May 25, 2005

World Media Watch

by Gloria R. Lalumia

BuzzFlash Note: WMW provides BuzzFlash readers foreign views and perspectives that are not usually available from the media here in the U.S. The presentation of these articles from these international publications is not an endorsement of their viewpoints.

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WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR MAY 25, 2005

1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--US FIGHTS IRAQ FIRE WITH STREET FIGHTERS (With the Iraqi resistance showing no signs of wavering and extending its roots deep into the population, the US has realized that to counter this threat it must change its approach. Asia Times Online has learned that the US, instead of training up a regular professional Iraqi army, will create what in effect will be armed militias, acting under US central command, to take the militias of the resistance on at their own game. … According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments - former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government. All three segments have already been equipped with low- and medium-level weapons purchased from various countries, including Pakistan. Military analysts believe the US military in Iraq will use the Kurd and Shi'ite militias to quell the resistance in central and northern Iraq, while in the south the former Ba'athists and old-guard Iraqi soldiers will be used against anti-US Shi'ite groups. To date, the Iraqi army has only been supplied with small arms - air and armored forces are still in the hands of the US Army - and there is no indication that the US will hand over any of this, or high-tech equipment, to the Iraqis. Iraq's future now seems to be in the hands of militias, under the command of the US on the one side and militias under the command of the resistance on the other; reminiscent of wartime Lebanon and Vietnam.)

2//The Globe and Mail, Canada--THE GREAT CASPIAN SEA ADVENTURE (Tomorrow morning, amid expected fanfare at BP PLC's gleaming Sangachal terminal on Azerbaijan's Caspian Sea coast, crude oil will finally start to flow into one of the most significant and expensive pipelines ever built. It's a day that, once upon a time, was supposed to forever alter global oil markets, making prices fall at the gas station near you and finally lessening the West's reliance on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But after 10 years of hype, the Caspian oil balloon has burst. When the first crude begins its winding 1,760-kilometre path through mountain passes and around conflict zones on its way to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, few will be expecting it to have much of an impact on oil prices. Instead, the question that will be asked is: How much more oil is there, really? And how did so many get so badly snookered? … But just as the crude is finally starting to creep westward, it's becoming clear that there's much, much less oil in the region than had been originally trumpeted. Instead of the 200 billion barrels predicted in 1995, most estimates now put the figure at somewhere between 17 and 32 billion, most of it on the other side of the Caspian from Azerbaijan, in the waters off Kazakhstan.)

3//RAI Novosti (Russian News and Information Agency), Russia--KAZAKH PRESIDENT SPEAKS OUT AGAINST THIRD COUNTRIES’ INTERFERENCE IN CASPIAN STATUS DEFINITION (Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has spoken out against third countries' interference in defining the status of the Caspian Sea. "I believe, it is up to the five Caspian states to resolve the problem, without third countries interfering. The question is about our interests, and the sea must unite us, become the sea of friendship, cooperation and commerce," Nazarbayev told a press conference in Baku, which was also attended by Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev. … President Aliyev said in his turn that the "agreements that had been reached between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia and Russia and Azerbaijan could lay the groundwork for a multilateral treaty between all the Caspian states. The three countries have absolutely finished talks, and signed agreements, which delimit national sectors," the Azerbaijani president said. At the same time, the president stressed that although the status of the Caspian Sea had not been completely defined, "this fact did not prevent foreign investors from working in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea.")

4//The Independent, UK--GERMANY’S ‘IRON LADY’ TO CHALLENGE SCHRODER (She has been compared to Margaret Thatcher and now Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative leader, is poised to follow the "Iron Lady" by becoming the first woman to run for Chancellor in elections this autumn. … Opinion polls suggested that her party was poised to seize power from Mr Schröder's ailing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in the election. A survey for German television gave the Christian Democrats 46 per cent, compared with 29 per cent for the SPD. Mr Schröder's failure to tackle Germany's deepening unemployment problem, with five million out of work, despite unpopular reforms designed to kick-start the economy, was cited as the main reason. … Despite Mr Schröder's troubles, some commentators doubted Mrs Merkel would be prepared for a snap election. "Mrs Merkel's programme has hardly been prepared," said Franz Walter, a political analyst at Göttingen University. "Half of the people who are likely to vote for her don't want radical market reforms at all. They just want stability. The remainder do want substantial deregulation. The differences are so great that the party is certain to run into big problems.")

5//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy--EU TO INCREASE AID (European Union development ministers agreed Tuesday to raise the level of the bloc's aid spending by 20 billion euros (25.3 billion dollars) by 2010. In a landmark decision, European Union (EU) foreign and development ministers meeting Tuesday (May 24) approved proposals by the European Commission, the EU executive, on how the bloc can meet a pledge of 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) in official development aid (ODA) by 2015. … Both goals are designed to revive the momentum towards achieving a United Nations target of spending 0.7 percent of national wealth on development by 2015, and are a part of a bid to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the same year. Only four EU states -- Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg -- have so far fulfilled a promise made in 1970 by the world's rich countries to reach the 0.7 percent figure. … Michel added that the deal "positions the European Union as the veritable global leader in development policy ahead of the high level meeting in New York" and would pressure other rich donors such as Japan and the United States, who currently lag behind the EU's more generous member states, to do more.)

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1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong May 25, 2005
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE25Ak01.html

US FIGHTS IRAQ FIRE WITH STREET FIGHTERS
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - With the Iraqi resistance showing no signs of wavering and extending its roots deep into the population, the US has realized that to counter this threat it must change its approach.

Asia Times Online has learned that the US, instead of training up a regular professional Iraqi army, will create what in effect will be armed militias, acting under US central command, to take the militias of the resistance on at their own game.

(SNIP)

Recent meetings of the so-called Higher Committee for National Forces (a grouping of Iraqi resistance bodies) and the 16th Arab National Congress held in Algiers played a pivotal role in building consensus among various Iraqi communist, Islamic, Ba'athist and nationalist groups on several issues, such as the right of Iraqis to defend themselves against foreign aggression and imperialism, and the right of Iraq to demand a political process untainted by occupation and which reflects the uninhibited will of the Iraqi people for a pluralistic and democratic Iraq.

The groups also condemned the continued occupation of Iraq and the establishment of any permanent US bases in the country, the privatization of the Iraqi economy and foreign corporations' unrestricted access to Iraq's resources.

On this common ground, the central command of the resistance reorganized its activities, a key to which was merging mohallah-level (street-level) Islamic groups scattered in their hundreds across Iraq to work toward a common goal - defeating the occupation. In turn, these militias would co-opt common folk into their struggle, so that, literally, the streets would be alive with resistance.

Aware of this development, the US has accepted that no conventional military force can cope with such a resistance, and therefore similar mohallah-level combat forces are needed.

According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments - former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government.

All three segments have already been equipped with low- and medium-level weapons purchased from various countries, including Pakistan. Military analysts believe the US military in Iraq will use the Kurd and Shi'ite militias to quell the resistance in central and northern Iraq, while in the south the former Ba'athists and old-guard Iraqi soldiers will be used against anti-US Shi'ite groups.

To date, the Iraqi army has only been supplied with small arms - air and armored forces are still in the hands of the US Army - and there is no indication that the US will hand over any of this, or high-tech equipment, to the Iraqis.

Iraq's future now seems to be in the hands of militias, under the command of the US on the one side and militias under the command of the resistance on the other; reminiscent of wartime Lebanon and Vietnam.

2//The Globe and Mail, Canada Tuesday, May 24, 2005
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews...

THE GREAT CASPIAN SEA ADVENTURE

One of the biggest pipelines ever is set to turn on the taps in Azerbaijan ... After years of hype, the question is: How much oil is there, really?

By Mark MacKinnon

BAKU -- Tomorrow morning, amid expected fanfare at BP PLC's gleaming Sangachal terminal on Azerbaijan's Caspian Sea coast, crude oil will finally start to flow into one of the most significant and expensive pipelines ever built. It's a day that, once upon a time, was supposed to forever alter global oil markets, making prices fall at the gas station near you and finally lessening the West's reliance on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

But after 10 years of hype, the Caspian oil balloon has burst. When the first crude begins its winding 1,760-kilometre path through mountain passes and around conflict zones on its way to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, few will be expecting it to have much of an impact on oil prices. Instead, the question that will be asked is: How much more oil is there, really? And how did so many get so badly snookered?

The $3.6-billion (U.S.) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, or BTC, pipeline, was born of the excited chatter that surrounded the Caspian in the early 1990s, when there was a mad stampede to the region, which had previously been sealed behind the walls of the Soviet Union.

Big oil firms spoke fantastically of a "new Middle East" without the tormented politics of that region. Tiny Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic in a very strategic position, was to become the next Kuwait.

Diversifying has become the buzzword of a Western world hooked on Middle Eastern oil after Sept. 11, 2001, when the perils of counting on the volatile Persian Gulf for supply were made all too clear. Since then, oil companies have scoured every corner of the planet, looking for the big find that could cut down reliance on OPEC.

Back in the 1990s, the U.S. State Department was the lead cheerleader behind the boom, telling analysts and oilmen that there were up to 200 billion barrels of crude under the choppy black waters of the Caspian Sea, a figure comparable only to the 262 billion barrels believed to sit beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia. No less a figure than Dick Cheney, then the plugged-in chief executive officer of oil services giant Halliburton Co., got caught up in the excitement. "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," he said in 1998.

At Washington's urging, the BTC was born along its incredibly complex route through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to make sure the oil got to Western markets without dallying in Iran or Russia (the route via Iran would have been far shorter and cheaper). The end terminal, at Ceyhan, sits not coincidentally near the U.S. air force base at Incirlik.

Before the rush, Azerbaijan, home to a mainly Muslim population of 7.6 million at the southeastern end of the Caucasus mountain range, was a forgotten and crumbling backwater at war with its neighbour, Armenia, over the disputed province of Nagorno-Karabakh. Today, an uneasy peace holds on that border, and the money that followed the oil to Azerbaijan is visible on the skyline of its capital city, Baku, where Western-style apartment buildings and glitzy hotels have sprung up to surround its stone-walled old city centre.

But just as the crude is finally starting to creep westward, it's becoming clear that there's much, much less oil in the region than had been originally trumpeted. Instead of the 200 billion barrels predicted in 1995, most estimates now put the figure at somewhere between 17 and 32 billion, most of it on the other side of the Caspian from Azerbaijan, in the waters off Kazakhstan.

BTC will still bring a desperately awaited one million barrels a day to market once it hits full capacity in an estimated four years' time, but -- in providing perhaps 3 per cent of global supply -- it's going to do nothing to change the West's reliance on the House of Saud.

(MORE)

3//RAI Novosti (Russian News and Information Agency), Russia May 24, 2005 21:53
http://en.rian.ru/world/20050524/40410208.html

KAZAKH PRESIDENT SPEAKS OUT AGAINST THIRD COUNTRIES’ INTERFERENCE IN CASPIAN STATUS DEFINITION

BAKU, May 24 (RIA Novosti, Gerai Dadashev) - Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has spoken out against third countries' interference in defining the status of the Caspian Sea.

"I believe, it is up to the five Caspian states to resolve the problem, without third countries interfering. The question is about our interests, and the sea must unite us, become the sea of friendship, cooperation and commerce," Nazarbayev told a press conference in Baku, which was also attended by Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev.

"After all, the interests of the Caspian states must prevail, and we should promote them," the Kazakh president added.

Nazarbayev said that Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan shared opinions on the median line, coastal waters and "open, demilitarized sea."

"Iran's position is a little different, and our negotiators are working hard to reach consensus," Nazarbayev said.

According to him, a regular meeting of Caspian leaders is to be held in Tehran, and the date will be fixed after the president of Iran is elected.

President Aliyev said in his turn that the "agreements that had been reached between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia and Russia and Azerbaijan could lay the groundwork for a multilateral treaty between all the Caspian states."

"The three countries have absolutely finished talks, and signed agreements, which delimit national sectors," the Azerbaijani president said.

At the same time, the president stressed that although the status of the Caspian Sea had not been completely defined, "this fact did not prevent foreign investors from working in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea."

(MORE)

4//The Independent, UK 24 May 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=640929

GERMANY’S ‘IRON LADY’ TO CHALLENGE SCHRODER

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

She has been compared to Margaret Thatcher and now Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative leader, is poised to follow the "Iron Lady" by becoming the first woman to run for Chancellor in elections this autumn.

Two conservative politicians, regarded as Mrs Merkel's main competitors, cleared the way for the 50-year-old east German after publicly endorsing her as the party's front-runner. The Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, took the high-risk decision to call a general election a year early after his ruling Social Democrats suffered devastating losses in the former stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia in a state election on Sunday.

(SNIP)

Mrs Merkel declined to acknowledge that she was in line for the post yesterday. "Our job is to take notice of the fears and worries of voters and I am optimistic that we will be in a better position to solve Germany's problems," she said.

Opinion polls suggested that her party was poised to seize power from Mr Schröder's ailing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in the election. A survey for German television gave the Christian Democrats 46 per cent, compared with 29 per cent for the SPD.

Mr Schröder's failure to tackle Germany's deepening unemployment problem, with five million out of work, despite unpopular reforms designed to kick-start the economy, was cited as the main reason.

The Chancellor's surprise decision to call an early election came as a political bombshell to the opposition conservatives and grassroots members of his own party. Mr Schröder proposed 1 July as the date for a vote of confidence yesterday. He will instruct his party to vote against him, paving the way for the President to dissolve parliament and call an election.

Several commentators speculated that Mr Schröder's gamble was aimed at presenting voters with a choice between himself and the untried and less charismatic figure of Mrs Merkel. Despite comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Merkel has earned the less flattering nickname of "Iron Girl."

As an east German and a Protestant, many conservatives regard her as being out of step with the party's largely Catholic, middle-class west German mainstream. A protégé of Germany's "unification" chancellor, Helmut Kohl, Mrs Merkel was catapulted to the position of conservative leader five years ago, at the height of a slush-fund scandal engulfing the party.

Her appointment was designed to show that the conservatives had made a clean break with a corrupt past. Yet despite being party leader, Mrs Merkel was forced out of the running to be candidate for Chancellor in the 2002 election when the job was given to Edmund Stoiber, the charismatic right-wing Bavarian prime minister.

Despite Mr Schröder's troubles, some commentators doubted Mrs Merkel would be prepared for a snap election. "Mrs Merkel's programme has hardly been prepared," said Franz Walter, a political analyst at Göttingen University.

"Half of the people who are likely to vote for her don't want radical market reforms at all. They just want stability. The remainder do want substantial deregulation. The differences are so great that the party is certain to run into big problems."

5//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy May 24, 2005
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28801

EU TO INCREASE AID

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, May 24 (IPS) - European Union development ministers agreed Tuesday to raise the level of the bloc's aid spending by 20 billion euros (25.3 billion dollars) by 2010.

In a landmark decision, European Union (EU) foreign and development ministers meeting Tuesday (May 24) approved proposals by the European Commission, the EU executive, on how the bloc can meet a pledge of 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) in official development aid (ODA) by 2015.

Under the plans drafted by Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, the EU's 15 older - and richer -- member states will make up the bulk of the effort to reach the objective with a commitment to spend at least 0.51 percent of GNI on aid by 2010 and at least 0.7 percent by 2015.

The bloc's 10 newest member states from mainly eastern Europe pledged they would strive to pay at least 0.17 percent by 2010 in order to reach a goal of 0.33 percent in 2015.

This would raise the joint average level of aid for all 25 EU member states from 0.33 percent of GNI to an average of 0.56 percent by 2010.

In real terms, such an increase in aid will mean 20 billion euros (25.3 billion dollars) more in aid for developing countries and will cost EU taxpayers in the 15 old member states only an additional 49 euros (61 dollars) a year.

Both goals are designed to revive the momentum towards achieving a United Nations target of spending 0.7 percent of national wealth on development by 2015, and are a part of a bid to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the same year. Only four EU states -- Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg -- have so far fulfilled a promise made in 1970 by the world's rich countries to reach the 0.7 percent figure.

Britain, France, Finland, Ireland, Belgium and Spain have fixed timetables to reach the 0.7 percent target before 2015, but other countries such as Italy and Austria are falling short of their longstanding commitments to fight poverty.

Belgium and Finland are committed to reaching the target by 2010, France and Spain by 2012, and Britain by 2013.

Announcing the decision Tuesday, Luxembourg development minister Jean-Louis Schiltz, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, said the decision marked the "biggest commitment" of aid since the MDGs were agreed in 2000.

"I consider this to be an essential development, an extremely important advance in international solidarity. Europe has shown today that international solidarity is not an empty phrase," he told media representatives.

Michel added that the deal "positions the European Union as the veritable global leader in development policy ahead of the high level meeting in New York" and would pressure other rich donors such as Japan and the United States, who currently lag behind the EU's more generous member states, to do more.

(MORE)