Stuck in the Canal

Op-Ed Contributor
NY Times

By DAVID FROMKIN
Published: October 28, 2006

FIFTY years ago tomorrow — on Oct. 29, 1956 — Israeli paratroops were dropped deep behind Egyptian lines in the Sinai peninsula, opening the way for the ground troops that followed. In a lightning campaign lasting less than five days, the Israelis took control of the entire peninsula. The Israelis had a rendezvous at the Suez Canal with the armed forces of Britain and France. But the British and French stopped short of their goal. Like out of shape ex-champions attempting a comeback, the Europeans were unable to get past the first round in their effort to return to the Middle East.

The Suez crisis was a divide in the history of the Middle East. It was the moment when America pushed out the Europeans and then tried to take their place — and the reverberations are still felt today. The road that led to Suez began in 1947, when the British Foreign Office notified the American Department of State that Britain could no longer afford to hold its positions in Greece and Turkey against pressure from Russia. Soon the United States was engaged in an effort to hold the line against Russia — there, but also all around the world.

The Middle East was essential to this policy of containment. The Arabic-speaking Muslim world had been taken in hand by Britain and France after the First World War, and though they had since achieved independence, the countries of the Middle East remained predominantly Western-influenced. European and American oil companies played an important role in Middle Eastern affairs. Britain retained a presence at the strategically vital Suez Canal in the form of a major military base and a garrison of more than 80,000 men. Not until the autumn of 1954 did Britain agree to withdraw from this installation.

The United States had always deplored European — especially British — imperialism. In the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson seemingly hesitated as to which side to join (or whether to at all), and in the end joined Britain and France only as an “associated power” rather than as an ally, thus making clear that our country did not share the goals of the other belligerents — goals that Wilson claimed were imperialistic.

As the United States accepted the responsibility, therefore, of defending the Middle East against possible Soviet aggression, its government was conflicted. In the interest of cold war containment, the United States should have wanted to shore up whatever remained of British and French presence and power in the Middle East, but at the same time the worry was that any association with the Europeans would drag America down.

As early as 1952, the C.I.A. was searching for an Arab leader to support, someone who would make hard, unpopular decisions. Recognizing that such a leader could be expected to have an agenda of his own, the agency needed him to take the lead in defending against Soviet expansionism.

Initially Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence, proposed Gamal Abdel Nasser, the emerging Egyptian dictator. John Foster Dulles, Allen’s brother and the secretary of state, agreed. But it soon became evident that Nasser had little or no interest in fighting communism or the Soviet Union. A charismatic figure, he aimed to unite the Arab peoples, and he exploited resentment of Western imperialism to win support. Secretary Dulles then turned to create an alternative anti-Soviet force: the Baghdad Pact, a northern-tier alliance of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. The only Arab state in the lot was Iraq, led by its pro-British prime minister, Nuri as-Said, who was widely perceived as the Anglo-American candidate for leadership of the Arab world, and as such the rival of Nasser.

In putting Nuri as-Said up, Secretary Dulles had in effect challenged Nasser to a duel. Nasser, a military man whose objective was to build his army, showed his independence of the West by ordering arms in large quantity from the Soviet bloc. Dulles took this at first as a bluff; then, when he could not stop it, he took it as a mortal insult — but he floundered, unable to find the right reply.

He offered to finance the Egyptian leader’s favorite project: the Aswan High Dam. Then, puzzlingly, he canceled the offer, apparently intending to humiliate Nasser publicly. The Egyptian trumped that. He nationalized the Suez Canal, transferring to Egypt the shares of the company that owned it. Nasser announced that Egypt would finance the dam itself, using the income from the canal. This bold move was a public challenge to Britain, the canal’s biggest user and shareholder, and to France, which had created the canal in the 19th century.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles believed that Nasser should be overthrown — some day. Repeatedly they told the British and French that it would be a mistake to use force, at least at the moment. But Britain and France were already planning how they might use force. Frenchmen imagined that Algeria’s revolt against them, launched in 1954, was inspired by Nasser, and that without him it would collapse. Britons found themselves losing control of Jordan because of Nasser, and believed that without him they could regain control.

There was more to it. The Western leaders had irrationally come to regard Nasser as dangerous, a Hitler or a Mussolini. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain was typical: a Foreign Office Arabist by background who moved in circles where it was felt that Arabs loved Englishmen, Eden believed that Nasser had somehow stolen that love. It was Nasser, he thought, who had taken away Jordan’s famed Arab Legion from its British officers. “I want him killed,” Eden said. So for months the allies had been conspiring. They would return to the Middle East, and they would invade Egypt. The confiscation of the canal company spurred them into action.

Eden, Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France and his foreign secretary, Christian Pineau, joined by a number of colleagues, hatched a plot based on an earlier plan for France and Israel to act together, and in which Britain now joined. In October 1956, Israel attacked Egypt through Sinai and drove to Suez. Britain and France then invaded, occupying the canal and claiming to be separating the Egyptian and Israeli Armies. The British, French and Israelis stuck to their prefabricated story, but their collusion was evident; soon they had to admit the truth.

The Americans had been kept in the dark, and they took it personally. Eisenhower in particular was angered by British wartime colleagues who had lied and deceived him. “What does Anthony think he is doing?” Eisenhower demanded. “Why is he doing this to me?” He refused to listen to excuses, claiming that “nothing justified double-crossing the United States.”

The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, grandstanded, threatening the Western imperialists. That enabled him to take credit for stopping the Europeans — even though it really was America that did it. The United States acted quietly but effectively. The Treasury Department threatened to withdraw support of the British currency unless the British Army left Egypt. Within 10 days, England would have collapsed financially. The British — and the invasion — stopped. To keep from being thought imperialists, the Eisenhower administration saved Nasser. The Suez crisis was over.

Britain and France had gone to war in order to keep their empires; instead, they lost them. The United States had aimed to keep Russia out of the Middle East, but the Suez crisis, and Khrushchev’s rhetoric, brought the Russians in. Eisenhower and Dulles believed that by their actions at Suez they were showing the nonaligned nations that, unlike the British and French, Americans were not imperialists — but the third world remained unconvinced. And in Europe, skeptics claimed the episode showed that the Americans intended to steal the empires of Britain and France.

Britain and France drew opposite conclusions from the Suez experience. Britain noted that it was dependent on the United States and would, for the most part, have to act accordingly and follow wherever America led. France decided that the United States would not protect France’s interests, and immediately, under Guy Mollet, began to build the atomic bomb — the result of American policy.

Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism — providing evidence to enemies who had asserted all along that Israel was no more than a European imperialist itself. And its victory in the Sinai campaign — one of many dazzling triumphs — illustrated the paradox that the more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought.

THE undoing of the British-French-Israeli alliance was that it rested on a lie. It is difficult to re-create the shock felt around the world when it became apparent that these supposedly honorable countries, and the principled statesmen who led them, would stoop to such a ridiculous fabrication. It was disgraceful: that they lied, and that the lie was so childish.

Scenarios had been prepared at various levels of the American government in the event that the Europeans acted against the Nasser regime. So far as I know, none of them envisaged the United States intervening to stop them. Had the allies fully and honestly informed Washington of their intentions, either the Eisenhower administration would have persuaded them to adopt an alternative strategy, or the allies would have convinced Washington to let them go ahead, or the United States would have explained to London how America’s control of the British currency gave it a veto power over British policy. One way or another, America’s angry reaction would have been avoided.

Though it cannot be proved, the lies of the allies weakened their cause in another important way. It outraged public opinion in France and, especially, Britain. A message was delivered: decision-makers in European governments were on notice that they no longer were free to initiate colonial wars.

The Europeans, to their credit, understood the message. Within years of the Suez crisis, Britain and France began decolonization programs in which they released territories they had held around the world. The winds of change had begun to blow — and they had come from Suez.

David Fromkin, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.”

Stay sharp: Eat a cup of vegetables a day

By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Eating two to three servings of vegetables every day might help keep the mind sharp in old age, a study suggests today.

The new findings add to the scientific evidence suggesting that a diet packed with vegetables might shore up the memory and protect against Alzheimer's.

Martha Clare Morris of the Rush University Medical Center and her colleagues studied 3,718 Chicago residents ages 65 and older. Each senior filled out a diet questionnaire and took at least two memory tests during a six-year period.

Test scores usually worsen slightly as time goes on, but seniors who said they ate 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slowed by 40% during the study. A serving in the study was defined as a half-cup.

"People who ate more vegetables could think faster and had better memories," Morris says. Green leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale or romaine lettuce provided the most benefit, she says.

The oldest people in this study, those at highest risk for Alzheimer's, showed the most memory protection when they reported eating a vegetable-laden diet. The study appears in today'sNeurology.

At the same time, the study found fruit consumption was not associated with a brain benefit. Other researchers have found fruit to be associated with protection, so experts still recommend fruit.

"Don't throw out your oranges — just step up your vegetable intake," says Elizabeth Edgerly of the Alzheimer's Association. Foods that reduce the risk of heart disease might protect the brain, she says. That heart-healthy diet includes whole grains, fish such as salmon, and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, particularly the dark-skinned ones that are thought to contain high levels of brain-protective substances called anti-oxidants, she says.
Posted 10/23/2006 8:15 PM ET

Muslims feel the long arm of Beijing

In Xinjiang, which is of strategic importance to China, Uighurs try to maintain their culture despite strict oversight.
By Mark Magnier, Times Staff Writer
October 23, 2006


HOTAN, CHINA — Mullah Masude, 63, removes his shoes and gingerly navigates an expanse of cheap carpeting in the Jaman mosque's main worship area before climbing a set of rickety steps to the roof.

Powered by a good set of lungs and lots of practice, the cleric belts out the afternoon call to prayer. Despite his best efforts, the chant is all but drowned out by the din of a single-stroke tractor engine and a passing bus.

Beijing bars mullahs from using loudspeakers, one of dozens of rules critics say are designed to mute Islam's voice in China, particularly among the Uighur minority here in the far-western region of Xinjiang, which the government considers a separatist threat.

Signs and banners at mosque entrances in Hotan, Kashgar and other western cities make it clear who is boss.

"Completely abide by the Communist Party's religious policy," reads an oversized banner straddling the gate of Hotan's Imam Asim tomb, half a mile over desert dunes from the nearest road. "Actively lead religion toward a just socialist society."

More than 2,000 miles to the east, Beijing seems a world away, which partly explains officials' deep-seated fear that the region's more than 8 million Uighurs will unite to form an independent state.

Mutton and flat bread trump pork and rice as the cuisine of choice, blue eyes and light skin are common, and many people speak only a few words of Mandarin.

Although most Uighurs are proud of their history, distinct language and centuries-old culture, they tend to see a Uighur homeland as a distant dream, given Beijing's tight grip and economic clout.

"I'm not in favor of it, nor do I think it's possible," said Elham Adl, 22, a Uighur tour guide in Dushanzi, a town in northern Xinjiang. "I don't want to see Xinjiang become a second Iraq. And if Xinjiang became independent, we'd lose access to China's big market."

But Beijing isn't taking any chances, critics say, and it continues to intimidate the clergy, weaken Uighur culture through assimilation policies and otherwise stifle dissent.

The strategy has been successful, largely putting an end to the bombings, protests and unrest of the 1990s, though some say China has only driven resentment underground.

"They put out the fire," said Dru C. Gladney, an anthropologist and president of Pomona College's Pacific Basin Institute. "But the embers are smoldering. And unless they address hearts and minds, it will flare again."

The government's iron grip underscores Xinjiang's strategic importance. The region has huge reserves of oil, gas, gold and uranium. It is home to the nation's Lop Nor nuclear testing facility.

With 17% of Chinese territory but just 1.5% of its people, Xinjiang is an important release valve for population pressures. It's a buffer against rival Russia. And any loosening would set a precedent for pro-independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet.

"Xinjiang is very important to China's security," said Raphael Israeli, a fellow at the Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "They will have to do what it takes when a rebellion becomes evident."

In the meantime, Beijing is working to soften local hearts and minds to its position, albeit in a sometimes heavy-handed manner.


'Love the motherland'

Ayinoor, a Uighur civil servant in her early 20s, is required to attend ideology classes for two hours a day aimed at hammering home the glories of the Communist Party, the danger of separatism and the benefits of national unity. Like others interviewed, she declined to give her family name for fear of losing her job.

If lecturing doesn't win her over, there's music, including a version of the party's recent "Eight Virtues and Eight Shames" campaign that she's required to sing, with such lines as "It's most glorious to love the motherland, a great sin to harm her." There's economic incentive: If she doesn't do well on a weekly political thought quiz, her pay is docked.

"I'm only telling you this," she said in the shadow of the historic Id Kah mosque in Kashgar, near two police cars and an army truck and a sign that read, "All ethnic groups warmly welcome the party's religious policies."

"At work I have to say, 'I love everything Han Chinese' or I get into trouble," she said, referring to the majority ethnic group.

Uighur clerics had ignored the ban on government employees entering mosques. But religious authorities started threatening their jobs as well. Now they report on attendees, who risk losing their jobs or worse. More than 300 Uighur civil servants have been jailed in recent years for their beliefs, locals say, and some were beaten to death.

Government officials were not available for comment, and the figure could not be verified.

Beijing's longer-term goal is to create a new generation of Mandarin-speaking Uighurs with fewer ties to Islam or traditional Uighur culture, critics say, including programs that send the brightest young Uighurs to Mandarin-only schools in other provinces.

"Chinese is very difficult, but it's the language of the marketplace," said Shiaili, 14, a student in Urumqi. "I've studied for two years. Sometimes I forget some of my Uighur."

Government officials did not respond to written requests for an interview. But Chinese minority and ethnic affairs officials in the past have denied trying to dilute Uighur culture and say they're raising living standards and spurring entrepreneurship, as seen, they say, by an economy that has grown forty-twofold since 1955.

But government officials also promise to remain vigilant. They blame separatist groups for more than 200 terrorist attacks since 1990, resulting in 162 deaths and more than 440 injuries.

"In Xinjiang, the separatists, religious extremists and violent terrorists are all around us," Wang Lexiang, Xinjiang's deputy chief of public security, said in August. "In China, endangering national security is the No. 1 crime. We have to crack down on it severely."

The Sept. 11 attacks gave Beijing a new argument, allowing it to tar pro-independence Uighurs as radical Muslims with ties to Al Qaeda, claims that are viewed with skepticism.

"China saw 9/11 as the best opportunity since 1949 to crack down on Uighur people," said Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Washington-based Uighur American Assn., which advocates the creation of an independent state called East Turkistan through nonviolent means. "China makes allegations that can't be proven, but after 9/11 it's very hard to champion your cause if you're Muslim."

Wary of the link between religion and politics, China prohibits anyone younger than 18 from entering a mosque or receiving a Muslim education.

"I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's the law," said Sulika, 43, a former soldier turned fruit seller, chomping down on a stew of sheep organs and intestine casings stuffed with rice.

Schools also require students to eat during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting and atonement. "If they don't eat, they get disciplined by the teachers," Sulika said.

Religious study for prospective clerics and others older than 18 must take place in heavily monitored government schools and after an extensive background check. At that age, many young Uighurs don't bother, having been seduced by video games and modern distractions.

"By that time, most aren't interested," said Ma Xueliang, a Muslim cleric at the Qinghai mosque in Urumqi.

If persuasion and distraction don't work, there's brute force. Xinjiang is riddled with informants, human rights activists say, amid claims that 1,000 Uighurs were executed and more than 10,000 imprisoned during a 1996-97 crackdown. Detentions have fallen off more recently, they say, because intimidation tactics are working.

"Control over Xinjiang society is very minute," said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch. "It's impressive and reminiscent of Soviet Union times."


New generation of mullahs

After 1990, the authorities replaced many longtime mullahs with a new generation educated in Chinese patriotic programs, and began paying their salaries directly and requiring annual license renewals.

In many parts of Xinjiang, mullahs are required to clear their Friday sermons, limited to 30 minutes, with local religious affairs bureaus and are punished for deviating from the script. Those who resist Chinese policy, by arguing, for instance, against abortion or family planning policies on religious grounds, are fired or jailed.

"My neighbor, an imam, was arrested 12 years ago for saying something the government didn't like," said one Uighur government worker, who asked not to be identified. "He's still in jail. Their message is clear: Keep your mouth shut."

In addition to its internal campaigns over the last decade, Beijing has tried to cut off links with ethnic Uighurs in neighboring countries by pushing for extradition treaties with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

"China has been very successful at portraying Uighurs as terrorists and themselves as victims of terrorism, while they manipulate Islam through their control over mosques," Seytoff said. "It's really not easy trying to stand up to such a powerful country and an emerging superpower."


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Begin text of infobox

17% - The Xinjiang region's portion of Chinese territory.

1.5% - The region's percentage of China's population.

link : http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-islam23oct23,0,838495.story?page=1&track=tottext

How N. Korea Changed the Nuclear Club's Rules

The weird and scary saga of how an isolated, bankrupt nation went nuclear—and how the United States failed to stop it.
By Michael Hirsh, Melinda Liu and George Wehrfritz
Newsweek

Oct. 23, 2006 issue - Great historical events can spring from small slights. Kaiser Wilhelm never forgave the French for not treating him to a parade in Paris. "The monarchs of Europe have paid no attention to what I have to say," the German emperor whined before setting the Continent aflame in 1914. By many accounts, North Korea's Kim Jong Il also suffers from a tender ego. For one thing the 5-foot-3 dictator is sensitive about his height (hence, one suspects, his bouffant hairstyle and elevator shoes). After ordering the kidnapping of a South Korean actress, Choe Eun Hee, in 1978 to help him start up a national film industry, the first thing the movie-mad Kim jokingly asked her at a welcoming dinner was: "Well, Madame, what do you think of my physique?" More painfully, he fears that in the eyes of his countrymen and allies, he can never match the achievements of his revered father, the "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung (who was close to six feet tall and who led a guerrilla army against the Japanese occupiers in the 1930s). By many accounts, the young Kim is fed up along with his top aides, who often reflect his views. "What I hear is, Big Brother is telling Little Brother, 'Don't do that'," the North Korean vice minister of Foreign Affairs, Kim Gye Gwan, complained when Beijing urged Kim Jong Il to cancel his planned missile tests in July. "But we are not boys. We are a nuclear power."

And so one can understand the reaction at the highest levels of Kim's secretive regime when he learned of George W. Bush's contemptuous comments about him at a meeting of Republican senators in 2002. In a private diatribe that left listeners stunned by its vehemence, the U.S. president called Kim a hateful "pygmy" who behaved like "a spoiled child at a dinner table." Since those remarks and other personal cracks by Bush were reported in NEWSWEEK and other Western publications, North Korean officials have regularly complained about them to Washington-based Korea scholar Selig Harrison, who visits Pyongyang often. "How can we deal with you when your leader doesn't show us even a minimum of respect?" Kim Gye Gwan asked Harrison in 2004.

History is not just about abstract forces like economics or ideology or geography. It is also shaped, often most decisively, by the aims and ambitions of deeply flawed men—men like Kim, his father and generations of North Korean soldiers, scientists and spies who have spent years trying to join the Nuclear Club. Did Kim decide to test a nuclear device last week because the leader of the world's only superpower refuses to talk directly to him? It's more complicated than that, of course, just as World War I had many more causes than Kaiser Wilhelm's Napoleon complex. But the trail of events that led to this perilous moment—making North Korea the first new declared nuclear power in eight years, and undoubtedly the most unstable of the eight (not including Israel) in the world today—had a great deal to do with years of misplaced pride and prejudice between Pyongyang and Washington, of deep misunderstanding and disastrous missed chances. In an Oct. 10 interview with a Seoul newspaper, a North Korean diplomat confirmed that Pyongyang was sending a message: "When we declared that we had weapons, the U.S. underestimated our abilities and doubted that we really had them. The nuclear test has proven [our word]."



I. Secrets of the North
No one in Washington has ever known quite how to deal with North Korea. As a lonely Stalinist regime, Kim's nation is a political toxic-waste site that has festered for 50 years amid East Asia's glittering successes. It is also a place of truly Orwellian oddity, where traffic cops in Pyongyang's empty boulevards go through the motions of directing cars when there are none, where thousands of people starve unnoticed and where Kim administers "a gulag the size of Houston," in Bush's words. Bill Clinton likewise despised Kim, and as president, Clinton came much closer than Bush ever has to attacking him. But the incumbent American president is, by many accounts, offended by Kim on a more deeply moral and personal level.

During his first trip to Seoul, soon after his Axis of Evil speech in early 2002, Karen Hughes, then Bush's counselor, told reporters that the president was fascinated by satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula at night, showing bright lights over the South and darkness over the power-starved North. To Bush, the pictures showed "the light and opportunity that comes with freedom, and the dark that comes with a regime that is oppressive," Hughes said. Just two weeks ago, at a press conference in the Rose Garden days before Kim's test, Bush recalled a meeting he had last April with a Japanese mother who had lost her teenage daughter to a North Korean abduction 29 years ago, possibly to be turned into a prostitute. He said the session—which he has called "one of the most meaningful moments of my presidency"—broke his heart.

While the size of North Korea's new test was unimpressive—at half a kiloton or less, it was little more than a nuclear popgun—Pyongyang continues to be the world's No. 1 missile proliferator. And the regime's long, shady history of secret kidnappings, amphibious commando missions and other spooky operations make American intelligence officials as nervous as they've ever been about what Kim has and what he might do with it. While the North has not yet been caught shipping nuclear materials abroad, it is conceivable that an enraged or cash-strapped Kim Jong Il could someday permit a baseball-size lump of plutonium loaded into a terrorist bomb to make its way to America.

Just as scary is what the North might pass on to other nuclear-minded regimes, especially its Axis of Evil companion, Iran. At the dawn of the Nuclear Age, during World War II, scientists worried that atomic technology could never be fully controlled—that the weapons produced to fight tyranny were demons in thin disguise. A NEWSWEEK investigation traces North Korea's nuclear demons back to their origins, and the story shows that, tragically, what was feared in the middle of the 20th century could become a commonplace of the early 21st.



Last week's half-kiloton explosion was the product of an effort spanning a half century or more. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment Kim Il Sung decided he needed the Bomb and a ballistic-missile program to go with it. But the ambition was in keeping with his deep insecurity going back to the dubious origins of his regime.

North Korea, after all, is an invented country, a relic of the cold-war divide. After the World War II defeat of Japan, which had occupied Korea, the regime was created by Stalin in 1945 out of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, and Moscow propped up Kim Il Sung as a strongman. The Americans, meanwhile, built their client state in the southern half. Both sides never gave up their claims to the whole peninsula, putting them on a permanent war footing. To consolidate power, Kim created a cultlike ideology of self-reliance called juche, a curdled brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian deference to authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. Some experts argue that Kim decided he needed a nuclear security blanket soon after the 1950-53 Korean War, which he battled to a draw. Then came the early 1970s, when he realized he was losing the economic contest against his blood enemies in Seoul, and after that the Soviet Union disintegrated—a failure that suddenly left Pyongyang without a communist patron or a nuclear umbrella to shield it. An increasingly paranoid Kim Il Sung also sponsored many acts of terrorism against the South, including the alleged sabotaging of a Korean Airlines plane in 1987, killing all 115 passengers and crew, the year before the Seoul Olympic Games. And he taught his son well.

Driven by two men with near-absolute power, North Korea's program was produced by a staggering cast of characters. They included idealistic Korean scientists educated in Imperial Japan and repatriated after World War II, their students educated in the Soviet Union and the thousands of homegrown technicians. Japan, one of the North's hardiest enemies today, gave Pyongyang the man deemed the "first father" of North Korea's nuclear program, the late scientist and inventor Lee Sung Ki, who earned a degree in chemical engineering at Kyoto Imperial University in 1931. In fact, despite its deep isolation, the Hermit Kingdom is known or suspected to have received nuclear assistance from 14 countries: Russia, China, Austria, France, Canada, Romania, Germany, Pakistan, India, Japan, Iran, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There were privateers, too: defectors, Chinese technology firms, Japanese trading houses and front companies scattered from Thailand to Scandinavia—all provided critical technologies, components or know-how by circumventing a global nonproliferation regime designed to thwart such commerce. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency unwittingly helped: analysts say a single North Korean diplomat, Choi Hak Gun, who was posted to IAEA headquarters in Vienna from 1974 to 1978, scoured the agency's library for nuclear know-how.


The human costs of North Korea's nuclear ambitions on the nation's best and brightest were terrible. Few paid a higher price than Kimchaek University's class of '62, according to a grad who defected from North Korea several years ago and told NEWSWEEK his story. As graduation at the elite college neared more than 40 years ago, the buzz on campus was that Kim Il Sung had ordered construction of an advanced research facility to study atomic energy, and that patriotic young scientists soon would be mobilized to work there. "Our professors really pushed the need for nuclear development," he recalls. "The rumor circulating among students was that those of us sent there wouldn't have long to live."

The defector, spared the fate of those assigned to nuclear labs, spent his adult life watching unlucky classmates grow sick, weak and despondent. On leave, one confided a Confucian desperation to marry and sire children before radiation rendered him sterile. "It was exactly what we feared," the defector says, still saddened by their sacrifice. "These guys went bald. Many of them lost their eyebrows. Some of them had constant nosebleeds. They looked so weak it was hard to even face them. The thinking was, 'If one scientist falls there will always be others to take his place'." That logic not only ravaged a generation of scientists sent like worker bees into toxic nuclear labs. It cost billions in hard currency that might have fed starving people and hobbled the national economy by imposing perpetual austerity under slogans like "Military first."

North Korea was also helped by its participation in the rogues' club of nations that have suffered U.S. sanctions for pursuing nuclear ambitions, led by Pakistan, since the end of the cold war. After Washington shut down exports of military hardware to Pakistan in 1985, none other than Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto concluded a missile deal with the North. Pakistan's black-marketing lead scientist, AQ Khan, visited North Korea 13 times over the next seven years. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has denied he knew anything about this, but according to former senior Pakistani officials those visits occurred with the knowledge and consent of the military leadership. Pakistan agreed to provide second-rate P1 centrifuge technology to North Korea in return for missiles, enabling Pakistan to extend the reach of its nuclear weapon deep inside India, and North Korean scientists received nuclear briefings at KRL (Khan Research Laboratory), Pakistan's main nuclear facility. Even so, the imported uranium enrichment technology has barely gotten off the ground. In the end, it was juche that prevailed.

Despite all this effort, the North Korean program remained a rather ramshackle affair, demonstrating that it's not so easy after all to build nukes. In the early 1990s, after Washington and Pyongyang nearly came to blows over the program, evangelist Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter went on peacemaking visits to the North, leading to Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework" deal with Pyongyang. Under that 1994 pact, Clinton obtained a commitment to freeze plutonium reprocessing in exchange for aid and a civilian nuclear plant. When American experts were finally allowed in to inspect Yongbyon, the center of North Korea's nuclear programs, that year, they could hardly believe their eyes. Inside, the cooling pond looked like an abandoned swimming pool. Above it, a window was broken; a bird's carcass floated on the water. Below a film of algae, underwater cameras revealed metal receptacles—they looked like milk-bottle baskets—at the bottom of the pool containing spent nuclear fuel rods that could be reprocessed to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Some rods were broken, many mired in sludge. Tree leaves and twigs littered the place. Staring at the debris, inspectors suddenly realized that frogs were living in the water.



But since the breakdown of the Agreed Framework in 2002—the Bush administration discarded it as a flawed Clinton-era policy—Yongbyon has been cleaned up and repaired, says Sig Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos who was invited to inspect it in January 2004. Hecker later said the North Koreans were now "beyond dispute competent" at the chemistry and metallurgy of plutonium reprocessing. Indeed, the history of North Korea's program is evidence that "any country on the map with a population of 20 to 25 million will have the core group of people who can [go nuclear] if they squeeze their economy hard enough," says Daniel Pinkston, a nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. And North Korea has long been, to say the least, quite open to squeezing people in pursuit of power—including many along the Potomac River half a world away.

II. Missed Signals
Oct. 17, 2000, was a beautiful moonlit night in Washington. Marshal Cho Myong Rok, second only to Kim in North Korea, stood sipping drinks with Madeleine Albright on the terrace of the State Department's opulent Benjamin Franklin Room. In a meeting earlier that day with President Clinton, Cho had declared that Pyongyang had renounced terrorism, and he delivered Kim Jong Il's personal invitation to the president to visit Pyongyang.

The two sides were tantalizingly near a deal to stop all North Korean missile exports and cease development, testing and deployment of anything other than short-range Scuds. At least so the Clinton team believed. In exchange, the North would get full diplomatic recognition, the promise of billions in aid from Washington and Tokyo, and the stamp of legitimacy and guarantee of security that a Clinton visit would bring, says Albright's former senior aide, Wendy Sherman. According to Yang Sungchul, the South Korean ambassador to Washington who was there that night, Albright and Marshal Cho conversed in one corner, she looking comfortable and the general bolt-upright as if standing at attention. "I'm sure he was overwhelmed" by the culture shock, says Yang: here was Cho, the leading general of a country whose capital features a U.S. war-crimes museum, surrounded by the enemy.

A week later Albright was in Pyongyang, meeting with what she described as a well-informed and charming Kim, who gave a sophisticated rundown of his security situation and graciously directed his waiters not to give her too much alcohol during toasts. At one point, recalls Sherman, Kim even called for U.S. troops to remain on the Korean Peninsula (to guard against China). Albright was also treated to a show involving tens of thousands of acrobats and dancers at a stadium, intended to impress her with the glorious feats of the North Korean revolution. During the spectacle, a mass of performers flipped colored placards that together depicted Kim's Taepodong I missile taking off for its first test in 1998. Kim turned to Albright at that moment and said, "That was the first launch of that missile, and it will be the last."


In retrospect, that evening was the high point of U.S.-North Korean relations. Since then, GOP hard-liners have gleefully criticized Albright for the visit, and dismissed the North Koreans as blackmailers. But had a lasting settlement been reached, many Asian and U.S. diplomats believe North Korea would likely not have tested a nuclear device, and would not have developed an intercontinental missile, the Taepodong II, with a range that can reach Alaska or Hawaii (though its first test failed).

In the end, Clinton was absorbed by Mideast peace talks, which the White House thought more important than a risky deal many aides doubted. But the incoming secretary of State, Colin Powell, was so impressed with the deal's terms that, when Albright and her aides briefed him and the then national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, he praised it to the press. On March 6, 2001, Powell declared that the new administration "plan[s] to engage with North Korea, to pick up where President Clinton left off. Some promising elements were left on the table." South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, full of messianic fervor about his new Sunshine Policy of détente with the North, rushed to Washington to make his case as well.

That's when the hammer dropped. Powell, it turned out, had forgotten to check with his boss before spouting off about North Korea. And Kim Dae Jung was stunned when he stepped out for a joint news conference after meeting Bush in March 2001. "He didn't talk about what we had agreed upon but began to criticize North Korea by saying that a regime that couldn't even feed its people was making nuclear weapons," Kim Dae Jung told NEWSWEEK last week. "From that time on, things began to go wrong. I am confident that if President Bush had [pursued] the agreement sought by President Clinton the North Korean issue would have been resolved, and I am very sorry about that."

The Bush team says both Powell and Kim Dae Jung got ahead of themselves, imposing policy on the new president when he'd barely been in office. There was, at the time, a hostile "anything but Clinton" tone in the White House, and Kim Jong Il was also a handy villain to have around to justify the centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy, the expensive missile defense program.

The attacks of September 11 cemented Bush's attitude toward Kim, and shifted him toward regime change. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, especially, was obsessed by the possibility that terrorists might get their hands on a nuclear weapon. He asked his team to review which nations had the capability to produce a nuclear weapon and which had links to terrorist groups. The review came up with a list of a dozen or so nations, including countries like Syria and Libya that might be coerced into abandoning their ambitions, but it concluded that a hard-core trio—Iran, Iraq and North Korea—were probably immune to any peaceful pressures. That, more than any other review by the administration, was what led to Bush's "Axis of Evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002.



While Clinton came very close to traveling to Pyongyang, Bush maintains that he has a much more realistic approach to Kim's perfidies. In fact, Bush himself approved a plan to cut off Kim and the North Korean elite's illegal financing, only days after America, China and other countries announced a new round of talks with North Korea a year ago. Bush's former senior director for Asia, Michael Green, told NEWSWEEK last week: "The president said, 'We apply the law'." Not surprisingly, the talks broke down.

There is some evidence that the Bush administration was seeking to manipulate intelligence on North Korea. During a visit to Pyongyang by lead negotiator James Kelly in October 2002, he presented what U.S. officials described as "proof" that the North had a secret uranium-enrichment program, undercutting Clintonite claims that Kim was adhering to a pledge not to advance his nuclear program. Bush officials later said the North Koreans had confessed. But diplomats now say that was a translation error. (Kelly could not be reached for comment.) While Kim was clearly violating the spirit of his '94 agreement by secretly importing centrifuge equipment, U.S. intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK that their monitors in the region have never detected telltale emissions from any centrifuges. Earlier in 2002, the then Pacific commander Adm. Dennis Blair told a Pentagon meeting chaired by Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Cambone that Blair's surveillance and monitoring teams had still detected nothing. According to a participant who would speak only if he was not identified, that led Cambone to stalk over to Blair after the meeting, jab his finger into his chest and declare that he expected more out of him.

Things grew so icy between the two countries in recent years that, in what is perhaps one of the more bizarre episodes in the long history of diplomacy, the North Koreans turned to one of their few American friends, the Hackensack, N.J., restaurateur Robert (Bobby) Egan, who heads a trade group promoting business with Pyongyang. For years Egan used to joke that North Korean diplomats at the United Nations frequented his Hackensack restaurant, Cubby's, because they liked feeling "naughty": his place pushed the limit beyond which the foreign diplomats were forbidden to travel without U.S. government permission. As Egan tells it, the North Koreans were once again offering to "sell" their nuclear and missile programs to the U.S. government. "They were willing to accept a price, spread over a number of years," Egan says. There were no takers.


South Korean diplomats point out that even Ronald Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union after calling it an "evil empire." "Having dialogue is not to make friends," Kim Dae Jung says. "You can have dialogue even with the Devil if it is necessary."

III. A Spreading Global Danger
Dealing with the devil is exactly how many U.S. officials would view a pact with Kim Jong Il, now that the work of two dictators, generations of scientists, black marketeers and military officers has apparently catapulted North Korea into the ranks of the nuclear. The administration does have a war plan for Korea. OPPLAN 5027 has long been part of the U.S. Pacific Command's inventory—initially as a plan only for the defense of the South, but since the early 1990s also laying out a follow-up invasion of the North and the toppling of the regime. Washington also has a contingency plan for taking out all known North Korean nuclear facilities—also worked up during the Clinton administration during the 1992-93 crisis. But military officials say the casualties on both sides would be enormous, even in the best case. One reason Bill Clinton decided to cut a deal, in fact, is that on May 19, 1994, Defense Secretary Bill Perry briefed the president on the likely costs of invasion: 52,000 U.S. military and 490,000 South Korean soldiers killed or wounded, and untold numbers of civilian casualties, all in the first 90 days. Perry ultimately was the one who went to Pyongyang to negotiate.

No surprise, then, that Bush has made clear he has no intention of attacking Kim. But there appears to be no easy diplomatic way out, either. Last Saturday the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution imposing sanctions, but China and Russia are still balking at anything too severe. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, the Treasury Department under secretary in charge of antiterrorism operations, Stuart Levey, said that Bush's decision to sanction the Macau-based bank that laundered money for Kim has had a ripple effect by warning other banks and businesses not to do business with North Korea or companies or financial entities linked to North Korea. The North Koreans are "looking for other access points" to the world financial system, but "they are having trouble finding new ones," he said.

The problem with Bush's approach, say his critics—who include Kim Dae Jung and many Asian diplomats—is that while he waits for regime collapse, bad things can happen. North Korea could be even more dangerous, since the removal of legitimate bank funds means Kim must resort to illicit funds instead—the kind that can come from WMD sales. And in the past six years Bush has permitted the North Korean leader to cross more U.S. "red lines"—by reprocessing spent fuel into plutonium, kicking out inspectors and declaring he has nuclear weapons—than Clinton did.


The gravest danger going forward is proliferation to like-minded regimes, especially to Iran. Despite the lack of any common goal—one regime would like to see the world turn Islamic green, the other wants things juchered—the two countries are closer to being an actual "axis" than they were when Bush launched the phrase in January 2002. And if Pyongyang is seen as getting away with its nuclear test, some Iranian officials indicate they may raise their own demands for a nuclear program. That's partly why Rice is traveling to Asia and Russia in a new diplomatic offensive this week: she will link North Korea and Iran together once again, arguing that as nuclear offenders they should be made outcasts, the new slavers of the 21st century.

For Washington, the greatest hope against Kim lies with China, which controls some 70 percent of the North's fuel supplies. U.S. officials hope that Chinese President Hu Jintao will decide he's finally had enough of his out-of-control former junior partner. Officials close to Vice President Dick Cheney are warning their Chinese counterparts that Japan could be forced to join the Nuclear Club. They are also warning that North Korea may threaten the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The fear? That Kim might resort to terror to make a point. As precedent, they cite the 1987 Korean Air disaster.

Last week, even as North Korea's apparatchiks threatened to fire off another test, its diplomats privately sent wistful messages to American counterparts imploring them to come back and talk. North Korean envoy Han Song Ryol, who was winding up a posting at his country's U.N. Mission in New York, sounded plaintive as he bid goodbye to U.S. friends. Han asked an American acquaintance who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter: "What can we do to get the Americans to talk with us?" Back came the answer: nothing. Still, Rice will tell her counterparts this week that, even after the test, Bush is open to letting the North back into negotiations.


In Bush's Oval Office sits a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, who served both in the government and at the front in the war Kaiser Wilhelm started partly out of pride in 1914. Churchill's was a long life: a veteran of the trenches, in 1955 he spoke to the House of Commons about the hydrogen bomb and arms control. He was worried, he said, about what might happen "if God wearied of mankind," but he would not give in. "Never flinch, never weary, never despair," Churchill said, and took his leave. The Nuclear Age is bleak, but an old man's words might help us see our way forward as we struggle to tame the demons.

With Mark Hosenball and Richard Wolffe in Washington, B. J. Lee in Seoul, Sarah Schafer at the China-North Korea border, Christopher Dickey in Paris, Zahid Hussain in Pakistan, Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo and Owen Matthews in Moscow

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15265432/site/newsweek/

For the Super-Rich, It’s Time to Upgrade the Old Jumbo Jet

A movie theater is part of Lufthansa’s design for a private Boeing 787.

By JOE SHARKEY
NY Times

October 17, 2006. The tremendously rich are different not only from you and me but also from the merely rich. For one thing, some of them have really nice airplanes.

This is not about the presumed titans of the private jet universe like the mighty Gulfstream G5’s or Global Expresses, whose occupants can leap continents and oceans at high speed and in plush comfort, without all the inconveniences of commercial airports, airline schedules and, well, strangers.

This is about big, long-haul airliners that are converted to private jets and can carry not only pampered passengers and their entourages, but also, in some cases, their Rolls Royces and racehorses. These are specially equipped, privately owned jumbo jets — the kind that normally carry as many 300 to 400 passengers — but reconfigured with interiors designed for the enjoyment of, at most, a couple of dozen.

← The proposed master bedroom for the Dreamliner as designed by Lufthansa Technik.

And in a market in which many owners progressively upgrade — starting out, for example, with a Boeing 737 and eventually moving up — the next big thing is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which lists for about $150 million and up.

As a private jet, at least under a new “V.I.P.” design being introduced today by Lufthansa Technik at the National Business Aviation Association convention and trade show in Orlando, Fla., the 787 will have 35 seats — most of which can also be used as single lie-flat seats, queen-size beds or double beds, said Jennifer Urbaniak, a Lufthansa spokeswoman.

As a commercial airliner, the 787 will seat 210 to 330 passengers, depending on the airline that flies it.

“There are around 39 Boeing 747’s with interiors configured for V.I.P. use in the world, and many 757’s and 767’s, an MD-11, and two 777’s,” said Aaga Duenhaupt, a manager for Lufthansa Technik, based in Hamburg, a subsidiary of Deutsche Lufthansa that designs and builds the interiors for new and used (or “pre-owned,” as they like to say in both the luxury car and luxury jet markets) airliners for individual or corporate use.

← The Boeing 787 Dreamliner has a list price of at least $150 million. The first planes are expected to arrive in 2008

Even though the first deliveries of the 787 are not expected until 2008, industry experts say that marketing interior design plans now makes sense because there is always great interest in the next big thing at the highest end of the luxury private jet market. Ordering now ensures getting into the front of the line for a private 787, fully loaded, they say.

PrivatAir, a Swiss company that markets charter and individual flights on privately configured big planes, is interested in buying a 787 from Boeing and in having it outfitted in true luxury, its chief executive, Greg Thomas, said.

“We’ve signed a letter of intent and are still in negotiations about the finer points of the contract,” he said. “We have put money down; at the moment it’s refundable. We are very interested in the airplane — the capabilities are superb and it’s a classy product.”

PrivatAir, which specializes in long-haul V.I.P. flights, manages a fleet of 50 aircraft, including a 757 that is chartered by governments worldwide for special purposes. The 757 is also used three or four times a year for so-called air-cruises — “around-the-world trips for 21 days, basically by retired Americans,” he said. Those trips can cost $50,000 to $70,000 a person.

Such planes are also used for special business purposes. “We’ve done movie launches,” Mr. Thomas said. “We did the launches of ‘Ocean’s 11’ and ‘Ocean’s 12’ and ‘King Kong,’ ” he said. “The studio will rent the plane for the actors to go and do premieres. One of the ‘Matrix’ movies we whistle-stopped in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to open the movie in several cities one day after another.”

Mr. Thomas said PrivatAir had ordered a 767 aircraft and expected delivery late this year.

Jumbo jets are often favored by Arab sheiks and other fabulously wealthy people who tend not to advertise their opulent lifestyles. A notch or two down-market, the 777’s, 767’s and 757’s are often coveted by corporate titans, among them Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, who bought a used 767 last year and spent millions converting it into a private jet.

Airliner-size jets are also used by individual business people. Among them is Willie Gary, who grew up in a family of migrant workers in Florida but is now a prominent liability lawyer. Weary of wasting valuable time away from his family in commercial airports and eager to have the space to conduct business in the air, Mr. Gary bought a Boeing 737 several years ago and had it outfitted as a private jet. He also owns a 16-seat Gulfstream G2 that he refers to as his “second plane.”

Mr. Gary planned to invest in a bigger private 757, but now he says he is ready to kick the tires of the 787 Dreamliner, once the plane is on the market.

“On the 737, we can take depositions,” Mr. Gary said. “We have meetings and settlement conferences. It gives me the luxury of getting in and getting out and moving on. I’ve touched down in as many as five states in a day,” he said. “But I’m not going to keep the 737 forever. I’m a goal setter, and I’m always looking for something new.”

Anticipating strong growth in private demand for the long-haul, airliner-size planes, Lufthansa Technik says it is setting up a unit to design 787 interiors for clients.

The interiors have been developed in a partnership with Andrew Winch, who is best known for designing top-luxury interiors for big yachts.

Over the years, Lufthansa Technik has designed the interiors for 12 jumbo 747’s, said Mr. Duenhaupt. A 747 purchased “green,” that is, with basically a bare interior, costs about $180 million, he said. “And then, if you really want that 747 to be a full-blown V.I.P. aircraft, with all the V.I.P. luxuries, you can spend up to $50 million more on the interior.”

Some private 747’s are even equipped with medical emergency rooms, “including ones that can do open-heart surgery when people are flying into a certain environment,” Mr. Duenhaupt said. “But preferably the surgery is done on the ground when the plane has landed.”

Luthnansa Technik is now working on preliminary designs for the much-delayed Airbus A380, which will be the biggest plane in the sky once it is available.

In addition to its size, which will allow for even more luxury, the A380 has a feature that may appeal to the most status-conscious of owners, who may travel with underlings. That feature harks back to the days of ocean liners, where social classes were physically segregated.

“The A380 will offer a chance to separate the senior V.I.P.’s from the junior V.I.P.’s because you have two decks, and they can be kept apart,” Mr. Duenhaupt said.

The New Feudalism

Forget corruption. In Putin's Russia, the nexus of payoffs and patronage is almost medieval, touching every aspect of life.
By Owen Matthews and Anna Nemsova
Newsweek International

Oct. 23, 2006 issue - When armed police showed up last Wednesday night at Zurab Dzhaparidze's Moscow apartment, he knew immediately why they'd come. Dzhaparidze's crime, the policemen claimed, was that his apartment's purchase documents hadn't been completed properly—they'd come to kick him out. But the 34-year-old film-festival organizer knew better. His real sin was to be Georgian. Ever since the Kremlin declared its disapproval of Tbilisi after an espionage row last month, Russia's police and bureaucrats have declared open season on Georgians, their businesses and their property.

Top executives at Royal Dutch Shell, too, had few illusions about why they were recently ordered to stop work on their $22 billion Sakhalin-2 exploration project. The stated reason was alleged environmental violations. But Shell's real crime, it seems, was not to let state-owned Gazprom muscle in on the oilfield. In both cases, the victims of the state-sponsored shakedown were left with little choice. Dzhaparidze paid a hefty bribe to get the police to go away. And Shell, analysts predict, will likely cut a deal with Gazprom.

What do the problems of a young Georgian in Moscow have in common with those of a giant Western oil company in Russia's Far East? Or, for that matter, with the dilemma of Lena N., a young actress who says she can't afford to pay the bribe to get her children into a state-run kindergarten, or Sergey Odinartsev, a businessman who found his warehouse confiscated by thugs he said were sent by the local secret police? The answer is that, after six years under Vladimir Putin, Russia has undergone a hidden but dramatic evolution—from mere authoritarianism to something that might best be described as modern-day feudalism.

Ever since he took office in 2000, Russia's president has worked to concentrate political power and economic wealth in the hands of the state. And he's succeeded, perhaps beyond his wildest dreams. These days, any transaction of value—from getting your kid into university, to arranging visits to doctors, to starting a business—depends upon the whims of the king, his knights in the Kremlin or the legions of vassals who live off their patronage and in turn pay them tribute. From the mightiest oligarch to the lowliest common citizen, every aspect of every

Russian's life—their right to a home, their car or work—increasingly presupposes some form of crooked relationship with the state and its servants.


Once upon a time, this would have been called corruption. Nowadays, says Elena Panfilova at Transparency International, that term seems almost quaint. "It assumes corruption is an aberration," she explains. "In Russia today, it is the system." Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in Parliament, likens Putin to a contemporary czar. Determined to recoup from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, he says, "Putin turned Russia a hundred years back to the traditions of empire and absolute personification of power. We are back to the times when the state and private business grew together in a single body."

It's an open secret, well known to Russia's political classes, that the head of this new order is a round table of 12 "Barons"—top ministers and Kremlin courtiers, all close personal friends of Putin (known informally as the tea-drinkers circle) who gather weekly at the presidential dacha. Below them is a veritable army of 1.5 million bureaucrats, plus 4 million so-called siloviki—policemen, soldiers and security officials. At its most primitive, Russia's new feudal order gives these "men of power"—the Barons' vassals, if you will—a license to steal and rob from lowlier citizens. Their weapon of choice, true to Putin's dictum that his rule would see the "dictatorship of the law," is the law itself.

Ask businessman Sergey Odinartsev, who arrived at work one morning last summer to find that armed thugs had taken over his tea-and-coffee warehouse in Tula, 200 kilometers south of Moscow. Complaining to the police, he knew, would be useless. The corporate raiders who stole his business had a slew of officially stamped papers confirming that they were the new owners. Worse, they were partners with what Odinartsev coyly calls "people stronger than local police"—the local security services. "They have powerful supporters," says Odinartsev. "I could apply to the court but I already know it is going to be just a waste of time."

The mechanism is simple, explains Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB major-general and now head of the State Duma's security committee. A would-be raider "finds an influential cover, either a bureaucrat or someone in State Security," he says. After a fee has been agreed, the bureaucrat "goes to the owner of the business you want to steal and says: sell your business for five rubles or you go to jail."


The only defense is to have more powerful patrons than your opponent. Moscow businessman Vladimir Moiseyev learned that rule when he tried to make a successful takeover bid for a large Moscow hairdressing salon. He had money, already owned 30 percent of the shares in the company and, most important, had good friends in the Interior Ministry's Organized Crime Unit. Unfortunately for Moiseyev, there was another bidder—someone connected, he says, to the presidential administration. As in a card game, Moiseyev was trumped by his rival's superior connections.

Gone are the days when businesses had to pay off mafia thugs. Now firms sign for-mal protection contracts with the local administration. One such, signed by a ceramics factory in southern Russia and grandly titled "Contract for the Social and Economic Development of the Region," stipulates a monthly payment to the local authorities. In exchange, the administration promises to solve "any problems arising with federal or regional organs." Earlier this year the ceramic factory's owner, who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals, sold out. All his profit, he complains, was going to bureaucrats "simply for the right to exist." According to a recent study by Moscow's InDem Foundation, an independent polling group, the volume of Russia's corrupt economy (the amount paid in bribes and kickbacks by Russian businesses as well as the value of deals cut with bureaucrats in exchange for protection) has skyrocketed from $33 billion in 2001 to $316 billion last year—a sum amounting to nearly half of Russia's official GDP.

Not surprisingly, given the opportunities for enrichment, government service has become a very popular profession. (According to the Federal Statistics Office, the number of public servants in Russia rose last year by almost 150,000 to 1.5 million—not counting the police or security services. By comparison, the Soviet Union's bureaucracy under Leonid Brezhnev numbered no more than 700,000.) Consider the lively market in bribes for work. Duma deputy Gudkov recalls that when a former colleague recently went job-hunting, he couldn't find a "free" job. "A senior bureaucratic post at any Russian ministry costs from $150,000 to $1 million, depending on how high you want to start," says Gudkov. "Even to get a job as a traffic policeman, one needs to pay from $3,000 to $5,000." Not that Russia's growing army of traffic police would ever trouble bureaucrats themselves. For brazen proof that bureaucrats are a caste apart, you have only to note the flashing blue lights on their official cars, which allow them to ignore traffic regulations with impunity.

Impunity is increasingly the watchword of Russia's powerful. Putin has been careful to appoint his most loyal courtiers as the heads of giant state-owned corporations. In 1997, the tycoon Boris Berezovsky boasted that seven oligarchs—powerful private businessmen—controlled the Russian economy. A decade on, the tables are turned. According to the state news agency, seven men from Putin's inner circle control state-owned companies that directly account for 40 percent of Russia's gross domestic product. They include Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, chairman of Gazprom, the $263 billion gas monopoly, and presidential administration deputy chief Igor Sechin, head of the giant state oil company, Rosneft. Another deputy head, Vladislav Surkov, chairs Transnefteprodukt, the state company for oil transportation, while presidential aide Viktor Ivanov chairs national air carrier Aeroflot, as well as the main air-defense contractor, Almaz-Antei. "We used to have a private oligarchy—now we have an oligarchy drawn from the secret police," says former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, referring to the KGB background of many of Putin's advisers.

In the new order, foreigners are an inconvenience; they don't play by the rules. IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant, for instance, confronted by a last-minute demand for more money before the opening of a Moscow mall in 2004, immediately filed a complaint in court and held a press conference, forcing greedy officials to retreat. This spring, the U.S. cell-phone company Motorola disclosed that Customs officials had apparently stolen $200 million worth of brand-new cell phones on consignment to their Russian partners, Evroset. "A Russian company could never go public like that; they would be crushed," says Panfilova. "The Customs made a mistake—they thought they were stealing from Evroset, not Motorola." By the same token, the Kremlin last week announced that Gazprom, not the five foreign oil majors that had been bidding, would develop the vast Shtockman gas field in Russia's Arctic Sea.


The spreading rot of Russia's new feudal order threatens to strangle Russia's real economy. The Kremlin is riding high on oil and gas prices, and enjoying a period of bullishness unprecedented in a generation. But Russia's underlying indicators are dire, on just about every index. The World Bank ranks Russia 151st among 208 countries in terms of accountability, political stability, effectiveness of the government, the quality of regulatory bodies, the rule of law and control over corruption—just below Uganda and Zambia but ahead of Kazakhstan and Niger. And Russia fell nine places—to 62—in the World Economic Forum's Growth Competitiveness Index. It came in 110th out of 125 for judicial independence, 116th in the soundness of banks and 107th in public trust in politicians. The root cause, says Nemtsov, is the inherent cronyism and inefficiency of the state sector. "Russia is rapidly moving towards being a Third World country," he says. "And the chances of returning all this into the channel of progress and economic development in the near future are extremely low."

The only remedy, says Valery Fadeyev, a member of the Public Chamber, a state-appointed consultative body, is "effective institutions, not simulated institutions." By that he means a bona fide political opposition, a free press and unambiguous laws, especially those guaranteeing the inviolability of private property. Unfortunately for Russia, Putin has systematically undermined all three. Russia's Parliament these days is little more than an assembly of Putin loyalists. As for the media, the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, among the last of the country's true investigative reporters, sums up its tragic state. Putin expressed regret at her death but added that she "wasn't very influential." And he was right, in his way. Official pressure and journalistic corruption have made the media one of the least trusted institutions in Russia.


Where will it all end? The system that Putin created in the name of stability may in fact turn out to be deeply unstable. A feudal society like Russia, with its vast network of tribute and patronage, ultimately depends on someone, or something, down near the bottom, actually working and producing money. Right now, that role is filled by oil and gas wells. The easy cash they produce gives Putin's court a license to pursue their own interests, often at the expense of the nation's. Yet money alone does not make a strong economy, just as the absence of public politics and a free press doesn't make for a healthy society. Rotten edifices, like Ukraine and Georgia's corrupt and complacent old regimes, are doomed to eventually collapse.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15269090/site/newsweek/

Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?

October 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
NY Times
By JEFF STEIN
Washington

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

My curiosity about our policymakers’ grasp of Islam’s two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other TV comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top F.B.I. officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam. One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau’s counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Mr. Bald maintained, wasn’t as important as being a good manager.

A few months later, I asked the F.B.I.’s spokesman, John Miller, about Mr. Bald’s comments. “A leader needs to drive the organization forward,” Mr. Miller told me. “If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective. ... Playing ‘Islamic Trivial Pursuit’ was a cheap shot for the lawyers and a cheaper shot for the journalist. It’s just a gimmick.”

Of course, I hadn’t asked about reading Urdu or Mr. bin Laden’s writings.

A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

AND to his credit, Mr. Hulon, a distinguished agent who is up nights worrying about Al Qaeda while we safely sleep, did at least know that the vicious struggle between Islam’s Abel and Cain was driving Iraq into civil war. But then we pay him to know things like that, the same as some members of Congress.

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

“Do I?” she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. “You know, I should.” She took a stab at it: “It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia.”

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda’s leaders follow?

“Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni,” she replied. “I may be wrong, but I think that’s right.”

Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies, to know the answer to such questions, so they can cut through officials’ puffery when they came up to the Hill?

“Oh, I think it’s very important,” said Ms. Davis, “because Al Qaeda’s whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you’ve got to understand, and to know your enemy.”

It’s not all so grimly humorous. Some agency officials and members of Congress have easily handled my “gotcha” question. But as I keep asking it around Capitol Hill and the agencies, I get more and more blank stares. Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don’t care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we’re fighting. And that’s enough to keep anybody up at night.

Jeff Stein is the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly.

With YouTube, Student Hits Jackpot Again

Jawed Karim on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif. He was involved in the genesis of YouTube but shunned a job there to focus on school.

October 12, 2006

By MIGUEL HELFT
Correction Appended

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 11 — For Jawed Karim, the $100,000 or so he would have to spend on a master’s degree at Stanford was never daunting. He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, the online payment company he had joined early on, was bought by eBay.

On Monday, still early in his studies for the fall term, he got lucky again. This time he may have hit the Internet equivalent of the multistate PowerBall.

Mr. Karim is the third of the three founders of the video site YouTube, which Google has agreed to buy for $1.65 billion. He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas about a Web site where users could share video. But academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business.

So while his partners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen built the company and went on to become Internet and media celebrities, he quietly went back to class, working toward a degree in computer science.

Mr. Karim, who is 27, became visibly uncomfortable when the subject turned to money, and he would not say what he stands to make when Google’s purchase of YouTube is completed. He said only that he is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, though he owns less of the company than his two partners, whose stakes in the company are likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some estimates. The deal was so enormous, he says, that his share was still plenty big.

“The sheer size of the acquisition almost makes the details irrelevant,” Mr. Karim said.

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet — something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching.

“There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. But his chosen path will not preclude another stint at a start-up. “If I see another opportunity like YouTube, I can always do that,” he said.

David L. Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford, said Mr. Karim’s choice was unusual.

“I’m impressed that given his success in business he decided to do the master’s program here,” Mr. Dill said. “The tradition here has been in the other direction,” he said, pointing to the founders of Google and Yahoo, who left Stanford for the business world.

Mr. Karim met Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen when all three of them worked at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, netting Mr. Karim a few million dollars, they often talked about starting another company.

By early 2005, all three had left PayPal. They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions at Max’s Opera Café, near Stanford, Mr. Karim said. Sometimes they met at Mr. Hurley’s place in Menlo Park or Mr. Karim’s apartment on Sand Hill Road, down the street from Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that would become YouTube’s financial backer.

Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential in turning his raw idea into what eventually became YouTube.

A YouTube spokeswoman said that the genesis of YouTube involved efforts by all three founders.

As early as February 2005, when the site was introduced, Mr. Karim said he and his partners had agreed that he would not become an employee, but rather an informal adviser to YouTube. He did not take a salary, benefits or even a formal title. “I was focused on school,” he said.

The decision meant that his stake in the company would be reduced, Mr. Karim said. “We negotiated something that we thought was fair.”

Roelof Botha, the Sequoia partner who led the investment in YouTube, said he would have preferred if Mr. Karim had stayed.

“I wish we could have kept him as part of the company,” Mr. Botha said. “He was very, very creative. We were doing everything we could to convince him to defer.”

Mr. Karim was born in East Germany in 1979. The family moved to West Germany a year later and to St. Paul, Minn., in 1992. His father, Naimul Karim, is a researcher at 3M and his mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.

“To develop new things and be aware of new things, this is our life,” Ms. Karim said, explaining her son’s interest in technology and learning.

After graduating from high school, Jawed Karim chose to go to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in part because it was the school that the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, and others who gave birth to the first popular Web browser attended.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to be the next Marc Andreessen, but it would be cool to be in the same place,” Mr. Karim said. In 2000, during his junior year, he dropped out to head to Silicon Valley, where he joined PayPal. He later finished his undergraduate degree by taking some courses online and some at Santa Clara University.

Armed with a video camera, Mr. Karim documented much of YouTube’s early life, including the meetings when the three discussed financing strategies and the brainstorming sessions in Mr. Hurley’s garage, where the company was hatched.

In his studio apartment in a residence hall for graduate students, he showed one of them, which he said was filmed in April 2005. In it, Mr. Chen talked about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50 or 60 videos on the YouTube site. Also, he said, “there’s not that many videos I’d want to watch.” The camera then turns to Mr. Hurley, who grins and says “Videos like these,” referring to the one Mr. Karim is filming.

Mr. Karim, who has remained in frequent contact with the other co-founders, said he was first informed of the talks with Google last week. On Monday, he was called in to the Palo Alto law offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to sign acquisition papers, and he briefly got to congratulate Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, he said.

Asked what he thought of the acquisition price, Mr. Karim said: “It sounded good to me.” When a reporter looked puzzled, he raised his eyebrows and added: “I was amazed.”


Correction: Oct. 13, 2006

An article in Business Day yesterday about the newfound fortunes of Jawed Karim, the third founder of the Web site YouTube, which was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion, misstated the year of his birth. Mr. Karim, 27, was born in 1979, not 1972.

Singapore none too fussy about the source of wealth in its financial sector

Michael Backman
July 26, 2006

YOU are an Indonesian businessman. You've bribed a state bank official to give you a $US200 million ($A265 million) loan without sufficient collateral, or a risk assessment, for a business venture you know won't get off the ground.

The authorities have found out and you're facing arrest. You need somewhere to go where authorities can't touch you. So where do you go? The answer is Singapore. Why? Because it is a half-hour flight from Jakarta, or 45 minutes by ferry from the Indonesian island of Batam, and, most importantly, it does not have an extradition treaty with Indonesia.

It is largely ethnically Chinese, just like many of Indonesia's white-collar criminals, if only because Indonesians of Chinese ancestry dominate that country's business sector.

Singapore finally agreed to negotiate an extradition treaty last year after years of Indonesia begging for one. The process has been ridiculously drawn out. At least six rounds of talks have been held. Indonesia is angry and feels that Singapore is being obstructionist. But why should Singapore be slow? Probably because it is a haven for Indonesian crooks on the run, and they bring their money with them. Billions of dollars in corruptly obtained funds have flowed into Singapore's property market and its banks.

It's a sensitive matter because financial services account for 22 per cent of Singapore's economy. You can imagine the situation from Jakarta's point of view. Singapore lectures Indonesia about the importance of the rule of law while giving its criminals a haven.

Despite the billions it gets from Indonesia, it gives back only a fraction in foreign assistance but then decries Indonesia for being insufficiently grateful.

Among the Indonesian crooks and suspects believed to be on the run in Singapore are Bambang Sutrisno and Adrian Kiki Ariawan, who were found guilty of embezzling the equivalent of $US162 million from Bank Surya; Sudjiono Timan, who was convicted of improperly diverting $US120 million from a state-owned investment company; Lidia Mochtar, who is wanted over the embezzlement of $US20 million from Bank Tamara; Agus Anwar, a suspect over $US214 million that's unaccounted for from Bank Pelita; and Pauline Maria Lumowa, who is wanted over $US184 million that's missing from Bank BNI. Others whose whereabouts are unknown are able to safely visit Singapore.

The US doesn't have an extradition treaty with Indonesia but co-operation by US officials saw the fugitive Indonesian David Nusa Wijaya, wanted in connection with embezzlement of about $US140 million, return to Indonesia from San Francisco earlier this year.

The US embassy in Jakarta said at the time: "The US Government understands that returning fugitives and stolen assets from abroad in corruption cases is a top law-enforcement priority in Indonesia."

Singapore argues that because its laws are based on English common law and Indonesian law is based on Dutch codes, the two systems are incompatible, making an extradition treaty difficult.

But that didn't stop India from signing such a treaty with the Philippines in 2004, or Australia from signing one with Indonesia. Fugitive Indonesian banker Hendra Rahardja, who embezzled almost $US300 million, was on the verge of being extradited from Australia in early 2003 when he died of cancer in Sydney. His funds in Australia were frozen and returned to Indonesia.

A corollary of Singapore's reluctance to sign an extradition treaty with Indonesia is its apparent lack of fussiness about the sources of the funds attracted to its banking sector.

Singaporean officials make all the right noises when it comes to monitoring illicit funds. But there is a perception that in practice Singapore is not fully meeting international expectations and obligations. One person involved in monitoring international money flows for a Western government told me last week that the results of Singapore's efforts to date were disappointing.

And a senior fund manager in the region had this to say: "Singapore has truly become the global centre for parking ill-gotten gains. The private banking teams are huge and in practice ask almost no questions (compared with the branches elsewhere, including Switzerland).

"An acquaintance of mine who made $US13 million through a corrupt deal (in Indonesia) was not asked about how he got the money despite obviously having a job that would not have allowed such amounts to have been accumulated. Russians, mainland Chinese and Indonesians are pouring money into Singapore. High-end property has risen 30-50 per cent in the last 18 months or so."

Singapore, he argues, is out of step internationally. He cites a recent case in which even a Swiss bank co-operated with the Indonesian Government in tracking down $US5.2 million in allegedly improper funds deposited by the former head of Bank Mandiri, Indonesia's largest state-owned bank.

Attention is now being turned to China. Singapore is working hard at making itself more attractive to Chinese mainlanders, be they tourists or individuals, with funds to park. Singaporean Government representatives are trawling through China, promoting Singapore over Hong Kong as a safe destination for funds and property investment. Direct flights are being established with regional centres across China. Casinos are being set up. There has even been an influx of mainland Chinese prostitutes into Singapore's quasi-legal sex industry. And there's no extradition treaty, or little chance of one.

Of course, Singapore will argue that it takes money laundering seriously and has all types of detection methods in place. But that is not the point. It's what happens in practice that counts. After all, even Chinese laundries can have window dressing.

source theage.com.au

The Charade Of Meritocracy

From FEER
October 2006

By Michael D. Barr

The legitimacy of the Singaporean government is predicated on the idea of a meritocratic technocracy. A tiny number of career civil servants play a leading role in setting policy within their ministries and other government-linked bureaucracies, leading both an elite corps of senior bureaucrats, and a much larger group of ordinary civil servants. Virtually all of the elite members of this hierarchy are “scholars,” which in Singapore parlance means they won competitive, bonded government scholarships—the established route into the country’s elite.

Scholars not only lead the Administrative Service, but also the military’s officer corps, as well as the executive ranks of statutory boards and government-linked companies (GLCs). Movement between these four groups is fluid, with even the military officers routinely doing stints in the civilian civil service. Together with their political masters, most of whom are also scholars, they make up the software for the entity commonly known as “Singapore Inc.”—a labyrinth of GLCs, statutory boards and ministries that own or manage around 60% of Singapore’s economy.

The basis of the scholars’ mandate to govern is not merely their performance on the job, but also the integrity of the process that selected them. The educational system is designed to cultivate competition, requiring top students to prove themselves every step of the way. Singapore’s schools first stream students into elite classes after Primary 3 and 4. They then compete for entry into special secondary schools and junior colleges, before vying for government and government-linked scholarships to attend the most prestigious universities around the world.

These scholarships typically require several years of government service after graduation, and the scholars are drafted into the Administrative Service, the officer corps of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), or the career track of a statutory board or GLC. The government insists that all Singaporeans have equal opportunities to excel in the system, and that everyone who has made it to the top did so purely by academic talent and hard work. Other factors such as gender, socioeconomic background and race supposedly play no more than a marginal role, if they are acknowledged as factors at all.

On the point of race, the Singapore government has long prided itself on having instituted a system of multiracialism that fosters cultural diversity under an umbrella of national unity. This is explicitly supposed to protect the 23% of the population who belong to minority races (mainly ethnic Malays and Indians) from discrimination by the Chinese majority.

But this system conceals several unacknowledged agendas. In our forthcoming book, Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project, Zlatko Skrbiš and I present evidence that the playing field is hardly level. In fact, Singapore’s system of promotion disguises and even facilitates tremendous biases against women, the poor and non-Chinese. Singapore’s administrative and its political elites—especially the younger ones who have come through school in the last 20 or so years—are not the cream of Singapore’s talent as they claim, but are merely a dominant social class, resting on systemic biases to perpetuate regime regeneration based on gender, class and race.

At the peak of the system is the network of prestigious government scholarships. Since independence in 1965, the technique of using government scholarships to recruit cohorts of scholars into the administrative and ruling elite has moved from the periphery of Singaporean society to center stage. Even before independence, a makeshift system of government and Colombo Plan scholarships sent a few outstanding scholars overseas before putting them into government service, including most notably former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Yet as late as 1975 this system had contributed only two out of 14 members of Singapore’s cabinet. Even by 1985, only four out of 12 cabinet ministers were former government scholars.

By 1994, however, the situation had changed beyond recognition, with eight out of 14 cabinet ministers being ex-scholars, including Prime Minister Goh. By 2005 there were 12 ex-scholars in a Cabinet of 19. Of these, five had been SAF scholars, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. A perusal of the upper echelons of the ruling elite taken more broadly tells a similar story. In 1994, 12 of the 17 permanent secretaries were scholars, as were 137 of the 210 in the administrative-officer class of the Administrative Service.

The government scholarship system claims to act as a meritocratic sieve—the just reward for young adults with talent and academic dedication. If there is a racial or other bias in the outcomes, then this can only be the result of the uneven distribution of talent and academic application in the community. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it when he spoke on national television in May 2005, “We are a multiracial society. We must have tolerance, harmony. … And you must have meritocracy … so everybody feels it is fair….” His father, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, was making the same point when, in 1989, he told Singapore’s Malay community that they “must learn to compete with everyone else” in the education system.

Yet if Singapore’s meritocracy is truly a level playing field, as the Lees assert, then the Chinese must be much smarter and harder working than the minority Indians and Malays. Consider the distribution of the top jobs in various arms of the Singapore government service in the 1990s (based on research conducted by Ross Worthington in the early 2000s):

• Of the top 30 GLCs only two (6.7%) were chaired by non-Chinese in 1991 (and neither of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

• Of the 38 people who were represented on the most GLC boards in 1998, only two (5.3%) were non-Chinese (and neither of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

• Of the 78 “core people” on statutory boards and GLCs in 1998, seven (9%) were non-Chinese (and one of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

A similar outcome is revealed in the pattern of government scholarships awarded after matriculation from school. Of the 200 winners of Singapore’s most prestigious scholarship, the President’s Scholarship, from 1966-2005 only 14 (6.4%) were not Chinese. But this was not a consistent proportion throughout the period. If we take 1980 as the divider, we find that there were 10 non-Chinese President’s Scholars out of 114 from 1966-80, or 8%, but in the period from 1981-2005 this figure had dropped to four out of 106, or 3.8%. Since independence, the President’s Scholarship has been awarded to only one Malay, in 1968. There has been only one non-Chinese President’s Scholar in the 18 years from 1987 to 2005 (a boy called Mikail Kalimuddin) and he is actually half Chinese, studied in Chinese schools (Chinese High School and Hwa Chong Junior College), and took the Higher Chinese course as his mother tongue. If we broaden our focus to encompass broader constructions of ethnicity, we find that since independence, the President’s Scholarship has been won by only two Muslims (1968 and 2005).

If we consider Singapore’s second-ranked scholarship—the Ministry of Defence’s Singapore Armed Forces Overseas Scholarship (SAFOS)—we find a comparable pattern. The Ministry of Defence did not respond to my request for a list of recipients of SAF scholarships, but using newspaper accounts and information provided by the Ministry of Defence Scholarship Centre and Public Service Commission Scholarship Centre Web sites, I was able to identify 140 (56%) of the 250 SAFOS winners up to 2005.

Although only indicative, this table clearly suggests the Chinese dominance in SAFOS stakes: 98% of SAFOS winners in this sample were Chinese, and about 2% were non-Chinese (counting Mikail Kalimuddin in 2005 as non-Chinese). Furthermore I found not a single Malay recipient and only one Muslim winner (Mikail Kalimuddin). A similar picture emerges in the lower status Singapore Armed Forces Merit Scholarship winners: 71 (25.6%) of 277 (as of late 2005) scholars identified, with 69 (97%) Chinese winners to only two non-Chinese—though there was a Malay recipient in 2004, and one reliable scholar maintains that there have been others.

The position of the non-Chinese in the educational stakes has clearly deteriorated since the beginning of the 1980s. According to the logic of meritocracy, that means the Chinese have been getting smarter, at least compared to the non-Chinese.

Yet the selection of scholars does not depend purely on objective results like exam scores. In the internal processes of awarding scholarships after matriculation results are released, there are plenty of opportunities to exercise subtle forms of discrimination. Extracurricular activities (as recorded in one’s school record), “character” and performance in an interview are also considered. This makes the selection process much more subjective than one would expect in a system that claims to be a meritocracy, and it creates ample opportunity for racial and other prejudices to operate with relative freedom.

Is there evidence that such biases operate at this level? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this question is “yes.” Take for instance a 2004 promotional supplement in the country’s main newspaper used to recruit applicants for scholarships. The advertorial articles accompanying the paid advertisements featured only one non-Chinese scholar (a Malay on a lowly “local” scholarship) amongst 28 Chinese on prestigious overseas scholarships. Even more disturbing for what they reveal about the prejudices of those offering the scholarships were the paid advertisements placed by government ministries, statutory boards and GLCs. Of the 30 scholars who were both prominent and can be racially identified by their photographs or their names without any doubt as to accuracy, every one of them was Chinese. This leaves not a shadow of a doubt that those people granting government and government-linked scholarships presume that the vast majority of high-level winners will be Chinese.



The absence of Malays from the SAFOS scholarships and their near-absence from the SAF Merit Scholarships deserves special mention because this is an extension of discrimination against the admission of Malays into senior and sensitive positions in the SAF that is officially sanctioned. The discrimination against Malays has been discussed in parliament and the media, and is justified by the assertion that the loyalty of Malays cannot be assumed, both because they are Muslim and because they have a racial and ethnic affinity with the Malays in Malaysia and Indonesia. Current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has historically been a vocal defender of this policy.

This discrimination hits Malay men hard, first because it deprives many of promising careers in the army, and second—and more pertinent for our study of the elite—it all but completely excludes potentially high-flying Malays of a chance of entering the scholar class through the SAF. A Chinese woman has a much better chance of winning an SAF scholarship than a Malay man.

Yet even before the scholarship stage, the education system has stacked the deck in favor of Chinese, starting in preschool. Here is the heart of Singapore’s systemic discrimination against non-Chinese. Since the end of the 1970s, the principles of “meritocracy” and “multiracialism” have been subverted by a form of government-driven Chinese chauvinism that has marginalized the minorities. It was not known to the public at the time, but as early as 1978, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had begun referring to Singapore as a “Confucian society” in his dealings with foreign dignitaries. This proved to be the beginning of a shift from his record as a defender of a communally neutral form of multiracialism toward a policy of actively promoting a Chinese-dominated Singapore.

The early outward signs of the Sinicization program were the privileging of Chinese education, Chinese language and selectively chosen “Chinese values” in an overt and successful effort to create a Mandarin- and English-speaking elite who would dominate public life. Two of the most important planks of this campaign were decided in 1979: the annual “Speak Mandarin Campaign” and the decision to preserve and foster a collection of elite Chinese-medium schools, known as Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools.

The SAP schools are explicitly designed to have a Chinese ambience, right down to Chinese gardens, windows shaped like plum blossoms, Chinese orchestra and drama, and exchange programs with mainland China and Taiwan. Over the years the children in SAP schools have been given multiple advantages over those in ordinary schools, including exclusive preschool programs and special consideration for preuniversity scholarships.

For instance, in the early 1980s, when there was a serious shortage of graduate English teachers in schools, the Ministry of Education ensured there were enough allocated to SAP schools “to help improve standards of English among the Chinese-medium students, in the hope that they will be able to make it to university”—a target brought closer by the granting of two O-level bonus points exclusively to SAP school students when they applied to enter junior college. By contrast, neither Indians nor Malays received any special help, let alone schools of their own to address their special needs. They were not only left to fend for themselves, but were sometimes subjected to wanton neglect: inadequately trained teachers, substandard facilities and resources and the “knowledge” that they are not as good as the Chinese.

This account of discrimination against non-Chinese might lead the reader to assume that the quarter of Singaporeans who are not Chinese must form a festering and perhaps even revolutionary mass of resentment. Such an assumption would, however, be a long way from the mark. Non-Chinese might be largely excluded from the highest levels of the administrative elite, but just below these rarefied heights there plenty of positions open to intelligent and hardworking non-Chinese—certainly enough to ensure that non-Chinese communities have much to gain by enthusiastically buying into the system, even after the glass ceilings and racial barriers are taken into account. There are many grievances and resentments in these levels of society but the grievances are muted and balanced by an appreciation of the relative comforts and prosperity they enjoy. For most, any tendency to complain is subdued also by knowledge that it could be worse, and the widespread assumption among members of minority communities that it will be if they seriously pursue their grievances. As long as the Singapore system continues to deal such people a satisfactory hand, if not a fair one, it should be able to cope with some quiet rumblings in the ranks.

While this discrimination is not sparking a reaction that threatens the regime in the short term, the resulting injustices are certainly undermining the myth that the regime operates on meritocratic principles. This is worrying in the longer term because this myth, along with the capacity to deliver peace and prosperity, is one of the primary rationales by which Singaporeans reluctantly accept the many unpopular aspects of the regime, such as the lack of freedom and democracy, the intrusion of government into most aspects of private life, the pressure-cooker lifestyle and the high cost of living.

The rhetoric of meritocracy has given Singaporeans the consolation of believing that their ruling elite are the best of the best and can therefore be trusted almost blindly on important matters, even if they are highhanded and lack the common touch. As this illusion gradually falls away—and today it is already heavily undermined—the trust that Singaporeans have for their government is becoming increasingly qualified. It remains to be seen how long the regime can avert the logical consequences of the contradictions between the myth and the reality.

Mr. Barr is a lecturer at the University of Queensland and author of Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man (Routledge, 2000) and Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War (Routledge, 2002).

link The Charade Of Meritocracy