Monthly Archives: December 2009

Remembering Gus Dur

December 31, 2009 1:46 pm by Gideon Rachman

Abdurrahman Wahid has just died. I knew him a bit during the mid-1990s, when the Suharto regime was still well entrenched and “Gus Dur” – as he was known – was a focus for the hopes of democrats and liberals. His position as a key figure in the opposition to dictatorship was made easier by the fact that he was descended from a long line of Muslim leaders, with deep roots in Java. But Wahid was anything but a parochial or forbidding figure. On the contrary, he was culturally tolerant, funny, liberal, fluent in English and intellectually-sophisticated.

I once travelled with him into Central Java to watch him preside over a religious ceremony, in a village that claimed to have just manufactured the world’s largest Koran. On the way there, he told me a joke that marked him out as an unusual Muslim leader. “Have you noticed,” he said, “that when the Jews pray, they stand by a wall and whisper. The Christians kneel and speak very quietly. But we Muslims stand in a tower and shout through a megaphone. It makes you wonder who is closer to God.” At this, he roared with laughter.

Continue reading: “Remembering Gus Dur”

Posted in Islamism |

How long can the Iranian government last?

December 30, 2009 2:17 pm by Gideon Rachman

The new outbreak of protests and repression in Iran have got me looking back at what I wrote in June, at the time of the presidential election. My first column was called “Democracy can still win in Iran“. The second was “Check-List for an Iranian revolution“. I think both are still valid. In the second column, I argued three things essentially. First that Iran met many of the pre-conditions for a successful revolution. Second, that the government had crossed a line – and possibly doomed itself -  by killing demonstrators in the streets. And finally that the precedent of the Iranian revolution of 1979 suggested that events would take some time to play out because “it took more than a year of sustained unrest to topple the Shah.”

It’s that last point that would be worrying me, if I were part of the Iranian establishment. The pattern of 1978-79 in Iran was that unrest would die down for a while and then flare up again, gradually gathering unstoppable momentum, as the months passed. As the FT reports this morning, there are plenty of religious and national holidays coming up- not to mention funerals of demonstrators – that will give the opposition the scope to get people out on the streets again.

So how should the Iranian regime handle things? That is a pragmatic question, not a moral one. Morally obviously, President Ahmadi-Nejad and his backers should hold fresh and free presidential elections and accept the results. Assuming they are not going to do that and are, instead, intent on hanging onto power – what might work? I suspect they will try a new and even more ruthless crackdown. That is what regimes of this sort tend to do. It might work for a few months. But my guess is that, if the Iranian government resorts to new force and repression, it will fall by the end of 2010.

The next question, of course, is what kind of government might replace the current clerical regime?

Posted in Iran |

The grim theme that links the year’s main events

December 23, 2009 11:26 pm by Gideon Rachman

The oddest thing about 2009 was how normal it was. At the beginning of the year, the global economic crisis was still causing panic in prime ministers’ offices and presidential palaces across the world. Many politicians were looking anxiously back to the 1930s.

Those fears of a return to a world of soup kitchens and fascist marches turned out to be overdone. The German economy contracted by more than 5 per cent in the year to September. But in that month, the Germans still re-elected Angela Merkel – the very epitome of stolid, centrist good sense. The Japanese elections, a month earlier, were more dramatic – marking the end of the Liberal Democratic party’s almost uninterrupted hegemony over postwar politics. But it is still too early to tell whether Japan has really changed as a country.

For that reason, neither the Japanese nor the German elections make my annual list of the five most important events of the year. Instead, my top five for 2009 are as follows.


The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Obama, US foreign policy, US politics, World affairs |

The ideal late Christmas gift

December 23, 2009 3:00 pm by Gideon Rachman

By Gideon Rachman

I am back in the office – briefly – to write my first column for a couple of months. It actually won’t appear until December 29th (in a week’s time), but editors here seem eager to get away for Christmas. Funny that.

Lots of colleagues have asked me, have you finished your book? The answer to this is Yes, I finished on Monday – although I am beginning to realise that these things are never truly finished. I am meant to submit it to the publishers in the middle of January.

Now, onto more pressing matters. For those of you who are still stumped about Xmas presents, there may still just be time to order this on the internet. It is Gnome Chomsky, a garden gnome modelled on the famous left-wing linguist. I think it would make an ideal present for Reza, who occasionally comments on this blog.

Charming little fella, ideal for the garden

Charming little fella, ideal for the garden

Here, by the way, are my favourite posts of the year:

Military manners in Afghanistan March
Latvian prime ministers and bookshops July
How Gaddafi upstaged Obama September
Doom, tantrums and walkouts in Davos January
In Hebron market February

Happy New Year to you all, I will be back and posting in the New Year.

Posted in Foreign affairs |

China’s bubbling housing market: Private chat points to government action

December 23, 2009 10:47 am by Financial Times

By Geoff Dyer, China bureau chief

A couple of years before the US housing market really collapsed, the journalist Michael Kinsley came up with the idea of a Dinner Party Index to work out when the bubble was about to pop. The theory was that if your dinner guests are already bored by anecdotes about quick profits from flipping properties, then the game will soon be up.

In China, the clever money listens less to middle-class chatter and more to the private conversations of senior officials – the Communist Party Index, if you like. Which is why the following interview on Chinese central television with He Keng, a leading member of the National People’s Congress, has gone viral on the Chinese internet over the past week.

CCTV: “Tell me, can an official like you afford property in Beijing?”

He Keng: “No, I simply can’t. What about you?”

CCTV:”At my current salary level, I don’t think I can afford it either.”

HK: “Well, if a famous host on CCTV or even a vice minister-level official like me can’t afford a decent home, it must be a huge problem for most ordinary people.”

CCTV: “Are property prices realistic at the moment?”

HK: “There are two main problems in the market right now. First, there is bubble. Then there is speculation. It means that ordinary people cannot afford their own property.”

The index’s rule is simple: when the grumbling among senior cadres reaches boiling point, expect government measures to slow down the market. Which is exactly what is beginning to happen.

Posted in China |

Ukraine: Why the infighting matters

December 18, 2009 7:00 pm by Financial Times

By Stefan Wagstyl, eastern Europe editor

When Ukraine’s economy was booming it did not seem to matter so much that its political leaders were locked in perpetual strife. The deadlock between president Viktor Yushchenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, his glamorous prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, the main opposition leader, made headlines.

But investors and consumers alike made hay. In mid-2008 everything came to grinding halt. And now the in-fighting matters. Kiev cannot survive financially without International Monetary Fund support, but the country’s programme has been suspended since October largely because the leaders cannot agree on the necessary reforms.

The situation is so bad that key letters of intent from Kiev to the IMF have to be signed not by one person, or even two but by four – the president, the prime minister, the central bank governor and the finance minister. The difficulties of dealing with this deadlock have in the past year cost Ukraine dearly. It is to be hoped that whoever wins next month’s presidential election will prove more adept at building consensus than Mr Yushchenko.

Related reading:

Economic cloud FT
Kiev infighting sours presidential race FT

Posted in Foreign affairs |

Trade peace in our time: Armistice signed in banana war

December 17, 2009 1:21 pm by Alan Beattie

By Alan Beattie, world trade editor

Church bells are ringing all over Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. The banana wars originally date from the 1950s and have been fought out in the World Trade Organisation (and its predecessor) since 1993. But now, peace has broken out over the bloodied battlefield, and negotiators are putting down their Blackberries and embracing like brothers and sisters.

I can’t help feeling some form of commemorative service is in order for all of their comrades who laid down large parts of their careers in the conflict. The whole thing is a good example of the dangers of handing out preferential trade schemes, particularly to countries chosen on fairly arbitrary grounds.

In this case, the right to sell bananas into the EU at elevated prices started off as a kind of apology for European colonialism. But it was never much of an anti-poverty programme, since it benefited one set of not particularly poor emerging markets (Jamaica, St Lucia) against another (Ecuador, Costa Rica). And much of the benefit was captured by banana shippers such as Fyffes in any case. It didn’t help that two of the most vocal banana growers (Guadeloupe and Martinique) are actually French departements and hence part of the EU.

Arbitrariness, rent-seeking, colonial guilt and French agricultural lobbying: it’s all a recipe for a stagnant war of attrition. At least the World Trade Organisation was on hand to do some mediation. It took a while, but we got there.

“What did we learn?” says Gardner Chubb, the CIA boss, in Burn After Reading. “I guess we learned not to do it again”. Unfortunately, we’re doing it all over again. Bilateral and other partial trade deals continue to proliferate. Whatever else you can say about the battle of the banana, it is certainly not the trade war to end all trade wars.

Posted in Uncategorized |

China’s delicate balancing act in Copenhagen

December 16, 2009 12:22 pm by Financial Times

By Geoff Dyer, China bureau chief

Pew Research last week put out an opinion poll with the astonishing result that 44 per cent of Americans think that China is now the “world’s leading economic power”. I could go on at length why this is misguided, but suffice to say that the Americans who believe this have a GDP per capita more than ten times higher than the Chinese.

Yet the Pew poll provides an interesting backdrop to the big power politics going on at the Copenhagen climate change conference. A couple of days after it was released, the head of the US delegation Todd Stern arrived in Copenhagen and announced bluntly that no US public money for climate change would go to China. Under intense pressure to make stronger commitments to limit carbon emissions, Chinese officials have found themselves in effect having to argue against the impressions in the Pew poll. What about the tens of millions of Chinese people still living in poverty, they have been pointing out.

This is an argument that is only going to get more intense over the coming years. Countries such as China, India and Brazil are rightly claiming a much larger international role to reflect their growing economic clout. But they also face gigantic development challenges. Even if they had the political will, they do not have the means to take on too many of the new international responsibilities that the Obama administration and some others would like them to embrace.

In the case of China, Copenhagen has brought these growing pains to a head. Throughout the build-up to Copenhagen, Beijing has been trying to pull off a delicate balancing act. Even though it has become both the biggest emitter of carbon and a powerhouse in renewable energy, China has also been the leading voice in the G77 group of developing nations (which actually has more than 130 members) and Beijing has used its position in the G77 to resist demands for more action. The American public might have an overly-rosy view of China’s real economic strength, but it should come as no surprise that Washington wants to peel China away from the safety in numbers of the G77.

Thank you for your responses to this entry. This post is closed to further comments.

Posted in China |

Wow, no bow: Chinese heir apparent stands tall after Obama

December 15, 2009 1:26 pm by Demetri Sevastopulo

By Mure Dickie, Japan bureau chief

Barack Obama’s critics will no doubt see it as a metaphor. During his recent visit to Tokyo, the US president bowed so low to Japan’s Emperor Akihito that some people wondered if he had spotted a Y100 coin on the Imperial Palace’s immaculately swept porch.

In sharp contrast, Xi Jinping, Chinese vice president and Communist party heir apparent, yesterday merely granted his royal highness the merest of nods.

While Obama’s defenders told critics such as Rush Limbaugh that he was merely showing respect for local customs and – as a notably tall man – seeking to get down to the more diminutive emperor’s level. But when it comes to protocol, Xi – himself a man of impressive height – was closer to the orthodox light-dip-of-head and handshake combo recommended by experts.

Yet maybe Xi would have been better to borrow the Obama approach. Local coverage of the vice president’s visit to Japan has been dominated by controversy over the new Democratic party-led government’s decision to, er, bow to Beijing’s request for the imperial audience even though the Chinese had failed to ask for it the regulation month in advance.

The sense that Beijing was pushing for – and getting – special treatment will be seized on as ammunition by those in Japan and elsewhere who believe the new DPJ government is too keen to snuggle up to its rising neighbour, and by those that think that China is growing too willing to throw its weight around in the region.

Indeed, in a press conference at the Japan Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Monday, Tsai Ing-wen, the visiting leader of feisty Taiwan’s main opposition Democratic Progressive party, warned that Beijing’s insistence on the imperial encounter was just the latest example of its growing willingness to “flex muscles”.

Asian democracies should stand together to manage an increasingly powerful but still authoritarian regime, she said. “China has to learn to respect other people’s sovereignty (and) other people’s protocol and traditions.”

Posted in Asia, China, Foreign affairs, Japan, US foreign policy, World affairs |

Seeing double: aid, climate change and Copenhagen

December 15, 2009 12:06 pm by Alan Beattie

By Alan Beattie, world trade editor

Nothing to gladden the heart of a reporter* more than a good row about development aid. It’s got everything: political posturing about rich versus poor; blindingly complex arguments about “additionality”; dire warnings that everything will fall apart without it; George Soros punting some version of his Special Drawing Rights plan for the twentieth time. And so it came to pass with the Copenhagen summit.

At least one thing is different this time: the NGOs are being a lot less credulous about the “$xxxbn to be spent on YYYY” spin. Even the One campaign, who in their previous incarnation of Data generally used to cheerlead whatever aid announcement the rich countries spun at them, have warned that this money has to be additional. All grist to the mill of fine campaigns like this one and this one.

But here’s the thing. No matter how much monitoring of the donors you do, it’s really hard to keep track of what is being spent where anyway. And any such earmarking is open to abuse.

An example: a developing country builds a solar-powered pump to irrigate farms growing vegetables, some of which are exported. Is that climate change aid? Or the agricultural aid we were told at the recent Rome summit had to be increased? Or is it aid for trade? And even if you could in principle classify it, what about all the developing countries whose public finance systems aren’t sophisticated enough to record it properly?

This ritual of announcing near-meaningless sums of money at each summit should be dropped. It’s patronising, misleading and silly. Developing countries use it as an excuse not to do anything; rich countries use it to pander to their domestic NGO constituencies. A market-based mechanism would be a much better way to proceed. I’m not holding my breath.

*Irony

Posted in Foreign affairs |
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The World

with Gideon Rachman

About this blog About Gideon Blog guide
Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs. Read more on the authors.

Gideon became chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times in July 2006. He joined the FT after a 15-year career at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Bangkok. He also edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections.

His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation
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