- Turkey slapped with Russian sanctions over jet downing
The Al Jazeera 29 Nov 2015
President Vladimir Putin ordered a series of economic sanctions against Turkey after a Russian fighter jet was shot down by Turkish forces and its pilot killed last week, as tensions over the war in Syria continue to escalate.
A decree published on the Kremlin's website on Saturday came hours after Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced "sadness" over the incident, saying he wished it hadn't happened.
"The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat," said Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, discussing the new sanctions.
A senior Turkish official told Reuters the move would only worsen the standoff between Moscow and Ankara.
Russia is Turkey's biggest supplier of natural gas and its second-largest trading partner.
Putin's decree - which entered into force immediately - included a ban on some unspecified goods and forbids extensions of labour contracts for Turks working in Russia as of January 1.
It also ordered the end of chartered flights from Russia to Turkey, and for Russian tourism companies to stop selling vacation packages that would include a stay in Turkey.
Russian analyst Lincoln Mitchell told Al Jazeera the sanctions would hurt both sides.
"Sanctions are a tool that the West has used against a number of countries, not least of which is Russia. We now see Russia taking a Western tool and using it," said Mitchell. "These sanctions are not going to bring great happiness to ordinary Russians. These are pretty hard-hitting sanctions, ones that hit Turkey hard - but also could hit Russia hard."
Putin's decree also ended visa-free travel between Russia and Turkey and ordered the tightening of control over Turkish air carriers in Russia "for security reasons".
The decree was issued "to protect Russian citizens from crimes", a Kremlin statement said.
Ankara says the Russian fighter jet entered its airspace on Tuesday even though it was warned repeatedly not to. Moscow says its pilots got no warning at all.
Earlier on Saturday, Erdogan had again defended Turkey's actions and criticised Russia for its moves in Syria before expressing his regrets over the shoot down. The jet's pilot was shot dead by rebels after he ejected and parachuted into Syria.
"We wish it hadn't happened, but it happened. I hope something like this doesn't happen again," Erdogan told a crowd of supporters.
OPINION: Turkey won't lose any sleep over Russia's harsh words
The Turkish president added that both sides should approach the issue in a more positive way, and renewed a call for a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the UN's climate change conference in Paris that starts on Monday.
Putin has so far refused to talk to Erdogan because Ankara has not yet apologised, a Putin aide said. Erdogan has said Turkey deserves the apology because its airspace was violated.
Project Syndicate NOV 16, 2015
Actually, the challenge posed by the Islamic State calls for several responses, as there is no single policy that promises to be sufficient. Multiple efforts are needed in multiple domains.
One is military. More intense attacks from the air against Islamic State military assets, oil and gas facilities, and leaders are critical. But no amount of air power on its own will ever get the job done. A substantial ground component is needed if territory is to be taken and held.
Unfortunately, there is no time to build a partner force on the ground from scratch. This has been tried and failed, and Arab states are unable or unwilling to constitute one. The Iraqi army has also come up short. Iran-backed militias only make matters worse.
The best option is to work more closely with Kurdish troops and select Sunni tribes in both Iraq and Syria. This means providing intelligence, arms, and being willing to send more soldiers – more than the 3,500 Americans already there, and possibly on the order of 10,000 – to train, advise, and help direct a military response.
Such an effort must be collective. It can be informal – a “coalition of the willing” that would include the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Arab states, and even Russia under the right circumstances – or carried out under NATO or United Nations auspices. The packaging matters less than the results. Symbolic declarations of war, though, ought to be considered with caution, lest the Islamic State appear to be winning every day it does not lose.
A diplomatic component is no less essential to any response. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a recruiting tool for the Islamic State and must go. But any successor government must be able to maintain order and not permit the Islamic State to exploit a power vacuum, as it has done in Libya.
Moreover, orderly political change can be brought about only with Russian and Iranian support. One near-term option worth exploring is a coalition government still headed by a representative of the Alawite minority, a concession that could well be the price of moving Assad out of power. In principle, and over time, a more representative national government could come about, although talk of holding elections in 18 months is fanciful under any scenario.
But reaching a compromise along these lines could well be impossible. This is why increased military effort is needed to bring about larger and more secure enclaves that could better protect civilians and take the fight to the Islamic State. Syria is not a normal country in any sense, and it will not be for a long time, if ever. A Syria of enclaves or cantons is a more realistic model for the foreseeable future.
Other indispensable elements of any effective strategy include expanded help for or pressure on Turkey to do much more to stem the flow of recruits to the Islamic State. And Turkey, along with Jordan and Lebanon, need more financial assistance as they shoulder the bulk of the refugee burden. Arab and Muslim leaders can do their part by speaking out to challenge the Islamic State’s vision and delegitimize its behavior.
There is also a domestic dimension to policy. Homeland security and law enforcement – increasing protection both at borders and within them – will have to adjust to the increased threat. Retail terrorists – individuals or small groups carrying out armed attacks against soft targets in open societies – are extremely difficult to deal with. The threat and the reality of attacks will require greater social resilience and quite possibly a rebalancing of individual privacy and collective security.
What is also required is a dose of realism. The struggle against the Islamic State is not a conventional war. We cannot eradicate or destroy it any time soon, as it is as much a network and an idea as it is an organization and a de facto state that controls territory and resources.
Indeed, terrorism is and will continue to be one of the scourges of this era. The good news, though, is that the threat posed by the Islamic State to the Middle East and the rest of the world can be dramatically reduced through sustained, concerted action. The main lesson of the attack on Paris is that we must be prepared to act over time and place alike.
- Leaders of China and Taiwan meet for first time in nearly seven decades
The Guardian 7 November 2015
The leaders of China and Taiwan met for the first time in almost seven decades on Saturday as Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou began a historic summit in Singapore with a minute-long handshake. “Nothing can separate us,” Xi told his Taiwanese counterpart in brief public remarks following the handshake. “We are one family … We are brothers who are still connected by our flesh even if our bones are broken.
Ma told Xi both sides had been working “to replace conflict with dialogue ... We follow different political systems, but we have developed military and economic cooperation,” he said.
The meeting between Communist party chief Xi and Nationalist president Ma was the first time two such leaders had come together since Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The last encounter between communist and nationalist leaders came in August 1945, when Mao and Chiang Kai-shek came together in Chongqing for seven weeks of talks.
Chinese state media painted the dialogue as a watershed moment which one analyst compared to Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, which paved the way for the normalisation of relations between Beijing and Washington. “This is also an icebreaking meeting,” Tao Wenzhou, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told CCTV, the state broadcaster.
Saturday’s summit, which was unexpectedly announced on Tuesday night, began at 3pm local time at Singapore’s five-star Shangri-La hotel. As Xi and Ma stepped out before the cameras and were bathed in a blaze of camera flashes, the presenter of a live CCTV broadcast told viewers: “This is certainly a landmark handshake.”
On Saturday night, the two men were due to hold a “casual” dinner at the Shang Palace, a high-end Cantonese restaurant where diners can order Australian lobster, Sri Lankan crab and Japanese beef. In an indication of the meeting’s political sensitivities, Xi and Ma were reportedly planning to split the bill.
The summit represents a high point in the seven-year rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing that began in 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou took office, vowing to end the political feud between the two sides. Ma, who will step down next year following a presidential election on 16 January, has overseen a striking improvement in relations with Beijing, which still regards democratically ruledTaiwan as a renegade province.
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But that engagement has become increasingly contentious in Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, with many of its 18 million voters fearing closer integration with authoritarian China. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last year to protest that growing proximity as part of the Sunflower movement.
Nathan Batto, a political scientist from Taipei’s Academia Sinica, said polls showed that while nearly all Taiwanese supported improved dialogue with China, fewer and fewer now backed the idea of reunification, which is Beijing’s ultimate goal. “The separations between Taiwan and China are much, much deeper than between the Koreas or the Germanys,” Batto said. “The public support here is for good relations with China – nobody wants to have a war – but not for any type of political integration. Taiwanese are very proud of their democracy and want to keep it,” he said.
Nick Bisley, the executive director of La Trobe Asia, said Saturday’s meeting was “probably the biggest thing in cross-strait relations since at least the lifting of travel restrictions” more than a decade ago. But Bisley said there were concerns in Taiwan that Beijing was using the meeting to try to swing the island’s upcoming elections back towards Ma’s Nationalist party (KMT).
