Turkey: Öcalan’s razor
Also: Portugal, Georgia, the BRICS, and the Commonwealth.
In today’s dispatch:
TURKEY. A terror attack with a simple explanation.
PORTUGAL. A rare race riot continues for a second night.
GEORGIA. The pro-EU opposition is trailing in the polls.
THE BRICS. A Western rival is yet to emerge, but it’s being built.
THE COMMONWEALTH. Colonial injustice dominates an increasingly marginal forum.
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TURKEY. Öcalan’s razor
A terror attack with a simple explanation.
Turkey attacked Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in Iraq and Syria Wednesday after PKK militants killed five at an Ankara arms factory. A senior politician said Tuesday the PKK's leader could be freed if he renounced the insurgency.
INTELLIGENCE. The olive branch extended by the normally hawkish Devlet Bahceli seems to have been answered in the negative. It's unlikely the PKK's Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999, personally ordered the strike on the Turkish Aerospace Industries facility, but there are many in the PKK who’d be happy to see an endless war grind on. And likewise, there are many in Turkey’s military-industrial complex who'd like to see it continue as well.
FOR BUSINESS. The PKK insurgency has been going for 45 years, with thousands killed on both sides. It has impeded ties between Turkey and its neighbours Syria, Iraq, and Iran, but it has also given Ankara an excuse to range across its borders and develop greater political and economic leverage. Iraq's Kurdish regional president visited last week, ahead of local polls. Outreach to Tehran has increased, both to resolve issues in Syria, and align views on Israel.
PORTUGAL. In a storm
A rare race riot continues for a second night.
Unrest across Lisbon and beyond continued into Wednesday morning after police shot a Cape Verdean man early Monday. Migration rules and anti-refugee views have hardened in recent months, following March’s legislative election.
INTELLIGENCE. Portugal generally enjoys calm ethnic relations, but like much of Europe, the far-right has had a resurgence in recent years. The nationalist Chega party saw a 38-seat swing in March (from 12 to 50, placing it third in the legislature), and complaints of hate crimes, including by the police, have risen. Portugal sees fewer irregular migrants than Spain, whose Canary Islands are 100 kilometres west of Africa, but Lusophone speakers do head there.
FOR BUSINESS. Portugal’s economy has performed better than the Eurozone average, but it suffers from the bloc’s wider afflictions, including rising housing costs and concerns that migrants are taking working-class jobs. Attempts to broker an EU-wide solution have failed. Member states are increasingly making national laws to fill the void. The Netherlands is tipped to follow Germany in setting a hard border. Italy is battling its courts over offshore processing.
GEORGIA. Dream on
The pro-EU opposition is trailing in the polls.
The ruling Georgian Dream party held its final rally before elections Saturday. Polls last week placed it between twice and three times the support of the next biggest bloc, Unity. The president urged Georgians to vote for the opposition.
INTELLIGENCE. Georgian Dream, chaired by Kremlin-linked oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has lost support in recent years, but is still likely to prevail against Unity and other pro-EU groups, which have the backing of President Salome Zourabichvili, a former French diplomat of Georgian origin who joined the government of Mikheil Saakashvili, a one-time Western banker and governor of Ukraine's Odesa. Saakashvili is now in jail. Zourabichvili refuses to pardon him.
FOR BUSINESS. Western media paints the election as a battle of the corrupt (backed by Russia) and the liberal (backed by the EU). Not all Georgians see it that way, with scepticism of all elites widespread. Populist nationalism, not post-Soviet nostalgia for Moscow, will be the key theme. Georgians generally distrust and dislike Russia – which occupies two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but that doesn’t mean they all trust or like the West.
THE BRICS. Bric by bric
A Western rival is yet to emerge, but it’s being built.
Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi held their first formal meeting in five years at the BRICS summit in Russia’s Kazan. Vladimir Putin outlined new payments and trading plans for the group. Four new members were officially welcomed.
INTELLIGENCE. The summit did not go perfectly for Putin. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince cancelled. Brazil’s president was unwell. A new cryptocurrency was left as an idea, not a commitment. Yet a pledge among members, representing now 37% of global GDP, to trade in local currencies is a step towards de-dollarisation, as was a joint statement decrying US sanctions and announcing plans for study into a common reinsurance platform and settlements system.
FOR BUSINESS. The US dollar remains too ubiquitous and too liquid to easily replace. Yet the same was said of the pound before the British Empire faded into history. Much of the price of gold is driven by enthusiasm for the BRICS and emerging market central bank purchases. A lot is froth, but there’s substance too. Sino-Indian tensions have held back the bloc but now they’re mending there’s a chance for real cohesion. Whether that happens is up to the US.
THE COMMONWEALTH. The empire strikes back
Colonial injustice dominates an increasingly marginal forum.
King Charles visited Samoa Thursday ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting Friday, where a new Secretary-General for the British Empire’s legal successor will be chosen from among three African candidates.
INTELLIGENCE. All three candidates, from Lesotho, The Gambia, and Ghana, support a Caribbean-led effort to get Britain to pay reparations for colonial slavery. Pacific island states, in focus during Samoa’s hosting, are advocating for extra funds to deal with climate change (and rules to curtail emissions among the Commonwealth’s Anglophone elite (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Many new members aren’t former colonies, nor democracies.
FOR BUSINESS. The Commonwealth is supposed to champion parliamentary government and the rule of law – positive colonial legacies, at least according to institutionalists like this year’s Nobel laureates for economics. Yet it’s an incoherent mess dominated by semi-dictatorships promoting pet causes. Britain uses it to retain global standing – as France does with its Francophonie – but the political trade-offs could promote stirrings of another Brexit.