Le Monde Diplomatique EN

SEPTEMBER 2016 | NO 1609
ENGLISH
RUSSIA HORN OF AFRICA BALKANS TECHNOLOGY
Popularity contest
for Putin’s party
Everybody gets a
piece of the action
Long era of tolerant
Islam under threat
Robots to care for
and serve you
US-style primaries selected candidates
for the general election this month |
CLÉMENTINE FAUCONNIER ▶ P5
Yemen war, piracy and a new port are
attracting the world’s money, dealers
and armies | GÉRARD PRUNIER ▶ P6
State-sponsored religion challenged
by new hardliners | JEAN-ARNAULT
DÉRENS & LAURENT GESLIN ▶ P12
Japan is backing the development of
automatons to help the elderly and the
sick | ARTHUR FOUCHÈRE ▶ P14
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JOHN S LAN DER / GETTY
BRIDGEMAN
Hotting up the
cold war again
West and East both shout louder and weapon up
MICHAEL T KLARE ▶ P2
Bomb Hugger (2002), Banksy

2 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
WEST FEARFUL AS IT LOSES MILITARY ADVANTAGE
Divided and
conquered
Serge Halimi | Translated by Charles Goulden
Walking into a big war
with eyes wide shut
The major powers are planning for war and claim
that’s the best way to defend against war. Will this
mutual hawkishness lead to armed conflict?
Michael T Klare | Original text in English
THE US CELEBRATES Labour Day in September. This
year’s celebration will be unusual because of the
many factory and office workers – especially white
men – thronging to Donald Trump’s rallies. The Republican
presidential candidate cultivates their support by
criticising the free trade agreements that have precipitated
the decline of former strongholds of US manufacturing industry,
and brought loss of status, bitterness and despair to
the working class. The ‘law and order’ that Trump promises
to restore is that of the 1960s, when – if you were white – you
didn’t need a university degree to have a good salary, two
cars, and a few days’ paid vacation.
For a New York billionaire whose fiscal programme is even
more regressive than Ronald Reagan’s – and whose practices
go against what he preaches (the products he sells are
manufactured in Bangladesh and China, he employs illegal
immigrants in his luxury hotels) – to become the voice of
working-class resentment would have been harder if trade
unionism had not been weakened. And if progressive parties
in the West had not for nearly 40 years steadily been replacing
working-class activists and leaders with professional
politicians, public relations executives, senior civil servants
and journalists, all safely enveloped in a bubble of privilege.
In the past, the left and the unions worked steadily to educate,
build local networks and provide intellectual ‘guidance’
for the working class. They mobilised members politically,
made sure they voted when it concerned their destiny, and
provided social welfare when their economic future was
threatened. They reminded members of the benefits of class
solidarity, the history of the gains made by labour, and the
dangers of division, xenophobia and racism. They no longer
do this work, or do it less well.¹ It’s clear who benefits. Without
political representation, social movements get bogged
down in identity polemics when they lose momentum. ISIS
murders have made the working class lose their bearings
so much that it has, in effect, become the far right’s most
influential election agent in the West.
A single detail is sometimes enough to sketch an ideological
picture. The death of Georges Séguy, a leading figure in
France’s trade union movement, on 13 August got only a few
seconds or a few lines in the French media – who were too
busy chasing down women wearing burkinis. It’s possible
that many journalists – whose knowledge of history is limited
to the latest tweets – didn’t know he led France’s largest
union, the CGT (Conféderation Générale du Travail) for 15
years. They will soon be sounding the alarm, urging us to
join in the struggle to defend democracy. That democracy
would be much safer if people didn’t see it as an ornament
of the privileged class who sneer at them ●
Serge Halimi is editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique
1 In France, some reasons for this change are analysed by Julian Mischi in
Le Communisme désarmé: Le PCF et les classes populaires depuis les années
1970, Agone, Marseilles, 2014. Regarding the US, see Thomas Frank, Listen
Liberal, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2016
Le Monde diplomatique
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in the United Kingdom
AS THE US presidential race approaches
its climax and European officials ponder
the implications of the UK’s Brexit vote,
public discussion of security affairs is
largely confined to strategies for combating international
terrorism. Both Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump are trying to persuade voters of
their superior qualifications to lead this battle,
while European leaders scramble to bolster their
countries’ defences against homegrown extremists.
But though talk of terrorism fills the news
media and the political space, it is secondary
in the conversations of generals, admirals and
defence ministers: it’s not low-level conflict that
commands their attention but rather what they
call ‘big wars’ – large-scale, high-level conflict
with great-power adversaries like Russia and
China. Such major conflicts, long considered most
unlikely, are now deemed ‘plausible’ by western
military strategists, who claim that urgent steps
are needed to deter and, if necessary, prevail in
such engagements.
This development, overlooked by the media,
has serious consequences, starting with heightened
tension between Russia and the West, each
eyeing the other in the expectation of a confrontation.
More worrying is the fact that many
politicians believe that war is not only possible,
but may break out at any moment – a view that
historically has tended to precipitate military
responses where diplomatic solutions might have
been possible.
The origins of this thinking can be found in
the reports and comments of senior military
officials (typically at professional meetings and
conferences). ‘In both Brussels and Washington,
it has been many years since Russia was a focus
of defence planning’ but that ‘has now changed
for the foreseeable future,’ states one such report,
summarising the views at a workshop organised
in 2015 by the Institute of National Strategic
Studies (INSS), a branch of the US National Defence
University. The report says that as a result
of Russian aggression in Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, many defence experts ‘can now envision
a plausible pathway to war’ and this, in turn, ‘has
led defence planners to recognise the need for
renewed focus of the possibility of confrontation
and conflict with Moscow.’¹
‘A return to great power competition’
Such a conflict would be most likely to occur on
NATO’s eastern front, encompassing Poland and
the Baltic states, and would be fought with hightech
conventional weapons. But these planners
also postulate that it could encompass Scandinavia
and the Black Sea region, and might escalate
into the nuclear realm. So US and European
strategists are calling for a build-up of western
military capabilities in all of these regions and
for moves to enhance the credibility of NATO’s
tactical nuclear options.² A recent article in the
NATO Review calls for the increased inclusion of
nuclear-capable aircraft in future NATO military
exercises, to create uncertainty in Russian minds
about the point at which NATO commanders
might order nuclear strikes to counter any Russian
breakthrough on the eastern front (and presumably
deter such an assault).³
This way of thinking, though confined until
recently to military academies and thinktanks,
has begun to shape government policy in significant
and alarming ways. We see this in the new
US defence budget, in decisions adopted at the
NATO summit in July, and in the UK’s July decision
to renew the Trident nuclear missile programme.
US defence secretary Ash Carter said the new
budget ‘marks a major inflection point for the
Department of Defence.’ Whereas the department
had been focused in recent years ‘on large-scale
counter-insurgency operations,’ it must now
prepare for ‘a return to great power competition,’
possibly involving all-out conflict with a ‘high-end
enemy’ such as Russia or China. These countries,
Carter declared, ‘are our most stressing competitors,’
possessing advanced weapons that could
neutralise some US advantages. To overcome
this challenge, ‘we must have – and be seen to
have – the ability to impose unacceptable costs on
an advanced aggressor that will either dissuade
them from taking provocative action or make
them deeply regret it if they do.’4
In the short term, this will require urgent action
to bolster US capacity to counter a potential Russian
assault on NATO positions in eastern Europe.
Under its European Reassurance Initiative, the
Pentagon will spend $3.4bn in fiscal 2017 to deploy
an extra armoured combat brigade in Europe and
to pre-position the arms and equipment for yet
another brigade. To bolster US strength over the
long term, there would be greater US spending
on high-tech conventional weapons needed to
defeat a high-end enemy, such as advanced combat
aircraft, surface ships and submarines. Carter
noted that, on top of this, ‘the budget also invests
in modernising our nuclear deterrent.’5 It’s hard
not to be struck by echoes of the cold war.
The final communiqué adopted by the NATO
heads of state and government in Warsaw on 9
July is also reminiscent of this era.6 Coming just
a few days after the Brexit vote, the NATO summit
drowned out any concerns over disarray in Europe
with a stentorian anti-Russian attitude. ‘Russia’s
recent activities and policies have reduced stability
and security, increased unpredictability
and changed the security environment,’ says the
communiqué. As a result, NATO remains ‘open
to political dialogue’ but must not only suspend
‘all practical civilian and military cooperation’
with Russia but also take steps to enhance its
‘deterrence and defence posture.’7
Of the steps taken at the summit to implement
this commitment, the most important is to deploy,
in rotation, multinational combat battalions
in Poland and the three Baltic republics, with
the US, UK, Canada and Germany each assuming
leadership of one unit. These deployments are
notable because they represent the first semi-permanent
garrison of NATO forces on the territory
of the former Soviet Union, and imply that any
skirmish with Russian forces in the Baltic region
could trigger a full-scale (possibly nuclear) war.
It became clear that nuclear escalation is still a
very real consideration in the minds of western
leaders soon after the NATO summit, when Britain’s
new prime minister Theresa May, in her first
major parliamentary appearance after assuming
office, won a vote on 18 July to preserve and enhance
the Trident nuclear missile programme.
‘The nuclear threat has not gone away,’ she told
parliament. ‘If anything, it has increased.’8 On this
basis, she asked British lawmakers to approve a
multiyear £41bn ($53bn) plan to maintain and
modernise the UK’s fleet of missile-carrying
submarines.
Analysing the other’s moves
When explaining the need to prepare for a major
war against a high-end enemy, US and European
analysts usually point to Russian aggression in
Ukraine and Chinese adventurism in the South
China Sea.9 Western military moves, it is claimed,
are an undesired but necessary reaction to provocations
by others. But probe more deeply into the
thinking of senior leaders and a different picture
emerges. Running throughout this discussion is a
pervasive anxiety that the world has changed in
significant ways, and that the strategic advantages
once possessed by the West are slipping away as
other powers gain increased military and geopo-

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
3
In this new
‘
era – ‘a
time of renewed great
power competition’ as
Ash Carter put it – the
US’s military might no
longer appears as formidable
as it once did
’
S E FA KARACA N / ANADOLU AGENCY / G ETTY
Soldiers rehearsing for this year’s 9 May Victory Day
parade in Moscow
litical leverage. In this new era – ‘a time of renewed
great power competition’ as Carter put it – the US’s
military might no longer appears as formidable as
it once did, while the military capabilities of rival
powers appear increasingly potent.
When speaking of Russia’s moves in Crimea
and eastern Ukraine, western analysts highlight
what they view as the illegal nature of the Russian
intervention. But their real concern is over
evidence that Russian investment in enhanced
military capabilities over the past decade is beginning
to bear fruit. Whereas western observers
largely dismissed the Russian forces in the wars
in Chechnya and South Ossetia as substandard,
those deployed in Crimea and Syria are believed
to be well-equipped and high quality. ‘Russia has
made significant strides in developing the capability
to use force effectively,’ noted the INSS report.
Western observers have also been impressed
by the growing strength and effectiveness of
the Chinese military. China’s ability to convert
low-lying reefs and atolls in the South China
Sea into islands capable of housing substantial
military installations has surprised and alarmed
US military officials, who had long viewed the
area as an American lake. Although the US still
enjoys air and naval superiority in the region,
these bold moves suggest that China has become
a significant military competitor and a growing
future challenge.
Under these circumstances, strategists see no
option but to acquire capabilities that will enable
the US to retain a significant military advantage
over all potential rivals for decades, and prevent
them from imposing their will on the international
system and undermining vital US interests. And
this means emphasising the big-war threats that
justify lavish spending on the super-sophisticated
weapons needed to defeat a high-end enemy.
Of the $583bn in Carter’s February US defence
budget, $71.4bn will be allocated to research and
development on new, advanced weapons – an
amount greater than the entire defence budget of
all but a few other countries. ‘We have to do this,’
Carter said, ‘to stay ahead of future threats in a
changing world, as other nations try to catch on to
the advantages that we have enjoyed for decades,
in areas like precision-guided munitions, stealth,
cyber and space.’¹0
Expenditure on advanced arms
Besides these research efforts, mammoth sums
will be spent on the acquisition of advanced
weapons intended to overcome Russian and
Chinese defensive systems and bolster US military
capabilities in potential areas of conflict,
such as the Baltic and the western Pacific. Some
$12bn will be spent over the next five years on
preliminary development of the B-21 Long-Range
Strike Bomber, a stealth aircraft capable of carrying
thermonuclear weapons and designed to
penetrate Russia’s heavily defended airspace.¹¹ To
counter Chinese gains in the Pacific, the Pentagon
will acquire additional Virginia-class submarines
and Burke-class guided missile destroyers, and
begin deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude
Area Defence (THAAD) system in South Korea –
an anti-missile system meant to defend against
attacks from North Korea, but which could also
bring down Chinese missiles.
A President Clinton or Trump would put their
own stamp on military policy. But it is highly
unlikely that the current emphasis on planning
for a major conflict with Russia and/or China
will disappear, no matter who wins the election.
Clinton already has the support of many neocons,
who consider her more trustworthy than Trump
and more hawkish than Obama. Trump has repeatedly
stated his determination to rebuild the
US’s ‘depleted’ military capability, and has chosen
former generals as key foreign policy advisers. He
has largely focused on the fight against ISIS, and
said that ‘if our country got along with Russia, that
would be a great thing.’ But he has also expressed
concern that China is ‘building a...fortress in the
South China Sea’ and has emphasised the need
to invest in new weapons systems more than
Obama has done, or Clinton during her time in
government.¹²
So should we expect military posturing and
muscle-flexing in highly contested areas like eastern
Europe and the South China Sea to become
the new normal, with a risk of accident, miscalculation
and unintended escalation? The US, Russia
and China have all signalled that they will deploy
more forces in these areas, in more frequent and
elaborate military exercises. Any of these could
produce an accidental clash between the major
powers, precipitating an uncontrolled chain of
events culminating in full-scale war.
An equally dangerous outcome is the growing
militarisation of international relations, with the
major powers more inclined to threaten military
action than to resolve disputes at the negotiation
table. This is not unprecedented: Christopher
Clark’s The Sleepwalkers and other pre-first world
war accounts describe how European leaders
were induced by military officers to favour armed
over diplomatic responses to perceived affronts,
hastening the onset of mass slaughter.
Although military thinkers in the West have
embraced the big-war approach with particular
enthusiasm, this outlook has powerful advocates
in Russia and China – actions on both sides tend
to reinforce the arguments made by their military
thinkers. It is clear that the problem is not East
or West, but rather the shared assumption that a
full-scale war between the major powers is entirely
possible and requires urgent military preparations.
Only by repudiating this assumption – by
demonstrating how such preparations more
often precipitate than discourage the outbreak of
conflict – will it be possible to eliminate the risk of
unintended escalation and improve the chances
for success in overcoming other urgent dangers ●
Michael T Klare is a professor of world security
studies at Hampshire College in Amherst (Mass)
and the author, most recently, of The Race for
What’s Left: the Global Scramble for the World’s
Last Resources (Picador, 2012)
1 Paul Bernstein, ‘Putin’s Russia and US Defence Strategy’,
Workshop Report, Institute for National Strategic Studies
(INSS), National Defence University (NDU), 19-20 August 2015
2 See Alexander Mattelaer, ‘The NATO Warsaw Summit: How
to Strengthen Alliance Cohesion’, Strategic Forum, INSS/NDU,
June 2016 3 Camille Grand, ‘Nuclear deterrence and the Alliance
in the 21st century’, NATO Review, 2016 4 US Department
of Defence, ‘Remarks by Secretary Carter on the Budget at the
Economic Club of Washington DC’, 2 February 2016 5 Secretary
of Defence Ash Carter, ‘Submitted Statement – Senate Appropriations
Committee – Defence (FY 2017 Budget Request)’, 27
April 2016 6 See Serge Halimi, ‘Provoking Russia’, Le Monde
diplomatique, English edition, August 2016 7 NATO, ‘Warsaw
Summit Communiqué’, Warsaw, 9 July 2016 8 As quoted in
Stephen Castle, ‘Britain’s New Leader Wins Votes to Renew
Nuclear Program’, The New York Times, 19 July 2016 9 See Didier
Cormorand, ‘For a fistful of rocks’, Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, July 2016 10 US Department of Defence,
‘Remarks by Secretary Carter on the Budget at the Economic
Club of Washington DC’, op cit 11 Secretary of Defence Ash
Carter, ‘Submitted Statement – Senate Appropriations Committee
– Defence (FY 2017 Budget Request)’, op cit 12 Maggie
Haberman and David E Sanger, ‘Donald Trump expounds on
his foreign policy views’, The New York Times, 26 March 2016

4 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
WHEN THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT TOURS ISRAEL
The wayward brother
Israel’s founding was the Woodstock of American Christian fundamentalism and the
Stand With Israel tour wants to hear all the great old hits
Tom Bissell | Original text in English
LAST SPRING, a number of rightwing
commentators made much
of a Bloomberg poll that asked
Americans if they were ‘more
sympathetic to Netanyahu or Obama’.
Republicans picked the Israeli prime
minister over their own president,
67% to 16%. There was a lot of affected
shock that things had come to this:
talk show host Rush Limbaugh said of
Netanyahu that he wished ‘we had this
kind of forceful moral, ethical clarity
leading our own country’; Mark Levin
described him as ‘the leader of the
free world’.
The one conservative radio show I
do find myself enjoying is hosted by
Dennis Prager. While Prager obviously
doesn’t like liberals – ‘The gaps between
the left and right on almost every
issue that matters are in fact unbridgeable,’
he has said – he often invites them
onto his show for debate, which is rare
among rightwing hosts. Yet his gently
exasperated take on the Obama-Netanyahu
matchup was among the least
charitable: ‘Those who do not confront
evil resent those who do.’
Prager’s audience is largely Christian;
Prager is a Jew. Over the years I’ve heard
numerous friendly callers tell him,
often in thick Southern accents, that
he’s the first Jew they’ve ever spoken
to. Last summer, he mentioned that he
would be heading up something called
the Stand with Israel Tour. For a little
under $5,000 you could join Prager,
and his most devoted listeners, on an
all-inclusive guided jaunt across the
world’s holiest, most contested land.
The goal, he said, was to remind Israel
of its devoted friends in the US.
America’s religious right hasn’t always
been enamoured of Israel, much
less of Jews. Quite a few of the originators
of the American Christian fundamentalist
movement were unabashed
antisemites. In 1933 the radio preacher
Charles Fuller told his listeners that
Jews represented ‘a wicked and wilful
rebellion against God’; other early fundamentalist
leaders eagerly circulated
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In 1981 Israeli prime minister Menachem
Begin publicly embraced
evangelical Christians, whose stated
determination to convert Jews to Christianity
had long spooked Israelis. Begin
was the first to recognise that the Israeli
right and American evangelicals shared
many common beliefs, from forbidding
abortion to maintaining a general suspicion
toward the Muslim world. The
Christian Coalition, founded in 1989
by the broadcaster and former Baptist
minister Pat Robertson, became invested
in the Zionist cause. Robertson
dwelled darkly on the Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat and his ‘gang of thugs’.
I wanted to more fully understand
why conservative politics had become
synonymous with no-questions-asked
support of Israel.
The Israel test
Months later, in November, we step
out of the elevator and into the lobby
of the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Ashdod,
Israel, to catch Prager’s tour-opening
lecture. We want good seats. But when
we arrive, 45 minutes before go time,
we find none. Everybody is already
here. The majority of our fellow Stand
with Israelites are 60 and older. There
are somehow around 450 of us, from
a dozen American cities. There are
too many Stand with Israelites for one
hotel, so our cohort has been spread
throughout Ashdod, a coastal city 20
miles north of Gaza and a frequent
target of Hamas’s rockets in the 2014
Gaza war. I watch our tour group’s few
latecomers step off their buses, all of
them marvelling, as I had, at the huge
banner draped across the front of the
hotel: Welcome to the Land of the Bible.
The presentation begins. Prager is
introduced by a bald, fit, velvet-voiced
Israeli named Reuven Doron, the man
on the ground for Genesis Tours: ‘We
are here for one purpose.’ Doron tells
us: ‘We came to stand with Israel.’ This
extracts a few vaguely amen-ish sounds
from the audience. Doron goes on: ‘You
are our strength, and our encouragement,
and a joy to our hearts.’
Eventually Prager himself ambles
over to the mic. He is a big man, around
six foot four, with fine white corn-silk
hair. In his khaki slacks and open-collar
blue-striped shirt, he could be the
provost of a university. He has a lot of
female admirers here, including his
third wife, a six-foot blond Amazon
standing in the back.
Prager begins by talking about something
he calls the Israel Test. The Israel
Test involves seeing ‘how people react
to Israel,’ which is, he says, ‘about as
quick a way you have to understand
their judgment.’ Meaning, essentially,
that if you ever find fault with Israel,
you’re horrible. President Obama failed
the Israel Test, even though, in 2012,
he sent the single largest military aid
package the US has provided the country
to date. John Kerry is an even worse
Israel Test failure, Prager tells us, because
he often takes a ‘middle position’
on the Israel-Palestine contretemps, ‘as
if there really wasn’t a dark and a light.’
He continues. ‘You can’t imagine
how proud I am of you...I’m very serious.
It means the world to me. To be
honest, when there were these attacks
that started a month ago’ – more than
a dozen Israelis had been stabbed in the
street by Palestinian assailants – ‘we
really didn’t know how many people
would cancel. And the answer is almost
nobody.’
Moral compass of the world
Prager emphasises that he’s not getting
paid to be here with us. He also believes
that American parents – Christians and
Jews alike – should send their children
to Israel between high school and college.
Why? ‘The moral compass of the
world,’ he says, ‘is upside down. If your
child can spend time in Israel ...and
then become clear as to how upside
down the world is, they will return
already immunised against the most
morally upside down of all western
institutions, the university.’
Too often, the subject of Israel becomes
just another way for Americans
to refract their own views of the US.
Liberals tend to assume that rightwing
evangelicals support Israel because of
how it fits into their imagined apocalypse:
only when God’s Chosen People
reoccupy the entirety of their biblical
territory will the Final Dispensation,
the rise of the Antichrist, the Tribulation,
the eventual return of Jesus Christ
and his Last Judgment commence.
In many ways, the founding of Israel
in 1948 was the Woodstock of fundamentalist
Christianity. A recent Pew
study of Christian fundamentalism
The Christian
Coalition became
invested in the
Zionist cause. Pat
Robertson dwelled
darkly on Yasser
Arafat and his
‘gang of thugs’
‘
’
found that 63% of white evangelicals
believe that the creation of a Jewish
state in modern times fulfils the
supposed biblical prophecy of Jesus’s
Second Coming. Yet not one evangelical
Christian I will meet on tour seems
interested in any of that. Rather, the
conservative Christian love of Israel
that I encounter, over and over again,
seems bound up in a notion of God the
Father, who has two children: Israel
and the US. This Israel – not a nation
but a wayward brother – lies beyond
history, beyond the deaths and wars
that made it, beyond the UN, beyond
the Oslo accords, beyond any conventional
morality. Understand that and
you have passed the Israel Test.
We visit Camp Iftach, where, we are
told, many of the soldiers present were
among the first combatants to enter
Gaza during the war of 2014. A soldier
walks out cradling a shiny yellow artillery
shell. Big cheers when we’re
informed that this shell was made in
the US.
At the Black Arrow Memorial, we’re
told to gather around a young Israeli
soldier, who recently finished his
third year of service in the IDF. He’s
dark-haired and bearded, with a long
face. ‘I don’t know what per cent of the
people,’ he says of the Palestinians he’s
encountered, ‘but most of them really
want to live in peace.’ He spent two
years in the West Bank, and whenever
he encountered young Palestinians
throwing rocks at cars, he knew they
were young and aimless, ‘not focused
about anything. They’re immature.’
The same kind of hate
He pauses, searching for a better English
word to describe these Palestinians.
Someone in the crowd suggests ‘thugs’.
The young soldier either ignores or
does not hear this. He goes on to say
that many Palestinian teenagers have
nothing to do but throw rocks. He adds:
‘We don’t need to think about all Arabs
when they do something wrong, because
I know a lot of people from their
side want to live in peace.’
A collective unease falls over the
crowd. You can almost hear the cognitive
whir while everyone’s brains
rewind and replay. The soldier goes on
to says that religion factors in, too. ‘The
radicals from both sides are taking part,
very good part, very big part, and this
becomes very, very, very complicated.’
A woman pushes through the crowd.
She’s in her forties and is wearing oversize
sunglasses, a puffy winter jacket,
yoga pants and colourful sneakers.
‘When you refer to radicals from both
sides,’ she says, ‘you’re talking about
radicals who teach their children at a
very young age to hate the Jews, versus
the radicals of the Jewish faith?’ Yes, the
young soldier answers. ‘But Jews do not
do any of that.’ She begins to gesture in
an am-I-going-crazy way. ‘Somehow
you’re saying that both have a role to
play? Am I understanding that correctly?
When the mentality is completely
opposite.’
The young soldier looks gapemouthed
at his interlocutor. He tries
to inform her that many Jews who live
in the ‘complicated areas’ of the West
Bank raise their children with the same
kind of hate.
At this, she throws up her hands.
‘Respectfully, no’, she says. ‘Respectfully,
no.’ A man near Trisha mutters: ‘If
Dennis Prager were here he’d rip that
guy a new asshole.’ With the crowd now
against him, the young soldier stands
silently, gripping his microphone.
Another soldier steps in, takes the
mic, and says: ‘Maybe there’s a small
language issue here, and let’s move
on, yes?’
‘Jews are a people’
Prager appears, wearing a sports coat,
his shoulders grey with damp. He
tells us about his university days, as a
student of Russian, buying copies of
Pravda from a 42nd Street newsstand.
One day, someone from the Israeli
government contacted him and asked
him to travel to the Soviet Union to
smuggle in Hebrew Bibles and prayer
shawls. ‘It was somewhat dangerous. I
was sent because I knew Hebrew and
Russian.’ He emerged with names of
Jews who wanted to leave the USSR,
and then began to deliver lectures on
Soviet Jewry. He describes this as ‘the
beginning of my public life.’
He would speak around four times a
week. ‘Almost every synagogue in the
United States – for that matter, Australia,
France, anywhere in the free world
– had a sign saying Save Soviet Jewry. To
my shock, no church had a sign saying
Save Soviet Christians. More Christians
were being killed by the Soviet government
than Jews were. So why weren’t
there Save Soviet Christians signs but
there were Save Soviet Jewry signs?
Because Jews are a people, whereas
Christians are a religion.’
According to Prager, this helps explains
why, even today, there is little
collective outcry for the Christians
being murdered by Islamic State (ISIS)
in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. ‘I don’t
know why Christians aren’t going crazy
over the decimation of Christians in
the Middle East,’ Prager says. ‘I’m going
crazy over the decimation of Christians
in the Middle East.’ (I have another explanation:
those being targeted are all
Middle Eastern Christians who belong
to sects – Syrian Orthodox, Maronite,
Chaldean – so conceptually unfamiliar
to western Christians that they may as
well be Muslims.)
The rest of Prager’s speech concerns
Judaism’s convergences with its sister
faith, Christianity. He affirms that Jews
are the Chosen People, while ‘Christians
are doing God’s work.’
Back on Bus Five to Nazareth, a largely
Arab area, where we’re having lunch
in an old immigrant detention centre
that’s been converted into a hotel. We
ascend a twisty road to see hillsides
awash in trash. Someone asks David,
our tour rep, ‘Why is every Arab town
we see filled with garbage?’ Another
person wants to know ‘How’d the Arabs
get Nazareth?’ David the rep explains
that Jews never lived in great numbers
in Nazareth; it was always an Arab town,
built up by Arabs for Christian tourists:
‘It’s not like Arabs took it from the
Jews,’ he says. No one appears satisfied
by this ●
Tom Bissell is a contributing editor to
Harper’s Magazine, which published
a longer version of this article in July
2016. He is the author most recently of
Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the
Twelve, Pantheon Books, New York, 2016

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
5
RUSSIA EXPERIMENTS WITH PRIMARY ELECTIONS
Putin’s party holds a popularity contest
There was an unexpectedly high turnout for the May primaries in Russia to choose candidates for the
September election. Democracy, or just another closed deal?
Clémentine Fauconnier | Translated by George Miller
S ERGEI SAVOSTYAN OV / TASS / G ETTY
THE LEADERS of United Russia claimed
surprise at a turnout in the primary election
on 22 May of perhaps 10 million,
nearly 10% of registered voters. Candidates
for the parliamentary election on 18 September
went through a preliminary US-style qualifying
process; many parties in western democracies
have adopted this but it’s unexpected in Russia,
which is associated with electoral fraud and the
assassination of opposition figures and journalists.
So does mass participation in the primaries
mean the party – and the Russian political system
– are democratising?
United Russia, often called ‘Putin’s party’, was
created in December 2001 to support the central
executive against two sources of opposition active
in the previous decade: the Duma, parliament’s
lower chamber, and regional governments. In
his first speech to the federal assembly in July
2000, Vladimir Putin said: ‘The authorities’ indecision
and the weakness of the state will bring
economic and other reforms to nothing. The
authorities must be guided by the law and the
single executive power vertical that is formed in
accordance with it.’ In 2003 United Russia became
the biggest party in the Duma; in 2007 it won
over two-thirds of the seats in the parliamentary
election; in 2011 over half. It also holds a majority
throughout Russia’s regions. Its domination at all
levels ensures a high degree of loyalty from the
legislative authorities through the party’s control
over the recruitment of the largest number of
elected politicians.
United Russia has a paradoxical place in the
political landscape. In Russia’s post-Soviet presidential
system, parliament has had limited room
for manoeuvre since Boris Yeltsin deployed armed
force against it in October 1993.¹ Government
members are appointed by the prime minister
– in turn appointed by the president – and come
from the civil service or big business. Most do
not belong to a political party. The relationship
between Putin and the party created to support
him is close but asymmetrical; Putin has never
been a member, though he served as its chairman
from 2008 until 2012, while he was prime minister
between his two presidential terms.
In his history of the party, pro-United Russia
political scientist Vitaly Ivanov writes: ‘It is a
party whose creation was decided by the leaders
of the state, and it implements their policies,
consolidates the faithful elite, centralises and
synchronises the work of central and regional
political machines, disseminates official ideology
and de facto extends the apparatus of the
state...Journalists and political scientists tend to
confuse the idea of a party of power and a party
of leadership [with reference to the Communist
Party in the USSR] but the difference is critical. A
party of leadership is, at least partly, an autonomous
political agent; the party of power is the
instrument of the powers that be.’²
A virtual party
Besides its lack of political influence, United
Russia also suffers from organisational weakness.
It is not deeply embedded in society and is
sometimes referred to as a virtual party. Officially
it claims two million members (around 1.4% of the
population), but these figures are inflated by collective
membership. Activism is not encouraged.
Since around 2005, United Russia’s leaders have
launched many initiatives aimed at making the
party a real structure. Although Russia’s political
class tends to claim its own particular path of
development, drawing on western party models
is central to its modernisation.
On the ideological level, the party now classes
itself as ‘conservative’. Its representatives invoke
the post-war period, inspired by Samuel Huntington,
the US political scientist who came up with
the ‘clash of civilisations’ concept. They emphasise
the stabilising role of parties with long-term
domination in the political landscape: Germany’s
CDU (Christian Democratic Union), the UNR
(Union for the New Republic) and then the UDR
The primaries
‘
were
less to decide between
contenders than to test
the names likely to win
most votes, and gave
the party a dry run for
the real election
’
(Union for the Defence of the Republic) in France,
and the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) in Japan.
Introducing primaries for candidate selection
– known as praimeriz in Russian, echoing the
English pronunciation – is the second part of this
effort to introduce western standards. They were
first held for the 2007 parliamentary election
and were made compulsory in November 2009
for candidates for the Duma and regional assemblies.
The liberal opposition, which had formed
a ‘Democratic Coalition’, also held primaries on
29 May 2016, but they were chaotic. With France’s
Socialist Party, the idea was initially promoted by
young leaders trying to circumvent party activists
and, through them, party bigwigs. The opposite
was true for United Russia, whose leadership –
working in concert with éminences grises in the
Kremlin – put primaries on the agenda to create
the impression of an open, modern organisation
capable of renewal.
The way the primaries were conducted distinguishes
them sharply from their foreign models,
since the final candidate lists only take partial
account of the results. The 2009 regulations state
that the vote ‘does not constitute a candidate
selection process’. United Russia’s leadership can
add its own names, exclude winners from the list
and even revise the order of the result. Prime minister
and party leader Dmitry Medvedev directly
selected a few candidates, including Putin’s deputy
chief of staff Vyacheslav Volodin, film director
Stanislav Govorukhin (who managed Putin’s 2012
campaign), and the high-profile chief prosecutor
of Crimea, Natalia Poklonskaya.
Candidates discredited
Shortly after the vote, the federal organisation
committee in charge of the primaries removed
around 10 winning candidates from the list, some
for vague reasons. Sergei Neverov, secretary of
the party’s general council, told a meeting of the
committee on 27 May: ‘A certain number of facts
recently brought to light have discredited one
of the candidates in the Kaliningrad region. It
turns out that another in the Ulyanovsk region
is facing charges. In Sverdlovsk there have been
complaints that a candidate abused his official
position.’ Two more were later dropped because
of ‘risks associated with their reputation’.
September’s election will mark a return to a
mixed electoral system: half the parliamentarians
will be elected under a proportional system from
a national list, and half in a constituency-based
first-past-the-post system. In 18 constituencies,
United Russia will not put up any candidates,
despite holding primaries. According to political
scientist Igor Bunin, the government ‘is freeing
up places for fraternal parties which are its allies’³
– the fringe of opposition parties which occupy a
different ideological niche from United Russia, but
remain loyal to Putin in return for parliamentary
representation.
The democratisation apparently signalled
by the primaries seems limited, given the leadership’s
control over the final choice. But the
promise of renewal that has been used to promote
primaries has not always been fulfilled in other
countries. Even when leaders lack the right of veto,
primaries tend to strengthen incumbents, since
political capital accrues to those who already have
some. In 2011 more than 50% of United Russia
incumbents were re-elected, which made the
Duma similar to western democracies, where
on average 70% of parliamentarians retain their
seats at elections.4
But the rules of the political game in Russia
have changed. Incumbents have been exposed,
if not to competition, then at least to increased
external pressure, because the United Russia primaries
have since 2016 been open to any citizen
without a criminal record who is not a member
of another political party. United Russia party
members faced external candidates (43% of the
2,781 in 2016), devaluing both party membership
and the idea of a party channel that recruits and
trains representatives.
The United Russia party applies for registration of
the list of party candidates
‘We bears do not need political wings’
In the 2016 primaries, emphasis was placed on
debate: to have their candidacy approved, participants
had to take part in discussions on subjects
specified by the party’s central or regional authorities,
such as education, health or the fight against
corruption. This may have created expectations
that policy differences would emerge, especially
as for the past decade there have been discussion
clubs intended to represent different sectors
within the party. The liberal-conservatives worry
about the administration’s pressure on business,
while the social-conservatives emphasise social
issues and promote conservative values (family,
religion). But candidates’ support for these ideological
strains was completely passed over. ‘We
bears do not need [political] wings,’ Boris Gryzlov,
then chairman of United Russia, told the party’s
general council in 2005. (The party’s emblem is a
white bear.) He rejected the idea of organising the
sectors into political platforms, claiming it risked
weakening the party.
As a result, online viewing figures for the
primary debates were low. Candidates, standing
behind lecterns before an audience made up entirely
of supporters, had two minutes to set out
their position before taking audience questions.
The tone was polite; candidates applauded each
other. The controlled environment was ill suited
to genuine debate; candidates were not allowed
to tell people not to vote for their opponents, or
to criticise them. Most communications with the
electorate – posters, leaflets and videos – had to
be approved by regional organising committees.
So candidates stood on a strictly individual
basis, which made the primaries like a popularity
contest, with voters able to back several candidates.
The primaries were less to decide between
contenders than to test the names likely to win
most votes, while giving the party a dry run for
the real election.
Political scientist Grigorii Golosov believes that
despite the party’s culture of non-dissent, ‘United
Russia’s primaries are clearly starting to acquire
aspects of a real political competition.’ Russia’s
political heavyweights, less and less exempt from
participation, are playing along. The clashes are
more personal than ideological. In St Petersburg,
the regional assembly parliamentarian Vitaly
Milonov, who introduced a law forbidding ‘the
promotion of non-traditional sexual relations
[homosexuality] to minors’, accused the less
flamboyant but no less influential Yuri Shuvalov,
the Duma’s former press chief, of sending young
people armed with pistols to the count, and of
handing out free food.
Such clashes attracted the press, which reported
complaints of irregularities – 426 on 22 May
alone. Accusations of electoral fraud made by
the opposition against the ruling party during
the 2011 demonstrations are now being echoed
among Putin’s supporters, which the Kremlin’s
communication advisers didn’t anticipate. For
now, no participant – candidate or voter – has
demanded greater transparency in the rules
from the party leadership. And no one has yet
suggested United Russia should hold primaries to
choose its presidential candidate for March 2018 ●
Clémentine Fauconnier teaches at the French
University College and is a research associate at
the Centre for Franco-Russian Studies, both in
Moscow
1 See Jean-Marie Chauvier, ‘Russia’s other October revolution’,
Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 2014
2 Vitaly Ivanov, Putin’s Party: the history of United Russia (in
Russian), Olma Media Group, Moscow, 2008 3 Quoted by
Mikhail Rubin, ‘United Russia offers the opposition a reward’
(in Russian), 29 June 2016, www.rbc.ru 4 Richard E Matland
and Donley T Studlar, ‘Determinants of legislative turnover: a
cross-national analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, vol
34, no 1, Cambridge, January 2004

6 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
EAST AFRICA DRAWN INTO PROXY WAR IN YEMEN
Horn of Africa, pivot of the world
Djibouti is a base for the world’s armies; Ethiopia and Eritrea are in hostile rivalry; and Somaliland
isn’t officially recognised as a state but runs itself competently
Gérard Prunier | Translated by George Miller
ETHIOPIAN ARMY reconnaissance units
crossed into the Tsorona region of Eritrea
shortly before dawn on 12 June, and
encountered Eritrean patrols. Within
minutes, a long stretch of the former frontline in
the war of 1998-2000 erupted into heavy artillery
shelling, tank movement and gunfire. Eritrea condemned
this as an act of aggression by Ethiopia;
Ethiopia maintained an awkward silence, then on
14 June issued a bellicose statement declaring it
was capable of full-scale war against its neighbour.
This threat may seem a disproportionate response
to a border skirmish, common since the
uneasy Algiers agreement signed in 2000 (see
The countries and their wars). But it needs to be
seen in the context of tensions far more serious
than they seem. On 18 June a discreet emergency
meeting was held in Washington at the request of
the Ethiopian government, and three days later
representatives of the armed Ethiopian opposition
met in Geneva. The Ethiopian regime has
marginalised all dissident movements so there
is no civil opposition. The Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) of the
former prime minister and president Meles Zenawi
(who died in 2012) has 472 of the 527 seats in
the House of People’s Representatives. In 2015 and
2016, revolts by the Oromo and Amhara peoples,
who have been left behind economically, were
brutally suppressed.
June’s political and diplomatic activity coincided
with military deployments. Ethiopian soldiers
have been stationed in Djibouti’s Tadjoura region
since 6 June, under an agreement signed with
its president, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, in May. The
head of the Djiboutian army publicly stated that
under this agreement the Ethiopian army could
enter Djiboutian territory without prior consent,
use local military facilities and even intervene in
internal conflicts.
Ethiopia fears Arab enemies
The agreement was hastily concluded after the announcement
of a contract, to develop the port of
Berbera, between the government of Somaliland
and the Dubai Ports World (DP World) company
(the third largest global port operator). After the
1998-2000 war, Ethiopia lost its direct access to
the sea. In Djibouti, Ethiopian forces are squaring
up to Eritrean ones, which have been there since
the border clash of June 2008 between Eritrea and
Djibouti over Cape Doumeira. The armies are separated
by a thin line of Qatari troops, deployed in
June 2010 at the request of both parties. Ethiopian
forces are also present in the Afar region, close to
the Eritrean port of Assab, just when the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) are trying to turn it into a
deep-water naval port opposite Yemen.
The geopolitical situation in the Horn of Africa
is chaotic. Ethiopia has a long-standing fear of
being surrounded by its Arab enemies, who, it
believes, have used Ethiopia’s Eritrean enemies
to gain a foothold on the African continent. This
might seem paranoid, but the long history of
Muslim threats to the former Abyssinian kingdom
makes it understandable. These fears have been
reinforced by Egypt’s fierce opposition to the
construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance
Dam on the Nile.¹
It will take seven years to fill the reservoir with
67bn cubic metres of water, and during this time
the flow of the river will be reduced by 25%. Egypt
has even contemplated destroying the dam, a
measure supported by former president Hosni
Mubarak. While it is impossible to imagine Saudi-Emirati
forces attacking Ethiopia, it is conceivable
that Egypt might threaten Ethiopia’s new base
at Assab – especially with air power – in the name
of Arab solidarity. The idea that attack may be the
best form of defence is gathering support within
the close-knit EPRDF circles who are responsible
for Ethiopia’s security. But Ethiopia – which is
one of the most significant military powers in the
sub-region – would then suffer military retaliation
from the whole Arab coalition, or financial and
diplomatic reprisals.
Djibouti is the weak point in the conflict between
Eritrea and Ethiopia.² Though generally presented
as a haven in a conflict zone, Djibouti has
become a focus of regional ambitions. It still has
a French military base – a colonial legacy, with
2,400 personnel costing France $33m a year. Since
1999 the US has also had 4,000 personnel on the
ground at a cost of $66m, enabling it to launch
drones against targets in Yemen and Somalia.
The Japanese also have a few hundred men here,
plus two ageing Lockheed maritime surveillance
aircraft that they have been using to fight piracy
since 2011; at a cost of $22m, this is the first new
overseas base the Japanese military has had since
the second world war.
The Germans and Spanish don’t have bases
in Djibouti, but do have several dozen soldiers
at Djibouti City’s Kempinski Hotel. And it has
been announced that from the end of this year
there will be a Chinese base at Tadjoura (well
away from westerners) with 5-10,000 troops and
perhaps a Russian aircraft carrier. The undisclosed
annual cost could be between $28m and $94m,
depending on whether the Chinese build a port
and airport; construction is under way. Russia is
also informally exploring establishing a military
presence in Djibouti.
Foreign troops in Djibouti, which is just 23,000
sq km (the size of Slovenia), will soon outnumber
indigenous forces. But is this country really a nation
state? ‘Djibouti is less a country than a commercial
city state controlled by one man, Ismaïl
Omar Guelleh,’ according to a US embassy cable
from 2004 released by WikiLeaks. Guelleh, who
took 87% of the vote in the presidential elections
this April, remains in absolute control. Military
policy is an essential tool in this hereditary principality,
which since 1977 has been controlled by
the Guelleh family and the Mamassan sub-clan of
the Issa clan. Djibouti, like Eritrea and Ethiopia, is
run by an authoritarian regime and is on human
rights organisations’ watchlists.³
Battle over ports
Djibouti is heavily dependent on its port, which
generates 76% of its GDP; 80% of this business
comes from Ethiopia, which has been denied
access to Assab since the 1998-2000 war. Against
this background, the non-recognised state of Somaliland
signed a trade agreement on 8 May with
DP World, which is owned by the government of
the UAE. This put Somaliland’s port of Berbera in
direct competition with Djibouti.
Abderrahman Boreh, Guelleh’s main opponent,
lives in exile in Dubai and has close links with
the UAE. In 2006 he encouraged DP World to do
a deal with Djibouti. In 2013, after Dubai refused
to extradite him, Guelleh rescinded DP World’s
port concession and granted it to a rival company
(the UK’s High Court threw out corruption
charges brought by Djibouti against Boreh over
this affair). Relations were so acrimonious that
diplomatic ties between Djibouti and Dubai were
severed this April.
DP World’s deal with Somaliland over Berbera,
with Boreh pulling the strings, has caused alarm
in Djibouti. Berbera, a former British colonial port,
has long been neglected; it only handles 40,000
containers a year, compared to Djibouti’s 900,000.
But Ethiopia has announced it wants to move 30%
of its traffic there and DP World plans to invest
$442m in it – more than Somaliland’s annual
budget. This explains Guelleh’s hurried visit to
Ethiopia to offer a ‘security accord’ permitting
the Ethiopian army to treat his country like a
conquered state. Ethiopia had already expressed
its desire to ‘consider Ethiopia and Djibouti as
one and the same territory’ in 2014 – a de facto
limitation on Djibouti’s sovereignty.
Guelleh’s worries have been fuelled by Boreh’s
conspicuous manoeuvres. Boreh requested an
official invitation to Somaliland’s 25th anniversary
of independence celebrations on 18 May. This
was refused, ‘as that would have amounted to a
declaration of war on Djibouti’, an official from
Somaliland said. But tensions remain acute, especially
as Boreh belongs to an Issa sub-clan, the
Yonis Moussa, victims of a massacre in central
Djibouti in December 2015. The circumstances
remain unclear and the exact number of deaths
unconfirmed. The Yonis Moussa form 60% of
Djibouti’s army, which has been deployed in the
Mabla Mountains north of the Gulf of Tadjoura,
where it is supposed to be fighting the Afar rebellion
by the Front for the Restoration of Unity
and Democracy (FRUD). Since the December 2015
killings, the army’s desire to fight has evaporated.
Guelleh is trying to cope by rallying support
from the Gadabursi sultan Abubakar Elmi Wabar,
an opponent of the authorities in his native
Somaliland. But Guelleh has a complex network
of alliances, and faces contradictory threats: he
is seeking aid from the Ethiopians – who are
pursuing their DP World deal in Berbera – and he
is dealing with Ethiopia’s Arab enemies, who are
demanding a military base in Djibouti to support
their war effort in Yemen.
Saudi intervention in Yemen
The Yemeni conflict is another element. Only
the 30km of the Bab El-Mandeb (Gate of Tears)
Strait separate Africa from Yemen. And until the
outbreak of civil war, Yemen had been the main
transfer point for refugees, political and economic,
That is not
‘
to say that
Chinese, US, French
and Russian power no
longer exists; but like
Gulliver attacked by
the Lilliputians, the
giants progress less
confidently, hampered
by awkward allies and
half-enemies
’
Refugees arriving by boat at the port of Djibouti
after crossing the Gulf of Aden to flee Yemen, 2015
from the Horn of Africa, heading for Europe. But
in 2011 Yemen was caught up in the Arab Spring.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, its pro-western dictator since
1978, was later ousted. Yemen had already been
contending with the (particularly active) Al-Qaida
in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) as well as a Zaydi
insurrection in Saada and Amran provinces, and
the uprising left the field to these movements.
Zaydi forces (known as Houthis after their original
leader, Hussein al-Houthi, killed in action in
2004) rapidly took the capital Sanaa, where they
joined forces with the deposed Saleh. On 25 March
2015 a Saudi-led coalition of Sunni countries
intervened.4 The (Shia) Houthis were suddenly
marked as an Iranian ‘fifth column’ on the Red
Sea, while Saleh’s successor, Abdu Rabu Mansur
Hadi, was held up – improbably – as a symbol
of democratic renewal. And so Yemen’s African
neighbours were drawn into the Arab maelstrom.
In April 2015, shortly after the Saudi attack, Eritrea’s
president Isaias Afewerki signed a far-reaching
cooperation agreement with the Saudis and
the armed coalition within the framework of the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The Gulf Arabs
then arrived in Assab to build an airport from
which Saudi bombers now take off, and the port
was quickly upgraded. The first (modest) contingents
of Eritrean troops went to the Yemeni
front and the cooperation then extended to the
Sudanese regime of President Omar al-Bashir,
who also sent troops in exchange for significant
Saudi funding. Eritrea also expelled Yemeni opposition
figures.
Such intense political and military activity
has caused anxiety in Ethiopia. Seeing its mortal
enemy, Eritrea, forging a close alliance with Arab
states is alarming – the more so since the US feels
it must make a gesture to the Sunni Arab world
to compensate for its nuclear deal with Shia Iran,
and so is wholeheartedly backing the Saudi-led
coalition. On 8 June, a UN commission of inquiry
found good reasons to believe that ‘crimes of
enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearances,
torture, persecution, rape, murder
and other inhumane acts’ had been committed
in Eritrea since 1991. But with its GCC connection,
Eritrea is benefiting from an unusual degree of
indulgence from the US – while, to please the
GCC, the US has been keeping dubious company
in the region.
In July 2015 the Gulf states and Saudis invited
Somaliland’s president Ahmed Mohamoud
Silanyo. The meeting was a piece of theatre in
which each actor played his role to perfection.
Silanyo was asked for troops and permission to
use the port of Berbera; he didn’t refuse but was
non-committal, and the GCC leaders pretended
not to realise. Honour was preserved.
TON Y KARU MBA / A F P / G ETTY

e
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
7
AGN ÈS STIENNE
Djibouti’s president Guelleh has also behaved
cautiously over Yemen. Guelleh, like his enemy
Silanyo, was non-committal when asked to open
(another) base for the Saudi-led coalition and
to send troops to Yemen. Eventually he granted
permission for Saudi transport planes – but not
war planes – to land. Though both Djibouti and
Somaliland are at loggerheads over the Red Sea
ports, they share the same tacit reservations over
Saudi/Gulf military operations in Yemen.
Status of Somaliland
The final element shaping regional geopolitics
is the question of Somaliland. The country has
existed de facto for 25 years, but remains officially
unrecognised. Consequently it receives almost no
foreign aid and is not a member of any international
organisation. It has a government, an (unarmed)
police force, a (reasonably well equipped)
army and a respected judicial system. It has also
been at peace for 20 years. Unlike its African
neighbours, it functions on incontestably democratic
lines and holds regular, peaceful elections.
This surprising democracy is the successor to
the former protectorate of British Somaliland,5
which claimed independence after the civil war
of 1981-91 that ravaged Somalia following the
fall of Siad Barre. Somaliland, which is governed
cautiously, almost timidly, is threatened by diplomatic
attrition and underdevelopment; it also
suffers from the quarantine imposed by the international
community. But it has succeeded politically.
In contrast, Somalia has sunk into internal
conflicts: in 2006 the Ethiopian army, supported
by the African Union, had to intervene to enable
the Somali transitional federal government to
retake the capital, Mogadishu, from warlords and
the Union of Islamic Courts. Somalia also suffers
from terrorism by the Islamist Al-Shabab militias,
as demonstrated by the deadly attack on a hotel
in the capital on 25 June.
The agreement of 8 June with DP World changed
the picture: Somaliland, already vulnerable, now
finds itself surrounded by a regional conflict. The
effects will be many and potentially destabilising
because the agreement represents an economic
and political threat to Djibouti. It places this fragile
state in the orbit of the UAE and risks upsetting
its internal stability. The port of Berbera, however
sleepy, was the only significant economic anchor
in a very poor country. As part of the fiefdom of
the Issa Moussa branch of the Habr Awal clan of
Issaqs, it fed the local population and provided
the clan with a comfortable income which it now
fears losing. The danger of clan warfare, which
Somaliland has managed to contain for a quarter
of a century, may be reactivated.
Somaliland survived ten years of national and
five years of regional civil war, and 20 of poverty
and international marginalisation. Can it survive
a disproportionate financial surge and diplomatic
and military exposure with parameters it cannot
control? In such a troubled region that question
remains open.
The imperialism of the major powers is in crisis:
it is contested, fought against, interfered with or
SOUTH
SUDAN
SUDAN
Juba
Khartoum
White Nile
Population of major cities
(thousands)
2 800
600
200
Nil
Blue Nile
UGANDA
Agricultural systems
Desert or semi-desert region,
nomadic farming
Subsistence and extensive farming
Cereal and cattle farming
Irrigation farming
Major area affected by
land monopolisation
Port Sudan
Badme
Tigre
GondarG
Amhara
Bahir Dar
Renaissance
Area affected by severe food insecurity
Oromia
Jima
Omo
Gibe III
Nairobi
ERITREA
Addis
Ababa
KENYA
Infrastructure
Airport
Railway
Dams
in service
bypassed by a plurality of ‘mini-imperialisms’
with which it now has to deal. That is not to say
that China, the US, France and Russia are no
longer powerful; but like Gulliver attacked by the
Lilliputians, the giants progress less confidently,
hampered by awkward allies and half-enemies.
Many local troublemakers are showing a level of
determined activity as dangerous as the actions
of the big beasts. Worse, the actions of these local
players have little to fear from public opinion that
is now more concerned about internal questions
than geopolitics.
In the Horn of Africa, the US is in a very awkward
situation. Apart from Eritrea and Sudan
(which would do anything to have economic
sanctions lifted), every state in the region is
officially a ‘friend’. Egypt is doing all it can to
suppress the Muslim Brothers; Ethiopia remains
a faithful ally (though it gazes at China longingly);
Djibouti is acting like a satellite for international
globalised capitalism, ready to welcome the devil
Red
Sea
Asmara
Tsorona
Dese
Nazret
Genale
Petroleum resources
Mekele
Afar
Hodeida
Saada
Amran
Assab
DJIBOUTI
Awash
Dire
Dawa
ETHIOPIA
Jubba
Commercial port
Djibouti
Aden
Hargeisa
Ogaden
Shebelle
under construction
Local opposition to development
projects violently repressed
SAUDI
ARABIA
Taiz
Baidoa
Kismayo
Extraction Exploration Refinery
Sanaa
Marka
Gulf
of Aden
Burao
Berbera
Somaliland
Galkayo
Beletweyne
YEMEN
Laasqoray
SOMALIA
Mogadishu
Military bases
French
Japanese
Boosaaso
Sources of instability
Garowe
Mukalla
Puntland
Indian
Ocean
0 250 km
US
Chinese
Major Ethiopian armed forces concentration
Aerial bombing
Border dispute
Refugees fleeing
violence
if he comes with an IMF endorsement; the Saudis
and Gulf states are sulking but have no alternative
godfather to the US. Somaliland begs for a little
pity. Eritrea is the only dissident, although its
ruined economy and exodus of young people
mean that it ends up begging on the doorstep of
the powerful.
The US is unable to reconcile all these ‘friends’
who make war without its permission, plot against
each other and pursue their own interests, neglecting
the US umbrella (or borrowing it without
authorisation). The Arab coalition received nearly
$10bn of US military supplies to pursue a war for
which the US has no enthusiasm. The GCC has also
alienated Ethiopia by bailing out Eritrea, and has
set all of the US’s clients and allies against each
other, perhaps throwing them into the arms of
China ●
Gérard Prunier is a senior fellow of the Atlantic
Council
ERITREA
Danakil
Desert
Dikhil
ETHIOPIA
Doumera
YEMEN
Bab
El-Mandeb
Strait
Mabla
Mountains
Gulf of
Tadjoura Tadjoura
DJIBOUTI Djibouti
Unrecognised
border
SOMALILAND
Bomb attacks
Refugee settlement
or camp
1 See Habib Ayeb, ‘Egypt no longer owns the Nile’, Le Monde
diplomatique, English edition, August 2013 2 See Jean-Louis
Péninou, ‘Horn of Africa: al-Qaida regroups?’, Le Monde
diplomatique, English edition, December 2001 3 See, for
example, The Pan-African Human Rights Defenders Network,
africandefenders.org 4 See Laurent Bonnefoy, ‘Yemen’s futile
war’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 2016
5 See Robert Wiren, Somaliland, pays en quarantaine (Somaliland:
a country in quarantine), Karthala, Paris, 2014
Map sources: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism; UNHCR;
Amnesty International; ‘Such a brutal crackdown’, Human
Rights Watch, 16 June 2016; Famine Early Warning Systems
Networks, June 2016; Land Matrix; World Population Review;
Africa Oil Corp; Bloomberg
Brothers and enemies
Gérard Prunier
THE Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
(EPLF) fought a war of independence
against Ethiopian government forces
between 1961 and 1991. The struggle
continued through the fall of Haile Selassie’s
Ethiopian empire in 1974 and the seizure of
power by Mengistu Haile Mariam (known as
the ‘Red Negus’ or ‘emperor’) in 1978.
During this long confrontation, the EPLF
developed close military ties with the Tigrayan
People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which was
fighting Mengistu from Tigray province. After
the EPLF-TPLF coalition’s victory in May 1991,
Eritrea’s secession was achieved consensually
in 1993; the EPLF assumed power in Asmara
(Eritrea) and its TPLF allies did so in Addis Ababa.
Both fronts were led by Tigrayan Christians,
which made their alliance seem more natural.
The subsequent tensions have often been
seen as a big brother-little brother quarrel. In
the struggle, the EPLF claimed it was the older
and better run organisation, and also had wide
international support, while TPLF support was
purely regional. Yet despite governing a much
smaller country (6 million compared to Ethiopia’s
94 million), the EPLF did not conceal its
sense of superiority. Though the initial postindependence
period was calm, Eritrea became
vocal in its economic demands: currency parity
with Ethiopia and an end to industrial investment
in Ethiopia’s Tigray province.
Meles Zenawi, the TPLF leader, became Ethiopia’s
president and tried to impress upon his
former allies that, as leader of a large country,
95% of which was non-Tigrayan, he was under
far greater constraints than during the war.
But in May 1998 Eritrea attacked Ethiopia over
territorial claims on tiny parcels of land with no
strategic or economic value. The war, in which
around 70,000 fighters died, cost over $2bn.
The guerrilla fighting of the independence
struggle was followed by a conventional conflict
like the first world war in Europe – trenches,
bloody frontal assaults, heavy artillery bombardments
– all for no real gain. An armistice
was signed in Algiers in June 2000, but no peace
treaty followed. There is still much bitterness
on both sides, with tensions always ready to
boil over into open conflict whenever there are
problems in either camp ●

8 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
WHO GETS WHAT IN A SMALL PATCH OF BLUE
The Baltic is full up
The seas are being divided into development zones like the land, and in the Baltic, different uses
for marine resources are in competition
Nicolas Escach | Translated by Charles Goulden
THE UNIFORM BLUE of maps
does not show the invisible
borders that now divide the
sea. The high seas are not so
much affected, but coastal waters and
continental shelves are exploited more
and more, for fishing, agriculture, industry
or recreation. These vast areas
off our coasts were used for years to
dump household rubbish, chemical
pollutants and other waste. Today they
are reservoirs of natural resources,
exploited for economic gain.
Human marine activity increased
at an unprecedented rate in the later
20th century, with the growth of
maritime trade, offshore exploitation
of hydrocarbons, wide use of
shipping containers, development
of marine aquaculture and offshore
wind farms, then marine power in the
2000s. Besides traditional activities
(fishing, navigation, granulate extraction,
dredging of ports), new developments
include ultra-deep drilling and
soon the extraction of polymetallic
nodules (rocky concretions rich in
minerals such as manganese, silicon
and cobalt). Exclusive economic zones
(EEZs) – coastal belts of up to 200 nautical
miles (370km) – remain under
state jurisdiction, but more and more
exploration and exploitation concessions
are being granted to private enterprises.
Brice Trouillet, a geographer
at the University of Nantes, records
a ‘trivialisation of marine space’. Is
it now necessary to divide the ocean
into zones with different uses, and institutionalise
its development? A 2014
EU directive exhorts member states to
initiate a planning process, to run from
September 2016 to 2021.
Zoning has contradictory effects: it
undermines the tradition of freedom
of the seas defended by the jurist and
philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)
in his Mare Liberum of 1609¹ and facilitates
the gradual appropriation
of strategic space with a high market
value; but it also resolves an intractable
problem.
In 2005 the countries bordering the
Baltic Sea, usually cooperative, clashed
over the proposed route of the Nord
Stream gas pipeline, from Vyborg in
Russia to Greifswald in Germany. It
was to pass close to the Swedish island
of Gotland: to the north was a marine
protected area; to the southeast an
area where second world war and
cold war chemical weapons had been
dumped; and all around the island
were fish farms. Now the protagonists
are applying the lessons from 2005
to Nord Stream 2 – a new pipeline to
be built by a consortium involving
Russia’s Gazprom and five European
enterprises – following a parallel route.
Maritime spatial planning is a useful
tool, given the increased complexity
of development projects.
Laura Melne, communication manager
for the intergovernmental cooperation
network Vision and Strategies
Around the Baltic Sea (Vasab), says Nord
Stream was a founding moment. ‘We
had to agree on the route. We were also
facing the prospect of new wind farms
being built in the Baltic, which meant
we had to work together to anticipate
future conflicts of use.’ Zoning aims
to optimise the use of space – just like
development planning on land – by
dividing it into roughly defined zones
and assigning them specific qualities
(types of activity, regulations, prescriptions).
Maritime spatial planning
differentiates and sometimes separates
uses, which leads to specialisation to
avoid incompatibilities and conflicts.
Nearing capacity
There’s a shortage of space in the Baltic.
The sea is almost completely enclosed,
measures only 450,000 sq km (a sixth
of the size of the Mediterranean) and
is bordered by nine countries, including
Germany and Russia,² the world’s
fourth and tenth largest economies
in 2015. The Baltic is nearing capacity:
it carries 8% of the world’s maritime
trade and is crowded, especially in the
Danish straits, with car ferries, container
vessels, cruise ships, fishing boats,
and wind farms; below the surface are
submarine cables, pipelines, wrecks
and wind turbine masts. Lithuania’s
EEZ, one of the world’s smallest at
7,031 sq km, is severely restricted in
its development potential: there are
Natura 2000 protected areas along
the coast, the Curonian Spit (listed as a
world heritage site by Unesco) and the
ecosystems of its lagoon to the south,
two military zones with restricted
access at its centre, and a dangerous
chemical munitions dumping site to
the west (see map).
The Klaipėda port authority plans
to extend its deepwater port by 2018,³
which will mean more dredging and
new landfill sites close to the coast.
Lithuania has decided to raise the
proportion of its energy needs met by
renewables to at least 20% by 2025, and
plans to build two wind farms with an
output of 800 megawatts (two-thirds
of the output of a reactor at its planned
nuclear power plant Visaginas 1). A map
of the EEZ makes it possible to identify
potential investment zones, attract
investors, avoid disputes and limit
economic and environmental risks.
Between 2007 and 2013, trial projects
co-financed by the EU were launched
in eight pilot planning zones, some
covering part or all of a state’s EEZ
(Lithuania and Latvia), others at the
‘
Planning ensures
the legal security
of investors in
the blue economy.
They need transparency,
efficiency
predictability and
stability
Karmenu Vella
’
intersection of national jurisdictions
(Bay of Pomerania). These experiments
are a response as much to geopolitical
ambitions as to a will to further economic
development. Karmenu Vella,
EU commissioner for the environment,
maritime affairs and fisheries, says:
‘Coherent planning ensures the legal
security of investors in the blue economy.
They need transparency, efficiency,
predictability and stability.’
The target sectors are the cruise
industry, wind power, short-haul
transport, aquaculture and blue biotechnology.4
Brussels suggests there
could be benefits of €500m to €3.2bn
for European economies, in reduced
transaction costs and increased investment
in aquaculture and wind power
(which provides 58,000 jobs today; the
European Commission hopes this will
rise to 200,000 by 2020 and 300,000
by 2030). Representatives of pressure
groups such as Ocean Energy Europe
and the European Wind Energy Association
(now WindEurope) played a large
part in the drafting of the directive on
maritime spatial planning.
The Baltic, shallow and almost entirely
enclosed, is highly sensitive to
pollution. Will zoning promote the
creation of sanctuaries to protect maritime
space, even if that means abandoning
the rest to intensive exploitation?
The first pilot projects show that
the most restrictive level of zoning is
rarely implemented, even to protect the
environment. In the Bay of Pomerania,
some zones are exclusively dedicated
to wind energy, but it is prohibited
everywhere else. Fishing, tourism, sand
and gravel extraction, and conservation
under Natura 2000 regulations,
have reserved zones in which they
do not have absolute priority, but are
given ‘particular attention’ over other
uses. Only national parks are classed
as priority areas, and activities that
clash with conservation objectives are
prohibited.
Blue charity business
A 2012 report on the blue charity business5
provoked a major controversy
over private foundations (such as the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation)
concerned with environmental issues,
being involved in research on maritime
spatial planning, notably for Unesco.
According to the report’s authors, who
have examined the boards of these
foundations in detail, ‘it is reasonable
to assume that [private foundations]
supporting environmental non-governmental
organisations today are not
completely neutral regarding offshore
oil interests, or the supply of rare earth
metals to high-tech industries.’ They
note that foundations tend to focus
their criticisms on over-fishing and
are more ambiguous about offshore
hydrocarbon exploitation. Activities
not easily limited to a particular area,
or involving areas with fluctuating
limits, such as fishing, lose out in this
kind of grid-drawing exercise, despite
their critical importance to coastal
populations.
This detachment may perhaps be
explained by the cold, machine-guided
economic rationalism that determines
the choice of zones. Algorithms generated
by a computer program (Marxan)
are supposed to determine the best site
for a wind farm or an oilfield, on the basis
of initial infrastructure costs, return
on investment (factoring in wind speed
and frequency, distance from existing
cable networks) and risks of conflict
(with bird and mammal migrations, or
tourist activities). Various scenarios are
put forward after all the factors have
been taken into account. Brice Trouillet
says: ‘The political aspect is ignored.
What is the purpose of planning? Is the
idea that the sea should be productive?
Implementing concrete measures
without a real overall strategy is tricky.’
As on land, spatial planning at sea is
not free from territorial egoism. Planning
for the Bay of Pomerania reveals
countries are out of step. The German
state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania,
a popular tourist destination (tourism
generates 11% of its GDP), has already
drawn up a plan for its territorial waters
(12 nautical miles, just over 22km) with
very stringent limits on the building
of wind farms, which must be at least
15km offshore. These measures would
force other states to accept, within the
joint planning framework, the creation
of a number of wind farms outside
German territorial waters. Several generations
of plans and legislative levels
are superimposed. ‘The problem is that
every country is at a different stage
in the planning process,’ says Melne,
referring to an EU project she is leading
within the Vasab network. ‘So while
some have already approved plans,
others are only beginning their initial
studies, which makes cooperation at
regional level very difficult.’
The aim of maritime spatial planning
is to create a map of the entire Baltic,
but this could revive boundary disputes:
at sea, the limits of sovereignty
are sometimes still vague. Parts of the
Bay of Pomerania planning zone, bordered
by Germany, Denmark, Sweden
and Poland, are disputed by Poland
and Denmark (the waters south of the
island of Bornholm) and by Germany
and Poland (the northern approach to
the ports of Świnoujście and Szczecin).
Another problem is the presence of
Russia in the Gulf of Finland and the
Kaliningrad enclave. Russia, not part
of the EU, is regularly accused of incursions
into its neighbours’ territorial
waters.
The 2014 directive, which EU member
states still have to write into their own
legislation, does not specify how it
should be applied, or the geographic
area to which it applies. In France, it
may conflict with prior EU and national
injunctions, leading to greater
complexity or even imposing the traditional
territorial layer cake (France’s
many levels of local government: regions,
departments, arrondissements,
cantons, communes) on the sea. But
the difference between land and sea is
clear: the law of the sea is still evolving,
and many legal ambiguities persist,
making it easier to defend rights acquired
and conquer further rights ●
Nicolas Escach is a geographer
1 Republished by CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2012 2 The others are Denmark,
Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland
and Sweden 3 Either at the Melnragė site, or at
Būtingė 4 Exploitation of marine organisms (algae,
microalgae) 5 Yan Giron with Alain Le Sann
and Philippe Favrelière, ‘Blue Charity Business’,
October 2012
DAV ID H E CKER / G ETTY

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
9
BAY
OF BOTHNIA
The Baltic’s crowded waters
The Baltic Sea is narrow, shallow, bordered by many countries and situated at a
crossroads of major geopolitical and trade interests. Besides maritime transport
routes used since the time of the Hanseatic League, it is cluttered with hydrocarbon
extraction sites, gas pipelines, fishing zones, military exercise zones and
marine protected areas. Exclusive economic zones (EEZs) cannot be delimited on
a purely geographic basis. Especially in the Bay of Pomerania, the idea of maritime
spatial planning based on human activities is taking shape.
Vaasa
GULF
OF
Oslo
Gävle
BOTHNIA
Åland
Rauma
260
Turku
FINLAND
Helsinki
430
Kotka
555
GULF OF
FINLAND
Vyborg
Ust-Luga
St Petersburg
1 715
RUSSIA
Lake
Ladoga
Nev a
NORWAY
Stockholm
Hiiumaa
Tallinn
ESTONIA
Pärnu
RD
SKAGERR AK
Frederikshavn
DENMARK
Aarhus
440
Kiel
Göta
Göteborg
820
SWEDEN
KATTEGAT
Karlskrona
Helsingborg
Copenhagen
Malmö
Zealand
Bornholm
Rügen
Öland
Bornholm
Basin
Gotland
BALTIC SEA
Gdynia
695
Gdańsk
1 090
Gotland
Deep
Curonian
Lagoon
Kaliningrad
Saaremaa
GULF
OF RIGA
Ventspils
Klaipėda
390
LATVIA
RUSSIA
LITHUANIA
Nemunas
Riga
390
Daugava
Vilnius
Vistula
Lübeck
GERMANY
Rostock
Greifswald
Szczecin
POLAND
N I COLAS ESCAC H AN D C É C ILE MARIN
0
Boundaries and tensions
Navigation
Energy
Wind farm
in operation, 2015
100 200 km
Territorial waters
Limit of exclusive
economic zone
Disputed limit (see inset map)
Major maritime traffic route
Intensive fishing zone
under construction or planned
Gas pipeline
Nord Stream
Nord Stream 2 (planned)
Oil rig
390
Naval bases
Oder
Exercise Baltops zone 2016 1
Suspected incursion
by Russian submarines since 2011
10 largest container ports in 2015;
size in thousands of TEU (20-foot equivalent units)
Environmental issues
Second world war chemical weapons dumping zone
Sand and gravel extraction sites
Nitrate & phosphate pollution levels of major tributaries
low medium high
Marine protected area
1 Annual NATO military exercise (in conjunction with Sweden and Finland)
Sources: Helsinki Commission (Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, helcom.org);
‘BaltSeaPlan Report 9’, The Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme, 2012; Marine Conservation Institute
(mpatlas.org); MarineTraffic, 2016; Actia Forum, ‘Port Monitor’ reports; Nord Stream AG, 2016
Copenhagen
Zealand
DENMARK
Rostock
Malmö
Trelleborg
Greifswald
GERMANY
0 50
Rügen
SWEDEN
Arkona
Basin
Ystad
100 km
Świnoujście
Bornholm
(Denmark)
Rønne
Szczecin
Area
claimed
by Denmark
and Poland
Oder
Bank
Northern approach corridor
to ports of Świnoujście and Szcecin
disputed by Germany and Poland
Oder
Bay of
Pomerania-Arkona
Basin pilot zone
POLAND

10 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
WE’VE GOT A PLATFORM, WHAT DO WE SHOW ON IT?
Convergence beats content
The French are experimenting with adding newspaper content as a consumer bonus to TV, Internet
and phone services in telecoms packages. It doesn’t offer much to the media
Marie Bénilde | Translated by Charles Goulden
COULD THE FUTURE of newspapers
be as part of a package
with telecoms services?
In France, the acquisition by
telecoms provider SFR (owned by Patrick
Drahi) of Libération, L’Express,
L’Expansion, Lire and L’Etudiant and
a 49% stake in TV channels BFMTV
and RMC this year has revived an idea
fashionable in the early 2000s, when
Jean-Marie Messier was head of Vivendi
Universal – convergence between telecoms
and media. The SFR Presse app
offers free newspaper content to SFR’s
18 million subscribers. So will print
media, with a dwindling readership and
being bought up by advertisers, depend
on distributors trying to retain existing
customers or attract new ones?
By June, three million SFR subscribers
had downloaded the app (which
now also covers Le Journal du dimanche,
Le Parisien and Midi libre). It could
be just a corporate tax dodge. On the
monthly statement, the papers are
priced at €19.90 – around two-thirds of
the standard package, which includes
telephone, Internet and television.
This allows SFR to charge customers
value added tax at the special print
media rate (2.1% rather than the usual
20%) on two-thirds of their bill, saving
millions a year.
But convergence makes media heavily
dependent on telecoms operators.
SFR offers its media deal to retain
customers: print media editors betray
the interests of their readers to target
an audience that will attract advertising,
but get only a few cents per copy
downloaded.
There is talk of SFR, Altice Média and
NextRadioTV (which owns BFMTV and
RMC) merging advertising sales functions
to increase their weight relative to
Google and Facebook, which command
two-thirds of France’s digital advertising.
According to CEO Michel Combes,
‘SFR decided to expand into media not
just to differentiate itself, but to regain
some of the advertising captured by
GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon].’¹
Access to subscribers’ data
allows SFR to personalise advertising.
Alain Weill, CEO of NextRadioTV and
SFR Média, recently made a statement
highly revealing of the priorities of
modern journalism: ‘If we know people
have a dog, they’ll see ads for Canigou
on their screens; if they have a cat,
they’ll get ads for Ronron.’²
Drahi has an option until 2019 to
buy 100% of NextRadioTV’s share
capital. He would then be breaking
the anti-concentration rule of the 1986
communications law, which makes it
illegal to own national media in more
than two of the three categories of
television, radio and print media. If he
goes ahead, SFR will control one daily
(Libération), one weekly (L’Express), two
television channels (BFMTV and RMC
Découverte) and two radio stations
(RMC and BFM Business). It also owns
sports channels and the pro-Israel
television channel i24news.
An imported idea
Combes believes convergence is a his -
torical trend. In the UK, BT (British
Telecom) has acquired football championship
broadcasting rights and broadcasts
its own sports channels over its
networks, while Rupert Murdoch’s Sky
group offers superfast broadband. In
the US, Comcast Cable has just acquired
DreamWorks Animation, co-founded
by Steven Spielberg, having bought
NBC Universal in 2011; telecoms operator
AT&T has acquired satellite operator
DirecTV; and Verizon has absorbed
AOL and Yahoo. Jeff Bezos, founder of
Amazon, bought the Washington Post
for $250m in 2013, and now includes
a subscription (free for the first six
months, $3.99 a month thereafter) in
the Prime membership programme,
which has 50 million subscribers.
Washington Post president Steve
Hills said: ‘Offering free access to new
subscribers through Prime allows us
to connect with millions of members
nationwide who may not have tried
the Post in the past’. In 2014 Amazon
developed a free Washington Post app
for the Kindle Fire. The paper’s digital
readership grew by 63% in a year, to
more than 70 million unique visitors
a month, topping the New York Times.
Bezos recruited nearly 80 digital developers.
Buying the Washington Post
gave him a means to influence the US
federal government when antitrust
and tax authorities were investigating
Amazon for monopolistic practices
and tax avoidance. In December 2015
the Chinese online commerce giant
Alibaba secured the goodwill of Xi
Jinping’s regime by acquiring Hong
Kong’s English-language daily South
China Morning Post.
Drahi told the French National Assembly’s
economic affairs committee
in 2015 there was ‘no major convergence
between print media and mobile
phones’. The owner of SFR and Numéricable
in France, HOT Telecom in Israel,
Portugal Telecom, and Suddenlink
Communications in the US said he took
a stake in Libération at the request of
a journalist, investing €14m, around
‘a thousandth’ of what he had put into
SFR, to save the paper. In reality, he was
asked to do so by President François
Hollande.
No one is
‘
asking
about the political
influence that
comes with the
control of major
news channels in
an industry tightly
regulated by the
state
Drahi was a telecoms magnate, but
also a Swiss resident whose personal
financial participation was located in
Guernsey: Arnaud Montebourg, as
minister for production recovery, said
he had ‘fiscal questions’ for him.³ Drahi
realised it was clever to rescue a paper
with close ties to the government when
preparing to consolidate telecoms
in France under the eye of historical
operator Orange, in which the state
has a 23% stake. Private operators are
keen to dissuade the government from
imposing troublesome regulations
that might, for example, require them
to ensure broadband coverage in less
profitable areas to prevent a digital
divide.
American dream
’
Drahi was not eager for convergence
right away. But the announcement
of SFR’s planned acquisition of NextRadioTV
and, in September 2015, of
Cablevision, which distributes the
News 12 channel and regional daily
Newsday in New York, began the channel-meets-content
romance. Combes
says: ‘Owning media allows telecoms
operators to differentiate and make
themselves more attractive. In return,
the media benefit from the operators’
strength in distribution, can accelerate
their digital development and, thanks
to the data that subscribers provide, are
able to offer them a made to measure
service’.4 This cannot mask the reality
of technocapitalism – the pursuit of
mergers and acquisitions in order to
grow and enhance debt capacity.
In Drahi’s case, this means raising
loans that will be repaid from the profits
made by the enterprises he acquires.
His creditors, especially banks such
as BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs,
are well aware of the influence of this
major high-risk client (Drahi borrows
at 7%). In June 2015, just before BFM
Business’s partial acquisition by SFR
was announced, its website headlined
‘Patrick Drahi’s insane €40bn debt’.
Drahi has cut jobs in his press division,
managed assets aggressively and
made economies of scale; in July SFR
announced it was cutting 5,000 jobs.
SFR’s absorption of television channels,
radio stations and newspapers
compensates for the loss of a million
subscribers, and has allowed Altice to
pay itself €980m.
This strategy is shunned by operators
who have burnt their fingers,
like Orange. Its CEO Stéphane Richard
reversed the policy of his predecessor,
who had paid €200m a year for a share
of broadcasting rights to the French
football championship for 2008-12, and
was trying to compete with Canal Plus
by financing films. In 2009 the competition
authority banned Orange from
making its sport, cinema and series
channels exclusive to its own subscribers.
Orange still invests €550m a year
in content, by producing around 20
films and distributing television series.
The Iliad (Free) group, founded by
Xavier Niel, co-owner of the Le Monde
group and L’Obs, has always disputed
the benefits of linking media and channels,
except if subscribers get access
to exclusive content. But exclusivity
can expose operators to regulators, as
when the French competition authority
denied Canal Plus the right to exclusive
distribution of Qatar’s beIN Sports
channel. The Telefónica group, which
wanted similar exclusivity for content
from audiovisual group Mediapro,
recently faced a ban in Spain.
Does journalism add value?
So Free prefers partnership agreements
that include content, and counts on its
position in the media to ensure coverage
of subjects it holds dear, such as
the blocking of YouTube ads in protest
against the extra bandwidth cost to
telecoms operators. ‘The question you
then have to ask is whether journalism
adds value, or not,’ Niel said in 2014.5
The other question – which no one is
asking – is about the political influence
that comes with control of major news
channels in an industry tightly regulated
by the state.
The Bouygues group has not really
used the content of TF1 to strengthen
its subsidiary Bouygues Telecom. But
its strength in television helps it to
maintain links with politicians and
exert an indirect influence on telecoms
legislation. The Bolloré group, which
has taken over Vivendi (Canal Plus, Dailymotion,
Universal Music) and signed
an agreement to acquire Mediaset’s
pay-TV channels in Italy, has become
the operator of Telecom Italia, with a
24.9% stake, and a very small minority
shareholder in Spain’s Telefónica. But
the complexity of national regulations
prevents Bolloré from broadcasting the
same content on channels subject to
different local authorities. So it’s more
to promote partnership agreements
for the distribution of its Canal Plus
and Universal content that Vivendi
continues to acquire stakes in telecoms
companies after disengaging from SFR
and Brazil’s GVT.
Vincent Bolloré feels the synergies
are still limited – even if he encourages
them between Vivendi, Canal Plus,
Dailymotion and Universal. Former
Vivendi CEO Messier also sees the
limits: ‘The debate on convergence is
a little outdated since the emergence
of the social media. The most important
aspect of convergence is that it
offers ubiquity. What is still true is the
“whatever, wherever and whenever I
want” part.’
So it’s less important to be able to
broadcast your own content on your
own channels than it is to respond to
demand from mobile devices that allow
users to watch videos and read newspapers
wherever and whenever they like.
What about quality of content? That’s
not the issue ●
Marie Bénilde is a journalist and the
author of On achète bien les cerveaux,
Raisons d’Agir, Paris, 2007
1 Le Figaro, Paris, 1 June 2016 2 Press conference,
27 April 2016 3 Europe 1, 14 March 2014 4 ‘SFR
lance la convergence’ (SFR launches convergence),
July 2016, communication.sfr.com 5 Polka, Paris,
February 2014
DAV ID RAMOS / G ETTY

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
11
SOCIALISE OUR ‘DIGITAL LABOR’
No such thing as free data
How do the world’s suppliers of online data – anybody using a smartphone – get to share in the
wealth they generate?
Pierre Rimbert | Translated by Charles Goulden
E DWARD B ERTHELOT / G ETTY
GLOBAL SALES of smartphones reached
1,424m units in 2015 – 200m more than
in 2014. In effect nearly a third of mankind
has a pocket computer, and we are
so accustomed to these convenient gadgets that
we easily forget the bargain they force on us, on
which the entire digital economy is based: Silicon
Valley companies give us apps in exchange for
our personal data. These companies brazenly
collect location, online activity, contacts and
other information,¹ which they analyse and sell
to advertisers, who are delighted to be able to
‘deliver the right messages to the right people in
the places and moments that perform best’, as a
Facebook ad platform proudly proclaims.
Though controversy over surveillance has been
growing since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations,
the collection of data for commercial purposes
is not generally seen as a political issue, relating
to communal choice, and therefore a matter for
collective debate. It arouses little concern outside
specialist organisations, perhaps because few
know about it.
There’s a saying from the 1970s: ‘If you’re not
paying for the product, you are the product.’ In
that decade US economist Dallas Smythe realised
that anyone slumped in front of a screen is
working unknowingly. Television, he said, creates
a product – the audience, the attention of viewers
– which TV channels sell to advertisers: ‘You
audience members contribute your unpaid work
time and in exchange you receive the programme
material and the explicit advertisements.’² The
unpaid work of Internet users is more active.
On social networks, we convert our friendships,
emotions, desires and anger into data exploitable
by algorithms. Every item of information on our
profile, every like, tweet, search or click adds to the
usable information held by Amazon, Google and
Facebook on servers around the world.
The unpaid work of converting the world
into data is termed ‘digital labor’. Silicon Valley
prospers from this original online sin. In 1867
Marx wrote in Capital: ‘What does the primitive
accumulation of capital, ie, its historical genesis,
resolve itself into?...the expropriation of the
immediate producers.’ Capital used ‘conquest,
enslavement, robbery, murder...force’, to enclose
common land, put starving peasants to work for
a wage, and colonise the South. Today it also uses
‘lolcat’ videos. Economic historians may credit
the casually dressed bosses of Silicon Valley with
the creation of a world-group of cheerfully dispossessed
labourers, willing co-producers of the
services they consume. Google’s $75bn revenues
in 2015, mostly from advertising, indicate the scale
of shameless accumulation through dispossession.
When Facebook published its 2016 second
quarter earnings, Re/Code amusedly reported that
the social network, with its 1.71bn monthly active
users, was ‘making more money on each person
[than ever before], $3.82 per user.’³
Stolen not given
Data (from the Latin for given) is the least appropriate
name for something that is in fact stolen.
The involuntary work done by Internet users may
be the subject of brilliant studies by academics,4
but the political and trade union left have not yet
incorporated this concept into their analysis, still
less their demands. Yet material and immaterial
exploitation are closely intertwined. Digital labor
is a link in the chain that shackles the miners of
Kivu, forced to extract the coltan used in making
smartphones, the workers at Foxconn in China
who assemble them, and the Uber taxi drivers, Deliveroo
couriers and Amazon warehouse workers
whose work is ruled by algorithms.5
Who produces data? Who controls it? How is
the wealth derived from it shared out? What other
economic models could there be? Making these
questions political issues is all the more urgent
because the proliferation of web-connected objects
(Internet of things) and the installation of
sensors on industrial production and logistics
lines increases the flow of information every day.
Ford’s CEO Mark Field boasted in 2015 that ‘today’s
cars produce a massive amount of data – upwards
of 25GB of information per hour’ (about two seasons
of Game of Thrones). From journeys made
to driving parameters, musical preferences and
weather forecasts, everything is transmitted to the
carmaker’s servers. Consultants already suggest
drivers might negotiate a discount.6
Some highly organised groups, conscious of
the need to protect their interests, have made
combating this theft of data a political priority.
These include big farmers in the US. Agricultural
machines fitted with data capture devices have
been harvesting information that makes it
possible to finetune sowing, soil treatment and
watering to the nearest metre. In 2014 seed and
chemical company Monsanto and tractor maker
John Deere both suggested to farmers in the
Midwest that they should transmit parameters
directly to the companies’ servers for processing.
Mary Kay Thatcher, the American Farm Bureau’s
senior director for congressional relations,
is wary. In the educational video Who owns my
data?, she says: ‘Farmers need to know who
controls their data, who can access it, whether
the aggregated or individual data can be shared
or sold.’ She is concerned that data captured by
multinationals will fall into the hands of speculators
who will use it to manipulate the market.
‘They only have to know the information about
what is actually happening with harvests minutes
before somebody else knows it.’7 Organisation
has paid off: in March, agricultural technology
providers and farmers’ representatives agreed
‘privacy and security principles for farm data’. In
July the Agricultural Data Coalition set up a server
farm for joint information storage.
We will all be (micro) shopkeepers
Ideas like these have not yet occurred to EU
leaders. In October 2015 complaints filed by an
Austrian student against Facebook for violation of
privacy led to the invalidation of the 20-year-old
Safe Harbour agreement, which had permitted the
transfer of data to US enterprises. The EU could
have forced the web giants to store Europeans’
personal data in Europe, but instead this year
signed a new framework agreement for automatic
transfers, with the Orwellian name Privacy Shield,
in exchange for a pledge from the US Director
of National Intelligence that there would be no
‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’. Now you
only have to switch on your mobile phone to
be involved, unknowingly, in an import-export
business. Though the struggle against the TTIP
agreement has attracted millions of supporters,
the reaffirmation of electronic free trade has
elicited no particular reaction.
The mobilisation in these areas, and its scale,
will result in three possible futures for digital
labor. In the first, users broker their own data.
Computer scientist Jaron Lanier proposes that if
‘something a person says or does contributes even
minutely to a database...then a nanopayment,
proportional both to the degree of contribution
and the resultant value, will be due to the person.
These nanopayments will add up, and lead
to a new social contract.’8 We will all be (micro)
shopkeepers.
In the second, the state takes back control.
With the intensification of austerity since the
beginning of the decade, popular anger has
grown over tax evasion by high-tech companies.
Alongside the European Commission’s antitrust
investigation of Google, and fraud investigations
by national authorities, the idea has emerged in
France of taxing high-tech enterprises on the
value generated by personal data. In their report
on tax in the digital sector, senior French civil
servants Nicolas Colin and Pierre Collin urge that
France should ‘recover the power to tax profits
derived from “unpaid work” by Internet users
located within French territory.’9
Sociologist Antonio Casilli proposes that such a
tax should fund an unconditional basic income,¹0
as an instrument of emancipation and to provide
some compensation for digital labor. This is one
way of turning personal data into a progressive
political issue. So there may be a third way, based
not on commodification but on socialisation.
In transport, health and energy, personal data
has until now been used only to implement
austerity by cutting costs. It could just as well
help to improve urban traffic flow, the healthcare
system, energy resource allocation, or education.
Rather than being transferred, by default, to the
US, it could be compulsorily transferred to an
international data agency under the supervision
of Unesco (United Nations Organisation for Education,
Science and Culture). Rights of access and
use could be differentiated: automatic for the individual
concerned; free, but anonymised, for local
government, research or public statistics organisations;
possible for organisers of non-commercial
public interest projects. For private entities,
access would be conditional and fees charged:
priority would be given to the common good,
rather than commerce. A related proposal was set
out in France in 2015, with a view to reclaiming
sovereignty. An international agency would have
the advantage of bringing together, under strict
standards, countries sensitive to privacy issues
that wish to challenge US hegemony.
The popularisation of shared ownership and
use of data is hampered by a technical inferiority
complex which combines perceptions that ‘it’s too
complicated’ and that ‘there’s nothing we can do
about it’. But, despite its complexity and jargon,
the digital domain is not distinct from the rest of
society, nor can it be separated from politics. The
critic Evgeny Morozov writes: ‘While many of the
creators of the Internet bemoan how low their
creature has fallen, their anger is misdirected.
There’s a saying from
the 1970s: ‘If you’re
not paying for the
product, you are the
product’
The fault is not with that amorphous entity but,
first of all, with the absence of robust technology
policy on the left – a policy that can counter the
pro-innovation, pro-disruption, pro-privatisation
agenda of Silicon Valley.’¹¹
The question is not whether there will be a
confrontation over control of digital resources,
but whether progressive forces will take part in
it. Pressure for the popular reappropriation of
online communications, the emancipation of
digital labor, and shared ownership and use of
data is a logical extension of a 200-year struggle.
They counter the fatalistic belief in a future dominated
by the surveillance state and the predatory
market ●
Pierre Rimbert is a member of Le Monde diplomatique’s
editorial team
1 Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: the Hidden Battles to Collect
Your Data and Control Your World, W W Norton & Company,
New York, 2015 2 Dallas W Smythe, ‘On the Audience
Commodity and its Work’, in Dependency Road: Communications,
Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada, Ablex, Norwood,
1981 3 Kurt Wagner, ‘You’re more valuable to Facebook than
ever before’, Re/Code, 27 July 2016 4 See online magazine
TripleC, www.triple-c.at 5 Trebor Scholz (ed), Digital Labor: the
Internet as Playground and Factory, Routledge, New York, 2013
6 Chuck Tannert, ‘Could your personal data subsidise the
cost of a new car?’, The Drive.com, 18 July 2016 7 Dan Charles,
‘Should farmers give John Deere and Monsanto their data?’,
22 January 2014, www.npr.org 8 Jaron Lanier, Who Owns
the Future?, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2013 9 Nicolas
Colin and Pierre Collin, Mission d’expertise sur la fiscalité de
l’économie numérique (Expert report on tax payment in the
digital economy), La Documentation Française, Paris, 2013
10 See Mona Chollet, ‘How much is just enough?’, Le Monde
diplomatique, English edition, August 2016 11 Evgeny Morozov,
‘The rise of data and the death of politics’, The Observer,
London, 20 July 2014

12 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
CHALLENGE TO EUROPE’S OLDEST ISLAM
The Balkan Muslims
Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are caught between the old socialist-backed form of their religion
and a new international version
Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin | Translated by George Miller
HUNGARY’S prime minister Viktor Orbán
said last October that ‘Islam has
nothing to do with Europe. It is a set
of rules created for a different world,
and Islam has been imported into our continent.’
This provoked a sharp response from the leader of
Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim community, Grand
Mufti Husein Kavazović, who reminded Orbán
that Judaism and Christianity also originated
outside Europe.
Muslim leaders in the Balkans are often keen
to emphasise Islam’s long history in their region
and distinguish their communities from those in
the West. This concern about rootedness is like
the claims of indigenousness made by strains
of Balkan nationalism, which assert that the
people with the longest history of settlement in
a territory have the most legitimate rights. But
the assertion is also a reaction to Islamophobia,
which presents Islam as an alien phenomenon.
The assertion also reflects the sense that Islam
in the Balkans is culturally different from its
Arab, African and Asian counterparts, and more
compatible with a notional European identity.
The long history of Islam in Europe dates back
to the eighth century. Islam reached the Balkans
with the Ottoman conquest, having been established
in Iberia (in the period of Al-Andalus,
711–1492) and in the Emirate of Sicily (948-1091).
Some accounts claim that even before Turkish
troops crossed the river Evros in Thrace (1371),
dervishes¹ made converts among the local, partly
Christianised, Balkan population, who had been
receptive to heresies such as Bogomilism.² But
only when Ottoman administrative structures
were established in the 15th century did conversion
begin in earnest. The Ottoman empire
never made conversion compulsory, but it did
offer incentives, notably financial: non-Muslims
had to pay additional taxes to get the sultan’s
protection. They also had restricted property
rights and were excluded from certain military
and civil leadership roles.
Conversions spread rapidly through Bosnia-Herzegovina.
From the 16th century, they
included many of the elite, a phenomenon some
historians explain with reference to the Bosnian
Church, whose ‘heretical’ tendencies were comparable
to those of the Bogomils and the Cathars. By
emphasising the traces left by Bogomilism, Bosnian
historiography has attempted to domesticate
Islam, attributing conversion less to outside forces
and more to national particularity. But the true
relationship is hard to assess. The speed of conversion
was due mainly to the weakness of Catholic
and Orthodox church structures.³ Islam found a
foothold most readily in regions historically contested
between eastern and western Christianity
– in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro – along
the fault that divided the Roman empire in 395.
Albanians pretended to be Muslims
In the Albanian world, conversion was slow.
In some Kosovan villages, Albanians publicly
claimed to be Muslims while secretly practising
Christianity. The men, who were entitled to own
and inherit property, were Muslim while the
women were Christian and taught their children
the rudiments of that faith. In the Viti/Kosovska
Vitina region, the religious tolerance proclaimed
in the Edict of Gülhane (1839), the Ottoman empire’s
first such reform, had tragic unintended
consequences: villagers previously considered
Muslim believed they could openly profess their
Catholic faith, but this was treated as apostasy and
immediately repressed. The inhabitants of the
villages of Binac/Binçë and Stubla were deported
to Anatolia.4 This strange syncretism sheds light
on the complexity of Kosovo’s identity, at least
until the 19th century.
The Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian Orthodox
churches were solidly structured and recognised
by the Ottoman empire as the heads of
millets (non-Muslim religious minority communities
legally protected by the sultan). In 1219 the
Byzantine patriarch granted St Sava, son of the
Serbian prince Stefan Nemanja, recognition of
an autonomous Serbian church. In 1557, after the
Ottoman conquest, Patriarch Makarije restored
autonomy to the church. Makarije was a brother
or cousin of the grand vizier Mehmed Paša
Sokolović, a Muslim convert, and came from an
aristocratic Bosno-Serbian family. Millets provided
a framework for the development of modern
nations in the 18th and 19th centuries, which
explains why each Orthodox church has its own
national character.
Nation-building sidelined Muslims, subjects
of the empire but unable to relate to particular
community structures, whether linguistic or national;
they long remained faithful to the Sublime
Porte (Ottoman authorities) and even opposed
the nationalism of Christian communities who
classed most Muslims as Turks, even if they spoke
Albanian or a Slavic language.
Growth of nation states
When Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visited Belgrade
in 1660, he marvelled at the works of art in a
magnificent city with an estimated 17,000 Muslim
households and dozens of mosques.5 The only
survivor is the Bajrakli mosque, built in 1575 and
badly damaged in anti-Albanian riots in March
2004.6 In 1804 the first Serbian uprising – soon
followed by insurrection in Greece – began the
gradual breakup of the Ottoman empire. Areas
inhabited by the Balkans’ Muslim communities
shrank dramatically.
But not until after the second Serbian revolt
in 1815 were ‘Turks’ summarily expelled from
the territories seized from the Ottoman empire
(Christians flocked to these from areas still
under Ottoman control). The expansion of the
Montenegrin state, accompanied by massacres
and enforced conversions to the Orthodox faith,
precipitated a Muslim exodus;7 it was the same
for Muslims in territories affected by the Greek
war of independence (1820). All became refugees
(muhajirs) fleeing the infidel ‘land of war’ (dar
al-harb) to reach the ‘land of Islam’ (dar al-islam).
The gradual emergence of nation states in the
Balkans caused a massive displacement of people.
The creation of an Albanian national identity
could not follow the Orthodox Christian model
since most Albanians were Muslim. Those who
promoted Albanian nationalism defended dual
loyalties to the Ottoman empire (the general
homeland), and to Albania (the specific homeland).
After the Russo-Turkish war of 1878 and
the Congress of Berlin, which ratified the division
of the Ottoman empire’s European possessions,
leaders from all the empire’s Albanian territories
met in Prizren (Kosovo) on 10 June 1878 to affirm
their wish to remain under Ottoman control, but
within an autonomous, united region (vilayet).
But the great powers neglected the Albanian
question.
The League of Prizren is considered the first
manifestation of Albanian nationalism, transcending
religious divisions. Albanian historians
emphasise that the founding fathers of their
‘national renaissance’ belonged to the Bektashi
order (tariqa).8 They included Naim Frashëri
(1846-1900), author of the Qerbelaja, an epic
poem about the battle of Kerbala in 680, the
point of rupture between Sunni and Shia. The
Bektashi order would become a national faith in
Albania, distinct from Sunni Islam and a marker
of national exceptionalism.
The Muslim exodus
After the first Balkan war (1912), the Ottoman
empire was forced to give up its last European
possessions. The sultan’s troops were driven back
by combined Bulgarian, Greek, Montenegrin and
Serbian forces, and the Albanians declared their
independence on 28 November 1912 in Vlorë. In
regions with majority Muslim populations, in
Kosovo and Macedonia, some beys tried to resist
the Balkan League’s forces, but hundreds of thousands
went into exile. In 1920 Turkey’s interior
minister estimated his country had accepted
400,000 refugees. The Balkan conflicts had also
killed tens of thousands. The Muslim exodus
from the Balkans continued under the Treaty of
Lausanne (1923), which prescribed population
exchanges between Greece and Turkey.
After the second world war, Turkey and socialist
Yugoslavia signed accords that led to the
departure of 200,000 Muslims from Macedonia,
Kosovo and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar. Many settled
in the Istanbul suburb of Bayrampaşa. The
pattern of Muslim settlement in southeast Europe
has been continually reshaped by wars and
population displacements. Interfaith coexistence
may have remained the rule, but there has been a
gradual homogenisation of territories. Not that
this is unique to the Balkans: until the late 20th
century it was also the norm in many regions
of the Middle East with significant Jewish and
Christian communities.
After the second world war, communist regimes
were established in every Balkan country save
Greece, which descended into civil war. The new
communist authorities regarded religion as a sign
of backwardness, and former religious leaders
were replaced by more compliant ones. Collectivisation
ruined Muslim elites and education
programmes stopped the wearing of the veil. But
differences of approach soon emerged between
Warsaw Pact states (Bulgaria, Romania and, until
1968, Albania) and dissident Yugoslavia. Marshal
Tito’s involvement with the non-aligned movement
– which held its first official conference in
Belgrade in 1961 – brought a rapprochement with
Arab states, particularly Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
Egypt. Yugoslavia saw its Muslim population as
valuable ambassadors. Yugoslav students went
to Egypt, Iraq and Syria for theological training;
new mosques were built. In 1969 Yugoslavia made
Bosnian Muslims a constitutive nation of the
state, on an equal footing with the Slovenians,
Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs and Macedonians.
This made it possible to state ‘Muslim’ as a nationality,
without necessarily practising the religion.9
Student numbers at Sarajevo’s Gazi Husrev-beg
madrasa (Quranic school) increased through the
1960s, and constraints on the religious press were
relaxed. A faculty of Islamic theology opened in
Sarajevo in 1977, to create a cohort of Yugoslav
imams and limit outside influence. The regime
encouraged an Islamic community narrowly focused
under the leadership of a grand mufti based
in Sarajevo, which became Yugoslav Muslims’ de
facto capital (as it was for Kosovo and Macedonia’s
Albanian speakers).
Mystical movement
The incorporation of Muslim cadres into the machinery
of the state under Tito was an inheritance
of the Ottoman period. It also aimed to remove
dissent and solidify state control of religious
practice. Even the mystic Sufi dervishes, especially
influential in Albania, were included: in 1974 a
Union of Dervish Orders (ZIDRA) was created,
the only mystical Muslim organisation set up by
a socialist regime.
Bosnia-Herzegovina’s pan-Islamic movement
was repressed. Its roots were in the Muslim Youth
(Mladi Muslimani) movement, established in 1941
with Nazi approval. It aimed to challenge sclerotic
Islamic institutions and the westernisation of
intellectual elites, and to return to the mythic
purity of original Islam. Influenced by the Iranian
revolution (1979), the pan-Islamic movement
echoed the overt anti-communist activity of the
Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II, and of
the Serbian nationalism developing in Orthodox
monasteries. The movement’s leading figure
was Alija Izetbegović, the future president of an
independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was arrested
in 1983 after publishing an anti-communist
tract, the Islamic Declaration, which advocated a
fusion of faith and politics, and took Pakistan as
the model for an Islamic state.
There was anti-religious pressure in Bulgaria
and Romania, where Muslims were marginalised
by the nationalist tendency of communist
regimes. Bulgaria began a national ‘regeneration’
programme in 1984, aiming to assimilate
Turkish, Pomak and Roma minorities by force;¹0
the names of 850,000 people were bulgarised,
and 3-400,000 Muslims emigrated to Turkey. In
Western Thrace, which remained Greek under
the Treaty of Lausanne, Muslims’ access to private
property was restricted, their citizenship
governed by religious rules, and some zones on
the Greek-Bulgarian border remained forbidden
to foreigners until 1989.
Enver Hoxha declared Albania the world’s first
atheist state in 1967, forbade all religious observance
and brought in harsh repression. Priests,
imams and dervish leaders were executed or sent
to labour camps. When the Communist regime
fell in 1991, all religious structures had to be rebuilt
from scratch, which required outside help: in
the 1990s Bibles and Qurans were major imports,
and Albania became a new missionary land. Since
then, it has remained the focus of a struggle for
influence between radicalism – often promoted
by young imams trained in the Gulf – and official
Islamic structures, closely linked with Turkey’s
KEMAL ZORLAK / ANADOLU AGENCY / G ETTY

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
13
Opposite page Ramadan prayers at Gazi Husrevbeg
mosque in Sarajevo Right Statue of Skanderbeg
and minaret of the Ethem Bey mosque and clock
tower, Tirana, Albania
D E AGOSTIN I / G ETTY
Presidency of Religious Affairs, and promoting a
more traditional line.
Yugoslavia’s Islamic community did not resist
the break-up of the country; each new state
equipped itself with national institutions. In
1993 Mustafa Cerić became Bosnia-Herzegovina’s
grand mufti, soon a key figure in post-Yugoslav
Balkan Islam. He had close links to President Izetbegović’s
SDA (Party of Democratic Action) and
thought that the break-up of Yugoslavia would allow
the re-Islamisation of society. This conflicted
with the realities of war (1992-5) and the division
of the country along ethno-religious lines under
the Dayton peace agreement.¹¹ Re-Islamisation
was imposed only in areas with a Bosniak majority.
Political and religious authorities tolerated
foreign Islamic volunteers who had come to
Bosnia-Herzegovina to bring humanitarian aid or
join the El Mudžahid international brigade. This
formation, which was drawn from international
Salafist¹² groups, disapproved of the idiosyncratic,
sometimes syncretist, practices of Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and local Muslims’ laxness. Hundreds
of former fighters stayed on, often taking
Bosnian citizenship, and proselytised until 9/11,
when international forces began to attack Islamist
networks. The involvement of these jihadists in
the Bosnian conflict has long been downplayed,
especially in journalistic accounts, as has the deep
penetration of their doctrine into Bosniak society.
It was too readily assumed that this foreign seed
would not germinate in an ‘intrinsically tolerant
and moderate’ form of Islamic society.
Islam as practised in the former Yugoslavia
bears the hallmark of socialism, which has enabled
it to reach a compromise with modernity.
However, official Islamic structures, and their
theological and spiritual legitimacy, are now being
tested by young imams who have returned from
Arab countries, and by new communication and
social networks. Radical sermons circulate online,
and the lived faith is sometimes more present in
closed groups on Facebook than in the mosque.
The violent conflicts that fracture Islamic communities,
especially in Macedonia and Kosovo, are
intergenerational: between old imams attached
to the traditional model and young zealots influenced
by doctrines from the Gulf monarchies. It
is a conflict between the vision of modern Islam
that prevailed in socialist Yugoslavia in the second
half of the 20th century and the new international
vision derived from globalisation. In other
countries, the difficult reconstruction of Islamic
communities post-communism has opened the
way to radical preachers ●
Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin are journalists
with the website Le Courrier des Balkans
1 The meaning of the original Persian term was ‘poor man’
or ‘beggar’. Dervishes belong to a mystical ascetic order 2 A
Christian movement that appeared in Bulgaria in the 10th
century and aimed to establish an ascetic, egalitarian society.
It spread through much of the Balkans, but was opposed by
the official church because it offered a conduit for peasant
resentment of the nobility 3 See John V A Fine Jr, The Late Medieval
Balkans: a Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century
to the Ottoman Conquest, University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor, 1987 4 See Ger Duijzings, Religion and the Politics of
Identity in Kosovo, Hurst, London, 2000 5 Evliya Çelebi (1611-
82) published an account of his adventures, Seyâhatnâme
6 These riots broke out in response to anti-Serbian pogroms
in Kosovo 7 See Nathalie Clayer and Xavier Bougarel, Les
Musulmans d’Europe du Sud-Est: Des Empires aux Etats
balkaniques (The Muslims of southeast Europe), Karthala,
Paris, 2013 8 Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam, considered
non-orthodox by hardline followers of Sunni Islam. The
Bektashi order was founded in Anatolia by Haji Bektash Veli
(1209-71). It is centralised, unlike any other order in Islam, and
has been based in Tirana since 1927 9 This designation was
officially changed during the war; Muslims became ‘Bosniaks’,
and the term ‘Bosnian’ designated all inhabitants of the
country, whether Bosniak, Croat, Serbian or other minority
10 The Pomaks are Muslim Slavs, and a significant presence
in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains. Most of Bulgaria’s Roma
are also Muslim 11 Dayton ratified the division of the country
into the Republika Srpska, and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
which was further divided into ten cantons, each
with either a Bosniak or a Croat majority 12 This fundamentalist
branch of Islam favours a return to the supposed origins
of Islam and advocates a literalist reading of the Quran
The view from the West
Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent
Geslin
THE WESTERN VIEW OF ISLAM in the
Balkans is distinguished by a constant
desire to find in it a radically different
form of Islam from that practised in the
rest of the Muslim world. This inclination was
already discernible in the central role accorded
to the Bektashi order¹ in the Albanian national
story. The tendency to distinguish between
Bektashism and Sunni Islam was accentuated
by Enver Hoxha’s hermetic, authoritarian
communism, at least until he banned all
religious practice in 1967. Bektashism became
a national religion in Albania, especially when
the global leadership of this highly centralised
order moved to Tirana in 1927, after Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk banned Sufi orders in Turkey.
The Bektashi orders proved important agents
for Albanian national identity. Since the fall
of communism, attempts to reconstruct a
Bektashi hierarchy divorced from the Muslim
community have failed: in the 2011 census,
only 1.9% of Albanians said they followed the
Bektashi order.
Followers of Sufi Islam and dervishes are
often seen as models of tolerance, though the
spread of the major orders in the Balkans was
linked to the Ottoman army – elite janissaries
were Bektashi; those orders, especially the powerful
Naqshbandis (an important Sufi order),
opposed Atatürk’s plans for a secular Turkey
and were the last to relinquish the principle of
the caliphate in the 1920s. Sufi Islam has always
had a mystical, heterodox and consciously rebellious
face, and another face that was military
and close to the authorities (and not found in
Africa and Turkey). It’s not coincidental that
the Naqshbandi order has enjoyed a significant
revival in Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1995, supported
by ex-army officers and members of former
president Alija Izetbegović’s SDA (Party of
Democratic Action). Sufi pilgrimages, especially
to Ajvatovica,² are a patriotic commemoration,
and regularly visiting a place of prayer often
helps career advancement in the party or the
administration.
In the 1990s, the desire to treat Balkan Islam
as a case apart met political needs: the conflict
in Bosnia-Herzegovina coincided with Algeria’s
civil war and, for some French intellectuals,
who viewed the world less as a complex interplay
of forces and more as a series of causes
to be taken up, it offered an opportunity to
contrast good and bad versions of Islam. They
were delighted to see that Muslim Bosniaks
drank alcohol (as though no Turk had ever
touched raki). In part because of the confusion
between Muslim national identity and religious
belief, non-practising Muslims were felt to be
especially modern.
The reality of secularisation under Yugoslav
socialism was an impediment to understanding
the parallel existence of Islam as lived and
practised, as well as the renaissance of the
practice that followed the breakup of the state
and the war. Bosnian Muslims were treated
as archetypes of Muslims liberated from the
ritual observance of their religion and a model
to be opposed to the temptations of radicalism
affecting the Muslim world. But many young
Muslims in the Balkans have since joined the
globalised jihad; more than 800 have gone to
Syria.³
This ideological construct is related to the
uncertainty of the western view of the Balkans.
Bulgarian anthropologist Marija Todorova,
pursuing Edward Said’s work on orientalism,
In 1969 Yugoslavia
‘
made Bosnian Muslims
a constitutive nation.
This made it possible
to state ‘Muslim’ as a
nationality, without
necessarily practising
the religion
’
coined the term ‘Balkanism’: the Orient as
imagined by Europe is a non-place, a utopia on
which western fantasies can be projected; the
Balkans, because they form a buffer between
east and west, belong to a real world that the
West has striven for two centuries to control
and shape. The idea of Europeanising the Balkans
as an ideological substratum of European
integration is the most recent manifestation of
this tradition: it supposes that becoming closer
to Europe will transform Balkan societies; they
will abandon traits viewed as cultural, such
as bad governance, corruption, authoritarian
tendencies or a propensity to disorder. Some
go further, including the novelist Ismail Kadare,
who believes all Albanians should reject the
Muslim faith and return to the Catholicism
of their ancestors to affirm their European
identity.
In these schematic visions, Islam and the
Orthodox Church, the Byzantine inheritance,
are markers of a negative otherness. But Islam
remains an unavoidable fact in the Balkans.
What status should it be given in the eyes of a
West with Islamophobic tendencies? The idea
of European Islam responds to this challenge
by making it possible to imagine a model form
of Islam in the Balkans. Meanwhile, the realities
of Islam in the Balkans remain more complex
than a reductive standoff between radicals and
moderates. This Islam will always be influenced
by the whole Muslim world, while being rich in
its specific history ●
1 Order founded by Hacı Bektaş Veli (1209-71) in Anatolia.
Exceptionally in Islam, it is highly centralised with, since 1927,
a world centre in Tirana 2 This pilgrimage, which has taken
place since the 15th century, was banned by the Communist
authorities. Since 1995, it has been drawing thousands to the
village of Prusac 3 ‘Foreign fighters: an updated assessment
of the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq’, The Soufan
Group, New York, December 2015

14 SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
JAPAN STAKES ITS FUTURE ON PERSONAL SERVICE ROBOTS
How can I help you today?
Japan already leads in industrial robots, and now its government is backing the development of robots
to assist or replace humans who care for the elderly or sick
Arthur Fouchère | Translated by Charles Goulden
YOU CAN’T MISS the 18m-tall Gundam
robot that stands facing Tokyo on the
man-made island of Odaiba, in Tokyo Bay.
This replica of the ‘hero’ of the popular television
anime series embodies western fantasies
that robots are everywhere in Japan and, in some
cases, have replaced human beings.
Japan is the market leader in industrial robots
– for cars, aircraft, chemicals – and accounts for
a third of all exports worldwide; it has been less
successful in service robots, though it showed
an early interest in the sector, targeting users in
defence, logistics and agriculture. But recently
it has attracted attention with social robots to
provide medical care, welcome visitors or assist
human workers; some mimic the human form
for manoeuvrability, and to make interaction
more pleasant.
Asimo, the first of this new generation, was
created by Honda in 2000 and is still the most
successful biped robot worldwide. But despite this
tour de force, and many other designs, the market
is in its infancy. Most reception and medical robots
are only at the research and demonstration
stage. Domestic robots (vacuum cleaners, lawn
mowers) are becoming popular, but are currently
the preserve of the US-based company iRobot.
Having fallen behind South Korea and the US
in the digital revolution, Japan is keen not to
miss the boat with service robots, especially as
the market has great potential: worldwide sales
of personal service robots rose 28% in 2014,¹ to
4.7m units. So it has set out a five-year plan for
a ‘robot revolution’² and is banking on this new
technology to make up for population decline.
The government, still reluctant to adopt an active
pro-immigration policy,³ hopes robots will make
up for a labour shortage – in the construction
industry there are three jobs for every applicant
– and boost sluggish economic growth. In
May 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan
must ‘spread the use of robotics from large-scale
factories to every corner of our economy and
society.’4 But the plan calls for an investment
of only 100bn yen ($995m) up to 2020, through
public-private partnerships, whereas South Korea
plans to spend $2.6bn.
Machines with a soul
Most projects originate within the i-RooBO Network
Forum, a consortium, of major industrial
groups and nearly 300 specialist start-ups, which
since 2014 have been working on 100 personal
service robots for consumer use. In the past, robotics
projects have been run by the automobile
and electronics giants (Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi,
NTT), working with major research centres led by
New Energy and Industrial Technology Development
Organisation (NEDO).5 It’s hoped that
involving smaller organisations will revitalise
research and development, criticised as inefficient.
The government’s plan is to supply small businesses
with ‘collaborative robots’ – more flexible
and cheaper than traditional industrial robots
– to handle repetitive, low value-added work. In
2013 Kawada Robotics unveiled Nextage, a highly
efficient robot shaped as a humanoid torso. With
stereo cameras built into ‘eyes’ and ‘hands’, Nextage
can assemble electronic equipment such as
cash registers with great precision. In three years
a hundred Japanese factories have bought 200
units, at $70,000 each (little more than a luxury
car). ‘Nextage doesn’t replace the worker, who
coexists with it and still has a role downstream in
the assembly chain,’ says Hiroyuki Fujii, Kawada’s
business development manager. Humans and
machines work side by side, and often the humans
give the machines names, a sign of acceptance.
The most spectacular innovation has been
interactive reception robots to serve consumers
(advice, sales, reception), which the government
wants to promote. The first of these was Pepper, a
child-like humanoid robot on wheels, introduced
by telephone carrier SoftBank, which acquired
a majority stake in French robotics company
Aldebaran in 2015. Pepper can analyse facial expressions
and tones of voice. SoftBank has sold
10,000 in a year in Japan. Peppers are in service
in 70 other countries, and exports to Europe are
just beginning. Since June there have been Pepper
receptionists at two Belgian hospitals, the Centre
Hospitalier Régional de la Citadelle in Liège, and
the AZ Damiaan in Ostend.
For the past year, guests at the Henn-na Hotel,
near Nagasaki, have been welcomed by a humanoid
and a dinosaur created by Osaka University,
while a trilingual ‘female’ receptionist with latex
skin, Chihira Junco, created by Toshiba, has staffed
the information desk at the Aqua City shopping
centre in Odaiba.
However impressive and entertaining these
robots may be, it is hard to see them as anything
more than pilot projects. Manufacturers have
promised more advanced prototypes from
2017. Their artificial intelligence will have to be
upgraded: they may be able to analyse their surroundings,
but their algorithms do not yet enable
them to reason, which limits their responses to
pre-programmed speech and actions. This is a real
challenge given the need for robots in the public
health sector, to care for elderly people.
Help for seniors?
Today, 26% of Japan’s population is over 65 (18% in
France; around 3% in Africa), and the ratio could
reach 40% by 2060.6 The number of dependent
seniors is growing, while official studies predict
a shortage of medical auxiliaries – their numbers
need to increase from 1.71 million in 2013 to 2.53
million in 2025. One solution is nursing robots to
reduce the work of auxiliaries and help patients
be more independent in daily life (walking, using
public transport, bathing, using the toilet). The
government plan is that the cost will be covered
by a health insurance system specifically for dependent
seniors, created in 2000. But the current
expense and weight of these robots prevent their
wider use.
State-run research centre Riken’s teddy bear
robot nurse, Riba, which attracted considerable
media attention, has not been commercialised.
According to Toshiharu Mukai, head of a robotics
research team at Riken, it’s too heavy and clumsy,
and is not yet able to carry patients securely: ‘It’s
a research project...Riba has never been used in
a real-life situation in a hospital.’
But in 2013, after a decade of research, Toyota
launched a number of models in its Partner Robot
range, including HSR (human support robot),
which talks, has articulated arms that can be
controlled using a tablet and can fetch objects,
open doors and draw curtains for bedridden
patients. HSRs are used in 34 medical facilities in
Japan. ‘A robot must never injure a patient. And
it must actually perform functions that a human
carer cannot. That will take time to achieve,’ says
Akifumi Tamaoki, general manager of the Partner
Robot division.
International standard ISO 13482, covering the
certification of robots and robotic devices for
personal care, was proposed by Japan and adopted
in 2014. It could stimulate the sector, which is underdeveloped
and was worth only $166m in 2015,
4.5% of the total service robot market. Under the
government plan, its value is projected to exceed
$500m in 2020, and perhaps $4bn by 2060.
Panasonic got ISO certification this April for
Hospi, an automatic medication delivery robot,
completed after 10 years of trial and error. Many
researchers are working on robotic exoskeletons
to support motor functions in patients with paralysis,
poliomyelitis or reduced mobility, or being
re-educated. Only a few thousand are in use in
Japan, but sales are forecast to grow worldwide.7
Advance in exoskeletons
Toyota, Panasonic, Honda and industrial robotics
giant Yaskawa have started making exoskeletons
and have developed a hire purchase system for
medical institutions, but a smaller company, Cyberdyne
(established by a University of Tsukuba
academic), was the first to break into the global
market with its HAL (hybrid assistive limb) devices,
which detect the wearer’s intention to move a
limb by capturing electrical signals from the brain.
They can support the movements of the elderly or
handicapped, and help with heavy manual tasks,
and workers at Haneda Airport are trying them
out for handling heavy loads.
Fujita Health University Hospital, one of Japan’s
most advanced medical institutions, uses
exoskeletons, including a robot that helps with
walking, with a control screen to regulate the quality
of movement and distribution of bodyweight,
under the supervision of medical staff. Eiichi
Saitoh, executive vice president of the hospital,
says there are also ‘balancing exercises linked
to video games, which elderly people enjoy very
much.’ These are machines to help patients work
on their balance, using sports-simulation games
like Nintendo’s Wii, while standing on a robotised
platform, though always under the supervision of
medical staff. It will be a while before such robots
are on sale for home use.
There are also ‘emotional robots’, designed to
help treat cognitive and behavioural disorders,
which form a relationship with the patient to
soothe dementia (Alzheimer’s and similar diseases),
anxiety or loneliness. The idea is to reproduce
the benefits of zootherapy, without the risks
of using a real animal. Paro, a baby seal robot
fitted with sensors and covered with synthetic
fur, responds to touch by bleating, blinking and
waving its flippers. Paro has sold thousands and
is exported to Scandinavia, France, Italy, Germany
and the US.
The trend is towards smaller, cheaper robots,
compatible with connected devices. Nao, Soft-
Bank’s other humanoid robot, and Sota, developed
by NTT, can remind the user to check heart
rate or take medication. It will be a few years
before they are in the home, but though there
may be technical and financial obstacles, there
are no psychological barriers. A poll in 2013 found
that 65.1 % of Japanese patients approved of the
use of robots, which they saw as life companions.
Robots are rooted in Japanese culture, as can
be seen from manga and anime – Astro Boy first
appeared in the 1960s – and during the Edo
period (1603-1868) there were karakuri ningyo
(small clockwork automata) that poured tea. In
the Shinto religion, some objects, animals and
elements of the natural landscape possess a soul,
and are referred to as kami (spirits/sacred). These
include Mt Fuji, the deer in the parks of the city
of Nara and, potentially, robots.
Japan aims to win the service robot wars, and
plans to use humanoid robots as a showcase for
its technology, especially during the Tokyo Olympics
in 2020. ‘We are preparing, very seriously,
for a Robot Olympics,’ says Satoshi Kochiyama, a
project manager in NEDO’s robotics department.
‘The idea is to speed their introduction into daily
life by showing people they are needed. There
will also be robots at the Olympic Village.’ But
compensating for demographic imbalances
and boosting Abenomics (the prime minister’s
economic policy) will require other measures,
including immigration and getting women into
the workforce ●
Arthur Fouchère is a journalist
1 International Federation of Robotics report, Frankfurt,
June 2016 2 ‘New Robot Strategy’, Headquarters for Japan’s
Economic Revitalisation, Tokyo, 2015 3 See Marc Humbert,
‘Japan no longer an island’, Le Monde diplomatique, English
edition, February 2015 4 ‘Celebration of the establishment of
the Robot Revolution Initiative Council’, website of the Prime
Minister’s Office, japan.kantei.go.jp 5 Established in 1980
after the first oil crises, NEDO handles major robotics projects
for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry 6 See Florian
Kohlbacher, ‘Japan’s silver Eldorado’, Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, June 2013 7 According to Allied Business
Intelligence, the global market will grow from $68m in 2015
to $1.8bn in 2025

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE | SEPTEMBER 2016
15
Opposite page A re-education session with a
robotic exoskeleton (left) and Chihira Junco,
robot receptionist at the Aqua City shopping
centre, Odaiba (photographs by the author)
Below The Gundam robot on Odaiba Island,
in Tokyo Bay
Growth forecast for Japanese robot market
Sector
Personal services (healthcare,
leisure, domestic chores)
($ billion)
100
Agriculture, fisheries, forestry
Technology
Industry
46.2
80
60
24.5
40
2.8
9.4
20
2015 2020 2025 2035
0
Source: Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Indusry
BSPI / GETTY
An eye on the US – and
on China
Arthur Fouchère
JAPAN SUFFERED A BLOW to its technological
pride after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima
in 2011, when it was forced to call for
help from military robots built by US firm
iRobot. Since then, it has pulled itself
together. The robotics giants Toshiba, Hitachi
and Mitsubishi have come together with iRobot
and BMW, under the International Research
Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, based
in Tokyo, to develop robots that will inspect the
reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and, if
possible, clean up the melted fuel.
Faced with the permanent threat of natural
disasters – such as the Kobe earthquake of 1995,
the tsunami of 2011, the eruption of Mt Ontake
in 2014 and the Kyushu earthquake this April
– the Japanese government is eager to develop
technologies useful in a crisis, and launched
a humanoid robot development programme
in 1998. In 2002 the National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
(AIST), brought out the HRP-2, a humanoid
robot, and after the 2011 tsunami, unveiled an
impressive biped robot 1.72m tall and fitted with
3D cameras, HRP-2 Kai (‘improved’ in Japanese).
HRP-2 Kai can walk through rubble, crouch,
open a door or activate a valve. But, says Fumio
Kanehiro, project leader at AIST, ‘it will not be
used in the field for another 10 to 15 years, at
least. Every movement it makes involves multiple
computer commands, and though it has
good balance and dexterity, it can’t yet move
fast enough to rescue a human being in an
environment that it is exploring and analysing
in real time.’ Following an agreement between
France’s Centre National de la Recherche (CNRS)
and AIST, a development centre in Toulouse is
currently working on this robot.¹
Japan is concerned about China. Since 2013
China has had the most industrial robots of
any country worldwide, accumulated through
massive imports (65,000 in 2015 according to
the International Federation of Robotics). But
it plans to develop domestic makers such as
Siasun and triple its own annual production
within the next five years. In July, China entered
the big league when its Midea group acquired
German firm Kuka, a global leader.
Japan holds patents to many components,
which keeps China dependent, and the major
Japanese makers invest in improving their machines
so as to maintain their status as pioneers
in high-end robots. But China is working hard
to catch up, and competition will intensify ●
1 Toyota is in talks to buy Google’s subsidiaries Boston
Dynamics and Shaft

16
SEPTEMBER 2016 | LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
Le Monde
BETWEEN US WE COVER THE WORLD
Burning summers after the spring
Two new accounts of Syria and Egypt, the states that failed after their popular attempts at revolution
Ursula Lindsey | LMD English exclusive
Children looking through the gates of
a school in Khosoos, Egypt
M OSAAB E LSHAMY / GETTY
AT WHAT POINT did the revolution
in Egypt go off the
rails? This was the question
my friends and I spent most
of our time discussing in smoke-filled
rooms in Cairo in the years following
the overthrow of President Hosni
Mubarak in 2011. Islamists swept the
elections; protests turned into clashes
and massacres; jails filled with young
men and women; an avuncular, menacing
general took over. And the uprisings
that had erupted in Syria, Yemen
and Libya degenerated into brutal civil
wars. Had it been a revolution after all?
In July, Amnesty International reported
on the Egyptian security forces’
practice of ‘disappearing’ civilians;
hundreds have been kidnapped, held
in secret locations, and tortured into
giving false confessions. This summer
in Syria, the rebel-held sector of Aleppo
was finally cut off by President Bashar
al-Assad’s forces who, with Russian
assistance, have bombed relentlessly
(hospitals are a particular target). Residents
must choose between starvation
and handing themselves over to government
soldiers.
Those in search of perspective should
turn to Burning Country: Syrians in
Revolution and War by reporter Robin
Yassin-Kassab and activist Leila al-
Shami (published by Pluto Press). It
offers a morally lucid account of the
revolt against the Assad regime and
an explanation of why it turned into a
civil war; it elicits the voices of Syrians
involved in the uprising, acknowledging
their suffering while explaining
the terrible choices forced on them:
‘Pressed on all sides, these are people
who’ve truly made history enough to
compete with and for a moment drown
the savage history made by states.’
The book chronicles the grassroots
political and cultural activism, the creativity
and courage of the revolution’s
first year. It also charts how the struggle
turned violent and sectarian. From
the beginning, the Assad regime insisted
on ‘reading the revolution through
ethnic and religious categories; largely
as a result of its own efforts, these categories
would indeed eventually grow in
importance until they dominated the
field of struggle. The regime’s priority
was to refuse any recognition of the
non-Islamist civil activists.’ The regime
knew it would be more convenient
to be seen as fighting an extremist
opposition – the ‘terrorists’ that it had
accused the demonstrators of being
from the start.
The regime made clear that it was
‘willing to go to war against the majority
of their country’s populace.’ Under
these circumstances, the revolution
quickly militarised. ‘Syria’s revolutionaries
didn’t make a formal collective
decision to pick up arms...rather, a
million individual decisions were
made under fire.’ At least 6% of Syria’s
population has been killed or wounded.
Assad has jailed more than 150,000.
Four out of five Syrians are living in
poverty. There are nearly five million
refugees and millions more displaced
within the country.
In 2013 Raed Fares, an activist in Kafranbel,
was asked if he’d have joined the
protests in 2011 knowing what would
follow. Fares replied: ‘No. The price
was too high. Just in Kafranbel we’ve
had 150 martyrs...I can’t cry anymore.
I don’t feel properly. I’ve taken pictures
of too many battles...But it’s too late
now. There’s no going back. We have
to finish what we started.’
Yassin-Kassab and Shami argue that
the revolt against the Assad regime
was not inevitable, nor was it doomed
to fail. They wager that had the Free
Syrian Army and grassroots organisers
not been abandoned and betrayed,
and had Assad not received such solid
economic and military support from
Iran and Russia, he might have fallen.
If the US had imposed a no-fly zone, it
could have saved lives and prevented
the devastation of Syria’s cities.
But ‘American diplomatic policy was
fairly constant...The (unrealised) aim
was to bring Assad to the negotiating
table, never to end his failed regime.’
The Obama administration was fearful
of what might happen in a vacuum created
by Assad’s fall; but by not taking
a stance, it allowed an equally dangerous
vacuum to open up. The idea that
Assad and his foreign backers will join
the West in an alliance against ISIS is
‘unadulterated fantasy’ because ISIS is
a by-product of the regime’s brutality
and its collapse. ISIS is also useful as
a source of leverage. The policy of the
regime has long been ‘to present itself
as the essential solution to problems it
has itself manufactured.’ Burning Country
makes a persuasive case that the
‘realist’ argument that one must deal
with Assad is morally unconscionable
and strategically foolish.
Yassin-Kassab and Shami are critical
of leftist orthodoxies on Syria. They
quote the Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj
Saleh: ‘I am afraid that it is too late for
the leftists in the West to express any
solidarity with the Syrians...Syria is
only an additional occasion for their
old anti-imperialist tirades, never the
living subject of the debate.’
Burning Country is dedicated to
Razan Zaitouneh, a human-rights lawyer
who defended political prisoners
under Assad. She lived in hiding before
settling in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb
of Damascus, and documented the
regime’s starvation siege and sarin gas
attack. Zaitouneh and other activists
were kidnapped in 2013, probably by
an Islamist militia. Their whereabouts
remain unknown.
The authors believe that Assad – dependent
on foreign backing, weapons,
and troops – will fall eventually. But
they admit ‘building a free and socially
just society out of Syria’s wreckage...will
be an almost impossible
task.’ Because ‘a people who dared to
demand freedom received annihilation
instead.’
THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE have not
faced annihilation, but their
aspirations for change have
been brutally curtailed. Yet Jack
Shenker, the former Cairo correspondent
for The Guardian, doesn’t see their
disappointment as the end of the story.
‘We stand at the beginning of a long and
deep-seated revolutionary moment,
looking out over a hurricane that will
cause Egypt to shudder for a very long
time,’ he writes in The Egyptians: a Radical
Story (published by Allen Lane).
Shenker declares his solidarity with
the Egyptian uprising, connecting it
to global struggles against economic
and political disenfranchisement, and
focuses on the many ways in which
Egyptians – before and after the 18 days
in which they called for Mubarak to
step down – have challenged a society
he describes as ‘Neoliberal. Ahistorical.
Static. Old. Male.’ His most valuable
contribution is a discussion of the economic
underpinnings of the uprising.
In the 1990s, Egypt underwent structural
adjustments recommended by
the International Monetary Fund that
privatised many state-owned businesses:
‘Across the 20-year privatisation
programme, the total market value
of all the assets sold by the Egyptian
government to the private sector was
estimated by experts at $104bn. The
actual amount received by the state
was $9.4bn.’
In the late Mubarak years, western
diplomats and business newspapers
celebrated the emerging ‘tiger on the
Nile’ while dismissing a wave of strikes,
as well as the impoverishment and
dissatisfaction of millions of Egyptians;
the number of Egyptians living on less
than $2 a day grew from 20% to 44%.
The rollback of Nasser-era land reforms
resulted in evictions that left a million
families without land. The state didn’t
withdraw from the market but acted
as a broker in deals that concentrated
wealth in the hands of well-connected
businessmen, the ruling family, and
the upper echelons of the military and
the security establishment, who expanded
monopolies based on exclusive
access to state resources.
Western governments and institutions
remained focused on the country
remaining open for business. At an
international economic summit soon
after President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi assumed
power in 2014, the message was
that ‘Egypt must get back to economic
growth: to do so the country needs
more debt, its assets need more privatisation,
its citizens need more austerity,
its dissenters need more muffling in
the name of security and stability.’
Economic liberalisation, democracy
and security would go hand in hand;
the latter two goals were undermined,
if not rendered impossible, by the first.
It takes significant state repression to
impose unpopular economic measures.
Egypt is now poised to take out a new
$12bn loan from the IMF, and Sissi has
already warned that new austerity
measures will be required.
But Shenker sometimes strains to
measure every facet of Egypt’s complex
social, historical and cultural reality
according to his theoretical yardstick.
All social ills are traced back to the regime
and its embrace of neoliberalism.
One gets little sense of the genuine
support for the status quo and for the
Egyptian army during the 2013 coup
against the Muslim Brotherhood, or of
the interplay between society and the
regime. When Shenker describes how
the authorities use sexual harassment
and violence to intimidate dissenters,
he doesn’t emphasise that these work
because they exploit prevailing societal
attitudes: female activists who are
assaulted or humiliated often face the
opprobrium of their own families and
communities.
Shenker also barely acknowledges
religiosity and political Islam as forces
in Egyptian society, and provides a cursory
account of the rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood and its relationship to the
security establishment and business
elites. He portrays the assassination of
President Anwar Sadat in 1981 as payback
for his economic policies, without
considering the anger of Islamists over
the peace treaty that Sadat had just
negotiated with Israel. He discusses
the Kefaya movement – a precursor
of the anti-Mubarak protests – but not
its focus on avoiding tawreeth, the
inheritance of power by presidential
scion Gamal Mubarak, distasteful to
many army leaders. He depicts the
clashes between protesters and police
in Mohamed Mahmoud Street in 2011
as much more significant than they
were. Several thousand protesters
fought the police in downtown Cairo
for days, trying to reach the interior
ministry. It was a display of courage and
rage, but confounding and tragic: many
protesters were killed and maimed, to
no avail. Shenker rightly condemns
the Muslim Brotherhood for its lack of
solidarity – the group was focused on
elections – but I don’t see any way that,
even if protesters had broken through,
their victory would have sounded ‘the
death knell for the police state’ ●
Ursula Lindsey is a writer based in the
Middle East and manages the website
The Arabist. This article is adapted
from a longer piece to be published in
The Nation on 26 September 2016. To
subscribe to The Nation go to www.
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