THE POLITICS OF URBAN PLANNING PAGE 8

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FEBRUARY 2007

NOSTALGIA FOR POWER, DREAMS OF AUTONOMY

Tsar Putin’s

GALERIE LELONG, P ARIS

KONRAD KLAPHECK: “War” (1965)

Somalia

THE United States, heavily engaged

in Afghanistan and Iraq in its global war on terror, is now fighting on a

third front in Somalia (1). Washington assembled an anti-terrorist coalition in

the Gulf of Aden in 2001 and it is clear from recent air raids and the deployment of US

battleships that it regards the Horn of Africa as part of the theatre of operations in its

battle against al-Qaida. It is up against the Union of Islamic Courts,

funded by Mogadishu traders who had had enough of Somalia’s warlords and their mul

tiple abuses. Union forces drove the warlords out of Mogadishu last June and began to bring

order to Somalia after nearly 15 years of chaos. The US takes a narrow view of the fi ght

against terrorism. It had backed the warlords and was not prepared to accept the new

order, especially as the Islamic Courts were rumoured to be receiving aid from Iran. The

US had run a programme of military assistance to Christian Ethiopia since 2002 and the

Pentagon encouraged it to launch an off ensive against Somalia, providing aerial reconnais

sance and satellite surveillance support. The Ethiopian campaign was a blitzkrieg:

the areas held by the Islamic Courts were occupied within a week, Mogadishu was taken

on 28 December 2006 and 20,000 Ethiopian troops are now deployed in Somalia. The US

led International Somalia Contact Group, set up last June, met in Nairobi, Kenya, in January

and called for the proposed United Nations peacekeeping force to be sent in urgently. So

far only Ethiopia and Uganda have agreed to send troops. Washington has agreed to grant

$16m in aid to the interim Somali president,

Abdullahi Yusuf, as well as humanitarian

aid and a further $24m, $14m of which is to be allocated to the peacekeeping force. The

Bush administration has accused the Somali Islamists of sheltering terrorists Fazul Abdul

lah Muhammad and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, involved in the 1998 attacks on the US embas

sies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida number

two, responded by calling on Islamist fi ghters to resist: “I appeal to my Muslim brethren

everywhere to respond to the call for jihad in Somalia. The real battle will begin by launch

ing your campaigns against the Ethiopian forces.” He recommended “ambushes, mines

and suicide bombs” and urged the Islamists to employ the tactics used by insurgents fi ghting

US-led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (2). Abulrahim Ali Modei, spokesman for the

Islamic Courts, claims his movement has not lost the battle (3). His men have regrouped

south of the Juba river, on the border with Kenya, in a zone where the Ethiopians and

US special forces have been pursuing the Islamists with backup from AC-130 fi ghter air

craft based at Djibouti. The capture of Kabul in 2002 and Baghdad in 2003 did not solve

the problems of the Taliban or Iraq, and the capture of Mogadishu by the Ethiopians has

not solved Somalia’s problems. They are just beginning.

IGNACIO RAMONET

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA WILSON

(1) Or possibly a fourth front. Bush declared that Lebanon was “the third front in the global war on terror” when Israel launched its off ensive against Hizbullah in August 2006. (2) BBC News, 5 January 2007. (3) International Herald Tribune , 4 January 2007

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Iraq: the state was murdered, it

didn’t commit suicide page 3

Pakistan: a balance between US

support and the Islamists page 4

United States: still getting it wrong

in the arc of crisis page 6

Jerusalem: stealing a city and its

suburbs a metre at a time page 8

Jerusalem: French companies back

the tramway of apartheid page 10

Jerusalem: the intolerant behaviour

of a museum of tolerance page 11

Europe: the inexorable spread of

urban gentrifi cation page 12

Uruguay: a president, a general and

the paper pulp mills page 14

Debate: which species will be let

into the humans’ club? page 15

Kofi Annan on the potential for an

alliance of civilisations page 16

Russia

Energy is at the centre of Russia’s strategic partnership with the European Union. Oil is the cause of its struggle with the US over the routes of pipelines from the Caspian and Central Asia. Dismantling the Yukos group will complete Russia’s renationalisation of energy. President Vladimir Putin, in his second term, has restored state power within a market economy framework.

BY JEAN-MARIE CHAUVIER

THE headline news is that Russia’s gross domestic product is now back

to its 1990 level. After the depression of the 1990s, there have been six years

of sustained growth at an annual average of 6%. After Russia’s oil bonanza came successes

in metallurgy, aluminium, armaments and agribusiness; there has also been a sharp rise

in domestic consumption, the repayment of Russia’s foreign debt, and huge increases in

education and health-care spending in the past five years. To everyone’s surprise, some

Russian firms are now transnational players in the global market.

The upturn is not yet assured: there is more poverty and less equality than in Soviet days.

Russia needs investment to overcome its weaknesses: loss of capital and of expertise,

obsolete infrastructures, a widening technology gap with other industrialised countries,

declining life expectancy and a decreasing birth-rate. Even so, economist Jacques Sapir

saw 2006 as a year of strategic reorientation (1), with a new industrial policy based on a

realisation that the economy cannot continue to depend entirely on gas and oil revenues.

This means more state intervention, against the advice of international organisations and

of Russian neoliberals, who are arguing over the use of a $80bn stabilisation fund.

The United States secretary of defence, Robert Gates, thinks that President Vladimir

Putin’s aim is to restore Russia to its former great power status and to revive national

pride (2). According to opinion polls Putin has 70%-80% of the people behind him, espe

cially the prosperous middle classes and the highest-paid workers. Lilia Ovtcharova of the

Independent Institute for Social Policy reports that wages are now 80% of their 1989 level

in real terms and that consumption is up by an average 167%. These fi gures do not refl ect

social diff erences. Poverty may be diminishing but it is still endemic and inequalities are

greater than ever, especially as market forces have swept away the Soviet safety net. So the

net result of 15 years of transition is due for a rigorous review, particularly in the light of the

vast, hidden, informal economy and society. President Putin is not Hugo Chávez or

Evo Morales. Despite the declared wishes of the majority, he has not questioned the pri

vatisations of the 1990s and he has not re

nationalised key sectors with the intention of establishing a social market economy. Only

those robber oligarchs with political ambitions have been prosecuted (3).

Faced with the choice of ultra-liberalism or state control, Putin opted for a compromise

that would reassure the new owners and the West: restore the sovereign powers of the

state, bring the oligarchs to heel and let the market economy take its course. What development will power this growth? Leonid Grigoriev, president of the Institute

of Energy and Finance, said (4): “To double GDP without modernising the economy is

not much of an achievement. Many people, especially the young and members of the busi

ness community, are aware that we now have a half- developed country, with raw materials

and huge social inequalities. The past 15 years have been wasted in the fi eld of scientifi c

advances. The well-educated and trained postwar generation is approaching retirement.

Investment began again fi ve years ago but it accounts for less than 20% of GDP and repre

sents only 33% of the capital invested in 1990.” There was a major turning-point at the

beginning of Putin’s second term in 2003, when he handed control of the crucial

hydrocarbons sector to selected state undertakings. The sector had partly recov

ered from the oligarchs, who had acquired their holdings at knockdown prices during

the privatisations of the Yeltsin era (5). Putin’s move to protect strategic assets does not pre

clude opening them to foreign capital; but, given the off ensive mounted by the public

energy monopolies Gazprom and Transneft, it is intended to block a US policy, insti

tuted in 1991, aimed at diminishing Russian power. This policy was the purpose of Nato

enlargement and the establishment of alternative energy supply routes to replace the

Russian networks. Another of Putin’s aims is to recreate a common Euro-Asian economic

area, possibly including a European-Russian partnership.

This Kremlin strategy, stalled in South Caucasus, has had some success in Ukraine, where

60% of the population are against joining Nato; and in Kazakhstan and Belarus, which

will have to abandon its outdated regime and

Continued on page 2