Germany Revises Refugee Policy

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Germany’s love affair with the seemingly endless numbers of refugees from Syria and other nations entering the country seems to have reached its limits, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under mounting criticism for her asylum policies.

Opponents of Merkel’s decision last year to allow more than one million asylum seekers into the country have been vocal in demanding a less welcoming policy and they seem to be having their way.

The backlash gained momentum after the New Year’s Eve assaults against women in Cologne by men largely described as Arab or North African in appearance. Critics claim the government is now failing at its most basic tasks: protecting its citizens and upholding security and public order.

Some 40 per cent of Germans want Merkel to resign because of her handling of the crisis, according to one recently published poll.

Indeed, there is a very real chance her three-party coalition government, which includes the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria along with her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU), could unravel. 

So the German cabinet has taken steps toward tightening asylum rules, including a two-year ban on family reunifications. They will now exclude three North African countries – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia -- from their asylum list. Refugees from those countries can now be sent home. 

It will also become easier to deport migrants who commit crimes. As well, asylum seekers will have to provide small contributions from their monthly stipends to help cover the costs of integration courses.

All this comes against the backdrop of forthcoming elections in three German states, Baden-Wurttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt. 

Opinion polls currently suggest that an anti-immigrant, right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded three years ago, will enter all three state legislatures. In the past two years, the party has won seats in five other German states.

A political movement further to its right, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), formed in 2014, demands even more restrictive immigration rules, particularly against Muslims. It has been holding major demonstrations in various German cities; one rally in Dresden last October drew nearly 20,000 people.

Merkel’s description of them as having “prejudice, coldness, even hatred in their hearts” hasn’t had much effect.

Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor and a Social Democrat, has accused PEGIDA of having become “a reservoir of racist xenophobia” and the “street arm” of the National Democratic Party (NPD), which is widely seen as neo-Nazi. 

Nonetheless, he admitted that “there is certainly a growth of populism on the right which has to do with parties and the social elites too often believing that their debates are identical with those of normal people.”

Horst Seehofer, the CSU minister-president (premier) of the state of Bavaria, has been pressuring Berlin to tighten its liberal policies. (Many of the migrants enter Germany at the Bavarian border with Austria.) 

“If our asylum policy isn't corrected,” Seehofer has warned, then “the existence of the CDU and CSU” is threatened.

Markel was a loyal citizen of the Communist East German Democratic Republic right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Has she retained some of its “internationalist” ideology?

The Death of Two Dictators

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Francisco Guillermo Flores of El Salvador, a country of some seven million people, who was facing charges of diverting $15 million in contributions for earthquake victims to his personal and political party accounts, died on Jan. 30, at age 56.

Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, a Guatemalan brigadier general who presided over some of the bloodiest years of his country’s civil war before seizing power in a 1983 coup, died Feb. 1. He was 85.

Flores was a member of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the conservative party that has controlled the presidency of El Salvador for two decades, beginning in 1989. He took office in 1999 and was in power until 2004.

He had been under house arrest since November 2014, accused of embezzling donations from the Taiwanese government that were intended for earthquake survivors in 2001. Flores contended that El Salvador enjoyed “a privileged relationship” with Taiwan because it backed that country’s application for membership in the United Nations.

In December, a Salvadoran judge ordered Flores to stand trial on charges of pocketing $5 million personally and dispersing $10 million to his party’s coffers.

When he was inaugurated for a five-year term in 1999 at the age of 39, Flores was the youngest president in the Americas.

After he was elected, Flores paid homage to a founder of his party, Roberto d’Aubuisson, a National Guard officer accused of many right-wing murders, including the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, during the country’s vicious civil war, in which an unknown number of people “were disappeared” during the conflict, and more than 75,000 were killed.

His government was characterized by its close alignment with United States policies. He authorized the deployment of 3,000 Salvadoran troops to Iraq in support of U.S. forces in 2003. Flores was also responsible for the Salvadoran adoption of the United States dollar as its official currency.

Guatemala’s Mejia Victores was in a long line of military dictators. From 1960 to 1996, more than 200,000 civilians were killed during a civil war between government forces and leftist guerillas. More than 80 per cent of the victims were Mayans, who make up about half of Guatemala’s population of 16 million.

Almost half of the war’s human rights violations occurred in 1982, when General Efrain Rios Montt seized power and made Mejia Victores his defence minister. Seventeen months later, Mejia Victores ousted Ríos Montt. But political killings continued.

The government, under pressure from the United States and other nations, did move to reform the political system, and Mejia Victores announced elections for the framing of a new constitution and for the presidency.

But shortly before leaving office in 1986, he issued a decree granting amnesty to all those accused of political crimes and human rights violations committed during his and his predecessor’s rule. The law was repealed a decade later.

In 2011, Mejia Victores was prosecuted in Guatemala on charges of crimes against humanity for the killings of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans by soldiers under his command. He was ruled unfit to stand trial because of a stroke.

The two countries have recently moved along different political trajectories. Salvador Sanchez Cerén, a former guerrilla fighter, won the 2014 presidential election in El Salvador as the candidate of the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

But in Guatemala, James Ernesto Morales was elected president last year under the banner of the right-wing National Convergence Front (FCN-Nacion), a party with close ties to the military.

Jewish Students Face Problems at York University

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

On many campuses across the country, pro-Israel students face a well-financed juggernaut of anti-Israel groups whose sole focus is to demonize Israel.

Toronto’s York University, in particular, has not been a hospitable place for Jewish students for the past few years. Many feel that a climate of anti-Semitism, masquerading as “anti-Zionism,” pervades the university. Some students have feared for their physical safety at times.

Things took an even uglier turn this past January. A pro-Palestinian acrylic painting on display over one of the entrance foyers to the Student Centre since 2013, entitled “Palestinian Roots,” has drawn criticism.

It shows a person looking at a bulldozer close to a building while holding rocks, wearing what looks like a Palestinian flag with a map of Israel without its borders – in other words, a map lacking the “Green Line” that divides Israel from the West Bank.

 

At the bottom of the mural, the words “justice” and “peace” can be seen along with other text. The artist, Ahmad Al Abid, is a 2013 graduate of York.

Gayle McFadden, chair of the York University Student Centre, sees nothing wrong with this. She said the student’s piece was “an artist’s interpretation of what’s currently going on in Palestine.” 

She added the usual boilerplate: “Anti-Semitism is directly against people of the Jewish faith, and I think that is abysmal and horrible, but critics of the state of Israel are not that.” The work is “merely critical of the state of Israel and its continued occupation of Palestine.” 

McFadden of course thinks she knows better than the Jewish students do as to what is and isn’t “anti-Semitic!”

Paul Bronfman, the chair and CEO of William F. White International Inc., a provider of movie and theatrical production equipment, was less sanguine when he recently learned of the mural. 

His company has provided thousands of dollars of equipment and technical services, as well as access to seminars, student lectures, trade shows and open houses, to the university.

He contacted York University, but was told the student centre is its own legal entity. Administrators, he complained, “gave me a bunch of political rhetoric” and “nonsense.”

Bronfman told York University president Mamdouh Shoukri that the school would be “persona non grata” until the painting was removed. “It’s not artistry; it’s just pure hate,” he contended.

 “I’m finally putting my money where my mouth is. I’m withdrawing all of our student filmmaker support,” Bronfman declared. 

 “This poster is more than a mere piece of art -- it is propaganda, and a clear call to murder,” Avi Benlolo, president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, has stated, adding that anti-Semitic attitudes are already “rampant” at the university. 

Benlolo said he had heard of Jewish students who no longer wear overt displays of their faith, such as Star of David necklaces or kippas.

In 2013, the York Federation of Students officially endorsed the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign, a push to impose economic and academic sanction on Israel.

Even ordinary Jewish, events are routinely targeted by protesters. Last December, a Chanukah get-together sponsored by the Hillel Jewish student group at York was disrupted by supporters of Students Against Israeli Apartheid. It is, of course, a Jewish religious holiday more than 2,000 years old.

 “If a mural condoning violence against any other nation was hung on campus, it would rightfully be condemned. Only when it pertains to Jews do we see this disturbing double standard,” remarked Danielle Shachar, a fourth-year psychology student, describing York as “a breeding ground for violence, hate and discrimination against Israel and its student supporters.”

She indicated that it leaves her feeling unsafe, especially on a campus where there has been violence against Jewish students in the past.

Natalie Slavat, the president of the York Hillel, asserted that “while the intentions of the artist are ambiguous at best, the way in which this piece is perceived by many Jewish students like myself is anything but vague.” In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “stone-throwing means one thing: Violence.”

Is the painting ant-Semitic? This is a matter of conjecture, because technically it is only criticizing Israel. But this may have become a distinction without a difference, since so-called anti-Zionist attacks more and more morph into simple anti-Semitism. I’m inclined to agree with the Jewish students, who certainly see it as creating a chilly climate for them at York. Perhaps they should have the last word.

Are Trump, Sanders Channeling Roosevelts?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the two “outsiders” contesting, respectively, the Republican and Democratic nominations for the American presidency, each seem to be channeling a President Roosevelt – just different ones.

Trump is an economic nationalist who advocates a robust and nativist foreign policy – a platform very similar to that of President Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican in the White House from 1901 to1908.

Sanders wants to recreate the liberalism of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s “New Deal.”

The multimillionaire Trump comes out of the early 20^th century “titans of industry” tradition, while the socialist Sanders is the child of the 1960s New Left, which was itself an attempt to recreate earlier American revolutionary movements for economic, racial and social change. 

While at the University of Chicago, Sanders joined radical student organizations like the Young People’s Socialist League and the Congress of Racial Equality.

Both New York-born men are secular and neither makes much use of religious imagery. 

Trump battles socially conservative evangelical Christians like Ted Cruz and “establishment” figures like Jeb Bush. Sanders has single-handedly taken on the well-oiled Hillary Clinton political machine, with only “grass roots” financial backing. 

Trump, who has never held elected office, is no dyed-in-the-wool Republican. He espouses socially liberal positions at odds with many in his party – indeed, his views have been sneered at by Cruz as being “New York values.” 

Like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump portrays himself as a “man of action.” (TR was a soldier in the 1898 Spanish-American War and one of its most conspicuous heroes.) Fred Trump, Donald’s father, told his three sons to be “killers.”

Trump supports the capitalist system but, again like Roosevelt, sees it as being in need of reform, in order to “make America great again.” 

Theodore Roosevelt believed that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick” in the realm of international affairs and that its president should be willing to use force, clearly something Trump agrees with.

Trump accuses the country’s elites of selling out America’s economic interests on behalf of a vague notion of “globalization” – one that has devastated domestic industries and has cost millions of workers well-paying jobs.

A populist, Sanders wants to revitalize the left and advance equality in the country. He also wants to reduce the power of the financial plutocrats on Wall Street who now dominate the economy and “buy” politicians through contributing billions of dollars in campaign donations. 

Sanders is the only candidate who prioritizes campaign finance reform and appeals to those who feel the entire democratic system has broken down.

As well, Sanders advocates major reforms, including making public colleges and universities tuition-free, instituting universal health care, and transforming a criminal justice system that over-incarcerates people. 

On foreign policy, Sanders is a “dove.” He advocates abandoning policies that favor unilateral military action and pre-emptive war, ones that make the United States “the de facto policeman of the world.”

In effect, both men are independents. Teddy Roosevelt left office after 1908 but, displeased with his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, in 1912 he bolted to form the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party. (Roosevelt had once referred to himself as being “as strong as a bull moose.”) This split the Republican vote, resulting in victory for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. 

Trump, too, often seems a bull in a china shop, his loyalty to the Republican Party paper-thin. Might he, like Roosevelt, do the same if he loses the nomination?

As for Sanders, he was not even a member of the Democratic Party until last November. His political career in Vermont began with the Liberty Union Party, which grew out of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. 

Either of these candidates, if successful, may overturn the American political system as we know it.

Haiti's Dysfunctional Political System

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As President Michel Martelly of Haiti left office on Feb. 7, due to term limits, his people were worse off than before the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country.

The transition to a new chief executive has been anything but smooth. A presidential election held last Oct. 25 saw Jovenel Moise leading with 32.8 per cent of the vote, and Jude Célestin second, with 25.2 per cent. Other candidates took the rest.

With no one obtaining a majority, a second round of balloting was necessary.

But there were allegations that the first round was marred by rampant fraud favoring Moise. Célestin condemned the results as a “ridiculous farce” and refused to campaign further.

As thousands of Célestin’s supporters took to the streets, the run-off was cancelled.

Haitian leaders finally installed an interim president, Jocelerme Privert, on Feb. 14, to oversee new elections April 24.

Situated on the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti became the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere, established in 1804 as the result of a successful slave revolt against its French plantation overlords.

But its 10.6 million people remain the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, mired in poverty, poor education and health care. Nearly half are illiterate, and only one in four has access to proper sanitation.

The country remains unable to house the 60,000 people still stuck in camps in appalling conditions.

Inflation has risen by six percentage points since last April to 12 per cent and Haiti’s currency, the gourde, has lost a quarter of its value in the past year.

The United Nations Human Development Index, a composite statistic that measures life expectancy, education, and income in a nation, places Haiti in the “low” category, at 163rd of 188 countries.

Since 1986, when president-for-life Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled a revolt, Haiti has struggled repeatedly to hold credible elections.

In 1990 and again in 2000, a left-wing priest and reformer, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, won the presidential election. But he didn’t last long either time, forced out of office through violence.

Martelly, a singer known as “Sweet Mickey” before entering the political arena, has been accused of enriching himself while in office.

Cronyism, a chronic problem in post-Duvalier Haiti, reached new heights. One official at the Interior Ministry admitted that she was encouraged to add ten per cent to each contract to allow for graft.

Another employee of the Interior Ministry, with a salary of about fifteen hundred dollars a month, had six cars and seven bank accounts.

Given all of this, Haiti is effectively a ward of the international community. The army was disbanded in 1995 and a UN Stabilization Mission, today comprising some 5,000 troops and police, now keeps the peace.

Many normal governmental functions are handled by NGOs funded from abroad; they are the only organizations that perform properly. The private sector, for example, runs eighty per cent of Haiti’s schools.

Martelly complained that, due to the foreign presence in Haiti, he actually wielded little power. Though billions of dollars poured into the country after the earthquake, Haiti had little say in how they were spent.

Three Caribbean Women Leaders

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the past 20 years, three Anglophone Caribbean countries, former British colonies, have been governed by women. Two of the nations are island states, while the third, on the South American mainland, faces the sea.

One woman has African ancestry, another is of South Asian background, and the third was American-born and Jewish.

Portia Simpson-Miller is currently the prime minister of Jamaica and leader of its left-of-centre People’s National Party (PNP), which currently holds 42 of the 63 seats in the House of Representatives.

Simpson-Miller has called an election for Feb. 25. Her government has attracted more than $1.1 billion in foreign direct investment since 2012. In addition, the country has been enjoying a period of low inflation, though the high unemployment rate remains a worry.

She pointed to her government’s “painful economic adjustments, including taming the monstrous debt” she inherited from the previous Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration.

Simpson-Miller has also stated that she hopes to make Jamaica a republic, replacing the British monarch as head of state, as the country this August will celebrates 50 years of independence.

Simpson-Miller was first elected to parliament in 1976. She served as a cabinet member in various PNP governments, under Michael Manley and P.J. Patterson, between 1989 and 2006.

She became party leader, and prime minister, in March 2006 upon the Patterson’s retirement. However, she lost power to the rival JLP a year later, and served as leader of the opposition until winning the December 2011 election.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the People’s Partnership Party (PNP), an alliance of smaller groups led by United National Congress (UNC) which is supported by Indo-Trinidadians, won a landslide victory in May 2010 against the incumbent, largely Afro-Trinidadian, People’s National Movement (PNM).

The PNP won 29 seats against PNM Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s 12, making Kamla Persad-Bissessar Trinidad’s prime minister. She had defeated the UNC’s founder, and former prime minister, Basdeo Panday, for leadership of the UNC four months earlier.

For decades, both government and opposition politics were dominated by men who came to be viewed as insensitive and out of touch with the people. In the run-up to 2007 election, won by the PNM, Persad-Bissessar had been marginalized by the UNC “boys club,” even though she had served as minister of education and then attorney-general between 1999 and 2001 in Panday’s 1995-2001 government.

Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar established a Ministry of the People, “where groups of concerned citizens can take their grievances and be heard” rather than having to resort to “demonstrating on the streets.” Also, a new Ministry of Food Production was created to help struggling farmers.

Persad-Bissessar was voted out of office last September, as the PNM won 23 of the 41 seats in the House of Representatives under their new leader, Keith Rowley. She is currently leader of the opposition.

Janet Rosenberg Jagan, who died in 2009, was president of Guyana from December 1997 to August 1999. She was the wife of Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese politician who was premier of British Guiana from 1961 to 1964, prior to independence.

He would later serve as president from 1992 to 1997, and upon his death was succeeded by his wife.

But Janet Jagan was not simply a spouse inheriting her late husband’s position. She took part in labour activism along with her husband and was a co-founder of the Marxist-oriented People’s Progressive Party (PPP), serving as its general secretary from 1950 to 1970.

The other main party, the People’s National Congress (PNC) was dominated by Afro-Guyanese.

She was elected to the colonial House of Assembly in 1953, but she and Cheddi were jailed by the British authorities, who were concerned about their alleged Communist sympathies.

Janet Jagan was elected to Guyana’s parliament in 1973, eventually becoming its longest-serving member.

Cheddi Jagan became president of Guyana in 1992. Upon his death in March 1997, Janet became leader of the PPP and won the December 1997 presidential election in her own right. She resigned due to ill-health in August 1999.

Last May David Granger, an Afro-Guyanese running for the Alliance for Change, won the presidency, ending 23 years of rule by the PPP.

All three women have made significant impacts on their respective nations while in office.

What Happened to Arab Spring?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Five years after the Arab Spring raised so many hopes for a new dawn in the Middle East, Libya, Syria and Yemen have descended into chaos and civil war.

Syria has become the battleground for proxy wars involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and even Russia and the United States. President Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power while at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed and millions more have fled the country.

Pro-democracy protests had erupted in March 2011 in the southern city of Deraa after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall.

This triggered nationwide protests demanding Assad’s resignation. The government’s use of force to crush the dissent led to armed rebellion. Fighting had reached the capital, Damascus, and the city of Aleppo, by 2012.

The war acquired sectarian overtones, pitting the country’s Sunni Muslim majority against the president’s Shia Alawite sect.

Today, Sunni Islamic State fighters have taken control of huge swathes of territory across northern and eastern Syria, establishing a “capital” in Raqqa. Meanwhile, attempts by outside parties, including Moscow and Washington, to broker an end to the war have so far failed to stem the violence.

U.N.-hosted peace talks now underway in Geneva envision a ceasefire followed by an 18-month timetable for a political transition in Syria, including the drafting of a new constitution and elections.

But most opposition groups have refused to attend until their demands are met, including an end to Russian and Syrian bombardment of regions controlled by them.

Elsewhere, Libya and Yemen have imploded, their central states replaced in whole or part by warring militias, some backed by foreign powers, some flying the flags of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

The demise of Libya’s quixotic but ruthless dictator, Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011, left a political vacuum in the country that has been filled by rival militias, Islamist followers pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, and rival governments.

Two administrations have been competing for control of Libya since mid-2014: the internationally recognised government based in Tobruk in the east, and the unofficial Government of National Salvation based in the capital, Tripoli. Each has its own parliament and a host of militias fighting on its behalf.

The creation of a unity government, the culmination of a year-long process of UN-sponsored negotiations between representatives of the rival administrations, was announced on Dec. 17, but it has now fallen afoul of quarrels between the two camps.

The Islamic State’s followers have created their own base in Sirte, Gadhafi’s former home, and several other towns. They have carried out a number of strikes against the country’s oil infrastructure.

Yemen, too, goes from bad to worse. The nine-month war between Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who belong to the Zaidi Shia sect and are backed by Iran, and the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, supported by a Saudi-led military coalition that has been conducting an aerial campaign against the rebels since March, shows no signs of abating.

The conflict has left some 6,000 people dead in what was already the Arab world’s poorest state.

Hadi had assumed the presidency on Feb. 27, 2012, replacing the autocratic Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled the country since 1990 (and had previously served as president of North Yemen for 12 years). Saleh was forced out after months of massive nationwide protests.

Pledging to support efforts to rebuild the country reeling from months of violence, Hadi however soon found himself running a failed state that shows little sign of recovery.

The old order embodied by the secular dictators has been shattered. As the state system splinters in the Middle East, the instability in the region will be chronic.

The big winner in all of this has been Iran, which has taken advantage of the turmoil in the Arab world to strengthen its alliances with Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Eastern Europe Remains Fearful of Russia

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

With Vladimir Putin engaged in great power politics in former Soviet regions like Ukraine, nations on Russia’s borders, especially the Baltic states and Poland, have asked NATO for more military support.

The United States plans to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons and other equipment there.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s newly-elected Law and Justice Party government in Warsaw is far more assertive than its predecessors in its relations with Moscow.

When Law and Justice was in the opposition for eight years, it agitated repeatedly for fresh investigations into the 2010 crash of a plane in Smolensk, Russia, that killed 96 people, including Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, then the country’s president, as well as top Polish politicians, generals, social activists and artists.

Some party officials, including a few with top positions in the new government, suggested that the crash might have been orchestrated and covered up by the Russians.

The new foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, has called on Russia to cooperate in a fuller investigation of the crash.

Estonia, a former Soviet republic, has had a tense relationship with its Russian population, who make up a quarter of its people. Fearing that Putin may use them to destabilize the country, the Estonians recently held their largest-ever war games and are one of the few countries to meet its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence.

In Russian-populated cities such as Narva, near the border with Russia, more than 80 per cent of the population is ethnically Russian, and they rely largely on news from Russian state media. So the Estonians have also launched a campaign to bolster what they call the country’s “psychological defences” against Russian misinformation.

Neighbouring Latvia, too, worries about threats from Russia. Its easternmost region, Latgale, has a large population of ethnic Russians, especially in Daugavpils, its largest city.

Russian nationalists see this region -- about a quarter of the country-- as fertile ground for their machinations to divide and weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.

Janis Sarts, the state secretary for Latvia’s Defense Ministry, noted that regular rotations of NATO troops and aircraft through Latvia had sent a firm message to Moscow that “the risks would be tremendous” if it tried to foment discontent.

Last spring Latvian soldiers and the local police held a joint exercise in Rezekne, the Latgale region’s historical and cultural capital, in a show of defiance.

In a new development, troops from Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine will form a new brigade, scheduled to be operational in 2017. It would comprise 4,000 troops and would work to strengthen defence and act as a possible deterrent force in the region.

“The multinational brigade is a sign, symbol and very clear signal to anyone who would want to undermine peace in Europe,” said Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz.

The brigade will be headquartered in Lublin, Poland. Lithuania and Poland are both members of NATO and the European Union, while Ukraine is not, though the Kyiv government has expressed its desire to join both organizations.

NATO is scheduled to meet in Warsaw in July for a summit and Polish officials are expected to again ask for the permanent presence of NATO troops on their territory.

Things Worsen in Parts of the Globe

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

“Why is everybody rushing towards religious obscurantism?” the eminent British political theorist and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin asked in 1986, as he entered his twilight years. 

“Colonels, terrorists, tyrants, ayatollahs, moral majorities” were, he wrote, creating a “growing darkness” in the world.

Three decades later, things are even worse. During the Cold War, a certain civility and rationality was practiced, even between the western and the Communist worlds. As the movie “Bridge of Spies” has shown us, there was even the possibility of enemy spies being exchanged.

One couldn’t imagine this happening today between the United States and the Islamic State. Captured prisoners are more likely to be beheaded, without even the pretense of show trials.

Entire areas of the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, have become zones of conflict between rival religious ideologues, rebels, terrorists, criminal gangs, and the remnants of states. Some countries have become violent political vacuums – think of the Congo, Libya or Somalia, where there is virtually no effective political system.

In most of these “shatter zones,” as Robert Kaplan called them in his book The Revenge of Geography, the states are the 19^th and 20^th artificial creations of European colonial powers. 

In the Middle East, this would be true of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iraq, for instance. In Africa, virtually all of its post-colonial states have little relation to ethnic, geographic, linguistic, or religious boundaries already in place prior to the partition of the continent in the late 19^th century. 

Indeed, they often include historically antagonistic peoples, while other groups are divided between countries that are just the legacy of empire-building by Europeans. 

Africa’s arbitrary boundaries divide almost 180 different ethnicities into two or more countries. Four in ten Africans belong to a group that has kin across borders. The Malinke in west Africa are among the most partitioned of peoples, split among six different states. 

Ethnic fragmentation across sub-Saharan Africa is so pervasive that on average just 28 per cent of the total population of a given country belongs to the majority group.

Canadians extol “diversity,” by which they mean the integration of immigrants, but in multinational states where it has always existed, it can be, at best, a mixed blessing.

In such polities, democracy can be a challenge, since parties are usually simply the vehicles of various ethnic groups, and government is little more than the victory of the larger against the less numerous.

Precisely because these types of states seemed almost designed to fail, nationalists in the colonial world often wished to sweep them away and recreate what they considered more “natural” (and stronger) units; hence the “pan” movements, such as pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.

Yet they did not succeed.  Even supposedly weak states that perhaps make no sense have proven to be remarkably resilient institutions. Successful secessions, even in Africa, have been few -- only Eritrea and South Sudan come to mind. The Igbo attempt to carve Biafra out of Nigeria failed, as have numerous other efforts.  

On the other hand, states that are really the expression of peoples with a common, often very old, culture, can be quite formidable. Their populations do not waste energy and resources squabbling among themselves, as do the heterogeneous multinational polities.

Instead, their efforts are directed towards common economic, military and political goals, making them durable entities. This is the case regardless of whether they are autocracies, democracies or theocracies. China, Iran, Israel, and Vietnam are examples of these. 

They are far stronger than their merely “objective” metrics, such as size, population, natural resources, and other factors, would indicate.