China-Russia Economic Alliance

The Sino-Soviet communist alliance of old has been transformed to a 21st century economic alliance now that they have resolved all their border disputes in 2005 ─ for the first time in 40 years. The Chinese and Russian economies are complimentary. Many of the products they generate do not compete directly. That is why Russia is not as concerned about China’s rising economic might as the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Little Russia in Beijing makes Chinatowns in America look like one horse towns. Hundreds of square blocks with stores of Russian made merchandise, restaurants, residential towers and direct factory outlets. Russian is spoken everywhere by Russians and Chinese alike.

Russia’s Primorsky Territory, with Vladivostok as its capital, borders three provinces in Northeast China that have century-old trade ties with each other. Heliongjiang and Jilin provinces are in the forefront of the cross-border trade. Suifenhe, a mountain city in China’s northeast Heliongjiang, is a booming border town because 5000 Russians cross the border each day to shop. Not just personal good but substantial trade deals involving textiles, shoes, fur coats, watches, appliances, electronics and food. They spent $1 billion in 2006. It is not one way trade. China buys timber, fertilizer, cement, steel and frozen fish. Heliongjiang spent $135.6 million in 2005 promoting its business ties with Russia with the aim of boosting the bilateral trade volume between the two countries to between $60 billion and $80 billion by the end of 2010. The provinces trade volume with Russia jumped from $1.79 billion in 2001 to $20 billion in 2004.

Vladimir Putin launched the “Year of Russia” in China in 2006, with more than 200 political, economic, military and cultural programs planned to highlight the warming ties. When Russia took on the presidency of the G8 summit, Putin invited China’s Hu Jintao to attend as Russia’s guest. China reciprocated with China’s Hu launching the “Year of China” in Moscow in 2007 with its largest ever overseas exhibition of 200 events, with a cultural festival, business forum and investment conference. Both countries have agreed to cooperate in the exploration of Mars. The relationship is purely strategic. It is a marriage of convenience without any passion.
Russia is not only China’s main defense partner, but is fast becoming China’s primary source of energy. A 2,300km multi-billion dollar oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to China was started in late 2005 and will become operational in November 2008. It will carry 30 million tones of oil, over three times the current volume of Russian oil being exported to China by rail. Russia has pledged to expand the flow to 50 million tones a year, roughly 1.2 million barrels a day. The alliance is a natural one. They share a peaceful common border and both want to extend their influence in central Asia and reduce U.S. influence there. They are succeeding ─ America is becoming isolated.

Given the huge gap between the populations and the very distant interest of Moscow compared to the close involvement of China, the Russian Far East risks being transferred, in all but name, to a form of Chinese control. There are several hundred thousand Chinese, if not millions, living and doing business in the country. Russia is acutely aware of this and has started cracking down on Chinese migrant communities in its retail and farming sectors.

Racism

The race riots in America, Australia, Britain and France brought into focus the global scale of 21st century religious and ethnic racism, growing divide and the violence it breeds. Yet racism continues rolling on into the 21st century. Whether it’s in America, where popular radio talk show host Don Imus called Rutgers women basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s.” That was not his first on the air racist or sexist remark, and probably not his last, especially if he stays unemployed.

The dismissal of the case against the three Duke University lacrosse players for allegedly raping an African-American stripper on the heels of Imus disparaging comment magnified and highlighted the highly combustible subject of race in America ─ on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in America’s national pastime.

In France during their 2007 presidential election, farmers got more political attention ─ and subsidies ─ than the smoldering North African Muslims ghettoes in its major cities. The ambers of the last race riots a couple of years earlier are warming up and ready to re-ignite. Police are being ambushed in the Paris outskirts by young banlieusards alienated by racial discrimination, poor housing and a rate of joblessness that hits 40 percent in some hoods. An urban guerilla war is on-going in the run-down neighborhoods that ring the nation’s major cities, much like the U.S. ghettoes of the 60s. The introduction of “ethnic statistics” after the last riots, a forbidden taboo since the French Revolution, reconfirmed in 1978, French government because officials are forbidden to collect information about a citizen’s ethnic or racial origins when conducting a census or other efforts to gather statistical information on the population. One of the main reasons being that the painful and still vivid memories of the Vichy regime of the second world war, when citizens’ “racial” and religious origin was stamped on identification documents and used in rounding up French Jews for delivery to the death camps. Any wonder North African-French Muslims are concerned and upset? Hey, they could wind up in concentration camps in a Catholic dominated Christian Europe.

Things aren’t much better in Great Britain where the predominantly Asian community, that also lives in run-down ghettos, is reluctant to desegregate as it creates new divisions ─ not much different than Australia. Living parallel lives in any community by any two or more groups be they ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual or political in any village, town, city, county or country makes no sense in the 21st-century. We have to interact and communicate with each other at all levels. Schools have to be integrated and our children must be exposed to the real geopolitical world and taught to respect all cultures, races and religions.

The first step is to admit that racism is a reality. Assimilation and integration are the next step. To narrow the gap, parents, religious leaders and teachers of all colors, religious beliefs and cultures have to join hands and educate and show future generations by example the benefits of multi-culturism. All people are equals. With love, patience, respect for others, education, rule of law and order, our children will grow up in a kinder, safer tolerant and harmonious multicultural free world. How many more generations must we loose to gangs, prison or extreme religious and political ideologies before we wake up?

Hired Guns

Countries that are reluctant to send members of their armed forces to be part of a peace keeping force, should have the option of sending experienced retired military personnel, much as they do in Afghanistan and Iraq today. Outsource the job to mercenaries. Mercenaries used to dominate warfare. The “Hessians” who served Britain in America’s War of Independence ─ many were actually from other German states ─ became notorious among the colonists for their brutality. Foreigners have formed a major part of every army in the world until the French Revolution. Their outlook was pithily expressed by a 17th-century soldier who said: “We serve our master honestly, it is no matter what master we serve.”

There are at least 20,000 private cowboys employed in Iraq alone, plus the thousands in Afghanistan. There is one private security employee for every four U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq. Among foreign troop contingents they are second in number ─ and in casualties ─ only to the U.S. military. Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “Corporate Warrior,” quips: “President George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ might thus be more aptly described as the ‘coalition of the billing.”

Many of the recruits stem from former police and military forces in the Philippines, Peru and Ecuador. Given crash courses ─ that don’t prepare them for armed conflicts. Maybe that’s why they call them crash courses? They violate human rights because they are armed. While U.S. and European mercenaries working in war zones make as much as $10,000 a month, a Peruvians doing the same job seldom make more than $1,000 ─ with the privilege of having their working rights violated.

It was thanks largely to “free lances” (the origin of that now common term) that absolute monarchs managed to consolidate their power in Europe and carve out vast overseas empires. Private entities like the Dutch and English East India Companies even marshaled their own armies and navies to defend their domains. No different than Halliburton and many other corporations doing business in dangerous neighborhoods do today.

Mercenaries have been effective in stopping human-rights abuses. In 1995-96, Executive Outcomes, a South African firm working for the government of Sierra Leone, made minced meat of a savage rebel movement known as the Revolutionary United Front that was notorious for chopping off the limbs of its victims. As a result, Sierra Leone was able to hold its first free election in decades. The now-defunct Executive Outcomes also helped the Angolan government quell a long-running insurgency by Jonas Savimbi’s Unita, leading to the signing of a peace accord in 1994. Another private firm, MPRI, helped to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia in 1995 by organizing the Croatian military offensive that stopped Serbian aggression.

Hired gunslingers, with state of the art equipment like aircraft carriers, could be equally effective in stopping the campaign of rape, murder and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Sudanese government and the janjaweed militia in Darfur. Sounds like a weed that should be smoked. They can end starvation and human rights abuses in places like Cambodia, Myanmar, Mosambique and North Korea. I agree with Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of “War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today,” who suggests mercenary firms could be employed by a global organization like the GSC, by an ad hoc group of concerned nations, or even by philanthropists like Bill Gates or George Soros.

Nuclear Standoff

Iran appears to have perfected the art of hostage taking into an effective instrument of its foreign policy. Iran’s seizure of 15 British sailors and marines in the wake of the U.N. sanctions imposed because of its nuclear program is a demonstration of the perfected art of hostage taking Iran taught Hezbollah in Lebanon. British and American journalists and clergy were kidnapped at gunpoint in Lebanon in the 80s and released for a price. Hezbollah’s cross border incursion into Israel to seize Israeli soldiers triggered the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006. What is America to do? Help Britain attack Iran?

Iran has made it clear that no one can prevent it from having a peaceful nuclear program. The Iran nuclear issue can only be comprehensively addressed through face to face negotiations between Iran, America and Europe. America and Iran have to come out of the diplomatic and economic wilderness they have been in for the last 27 years, establish diplomatic relations and start a direct dialogue on how to resolve the nuclear dispute with a solution that allows Iran to develop nuclear power for peaceful means. Burying the past is the key to better future U.S.-Iran relations. To expect the world’s fourth largest oil exporter to abandon its right to nuclear technology is delusional.

Iran was one of the first countries to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty concluded in 1968, and co-operated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for more than 30 years. America’s aim to force Iran to give up uranium enrichment is in breach of the NPT which clearly states that any signatory country that gives up nuclear weapons and accepts the IAEA’s absolute and unconditional control is entitled to produce electric energy from civil nuclear sources, and to receive from the international community, if necessary, technical and financial support. Iran’s oil resources are finite and it must develop and control the nuclear power to generate the energy ─ a basic right as an NPT signatory.

Iran has said it has enriched uranium to 4.8 per cent as of the late summer of 2006, far below the more than 90 percent level needed for a bomb. Iran hopes to reach a level of 20 per cent to fuel a light water reactor it plans to build. Iran is adamant that it is enriching uranium solely to generate electricity. America and Israel are convinced Iran’s nuclear program is a front for building atom bombs. Iran did pursue a clandestine nuclear program for 18 years until it was uncovered by the International Atomic Agency in 2003. All the more reason America and Iran must sit down and talk to each other directly.