The.Economist.2007-02-10 (966424), страница 17
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Aside from its $800m contract to build a nuclear reactor at Bushehr,Russia has won a commitment to supply six more plants. This props up Russia's own creaking nuclearindustry, improves its chances of selling the technology elsewhere, and keeps Iran from criticisingRussian policy in Muslim Chechnya.Yet the commitment, underlined last year by the sale to Iran of anti-aircraft systems that could helpdefend nuclear installations from cruise missiles, among other threats, has also boosted Russia's role asan arbiter.
As Iran has prevaricated in its dealings with the UN Security Council and the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency, Russian engineers are understood to have slowed completion of the plant atBushehr, now not expected to come on stream until the autumn. Russia has also declined Iran's requestsfor fancier anti-aircraft missiles, saying its order books are full.This does not soothe American and Israeli critics, who suspect that Russia has made a devil's bargainwith the Islamic Republic. But it does mean that when Russia voted, in December, in favour of a UNSecurity Council resolution to sanction Iran for proceeding with plans that might let it make nuclearweapons, Iran's leaders sat up abruptly and listened harder.
Russia would like to think that the recentslight softening of Iran's public tone and the rising domestic criticism of its president, MahmoudAhmadinejad, may owe something to fears of losing its only legitimate outside source of nucleartechnology.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipThe Gulf statesBuying up art and cultureFeb 8th 2007 | CAIROFrom The Economist print editionA spending spree to get culture and learningCOSMOPOLITAN atmosphere, Arabian charm: how life should be.
So declare brochures for SaadiyatIsland, a colossal and luxurious waterfront community soon to rise on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, capitalof the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But to lure Saadiyat's would-be 45,000 home-owners away from theglitz of Dubai, next door, Abu Dhabi knows it must offer a bit more.Dubai already has giant shopping malls, beach hotels and skyscrapers. What it lacks is culture. Not thevibrant commercial culture of a booming, polyglot entrepôt, but the big-name, big-draw culture ofhallowed institutions and famous works of art.
So Abu Dhabi has stolen a march on its rival by buying agood chunk of such stuff—off the shelf.Last year it signed a deal for New York's Guggenheim Foundation to create a world-class modern-artmuseum as a showpiece for Saadiyat Island's Culture District. The $400m building, to be designed by aLos Angeles architect, Frank Gehry, is billed as the biggest yet in a spreading franchise of Guggenheimsin such outlets as Berlin, Bilbao and Venice.Abu Dhabi is negotiating to build a Louvre too: not a replica of the Paris palace but a huge translucentdome filled with fountains to be designed by a Frenchman, Jean Nouvel. Under a contract said to beworth up to $1 billion, a consortium of top French state museums would lend works, advise on anambitious acquisitions plan, and lease the Louvre brand name for an eventual museum of classical andancient art.Other projects for the Culture District include a performing arts centre designed by Zaha Hadid, aBaghdad-born British woman, and a maritime museum by Japan's Tadao Ando.
Abu Dhabi is also pitchingto a different kind of audience with Ferrari World, a red-hued theme park celebrating the famed racingcars. And it has opened a fully-fledged branch of the Sorbonne, the Paris university.That has boosted the emirate's position in what has become a race among wealthy Gulf states to wooprestigious seats of learning.
So far Qatar is in the lead, with branches of five top American colleges, aswell as the Rand Corporation, a California think-tank. Its latest acquisition is a branch of St Cyr, theFrench military academy. Sharjah, another of the seven statelets making up the UAE, plans to host anoutpost of INSEAD, a Paris business school.Its graduates are needed. In the past four years, the six countries in the Gulf Co-operation Council haveseen their annual income from oil exports soar from $100 billion to $325 billion.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipSomaliaIt isn't nearly overFeb 8th 2007 | NAIROBIFrom The Economist print editionWaiting for peace, peacekeepers and the germ of an economyAPGet article backgroundA FULL month after the routing of Islamist forces in Somalia, it ishard to say whether the country is slipping back into anarchy orlimping forward towards reformed statehood: like a tennis stroke,it all depends on the follow-through.
The signs are not promising.Having shredded Islamist fighters with air strikes, and thenadmitted it missed its intended targets, America is offering onlytoken sums to put Somalia back on its feet. A generous Americanpackage would be received with suspicion by Somalis, but theEuropean Union (EU) is being just as stingy. True, the Somalitransitional government has almost no capacity to absorb money,and foreign aid-workers remain a target of rogue gunmen.
But theIn a mood for compromise?lack of a follow-through extends most patently to the promisedAfrican Union (AU) peacekeeping force. So far, no peacekeepers of any kind have arrived, unless youinclude the Ethiopian force that toppled the Islamists and is meant to be going home soon.African governments have so far promised only 4,000 of the 8,000 soldiers needed to hold the line inMogadishu, Somalia's capital. Ugandans, Nigerians and Ghanaians will arrive within a month, lettingEthiopia withdraw. It is uncertain who will pay for the operation or what will happen if things again turnnasty in Mogadishu. Life there is already getting jittery, with daylight attacks on Ethiopian troops andnight-time mortar and rocket assaults on the presidential palace, hotels and port, probably by remnantIslamist fighters.The hunt for three al-Qaeda men believed to be hiding in Somalia continues.
Ethiopia says it is workingon America's behalf to test the DNA of corpses littering groves in south Somalia. None has so farprovided a match for the al-Qaeda men. Tattered and bloodied papers belonging to Aden Hashi Ayro, acommander of the jihadist militia connected to the Islamic courts, have been recovered, but it is not clearif Mr Ayro bled to death or escaped.Either way, the sense of inviolability the jihadists once exuded is gone. Ethiopians paraded a capturedIslamist cleric in the port of Kismayo: they had found him riddled with bullet holes among dead Islamistfighters and patched him up to become an unlikely apologist for the transitional government.
A moderateleader of the Islamic courts, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, has since been given asylum in Yemen, possibly withthe backing of America, which thinks he could be useful too.Then there are the foreign fighters. There were probably few of them, their fate pathetic. Some died onthe battlefield, more were shot up in the mangrove swamps along the Kenyan border. Stragglers werepicked up by Kenyan security forces and sent to police cells in Nairobi.
A Kenyan human-rights groupsays that two of those caught were American.The big question is whether the Somali government has the stomach for genuine national reconciliation.At a top-level meeting this week in Mogadishu there were appeals for unity. The rhetoric soundedpromising, but some ministers will have to renounce their posts and clan influence in favour of some ofthose who backed the Islamic courts.
Three ministers were sacked and the cabinet shuffled.Reconciliation runs two ways: the government is asking Somalis to look generously on neighbouringEthiopia, whose forces have acted mostly with restraint but who are widely despised. And even if AUtroops do keep the peace, Somalis must fast find a way to revive their shattered economy.
Their countryneeds help to overhaul its informal banking system, to market and export its fruit and livestock, and toprotect its vast fishing grounds from illegal tuna-catching boats, some of them from the EU. In particular,thousands of young gunmen, most of them uneducated and without prospects, need jobs.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.About sponsorshipSouth AfricaLooking in the mirrorFeb 8th 2007 | JOHANNESBURGFrom The Economist print editionWhy is a review of South Africa by its African peers being delayed?Get article backgroundAMID fanfare and hope, a “New Partnership for Africa's Development”, known as Nepad, was proclaimedfive years ago as a “vision and strategic framework for Africa's renewal” under the auspices of what wassoon to become the new-look African Union (AU). Two years later, one of its most novel and ambitiousideas took shape.
In order to keep each other up to a new democratic mark, the bravest and most candidof Africa's governments would allow themselves to be judged by their peers. Hence the creation of anAfrican Peer Review Mechanism, whereby panels of independent-minded men and women from acrossthe continent would assess each country as it dared to step forward to be scrutinised.Rwanda and Ghana boldly put themselves forward, followed by Kenya. Mauritius is also under review.Next up was South Africa, the continent's undisputed economic and democratic heavyweight. Itswillingness to be judged, warts and all, was seen as big fillip for this voluntary mechanism, which isintended to prod governments into performing better, since the public assessments of them could beembarrassing. Some think the South African government is peeved by the draft review now in unofficialcirculation, though it insists it has had nothing to do with a decision to delay publication until the next AUmeeting, in July.
Officially, Africa's leaders said that the report was simply not yet final.At last month's AU summit in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, a discussion of the peer review of SouthAfrica among the leaders of the 26 countries which have signed up to the idea had been heralded. Thereview panel had submitted its draft report in November, and the South African government wassupposed to respond forthwith. But a revised “action plan” was presented by South Africa just before thesummit. There was apparently too little time to incorporate it and finalise the panel's report.Though the draft report highlighted South Africa's post-apartheid achievements, including its liberalconstitution, sound economic policy, generally sensible new laws and free politics, it did not shy awayfrom spelling out problems it has yet to solve: still brittle race relations, rising xenophobia (againstimmigrants from Zimbabwe, for instance) and the lingering reluctance of some whites to embrace thenew South Africa.
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