Perspectives
High stakes
Russia acted swiftly in late July 2017 in retaliating against a decision by the US Senate to impose sanctions against Moscow. Russia’s foreign ministry gave the United States a month to reduce its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people. That’s the same number of Russian diplomats left in the United States at the end of 2016 when the outgoing Obama administration expelled 35 Russians, and seized two Russian compounds. Moscow also announced the seizure of a recreational compound and a US diplomatic warehouse. Moscow’s action gives the US little choice but to cut hundreds of personnel. Most of the US diplomatic staff is based in Moscow. Others are in consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok. A day before Moscow’s announcement, the US Senate voted 98 to 2 to strengthen existing sanctions as a further punishment against Russia for its annexation of Crimea in 2014. The vote also gave Congress the power to block President Donald Trump from using his veto against the sanctions. The US action and Russia’s reaction have brought relations between Moscow and Washington to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. Diplomatic ties between the two superpowers have been on a downward spiral because of allegations by US intelligence agencies that Russia tried to influence last year’s presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. Moscow denies the allegation. Continue Reading »
The Shimmering Illusion
Based on presentation to the Thomas More Institute in Montreal, Canada in November 2015.
Wouldn’t it be nice if political leaders actually served their citizens? However, despite noble words of taking office to serve people, over time consensus, negotiation and agreement tend to give way to such sentiments as ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ One compromise leads to another and democracy slowly shifts from serving the people to serving those in power. In extreme cases, violence replaces dialogue. The Fragile States Index for 2015 assigns countries a score based on such social, economic and political criteria as mounting demographic pressures, massive displacement of refugees, uneven economic development, severe economic decline, and wide spread human rights abuses. Countries such as the United States have a score of 35.3, Canada 25.7, Germany 28.1, the United Kingdom 33.5 and France 33.7. The lower the score, the better political leaders serve their citizens. However, if we choose four countries in Africa in various states of development, we see a marked difference in the score. Mali, for example, comes in at 93.1, Malawi 86.9, Togo 86.8 and Côte d’Ivoire 100. Continue Reading »
Seeds of Division
Conflict, dictatorships, instability and religious extremism in the Middle East, in the Horn of Africa, and in Central Africa plus the siren call of a better life has resulted in Europe’s worst immigration crisis since the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people continue to crowd onto unseaworthy boats in hopes of crossing the Mediterranean, while thousands of Syrian refugees stream along railway tracks in the Balkans in hopes of finding asylum in Europe.
The number of dead continues to climb as overcrowded vessels flounder and sink, taking hundreds to a watery grave. More than 2500 people have drowned in the Mediterranean in the first nine months of this year. As in each of the ten years prior to 2015, the number of people who lose their lives in 2016 while looking for a better place to live will most likely surpass that. On the last week-end in August 2015, “the Italian coastguard plucked 4,400 people from the Mediterranean coast off Libya in 22 different operations…. Meanwhile the Greek coast guard picked up 877 people in 30 search and rescue operations.” (1)
The Ghosts of Ukraine
A year after the first protests in Kiev’s Maidan Square, the stakes in Ukraine are high, and increasingly more dangerous. The protests began in November 2013 after then president Victor Yanukovich backed down on a decision to sign a partnership deal with the European Union. In an abrupt turnabout, Yanukovich signed an accord with Russia for a $15-Billion bailout to help Ukraine’s ailing economy. Continue Reading »
In The North
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire – We were sitting at a bar in Grand Bassam, some 25 kilometres east of Abidjan. Grand Bassam is a small, quiet village of beach resorts in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). One hotel, Koral Beach, is nestled beneath towering palms and overlooks the water with its magnificent thundering waves in a constant attack on the hot brown sands. It’s not a luxury hotel in the sense of the huge American or French hotel chains, or even by Third World standards, but for those who frequent the place, the basic comfort there is a world away from the hovels and tin-roofed shacks of the poor. It was the week of Barack Obama’s swearing in as president of the United States, the same week I was giving a journalism course at a seminar for the written press.