Saturday, May 31, 2014

Ukraine to push on with army offensive, row grows over Russian fighters reports

By Richard Balmforth and Sabina Zawadzki KIEV/DONETSK Ukraine Sat May 31, 2014

 

A pro-Russian separatist stands guard near the gates of a base in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk May 30, 2014. REUTERS-Maxim Zmeyev

Pro-Russian separatists look at a map on their base in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk May 30, 2014.  REUTERS-Maxim Zmeyev

A pro-Russian separatist stands guard near the gates of a base in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk May 30, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Maxim Zmeyev

KIEV/DONETSK Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukraine's government vowed on Friday to press ahead with a military offensive against separatists, despite a deadly attack on an army helicopter, amid increasing reports that fighters from Russia have been involved in rebellions in the east.

President-elect Petro Poroshenko, who scored an overwhelming first-round victory in a poll on May 25, swore to punish those responsible for the shooting down on Thursday of the helicopter near Slaviansk, which killed 14 servicemen including a general.

Acting Defence Minister Mykhilo Koval, repeating charges that Russia was carrying out "special operations" in the east of Ukraine, said on Friday that Ukrainian forces would continue with military operations in border areas "until these regions begin to live normally, until there is peace".

Elsewhere in Ukraine's troubled eastern regions, a separatist group detained a second four-person team of monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based OSCE said. Last Monday separatists in another area detained a four-man OSCE team and have not yet released them.

Ukrainian authorities have long alleged that the rebellions have been fomented by Moscow among the largely Russian-speaking population, which is especially vulnerable to cross-border propaganda hostile to Kiev's "Euro-Maidan" revolution that overthrew Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovich in February.

Reports by Ukrainian border authorities and journalists on the ground now appear to show increasing evidence of direct involvement by fighters from Russia in the rebellions that erupted two months ago in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

According to these reports, fighters may be coming into Ukraine from former hotspots in Russia and its North Caucasus fringes such as Chechnya whose own troubles in the past 20 years have spawned a proliferation of armed groups.

Ukraine's authorities say Russian border guards are doing nothing to stop fighters crossing the long land border from Russia, along with truck loads of ammunition and weapons.

In the latest such report, Ukrainian border guards said on Friday they had seized a cache of weapons including guns, machine-guns, grenade-launchers, sniper rifles and 84 boxes of live ammunition in two cars they stopped as they crossed from Russia.

A total of 13 people were detained, the border guard service said in a statement on its website.

Reuters correspondents in Donetsk, an industrial city and one of the main separatist centres, saw coffins loaded onto a vegetable truck on Thursday and driven off after being told by rebels that "volunteers" from Russia killed earlier in the week in an army offensive were being repatriated.

BODIES

An official of the Ukrainian border guard service said on Friday that bodies of slain Russian nationals were being allowed to return to Russia for humanitarian reasons.

"We don't need them to fertilise the land of Ukraine," Serhiy Astakhov, an aide to the head of the border guard service, said in Kiev in reply to a journalist's question.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov says weapons that could only have been brought in from Russia were found at the scene of Donetsk airport after it was cleared of rebels.

The reports have revived Russia-West tensions that had eased slightly after Moscow pulled back thousands of its troops from the border with Ukraine in what the United States described as a "promising sign".

The U.S. State Department said on Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry had pressed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to end all Russian support for separatists and call on them to lay down their arms.

Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said Russia was clearly behind the violent unrest, though there were no immediately effective steps the West could take to stop it.

Poroshenko, a 48-year-old wealthy businessman who has emerged as a national leader from six months of turmoil, will plunge into a hectic round of meetings with world leaders next week with the fate of his country on their minds.

He will hold talks on the crisis with U.S. President Barack Obama in Warsaw on June 3-4 when both men attend events marking Poland's emergence from communist rule.

Then later at the end of the week in France he will have the opportunity to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as European leaders, at an international gathering marking the "D-Day" World War Two landings in Normandy.

Poroshenko voiced support for a resumption of the military drive against the separatists as soon as it became clear he had been overwhelmingly voted in as president last Sunday. The day after the vote, Ukrainian forces attacked rebels who seized Donetsk international airport, killing 50 of their number in fierce airstrikes.

Poroshenko, due to be inaugurated on June 7, has vowed to punish the perpetrators of the attack on the Ukrainian helicopter.

In a step to resolving a long-standing row over gas deliveries which has long bedevilled Ukraine's relations with its main supplier Russia, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said Ukraine had paid $786 million to Russia in back payments.

Russia's energy minister said in Berlin on Friday that talks aimed a settling a gas debt which Gazprom, the Russian state gas monopoly, says will be at about $5.2 billion by June 7 should be able to continue next week.

Donetsk, an industrial hub of 1 million where strategic buildings are being held by rebels, was quiet on Friday. But the airport violence brought a subdued air to the last day of the school year when school-leavers usually celebrate in the parks with champagne and ice-cream.

Long lines were forming at the city's railway station following Monday and Tuesday's clashes as many people headed out of the city for safety reasons.

Vita, a middle-aged woman waiting with her daughter and little granddaughter for a train to Moscow, said: "We are really concerned with what is going on, I need to take away my pregnant daughter. We'll leave her with my sister in Moscow and come back to my husband who stayed at home with all our belongings."

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Donetsk and Natalya Zinets in Kiev; Writing by Richard Balmforth; Editing by Peter Graff)

Ukraine to push on with army offensive, row grows over Russian fighters reports | Reuters

Front National wins European parliament elections in France

Ian Traynor in Brussels theguardian.com, Monday 26 May 2014
Elections return record number of MEPs opposed to EU project, with far right winning in France, Denmark and Austria
Rolling coverage of the European election results
Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen's Front National party came first in three exit polls with more than 25% of the vote. Photograph: Remy De La Mauviniere/AP
European politics were jolted as seldom before on Sunday when France's extreme nationalists triumphed in the European parliament elections, which across the continent returned an unprecedented number of MEPs hostile or sceptical about the European Union in a huge vote of no confidence in Europe's political elite.
France's Front National won the election there with a projected 25% of the vote, while the governing socialists of President François Hollande collapsed to 14%, according to exit polls.
In Britain the Nigel Farage-led insurrection against Westminster was also expected by all three main parties to deliver a victory for Ukip in the election, albeit with a lower lead than some opinion polls had been predicting in recent weeks. Turnout in Britain was 36%, higher than at the last European elections in 2009.
Four days of elections across 28 countries returned a record number of MEPs opposed to the EU project. Voters delivered a string of sensational outcomes, according to exit polls, with radical and nationalist anti-EU forces scoring major victories both on the far right and the hard left.
In Greece, Alexis Tsipras led the Syriza movement to a watershed victory for the left over the country's two traditional ruling parties – currently governing in coalition – the New Democracy conservatives and the Pasok social democrats. The neo-fascists of Golden Dawn took about 10%.
Exit polls suggest the nationalist anti-immigrant Danish People's party won by a similar margin in Denmark.
Morten Messerschmidt
Morten Messerschmidt of the Danish People's party, arrives at the Danish parliament in Copenhagen after his party won the European election. Photograph: Olesen Peter Hove/AP
In Austria the far-right Freedom party was projected to take a fifth of the vote. In Hungary, the neo-fascist Jobbik movement took around 15%.
On the hard left, Sinn Féin did well in Ireland, and Die Linke took about 8% in Germany. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) scored an expected easy victory, but the EU's most powerful state, also returned its first Eurosceptics in the form of the Alternative for Germany as well as its first neo-Nazi MEP from the Hitler apologists of the National Democratic party of Germany, according to German TV projections.
Merkel's party dropped several points while the Social Democrats (SPD) made significant gains, narrowing the gap between the two big parties to about eight percentage points.
The election mattered more than ever because the Strasbourg-based parliament has gained greater powers, meaning it will have a strong say in most EU legislation over the next five years and will also shape the outcome of the battle for the most powerful post in Brussels, the new head of the EU executive, the European Commission.
But its mandate to exercise those powers was dented by the low turnout of roughly 43%, raising renewed questions about the parliament's legitimacy.
Europe's Christian Democrat bloc, led by Merkel's CDU, were expected to emerge as the biggest grouping of MEPs, albeit forfeiting some 50 seats, with the Social Democrats improving their performance to come second.
The two big pro-EU blocs can easily muster a majority between them in the 751-seat chamber and may club together in the form of a Berlin-style grand coalition to prevent legislative gridlock.
But after five years of currency and debt crisis, recession, and savage austerity, the results exposed a Europe of division: extremely volatile, fragmented, with voters disenchanted and those choosing to vote cutting their support for the mainstream in favour of fringe parties.
Average turnout across the EU was put at just over 43%, the same as the last election in 2009 which was the lowest ever for a parliament that has steadily accrued greater powers.
Voters turnout in Germany
Turnout in elections for the European parliament averaged out at 43.11 percent across the 28-nation European Union. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
For Europe's political class, the result in France was the most shocking. Le Pen promptly described the vote as support for "France for the French", called on the government to resign and for Hollande to dissolve the French parliament.
Whether voters opted for the far right, hard left, or opposition, the anti-incumbent backlash was felt in most parts of Europe and is likely to have a profound impact on national politics everywhere as well as on the conduct of policy-making at the EU level.
Despite the low turnout, a spokesman for the European parliament described the voter participation as "historic", arguing that the trend towards lower turnout since the first direct elections in 1979 had been reversed.
The immediate impact of the election will vary. The performance of Le Pen will have unknown consequences for French politics while in Italy the expected victory of the new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, will be seen as a mandate for his proposed reforms despite the fact that his administration is unelected.
The results will bring pressure for early national elections in Greece and Bulgaria while a sweeping victory of social democrats and Greens in Sweden signals a thorough defeat for the governing conservatives in September.
As the political elite licks its wounds and considers it options, attention will promptly shift to the formation of coalitions of voting blocs in the parliament and infighting over how the top jobs in Brussels are to be distributed over the coming months.
Leading Christian Democrats predicted they would be the biggest bloc by a margin of around 20 seats and laid claim to the post of the new head of the European commission being filled by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg. However, his rival, Martin Schulz, a German Social Democrat, was feted last night in Berlin as the moral victor of the election. Both camps will now seek to lure smaller parties and independent MEPs to their side to try to muster an absolute parliamentary majority needed to endorse a new commission chief.
National government leaders are to gather in Brussels on Tuesday evening to plot their next moves. Hollande will be the weakest figure at the summit, while David Cameron will seek to exploit the impact of the electoral earthquake to bolster his case for deep seated reform of the EU.
France's National Front wins Euro vote in France
Posters announce France's Front National as the leading political party in the country are hung at their party's HQ. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/REUTERS
Despite the National Front triumph, it remains to be seen whether Le Pen will be able to cobble together enough parties from enough countries to form a voting bloc in the new parliament. That requires a minimum of 25 MEPs from at least seven countries. While she will easily muster the MEP numbers, potential allies in Belgium and Slovakia may not get into the parliament, making it more difficult to get seven countries. Le Pen's biggest ally, Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party in The Netherlands, did less well than expected.
It also remained to be seen whether Cameron would be able to maintain his breakaway faction of European Conservatives and Reformists. His Polish allies were projected to take 19 seats, suggesting they would supplant the Tories as the biggest national contingent in the bloc.
In Greece victory for Syriza would appear to reflect popular frustration with the harsh spending cuts the government has adopted in recent years to meet the terms of its economic rescue programme.
Alexisd Tsipras
Leader of Greek leftist main opposition Syriza party Alexis Tsipras, after leading his party to victory. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
The surge in support for the far left raises doubts about how much longer the centre-right government can last with a parliamentary majority of just two seats, although government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said there was no question that the government would not finish its four-year term.
"It's easy for people to cast a protest vote in European elections," he told Greek television. "The political scenario of a government collapse, which Syriza was trying to paint, has not been borne out by the facts."
In a first for Greece, neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn looks set to elect at least two out of Greece's 21 MEPs.
The party ranks third with up to 10% of the vote, despite an ongoing criminal investigation and the fact that several of its leading members are in pre-trial detention.






























Front National wins European parliament elections in France | World news | theguardian.com

European elections: six countries that went left, not right


Which nations bucked the trend in the Euro elections and surged towards left wing parties?
Supporters of Greece's opposition Syriza party
Supporters of Greece's opposition Syriza party, overall winner in the Euro elections. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
The headline gains were for nationalist and Eurosceptic parties – witness all those pictures of "evil" Nigel Farage smiling into his pint glass, or of Marine Le Pen, whose Front National party triumphed in France, throwing back her head and cackling. But some member nations bucked the trend in the Euro elections and registered a surge towards left wing candidates. Here's who:
 

Spain

EU parliament election in Madrid
Willy Meyer of Spain's United Left party, which gained around 12 seats. Photograph: Fernando Villar/EPA
The People's party was one of the few governing parties to win the largest portion of the vote. But it's the large gains by leftwing parties that are exciting political commentators. Between them, the two dominant political parties (People's party and Socialist party) lost five million votes compared with their 2009 performance. Meanwhile, the protest party Podemos ("We can") took nearly 8% of the vote and five seats. Podemos was formed only four months ago, having grown out of the Spanish indignados who camped out in Madrid's Puerta del Sol square in 2011. Coalition group United Left also gained four seats, further increasing the voice of the left in parliament. "It's the hour of the people. This is only the beginning," Podemos's leader Pablo Iglesias, tweeted. "Clearly, we can."

 

Greece

First, the bad news. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party claimed three seats, its first MEPs, with around 9.37% of the vote – a huge improvement on its 2009 performance, in which it polled less than 0.5%. But the overall winner in Greece was the left wing opposition party Syriza, which campaigned against the government's austerity policies. Partial results indicate it won the vote by three or four points from the governing New Democracy party.

 

Italy

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi during a press conference, Rome, Italy - 26 May 2014
Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, whose centre-left Democratic party exceeded expections. Photograph: Rex Features
Prime minister Matteo Renzi and his centre-left Democratic party exceeded expectations to win just over 40% of the vote. The Five Star Movement led by the former comedian Beppe Grillo, an anti-establishment, anti-European party, came second but with fewer votes than expected. Forza Italia, the party of Silvio Berlusconi, took its lowest ever vote share. Italy, the stable heart of Europe: you heard it here first. The massive endorsement of Renzi, however, is very much a matter of national politics. He was the elected mayor of Florence and holds no seat in parliament; he became prime minister in February at the invitation of Italian president Giorgio Napolitano. The result gives him the mandate he lacked.
 

Portugal

Socialist party candidate Francisco Assis in portugal
Socialist party candidate Francisco Assis (left) embraces the party leader Antonio Jose Seguro after their election victory. Photograph: Tiago Petinga/EPA
"From Dublin to Lublin, from Portugal to Pomerania, the pitchfork-wielding populists are converging on the Breydel building in Brussels – drunk on local hooch and chanting nationalist slogans and preparing to give the federalist machinery a good old kicking with their authentically folkloric clogs," Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph on Monday. Actually, this is a little unfair on Portugal, which Johnson may have included for alliterative reasons. There was no emergence of a particularly Eurosceptic party. The country's opposition Socialist party topped the poll with around 31.5% – leaving the ruling Social Democratic party in second place. The victory was driven by an electorate registering its objection to austerity measures; the country exited its ¤78bn (£63bn) euro bailout programme earlier this month.

 

Slovakia

You would be hard pushed to call it a surge. Only around 13% of the Slovakian electorate voted – and they voted in support of the ruling Smer socialist party. Eurosceptic liberals SaS got one seat. But the dominant mode of Euroscepticism here is Euroabstention.

 

Romania

TOPSHOTS A Romanian woman casts her ball
A Romanian woman casts her vote. Photograph: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images
Farage put Romania firmly on the British political agenda. But there has been no Eurosceptic backlash in Romania, where preliminary data indicates that the governing alliance of the Romanian Social Democratic party prime minister Victor Ponta is on course to win 37.3% of votes. Let's hope that Farage gets to sit next to some nice Romanian MEPs.
Note: This article was amended on May 27, 2014. The original stated that United Left had gained around 12 seats. This figure referred to the total gains of the anti-bailout hard-left group in the European Parliament. United Left gained four seats.











European elections: six countries that went left, not right | Politics | The Guardian

Meet the new faces ready to sweep into the European parliament

Remi Adekoya, Helena Smith, Lizzy Davies, Anne Penketh, and Philip Oltermann
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2014
The fresh crop of MEPs includes Holocaust deniers, fascists, xenophobes – and a leftwing war hero
poland korwin-mikke
Janusz Korwin-Mikke reacts after EU elections exit polls in Warsaw, Poland. Photograph: Pawel Supernak/EPA
 

Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Poland

Poland's newly elected MEP is anti-EU, anti-democracy, pro-Putin and, by his own account, anti-women. The 72-year-old led his party New Right to fourth place in the elections, with 7.2% of the vote. He also gained 28.5% of votes among 18- to 25-year-olds – more than any other party.
His persistence seems to be paying off: Korwin-Mikke has run in just about every election – presidential and parliamentary – in post-communist Poland. But apart from a brief stint in parliament in the early 1990s, he had previously never made much headway, always ending up with less than 3%.
A colourful and abrasive character, Korwin-Mikke makes Milton Friedman look like a socialist.
He favours a Dickensian-era style of capitalism in which there would be no labour laws and market forces could operate unhindered. He calls the EU a "communist project" which is run by "Maoists like Barroso" and has said he would like to put the European commission building to better use by "turning it into a brothel".
He has said that "women are dumber than men and should not be allowed to vote". "Evolution has ensured that women are not too intelligent. After all, no intelligent being would last more than an hour a day with a baby and all its goo-goo ga-ga gibberish," said Korwin-Mikke, who also happens to be a champion bridge player.
He is similarly derisive of democracy, calling it the "stupidest form of government ever conceived", favouring a monarchy instead. He has said he will spend no longer than 18 months in the European parliament as he now hopes to cross the 5% threshold needed to get into the Polish parliament in elections scheduled for next year.
When asked by journalists why, then, he even bothered to fight these elections, Korwin-Mikke replied: "What do you mean why? Thanks to this I will have immunity, some money and I can get myself an MEP office." He promised, though, that during his first three months in the European parliament "I will raise so much hell that they will remember me there for a long time".
Manolis Glezos
Greek resistance hero, politician and writer Manolis Glezos addressing supporters during a rally of the Left Coalition Party in central Athens. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Manolis Glezos, Greece

Not all the new MEPs are far-right, xenophobic and anti-Europe. Manolis Glezos, the new European parliament's oldest deputy, is a 92-year-old second world war hero, leftwing icon, inveterate writer and indefatigable activist. On Monday, he added another feather to his cap, winning more votes (105,184) than any other Euro parliamentarian on Greece's 21-MEP ticket. He doesn't tweet, doesn't type and insists on taking an afternoon nap every day – a legacy of being exiled and imprisoned for 16 years for his views. "That way I get two days out of one," he once told the Guardian. "I start at 7am stop at 3pm, start again at 5pm and go all the way through to midnight. I get a tremendous amount done."
Famous for ripping down the swastika from the Acropolis within days of Nazi forces overrunning Greece, Glezos is also considered the greatest living authority on the resistance movement against Hitler's occupying forces, penning two voluminous tomes (both running to more than 800 pages) on the period.
As the anti-austerity, radical-left Syriza party's top representative in Brussels, he does not intend to put down his pen. The anti-capitalist has a lot to say in the 766-seat parliament – not least about Germany's "colonisation" of Europe. "Greece is the guinea pig of policies exacted by governments whose only God is money," he said. "It started here but will move to other states … people are clearly reacting and we have to give voice to them." Doing that will not be as easy as it sounds.
The intrepid Glezos has one fear: flying. On doctors' orders he will not be able to join other MEPs on the Athens-Brussels plane route. But he has already come up with a contingency plan – and has boat timetables and bus timetables at the ready.
Alessandra Mussolini
Alessandra Mussolini is the grand-daughter of the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Photograph: Laura Lezza/Getty Images

Alessandra Mussolini, Italy

Niece of Sophia Loren and granddaughter of Il Duce, Mussolini has had a career as colourful as her ancestry. She has posed topless for Playboy, played a nun in a critically derided film, and played a vocal role in far- and centre-right Italian politics since the early 90s. Now, 10 years after she was first elected an MEP for her (now defunct) Social Alternative list, she is to return to the European parliament – this time for Silvio Berlusconi's beleaguered Forza Italia (FI) party.
Mussolini, 51, has never been short of an opinion, no matter how offensive. The far-right group in Europe of which she was a member broke up in 2007 after comments she made about crime rates among Romanians provoked a storm of protest – unsurprisingly – among her colleagues in the Greater Romania party. In 2006, responding to an accusation by a transgender MP candidate that she was a fascist, she declared: "Better fascist than faggot."
Occasionally, however, sharp tongue has won her plaudits from beyond her usual fanbase. When, in 2004, Ukip's Godfrey Bloom remarked that "no self-respecting small businessman with a brain … would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age," she reportedly retorted: "I am from Naples and I can say that we women do know how to cook and clean the fridge and even be politicians, while perhaps Godfrey Bloom knows neither how to clean the fridge nor to be a politician."
Bruno Gollnisch
Bruno Gollnisch was defeated by Marine Le Pen for the Front National presidency in 2011. Photograph: Bruno Vigneron/Getty Images

Bruno Gollnisch, France

Marine Le Pen has done her best to put in place a slick, media-friendly operation since taking over as head of the Front National. But in the south-east region where her racist father, Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected in Sunday's European elections, another old-style FN politician was re-elected alongside the Front National founder: Gollnisch, who was defeated by Le Pen's daughter for the FN presidency in 2011.
Gollnisch, 64, is a former academic who is a regional councillor in the southeastern Rhone-Alpes and has served consecutive mandates as an MEP since 1989. But like Le Pen senior – who last week said the French immigration problem could be solved "in three months" by an Ebola virus outbreak – he is a potential embarrassment for the new-look FN. He is an outspoken critic of Islam who had his parliamentary immunity lifted in May 2011 when he was sued for inciting racial hatred in anti-Islamic comments three years earlier.
In February last year, he dropped his trousers and mooned at a regional council meeting in order to protest at state subsidies being given to certain musical bands who sang about sex. He said afterwards that he wanted to "show disapproval of the region's cultural decisions."
In August last year, he provoked a spat with the Socialist party over a personal attack on party spokesman Eduardo Rihan Cypel, who is of Brazilian origin. Gollnisch said Rihan Cypel reminded him of "people that you invite round, and once they settle in, they want to bring everybody round".
Mario Borghezio
Mario Borghezio last year called the Italian government a 'bongo bongo' administration. Photograph: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images

Mario Borghezio, Italy

Last year, Borghezio called the Italian government a "bongo bongo" administration and black minister Cécile Kyenge more "a housekeeper" than a politician – resulting in an expulsion from the rightwing Europe of Freedom and Democracy group, to which Italy's xenophobic Northern League belongs. He complained of having been the victim of a "grotesque persecution" by Nigel Farage, co-chair of the EFD, who branded his words repugnant. But, after another tub-thumbing, immigrant-bashing election campaign, Borghezio could be back.
The 66-year-old veteran of the Italian right was standing in the central region of Italy and thanked the "good guys" of a far-right group, Casa Pound, for having helped him with the logistics of his campaign. (Among other high points, it saw him hand out bread "for our people" in a strongly multicultural area of Rome, and be shouted down at a primary school's gates by angry mothers. "Those two witches brought me good luck," he told online news site Linkiesta.)
Borghezio's comments about Kyenge (whom he accused of trying impose her "tribal traditions" on Italy) got him in hot water last year, but it was hardly his first offence. He has described Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide, as "a patriot", and praised some of the ideas of Anders Bering Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 Norwegian attacks, as "excellent".
In Brussels, Borghezio could be joined by Gianluca Buonanno, a fellow leghista who has his own long list of greatest hits. In January, he smeared his face with black greasepaint in the national parliament in a protest against supposed prejudice against Italians. On 1 April – known in Italy as "April's fish" – he contributed to a debate on illegal immigration by pulling out a sea bass from under his seat in the chamber and waving it vigorously. Last year he reportedly produced a fennel bulb during a parliamentary debate on gay rights. In Italian, the word for fennel is also used as a derogatory term for gay men.
Martin Sonneborn
Martin Sonneborn has a reputation as someone who pushes political satire to its limits. Photograph: Timur Emek/Getty Images

Martin Sonneborn, Germany

His party campaigned with such incisive slogans as "Merkel is stupid" and "Hands off German willies: No to the EU penis-norm", and proposed building a wall around Switzerland. Yet in Germany, its dadaist election campaign seems to have struck a chord. Europe's only purely satirical party managed to gain 0.6% of the overall vote and will send its first MEP to Brussels. Sonneborn, a former editor of satirical magazine Titanic, has already announced plans to resign after a month: "I will spend my first four weeks in Brussels by intensively preparing for my resignation," he said. "We have a rota of 60 candidates who haven't earned a penny in national politics, and I will make sure they'll all get a go on the gravy train before 2019."
He told The Guardian said he was looking forward to meeting Ukip: "We are planning to create an alliance of idiots and fools, which I think has a lot of potential with the new crop of MEPs. Nigel Farage would fit very well into this new group, and I would herewith like to extend an invitation to him."
In Germany, Sonneborn has a reputation as someone who pushes political satire to its limits. In the late 90s he repeatedly impersonated fictitious candidates from real parties like the German Social Democrats, the liberal FDP and the far-right DVU, often campaigning with deliberate offensive slogans that highlighted the respective parties' prejudices. During the 2005 general election campaign, he auctioned off slots in the party's political ads for product placement.
Asked whether satirising politics was still funny at a time when the European parliament was increasingly filled with politicians like Farage or Beppe Grillo, who didn't take the political processes in Brussels seriously in the first place, Sonneborn said: "The party pursues modern turbo politics with other people's ideas. Our manifesto may not be authentic, but our appetite for power is".
Udo Voigt
In the past Udo Voigt has described Hitler as 'a great German statesman'. Photograph: Morris Mac Matzen/Reuters

Udo Voigt, Germany

Germany's first far-right MEP has praised Hitler as a "great statesman" and suggested that Rudolf Hess should win the Nobel peace prize. Voigt, 61, is a former head of the NPD, an organisation that Germany's interior intelligence service classifies as a far-right extremist party. During his leadership from 1996 to 2011, Voigt took the party into a more aggressively nationalist direction, prompting a failed attempt to outlaw the party by Germany's federal court in 2003. A renewed attempt, arguing that its ideology is identical to that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, is ongoing.
The son of a former Wehrmacht officer, Voigt joined the NPD aged 16, and held on to his membership even when it cost him his job in the military services. After he took over the NPD leadership in 1996, he openly recruited younger neo-nazis to the organisation, against the will of other party members.
In a 2004 interview with the rightwing newspaper Junge Freiheit, Voigt described Hitler as "a great German statesman", and the current democratic German republic as "an illegitimate system".
In 2005, Voigt received a four-month suspended sentence for incitement of the people, after calling for an armed uprising against the state at a 1998 rally. Police video recordings in 2007 showed that Voigt planned to suggest Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, as a candidate for the Nobel peace prize.
In December 2007, an investigation on German TV showed an interview Voigt had given to a group of Iranian journalists, in which he claimed that "no more than 340,000" Jews had died in the Holocaust, as opposed to the six million figure that is accepted by most historians.
In 2012 a Berlin court handed Voigt a 10-month suspended sentence and a fine of €1,000 for glorifying the actions of the Waffen-SS at a party meeting in 2010. He has described the Nazi salute as a "peace greeting" and called for an end to its ban in Germany.
After election results were released, Voigt hailed the "breaking up of old political structures in Europe". "We will try to build alliances to fight against foreign infiltration, and seek the cancellations of the Schengen agreement and the proposed transatlantic trade agreement. We want Europe to be a union of fatherlands and ethnicities."
Voigt said he had recently been invited to Strasbourg by the British National party's Nick Griffin to discuss far-right alliances, and that talks were ongoing with parties including France's Front National, Hungary's Jobbik and Greece's Golden Dawn.
He said he was saddened by the BNP's failure to win a seat but was looking forward to talking to other parties from Britain: "It's now up to Ukip to say if they want to work with us."
Voigt said the election result had been "a success, though perhaps not a total success". His party had gained 1% of the vote in Germany, 0.3% less than at the general election last year and less than other minor splinter parties, such as the Animal Rights party. At previous European elections, the NPD had failed to gain more than the prerequisite 3% hurdle quota, which was abolished for the first time at this year's election.





































Meet the new faces ready to sweep into the European parliament | World news | The Guardian

Friday, May 30, 2014

The next pawn in the Eastern Europe chess game

By Matthew Dal Santo
Ukraine crisis in Donetsk
Photo: Pro-Russian militants drive towards Donetsk airport on May 26, 2014. (Reuters: Yannis Behrakis)
Outside the walls of the Kremlin, no one knows the reason for its apparent acquiescence in Eastern Ukraine. But the elaborate dance for control of Europe's borderlands isn't over - Russia's next move will likely be in the forgotten yet significant satellite state of Transnistria, writes Matthew Dal Santo.
An uneasy quiet hangs over Eastern Ukraine. It's not for want of bloodshed, Tuesday's shoot-out between Ukrainian regular forces and rebel paramilitaries for control of the main regional airport at Donetsk having left 50 people dead, their numbers drawn mostly from the pro-Russian separatists who had seized the terminal on Sunday. Rather, people in Eastern Ukraine have been left wondering about the elusive purpose for which this blood has been shed.
Removed for treatment to local hospitals, Chechen mercenaries lie reportedly among the wounded. One way or another, the money that brought them to Ukraine must have come from Russia. But if Russia has had a hand in this week's violence, so far at least Ukraine's bloody recapture of the airport has elicited but the gentlest of rebukes from the Kremlin.
Even in failure, an operation that in its first hours bore a disturbing likeness to the seizure of airports, highways and police stations by Russian forces in Crimea in March could usefully have provided the pretext for Russia to send over the border the 40,000 soldiers it's had stationed along Ukraine's eastern border since February (and promised three times to withdraw).
Instead the rebels' failed seizure of Donetsk airport looks increasingly like the actions of desperate local commanders who didn't get the Kremlin's memo that the invasion was over - the forlorn last stand of a confected rebellion deserted by the only man capable of converting its stated aspirations into anything like a concrete political or institutional settlement, Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Donbass is on its own, Putin seems to be saying. The fighting, the homespun referenda, the chest-thumping declarations of independence, the defiantly neo-Soviet 'People's Republics' of Donetsk and Lugansk, the wounded and the dead themselves, have all been for nothing.
An icon of Jesus lies among blood-soaked shattered glass near Donetsk airport. 
Photo: An icon of Jesus lies among blood-soaked shattered glass near Donetsk airport. (Reuters: Yannis Behrakis)
What has brought about this change in Putin's calculations? Sanctions? According to the IMF, $US100 billion will have fled the Russian economy before the end of the year. The German-brokered negotiations? Behind the scenes Berlin has been working hard to bring the two sides together. A quiet word from China's Xi Jinping? Beijing might covet Russian gas (and has probably enjoyed watching Putin poke a stick in the West's eye), but it's also allergic to separatist movements of any hue. Or is this just a judo-style feint, as latter-day Kremlinologists have been wont to surmise, pointing out Putin's known love of the Japanese martial art?
Outside the walls of the Kremlin, no one knows. Besides, it's increasingly clear that Russia has other fish to fry.
Russia will probably make its next move in this elaborate dance for control of Europe's borderlands not in the industrial cities of Ukraine's east but on its far south-western flank in a Russian-backed satellite state known (to those who know of it) as 'The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic', or Transnistria. The right bank of the River Dniester, it represented just over 200 years ago the high water mark of the 'New Russia' Catherine the Great carved out of formerly Turkish lands on Europe's southern steppe (though Russian armies added a bit more when they rolled back Napoleon).
Some 250 miles long and an average 15 miles wide, the enclave remains a handy piece up Moscow's sleeve in a duel for influence in Europe's south-eastern corner.
A part, de jure, of the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, Russian-leaning Transnistria broke away from mainly Romanian-speaking Moldova in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the result of a row over language rights that foreshadowed those that would break out with special strength in the Baltics and, more recently, in Ukraine. By all accounts, a post-Soviet dystopia of concrete apartment blocks, kleptocrats and Kalashnikovs, it's an outpost of empire on the edge of the Balkans whose autonomy a thousand or so Russian soldiers still defend.
Until a few weeks ago, it was largely forgotten by most in Europe.
Then, the same weekend (May 10-11) that the inhabitants of two other newly declared, pro-Russian 'People's Republics' headed to the polls in Donetsk and Lugansk to vote on (implicitly Russian-backed) independence, and Vladimir Putin flew triumphantly in to review the fleet in his new Crimean conquest, Russian deputy prime minister Dimitry Rogozin travelled to Transnistria's capital at Tiraspol to celebrate Victory Day with Moscow's comrades on the Dniester. On the way home, he was detained by Moldovan police on the runway in Moldova's capital Chisinau - Transnistria, unfortunately, doesn't have an airport of its own. He was said to be carrying with him a clutch of petitions from Transnistrian patriots for a Crimea-style return to the Russian Motherland.
Moscow threatened economic retribution: Moldova's economy remains heavily dependent on remittances from Moldovans working in Russia; the export of wine, apples and other agricultural products; and big imports of Russian gas.
Yet the Kremlin left Transnistria's appeal for patriotic reunion unrequited, just as it coyly batted aside the affections of the pro-Russian movement in Donetsk and Lugansk. Like Donbass in Ukraine, Transnistria seems more useful to the Kremlin as a part of Moldova than as a fully-fledged territory of the Russian Federation.
Pro-Russian separatists speak with local residents during a rally in Donetsk on May 25. 
Photo: Pro-Russian separatists speak with local residents during a rally in Donetsk on May 25. (Reuters)
At least, that is, for the time being. The European Commission announced earlier this month that it would go ahead with inviting Moldova (and, for good measure, Georgia) to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union on June 27. Never mind that it was the prospect of Ukraine's signing the same kind of agreement late last year that raised Russia's ire and led, by twists and turns, to the shoot-out at Donetsk on Tuesday.
Though it seems reckless that Brussels could even contemplate, at this stage, the courtship of yet another former Soviet territory, if Russia hopes to repeat in Moldova the trick it played in Ukraine, time's running out. With parliamentary elections forthcoming, and Moldova far from united behind the government's EU push, Moscow is probably hoping the implicit threat of Russian intervention that Transnistria represents will help pro-Russian parties scrape over the line. The Kremlin knows that even signed agreements have to be ratified and implemented.
If they don't, and Moldova races forward to embrace a new European destiny, Moscow can still go ahead and recognize the petitions from Transnistria it has so far ignored - or at the very least recognise the satellite's full independence from its Moldovan parent, as it did with South Ossetia after its war with Georgia in 2008. After all, it seems unimaginable that, having fought tooth and nail to prevent independent Ukraine from sliding further towards the West, Moscow would consent to losing to Brussels what is, to all intents and purposes, already a ribbon of Russian territory.
Why do such millstones matter?
So long as Moscow keeps a toehold in Transnistria, it holds in reserve a useful lever over Odessa, Ukraine's second city and major port less than 70 miles away by highway and widely billed as a top priority among Russia's strategic aims in Ukraine. Since the outbreak of the crisis in March, General Breedlove, NATO's top commander in Europe, has worried aloud about Russian movements in and around Transnistria and what they might spell about Russian intentions elsewhere, especially regarding Odessa.
Founded in 1792, Odessa made Russia, for the first time in its history, a Balkan power. Crossing the Dniester, Russian armies could harry Turkey's European provinces - holding out, under the guise of a common attachment to Orthodoxy and a shared Slavic identity ('Pan-Slavism'), the prospect of liberation to their mainly Christian subjects. Moving north, they could intervene, often decisively, in the affairs of central Europe, as they did in 1849 when Tsar Nicholas I restored Austria's ancient Habsburg dynasty to a throne from which the Hungarian revolution threatened to drive it. Despite its name, the Crimean War opened in 1854 with Russian troops driving south into the Turkish provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia (today's Romania).
 
A man and woman cast their ballots 
Photo: Ballots are cast in the eastern Ukrainian town of Dobropillya on May 25, 2014. (AFP: Dimitar Dilkoff)
As the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, St Petersburg courted Romania, Bulgaria and, most fatefully, Serbia in an effort to outflank Austria-Hungary and Germany for markets and influence in the Balkans. Had the tsar not tied a Eurasian empire of some 175 million to tiny Serbia - caught as it was by then in a death struggle with Austria - the shots that cut down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo wouldn't have led to a general European war in the summer of 1914. In the Second World War, Stalin sent the Red Army on a long detour through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary that wasn't strictly necessary for victory over Germany in order to guarantee Soviet domination after the war.
Nostalgia for dominance in the Balkans isn't just history. When asked to justify Russia's annexation of Crimea, Putin never fails to invoke Kosovo, whose statehood Russia has never recognised. Exhibit A in Russia's never-ending campaign to prove the extent of Western perfidy, Kosovo also symbolises Russia's inability to defend its interests in the Balkans.
It's a humiliation Moscow would dearly love to right. In Transnistria, then, Russia keeps a deposit on its comeback as a power in the Balkans.
After all, if the Ukraine crisis has taught us anything, it is that the Kremlin still views Europe through the lens of hard-headed realpolitik, with NATO its competitor for power and influence. Only in Europe's south-east corner can Russia still hope both to woo still non-aligned and traditional Russian allies like Serbia and Montenegro, and cajole torn or struggling NATO and EU members Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, whose increasingly illiberal politics often chime with Moscow's and whose economies are among the most dependent on Russian gas in Europe. Even the troubled Greeks have been coy in their criticism of Russia's Crimea gamble.
NATO has fretted most about what the Kremlin's machinations in Ukraine mean for former outposts of empire in the Baltic, but Russian grand strategy under both the tsars and the Soviets had a southern as well as a northern leg. And Russia has neither given up its claim to being a Balkan power, nor its historical role as patron of the southern Slavs. Certainly, Romania, which shares a language and a long border with Moldova, is worried about Russia's de facto return to the neighbourhood.
What does this mean for Donbass?
Its value to the Kremlin lies above all in the federalisation plan Russia hasn't given up imposing on Ukraine and whose virtue, from the Kremlin's point of view, lies primarily in the possibility it holds for Russia to carve out friendly sub-states, à la transnistrienne, in those areas of greatest interest to it, including Odessa and the Balkan dream it, with Transnistria, stands for.
A decade ago, Working Dog's Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch penned a series of 'Jet Lag Travel Guides'. Among them was a guide to the fictional Eastern European nation of Molvanîa, which was in the book's words, 'untouched by modern dentistry'. For the past 25 years, it's been easy to poke fun at Transnistria and places like it. But from Tiraspol to Donetsk and Lugansk, and Sukhumi in the Caucasus (where unrest broke out yesterday, which locals look to Russia to quell), the nostalgic neo-Soviet satellites that have risen up in Europe's borderlands are pieces in a deadly geopolitical game. Not since the end of the Cold War has Europe looked like such a chess board.
To return to the airport, this isn't the end of Ukraine's ordeal; it's just a hiatus.
Matthew Dal Santo is a freelance writer and foreign affairs correspondent. He previously worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. View his full profile here.





























The next pawn in the Eastern Europe chess game - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian: Is this a modern day witch hunt?

Hannah Strange

By Hannah Strange  29 May 2014

Meriam Ibrahim is on death row in Sudan for refusing to renounce Christianity. Hannah Strange explores what's really going on

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, 27, who was born to a Muslim father but brought up a Christian by her mother

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, 27, who was born to a Muslim father but brought up a Christian by her mother

Daniel Wani with his newborn baby daughter

Daniel Wani with his newborn baby daughter Maya Photo: COURTESY LEGAL TEAM

Of all the places one does not want to fall foul of religious diktats, Sudan ranks fairly high on the list. While in much of the Middle East and North Africa, apostasy - the act of abandoning one's faith - is deemed to be a criminal act, Sudan counts as one of few countries which regard it as a mortal sin.

But in the more than two decades since Sudan enacted its 1991 Criminal Code making apostasy punishable by death, no one has actually been executed. So why Meriam Ibrahim, and why now? Has Sudan become more religiously extreme, or is there something else in play?

Even in the countries practicing the highest degree of religious repression, actual application of such punishments is relatively rare. Given the lack of a blanket penalty, it is doubtful whether the real motivation is ever truly a question of religious morals. In recent years, a number of high profile cases around the world have suggested instead a personal or community grievance at work. In Pakistan, a Christian couple - Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar - were sentenced to death in April for allegedly sending a text message insulting the Prophet Mohammed to the imam of their local mosque.

What's really going on?

But read beyond the headlines, and the grudges and vendettas which fuel such complaints begin to reveal themselves. The imam had long been involved in a dispute with the couple, their lawyer said: he "made a threat with the full knowledge that they would face the death penalty". They are far from alone: Asia Bibi, currently awaiting execution from a windowless prison cell in Lahore, claims she had been in an argument with one of the local women who reported her, and Pakistani human rights campaigners say the country's laws on defaming Islam are often used as a mean of settling scores.

A denunciation of blasphemy or apostasy, then, has become the go-to, sure-fire means of taking out someone who offends you, whom you might fear, envy or hate for a myriad of different reasons. In essence, it has become the modern-day version of accusing someone of witchcraft.

 

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It wasn't so long ago that witch hunting was in full, vengeful force in Britain: the town that I grew up in still has a ducking stool in the local river - thankfully maintained purely for tourist titillation these days.

It is practiced, still, in many countries around the world - Thomas Muthee, a Kenyan preacher who gained international attention for his association with Sarah Palin during her 2008 vice-presidential campaign, based his credentials on his successful exile of a local "witch" named Mama Jane.

The hunting of witches is often fuelled - and enabled - by dogmatic religious ideologies, be them Christian, Muslim or another. While the victims, in the patriarchal societies where it usually takes place, are often women - but not always. "The witch" has taken many guises over the years - think the Communist, in the McCarthy era, or conversely the anti-Communist under Stalin. Many political dissenters, or those espousing alternative lifestyles, have been similarly branded in the past. It is no coincidence that in Britain the last successful blasphemy prosecution was the 1977 verdict against Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, for publishing the controversial James Kirkup poem, The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name.

In short, anyone considered to deviate from the established norm can incur the wrath of the mob. The witches are the outliers, and in the social and familial environment which Meriam inhabits, (who just gave birth whilst wearing leg shackles) she certainly fits the profile.

The family politics

According to Sudanese politicians, she was denounced by her own half brother, who complained that she had gone missing for a number of years and the family was then shocked to discover she had married a Christian man. Meriam had always trodden her own path: her father having left when she was six, she was raised not according to his Muslim faith but the Christianity of her mother. She went on to become a successful, educated and independent woman - a doctor who also owned a profitable general store in a Khartoum shopping mall, who married a man - a US national also outside her father's religion - of her own choosing.

If that wasn't offensive enough - to a certain narrow patriarchal thinking - her case, like so many others, appears to have the added impetus of personal grievance. According to her US legal team, her relatives - from whom she was long estranged - brought the complaint out of pure greed: Justice Centre Sudan, an NGO which is paying for her defence, said her family appeared to have set their sights on her business. "They've been doing really well and the business was growing … her half brother and half sister must have heard about this and worked out she was a relative of theirs because of her name," a spokesperson said according to the Daily Mail. "The first thing Meriam knew about them was when her half brother and half sister filed the lawsuit."

To the Sudanese government too, the role of actual religious adherence is questionable. Clearly at least somewhat moved by the international backlash, it has made the unusual move of putting out a statement on the case, making clear Meriam's sentence is subject to appeal and not final. Mohammed Ghilan, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, told Al Jazeera he believed the embattled government of Omar al-Bashir - an Islamist, who in 2008 became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity - was using the case as a ploy to appear as "defenders of Islam" and divert attention from internal conflicts and perceived corruption.

"The punishment has little to do with religion and serves as a political distraction," Mr Ghilan said, adding that it was "an attempt to give the regime legitimacy with the more conservative crowd".

So neither for those who provoked the sentence or for those overseeing it, does religious morality appear to be the overriding concern. It is for that reason that in general, apostasy and blasphemy laws (which linger on the statute books in far many countries than you might imagine - Britain dropped its own blasphemy law in 2008) only get rare outings. They are there to be trotted out periodically as tools of individual punishment, vengeance or political expedience. That is to say, when someone, usually a woman, needs burning at the stake.

Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian: Is this a modern day witch hunt? - Telegraph

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Egypt's Sisi wins presidential election with more than 90 per cent of vote

By Yasmine Saleh and Michael Georgy CAIRO Thu May 29, 2014
Supporters of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a poster of him as they celebrate at Tahrir square in Cairo May 28, 2014. REUTERS-Mohamed Abd El Ghany
Supporters of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hold a poster of him as they celebrate at Tahrir square in Cairo May 28, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany
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CAIRO (Reuters) - Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the general who toppled Egypt's first freely elected leader, took more than 90 per cent of the vote in a presidential election, provisional results showed on Thursday, as he joined a long line of leaders drawn from the military.
But a lower-than-expected turnout figure raised questions about the credibility of a man idolized by his supporters as a hero who can deliver political and economic stability.
Sisi won 93.3 per cent of votes cast, judicial sources said, as counting neared its conclusion after three days of voting. His only rival, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, gained 3 per cent while 3.7 per cent of votes were declared void.
Turnout was 44.4 per cent of Egypt's 54 million voters, judicial sources said, less than the 40 million votes, or 80 per cent of the electorate, that Sisi had called for last week and also less than the 52 per cent turnout Mursi won in 2012.
"We are now divided with the turnout," said Tarek Awad, 27 and unemployed, celebrating Sisi's victory in Tahrir on Thursday morning. "If about half of voters wanted Sisi, the other half don't want him. What about them?"
The stock market .EGX30, which fell 2.3 per cent on Wednesday as some players said the turnout was a disappointment, was down a further 0.9 per cent by late morning on Thursday. On the black market, the Egyptian pound weakened slightly.
Mohamed El Sewedy, chairman of the Federation of Egyptian Industries, said, however: "The business community is very happy about the results. My friends and I have a lot of hope.”
Others saw the stability offered by Sisi as important.
"Everybody just wants some form of stability against which you can decide what to invest. When there's stability it makes risk assessment much easier," said Angus Blair, chairman of business and economic forecasting think-tank Signet.
Most Egyptian newspapers celebrated the result, with state-run Al-Akhbar calling it "a day of hope for all Egyptians".
Fireworks erupted in Cairo to celebrate Sisi's victory late on Wednesday. His supporters waved Egyptian flags and sounded car horns as celebrations lasted through the early hours of the morning.
About 1,000 people gathered in Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak in 2011 and raised hopes of a democracy free of influence from the military.
As Egyptians travelled to work, there were only a handful of Sisi supporters left in Tahrir.
Sisi, who ousted Mursi last year after mass protests against his rule, is seen by supporters as a strong figure who can end the turmoil that has convulsed Egypt for three years since the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.
Critics fear Sisi will become another autocrat who will preserve the army's interests and quash hopes of democracy and reform.
Sisi enjoys the backing of the powerful armed forces and the Interior Ministry, as well many politicians and former Mubarak officials now making a comeback.
"This is the best possible result. He is from the army, so he knows Egypt," Yeshiva Hassan, a vendor selling radios on a downtown Cairo street, said.
TOUGH MEASURES
But the former military intelligence chief may not have the popular mandate to take the tough measures needed to restore healthy economic growth, ease poverty and unemployment, and end costly energy subsidies in the most populous Arab nation.
In a country polarized since the revolt against Mubarak, many Egyptians said voters had stayed at home due to political apathy, opposition to another military man becoming president, discontent at suppression of freedoms among liberal youth, and calls for a boycott by Islamists.
Horsham Moans, Sabahi's campaign manager, questioned the legitimacy of the vote, saying there had been violations.
"Until yesterday turnout was much lower than what was announced today. Did the percentage suddenly reach 46 per cent?"
An editorial in state-run Al-Ah ram newspaper called for "a serious and real pause" to review the past three days' events.
"The behaviour and style of some almost corrupted the image and contributed to the impression that what happened did not follow the conditions of a proper democratic process or fair competition", it said.
ARMY INTERESTS
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HR) said the security crackdown after Mursi's ouster had created a repressive environment that undermined the fairness of the election.
“The mass arrests of thousands of political dissidents, whether Islamist or secular, has all but shut down the political arena and stripped these elections of real meaning,” Sarah Leah Whit son, TRW's Middle East and North Africa director, said.
Some Egyptians, exhausted after years of upheaval, have concluded that Sisi is a strong figure who can bring calm, even though past leaders from the military mismanaged the country.
Despite an official campaign to bring out more voters, Egyptians, many opposed to Sisi, gave various reasons for their lack of enthusiasm.
Young secular activists, including those who backed Mursi's ouster, had become disillusioned with Sisi after many were rounded up in the crackdown that also restricted protests.
Since he gave a series of television interviews, many Egyptians feel Sisi has not spelled out a clear vision of how he would tackle Egypt's challenges, instead making a general call for people to work hard and be patient.
He has presented vague plans to remedy the economy, suffering from corruption, high unemployment, and a widening budget deficit aggravated by fuel subsidies that could cost nearly $19 billion in the next fiscal year.
Sisi also faces the formidable challenge of crushing an Islamist armed insurgency and eliminating any threat from the Brotherhood, which, as the country's best-organized political force, had won every national vote held after Mubarak's fall.
The Muslim Brotherhood, a movement loyal to Mursi and outlawed as a terrorist group by the military, has rejected the election, describing it as an extension of the army takeover.
The Brotherhood, believed to have about one million members in a country of 85 million, has been devastated by one of the toughest crackdowns in its history. Its top leaders, including Mursi, are on trial and could face the death penalty. The movement seemed inspired by the low turnout in this week's poll.
"Sisi and those with him have to admit that Egypt is against them and the Dr. Mohamed Mursi is their president and the president of all Egyptians,” an Islamist alliance that includes the Brotherhood said in a statement.
The United States, Egypt's ally in the West, has yet to comment on Sisi's victory.
(Additional reporting by Maggie Fick, Stephen Kalin, Shadia Nasralla and Samia Nakhoul in Cairo and; Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Louise Ireland and Giles Elgood)



































Egypt's Sisi wins presidential election with more than 90 per cent of vote | Reuters

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Egypt president's calm before the storm

 By Bob Bowker
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi supporters in force 
Photo: It remains to be seen how Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will perform in using his newly-acquired authority. (AFP: Mahmoud Khaled)
Egypt's president-to-be will have a brief window to start real reform before the realities of terrorism, a struggling economy and an expectant military come to the fore, writes Bob Bowker.
The next six months will see a period of relative calm in Egyptian politics, reflecting a strong popular desire, above all else, for the return of a more authoritarian style of rule. The repression of the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters will continue, alongside the quelling of other dissenting voices.
The real challenges lie 18 months ahead.
Despite his popularity at present, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will not be a populist president. His accessibility to the public will be limited by security concerns. Financial stringency, including efforts to wind back unsustainably high fuel subsidies will be required to address a burgeoning budget deficit that Egypt's Gulf backers will not support indefinitely.
Sisi's political style - strong on paternal imagery and light on detail - reflects his military background. He exudes confidence that the political tide is running in his favour. But that self-assurance is bound to be tested as he turns to address the challenges of developing and implementing credible programs, rather than suggesting ad hoc initiatives in response to Egypt's economic situation.
Absent such programs, that situation looks set to worsen. The Egyptian government already owes as much as $8 billion to foreign energy companies, with the external debt probably growing at about $700 million a month. It also faces the prospect of rising costs for wheat imports as suppliers insure their sales against default. A major challenge in refinancing domestic borrowing looms in 2015.
The tourism sector is barely alive, with hope pinned on a recovery after the summer if terrorist attacks can be prevented. Like tourism, a return of foreign direct investment from western sources will hinge mostly on a perception that Egypt has returned to something akin to the predictability of the Mubarak years. Education, health services and infrastructure all require urgent overhauls.
Meanwhile, however, fundamental questions about Egypt's future remain unanswered. Can a state-oriented economy deliver sufficient economic growth to keep within manageable political limits the expectations and aspirations of ordinary young Egyptians for economic security and dignity? And can the Egyptian system deliver the reforms that will be required for that to happen?
The evidence to date suggests a high risk of failure on both counts. The civil service remains somnolent and unwieldy. The outputs of the judicial system are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic. The efforts, under the Morsi government, to address high-level corruption have been impeded, if not halted by the return to military-based rule. The privileged business community of the Mubarak era strongly supported a Sisi victory but issues of transitional justice remain to be resolved. Terror attacks have continued, with links to the ongoing insurgency in the Sinai. There is little prospect in coming months of an easing of the travel advisories and restrictions that have decimated the tourism sector.
It also remains to be seen how Sisi will perform in using his newly-acquired authority. The latest Egyptian constitution allows for the possibility of a stronger presidency. But it also provides scope for greater separation of powers between the military, executive, judiciary and parliament, each of which is bound to resist any encroachment upon their roles.
One thing is certain: the Egyptian military will not give the president unqualified support unless he appears to be succeeding, in equal measure, in quashing the Brotherhood, protecting the state from internal threats and looking after their interests.
Sisi's support base - the poor and ill-educated on one hand, and the wealthy upper class on the other - also displays contrasting demands. The poor demand economic security and protection against economic duress; the rich insist that priority has to be accorded to restoring financial sustainability and restoring a predictable business environment upon which welfare schemes may be based.
One thing is certain: the Egyptian military will not give the president unqualified support unless he appears to be succeeding, in equal measure, in quashing the Brotherhood, protecting the state from internal threats and looking after their interests. Nor will it allow itself to be dragged down by him if he is seen to be failing to command popular support.
There is a brief window of political opportunity for Sisi to show he is capable of improving the economic situation of ordinary Egyptians. Even evidence of modest changes for the better would have a significant impact on his political shelf life.
But if he fails to do so, by the late summer of 2015 there is a distinct possibility that the Egyptian government, as it faces deepening economic and social challenges, will become even more repressive. Should that happen, the government will be less confident and less willing to risk implementing painful but necessary reforms.
If the military divides over its assessment of Sisi's leadership (and the appointment of his son-in-law as chief of the defence force adds a further potential complication in that respect) there will be damage to the standing of the one institution upon which most ordinary Egyptians now rest their hopes.
The international community should continue to criticize abuses of human rights and the restriction of political freedoms in Egypt. But few Egyptians would agree at this juncture that a more open and inclusive political order would be in Egypt's interests. Nor, in fairness, would there be any guarantee that more empowerment, inclusiveness and respect for human rights would achieve a restoration of notions of constitutionality, or build a sense of political equilibrium between Egypt's contending forces.
Egypt is what it is - impenetrable to outsiders, its military embraced by the Saudis and Emiratis for political and strategic reasons, and its population largely impervious to external advice, criticism and ridicule alike. Its future and that of much else besides now rests on the shoulders of an individual whose commitment to the nation is clear. But Egypt's willingness to be led by him, or any other figure, remains in doubt. And whether Sisi has the vision and skill and capacity to pursue a reformist agenda while he leads his country is far from certain.
Bob Bowker is Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University. View his full profile here.
Egypt president's calm before the storm - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Egypt charges 200 Islamist militants with bombings, other violence


Egypt's public prosecutor has charged 200 suspected Islamist militants with "founding, leading and joining a terrorist organisation" and launching bomb and rocket attacks across the country.
The accused belong to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, or Supporters of Jerusalem, a group that has claimed some of the deadliest attacks of the past nine months and is listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States.
The prosecutor's statement on Saturday said 102 of those charged were in government custody with the rest on the run.
Militant violence has spiralled in the Sinai Peninsula, Cairo and other cities since the army toppled Islamist president Mohammed Morsi last July after mass protests against his rule.
The army-backed government accuses Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood of perpetrating violence. The group says it is committed to non-violence.
Who is Abdel Fattah al-Sisi?

The man tipped to be the next Egyptian leader once dreamt he would be president, writes Hayden Cooper.
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief who led Morsi's ousting and is widely expected to win a presidential election this month, has said the Brotherhood would cease to exist during his presidency.
The prosecutor's statement said the charges related to 51 attacks that killed 40 policemen and 15 civilians, including a car bomb at a security compound in central Cairo in January and an attempt to kill the interior minister in September.
According to government figures, about 500 people have been killed in such attacks, mostly policemen and soldiers.
Saturday's statement called Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis "the most dangerous terrorist organisation" and said it had collaborated with Al Qaeda and Palestinian group Hamas.
It said investigations of the suspects showed Morsi had struck a deal with the group to refrain from attacks during his presidency in exchange for pardoning any members of the group.
Morsi, in government custody since his ousting, is charged in several cases including one in which he is accused of conspiring with Hamas to break out of jail in 2011 during the uprising against former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
An Egyptian court sentenced more than 1,000 Brotherhood supporters to death in two cases this year on charges including inciting violence that followed Morsi's overthrow.
Foreign governments and human rights groups have expressed alarm over the rulings.
Reuters
Egypt charges 200 Islamist militants with bombings, other violence - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Egyptian former military chief launches presidential campaign

Louisa Loveluck in Cairo theguardian.com, Monday 5 May 2014

Abdel Fatah al-Sisi emphasises role of media in uniting country and hints at tough austerity measures to revive economy

Abdel Fatah al-Sisi

Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the frontunner in the Egyptian elections. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/AFP/Getty Images

Egypt's former military chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi officially launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, exactly 10 months after leading the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi.

At a meeting with a leading media personalities, Sisi emphasised the "critical" role of the local press in the months ahead. "They are capable of uniting Egyptians after the massive polarisation," he said.

Sisi hinted on Saturday that he could implement tough austerity measures to revive Egypt's ailing economy if elected.

Some food prices have risen by two-thirds since the 2011 revolution. "I get letters from people that can't find food … and they tell me, 'we're not eating, but we accept that for your sake,'" Sisi told the state newspaper al-Ahram.

Hamdeen Sabahi, a Nasserist who came third in the first round of Egypt's 2012 presidential elections, used the first day of his campaign to try to establish clear ground between himself and the frontrunner Sisi. He promised to revoke a law that places heavy restrictions on the right to protest.

"I will put a stop to the protest law and will re-issue a law that regulates but doesn't ban peaceful protesting," he said in a speech aired on state television.

The law, issued in late November, bans demonstrations by groups of more than 10 people without an official permit. A number of high-profile figures from Sabahi's Popular Current party have been imprisoned under the law.

Sabahi has vowed to focus on reforming the Egyptian state, maintaining security, kickstarting the economy and restoring social justice. These lofty promises appear to many to be the idealism of a campaign that cannot win but that wants to build a support base for the future.

His rhetoric strikes a fine balance between carving out political space between himself and Sisi, and supporting the current government's popular crackdown on its rivals. In an apparent reference to secular and liberal political groups that have fallen prey to a dragnet of arrests aimed ostensibly at Islamists, Sabahi promised to free all "opinion prisoners".

According to a recent survey by the Egyptian polling centre Baseera, 72% of those who intend to vote in the elections on 26-27 May say they will back Sisi, and 2% Sabahi.

Sisi says Muslim Brotherhood will not exist under his reign

Louisa Loveluck in Cairo The Guardian, Tuesday 6 May 2014

Egypt's former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issues warning as country prepares for presidential elections on 26-27 May

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

Egyptians watch Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on a TV screen in downtown Cairo. Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Egypt's former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Monday night that the Muslim Brotherhood – the group he removed from power last year – will not exist if he is elected president later this month.

The comments, in an interview broadcast on two Egyptian television stations, were the clearest indication yet there was no prospect for political reconciliation with the Islamist group that propelled Mohamed Morsi to the presidency in 2012.

"There will be nothing called the Muslim Brotherhood during my tenure," Sisi said on Egypt's privately-owned CBC and ONTV television channels.

The Brotherhood has been subject to an aggressive state-led crackdown in the months since Morsi's overthrow. The movement was formally blacklisted as a terrorist organisation on Christmas Day and continues to be blamed for bomb attacks across Egypt, although many have been claimed by militant groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Beit el Maqdis.

Sisi said he had survived two assassination attempts in the months since Morsi's ousting in July last year.

The former field marshal's claims appeared to vindicate the tight security measures that have dominated his campaign. Instead of taking to the campaign trail like his sole opponent, Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, Sisi will reportedly be sending emissaries to his rallies across the country.

A kingmaker in Egypt's post-Morsi politics, Sisi remains a prime target for a domestic militant insurgency which has targeted the army and police force in retaliation for their roles in Morsi's overthrow and their subsequent crackdown against the Brotherhood and other political opponents.

Egypt's presidential elections, scheduled for 26-27 May, will take place against a backdrop of deep societal divisions. At least 16,000 people have been imprisoned and more than 2,500 killed in the crackdown.

Yet Sisi remains popular, with many Egyptians arguing that he is the only leader capable of restoring security and enough confidence to steady the country's faltering economy. He is expected to win by a landslide.

During the course of the interview, Sisi also addressed allegations, often levelled by critics, that his ascent to power was part of a long-term plan.

"I took the side of millions not because I was interested in power," he said, claiming that he had only taken the decision to run for president in late February after a public show of support from Egypt's supreme council for the armed forces. He has cast his decision as a patriotic duty that was necessary to rescue the nation.

Highlighting the series of challenges that Egypt's next president must face, Sisi said his priorities in power would be security and stability. He described Egypt's high rate of unemployment as "shameful".

According to a recent survey by the Egyptian polling centre Baseera, 72% of those who intend to vote in the elections say they will back Sisi, with 2% supporting Sabahi.