Wu Wei

Bail out scales

From the BBC here




I would like to know why the British bail out package is so big compared with British GDP, whereas the US one is much smaller relatively, ditto the Eurozone package, twice the size of the UK package whereas the Eurozone GDP must be 5 or 6 times the UK's.  OK London is  a big financial centre but even so.  I think we should be told.

EU Observers

Not much time to blog at the moment, a sudden rush of work.  So I am just quoting some extracts from EU Observer which seems to have a lot of coverage of Georgian issues at the moment.  So it's not surprising the Geneva talks failed.

[Comment] A mission for all of Georgia  7 October 2008
Joseph Stalin is probably turning in his grave as police from the European Union patrol the streets of his home town, Gori, Georgia. The European Union's decision on 15 September to deploy a EU monitoring mission to this part of the former Soviet Union is indeed a significant step. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, currently holding the rotating EU presidency, has to some extent been justified in heralding Russia's acquiescence to the mission as a clear victory for European diplomacy.

But the constraints the EU faces are evident as well. Sarkozy felt he needed President Dmitry Medvedev's approval to deploy in a country in Europe's new neighbourhood with its own NATO and EU membership aspirations. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that the EU will not be welcome in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, entities Russia now recognises as independent states. For now the observers will be sent to confirm Russia's withdrawal from Georgia, particularly the towns of Poti and Senaki, and villages between Gori and the South Ossetian administrative border. Russia has pledged to withdraw by 10 October.

A good start, but not nearly enough. Member states are going to have to push Russia much harder to guarantee that the mission will be able to work throughout Georgia, including in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

If the EU is unable to act in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and if Russia completes its final withdrawal from the rest of Georgia, the mission's futility will rapidly become obvious. EU observers will be overseeing a fairly mundane return to normal life in a handful of towns and villages in western and central Georgia: including the ongoing return of some 127,000 displaced persons, reconstruction of their homes, and handout of humanitarian aid. Monitors will be unarmed and unable to intervene if any violence occurs. The best the EU's personnel can do is take testimony of what happened during the actual conflict and begin determining what crimes occurred. But a month or two should suffice for such work. Thereafter, the EU's presence will be superfluous in those areas.

and then some extracts from

Saakashvili saved Georgia from coup, former Putin aide says 14 October
The Georgian president had no other option than to attack South Ossetia in order to save his country from a Russian coup, Andrei Illarionov, former advisor to Vladimir Putin has said in an interview with EUobserver on the margins of the "European Resource Bank" conference which took place in Tbilisi last weekend (9-12 October).

.......

The unilateral recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by the Russian authorities seems to be a "plan B" that Moscow is not genuinely happy with, Mr Illarionov says.

"It appears that plan A was to disorganize the Geogian government and society with some kind of civil war, coup d'etat or revolution, with the participation of Ossetians and Georgians within Georgia to change the regime."

"But since Georgian troops went into Tskhinvali and were able for a number of days to keep the Russian army from moving into Georgia, it was enough time to relocate the rest of the army from the West of the country to defend Tbilisi, to attract world-wide attention, to 'wake up' the public and politicians around the world and to mobilise international support."

"After a few days it became evident that plan A, to organize a revolution or civil war failed. The Russian authorities were forced to move to plan B. But it was a big frustration for the Russian authorities. When you hear bad words used by the Russian officials for Mr Saakashvili, it is just expression of their deep frustration that Mr Saakashvili was able to destroy their well-prepared plan A."

"Plan B was that Russia is trying to defend the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This was made public only a few days after the war and ultimately they have chosen to pretend that they are in favour of their independence. But it is in deep contradiction with the position the Russian authorities have kept for so long, on non-recognition of Chechnya, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Transdnistria."

"The last thing that Russia needs is these [Georgian] breakaway regions. It's a big problem for the Russian government. It's a serious financial drain, they're not quite sustainable and there's a big criminal problem as well ... All of a sudden you have tens of thousands armed people who can easily enter Russian territory. It's an incredible headache."

Vandalised EU flag tells story of Georgia conflict  15 October
As EU leaders in Brussels meet to debate Russia relations and diplomats in Geneva discuss Georgian security, one Polish aid worker aims to remind politicians of the stark realities of the conflict via a vandalised flag.
............
"The Russians attacked the university in Gori, which was shelled with high-calibre ordnance," he said. "When we entered we saw fires, books scattered everywhere. Then we noticed how the Russian soldiers had attacked the university flag and the EU flag, which was full of holes from bullets and bayonets. This symbol of the EU countries and of Georgian aspirations was an object of direct physical hatred."

The medical worker picked up the flag and aims to pass it on to European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering in the coming days, to show the war was not just a scrap over bits of Georgian land, but a clash between two bordering ideologies and "empires" - the EU and Russia.

"The parliament should keep this as a sort of museum piece," Mr Wlaszczyk said. "It shows, among certain parts of Russian society, the Russian attitude toward the EU. EU countries should realise that this is being seen as a conflict between two empires."

Based on first-hand witness accounts from Georgian refugees and the wounds of patients examined at his hospital, the aid worker accused Russian forces of planting booby traps in Georgian homes as they retreated, some of which were concealed in children's toys.

But his most vivid memory is the aftermath of a Russian air strike on a kindergarten in Gori, which caused the roof to collapse.



Technorati Tags: Georgia, Russia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia

Another crime of Stalin

I'd never heard of this one either.

My Simferopol home yesterday noted that the Crimean Tatars' deportation by Stalin in 1944 for supposed German sympathies was not the only disaster to befall them.  Some Tatars were simply left behind on the Arbatskaya Strilka and drowned. 

She shows a map of a narrow strip of sand pretty much like the Curonian spit in Neringa, but maybe narrower, looking at her photos.



Now mass drownings have to be organised by someone, so calling it drowning is not very accurate.  Murder is actually what it is. Genocide possibly, if the numbers are high enough.  (Er, how high do they have to be? 7000 in Srebrenica is the precedent?) 

What happened to the rest is not very pretty according to Wikipedia:

All Crimean Tatars were deported en masse, in a form of collective punishment, on 18 May 1944 as special settlers to the Uzbek SSR and other distant parts of the Soviet Union. The decree "On Crimean Tatars" describes the resettlement as a very humane procedure. The reality described by the victims in their memoirs was different. 46.3% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. This event is called Sürgün in the Crimean Tatar language. Many of them were re-located to toil as indentured workers in the Soviet GULAG system.

Perhaps as well not many people live in Neringa, and the Germans had already fled, otherwise Stalin might have tried the same solution on the coast of Lithuania in 1945.

However, there are still some Tatars left, again according to Wikipedia

Today, more than 250,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea and about 150,000 remain in exile in Central Asia, mainly in Uzbekistan. There are 5,000,000 people of Crimean Tatar origin living in Turkey, descendants of those who emigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Dobruja region of Romania and Bulgaria, there are more than 27,000 Crimean Tatars: 24,000 on the Romanian side, and 3,000 on the Bulgarian side.

I was working in Kyiv in 1994, when the Crimean Tatars came back to the Crimea.  Our Deputy Minister (a rather humane character with good intentions) frequently had to go to try to solve the housing crisis their return caused.  Whether it is solved now, I am not sure.

Defenders of freedom

Is there only me who has noticed that the countries in the FT survey here, which don't want to go to war with Russia, in order to defend the Baltics,   have themselves a rather poor record themselves with defending freedom? 

Or do Germany, Italy and Spain have some other explanation? 

The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine

I'm just catching up on my two week backlog of the Economist which despite Georgia's lack of a postal system still manages to arrive.  It normally arrives 5-10 days late, but the ones due immediately after the war didn't make it at all, which was a blessing as I had already bought and read them on my travels.

Sometimes reading the news a week or so later is enough to make things that would normally be past their sell by date become live again. And so it was rather unexpectedly with this book review:  Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine by Marion Nestle. 

I'm not so desperate for reading matter that I would normally bother about a book telling me how in the spring of 2007 contaminated pet food killed thousands of cats and dogs in America.  Even though my cat would probably want me to read it.  It doesn't get a very good review, but they do say it deserves a wider readership.  It seemed to be yet another story about the failure of American Regulators in cahoots with the bosses of American pet-food companies, and lack of supervision in China.

I was having a laugh about Bee's summer job last year packing organic cat and dog food.

But then I read the word melamine and looked closer.

It seems the outbreak was caused by shipments of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate from China that had been adulterated with melamine and cyanuric acid, two cheap chemicals which are rich in nitrogen.  Now doesn't that begin to sound familiar?

According to the review, the book says:

Since the usual test for protein in animal feed just measures the level of nitrogen these chemicals can be added to far more expensive feed ingredients without anyone noticing.  Both chemicals can be tolerated in small doses but  are harmful in large doses, and they are even more dangerous when combined, producing crystals in the urine and causing potentially fatal kidney damage. 

Now isn't that beginning to sound very familiar?

The review continues:

the contaminants also found their way into the human food chain, "salvaged" pet food (left over from the production process) is fed to chicken and pigs and wheat gluten also goes into feed for fish and farm animals.

Personally I have had two mild kidney infections in the last year and put it down to old age, but now I'm beginning to wonder. Perhaps I'm safer in Georgia where food is normally imported from Turkey not China.

But how come the Chinese are still getting away with melamine substituting for protein in milk products, over 18 months later. Did no one tell the Chinese, or did they not care?  And what else has got melamine in now?

More experience with cyber attacks

Here's an interesting article in yesterday's newsletter from the Jamestown Foundation. (Actually I can't post the link because the Jamestown article hasn't been posted yet.  The site hasn't been updated since Wednesday which is unusual).

While I was thinking and blogging that sites in Tbilisi were down because of everybody trying to view them, it seems it was more sinister than that.

Apparently the following sites were attacked:

the websites of the President of Georgia, Georgian Parliament, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Bank of Georgia, the English-language on-line news dailies The Messenger and www.civil.ge, as well as the on-line version of the popular Rustavi 2 television channel.

In addition, the websites of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Bank of Georgia were defaced with the digitally reformatted image of President Saakashvili superimposed on a collage of photos of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler (The New York Times, August 12; International Herald Tribune, August 13; The Washington Post, August 14; The Independent, August 17).

What's interesting is who came to the rescue.  It seems a volunteer watchdog, the Shadowserver Foundation, is a group specializing in analyzing malicious activities on the Internet.  We shall leave aside who might be interested in funding such a body, or even why it has to be left to a volunteer organisation.

The websites of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and www.civil.ge were temporarily accommodated with Google’s permission on Blogspot domain, which is better protected against a sustained DDOS* attack (The New York Times, August 12; Transitions Online, http://blogs.tol.org, August 15). On August 9 the President’s website and the on-line version of the Rustavi 2 television channel were transferred to the new host, Tulip Systems, Inc., an Atlanta-based Internet hosting company owned by the Georgia native Nino Doijashvili.

Estonia, where the NATO Cyber Defense Center (see EDM, May 15) is located, began to host the website of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dispatched two information security specialists from its Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to assist the Georgian authorities (Wired/Danger Room, August 11; The Earth Times, www.earthtimes.org, August 11; IDG News Service, August 12; Rosbalt news agency, August 13).

According to a press statement released by Estonia’s State Center of Development of Information Systems, in addition to the website of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Estonia is now also hosting the websites of the National Bank of Georgia and the English-language on-line news portal www.civil.ge (www.lenta.ru, August 27; www.iToday.ru, August 27).

So it seems already there is a quick response mechanism in place for Russian cyber attacks.  It's not clear whether this hosting abroad is still going on or not.  If it is, it would explain why there is not much bandwidth available for ordinary Georgians at the moment, if all government traffic is using international connections instead of just domestic ones.  The office internet is very slow, and my home internet has faded out altogether although all the lights are on in the right places in the modem.  Occasionally I can piggyback on an unsecured wireless signal called "Default", but it tends to kick me off. Sorry, I wouldn't do it if my own connection was working.

The IT infrastructure in Georgia is already weak enough without that, as the article points out:

In terms of actual damage, the Russian cyber attack had a significant impact only on the timely dissemination of information from Georgia during the first five days of the conflict. Georgia’s relative backwardness with regard to the Internet availability--only 7 percent of the population has access to the Internet--turned out to be a blessing in disguise (Global Voices, www.globalvoicesonline.org, August 17).

According to the World Economic Forum, Georgia ranks 93rd among 122 nations in Internet use; and it holds 74th place out of 234 nations (behind Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, and el Salvador) if judged in terms of the number of Internet addresses (International Herald Tribune, August 13; Defense News, August 18).

If Georgia had been more dependent on the Internet, the Russian cyber attack might have produced more dire consequences, as Russian hacktivists could have disrupted the energy, transportation, communications, and banking networks. It should be recalled here that the Russian cyber attack on far more advanced Estonia nearly brought its government and banking sector to a standstill in 2007, when irate Russian hacktivists launched on-line campaign in retaliation for the relocation of the Soviet-era World War Two monument.

It seems that Russia was not trying to disrupt civilian life as it could have simply bombed the power lines from the main hydro power station, Enguri.  This installation, built in Soviet times, has its dam in Abkhazia and the control panel in Georgia proper.  Of course, the buffer zone now goes straight through the turbines.  So the Russians can simply take it over any time.  Cut that off, and you can bring Georgia back to the 90s, when there was no electricity, and certainly no internet.  Talking in our office, we agreed it was harder to live without internet than without electricity, though one depends on the other.  So we are making plans to buy a generator, since we keep having power cuts anyway. 

Coming back to the cyber war, one assumes that Russia has taken similar precautions to transfer its important websites to friendly websites in other countries, er like Nicaragua and Venezuela, or even to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, since no one will bother to cyber attack them.  What is the cyber equivalent of "beyond the Urals" like during the Second World War.

This seems like something Vilhelm Konnander should know about, based on his last post here.


Do we need to worry about cyber attacks from Iran and Osama bin Laden? Is that what he is up to plotting in the tribal areas?



*Distributed denial of service

The Economist.com debate on relations with Russia.

Hat tip to Vilhelm Konnander for pointing this out and apologies for the cut and paste from his blog.
You can find the Economist Debate Hall here.

The West must be bolder in its response to a newly assertive Russia."

This is the proposition made for the upcoming The Economist debate series, setting off on 9 September. The opposite argument holds that this position is made erroneous by Western misperceptions of Russia, based on renewed reminiscences of an increasingly distant Cold War era.

Speaking for the pro side is Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Representing the con argument is Dmitri V. Trenin, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Centre.

Thus, Slaughter initiates the debate by the following argument:

The West should be bolder in confronting a newly assertive Russia, but bolder in a way that understands and manipulates the realities of 21st-century politics rather than plunging us back into a 20th-century stalemate.

In his rebuttal, Trenin starts out opposing this statement accordingly:

Those who argue that the West should be bolder in its response to a newly assertive Russia are trying to use their memories of the past to deal with a very different present and a highly uncertain future.

The debate will span over the period 9-19 September with rebuttals on the 12th and closing arguments on the 17th. The winner will be announced on the 19th, and topics covered be open for discussion and comments until 26 September.

Registered users will be able to vote surreptitiously for either alternative during the ten day debate. Following the Oxonian tradition, "members of the House will be thus allowed to "cross the floor" by such vote if arguments are convincing enough to turn their opinion. Questions to the contrahents may be sent in via the Chairman, viz. moderator, who will act as arbiter in selecting those of relevance for further dissection in debate.

The Economist presents the following background for the debate:

Russia’s incursion into neighbouring Georgia has Western governments worried about renewed Russian assertiveness. The diplomatic frost between America and Russia remains at a level not seen since the cold war, leading to predictable results: Russian/NATO joint military exercises cancelled, private energy co-operation agreements withdrawn, foreign ministers returned home.

Is Russia’s intention to upset the current international order, or is it responding directly to the widening sphere of American influence in former Soviet countries (for example, the promise of eventual NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia)? Can the European Union speak with one voice and take the diplomatic lead? Or must America protect the world order by standing up to Russia to prove that any form of aggression comes at a cost? Finally, are we witnessing the dawn of a second cold war, in which the West should resist the lure of appeasement?

For myself, I certainly welcome a debate about knee-jerk cold war reactions and the new assertive Russia.  It rather depends on what you mean by bolder: bolder in the sense of stronger reactions rather than weaker, or bolder in the sense of more imaginative and/or creative to get out of the old stereotypes. The weakness of the opposing statement is it seems to imply that no reaction is necessary, which can't be true. Ignoring Russia cannot be the answer to a country looking for more recognition.
.
You can read Vilhelm's view here

Fake weaponry by order

English-Russia reports the following:
Russia exports a lot of armaments and military equipments to other countries. Some more countries would like to buy it too but their budgets can’t afford them to do this, so Russian engineers have created a full set of fake weaponry for some countries. If you are a military leader of some not-so-rich country you can be as cool as your more wealthy neighbors. It would be just like a real thing for the foreign satellites or spy-planes, just bring it to the place, inflate and you are done.

See them here.

Where are the American equivalents?

If you want the real thing go here.

Some news from Tbilisi

Technorati tags: Geogia, Tbilisi, Lithuania, sakotis

After one day back, Tbilisi looks remarkably normal. 

After a power spike, some equipment in our office got damaged but all spare parts were available so we are working normally.  Bankomats don't give dollars, the lari has risen against the dollar and euro for reasons that are beyond most of us. 

The supermarket across the road is continuing with its remont but our local restaurant is closed temporarily.  There are no problems with supply of food and petrol.

The only serious consequences are that many people have delayed their holiday till after the war, and several of our colleagues have decided to get married. 

I brought back a Sakotis (a biscuity sort of cake) from Vilnius which travelled well in its own business class seat, since the box wouldn't fit in the overhead locker.  It was handmade and definitely tasted better than the usual ones.

There are of course lots of rumours and speculations, some worse than others.  I will wait till I have more information before posting any of them here.  The TV is now completely without any Russian channels but BBC Prime has appeared (lucky Georgians?) free of charge.  I'm told that Russian websites are also blocked.  Saakashvili is still to be convinced of the need for media freedom. 

Here are some posters outside the UN building near our office.

Northern Cyprus: Similarities with Georgia?

An interesting comment from a blog about North Cyprus (spelling as in the original) picked up by Global Voices on Line under the heading Northern Cyprus: Similarities with Georgia? here:

If Russia does decide to recogonize Georgia's two seperatist regions, they'd be in a diplomatic situation similar to North Cyprus. Turkey is the only country to recongize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. And Turkey doesn't recongize Cyprus itself. So Russia may revoke their recongition of Georgia in favor of it's two problem areas. :/

Well it's true that North Cyprus is only recognised by Turkey, so Abkhazia and South Ossetia are already doing marginally better.

However, North Cyprus recently voted to rejoin South Cyprus and hence join the EU. As a result North Cyprus has a significant package of assistance from the EU.

Somehow I don't think Abkhazia and South Ossetia are going to be voting that way any time soon. And what sort of assistance will they get from Russia, apart from annexation? Is the standard of living significantly higher over the border in Russia? Is life safer, the press freer? Not after the recent gunning down of Magomed Yevloyev, the owner of an internet site critical of the Russian authorities in the volatile region of Ingushetia.