he said, in a December 2002 meeting with officers of the IRGC, that because the United States does not have experience with the Iraqi military it "will get caught in a quagmire." Hashemi-Rafsanjani said in an April 2003 sermon, "They are in a quagmire." And a year later he said, "Americans have a bumpy road ahead of them. . . . They are really in a quagmire." He continued, "The day they set foot in Baghdad, I said that they had entered a quagmire and that from then onwards, the policy of extricating themselves from the quagmire had to be implemented."
It is noteworthy that the Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been leading an insurrection against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, met with Hashemi-Rafsanjani and IRGC officials during a June 2003 visit to Iran. Khatami refused to meet al-Sadr during that visit, and al-Sadr rebuffed Iranian Foreign Ministry officials who visited Iraq in mid-April 2004. Hashemi-Rafsanjani appeared to be trying to exploit this relationship when he told Al-Arabiyah television on May 5, "What we said regarding the Americans' fall in the Iraq quagmire is a fact being admitted by the U.S. leaders themselves." He continued, "If the United States makes an official decision to put the future of Iraq in the hands of the Iraqis, Iran can extend help at whatever level. This is because we have capabilities, friendships, and good relations with the Iraqi people."
Iranian actions can seem to cancel each other out. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran is using inflammatory propaganda in its radio broadcasts to undermine U.S. reconstruction and security efforts. Its special operations personnel reportedly are active in both countries. At the same time, Iran has pledged more than $500 million in aid for Afghanistan's reconstruction, and it already has sent business delegations to Baghdad. When one recognizes that different agencies have different agendas as a result of weak coordination or outright competition, the situation makes more sense.
Appearances to the contrary, Iranian foreign policy making is a rational process. However, it does not lend itself to the modeling favored by political scientists. The best way to understand Tehran's actions and to predict what it will do in the future is to know how the system operates and to be thoroughly familiar with the individuals within the system.
Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Press is The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons, by Sidney Drell and James Goodby. To order, call 800.935.2882.


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UN Nuclear Agency Demands Iran Suspend Uranium Enrichment
Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The United Nation's nuclear watchdog agency demanded Iran cease all uranium enrichment activities and said it will decide on Nov. 25 whether to take steps to ensure the country's atomic program isn't a threat to the international community.
The International Atomic Energy Agency ``considers it necessary that Iran immediately suspend all enrichment-related activities,'' it said in a three-page resolution. The Vienna- based agency also demanded Iran further open its atomic program to inspectors. It did acknowledge the country has a right to enrich uranium.
The U.S. says Iran, with the second-highest oil reserves in the world, is concealing a nuclear weapons program and wants it sent before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Iran says its atomic program is peaceful and only intended to generate energy.
Iran's uranium enrichment activities have been suspended since October 2003, and the nation will decide in coming days if that will continue, said Hossein Mousavian, the head of Iran's delegation to the IAEA. It is Iran's ``national right,'' to convert uranium, he said earlier this week.
``We will continue our cooperation with the IAEA fully and transparently to clarify and resolve any remaining issues,'' Mousavian said at a press conference after the passage of the resolution.
Iran has had more than 800 IAEA inspections in the last year.
U.S. `Pleased'
The U.S. is ``pleased'' the IAEA has set Nov. 25 as a ``deadline for Iran to cease its pursuit of nuclear weapons,'' said Jackie Sanders, the head of the U.S. delegation.
``The resolution calls on Iran to take confidence building measures related to enrichment and reprocessing activities,'' Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA director general, said at a press conference. ``I think people were ready to listen to Iran's point of view, and I look forward to resolving the outstanding issues at the board meeting in November.''
The so-called Non-Aligned Movement of nations, representing 13 of the 35 seats on the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors, succeeded in making the resolution recognize a distinction between Iran's commitment to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty and its voluntary ``confidence building measures'' to stop enriching uranium.
`Confidence Building'
All signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty are allowed to enrich uranium as long as the activities are for producing energy and declared to the IAEA. Iran signed an additional protocol last year to suspend enrichment after engaging in undeclared activities.
``We are fully cognizant of the distinct difference between legal obligations and confidence building measures,'' Germany's delegation said in a statement. ``Signatories of the NPT should benefit fully from the peaceful use of nuclear energy.''
The Non-Aligned Movement has been in existence since the 1960s. It's members on the IAEA's Board of Governors come from Cuba, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Tunisia, Vietnam, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sudan, Malaysia and Pakistan. The group is composed of more than 100 member countries.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Chris Collins at collinsc@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: September 18, 2004 13:44 EDT


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Iran Is Criticized for Its Lack of Candor on Nuclear Program
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Sept. 18 - The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors passed a resolution on Saturday criticizing Iran for a lack of candor over its nuclear program and calling for the country to suspend all uranium enrichment activities that could contribute to producing fuel for a nuclear bomb.
The resolution, which was delayed by haggling over wording about the suspension, said the agency "considers it necessary" that Iran halt all of its uranium enrichment programs and meet all of the agency's demands before its Nov. 25 meeting.
It said the board would then "decide whether or not further steps are appropriate." The United States wants Iran's past breaches of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty referred to the United Nations Security Council, which could decide to impose sanctions against the country.
Uranium enrichment, in which uranium is converted into a gas and spun in centrifuges to concentrate more fissile isotopes, is used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, but it can also produce uranium suitable for nuclear weapons.
Signatories to the treaty are allowed to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, but the activity can bring countries to within months of being able to produce a bomb.
Iran last year agreed to suspend uranium enrichment after it was found to have concealed an extensive enrichment program, which constituted a breach of its treaty obligations. But it almost immediately began quibbling over what activities that included.
In July, Iran resumed the manufacture of centrifuge parts and the assembly of centrifuge units, though it has upheld its suspension on using those centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The resolution passed on Saturday calls for Iran to stop all enrichment-related activities, including the manufacture and assembly of centrifuge parts, centrifuge testing and the conversion of uranium into gas.
The nuclear agency's chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, speaking after the resolution passed, said Iran needed to suspend its enrichment activities "in order to restore confidence" in its peaceful intentions, Agence France-Presse reported.
While Iran insists that its nuclear program is designed for power generation and other peaceful purposes, the country's sluggish response to the nuclear agency's requests for information and the program's own inconsistencies have convinced the United States and some other countries that Iran is hiding efforts to build a nuclear bomb.
Besides working on a light-water nuclear reactor near the Iranian port of Bushehr, for example, Iran had secretly begun work on a heavy-water reactor. It is easier to extract bomb-grade plutonium from the spent fuel of heavy-water reactors.
The nuclear agency has asked Iran to explain why it is building the heavy-water reactor and, in June, called for it to halt construction. Iran has not complied.
Washington also suspects that a partially buried bunker on a munitions plant in Parchin, 20 miles southwest of Tehran, could be used to test the kind of high-intensity explosives that surround a core of highly enriched uranium or plutonium in a nuclear implosion bomb.
Hossein Mousavian, the head of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Friday that Iran would grant the nuclear agency access to the site. "We have never rejected an I.A.E.A. inspection," he said.
The country has continued to convert small amounts of uranium into the gas used in enrichment centrifuges, despite the nuclear agency's calls for it to stop. Earlier this month, Iran said it planned to convert more than 40 tons of uranium into gas soon. Experts say that will produce enough uranium hexafluoride gas to yield enriched uranium for several bombs.
Iran also insists that its moratorium on enriching uranium is temporary. "Suspension is not cessation," Mr. Mousavian said Friday.
Objections from many so-called nonaligned countries delayed the final passage of the resolution, which was drafted by Britain, France and Germany and later amended by the United States. Those countries wanted it made explicit that enrichment activities are allowed to all signatories of the nonproliferation treaty, and that any suspension by Iran would be made voluntary to build international confidence.
The United States spent the morning meeting with several reticent board members that have enrichment programs of their own, searching for wording that would allow the draft resolution to pass without having to submit it to a vote. While resolutions can be passed by vote, the agency prefers working by consensus to avoid politicizing its actions.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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>> NORTH KOREA



1,400 former senior officials in Seoul charge South now led by pro-North Koreans

Intelligence officials reject N. Korea's explanation of huge blast
"There is no reason for the North's regime to secretly conduct the demolition of a mountain in the middle of the night if it is for a hydroelectric project," said a South Korean intelligence official.

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Kim Jong-Il's sister-in-law told how Kim's eldest son, Kim Jong Nam (above) had an official killed in hopes of succeeding his father.

Report: North Korea building strategic underground facility near blast site

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North Korea 'planning more blasts'
(CNN) -- North Korea is planning to carry out two more explosions as part of a hydroelectric power plant project after a major blast last week sparked speculation a nuclear test had taken place, Kyodo news agency has reported.
A North Korean engineer told a group of diplomats who visited the site that they had been carrying out deliberate detonations for several weeks, the German ambassador to Pyongyang said in a telephone interview.
Diplomats from Germany, Britain, the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Poland, and Sweden made the one-day trip to Yanggang province on Thursday to verify North Korea's statement that the explosions were deliberate.
The mystery began when a 4-kilometer (2 miles) wide mushroom cloud was spotted near the Chinese border on satellite images by South Korea's Yonhap agency.
Two blasts took place on September 8 and 9, according to the engineer, but the pictures were not seen until three days later.
The explosions moved 150,000 cubic meters of earth and rock, according to Doris Hertrampf, the German ambassador.
"It was a huge construction site, and I saw large movements of earth going on,'' Hertrampf said.
But the Polish ambassador to Pyongyang, Wojciech Kaluza, said the group had reached no conclusion about North Korea's explanations.
European Union diplomats will meet on Friday to discuss the issue further, Kyodo reported Kaluza as saying.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Reuters on Tuesday North Korea's explanation squared with Washington's view.
Some outside analysts speculated the explosion could have been at the Yongjo-ri Missile Base, a facility believed to house up to 36 NoDong missiles.
U.S. officials say there is no evidence that is true, though it cannot be completely ruled out.
According to data gathered by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), Yongjo-ri is a suspected site for North Korea's uranium enrichment program.
South Korea skeptical too
On Tuesday South Korea's defense minister said the country was seeking independent verification on the nature of the blast.
Yoon Kwang-woong said the South would use intelligence channels and satellite images to check on the source of the blast in a northern region of the North.
Hydroelectric experts in Seoul have questioned the North's explanation, saying the relatively small Huchang river in the area made it an unlikely and unfeasible site for a major hydro power plant, according to Reuters reports.
The nation's media have also raised questions, with the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoting a North Korean defector familiar with the region who said the body of water in the area was not sufficient for a large power plant.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency said late Monday that reports of a large accidental explosion at the site or a nuclear test was a "preposterous smear campaign."
"Probably, plot-breeders might tell such a sheer lie, taken aback by blastings at construction sites of hydropower stations in the north of Korea," KCNA said.
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/09/16/nkorea.blast/index.html

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Lack of Intelligence Capabilities
Ado Over Mysterious Blast in North Turns Into Farce
Korea Times
The week-long ado over a mysterious blast in North Korea is now turning into a mere farce as it seems to have been touched off by our intelligence officials' poor assessment of an American satellite picture.
The fiasco has brought to light our poor intelligence capabilities concerning the Northern regime. It has also prompted the general public to raise concerns about intelligence cooperation between Seoul and Washington.
The comic episode began on Sept. 9 when the government received a picture of ``mushroom'' clouds over a Northern county bordering with China taken by a U.S. commercial satellite. The clouds led intelligence officials to believe they were caused by an enormous explosion. Some even speculated that the blast was much bigger than the explosion at the Ryongchon train station which took place in April, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands of others, with children accounting for the largest number of the victims.
However, the government kept silent until Sept. 12 when local and foreign media began reporting that a large-scale blast might have taken place in Kimhyongjik county, Yanggang Province. Some foreign papers, simply relying on their analysis of the mushroom clouds, even suspected that the North might have conducted a nuclear experiment.
In a hasty press conference later in the day, Minister of Unification Chung Dong-young made a crucial mistake by saying that the clouds seemed to indicate an accidental explosion of serious magnitude. But he ruled out the possibility of a nuclear experiment.
The following day, the North told the visiting British deputy foreign minister that the blast was part of the ongoing construction of a hydraulic power plant in the county that began in May.
The North's explanation was corroborated by a picture of the area concerned taken by our satellite on Wednesday. The picture showed no sign of a recent large explosion.
Now it has even been suggested that the clouds were a natural phenomenon.
The hasty misjudgments concerning the U.S. satellite picture have made our government's intelligence capabilities, especially those aimed at the North, a laughingstock in the international community.
It does not make sense that the government seems to know almost nothing about what is happening in the North, even though it maintains various channels of dialogue with Pyongyang, which have become somewhat disrupted.
Taking a lesson from the latest confusion, the government ought to strengthen its ability to collect and assess information concerning Northern affairs and cooperation in the field of intelligence with Washington.
9-17-2004 17:34
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N Korea blast: The only certainty is doubt
By David Scofield
Two massive explosions in five months, one at a train station and one in the mountains, have rocked North Korea and caused rampant speculation about what's really going on in the Hermit Kingdom. The details of this latest blast in the military region near the Chinese border are not known, but North Korean officials told a visiting British diplomat that it had to blow up a mountain in order to build a hydro-electric project. Hmm.
The explosion last Thursday occurred in a remote, closely guarded military zone, reputed to be the location of missiles, even illicit nuclear projects. It took place in the North Korean county of Kim Hyeong-jik, named after Korean leader Kim Jong-il's grandfather. It sent up a huge non-nuclear cloud at midnight on the anniversary of the founding of the North Korean state 56 years ago.
The extreme control North Korea's leaders have over information dissemination within and, by extension, beyond the country guarantees more questions than answers in the wake of such detonations. Details surrounding the rail explosion in Ryongchon mere hours after Kim Jong-il's train passed through on his return trip from China in April are still elusive. Official reports then, as now, seem implausible, but without further evidence, the world's attention moves on, the truth buried like the untold numbers of victims involved.
Of course, stories and rumors continue to swirl. The train "accident" in April was an assassination attempt, many believe, pointing to Kim's crackdown on the use of mobile phones as evidence. Others, including many North Korean refugees, believe it was actually part of plan by Kim to create the illusion of an assassination attempt and use the event as justification to purge certain senior party members. And what of the Syrian technicians who were reported to be among the dead? Was this proof that that disaster was the result of a missile shipment gone awry? The first victim of war, even a "cold" one, is the truth.
The truth is no more malleable than in North Korea; facts being what the leadership, in the absence of vocal observers, decide them to be. Of course, not everyone is in the dark. The United States, China and Russia all have the remote sensing technology necessary to monitor the area for clues to what exactly ignited in the far north. Explosives leave chemical signatures that are carried aloft; blasts of different types leave behind characteristic scorches and craters.
Indeed, this mysterious event, like the Ryongchon disaster three months ago, sheds more light on the relationship between South Korea and the United States than it does of North Korea. When news of the detonation first began to break in South Korea on the weekend, anonymous sources within the South's defense establishment soon began commenting on the lack of information moving their way from their US counterparts.
The United States is South Korea's most valuable intelligence-gathering asset, providing, as it does, intelligence concerning North Korean military assets and maneuvers. But it seems the data are becoming more heavily vetted, a likely consequence of South Korea's growing ties with the North. The US is probably increasingly unsure how much of what it knows is making its way to North Korea, which would treasure US intelligence and would like to know just what Washington has gleaned and what it hasn't. Unexplained events like these explosions also highlight the fundamental changes that have taken place in the relationship between the US and South Korea.
In the final analysis, it's clear that again North Korea has managed to leave the world with more questions than answers. At the time of the explosion, British Foreign Office minister Bill Remmel was in Pyongyang to engage North Korea on human-rights issues. Immediately after word of the explosion, the British delegation "demanded", according to the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), some explanation - and it got one. North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun issued a statement indicating the explosion was part of the planned demolition of a mountain, destroyed, we are told, in preparation for a new hydro-electric project. In other words, the North Koreans decided to pack a mountain full of explosives (estimates put the explosive power at 1,000 tons) and waited until almost midnight on the eve of the country's foundation anniversary to level the mountain - yet none of this was broadcast, and so the domestic propaganda value of such an explosive display lost.
The implausibility of hydro-electric projects aside - South Korean analysts indicate the explosion took place in an area unsuitable for water-powered electricity generation - the statement does indicate one point: the North Koreans are expecting commercial satellites to produce pictures of a mountain removed, a large crater similar to what intelligence analysts have already hinted is evident from satellite photos.
It's also interesting that the mountain in question is set in the middle of one of North Korea's most heavily guarded and restricted counties. The whole area is a "military camp", Chinese observers have commented. In fact, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the region is thought to house North Korea's medium-range missiles in a complex of tunnels deep underground. The county is also the location of sites suspected to house North Korea's highly enriched uranium (HEU) project, the catalyst behind the latest nuclear crisis. North Korea admits it has a nuclear program, but denies that it involves enriched uranium.
An example of just how far the speculation goes: Some wonder whether it was possible that the three-to-four-kilometer-wide non-nuclear mushroom cloud, the first clue of the explosion last Thursday, was actually the result of a precision attack by either China or the US on these suspect sites, a prelude to the upcoming but still not scheduled six-party talks. The negotiations are aimed at persuading North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program in return for security guarantees, alternative energy supplies and massive economic assistance.
With no radioactive fallout reported by any of North Korea's neighbors, nor from regional technologies designed to monitor such events, all indications are a conventional explosion of unconventional magnitude - similar to the Massive Ordnance Air Burst (MOAB) the United States tested in the spring of 2003.
Designed to replace the Vietnam-era, 12,000-pound (5,440-kilogram) "Daisy Cutter" bomb, the US Air Force's new 22,000-pound (10,000kg), Global Positioning System (GPS)-guided MOAB, applied in multiples, could create a conventional explosion similar to that which has been described to have happened in North Korea. Tests of a single MOAB (those who witnessed it referred to it as the Mother of All Bombs) in 2003 showed that the weapon created a mushroom cloud that extended about three kilometers in the air, yet left a relatively small seismic signature. Of course, that MOAB tested in Florida was designed, as the name suggests, to burst above ground, but the crater - the missing North Korean mountain - suggests a ground or below detonation: subterranean force projection? The USAF includes "deeply buried targets" within the 10-tonne weapon's target range; it is a penetrating weapon capable of delivering the explosive power of 18,000 pounds (more than 8,000kg) of Tritonol to targets deep beneath the surface.
Such an attack from beyond, especially if it involved China, would likely not elicit an immediate, direct response from North Korea. To acknowledge an attack would mean acknowledging the target, and would also create pressure to retaliate, a hasty response that could spell the end of the Kim regime.
Of course, this could also be a demonstration of North Korea's conventional firepower, though the efficacy of such a demonstration, tremendous explosive energy in an undeliverable format, seems a bit hollow. Or perhaps human error, an accident, an ammunition depot or arms factory ignited because of faulty equipment and carelessness, or as the result of some external catalyst.
In the end, this event, like the last, will likely be swept aside in days and weeks to come as a lack of new evidence relegates the story to the wayside. We may never know the what, why, how or even who behind the blast.
David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


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Diplomats visit N. Korean blast site
BEIJING - Foreign diplomats who visited the site of a mysterious explosion in North Korea said yesterday it was a hydroelectric project under heavy construction.
Video footage from an independent source showed excavations and evidence of blasting in a river valley. -- AP
The blast, reported by South Korean media last week, initially raised concern that North Korea had tested a nuclear weapon. A mushroom cloud was seen in an area known to contain storage sites for missiles and explosives.
To prove this was not the case, North Korea on Thursday took a group of foreign diplomats to what it said was the blast site in Samsu county in the remote north-east.
Pyongyang had said the reported blast was one of two controlled explosions to remove a mountain to make way for a power plant.
The diplomats from Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Sweden, the Czech Republic, India and Mongolia reached the site after a 90-minute flight followed by a three-hour drive, according to Sweden's ambassador to North Korea Paul Beijer.
They spent about 1 1/2 hours taking photographs, talking to officials at the site and gathering information that their governments' technical experts would analyse, he said.
Video footage showed excavations and evidence of blasting in a river valley. Scores of workers - many of them apparently carrying sacks of material - were shown swarming around.
Polish Ambassador Wojciech Kaluza said the North Korean project manager told them there were 50,000 workers at the site and gave figures on the size of the project, the amount of explosives used and of soil that had to be removed, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.
The visitors were told the blasts on Sept 8 and 9 were larger than usual to speed up work on the dam, and that more were planned, said German envoy Doris Hertrampf.
The area visited was about 60km east of the site initially identified by South Korean intelligence authorities.
South Korean Vice Unification Minister Lee Bong Jo yesterday said the latest assessment was that no blast took place at the suspected site in Kimhyongjik county, which is near the Chinese border. Rather, it was more likely an earth tremor.
As for the reported mushroom-shaped clouds, he said they could be explained away as natural phenomena.
Mr Yun Du Min of South Korea's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security said intelligence failure and the suspicion with which secretive North Korea is viewed contributed to the confusion.
'This appears to have been an intelligence failure as we looked into a very closed society. The heightened level of alert in the way the international community looks at North Korea likely bred this incident,' he said.
Another round of six-party talks on the North's nuclear programme was to have been held in Beijing before the end of this month. The talks now seem unlikely. -- Reuters, AFP, AP

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North Korea Blast Wasn't Nuclear, Diplomat Says After Visiting Site
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 18, 2004
BEIJING, Sept. 17 (AP) - Video of the area where North Korea said a huge explosion had occurred last week showed dozens of workers swarming around a construction site resembling a large dam project, while a foreign diplomat who visited the site said Friday that he had found no sign that the blast was nuclear.
South Korea, meanwhile, said a mushroom-shaped plume thought to be from the blast on Sept. 9 was 60 miles away from the site where North Korea said it occurred, and that it may have been a natural cloud formation.
Diplomats from seven countries were flown by the North Korean government to the country's remote northeast, near the border with China, on Thursday to verify claims that the explosion was part of work on a hydroelectric dam.
"One thing is entirely clear: This was not a nuclear explosion that happened at this site," Sweden's ambassador to North Korea, Paul Beijer, said by phone from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. "This is a site where thousands of people are working on dam building."
Concern arose when South Korea said days after the blast that a mushroom cloud more than two miles wide had been spotted by satellite.
Independent video of the construction site was obtained by Associated Press Television News in Pyongyang, hours after the ambassadors returned from their visit.
The video showed a building complex intact near a place where rock had been blasted away, with scores of workers moving around. A deep excavation with large pools of water and wooden shelters could be seen across the valley, apparently where the dam is intended to rise.
The size of the cloud and the timing of the blast, which coincided with the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding, fed speculation in the South Korean news media that it was a nuclear test. But a South Korean official, Deputy Unification Minister Lee Bong Jo, said his government concurred with the North's insistence that the blast had not been nuclear.
The incident occurred amid efforts to arrange a new round of six-nation talks on demands for the North to give up nuclear ambitions. The talks involve the Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.
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SNAG IN SIX-PARTY TALKS
Pyongyang demands Seoul reveal N-tests
The communist country says it won't return to talks over its nuclear programme unless South Korea discloses details of secret N-tests
SEOUL - A delay in planned six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear activities appeared certain with the communist nation saying it will not talk until South Korea fully discloses the details of its secret atomic experiments.
China, host of three previous rounds of talks, acknowledged on Thursday that 'many difficulties' stand in the way of this month's talks.
'It is down to North Korea and the United States,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said in Beijing. 'There are many difficulties for the talks to be held as planned.'
Mr Kong gave no details but appealed to the participants to 'make efforts so we can hold the next round before the end of September, as we agreed earlier'.
North Korea relayed its position on the talks when British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell visited Pyongyang earlier this week, a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry told the country's official news agency, KCNA.
The comments further clouded US-led international efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear activities.
During Mr Rammell's four-day visit that ended on Tuesday, North Korea 'clarified its stand that it can never sit at the table to negotiate its nuclear weapon programme unless truth about the secret nuclear experiments in South Korea is fully probed', KCNA quoted the North Korean spokesman as saying.
South Korea recently acknowledged that it conducted a plutonium-based nuclear experiment more than 20 years ago. That admission came shortly after it said it conducted a uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago.
Plutonium and enriched uranium are two key ingredients of nuclear weapons.
South Korea has denied any ambition to possess nuclear arms. Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon said he was confident that investigations by a UN nuclear watchdog will prove that his country's nuclear experiments were not conducted for weapons advancement.
Three rounds of talks by China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia have not produced major progress towards settling the nuclear dispute.
The six nations had previously agreed to meet again by the end of this month, but no date has been set.
Washington wants North Korea to halt its nuclear activities immediately.
North Korea says it will freeze its nuclear facilities as a first step towards their eventual dismantling only if the US lifts economic sanctions and provides energy and economic aid. -- AP

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>> CHINA

The Chinese puzzle: Jiang's retirement
By Zhu Zhan
HONG KONG - When the curtain rose on the decisive party plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Thursday, startling reports surfaced in Beijing's political circles that the current commander-in-chief and former president Jiang Zemin would propose his resignation as military leader. While the reports have not been confirmed, many political observers see the possible resignation as Jiang's tactic to dispel the mounting pressure on him to yield power. He might step down but still be China's "Phantom Regent".
It is believed that such a decision could please some party chieftains who are unhappy to see Jiang as the supreme military leader for a prolonged period; on the other hand, a decision to step down would strengthen Jiang's hand and bargaining position as he seeks to install his confidants and proteges in the administration. As the positions of some military heavyweights remain unclear, the ball seems to be in the court of President Hu Jintao, who is supposed to control the armed forces concurrently - it is one of the Middle Kingdom's old traditions that state and military leadership go hand in hand. Jiang is chairman of the party's powerful Central Military Commission (CMC).
Reuters and Taiwan's United Daily News reported this week that Jiang had proposed to hand in his notice of resignation, tallying with an earlier dispatch from the New York Times. In addition, members of the CMC reportedly are to be increased from four to seven, with three entries from the navy, the air force and the No 2 Artillery.
Coincidence or not, early this month Beijing staged a high-profile celebration of the 60th anniversary of the death of "martyred" anti-Japanese hero Peng Xuefeng. Jiang even inscribed the name of the book Biography of Peng Xuepeng. In fact, Peng Xuefeng's son, Peng Xiaofeng, is now commissar of the No 2 Artillery, a high-ranking position in Chinese military system. He and Liu Yazhong, vice commissar of the air force, are both considered under the patronage of Jiang. Obviously, Jiang has been actively preparing to extend his authority within the military, if he is forced out of power some day.
One informed source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Asia Times Online that Jiang, now 78, had promised in 2002 to steer the CMC for only two years. Now, time is up. Party veterans who had been edged out of the top echelon by Jiang, including former chairman of National People's Congress Qiao Shi and former chairman of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihuan, have long been murmuring their discontent about the "Phantom Regent" and cannot wait to see him out. During the CCP's massive commemorations for the centennial anniversary of the birth of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Deng's virtue of early retirement from the throne and his hands-off manner had been hyped by the state-run media. Political commentators aver that all these developments and displays put considerable pressure on Jiang Zemin.
Jiang's proposed retirement could also be interpreted as his scheme of "one step backward and two steps forward". In return for his resignation, he can still project his influence by installing confidants in the expanded Central Military Commission, negotiate for his appointment of a vice chairman in the CMC, and even reserve the right to name Hu Jintao's successor as CMC chairman. This is a common political trade-off practice in Chinese political arena.
At the moment, most military heavyweights have yet to declare their stance on the matter. However, some pro-Jiang generals rushed to pledge support for their boss. Guo Boxiong, Jiang's deputy in the CMC, stressed that the armed forces should follow Jiang's orders under any circumstance. Another CMC member, Xu Caihou, reiterated on a few occasions the significance of the so-called "Three Represents" theory developed by Jiang that has already been added to China's constitution. The theory reads "The party must always represent the requirements of the development of China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of the development of China's advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China".
Predictably, China's state president and CCP chairman Hu Jintao might be quite cautious in responding to Jiang's proposal. In retrospect, former party chief Hu Yaobang was kicked out of Zhongnanhai (the compound of China's leaders) by Deng Xiaoping, partly because of his remarks endorsing Deng's pledges to withdraw completely from the political arena. It is reported that President Hu declined Jiang's resignation two years ago, so how he will react this time around remains a focus of the world's attention.
It is generally believed that it will take some time for Hu to operate against the backdrop of Jiang's legacies and popularity in the military. As recently as June, Jiang promoted 15 military officers to full general - mostly from the pro-Jiang camp, including his top bodyguard You Xigui, who now is director of the Central Guard Bureau. In China, an officer in You's position is seldom promoted to such a military rank, and most observers say that Jiang is trying to maximize his power in the armed forces. Moreover, his "Three Represents" theory, now enshrined in the Chinese constitution, can play a part in his efforts to broaden his influence.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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Resignation of China's Senior Leader Appears Imminent
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, Sept. 18 - Jiang Zemin, China's military chief and longtime senior leader, may formally step down on Sunday, putting President Hu Jintao in full command of the Chinese Army, state and governing party, according to people informed of the proceedings of a secretive Communist Party meeting.
Mr. Jiang's retirement, which has not been confirmed by official sources, would come as a surprise to many political experts, who expected him to remain chairman of the Central Military Commission and the de facto senior leader until 2007.
It remains possible that his resignation, submitted earlier this month and now said to be under consideration by a top decision-making body, may be rejected. But Mr. Jiang, 78, who became China's top political and military leader after the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989, has come under heavy pressure to allow a new generation of leaders to grapple with China's mounting political and economic challenges.
People who have seen Mr. Jiang or spoken to his relatives in recent weeks say he has serious health problems. One person said he had throat cancer; another said he had persistent heart troubles. It was unclear whether these health issues might have forced Mr. Jiang to retire before he was ready, or, whether they might provide a cover story for a decision that has more to do with internal politicking.
Mr. Hu, 61, who took Mr. Jiang's titles of Communist Party chief in 2002 and president in 2003, has put forward plans to inject more transparency and discipline into the one-party political system and to raise incomes of blue-collar workers and peasants. But Mr. Hu has also imposed stricter controls on the media than those that existed when Mr. Jiang held China's top titles, and he has ruled out experimenting with Western-style democracy. He remains an enigma, a carefully crafted product of the Communist Party system, whose innate reserve appears to have been magnified by behind-the-scenes tussles for influence with Mr. Jiang.
Though Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang have not openly clashed over policy matters, several party officials have argued that they had become the effective standard-bearers for rival schools of thought on many domestic and foreign policy issues. The notion that there are two camps at the top may have made lower-level officials less inclined to carry out policies they oppose, including the continuing campaign to slow China's overheated economy and curtail wasteful state spending.
Numerous questions remain about Mr. Jiang's actions. Among them is why he submitted his resignation a short time after party officials said he appeared to be trying to enhance his authority.
In recent months, he has promoted numerous military officials to higher posts. Experts took that as a sign that he was solidifying his control of the military rather than preparing to hand his responsibilities to Mr. Hu, as had been agreed before the leadership transition in 2002. State media also increased its coverage of Mr. Jiang in recent months.
Party officials say that in recent private meetings with leading scholars, Mr. Jiang challenged the economic program pursued by Mr. Hu and Wen Jiabao, the prime minister.
Earlier this year, Mr. Jiang opposed and effectively sidelined a new framework for China's foreign policy Mr. Hu had developed. Mr. Jiang argued that a slogan Mr. Hu had begun using to describe China's ambitions as a great power, "peaceful rise," sent the wrong signal at a time when Beijing was warning Taiwan that moves toward independence would provoke military retaliation.
Mr. Jiang was active enough in recent weeks that several well-informed political analysts in Beijing said they suspected that his proffered resignation, which The New York Times first reported earlier this month, might be a trick to mobilize his core constituency, or to fend off the attacks from party elders anxious for him to retire. Those people speculated that Mr. Jiang might have intended to have his resignation rejected, perhaps on the ground that sensitive foreign policy problems, including those involving Taiwan and North Korea, required his continued attention.
That remains possible. But two people informed about the leadership's decision-making process said they expected the full 198-member Central Committee to vote on Mr. Jiang's resignation and a new slate of candidates to fill slots on the Central Military Commission before its annual four-day session ends Sunday.
These people said it was unlikely that Mr. Jiang's resignation would be under consideration by the Central Committee if it were merely a gambit, as matters that go before that body tend to be pre-approved by the governing Politburo.
Moreover, Mr. Jiang told domestic and foreign visitors in recent weeks that he was wary of the appearance that he is clinging to power and has every intention of handing over authority to Mr. Hu, as has been the formal plan of the Communist Party since at least the late 1990's.
Mainland media have not carried any news about Mr. Jiang's resignation. But Reuters, Agence France-Presse and The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based English-language daily, all carried reports Saturday quoting party and diplomatic sources as saying Mr. Jiang's retirement would be announced on Sunday.
It is not clear how the Central Military Commission, which controls all of China's armed forces, would be restructured under a new chairman.
Mr. Hu is currently a vice chairman of the eight-member commission, along with two generals, Guo Boxiong and Cao Gangchuan. Mr. Jiang has been thought to favor promoting his longtime prot?g? and ally, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, to serve as a vice chairman. Two people informed about a recent debate inside the military commission said Mr. Jiang made Mr. Zeng's promotion a condition of his retirement. They also said Mr. Hu opposed this move, possibly because it would leave his control of the military incomplete.
Chris Buckley contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company




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First or Equals?
China's President Hu wants to consolidate power, but his predecessor Jiang Zemin has not yet faded away
BY MATTHEW FORNEY | BEIJING
The Beijing Olympics were to be the most lavish ever. China would spend $34 billion to refit the capital with sparkling new subways and 10 state-of-the-art stadiums. The spending was the plan of former Communist Party chief and former President Jiang Zemin, who took credit for Beijing's winning bid in 2001. The Olympic projects, it was hoped, would mark China's economic growth and proclaim its arrival as a world power. Now times have changed. Last week Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Olympic-organizing committee, scrapped half the planned stadiums in a demonstration of what he called "the principle of thrift." But in Beijing, observers of the always opaque Chinese leadership are wondering if the new policy smacks of political infighting as much as it does of economy.
Though Jiang stepped down from his positions as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2002 and President of the country in 2003, he remains chairman of the Central Military Commission and hence commander of the People's Liberation Army. Hu Jintao, who succeeded Jiang as Party chief and President, wants to consolidate his own power. Last week, a report in the New York Times suggested that Jiang may give up his army position at a key Communist Party plenum this week. There is no consensus in Beijing on whether such an outcome is likely. But with rumors swirling, cancellation of the Olympic stadiums gained added significance. Older Chinese remember that in 1979, Deng Xiaoping signaled his rise to power by canceling 10 massive industrial projects championed by his rival, Hua Guofeng. In all likelihood, says a well-placed Beijing academic, the scaling back of the Olympic plans relates to a "struggle" between Hu and Jiang.
Hu's primacy remains incomplete. Jiang continues to enjoy the loyalty of many senior Party and military officials and maintains a power base in China's commercial hub of Shanghai. But as is always the case in China, assessing whether there are differences between the two men depends on the examination of tiny shards of evidence. According to agreed protocol, for instance, Hu can demonstrate first-among-equals status by entering meeting halls before Jiang. Yet Jiang often ambles into halls first. So Beijing's political insiders watched closely on August 22 as both men entered the Great Hall of the People to commemorate the centenary of Deng's birth. Just before Jiang entered ahead of Hu, the live television broadcast cut to a shot of the red star on the ceiling and didn't pan the hall until Jiang had seated himself. "Apparently, Hu had had enough," says an editor at a Party-run newspaper. In this shadowland, the hardest question to answer is whether personal differences speak to larger disagreements on policy. Hu has emphasized a balanced development between China's booming coastal cities and its poor hinterland, and he seems to want closer ties with European and Asian nations, as well as with the U.S. Jiang, for his part, encouraged rapid economic growth along the coast and made sound relations with the U.S. the cornerstone of his foreign policy. Last December, Hu made a major speech on "The Peaceful Rise of China," which was meant to signal his arrival as a theorist while assuring the world that China's emergence as a world power would not threaten its neighbors. But Jiang, says a Western diplomat in Beijing, "forced Hu to tone [the theory] down." In subsequent speeches, Hu has referred instead to China's "peaceful development."
Conceivably, the change in wording suggests differences in policy. Many Chinese foreign-relations experts, for example, have long favored a more conciliatory posture toward Taiwan. They remain deeply skeptical that Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian could ever become a trusted negotiating partner but fear that threatening Taiwan with military action may only drive the island further down the road to independence. That sentiment is shared by many who worked on Hu's "Peaceful Rise" theory, according to a scholar who consulted with them. This source says Jiang opposed the slogan partly because it sent too soft a message to Taiwan and Washington. In the same vein, Beijing's attitude toward Hong Kong could also hinge on contests at the top. China watchers in Hong Kong are deeply divided on whether there are any splits in Beijing in policy toward the city. But it was Jiang who appointed Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's deeply unpopular Chief Executive. Hu, for his part, has seemed to distance himself from Tung by urging him to pay closer attention to the popular will.
In moving to consolidate power, Hu has shown a deft touch. In July, he visited Jiang's power base of Shanghai. Senior officials there had complained that new austerity measures requiring Beijing's approval were deflating the city's boom. A smiling Hu allowed photographers to record him strolling past marshland that Shanghai officials hope to turn into an industrial zone and touring high-profile factories. Shortly after Hu returned to Beijing, the central government approved construction of a long-awaited tunnel-and-bridge project to Chongming Island, and city officials say the second phase of a deepwater port has not been blocked by central planners. The message seemed to be that Shanghai could continue steaming ahead. "Hu set out to defang Jiang's tiger" in Shanghai, says the Western diplomat.
Hu may also be able to rely on unexpected allies in the army, where he is No. 2 to Jiang. Last month Gen. Chi Haotian, a retired Defense Minister long considered supportive of Jiang, wrote in Seeking Truth, a Party magazine, that the army must "at all times obey the Party" and "cannot concentrate power in a few individuals." Chi then praised Deng for his quick resignation as head of the military in 1989: "He just said 'bye-bye,' picked up his briefcase and left." This, wrote Chi, showed that Deng was a "truly selfless man, a man who considered the overall picture." That sounded like a message to Jiang. Taken together with the stadium cancellations, those messages seem to be getting more frequent, and louder.
With reporting by Hannah Beech/Shanghai


A Disappearing Act
Jiang Zemin gets painted out of the picture in a mysterious set of photos
BY MATTHEW FORNEY | BEIJING
Every appearance by Chinese leaders is political. They enter rooms in single file according to rank, and newspapers place photos of senior officials higher on the page than those of lesser rivals. So strict are the rules that when Hu Jintao took over as Party chief from Jiang Zemin two years ago, Beijing's print media waited four hours for instructions from propaganda officials on whose picture to run at the top. (They ran side by side.) The two leaders are now thought to be jockeying for power; Jiang remains chairman of the Central Military Commission, and a key Party meeting is scheduled for this month.
Thus a set of photos, published last month during celebrations for the 100th birthday of late Communist Party patriarch Deng Xiaoping, raises questions about the relationship between the two men. The original image, published in the state-run Oriental Outlook magazine in the last week of August, shows Hu shaking hands with Deng in 1992 while Jiang stands behind them, as if giving introductions. But in the other two photos, which appeared in Shanghai's Wen Hui Bao newspaper on Aug. 13 and in a set of pictures celebrating Deng's centenary, Jiang has vanished. At least one of the doctored photos was released by the Xinhua news agency--which implies either official complicity or a massive goof. Either way, "it can only be embarrassing for Jiang," says an editor from a Party-run newspaper, because "someone very publicly wants him to disappear."


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Hu-Jiang struggle: Not a shooting war
By Yu Bin
Does China have a gun control problem? Yes. Whoever controls one of the world's largest armed forces naturally draws worldwide attention. Recent media mania, however, seems excessive in painting an intensifying power struggle between the moderate-reformist head of state and Communist Party President Hu Jintao, and the nationalist-conservative military strongman Jiang Zemin, 78, chairman of China's powerful Central Military Commission (CMC).
On the eve of the fourth plenary session of the 16th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) National Congress from September 16-19, the Jiang-Hu rivalry is said to have reached such a state that various key policy issues are at stake. They are reported to include Beijing's uncompromising stance toward Taiwan, Hong Kong's democratic elections, growing social instability at home, rampant corruption, inner-party democracy, and the most salient issue of all, who will command the 2.5-million-member People's Liberation Army (PLA). The PLA is said to favor a hardine policy toward Taiwan and the storm clouds gathering over the Taiwan Strait indeed represent a serious issue for both leaders.
All of these reports on divisions and struggle have yet to be solidly proved. The media focus on the so-called Jiang-Hu rivalry over the CMC chairmanship misses other points that may be more important. In the absence of major foreign and domestic crises, current politicking in China has more to do with policy issues, particularly Taiwan, than major personnel changes; and more to do with leadership continuity than its reshuffling. The alleged Jiang-Hu gun control (control of the military) dispute and the PLA's allegedly increasing role in Chinese politics may not hold much water, given the clear trend toward firm civilian control of the military in the reform decades from 1978 to the present.
The PLA's de-politicization under Deng Xiaoping
After the massive military intervention in politics during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), China's political and military elite came to the consensus that the excessive politicization of the armed forces should not be repeated; soldiers should be back in their barracks, and the PLA should focus on professionalizing, restructuring, training, streamlining and modernizing. As a result, civilian leadership regained its authority over the armed forces. Under former leader Deng Xiaoping, the PLA was essentially de-politicized, de-factionalized, and pulled out of its ubiquitous involvement in civilian affairs. Since then, it has engaged in the longest period of serious professionalization in its history.
By the late 1980s, the PLA involved itself in quelling student-led demonstrations. The military was, nonetheless, brought back into politics, albeit reluctantly, by civilian leadership. Once normalcy and stability were achieved, Deng moved quickly to place the PLA under the new CMC chairman, Jiang Zemin, in November 1989. In the next few years before finally fading away, Deng would make sure that Jiang institutionalized his control of the PLA.
Jiang, the PLA's first civilian boss
A technocrat trained in the former Soviet Union, Jiang had no formal military experience whatsoever. Nor did he have any institutional backing from the vast central bureaucracies in Beijing, except for Deng's personal support. As the PLA's first real civilian leader, however, Jiang managed to develop an unprecedented institutionalized authority, which enabled him to assume all the top offices: CCP general secretary, president of the state and chairman of the party's CMC.
These formal titles, however, were not necessarily sufficient to enable Jiang to command the PLA. During his tenure as CMC chair, Jiang made a concerted effort to befriend the PLA, leading to the PLA's eventual acceptance of his leadership. Perhaps more than any other top leader, Jiang reached out to cultivate support from the PLA. Military spending rose steadily in the 1990s. Jiang also traveled widely and frequently to military units during holidays and visited troops in remote areas. Even on his way to and from foreign visits, Jiang lost no opportunity to send cables from his Chinese Air Force One to the PLA's border security units on the ground below. Beyond those high-altitude gestures, Jiang managed to gain support and loyalty from almost all sectors of the PLA: from younger officers, for his broad policy of nurturing a highly educated, well-trained and professionalized officer core; from the rank-and-file, for improving soldiers' living conditions; and from older generals, for being promoted to comfortable retirement or semi-retirement. Over time, Jiang felt so confident of his ability to command and control the PLA that he decided in 1998 to sever the military completely from any commercial activities - something that Deng was either unwilling or unable to do.
Jiang is by no means a Mr Nice Guy for the PLA. He also took major steps, almost every five years, to reshape the army. This includes the CMC's decision in April 1992 to continue streamlining and restructuring the PLA in order to consolidate its one-million-person cut in the 1980s, and the September 1997 decision to cut an additional 500,000 personnel in three years. This was followed by a major overhaul of the PLA's command-and-control, logistics, and armament mechanism in April 1998, when a unified general armament department was created alongside the PLA's general staff, general political, and general logistics departments. One of Jiang's most recent efforts to reform the PLA came when he articulated the historical mission for the PLA's mechanization and information-based military (xinxi hua) in the CCP's 16th Congress in November 2002.
In retrospect, Jiang has gone to extraordinary lengths to institutionalize as well as personalize his ties with the PLA. Lacking the personal charisma of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Jiang has sought to dominate almost every policy-making institution.
Implications for Hu Jintao
Jiang, the former paramount leader, may well turn over his command of the Chinese military in the upcoming plenary session, just as he yielded his Communist Party chairmanship to Hu Jintao in late 2002 and the state presidency in March 2003. Or he may choose to fade away over a few more years. Whatever way Jiang goes, and he eventually will go, the PLA's future top civilian leader, presumably Hu, will have to operate against the backdrop of Jiang's PLA legacies and popularity. This has a number of implications.
First, Hu himself will have to nurture his own relationship with the PLA. Simply taking over the CMC chair from the elderly Jiang doesn't mean that Hu himself will not have to define the style, scope and depth of his own ties with the military. In this sense, the formal CMC title may not be of overriding importance for Hu. He will need to demonstrate his commitment to the military.
Second, the process for Hu to assume the PLA's new civilian leadership already started at least five years ago, when Hu became a vice chairman of the CMC. Ever since then, Hu has been part of the team, though still in Jiang's shadow. Hu's elevation to the No 2 position in the CMC was more than a procedural and symbolic promotion, given his deep involvement in the de-commercialization of the PLA in the late 1990s. During the early reform period, the PLA rapidly and significantly expanded its commercial activities and was engaged in extensive industrial and not necessarily military-related enterprises.
The military was also responsible for much of the rising tide of corruption, tax evasion and smuggling. Several efforts to reduce the military's commercial activities during the 1990s yielded few results due to strong resistance from the military. Once Jiang made the decision to de-link the PLA from commercial activities, however, Hu was assigned to do the dirty work of actually separating the PLA from its lucrative enterprises. This was guaranteed to be unpopular among PLA officers. The fact that the PLA went along with these decisions suggests its initial acceptance of Hu as its future commander-in-chief.
The current dual-center of politics in China, with Hu as the party/state leader and Jiang as the PLA boss may not be desirable for timely and efficient decision making. The unfinished leadership transition from Jiang to Hu, however, is perhaps the most uneventful compared to that of any of Jiang's predecessors. Jiang began taking over the PLA at a time of national crisis in 1989 (the Tiananmen Square massacre took place in June 1989). Before that, Deng's leadership was established in the aftermath of China's 10 years of political turmoil. Deng's comeback began in 1978. To go back further, Mao Zedong never developed easy ties with the PLA, as he was in conflict with both of his defense ministers - Peng Dehuai, in 1959, and Lin Biao, in 1971. It is unlikely Hu and Jiang have any compelling reason to hurry through the power transition of the CMC leadership.
Third, it remains to be seen if the unfinished handover of the CMC chairmanship to Hu would spill over into other policy areas. Hu and his new premier and ally Wen Jiabao quickly established themselves as a kinder and gentler fourth generation of leaders tilting toward the less fortunate groups in China. This is in contrast with Jiang's merit-based and market-driven approach favoring the political, business and intellectual elites. In early 2003, Hu went so far as to unveil his own "Three People's Principles" - power for, sympathy with, and benefit for the people. Jiang's theory of the "Three Represents" (meaning the CCP represents the most productive parts of Chinese society) remains part of Hu's vocabulary. Hu's more "compassionate" public policy, however, is a timely and healthy balancing move, as China is fast becoming one of the most inegalitarian nations in the world after decades of market reform.
Fourth and finally, it's common sense that leadership crises in China usually occur in times of socio-political upheaval. Although China is faced with tremendous difficulties in its economic and political reforms, the huge nation has been in the midst of continuous economic development with no sign of a major domestic crisis (except for the severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, outbreak in 2002). Jiang and Hu may have disputes over some specific issues, but perhaps they have more in common when it comes to maintaining China's steady and rational economic growth, as well as social stability.
Political stability and the gathering Taiwan storm
The only possible source of crisis, therefore, may come from the highly sensitive and increasingly dangerous issue of Taiwan's independence, as Taiwan's self-imposed timelines are fast approaching, regarding the constitutional revision in 2006 and perhaps bolder moves toward independence before the end of President Chen Shui-bian's second term in 2008.
If this is the case, the policies of Jiang or Hu will largely be driven by the perception of a sharply deteriorating cross-strait situation in that Taiwan is fast becoming a grave threat to China's core national interests. This means that Taiwan is seen as a break-away province reaching the point of no return; as a key component of a de facto military alliance against China, and as a ready platform from which to launch military strikes on China's vital political, economic and population centers. In a broader historical perspective, China's Taiwan policy will be driven not necessarily by the hawks in the PLA alone, but by a deluge of Chinese nationalism that has been building ever since the late 19th century, when Taiwan was ceded to Japan after the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War. This is the case regardless of the nature of the China's political system: emperor-based, republican, communist, or democratic.
Given the Taiwan situation as it is now unfolding, Jiang and Hu may well be more united in seeking an effective solution-resolution than in vying for the position of chairman of the CMC. And Jiang may continue to command the PLA in the near future, as a storm gathers over the Taiwan Strait.
Yu Bin is an associate professor of political science, Wittenberg University, and senior research associate, Shanghai Institute of American Studies. He is also a regular contributor to Pacific Forum/CSIC, Comparative Connections, and co-author of Mao's Generals Remember Korea (University Press of Kansas, 2001). He can be reached at byu@wittenberg.edu .
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)



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Communist Party 'must adapt to change'
With problems curbing graft and abuses, the CCP is having a tough job sustaining its achievements, say state media
By Chua Chin Hon
BEIJING - China's ruling Communist Party must adapt to the changing times if it is to succeed in leading the country through the breakneck pace of economic and social changes, state media said yesterday as a key meeting focused on shoring up the leadership's governance entered its second day.
The country's top communist leaders have been meeting behind closed doors at the Jinxi Hotel in the western part of Beijing since Thursday for the Fourth Plenum of the 16th Communist Party Central Committee.
Topping the agenda at the four-day meeting is the discussion on how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can improve its 'ruling capability' - a topic that has attracted some unusually frank criticism in the state media recently.
In an editorial yesterday, the English-language China Daily said that economic growth and material wealth alone would not be enough to help the country grow further.
'The ruling party is having a tough job sustaining what it has achieved and letting all members of society share the fruits of its prosperity,' it added.
'China's economic and social transition has reached a crucial point, setting an unprecedented test for the party's competence to govern the country.'
That the Communist Party should put its 'ruling capability' up for open discussion for the first time in its 55-year rule prompted many analysts to interpret it as an implicit admission of the party's waning legitimacy.
Despite long-running anti-graft campaigns, the top Chinese leadership has had limited success in reining in widespread corruption and official abuses which have severely dented the ruling party's image in the eyes of ordinary Chinese.
'The party still suffers from incompetent leading cadres, loopholes in governance and supervision and immature governing mechanisms,' the official Xinhua news agency said in a news commentary late on Thursday.
The report also trotted out a recent survey of party cadres to illustrate the extent to which their 'ruling capability' has been found wanting.
For instance, 67 per cent of the cadres felt that they were not competent enough in tapping the market economy while 58 per cent said they lacked the ability to make a decision based on 'scientific judgment'.
'More than one third either had difficulty tackling a complicated situation or totally lost their heads in such a situation,' Xinhua added.
Political reforms aimed at tackling such issues are expected to be announced at the plenum's closing tomorrow.
However, the international media has so far been more curious about the fate of former president and ageing strongman Jiang Zemin.
Rumours of his retirement at the Fourth Plenum reached fever pitch in the run-up to the meeting.
There has been neither official denial nor confirmation to date.
But tellingly, all major party newspapers such as the People's Daily yesterday ran a front-page article in the prominent top right hand corner announcing that the military supremo had signed a new order to the People's Liberation Army - signalling that Mr Jiang is not about to exit stage left.
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Pressures for Expanding Local-Level Democracy
Joseph Fewsmith
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has faced numerous pressures in recent years to reform its governing practices, particularly at the local level where these practices directly affect the lives of citizens. Despite years of campaigning against it, corruption continues to get worse; the abuse of power by local officials has inflamed relations with the local citizenry; and there seems to be a palpable need to enhance the legitimacy of local officials. Village-level elections were introduced in China in the late 1980s to respond to such needs, but they created new problems: party secretaries clashed regularly with village heads, and township cadres resented newly assertive village leaders. Moreover, the electoral process stalled as efforts to promote it at the township level met resistance. In recent months, however, there have been new and expanded experiments with local-level democracy involving increasing the importance of local people's congresses, opening up the electoral process, and using some form of election to choose local cadres. Importantly, these experiments are not limited to the village level but are taking place at the township and sometimes county levels. Such innovations may not be the harbinger of democratization, but they do reflect increased pressures to cope with the problems of local governance.
Local governance has been a troubled area in China in recent years. Although village elections, started in 1987, offered hope of better governance and more democratic choice, their implementation has been uneven at best, and they have not yet been permitted to move up to the township level on a regular basis. Meanwhile, tensions between local cadres and peasants have increased. Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), has written vividly of peasants' efforts to resist the tax burden imposed on them.1 Not coincidentally, Zhao Shukai of the State Council's Development Research Center has depicted local government as ever more focused on the task of revenue collection.2 Chen Kuidi and Chun Tao's Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (Investigation of China's peasants), which became a best-seller this year before it was banned, has similarly described the poverty and oppression of China's peasants.3 Over the past year or so, there have been notable efforts to reduce this tax burden, but they have only shifted the focus of peasant protests to disputes over land rights.4 Good governance has been in very short supply; Shanghai researcher Xiao Gongqin has warned of the development of "sultanism" at the local level.5 Breaking this cycle of political oppression, excessive taxation, resistance, and violence has become a major focal point for researchers and policy advisers in China, as well as an object of citizen activism. Xinwen zhoukan (Newsweek) labeled 2003 the year
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of the "new popular rights movement" because of the many efforts to use legal means to articulate and protect the rights of citizens.6 Two major reflections of this trend have been the expansion of citizen participation in local people's congress elections and Chinese Communist Party efforts to develop "inner-party democracy" (dangnei minzhu) in response to problems at the local level.
Township People's Congresses
According to China's election law, people's congresses (the legislative body) below the county level (meaning the township level in the countryside and either the municipality or the district level in large urban areas) are to be elected directly. This stipulation has not, generally speaking, led to an expansion of democratic rights, because the nomination process has been dominated by higher-level authorities and because localpeople's congresses have been toothless, rubber-stamp bodies. Whereas the National People's Congress (NPC) has acquired some saliency in the political process, that development had not been duplicated at the local level. In recent years, especially in2003, that situation has begun to change. The election law includes provisions for selfnominated candidates (candidates can get on the preliminary ballot if more than 10 people sign a petition in support of their candidacy) as well as for write-in candidates. Whereas self-nominated candidates are generally eliminated by the local election commission, which goes through a process of "fermentation" (yunniang) and discussion to decide on formal candidates (there is no requirement for a primary election), some have been allowed to get on the ballot and even be elected in recent years. Along with this slight opening of the electoral process has come greater electoral campaigning, including the use of the Internet, campaign flyers, and even posters. Below, we look at several cases that have become well known in China but are rarely covered abroad.
Antecedents in Hubei
Born in 1958, Yao Lifa, of Qianjiang City in the central province of Hubei, was apparently the first person in China elected through self-nomination to a municipal-level people's congress. Apparently ambitious, Yao, who has a vocational school education and works at an elementary school, began competing for a seat in the local people's congress in 1987, when the election law was first promulgated. The law allows for selfnominated candidates, and Yao used this provision to run for office. Twelve years later, in 1999, he was finally successful. Over the course of the next five years, Yao was a busy and controversial figure--he raised 187 of the 459 suggestions, opinions, and criticisms presented to the local people's congress. Yao also undertook a survey of the 329 villages under Qianjiang City and found that 187 village chairmen and 432 vice chairmen and village committee members in 269 villages who had been elected in 1999--some 57 percent of the total--had been dismissed over the course of the following three years.7
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In 2003, Yao and 40 other people--including teachers, village heads, lawyers, workers, and peasants--put themselves forward as candidates for the Qianjiang Municipal People's Congress, and 32 of them became formal candidates. In an election fraught with controversy, the whole group of self-nominated candidates lost the election, though Yao at least vowed to run again in the next election. Because Yao and the others were not backed by local authorities, their only chance of being elected was to wage a write-in campaign. Yao had succeeded in doing so in 1999, but local authorities were determined to prevent more than one successful write-in campaign in 2003. As Li Fan put it, the local administration felt it was bad enough to have one Yao Lifa in the people's congress; they would not have been able to tolerate 32 Yao Lifas!8
In 2001, L? Banglie of Baoyuesi Village in Zhijiang City, Hubei, was angry at the way local cadres demanded taxes despite the failure of his (and the rest of the villagers') crops. After failing in his petitions to the township authorities, L? traveled to Beijing. After a few weeks, township cadres brought him back to Hubei, saying that everything would be resolved. When matters were not resolved, L? returned to Beijing in December, but he was again brought back by local officials. In April 2002, after reading Li Changping's best-seller, Telling the Truth to the Premier, L? returned to Beijing, where he sought out Li Changping. Later, back home in Hubei, other villagers sought out L? to discuss their charges against local officials--that when flooding forced them to move, the government had allocated 15,000 yuan in compensation, but township authorities had distributed only 13,000 yuan. So off to Beijing went L? Banglie once again.
In November 2002, having learned something of China's laws, L? ran for village head, winning the highest number of votes. Complaints arose that his hukou was not in that village, and L?'s candidacy was disallowed. In January 2003, L? returned again to Beijing, where he participated in a training class organized by CASS and other organizations. Understanding more about China's laws, he returned to his township and demanded that the village election be investigated, enforcing his demand with a hunger strike. In June, he organized a petition to recall the village head and got 709 of the 2,152 villagers to sign, well over the one-fifth needed. Shortly thereafter he was assaulted by three youths who beat him with clubs. When he did not drop his campaign to recall the village head, he was beaten yet again--resulting in a 43-day hospital stay. As the year-end election for people's congress approached, L? began thinking about running for office. He contacted Yao Lifa, and soon used Yao's method of organizing a write-in campaign. On December 6, 2003, L? was elected to the township people's congress with 4,551 votes out of a possible 6,000-plus ballots. L?'s struggle for justice suggests not only his own stubbornness, but also the willingness of local officials to use all sorts of methods, including physical violence, to prevent people like L? from becoming members of the local people's congress. In 2000, one Zhang Jiagui was elected village head in a village not far from L?'s, but because he insisted on clearing up public finances from the preceding period, he was beaten to death.
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In Songci Municipality, across the Yangtze River from Zhijiang, one Yang Changxin, who was a member of the local people's congress, was arrested and sentenced to jail for three years for disturbing the public order. The struggle to break the hold of the local political elite is not only difficult but also dangerous.9
The 2003 Shenzhen Election
In April and May 2003, districts under Shenzhen Municipality in Guangdong held elections for the local people's congresses. Whereas previously nominations, aselsewhere in China, were controlled and manipulated by higher authorities, this time 10 or more self-nominated candidates took part in the election, two of whom were elected. Whether resulting in election victories or not, each of these candidacies challenged to a greater or lesser extent the old ways of doing things while reflecting social change. One interesting case is that of Xiao Youmei, a 48-year-old woman who had been elected to the municipal people's congress in 2000. Believing that her chances in the next election were not good (for reasons unexplained), Xiao decided that she would run for the people's congress in the district where she lived, Luohu District. She was able to collect 33 signatures to put herself on the ballot, but she was the weakest of the three candidates. Those who had supported her nomination were the retired and unemployed, while the other two candidates were backed by large work units.
In April 2003, a meeting was held to introduce the candidates to voters'
representatives, but only 15 representatives attended the meeting, and Xiao realized that it would be impossible to introduce herself to the voters in this fashion. Faced with the indifference of residents' committees to her pleas to meet the voters, Xiao and herhusband decided to print up campaign posters to introduce her credentials and experience to the voters. Her slogan was, "Listen to the voices that come from the grass roots, supervise the government's work style and political reform, reflect the desires of the broad masses, and be a bridge between the government and the citizens."
Xiao's election poster was a first in China. Local residents' committees were skeptical, so Xiao turned to the district election commission for a decision. In an equivocal but nonetheless surprising decision, the election commission ruled that it would neither support nor oppose putting up posters; local residents' committees "may support" (peihe) her.10 Unfortunately for Xiao, security at the first work unit she went to would not let her post her campaign material, and security at the second ripped it down. After the intervention of the district election commission, she was allowed to put up her poster in several prominent places, thus drawing much attention. In the end, however, these efforts were not enough. Xiao received 191 votes, much better than expected but not more than half of the 809 votes cast.11
Xiao Youmei obviously failed in her quest to be elected, but her campaign activities inspired others, and the relatively enlightened response of the district election commission suggested a willingness to adjust to the changing needs of society.
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One person inspired by Xiao Youmei was Wu Haining, who read about Xiao's campaign posters in the April 22, 2003, edition of Nanfang dushi bao (Southern metropolitan daily). Wu had been nominated through the support of 151 people, but the election, originally scheduled to be held on April 23, was canceled after another candidate suddenly withdrew. Wu immediately complained about the canceled election, and the district election commission decided that the election would be held on May 9. Besides Wu, the other candidate would be one Chen Huibin, head of the residents' committee in that area as well as head of the election commission leadership small group. Realizing that he was at a disadvantage, Wu visited Xiao to see her campaign poster. On May 6, Wu posted his own campaign material in several places and stuffed some 1,900open letters in residents' mailboxes. Although he was subjected to pressure from officials, his posters were not torn down. The day before the election, the election commission posted a new list of voters' names. The list contained 849 names, 189 more than the list had had when voter registration was closed on April 3.
Wu lost the election, but he did not yield. Rather than concede defeat, he issued a statement that questioned the election procedures. He also filed a complaint with the municipal people's congress (no decision has been reached as of this writing).12 On May 25, some 33 voters signed a petition calling for Chen Huibin's removal.13 People's Daily weighed in on the side of the petitioners, saying that the drive to remove Chen, whether successful or not, "will have considerable impact on the improvement of the people's congress system in China, promotion of the process of grassroots democracy, and still more sufficient protection of voters' democratic rights."14
Another person to run for election was much more of an insider than either Xiao or Wu. Wang Liang had been sent to the United States to study for his master's inpublic administration, which he received in 2002. Returning to Shenzhen, Wang was appointed principal and party secretary of the Shenzhen High-Tech and Industrial School. He was also qualified as an accountant and a lawyer, and was studying for his doctorate. In late April 2003, Wang decided to declare his own candidacy, only to discover that the students and staff at his school had been left off the voter registration rolls, making him ineligible to run. After talking to students and staff at the school, Wang called the district election commission to say that he wanted to run. The election commission supported his effort, but because formal nominations were over, it suggested he run a write-in campaign. It also allowed the students and staff to register to vote. Wang noted that the campaigns of Xiao Youmei and Wu Haining had stirred controversy, so he adopted a lower-key style, printing up very simple campaign sheets. In the end, he won the district election to the people's congress with the highest vote total.15
The Beijing Election
China's media were supportive of Shenzhen's election, and in August 2003 the People's Daily web site carried an article saying that "increasing the number of selfnominated candidates allows the masses to better select their own spokespersons,
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enlarges the scope of orderly participation in politics by the citizens, enriches the elections of people's congresses, and infuses fresh content into the people's congresses' work."16 So a more open atmosphere was extant as the Beijing district people's congress elections approached.
In these elections more than 20 self-nominated candidates took part, although only three were elected. One was Xu Zhiyong, a 30-year-old instructor in the law schoolat Beijing Postal Academy. Xu was one of three law professors who had posted an appeal on the Internet after Sun Zhigang was beaten to death in detention in May 2003. That appeal led to the revision of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) law on detention. In October of the same year, Xu was the lawyer who argued on behalf of Sun Dawu, a wealthy entrepreneur who had been detained on trumped-up charges. In November, Xu declared himself a self-nominated candidate for the local people's congress in Beijing's Haidian District (the area in the northwest of the city where most of the universities are located). He posted an appeal for support on the Internet, and within three hours had received over 700 responses. Xu also received the support of his school, and on December 10 he was elected with the highest number of votes--some 10,106 out of 12,609 cast. Since Xu was supported by his school, his candidacy cannot be considered an "opposition" candidacy, but his involvement in the Sun Zhigang and Sun Dawu cases certainly reflects a willingness to challenge the status quo.17
Another candidate was Nie Hailiang, one of six property owners (yezhu) who presented themselves as self-declared candidates. Nie had a master's degree from Qinghua University in environmental science and engineering, and he had gone on toopen a company dealing with energy management. He was also the developer of the Yunquyuan residence in the Huilongguan community. Originally, three property owners from the same district were planning to participate in the election, but the other two dropped out so that support could be concentrated on Nie. In the end, Nie received about two-thirds of the votes in that district. Nie's election, like the candidacy of Wu Haining in Shenzhen, represented a new phenomenon--property owners banding together to protect their rights through the electoral process.18
The other self-nominated candidate to win election in Beijing was Ge Jinbiao, a 35-year-old with a doctorate in law who was an instructor at the law school at Beijing Industrial and Commercial University. A total of 276 people received votes in the first round of the election (competing for three seats), and none of the candidates surpassed the required 50 percent of the votes. By placing third in the voting, Ge secured himself a place on the final ballot along with the three officially backed candidates. Like other self-nominated candidates, Ge placed a lot of effort into campaigning. He went to the student dorms and passed out thousands of campaign brochures, promising to serve the interests of the voters and to protect the interests of the students. When the votes were counted on December 16, Ge placed first, with a total of 7,839 votes out of 11,512 ballots.19
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It should also be noted that Yao Yao, the 20-year-old son of Yao Lifa who is a law major at China Politics and Law University, was one of the other self-declared candidates.20 Another was Shu Kexin, who attracted a great deal of attention for his attempts to create a campaign office that was staffed with volunteers to shape his media image and try to persuade potential voters. One of Shu's campaign aides noted in an interview that the candidate had been inspired by Yao Lifa.21
Political Reform in Pingba
The initiatives to push the bounds of political reform discussed above all involved efforts to invigorate the district and township people's congresses. They also were marked by attempts to open up the system, with or without the support of higher levels, and introduce new modes of participation, including campaigning and the use of write-in candidacies. In Pingba Township in Chengkou County in Chongqing Municipality, there was a much broader push to reform the political system, including increasing the importance of the people's congress, and it was led by the local CCP branch. These measures were approved by a township-level party plenum and a simultaneous meeting of the township people's congress. The reform consisted of the following aspects:
1. Selection of the township party secretary would be in accordance with the three-ballot system. First, if the number of candidates for party secretary were to exceed one, then the party congress would hold a primary to determine primary candidates. Second, formal candidacy would be decided by a vote of all residents (whether members of the CCP or not). Finally, all party members in the township would choose among the formal candidates. The township head would be elected by direct vote of all residents. The newly elected township head would then select his or her own "cabinet," subject to the approval of the township people's congress.
2. A party congress standing committee would be established at the township level. The standing committee would meet every three months (considerably more often than the usual proposal to have it meet once a year).
3. Similarly, the township people's congress would establish a standing committee. Each of Pingba's 17 electoral districts would choose one person from its delegation to the people's congress to serve on the standing committee. The standing committee would meet every two months. Specialized representatives (presumably those with more knowledge of such topics as public finance) could meet on an ad hoc basis.
4. A new relationship would be established among the party, the government, and the local people's congress. The party committee would no longer interfere in the work of the government. The party committee would be restricted to deciding on major matters to be executed by the local government and supervising the implementation of resolutions passed by the local people's congress. The party committee would also be responsible for supervising the conduct of its own members.
5. An inner-party supervisory mechanism would be instituted.
6. The government would also be under the comprehensive supervision of the local people's congress.
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7. Public finance would be made open, and the government's budget would have to gain the approval of the local people's congress as well as be subject to supervision during its implementation. On August 26, 2003, three candidates for township party secretary in Pingba put forth their governing platforms and responded to questions from the audience (which was open to the general public as well as local cadres). A lively discussion then took place covering all matters of local concern, including education, transportation, the environment, family planning, land distribution, and so forth. On August 28, just as final preparations for the election were getting under way, the county party committee ordered the election and the reform stopped. Moreover, the county party committee put the Pingba Township party secretary, Wei Shengduo, under "dual supervision" and appointed a new party secretary. After two weeks, Wei was allowed to return home, but was left awaiting higher levels' decision on his next job assignment, if any.22
It does not seem strange that this reform plan was stopped by higher-level party officials; what is intriguing is that the plan went as far as it did and that party officials at the township level approved it. Allowing the public to vote for a party secretary at the township level--if only in the form of an opinion poll--is unprecedented, but what is unique, and in accord with the other examples looked at in this analysis, is that the plan envisioned a far greater role for the local people's congress. Most townships are scheduled to reelect their people's congresses in late 2004 and in the first half of 2005,making the various trends traced here relevant as we go forward.
Inner-Party Democracy
Inner-party democracy--an old topic in the CCP lexicon--has been revived in recent years as another way of channeling the calls for reform at the local level. In particular, calls for inner-party democracy are a direct response to village elections: once people could elect the village chief, people began to ask why they could not also elect the village secretary. In addition, inner-party democracy is seen by party researchers as a way of breaking up the corruption and personal networks that are associated with having power concentrated in the hands of the "number one leader" (yi ba shou) at each level.23 Implementation of the three-ballot system in Baicheng City in Jilin Province to decide cadre promotions was described in a previous issue of China Leadership Monitor.24 That experiment started in 2000, when the newly installed party secretary found himself under so much pressure from leaders at different levels to promote one person or another that he finally decided to open up the process and promote cadres through democratic mechanisms. The experiment remains limited because it is restricted to the section (chu) level, but it did receive the endorsement of higher levels in the party.25
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In Sichuan Province, which has pioneered many of the experiments in local democracy, the party secretary of Pingchang County designated one-third of the townships under his administration to experiment with direct election of the township party secretary by all party members in that jurisdiction. In one of those townships, Lingshan, eight party members competed for five positions in what the press hailed as a "breakthrough" in the cadre selection process.26 Recently the CCP Organization Department in Sichuan declared that cadres at and below the county level must be recommended by the "masses."27 If implemented, that policy would mark a substantial raising of the level at which some form of democratic process is used. Other experiments are taking place elsewhere in the country. For instance, Luotian County in Hubei Province replaced its CCP standing committee with a broader 15-person committee elected directly by the party congress--which also meets annually to monitor affairs.28
Notes
1 Yu Jianrong, "The Evil Forces in the Rural Areas and the Deterioration of Grassroots Administration--A Survey of the South Area of Hunan," Zhanlue yu guanli, September 1, 2003, 1-14, trans. FBIS CPP-2003-1008-000183.
2 Zhao Shukai, "Governance in Villages: Organization and Conflict," Zhanlue yu guanli, November 1, 2003, 1-8, trans. FBIS CPP-2004-0102-000114.
3 Chen Kuidi and Chun Tao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (Investigation of China's peasants) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004).
4 Yu Jianrong, "Tudi wenti yicheng wei nongmin weiquan kangzheng de jiaodian" (The land problem has already become the focal point in peasants' protests and efforts to uphold rights) (n.p., n.d.).
5 Xiao Gongqin, "Jingti defang quanli `Sudanhua' xianxiang" (Beware of the `sultanization' of power at the local level), Neibu canyue, 2003, no. 10 (March 14).
6 Li Fan, ed., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan baogao (Grassroots democracy in China) (Beijing: Fal? chubanshe, 2004), 5.
7 Huang Guangming and He Hongwei, "Striking Dilemma in Grassroots Administration in Dianjiang [sic, Qianjiang] Village [sic, City], 187 Elected Village Officials Dismissed in Three Years," Nanfang zhuomo, September 12, 2002, trans. FBIS CPP-2002-0916-000029, and Dang Guoying, "The Reality and Future of Villagers' Autonomy," Nanfang zhuomo, September 30, 2002, trans. FBIS CPP-2002-1008-0000051.
8 Li Fan, ed., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan baogao, 158.
9 Ibid., 168-76.
10 Ibid., 75.
11 Ibid., 78. See also Yi Ying, "Shenzhen's Election Campaign Storm," Nanfang zhuomo, May 29, 2003,
trans. FBIS CPP-2003-0606-000021.
12 Li Fan, ed., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan baogao, 40-41.
13 China Daily, August 9, 2003.
14 Renmin ribao (Internet version), June 27, 2003, trans. FBIS CPP-2003-0707-000142.
15 Li Fan, ed., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan baogao, 43-44.
16 Ibid., 122-23.
17 Ibid., 125-26.
18 Ibid., 127.
19 Ibid., 128.
20 Irene Wang, "A Whiff of Freedom in Beijing Election," South China Morning Post, November 21, 2003.
21 Lin Chufang, "Penetrating Deeply into the Depths of Success: A Campaign Office for an Independent Candidate Quietly Opens Its Doors," Nanfang zhuomo, October 30, 2003, trans. FBIS CPP-2003-1103-0000007.
22 Li Fan, ed., Zhongguo jiceng minzhu fazhan baogao, 179-235.
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23 Interviews in Beijing, August 2004.
24 Joseph Fewsmith, "The Third Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee," China Leadership Monitor 9 (winter 2004).
25 Interviews in Beijing, August 2004.
26 "Direct Elections Move to Township Level," China Daily, May 18, 2004, and Li Wei, "Political Achievements of the `Openly Nominated and Directly Elected Secretary,'" Sichuan ribao, trans. FBIS CPP-2004-0130-000043.
27 Min Jie, "Sichuan: Cadres Must Be Selected through Mass Nomination--Those without Democratic Recommendation or Not Approved Of by Majority of Masses in Democratic Recommendation Cannot Be Named as Candidates to Be Examined for Filling Vacant Posts," Zhongguo qingnian bao, August 3, 2004, trans. FBIS CPP-2004-0803-000075.
28 "China's Ruling Party Seeks to Decentralize Power," Xinhua News Agency (English), July 1, 2004, FBIS CPP-2004-0701-000219.

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>> IRAQ

Turkey snaps over US bombing of its bretheren
By K Gajendra Singh
For the first time since the acrimonious exchange of words in July last year following the arrest and imprisonment of 11 Turkish commandos in Kurdish Iraq, for which Washington expressed "regret", differences erupted publicly this week between North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies Turkey and the US over attacks on Turkey's ethnic cousins, the Turkmens in northern Iraq.
Talking to a Turkish TV channel, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul warned that if the US did not cease its attacks on Tal Afar, a Turkmen city at the junction of Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Ankara might withdraw its support to the US in Iraq.
"I told [US Secretary of State Colin Powell] that what is being done there is harming the civilian population, that it is wrong, and that if it continues, Turkey's cooperation on issues regarding Iraq will come to a total stop." He added, "We will continue to say these things. Of course we will not stop only at words. If necessary, we will not hesitate to do what has to be done."
Turkey is a key US ally in a largely hostile region. US forces use its Incirlik military base near northern Iraq. Turkish firms are also involved heavily in the construction and transport business in Iraq, with hundreds of Turkish vehicles bringing in goods for the US military every day. It is an alternative route through friendly northern Kurdish territory to those from Jordan and Kuwait. But many Turks have been kidnapped by Iraqi insurgent groups and some have been killed.
Turkey contains a large ethnic Turkmen population and Ankara has long seen itself as the guardian of their rights, particularly across the border in northern Iraq, where they constitute a significant minority.
The US attacks on Tal Afar, which Iraqi Turkmen groups in Turkey say have left 120 dead and over 200 injured, were launched, the US says, to root out terrorists. The US has denied the extent of the damage, saying that it avoided civilian targets and killed only terrorists it says were infiltrating the town from Syria.
US ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman commented, "We are carrying out a limited military operation and we are trying to keep civilian losses to a minimum. We cannot completely eliminate the possibility [of civilian casualties] ... We believe the operation is being conducted with great care," he said after briefing Turkish officials. There have not been any reports of further attacks since the Turkish warning.
The deterioration in US-Turkish relations underlines the fast-changing strategic scenario in the region in the post-Cold War era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the September 11 attacks on the US, the US-led invasion on Iraq, now conceded as illegal by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the deteriorating security situation in that country.
Despite negative signals on Ankara's mission to join the European Union, Turkey is moving away from the US and closer to the EU - it is even looking to buy Airbuses, and arms, from Europe rather than the US.
At the same time, Turkey is drawing closer to Syria, normalizing relations with Iran and improving economic relations with Russia, as well as discuss with Moscow ways to counter terrorist acts, from which both Russia and Turkey suffer. Russian President Vladimir Putin called off a visit to Turkey when the hostage crisis broke at Beslan in the Russian Caucasus last week.
And Turkey has also moved away from long-time friend Israel, the US's umbilically aligned strategic partner in the Middle East. Turkey has accused Israel of "state terrorism" against Palestinians. A recent ruling party team from Turkey returned from Tel Aviv not satisfied with Israeli explanations over charges that it was interfering in northern Iraqi affairs.
With newspapers full of stories and TV screens showing the Turkmens being attacked in the US operations at Tal Afar, many Turks are angry at what is being done to their ethnic brethren. These have been large protests outside the US Embassy in Ankara, and the belief that the US attacks are a part of a campaign to ethnically cleanse the Turkmens from northern Iraq is widespread.
"Some people are uncomfortable with the ethnic structure of this area, so, using claims of a terrorist threat, they went in and killed people," said Professor Suphi Saatci of the Kirkuk Foundation, one of several Turkmen groups in Turkey.
He claims that the the attacks are a part of a wider campaign to establish Kurdish control over all of northern Iraq, and he points to the removal of Turkmen officials from governing positions in the region to be replaced by Kurds. He also says that the Iraqi police force deployed in northern Iraq is dominated by members of Kurdish factions. "The US is acting completely under the direction of the Kurdish parties in northern Iraq," says Saatci. "Tal Afar is a clearly Turkmen area and this is something they were very jealous of."
While Kurdish officials deny any attempt to alter the ethnic balance in the region, last week Masud Barzani, leader of one of the two largest Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), said that Kirkuk "is a Kurdish city" and one that the KDP was willing to fight for, which certainly did not calm fears of the Turkmens and angered the Turks. Many Turkmen see Kirkuk as historically theirs. Turkey considers northern Iraq - ie Kurdistan - as part of its sphere of influence, especially the Turkmen minority. Ankara is especially concerned that the Kurds in Iraq don't gain full autonomy as this would likely fire the aspirations of Turkey's Kurdish minority.
The US military disputes that its forces laid siege to Tal Afar, saying that the operation was to free the city from insurgents, including foreign fighters, who had turned it into a haven for militants smuggling men and arms across the Syrian border. And a military spokesman denied that Kurds were using US forces to gain the upper hand in their ethnic struggle with the Turkmens. The US characterized the resistance in Tal Afar as put up by a disparate group of former Saddam Hussein loyalists, religious extremists and foreign fighters who were united only by their opposition to US forces.
Gareth Stansfield, a regional specialist at the Center of Arab and Islamic Studies at Britain's University of Exeter, said recently that "the most important angle of what the Turkish concern is [and that is] that there is a strong belief in Ankara that Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, and the Americans, were suckered into attacking Tal Afar by Kurdish intelligence circles, and really brought to Tal Afar to target ostensibly al-Qaeda and anti-occupation forces with the Kurds knowing full well that this would also bring them up against Turkmens and create a rift between Washington and Ankara over their treatment of a Turkmen city."
Turkey maintains a few hundred troops in the region as a security presence to monitor Turkish Kurd rebels who have some hideouts in the region. But any large-scale presence has been derailed by the objections of Iraqi Kurdish leaders. "That has created an uneasy state of co-existence between Ankara and the two major Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a balance which any US military operation in the area could easily disturb."
Stansfield added that the incident shows how volatile tensions remain between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds, despite ongoing efforts by both sides to work together. "The Turkish position has become increasingly more sophisticated over the last months, and arguably years, with Ankara finding an accommodation with the KDP and PUK and beginning to realize that while it is not their favored option to allow the Kurds to be autonomous in the north of Iraq, it is perhaps one of the better options that they are faced with in this situation," said Stansfield.
He added, "However, the relationship between the two principle Kurdish parties and the government of Turkey will always be sensitized by the Kurds' treatment of Turkmens and indeed now the American treatment of Turkmens vis-a-vis Kurds."
Transfer of sovereignty and the Kurds
In January this year, the then Iraqi Governing Council agreed to a federal structure to enshrine Kurdish self-rule in three northern provinces of Iraq. This was to be included in a "fundamental law" that would precede national elections in early 2005. The fate of three more provinces claimed by the Kurds was to be decided later. "In the fundamental law, Kurdistan will have the same legal status as it has now," said a Kurdish council member, referring to the region that has enjoyed virtual autonomy since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
"When the constitution is written and elections are held, we will not agree to less than what is in the fundamental law, and we may ask for more," said the Kurdish council member. Arabs, Turkmens, Sunnis and Shi'ites expressed vociferous opposition to the proposed federal system for Kurdish Iraq. They organized demonstrations leading to ethnic tensions and violence in Kirkuk and many other cities in north Iraq. Many protesters were killed and scores were injured.
However, when "sovereignty" was transferred on June 30 to the interim government led by Iyad Allawi, the interim constitutional arrangement did not include a federal structure for Kurdish self-rule, although to pacify the Kurds, key portfolios of defense and foreign affairs were allotted to them.
A press release from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) stated that "the current situation in Iraq and the new-found attitude of the US, UK and UN has led to a serious re-think for the Kurds. The proposed plans do not seem to promise the expected Kurdish role in the future of a new Iraq. The Kurds feel betrayed once again." It added that "if the plight of the Kurds is ignored yet again and we are left with no say in the future of a new Iraq, the will of the Kurdish people will be too great for the Kurdish political parties to ignore, leading to a total withdrawal from any further discussions relating to the formation of any new Iraqi government. This will certainly not serve the unity of Iraq." Underlining that the Kurds have been the only true friends and allies of the US coalition, the release concluded that "the Kurds will no longer be second-class citizens in Iraq". However, the Kurds did not precipitate matters.
Demographic changes in north Iraq
Kirkuk, with a population of some 750,000, and other towns are now the scene of ethnic and demographic struggles between Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds, with the last wanting to take over the region and make the city a part of an autonomous zone, with Kirkuk as its capital.
The area around Kirkuk has 6% of the world's oil reserves. In April 2003, it was estimated that the population was 250,000 each for Turkmen, Arab and Kurd. A large number of Arabs were settled there by Saddam Hussein, and they are mostly Shi'ites from the south. The Turkmens are generally Shi'ites, like their ethnic kin, the Alevis in Turkey, but many have given up Turkmen traditions in favor of the urban, clerical religion common among the Arabs of the south. Kirkuk is therefore a stronghold of the Muqtada al-Sadr movement which has given US-led forces such a hard time in the south in Najaf. The influential Shi'ite political party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), also has good support, perhaps 40%, in the region. Kurds are mostly Sunnis, and were the dominant population in Kirkuk in the 1960s and 1970s, before Saddam's Arabization policy saw a lot of Kurds moved further north.
According to some estimates, over 70,000 Kurds have entered Kirkuk over the past 17 months, and about 50,000 Arabs have fled back to the south. It can be said, therefore, that now there are about 320,000 Kurds and 200,000 Arabs in the city. The number of Turkmen has also been augmented. During the Ottoman rule, the Turkmen dominated the city, and it was so until oil was discovered. It is reported that, encouraged by the Kurdish leadership, as many as 500 Kurds a day are returning to the city. The changes are being carried out for the quick-fix census planned for October, which in turn will be the basis for the proportional representation for the planned January elections, if these are even held, given the country's security problems. Both the Turkmens and Arabs have said that the Kurds are using these demographic changes to engulf Kirkuk and ensure that it is added to the enlarged Kurdish province which they are planning. The Kurds hope to get at least semi-autonomous status from Baghdad.
North Iraq and Turkey's Kurdish problem
Turkey has serious problems with its own Kurds, who form 20% of the population. A rebellion since 1984 against the Turkish state led by Abdullah Ocalan of the Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has cost over 35,000 lives, including 5,000 soldiers. To control and neutralize the rebellion, thousands of Kurdish villages have been bombed, destroyed, abandoned or relocated; millions of Kurds have been moved to shanty towns in the south and east or migrated westwards. The economy of the region was shattered. With a third of the Turkish army tied up in the southeast, the cost of countering the insurgency at its height amounted to between $6 billion to $8 billion a year.
The rebellion died down after the arrest and trial of Ocalan, in 1999, but not eradicated. After a court in Turkey in 2002 commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence passed on Ocalan and parliament granted rights for the use of the Kurdish language, some of the root causes of the Kurdish rebellion were removed. The PKK - now also called Konga-Gel - shifted almost 4,000 of its cadres to northern Iraq and refused to lay down arms as required by a Turkish "repentance law". The US's priority to disarm PKK cadres was never very high. In fact, the US wants to reward Iraqi Kurds, who have remained mostly peaceful and loyal while the rest of the country has not.
Early this month, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey's patience was running out over US reluctance to take military action against Turkish Kurds hiding in northern Iraq. In 1999, the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire after the capture of its leader, Ocalan. But the ceasefire was not renewed in June and there have been increasing skirmishes and battles between Kurdish insurgents and Turkish security forces inside Turkey. Turkey remains frustrated over US reluctance to employ military means against the PKK fighters - in spite of promises to do so.
Iraqi Kurds have been ambivalent to the PKK, helping them at times. Ankara has entered north Iraq from time to time - despite protests - to attack PKK bases and its cadres. Ankara has also said that it would regard an independent Kurdish entity as a cause for war. It is opposed to the Kurds seizing the oil centers around Kirkuk, which would give them financial autonomy, and this would also constitute a reason for entry into north Iraq. The Turks vehemently oppose any change in the ethnic composition of the city of Kirkuk .
The Turks manifest a pervasive distrust of autonomy or models of a federal state for Iraqi Kurds. It would affect and encourage the aspirations of their own Kurds. It also revives memories of Western conspiracies against Turkey and the unratified 1920 Treaty of Sevres forced on the Ottoman Sultan by the World War I victors which had promised independence to the Armenians and autonomy to Turkey's Kurds. So Mustafa Kemal Ataturk opted for the unitary state of Turkey and Kurdish rebellions in Turkey were ruthlessly suppressed.
The 1980s war between Iraq and resurgent Shi'ites in Iran helped the PKK to establish itself in the lawless north Kurdish Iraq territory. The PKK also helped itself with arms freely available in the region during the eight-year war.
The 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war proved to be a watershed in the violent explosion of the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey. A nebulous and ambiguous situation emerged in north Iraq when, at the end of the war, US president Bush Sr encouraged the Kurds (and the hapless Shi'ites in the south) to revolt against Saddam's Sunni Arab regime. Turkey was dead against it, as a Kurdish state in the north would give ideas to its own Kurds.
Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in the Gulf were totally opposed to a Shi'ite state in south Iraq. The hapless Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites paid a heavy price. Thousands were butchered. The international media's coverage of the pitiable conditions, with more than half a million Iraqi Kurds escaping towards the Turkish border from Saddam's forces in March 1991, led to the creation of a protected zone in north Iraq, later patrolled by US and British war planes. The Iraqi Kurds did elect a parliament, but it never functioned properly. Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani run almost autonomous administrations in their areas. This state of affairs has allowed the PKK a free run in north Iraq.
After the 1991 war, Turkey lost out instead of gaining as promised by the US. The closure of Iraqi pipelines, economic sanctions and the loss of trade with Iraq, which used to pump billions of US dollars into the economy and provide employment to hundreds of thousands, with thousands of Turkish trucks roaring up and down to Iraq, only exacerbated the economic and social problems in the Kurdish heartland and the center of the PKK rebellion.
But many Turks still remain fascinated with the dream of "getting back" the Ottoman provinces of Kurdish-majority Mosul and Kirkuk in Iraq. They were originally included within the sacred borders of the republic proclaimed in the National Pact of 1919 by Ataturk and his comrades, who had started organizing resistance to fight for Turkey's independence from the occupying World War I victors.
So it has always remained a mission and objective to be reclaimed some time. The oil-rich part of Mosul region was occupied by the British forces illegally after the armistice and then annexed to Iraq, then under British mandate, in 1925, much to Turkish chagrin. Iraq was created by joining Ottoman Baghdad and Basra vilayats (provinces). Turks also base their claims on behalf of less than half a million Turkmen who lived in Kirkuk with the Kurds before Arabization changed the ethnic balance of the region.
With its attacks on Tal Afar, the US is stirring a very deep well of discontent.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Emai: Gajendrak@hotmail.com

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


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Once a Palace, Now Saddam Hussein's Prison
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 18 - Nine months after American troops pulled him disheveled and disoriented from an underground bunker near his hometown, Tikrit, Saddam Hussein is living in an air-conditioned 10-by-13 foot cell on the grounds of one of his former palaces outside Baghdad, tending plants, proclaiming himself Iraq's lawful ruler, and reading the Koran and books about past Arab glory.
American and Iraqi officials who have visited the former Iraqi leader say he wears plastic sandals and an Arab dishdasha robe, eats American soldiers' ready-to-eat meals for breakfast, and is permitted three hours' daily exercise in a courtyard outside his cell. He has been flown by Black Hawk helicopter to an American military hospital in Baghdad, where doctors ran tests for an enlarged prostate, which they believe could be an early pointer to cancer.
He has undergone hours of interrogation by investigators preparing evidence for his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
But he has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, or to show remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people killed during his 24-year dictatorship, officials say. He has insisted that his position as Iraq's president gave him legal authority for all he did and that his victims were "traitors." At every encounter, the officials say, he insists that he is still the constitutionally elected president.
More than 80 other "high value detainees" at the same prison - including more than 40 who were on the Pentagon's "pack of cards" of Iraq's most-wanted fugitives - are kept away from Mr. Hussein, said Bakhtiar Amin, the Iraqi human rights minister. Mr. Hussein has been in solitary confinement since his capture on Dec. 13, officials said, because of a fear that he would try to rig evidence or intimidate old associates in the prison.
But the core of the group, 11 men who appeared with him in court on July 1, are allowed to exercise together, and to play chess, poker, backgammon and dominos. Offsetting those privileges, they have faced indignities Mr. Hussein has been spared, including, at the outset, digging their own latrines. But the strict protocol favored by authoritarian regimes still rules. "They call each other by their old titles, Mr. Minister of this, Mr. Minister of that," Mr. Amin said. "It is as if nothing has changed."
When Mr. Hussein appeared in court to be advised of his legal rights and of the charges under investigation, officials said it could be two years or more before he was brought to trial. None of the other former officials who appeared with him were likely to come to trial for as much as a year, they said, because of the tons of documents to be processed, as well as the need to interview the thousands of Iraqis who have come forward as potential witnesses.
But the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has decided to fast-forward the legal processes. It has begun a shake-up of the staff at the special tribunal set up last year to hear the cases and hopes to begin the first high-profile trial, probably against Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Mr. Hussein's known as Chemical Ali, by November. Mr. Hussein's trial will follow, perhaps next year if the prosecutors are ready, Iraqi and American officials say.
In an interview at his heavily guarded residence in Baghdad on Thursday, Dr. Allawi said the government had "received the resignation" of Salem Chalabi, the American-educated lawyer who has been the court's chief administrator. He is a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader who was favored by the Pentagon before the March 2003 invasion, but who has recently been shunned by the American hierarchy here. Ahmad Chalabi has set himself up as a rival to Dr. Allawi among Iraq's majority Shiites, and his nephew, who has been implicated by the Allawi government in a murder case unrelated to the work of the tribunal, has been out of Iraq for most of the past two months.
Small Pleasures
In prison, Mr. Hussein has asked for some vestiges of the pleasures he enjoyed when he moved between dozens of palaces. "This was a man whose regime used a shredder to turn human bodies into ground beef," said Mr. Amin, the 46-year-old rights minister, who spent years abroad as an exile chronicling the abuses of Mr. Hussein's government and petitioning foreign governments and rights organizations to shun the Iraqi government.
"And now he sits there in his cell and asks for muffins and cookies and cigars," he said.
Mr. Hussein and his top lieutenants are being held at Camp Cropper, a heavily fortified compound that crouches behind high walls topped with rolls of razor wire, beneath sandbagged watchtowers manned by soldiers with machine guns. The camp lies within a vast American headquarters complex known as Camp Victory, that includes a network of palaces, as well as lakes that Mr. Hussein filled with fish. Planes using Baghdad International Airport pass low over the prison, 10 miles from the center of Baghdad.
For the trials, courtrooms are being readied in one of the vast, neo-imperialist buildings inside the former Republican Palace compound in central Baghdad that make up the Green Zone, the headquarters for the Allawi government and 2,500 American military and civilian officials. The five-judge panels that will preside at the juryless trials will have the power to impose death sentences on Mr. Hussein and his associates some of whom wept when they were told at the July hearing that they faced possible execution. For Mr. Hussein and his victims, a trial in the new court building, which The New York Times was asked not to identify for security reasons, will have a special irony. Mr. Hussein, who favored an architectural style emphasizing huge sandstone columns and portals, will face a reckoning in one of the buildings he erected to glorify his rule. In the dock, he will be a short walk away from the Republican Palace beside the Tigris River, once his main seat of power.
The Allawi government believes that the Iraqis, subjected to decades of terror, will begin to recover only when they see the men responsible brought to account. "Without justice, I don't see any possibility of healing the wounds in this society," Mr. Amin, the human rights minister, said. "These people turned Iraq into a 'massgrave-istan' by the scale of their crimes."
"They made an industry of murder," he said.
Establishing Legitimacy
There are political pressures, too. Dr. Allawi will be a candidate in elections set for January, a crucial step toward the goal of a constitutionally established, popularly elected government by 2006. With the mounting insurgency, he needs to bolster his waning popularity among Iraqis who increasingly blame him for the chaos. By putting top figures from the former government on trial, aides believe, he can remind Iraqis of the trauma that ended with their overthrow.
In the interview, Dr. Allawi said political calculations and a desire for revenge - he was nearly killed by assassins Mr. Hussein sent to his exile home in London, who attacked him with an ax while he slept, leaving him hospitalized for a year - played no part in his decision to accelerate the trials. Rather, he said, what he sought was a catharsis. "We need to bury the past," he said.
Dr. Allawi was a rising student leader in the governing Baath Party in the 1960's when he first met Mr. Hussein. He recalled him as a "thug who enjoyed hurting others," and as a man whose rule had been "like a horror movie." Now, he said, Mr. Hussein was paying the price. "My guess is that Saddam is dying every day," he said. "He is in prison, he is alone, he has lost everything, he has no power, nothing; and to him, that is worse than death."
Western legal experts familiar with the tribunal's work say they doubt the tribunal can meet Dr. Allawi's timetable for a November start to the trials. In many cases, the preparation of evidence is far from complete, and so far, the tribunal has found no Iraqi lawyers to defend Mr. Hussein and his associates.
In July, several defendants, including Mr. Majid, said they wanted lawyers from elsewhere in the Arab world, but none have come forward. "The high-value criminals have been informed about this, that no Iraqi lawyers are willing to take their cases, and that the foreign lawyers who said that they would didn't come forward, either," Mr. Amin said.
In his cell, Mr. Hussein has a fold-up bed, a small desk and a plastic chair, as well as a supply of bottled water and ice, a prayer mat and a choice of more than 170 books from a library supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross. He sleeps a lot, officials said, and reads Arabic-language books with a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles, including tomes of ancient poetry and tales from nearly 1,000 years ago, when Baghdad was a famous center of learning and the capital of the Islamic world.
On visits to the Army's hospital in the Green Zone, Mr. Hussein has staked out his independence in other ways. In the hospital - named for Ibn Sina, a scientific pioneer of the early Islamic world - he has been treated by American military doctors and Iraqi physicians who were on his presidential medical team. Near wards filled with wounded American soldiers, he has undergone blood tests and scans that have confirmed that he has an enlarged prostate gland, medical officials said, as well as a hernia problem and trouble with one of his eyes.
But he has refused a surgical biopsy that might determine whether the prostate condition was cancerous, a decision officials involved said was common among American men of Mr. Hussein's age, 67, who often choose not to take the biopsy when they are told that the condition could take years to become life-threatening. "He has time," one official said. "There is no health issue that would prevent him standing trial."
Another official said Mr. Hussein had helped an American Navy surgeon take blood by gripping a tourniquet on his arm, and remarked, in English, "Perhaps I should have been a doctor, not a politician."
In the courtyard by his cell, Mr. Hussein has placed white-painted stones around the plants he tends, a fact that struck Mr. Amin, the human rights minister, as bizarre. "It's an irony of history," he said. "This is a man who committed some of the biggest acts of ecocide in history, when he drained the marshes in southern Iraq, used chemical weapons against 250 Kurdish villages, and shipped whole palm tree plantations to the charlatan leaders of the Arab world who were his shoeshine boys.
"And now he's a gardener."
Mr. Amin said Mr. Hussein had been denied newspapers, radio and television, and thus knew little about the political events in Iraq that have followed his capture. But he said the former ruler was upset when he was told that a prominent Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, had been named by the United States to replace him as president.
"He was shaken and he was very upset," Mr. Amin said. "He couldn't accept that." He added: "He's a megalomaniac and a psychotic. He has never expressed any remorse for any of his victims. He is a man without a conscience. He is a beast."
Therapy Sessions Declined
An American general said Mr. Hussein had been offered sessions with American military psychologists, but had refused them, as had all his closest associates. Still, all 12 are watched by an American mental health team - especially under interrogation - for any sign they may be contemplating suicide. None has given cause for concern so far, the general said. Other officials gave a somewhat different picture, saying that some of the men had bouts of depression and complained bitterly about being denied family visits.
In the converted mosque annex at Camp Victory that was used as a courtroom in July, several of the former leaders seemed deeply shaken when told they faced a possible death penalty. Several blamed Mr. Hussein for the killings, and said they were only following orders. Since then, Iraqi officials said, several have offered to cooperate with their interrogators. One is Tariq Aziz, the cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking former deputy prime minister, who was Mr. Hussein's diplomatic emissary; another is Barzan al-Tikriti, Mr. Hussein's half-brother.
Mr. Amin said he was hailed by Mr. Tikriti during a visit to Camp Cropper. "Somebody called out, 'Mr. Minister! Mr. Minister!' and said, 'Why are you treating me like Ali Hassan al-Majid? I am not one of them, everybody knows about the deep rivalry within my family' " - a reference, Mr. Amin said, to an incident in the early 1990's when Uday Hussein, the former ruler's oldest son, who was married to Mr. Tikriti's daughter, shot and seriously wounded his father-in-law in the legs during an argument over his treatment of his wife.
"He was depressed, it was a cry for help," Mr. Amin said. "But I told him, 'If you want to see the list of your crimes, I will show it to you. It is a long one.' "
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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>> BANKING

September 18, 2004
Japan Shuts Unit of Citibank, Citing Violations
By TODD ZAUN
TOKYO, Sept. 17 - In one of the severest penalties ever imposed on a bank in Japan, regulators on Friday ordered Citigroup to close its Japanese private banking operations because of serious violations of the country's banking laws.
The Financial Services Agency ordered Citibank to shut the four branches in Japan where it offers private banking services to wealthy customers after the agency discovered a string of violations and improprieties over the last three years. The actions cited included failing to put in effect measures to prevent money laundering, overcharging customers for financial derivative products and making loans that helped clients carry out a variety of improper deals, regulators said.
"A number of acts injurious to public interests, serious violations of laws and regulations, and extremely inappropriate transactions were uncovered at the Private Bank Group, which led us to conclude that continued future operations are inappropriate," the Financial Services Agency wrote in its order.
Citibank in Japan apologized for the violations and vowed to improve its management and its internal controls.
"Citibank Japan sincerely apologizes for the problems identified in the F.S.A. orders and is earnestly addressing the issues raised and working to prevent their recurrence," the bank said in a statement. It added that it "is committed to doing everything necessary to restore the confidence of its customers."
The bank was ordered to come up with a plan to improve its business operations by Oct. 22. Citibank will have a year to close its private banking business. Though it cannot accept new customers after Sept. 29, the bank can continue to serve its current clients until Sept. 30, 2005. On that date, regulators will revoke Citibank's license to operate the four branches and they must be closed. Citibank could reapply for those licenses, but that would probably take years.
The bank said it did not know yet what would happen to the 400 employees working in the Japanese private banking division.
Citibank also has 25 retail branches in Japan, but those branches are not affected by Friday's order.
It was the second time this week that Citigroup has expressed contrition for breaches in its overseas operations.
On Tuesday, the company apologized for a huge bond trade in Europe that outraged competitors and led to an investigation by regulators in Britain; France and Germany are also looking into the trade. In early August, Citigroup traders sold 11 billion euros of European government debt ($13 billion) within minutes via an electronic trading system only to buy some of it back less than an hour later at lower prices.
The transactions were not illegal, but rivals said Citigroup violated an unwritten rule among big bond houses not to use their trading heft to manipulate prices.
Citibank's private banking business in Japan concentrates on customers with about $1 million to save or invest and emphasizes highly personalized service. But regulators said Citibank's private banking division often misled its well-heeled clients. Regulators said Citibank charged some customers above-market prices for publicly traded derivatives and failed to explain fully the risks involved in many of its financial products.
Regulators say Citibank also went beyond the scope of its banking license by brokering real estate and art deals for its rich clients - activities not allowed under Japanese banking laws.
Private banking employees were also reckless with client information, the bank regulators said. For example, some employees kept records of secret passwords for the most forgetful clients. Regulators discovered no cases of employees using the passwords to steal money.
Toshihide Endo, director of the Financial Services Agency's supervisory bureau, said that employees of the private banking group might have been tempted to take shortcuts when screening clients because "their salaries and performance evaluations were closely linked to sales targets.''
"That might be one of the main reasons this kind of misconduct happened at Citibank," he said.
In one case, the private banking unit in Japan accepted a customer who had been flagged repeatedly as suspicious by another unit of Citibank, the agency said in its statement. In another, the private banking group made a loan to a group of clients who used the money in a stock manipulation scheme. One of those same clients received a short-term loan from Citibank to inflate his account balance temporarily in a scheme to secure a government grant, Mr. Endo said.
Citibank said on Friday that six executives in Japan had left the company because of the problems made public Friday and that it had reprimanded other employees.
In July, Citigroup appointed its chief auditor, Douglas Peterson, to succeed Charles Whitehead as chief executive of the Japan operations.
A Citibank Japan spokesman, Toru Ichikawa, would not comment on whether Mr. Whitehead's departure was related to the troubles at the private banking division.

Citigroup does not provide figures on how much the private banking business in Japan contributes to its overall revenue or profit, but overseas private banking contributed only about 3 percent of Citigroup's net income in 2003.

Citibank's retail banking unit was also ordered to stop taking new foreign-currency deposits for one month, beginning Sept. 29, and to improve management controls. This suspension came for failing to detect a case in which a Citibank employee embezzled 1.8 billion yen (currently $16.4 million) from depositors over seven years, beginning in 1997.

The only other bank to face shutdown orders from Japanese regulators was Credit Suisse Financial Products, which had its banking license revoked in 1999 for blocking an investigation into whether it was engineering financial products specifically to help companies conceal losses on their accounting statements. The company was a unit of the Credit Suisse Group.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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>> TERROR


The Terrorism to Come
By Walter Laqueur
Walter Laqueur is co-chair of the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of some of the basic texts on terrorism, most recently Voices of Terror (Reed Publishing, 2004). The present article is part of a larger project; the author wishes to thank the Earhart Foundation for its support.
Terrorism has become over a number of years the topic of ceaseless comment, debate, controversy, and search for roots and motives, and it figures on top of the national and international agenda. It is also at present one of the most highly emotionally charged topics of public debate, though quite why this should be the case is not entirely clear, because the overwhelming majority of participants do not sympathize with terrorism.
Confusion prevails, but confusion alone does not explain the emotions. There is always confusion when a new international phenomenon appears on the scene. This was the case, for instance, when communism first appeared (it was thought to be aiming largely at the nationalization of women and the burning of priests) and also fascism. But terrorism is not an unprecedented phenomenon; it is as old as the hills.
Thirty years ago, when the terrorism debate got underway, it was widely asserted that terrorism was basically a left-wing revolutionary movement caused by oppression and exploitation. Hence the conclusion: Find a political and social solution, remedy the underlying evil -- no oppression, no terrorism. The argument about the left-wing character of terrorism is no longer frequently heard, but the belief in a fatal link between poverty and violence has persisted. Whenever a major terrorist attack has taken place, one has heard appeals from high and low to provide credits and loans, to deal at long last with the deeper, true causes of terrorism, the roots rather than the symptoms and outward manifestations. And these roots are believed to be poverty, unemployment, backwardness, and inequality.
It is not too difficult to examine whether there is such a correlation between poverty and terrorism, and all the investigations have shown that this is not the case. The experts have maintained for a long time that poverty does not cause terrorism and prosperity does not cure it. In the world's 50 poorest countries there is little or no terrorism. A study by scholars Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reached the conclusion that the terrorists are not poor people and do not come from poor societies. A Harvard economist has shown that economic growth is closely related to a society's ability to manage conflicts. More recently, a study of India has demonstrated that terrorism in the subcontinent has occurred in the most prosperous (Punjab) and most egalitarian (Kashmir, with a poverty ratio of 3.5 compared with the national average of 26 percent) regions and that, on the other hand, the poorest regions such as North Bihar have been free of terrorism. In the Arab countries (such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also in North Africa), the terrorists originated not in the poorest and most neglected districts but hailed from places with concentrations of radical preachers. The backwardness, if any, was intellectual and cultural -- not economic and social.
These findings, however, have had little impact on public opinion (or on many politicians), and it is not difficult to see why. There is the general feeling that poverty and backwardness with all their concomitants are bad -- and that there is an urgent need to do much more about these problems. Hence the inclination to couple the two issues and the belief that if the (comparatively) wealthy Western nations would contribute much more to the development and welfare of the less fortunate, in cooperation with their governments, this would be in a long-term perspective the best, perhaps the only, effective way to solve the terrorist problem.
Reducing poverty in the Third World is a moral as well as a political and economic imperative, but to expect from it a decisive change in the foreseeable future as far as terrorism is concerned is unrealistic, to say the least. It ignores both the causes of backwardness and poverty and the motives for terrorism.
Poverty combined with youth unemployment does create a social and psychological climate in which Islamism and various populist and religious sects flourish, which in turn provide some of the footfolk for violent groups in internal conflicts. According to some projections, the number of young unemployed in the Arab world and North Africa could reach 50 million in two decades. Such a situation will not be conducive to political stability; it will increase the demographic pressure on Europe, since according to polls a majority of these young people want to emigrate. Politically, the populist discontent will be directed against the rulers -- Islamist in Iran, moderate in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Morocco. But how to help the failed economies of the Middle East and North Africa? What are the reasons for backwardness and stagnation in this part of the world? The countries that have made economic progress -- such as China and India, Korea and Taiwan, Malaysia and Turkey -- did so without massive foreign help.
All this points to a deep malaise and impending danger, but not to a direct link between the economic situation and international terrorism. There is of course a negative link: Terrorists will not hesitate to bring about a further aggravation in the situation; they certainly did great harm to the tourist industries in Bali and Egypt, in Palestine, Jordan, and Morocco. One of the main targets of terrorism in Iraq was the oil industry. It is no longer a secret that the carriers of international terrorism operating in Europe and America hail not from the poor, downtrodden, and unemployed but are usually of middle-class origin.
The local element
The link between terrorism and nationalist, ethnic, religious, and tribal conflict is far more tangible. These instances of terrorism are many and need not be enumerated in detail. Solving these conflicts would probably bring about a certain reduction in the incidence of terrorism. But the conflicts are many, and if some of them have been defused in recent years, other, new ones have emerged. Nor are the issues usually clear- cut or the bones of contention easy to define -- let alone to solve.
If the issue at stake is a certain territory or the demand for autonomy, a compromise through negotiations might be achieved. But it ought to be recalled that al Qaeda was founded and September 11 occurred not because of a territorial dispute or the feeling of national oppression but because of a religious commandment -- jihad and the establishment of shari'ah. Terrorist attacks in Central Asia and Morocco, in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and partly in Iraq were directed against fellow Muslims, not against infidels. Appeasement may work in individual cases, but terrorist groups with global ambitions cannot be appeased by territorial concessions.
As in the war against poverty, the initiatives to solve local conflicts are overdue and should be welcomed. In an ideal world, the United Nations would be the main conflict resolver, but so far the record of the U.N. has been more than modest, and it is unlikely that this will change in the foreseeable future. Making peace is not an easy option; it involves funds and in some cases the stationing of armed forces. There is no great international crush to join the ranks of the volunteers: China, Russia, and Europe do not want to be bothered, and the United States is overstretched. In brief, as is so often the case, a fresh impetus is likely to occur only if the situation gets considerably worse and if the interests of some of the powers in restoring order happen to coincide.
Lastly, there should be no illusions with regard to the wider effect of a peaceful solution of one conflict or another. To give but one obvious example: Peace (or at least the absence of war) between Israel and the Palestinians would be a blessing for those concerned. It may be necessary to impose a solution since the chances of making any progress in this direction are nil but for some outside intervention. However, the assumption that a solution of a local conflict (even one of great symbolic importance) would have a dramatic effect in other parts of the world is unfounded. Osama bin Laden did not go to war because of Gaza and Nablus; he did not send his warriors to fight in Palestine. Even the disappearance of the "Zionist entity" would not have a significant impact on his supporters, except perhaps to provide encouragement for further action.
Such a warning against illusions is called for because there is a great deal of wishful thinking and na?vet? in this respect -- a belief in quick fixes and miracle solutions: If only there would be peace between Israelis and Palestinians, all the other conflicts would become manageable. But the problems are as much in Europe, Asia, and Africa as in the Middle East; there is a great deal of free-floating aggression which could (and probably would) easily turn in other directions once one conflict has been defused.
It seems likely, for instance, that in the years to come the struggle against the "near enemy" (the governments of the Arab and some non-Arab Muslim countries) will again feature prominently. There has been for some time a truce on the part of al Qaeda and related groups, partly for strategic reasons (to concentrate on the fight against America and the West) and partly because attacks against fellow Muslims, even if they are considered apostates, are bound to be less popular than fighting the infidels. But this truce, as events in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere show, may be coming to an end.
Tackling these supposed sources of terrorism, even for the wrong reasons, will do no harm and may bring some good. But it does not bring us any nearer to an understanding of the real sources of terrorism, a field that has become something akin to a circus ground for riding hobbyhorses and peddling preconceived notions.
How to explain the fact that in an inordinate number of instances where there has been a great deal of explosive material, there has been no terrorism? The gypsies of Europe certainly had many grievances and the Dalets (untouchables) of India and other Asian countries even more. But there has been no terrorism on their part -- just as the Chechens have been up in arms but not the Tartars of Russia, the Basque but not the Catalans of Spain. The list could easily be lengthened.
Accident may play a role (the absence or presence of a militant leadership), but there could also be a cultural-psychological predisposition. How to explain that out of 100 militants believing with equal intensity in the justice of their cause, only a very few will actually engage in terrorist actions? And out of this small minority even fewer will be willing to sacrifice their lives as suicide bombers? Imponderable factors might be involved: indoctrination but also psychological motives. Neither economic nor political analysis will be of much help in gaining an understanding, and it may not be sheer accident that there has been great reluctance to explore this political-intellectual minefield.
The focus on Islamist terrorism
To make predictions about the future course of terrorism is even more risky than political predictions in general. We are dealing here not with mass movements but small -- sometimes very small -- groups of people, and there is no known way at present to account for the movement of small particles either in the physical world or in human societies.
It is certain that terrorism will continue to operate. At the present time almost all attention is focused on Islamist terrorism, but it is useful to remember from time to time that this was not always the case -- even less than 30 years ago -- and that there are a great many conflicts, perceived oppressions, and other causes calling for radical action in the world which may come to the fore in the years to come. These need not even be major conflicts in an age in which small groups will have access to weapons of mass destruction.
At present, Islamist terrorism all but monopolizes our attention, and it certainly has not yet run its course. But it is unlikely that its present fanaticism will last forever; religious-nationalist fervor does not constantly burn with the same intensity. There is a phenomenon known in Egypt as "Salafi burnout," the mellowing of radical young people, the weakening of the original fanatical impetus. Like all other movements in history, messianic groups are subject to routinization, to the circulation of generations, to changing political circumstances, and to sudden or gradual changes in the intensity of religious belief. This could happen as a result of either victories or defeats. One day, it might be possible to appease militant Islamism -- though hardly in a period of burning aggression when confidence and faith in global victory have not yet been broken.
More likely the terrorist impetus will decline as a result of setbacks. Fanaticism, as history shows, is not easy to transfer from one generation to the next; attacks will continue, and some will be crowned with success (perhaps spectacular success), but many will not. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, many terrorists thought that this was the answer to their prayers, but theirs was a false hope. The trust put today in that new invincible weapon, namely suicide terrorism, may in the end be equally misplaced. Even the use of weapons of mass destruction might not be the terrorist panacea some believe it will be. Perhaps their effect will be less deadly than anticipated; perhaps it will be so destructive as to be considered counterproductive. Statistics show that in the terrorist attacks over the past decade, considerably more Muslims were killed than infidels. Since terrorists do not operate in a vacuum, this is bound to lead to dissent among their followers and even among the fanatical preachers.
There are likely to be splits among the terrorist groups even though their structure is not highly centralized. In brief, there is a probability that a united terrorist front will not last. It is unlikely that Osama and his close followers will be challenged on theological grounds, but there has been criticism for tactical reasons: Assuming that America and the West in general are in a state of decline, why did he not have more patience? Why did he have to launch a big attack while the infidels were still in a position to retaliate massively?
Some leading students of Islam have argued for a long time that radical Islamism passed its peak years ago and that its downfall and disappearance are only a question of time, perhaps not much time. It is true that societies that were exposed to the rule of fundamentalist fanatics (such as Iran) or to radical Islamist attack (such as Algeria) have been immunized to a certain extent. However, in a country of 60 million, some fanatics can always be found; as these lines are written, volunteers for suicide missions are being enlisted in Teheran and other cities of Iran. In any case, many countries have not yet undergone such first-hand experience; for them the rule of the shari'ah and the restoration of the caliphate are still brilliant dreams. By and large, therefore, the predictions about the impending demise of Islamism have been premature, while no doubt correct in the long run. Nor do we know what will follow. An interesting study on what happens "when prophecy fails" (by Leon Festinger) was published not long after World War ii. We now need a similar study on the likely circumstances and consequences of the failure of fanaticism. The history of religions (and political religions) offers some clues, as does the history of terrorism.
These, then, are the likely perspectives for the more distant future. But in a shorter-term perspective the danger remains acute and may, in fact, grow. Where and when are terrorist attacks most likely to occur? They will not necessarily be directed against the greatest and most dangerous enemy as perceived by the terrorist gurus. Much depends on where terrorists are strong and believe the enemy to be weak. That terrorist attacks are likely to continue in the Middle East goes without saying; other main danger zones are Central Asia and, above all, Pakistan.
The founders of Pakistan were secular politicians. The religious establishment and in particular the extremists among the Indian Muslims had opposed the emergence of the state. But once Pakistan came into being, they began to try with considerable success to dominate it. Their alternative educational system, the many thousand madrassas, became the breeding ground for jihad fighters. Ayub Khan, the first military ruler, tried to break their stranglehold but failed. Subsequent rulers, military and civilian, have not even tried. It is more than doubtful whether Pervez Musharraf will have any success in limiting their power. The tens of thousands of graduates they annually produce formed the backbone of the Taliban. Their leaders will find employment for them at home and in Central Asia, even if there is a de-escalation in tensions with India over Kashmir. Their most radical leaders aim at the destruction of India. Given Pakistan's internal weakness this may appear more than a little fanciful, but their destructive power is still considerable, and they can count on certain sympathies in the army and the intelligence service. A failed Pakistan with nuclear weapons at its disposal would be a major nightmare. Still, Pakistani terrorism -- like Palestinian and Middle Eastern in general -- remains territorial, likely to be limited to the subcontinent and Central Asia.
Battlefield Europe
Europe is probably the most vulnerable battlefield. To carry out operations in Europe and America, talents are needed that are not normally found among those who have no direct personal experience of life in the West. The Pakistani diaspora has not been very active in the terrorist field, except for a few militants in the United Kingdom.
Western Europe has become over a number of years the main base of terrorist support groups. This process has been facilitated by the growth of Muslim communities, the growing tensions with the native population, and the relative freedom with which radicals could organize in certain mosques and cultural organizations. Indoctrination was provided by militants who came to these countries as religious dignitaries. This freedom of action was considerably greater than that enjoyed in the Arab and Muslim world; not a few terrorists convicted of capital crimes in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria were given political asylum in Europe. True, there were some arrests and closer controls after September 11, but given the legal and political restrictions under which the European security services were laboring, effective counteraction was still exceedingly difficult.
West European governments have been frequently criticized for not having done enough to integrate Muslim newcomers into their societies, but cultural and social integration was certainly not what the newcomers wanted. They wanted to preserve their religious and ethnic identity and their way of life, and they resented intervention by secular authorities. In its great majority, the first generation of immigrants wanted to live in peace and quiet and to make a living for their families. But today they no longer have much control over their offspring.
This is a common phenomenon all over the world: the radicalization of the second generation of immigrants. This generation has been superficially acculturated (speaking fluently the language of the host country) yet at the same time feels resentment and hostility more acutely. It is not necessarily the power of the fundamentalist message (the young are not the most pious believers when it comes to carrying out all the religious commandments) which inspires many of the younger radical activists or sympathizers. It is the feeling of deep resentment because, unlike immigrants from other parts of the world, they could not successfully compete in the educational field, nor quite often make it at the work place. Feelings of being excluded, sexual repression (a taboo subject in this context), and other factors led to free-floating aggression and crime directed against the authorities and their neighbors.
As a result, non-Muslims began to feel threatened in streets they could once walk without fear. They came to regard the new immigrants as antisocial elements who wanted to change the traditional character of their homeland and their way of life, and consequently tensions continued to increase. Pressure on European governments is growing from all sides, right and left, to stop immigration and to restore law and order.
This, in briefest outline, is the milieu in which Islamist terrorism and terrorist support groups in Western Europe developed. There is little reason to assume that this trend will fundamentally change in the near future. On the contrary, the more the young generation of immigrants asserts itself, the more violence occurs in the streets, and the more terrorist attacks take place, the greater the anti-Muslim resentment on the part of the rest of the population. The rapid demographic growth of the Muslim communities further strengthens the impression among the old residents that they are swamped and deprived of their rights in their own homeland, not even entitled to speak the truth about the prevailing situation (such as, for instance, to reveal the statistics of prison inmates with Muslim backgrounds). Hence the violent reaction in even the most liberal European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark. The fear of the veil turns into the fear that in the foreseeable future they too, having become a minority, will be compelled to conform to the commandments of another religion and culture.
True, the number of extremists is still very small. Among British Muslims, for instance, only 13 percent have expressed sympathy and support for terrorist attacks. But this still amounts to several hundred thousands, far more than needed for staging a terrorist campaign. The figure is suspect in any case because not all of those sharing radical views will openly express them to strangers, for reasons that hardly need be elaborated. Lastly, such a minority will not feel isolated in their own community as long as the majority remains silent -- which has been the case in France and most other European countries.
The prospects for terrorism based on a substantial Islamist periphery could hardly appear to be more promising, but there are certain circumstances that make the picture appear somewhat less threatening. The tensions are not equally strong in all countries. They are less palpably felt in Germany and Britain than in France and the Netherlands. Muslims in Germany are predominantly of Turkish origin and have (always with some exceptions) shown less inclination to take violent action than communities mainly composed of Arab and North African immigrants.
If acculturation and integration has been a failure in the short run, prospects are less hopeless in a longer perspective. The temptations of Western civilization are corrosive; young Muslims cannot be kept in a hermetically sealed ghetto (even though a strong attempt is made). They are disgusted and repelled by alcohol, loose morals, general decadence, and all the other wickedness of the society facing them, but they are at the same time fascinated and attracted by them. This is bound to affect their activist fervor, and they will be exposed not only to the negative aspects of the world surrounding them but also its values. Other religions had to face these temptations over the ages and by and large have been fighting a losing battle.
It is often forgotten that only a relatively short period passed from the primitive beginnings of Islam in the Arabian desert to the splendor and luxury (and learning and poetry) of Harun al Rashid's Baghdad -- from the austerity of the Koran to the not-so-austere Arabian Nights. The pulse of contemporary history is beating much faster, but is it beating fast enough? For it is a race against time. The advent of megaterrorism and the access to weapons of mass destruction is dangerous enough, but coupled with fanaticism it generates scenarios too unpleasant even to contemplate.
Enduring asymmetry
There can be no final victory in the fight against terrorism, for terrorism (rather than full-scale war) is the contemporary manifestation of conflict, and conflict will not disappear from earth as far as one can look ahead and human nature has not undergone a basic change. But it will be in our power to make life for terrorists and potential terrorists much more difficult.
Who ought to conduct the struggle against terrorism? Obviously, the military should play only a limited role in this context, and not only because it has not been trained for this purpose. The military may have to be called in for restoring order in countries that have failed to function and have become terrorist havens. It may have to intervene to prevent or stop massacres. It may be needed to deliver blows against terrorist concentrations. But these are not the most typical or frequent terrorist situations.
The key role in asymmetric warfare (a redundant new term for something that has been known for many centuries) should be played by intelligence and security services that may need a military arm.
As far as terrorism and also guerrilla warfare are concerned, there can be no general, overall doctrine in the way that Clausewitz or Jomini and others developed a regular warfare philosophy. An airplane or a battleship do not change their character wherever they operate, but the character of terrorism and guerrilla warfare depends largely on the motivations of those engaging in it and the conditions under which it takes place. Over the past centuries rules and laws of war have developed, and even earlier on there were certain rules that were by and large adhered to.
But terrorists cannot possibly accept these rules. It would be suicidal from their point of view if, to give but one example, they were to wear uniforms or other distinguishing marks. The essence of their operations rests on hiding their identities. On the other hand, they and their well-wishers insist that when captured, they should enjoy all the rights and benefits accorded to belligerents, that they be humanely treated, even paid some money and released after the end of hostilities. When regular soldiers do not stick to the rules of warfare, killing or maiming prisoners, carrying out massacres, taking hostages or committing crimes against the civilian population, they will be treated as war criminals.
If terrorists behaved according to these norms they would have little if any chance of success; the essence of terrorist operations now is indiscriminate attacks against civilians. But governments defending themselves against terrorism are widely expected not to behave in a similar way but to adhere to international law as it developed in conditions quite different from those prevailing today.
Terrorism does not accept laws and rules, whereas governments are bound by them; this, in briefest outline, is asymmetric warfare. If governments were to behave in a similar way, not feeling bound by existing rules and laws such as those against the killing of prisoners, this would be bitterly denounced. When the late Syrian President Hafez Assad faced an insurgency (and an attempted assassination) on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1980, his soldiers massacred some 20,000 inhabitants. This put an end to all ideas of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.
Such behavior on the part of democratic governments would be denounced as barbaric, a relapse into the practices of long-gone pre-civilized days. But if governments accept the principle of asymmetric warfare they will be severely, possibly fatally, handicapped. They cannot accept that terrorists are protected by the Geneva Conventions, which would mean, among other things, that they should be paid a salary while in captivity. Should they be regarded like the pirates of a bygone age as hostes generis humani, enemies of humankind, and be treated according to the principle of a un corsaire, un corsaire et demi -- "to catch a thief, it takes a thief," to quote one of Karl Marx's favorite sayings?
The problem will not arise if the terrorist group is small and not very dangerous. In this case normal legal procedures will be sufficient to deal with the problem (but even this is not quite certain once weapons of mass destruction become more readily accessible). Nor will the issue of shedding legal restraint arise if the issues at stake are of marginal importance, if in other words no core interests of the governments involved are concerned. If, on the other hand, the very survival of a society is at stake, it is most unlikely that governments will be impeded in their defense by laws and norms belonging to a bygone (and more humane) age.
It is often argued that such action is counterproductive because terrorism cannot be defeated by weapons alone, but is a struggle for the hearts and minds of people, a confrontation of ideas (or ideologies). If it were only that easy. It is not the terrorist ideas which cause the damage, but their weapons. Each case is different, but many terrorist groups do not have any specific idea or ideology, but a fervent belief, be it of a religious character or of a political religion. They fight for demands, territorial or otherwise, that seem to them self-evident, and they want to defeat their enemies. They are not open to dialogue or rational debate. When Mussolini was asked about his program by the socialists during the early days of fascism, he said that his program was to smash the skulls of the socialists.
Experience teaches that a little force is indeed counterproductive except in instances where small groups are involved. The use of massive, overwhelming force, on the other hand, is usually effective. But the use of massive force is almost always unpopular at home and abroad, and it will be applied only if core interests of the state are involved. To give but one example: The Russian government could deport the Chechens (or a significant portion), thus solving the problem according to the Stalinist pattern. If the Chechens were to threaten Moscow or St. Petersburg or the functioning of the Russian state or its fuel supply, there is but little doubt that such measures would be taken by the Russian or indeed any other government. But as long as the threat is only a marginal and peripheral one, the price to be paid for the application of massive force will be considered too high.
Two lessons follow: First, governments should launch an anti-terrorist campaign only if they are able and willing to apply massive force if need be. Second, terrorists have to ask themselves whether it is in their own best interest to cross the line between nuisance operations and attacks that threaten the vital interests of their enemies and will inevitably lead to massive counterblows.
Terrorists want total war -- not in the sense that they will (or could) mobilize unlimited resources; in this respect their possibilities are limited. But they want their attacks to be unfettered by laws, norms, regulations, and conventions. In the terrorist conception of warfare there is no room for the Red Cross.
Love or respect?
The why-do-they-hate-us question is raised in this context, along with the question of what could be done about it -- that is, the use of soft power in combating terrorism. Disturbing figures have been published about the low (and decreasing) popularity of America in foreign parts. Yet it is too often forgotten that international relations is not a popularity contest and that big and powerful countries have always been feared, resented, and envied; in short, they have not been loved. This has been the case since the days of the Assyrians and the Roman Empire. Neither the Ottoman nor the Spanish Empire, the Chinese, the Russian, nor the Japanese was ever popular. British sports were emulated in the colonies and French culture impressed the local elites in North Africa and Indochina, but this did not lead to political support, let alone identification with the rulers. Had there been public opinion polls in the days of Alexander the Great (let alone Ghengis Khan), the results, one suspects, would have been quite negative.
Big powers have been respected and feared but not loved for good reasons -- even if benevolent, tactful, and on their best behavior, they were threatening simply because of their very existence. Smaller nations could not feel comfortable, especially if they were located close to them. This was the case even in times when there was more than one big power (which allowed for the possibility of playing one against the other). It is all the more so at a time when only one superpower is left and the perceived threat looms even larger.
There is no known way for a big power to reduce this feeling on the part of other, smaller countries -- short of committing suicide or, at the very least, by somehow becoming weaker and less threatening. A moderate and intelligent policy on the part of the great power, concessions, and good deeds may mitigate somewhat the perceived threat, but it cannot remove it, because potentially the big power remains dangerous. It could always change its policy and become nasty, arrogant, and aggressive. These are the unfortunate facts of international life.
Soft power is important but has its limitations. Joseph S. Nye has described it as based on culture and political ideas, as influenced by the seductiveness of democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity. This is a powerful argument, and it is true that Washington has seldom used all its opportunities, the public diplomacy budget being about one-quarter of one percentage point of the defense budget. But the question is always to be asked: Who is to be influenced by our values and ideas? They could be quite effective in Europe, less so in a country like Russia, and not at all among the radical Islamists who abhor democracy (for all sovereignty rests with Allah rather than the people), who believe that human rights and tolerance are imperialist inventions, and who want to have nothing to do with deeper Western values which are not those of the Koran as they interpret it.
The work of the American radio stations during the Cold War ought to be recalled. They operated against much resistance at home but certainly had an impact on public opinion in Eastern Europe; according to evidence later received, even the Beatles had an influence on the younger generation in the Soviet Union. But, at present, radio and television has to be beamed to an audience 70 percent of which firmly believes that the operations of September 11 were staged by the Mossad. Such an audience will not be impressed by exposure to Western pop culture or a truthful, matter-of-fact coverage of the news. These societies may be vulnerable to covert manipulation of the kind conducted by the British government during World War ii: black (or at least gray) propaganda, rumors, half-truths, and outright lies. Societies steeped in belief in conspiracy theories will give credence to even the wildest rumors. But it is easy to imagine how an attempt to generate such propaganda would be received at home: It would be utterly rejected. Democratic countries are not able to engage in such practices except in a case of a major emergency, which at the present time has not yet arisen.
Big powers will never be loved, but in the terrorist context it is essential that they should be respected. As bin Laden's declarations prior to September 11 show, it was lack of respect for America that made him launch his attacks; he felt certain that the risk he was running was small, for the United States was a paper tiger, lacking both the will and the capability to strike back. After all, the Americans ran from Beirut in the 1980s and from Mogadishu in 1993 after only a few attacks, and there was every reason to believe that they would do so again.
Response in proportion to threat
Life could be made more difficult for terrorists by imposing more controls and restrictions wherever useful. But neither the rules of national nor those of international law are adequate to deal with terrorism. Many terrorists or suspected terrorists have been detained in America and in Europe, but only a handful have been put on trial and convicted, because inadmissible evidence was submitted or the authorities were reluctant to reveal the sources of their information -- and thus lose those sources. As a result, many who were almost certainly involved in terrorist operations were never arrested, while others were acquitted or released from detention.
As for those who are still detained, there have been loud protests against a violation of elementary human rights. Activists have argued that the real danger is not terrorism (the extent and the consequences of which have been greatly exaggerated) but the war against terrorism. Is it not true that American society could survive a disaster on the scale of September 11 even if it occurred once a year? Should free societies so easily give up their freedoms, which have been fought for and achieved over many centuries?
Some have foretold the coming of fascism in America (and to a lesser extent in Europe); others have predicted an authoritarian regime gradually introduced by governments cleverly exploiting the present situation for their own anti-democratic purposes. And it is quite likely indeed that among those detained there have been and are innocent people and that some of the controls introduced have interfered with human rights. However, there is much reason to think that to combat terrorism effectively, considerably more stringent measures will be needed than those presently in force.
But these measures can be adopted only if there is overwhelming public support, and it would be unwise even to try to push them through until the learning process about the danger of terrorism in an age of weapons of mass destruction has made further progress. Time will tell. If devastating attacks do not occur, stringent anti-terrorist measures will not be necessary. But if they do happen, the demand for effective countermeasures will be overwhelming. One could perhaps argue that further limitations of freedom are bound to be ineffective because terrorist groups are likely to be small or very small in the future and therefore likely to slip through safety nets. This is indeed a danger -- but the advice to abstain from safety measures is a counsel of despair unlikely to be accepted.
There are political reasons to use these restrictions with caution, because Muslim groups are bound to be under special scrutiny and every precaution should be taken not to antagonize moderate elements in this community. Muslim organizations in Britain have complained that a young Pakistani or Arab is 10 times more likely to be stopped and interrogated by the police than other youths. The same is true for France and other countries. But the police, after all, have some reasons to be particularly interested in these young people rather than those from other groups. It will not be easy to find a just and easy way out of the dilemma, and those who have to deal with it are not to be envied.
It could well be that, as far as the recent past is concerned, the danger of terrorism has been overstated. In the two world wars, more people were sometimes killed and more material damage caused in a few hours than through all the terrorist attacks in a recent year. True, our societies have since become more vulnerable and also far more sensitive regarding the loss of life, but the real issue at stake is not the attacks of the past few years but the coming dangers. Megaterrorism has not yet arrived; even 9-11 was a stage in between old-fashioned terrorism and the shape of things to come: the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The idea that such weapons should be used goes back at least 150 years. It was first enunciated by Karl Heinzen, a German radical -- later a resident of Louisville, Kentucky and Boston, Massachusetts -- soon after some Irish militants considered the use of poison gas in the British Parliament. But these were fantasies by a few eccentrics, too farfetched even for the science fiction writers of the day.
Today these have become real possibilities. For the first time in human history very small groups have, or will have, the potential to cause immense destruction. In a situation such as the present one there is always the danger of focusing entirely on the situation at hand -- radical nationalist or religious groups with whom political solutions may be found. There is a danger of concentrating on Islamism and forgetting that the problem is a far wider one. Political solutions to deal with their grievances may sometimes be possible, but frequently they are not. Today's terrorists, in their majority, are not diplomats eager to negotiate or to find compromises. And even if some of them would be satisfied with less than total victory and the annihilation of the enemy, there will always be a more radical group eager to continue the struggle.
This was always the case, but in the past it mattered little: If some Irish radicals wanted to continue the struggle against the British in 1921-22, even after the mainstream rebels had signed a treaty with the British government which gave them a free state, they were quickly defeated. Today even small groups matter a great deal precisely because of their enormous potential destructive power, their relative independence, the fact that they are not rational actors, and the possibility that their motivation may not be political in the first place.
Perhaps the scenario is too pessimistic; perhaps the weapons of mass destruction, for whatever reason, will never be used. But it would be the first time in human history that such arms, once invented, had not been used. In the last resort, the problem is, of course, the human condition.
In 1932, when Einstein attempted to induce Freud to support pacifism, Freud replied that there was no likelihood of suppressing humanity's aggressive tendencies. If there was any reason for hope, it was that people would turn away on rational grounds -- that war had become too destructive, that there was no scope anymore in war for acts of heroism according to the old ideals.
Freud was partly correct: War (at least between great powers) has become far less likely for rational reasons. But his argument does not apply to terrorism motivated mainly not by political or economic interests, based not just on aggression but also on fanaticism with an admixture of madness.
Terrorism, therefore, will continue -- not perhaps with the same intensity at all times, and some parts of the globe may be spared altogether. But there can be no victory, only an uphill struggle, at times successful, at others not.
Feedback? Email polrev@hoover.stanford.edu. Or send us a Letter to the Editor.
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>> RUSSIA

Russia's New--and
Frightening--"Ism"
John B. Dunlop
In recent years, a new ideology has gained adherents among Russian elites: "Eurasianism," the belief that Russia must reassert its dominance over the Eurasian landmass. An unsettling assessment of the work of Aleksandr Dugin, the leading Eurasianist theorist.
John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Few books published in Russia during the post-communist period have exerted such an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites as Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 neo-fascist treatise Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geo-political Future of Russia). The impact of this intended "Eurasianist" textbook on key Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and the Putin periods.
Five years before President George W. Bush announced his "axis of evil," Dugin had introduced three key neo-Eurasian axes: Moscow-Berlin, Moscow-Tokyo, and Moscow-Tehran. The basic principle underlying these three axes was said to be "a common enemy," by which he meant the United States.



The Moscow-Berlin Axis
According to Dugin, as a result of a grand alliance to be concluded between Russia and Germany, the two countries will divide up into spheres of influence all the territories lying between them, with no "sanitary cordon." Dugin proposes that Germany be offered political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe and that Kaliningrad be returned to Germany as part of this bargain. The "unstable" state of Finland, which "historically enters into the geopolitical space of Russia," is seen as an exception. Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania are also to be allocated to the Russian-Eurasian sphere of dominance, as is "the north of the Balkan peninsula from Serbia to Bulgaria," which is described as part of the "Russian South."
At one point in his textbook, Dugin confides that all arrangements with "the Eurasian bloc of the continental West," headed by Germany, will be merely temporary and provisional in nature. "The maximum task [for the future]," he underscores, "is the `Finlandization' of all of Europe."
As for the former Soviet Union republics situated within Europe, all--with the single exception of Estonia--are to be absorbed by Eurasia-Russia. Belarus, Dugin pronounces, "should be seen as part of Russia." In a similar vein, Moldova is assigned to what Dugin terms the "Russian South." On Ukraine, Dugin stipulates that, with the exception of its three westernmost regions--Volhynia, Galicia, and Transcarpathia--Ukraine, like Belarus, constitutes an integral part of Russia-Eurasia.



The Moscow-Tokyo Axis
The cornerstone of Dugin's approach to the Far East lies in the creation of a Moscow-Tokyo axis. In Russia's relations with Japan, he emphasizes that the principle of a common enemy "will prove decisive." Dugin recommends that the Kuriles be restored to Japan, just as Kaliningrad should be returned to Germany.
Dugin sees the People's Republic of China, like the United States, as an enormous danger to Russia-Eurasia. "China," he warns, "is the most dangerous geopolitical neighbor of Russia to the south" and verges on being an American factotum. At several points in his book, Dugin expresses a fear that China might "undertake a desperate thrust into the north--into Kazakhstan and Eastern Siberia."
Because of the threat that it represents to Russia's perceived vital geopolitical interests, China must, to the maximum degree possible, Dugin asserts, be dismantled. "Tibet-Xinjiang-Mongolia-Manchuria," he writes, "taken together comprise a security belt of Russia." "Without Xinjiang and Tibet," he concludes, "the geopolitical breakthrough of China into Kazakhstan and Siberia becomes impossible." As "geopolitical compensation" for the loss of its northern regions, China should be offered development "in a southern direction--Indochina (except Vietnam), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia."



The Moscow-Tehran Axis
The most ambitious and complex part of Dugin's program concerns the South, where the focal point is a Moscow-Tehran axis. "The idea of a continental Russia-Islamic alliance," he writes, "lies at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy. . . . This alliance is based on the traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilizations." As the result of a broad Grand Alliance to be concluded with Iran, Russia-Eurasia will eventually enjoy realizing a centuries-old Russian dream of reaching the "warm seas" of the Indian Ocean. Russia is to enjoy "geopolitical access--in the first place, naval bases--on the Iranian shores."
As the result of such an alliance, Dugin argues, Russia-Eurasia should be prepared to divide up the imperial spoils with "the Islamic Empire [of Iran] to the south." Which part of the South should come under Russia? "What is the Russian South?" Dugin asks at one point in his book. He answers that it includes "the Caucasus [all of it]," "the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian," "Central Asia [that is, all of the former Soviet republics]," plus Mongolia. Even these regions, he adds, should be seen "as zones of further geopolitical expansion to the south and not as `eternal borders of Russia.'" Turkey is seen as being almost as dangerous to Russia-Eurasia as are the United States and China. Turkish minorities must be provoked into rebellion, and there is a need, he stresses, to create "geopolitical shocks" within Turkey.
Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics represents a harsh and cynical repudiation of the architecture of international relations that was laboriously erected following the Second World War and the emergence of nuclear weapons. Dugin and his "system" want to return us, it seems, to the combustible interwar period and something akin to the rise of fascism in Europe, with the lurid imperial fantasies of Il Duce, the f?hrer, and other demagogues. Could, one wonders, a reversion to a destructive past be the "dividend" that Russia and the West are to receive for having with enormous effort put an end to the Cold War?
A considerably longer version of this essay appeared in Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, nos. 1/2 (2001).

Available from the Hoover Press is The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, edited by Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev. To order, call 800.935.2882.
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>> FOREIGN AID

How Foreign Aid Can Help the Poor--and Why It Doesn't
by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
July 28, 2004
People who think foreign aid ought to be used to help end poverty complain that it has too many strings attached. That strings are attached is true; the problem is not too many strings but rather that the wrong strings are attached to end poverty.
Most aid reflects a deal between leaders in rich, democratic countries and leaders in poor, despotic countries. Autocrats need money to keep core supporters--the military, key bureaucrats, close family members--in line, and democrats need policy concessions that help with reelection. Since few voters care much about foreign policy, these are marginal effects and so small amounts are spent on aid.
A natural opportunity exists for deals between democrats and autocrats. The latter don't need successful policies to stay in office, so they can agree to policies their citizens don't like in exchange for money to sustain them in power. Just consider Hosni Mubarak's agreement for Egypt to live in peace with Israel. In fact, autocrats like Mubarak must maintain their citizenry's dislike for policy concessions they grant. If the policy could be enforced without aid, there would be no reason to continue to pay. Democratic leaders cannot easily buy incumbency; they must deliver policies their constituents like. Thus, the main string attached to foreign aid deals is money for policy. That is a winning situation for leaders in donor and recipient countries and is pretty good for donor citizens too. But it is bad for ordinary citizens in the recipient country. Their welfare is sold for aid.
No wonder aid does little to raise incomes, improve health or education, or do the myriad other things well-intentioned people would like aid to do. How might these problems be corrected? There are four steps to changing aid into a means to help the poor:
Encourage individuals and groups to give aid through NGOs or directly to needy recipients, rather than by and to government. Shifting aid outside government reduces the danger of government deals that do not alleviate poverty. (Currently the United States contributes about $56 per American citizen in global aid. Total assistance could easily be maintained if wealthier families contributed twice that, deducting it from their taxes as charitable giving.)
Require aid recipients to open their books to independent, external audit.
Broadcast audit results in easily digested form.
When aid must be given to governments, give to those that have at least two organized, freely operating political parties or other political groups that articulate views different from those of their government, and be sure that these groups have an unencumbered right to compete against the incumbent leader for office.
Until poverty-alleviating aid is moved out of the government's domain and into the hands of caring citizens, and until government aid is constrained to go as directly as possible to those who need the money the most, aid will continue to serve as a means to achieve policy goals (a good thing), to prolong despotism (a bad thing), and to lead recipients to engage in policies that are against the interests of their own citizens (a very bad thing).