Monthly Archives: December 2009

Gideon Rachman 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. Read more

Posted in Islamism |

Gideon Rachman 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. Read more

Posted in Iran |

Gideon Rachman 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. Read more

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

Gideon Rachman 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. Read more

Posted in Foreign affairs |

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

December 23, 2009 10:47 am by Financial Times

Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times blogs on Chinese government measures to slow China’s housing market. Read more

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. Read more

Posted in Foreign affairs |

Alan Beattie Trade peace in our time: Armistice signed in banana war

December 17, 2009 1:21 pm by Alan Beattie

Alan Beattie’s blog post for the Financial Times looks at the outbreak of peace in the banana trade wars.  Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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

Alan Beattie 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. Read more

Posted in Foreign affairs |
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