Year: 2009

By Gavan McCormack

The making of an unequal, unconstitutional, illegal, colonial and deceitful US-Japan agreement.

Yes We Can – But You Can’t

Elections at the end of August gave Japan a new government, headed by Hatoyama Yukio. In electing him and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japanese people, like the American people less than a year earlier, were opting for change – a new relationship with both Asia and the US, including a much more equal one with the latter. Remarkably, however, what followed on the part of the Obama administration has been a campaign of unrelenting pressure to block any such change.

The Obama administration has targeted in particular the Hatoyama desire to re-negotiate the relationship with the United States so as to make it equal instead of dependent. Go back, it seems to be saying, to the golden days of “Sergeant-Major Koizumi” (as George W. Bush reportedly referred to the Japanese Prime Minister) when compliance was assured and annual US policy prescriptions (“yobosho”) were received in Tokyo as holy writ; forget absurd pretensions of independent policies.

The core issue has been the disposition of American military presence in Okinawa and the US insistence that Hatoyama honour an agreement known as the Guam Treaty.

The Guam Treaty

The “Guam International Agreement” is the US-Japan agreement signed by Secretary Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Nakasone Hirofumi in February and adopted as a treaty under special legislation in May 2009, in the first days of the Obama administration. Support for the Aso government in Japan was collapsing and the incoming Obama administration moved urgently to extract formal consent to its plans in such a way as to ensure that any such agreement would bind any subsequent Japanese government.

Japan Focus for more

By KEVIN MINK

Leave it to the State Department to soft-pedal religious extremism in the Middle East. Oh not in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. In the most recent edition of the department’s annual Report on International Religious Freedom, both are designated “Countries of Particular Concern,” members of a select group chastised for their extreme intolerance. Which is as it should be.

But where is State’s acknowledgement of the happenings – from the absurd to the inhumane – in another, nearby country, where religious chauvinism has reached depths equaling those among any of its neighbors? I’m talking, of course, about the State of Israel – a place unfit, it seems, for any “particular concern” from Hillary & Co.

Certainly, the Report reports on Israel. But to avoid grouping the Jewish State with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and similarly intolerant countries, its authors resort to language one can only describe as Carrollian, leading readers through a looking glass in which words, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, mean anything theychoose them to mean, nothing more and nothing less.

So while a reality-based Israeli reporter, writing in Ha’aretz, can say that “Israel dismally fails the requirements of a tolerant pluralistic society,” the State Department authors mean for us to believe something else entirely. Forget “dismal.” According to them, the behavior of Israeli Jews towards the Palestinians – Christian and Muslim – has merely “strained” the relationship between the two.

It’s an interesting locution, given that, just three years ago, then-Prime Minister Olmert told a beaming Congress that his “people” had an “eternal and historic right” to all of Palestine. Given, too, that in past months, alert readers of the foreign press have seen the following items:

Israeli groups, both public and private, have launched efforts to prevent Jewish women from dating and marrying Arab men – this, after an opinion poll found that more than 50% of Jewish Israelis equate intermarriage with “national treason.” Journalist Jonathan Cook reported on a religious organization, Yad L’Achim, dedicated to “saving” – through military-style “rescues” – Jewish women from their significant Arab others. “The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the group’s website.

Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz announced plans to “Hebraicize” all road signs in Israel, removing historic Arabic place-names and forcing Palestinians to recognize Jerusalem, for instance, as “Yerushalaim,” and not “Al-Quds,” as they have for centuries. An Arab member of the Knesset described this as an attempt to “erase the existence of the Arab people.” Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said: “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult.”

A group of right-wing legislators sought to officially commemorate, in the Knesset, the death of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane, who advocated forcibly expelling all Palestinians from Palestine, saw Arabs, in the words of Israeli journalist Teddy Preuss, as “nothing more than disease-spreading rats, lice or other loathsome creatures.” One of the legislators, Michael Ben-Ari, is a self-described “student and follower” of Kahane. He is now “offering” to expel Israel’s Arab population to Turkey or Venezuela.

An influential West Bank rabbi, Yitzhak Shapira, published a book that Israeli daily Ma’ariv described as “the complete guide to killing non-Jews.” Drawing on the Bible and religious law, the 230 page King’s Torah “opens,” according to journalist Roi Sharon, “with a prohibition against killing non-Jews” but “very quickly” moves “to [granting] permission” for their murder, under certain conditions. Among the gentiles one is permitted to kill, according to the rabbi, are adult civilians and children. Shapira writes: “One must consider killing even babies … because of the future danger that will be caused if they are allowed to grow up to be as wicked as their parents.”

This, then, is “strain”?

As even Humpty Dumpty admits, one, ultimately, has to “pay extra” for making words do work like that. And pay we do. Since 1949, the United States has given nearly $114 billion in aid, military and economic, to the self-styled “Light unto Nations.” But to what end? Are we really “promot[ing] dialogue,” as Secretary Clinton said in introducing the Report, “on how best to accommodate religious communities”? Or protecting, as she continued, “each individual’s right to believe or not believe”? In response, we need only consult one final item, published on that side of the looking glass absent the strenuous doublespeak at State.

In late November, Ha’aretz followed up on Yitzhak Shapira. Funding for the “Baby Killing Rabbi” had come straight – to the tune of $305,000 since 2006 – from the Israeli government till.

Kevin Mink is a freelancer in Athens, GA. His writing on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has appeared in CounterPunch and The Arab American News. Contact him at kevjmink@yahoo.com.

Counterpunch

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

In the early 1970s the UN spearheaded the progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neoliberal onslaughts gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert some semblance of moral leadership, regrouped behind the supposed crisis of climate change as concocted by the AGW lobby, behind which lurk huge corporate interests such as the nuclear power companies. Radicals from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, putting forward proposals for upping the Third World’s income from its primary commodities, were displaced by climate shills in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC. The end consequence, as represented by Copenhagen’s money-grubbing power plays over “carbon mitigation” funding, has been a hideous travesty of that earlier vision of a global redistribution of resources.

Such is the downward swoop of our neoliberal era. In Oslo Obama went one better than Carter who, you may recall , proclaimed in 1977 that his crusade for energy conservation was “the moral equivalent of war.” Obama trumped this with his claim that war is the moral equivalent of peace. As he was proffering this absurdity, Copenhagen was hosting its global warming jamboree, surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic – human-caused – global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web over a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.

Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception – particularly the executive summaries — carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters Shell and BP, also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.

Counterpunch for more

By CHARLES R. LARSON

The Middle East appears to have been shocked by Seba al-Herz’s The Others, a novel about clandestine lesbian activities in Saudi Arabia. The author’s name is a pseudonym; the translator is not identified; three years ago the book was published in its original Arabic version in Beirut, that liberal bastion of the Middle East where so many Arabic writers have begun their literary careers. The American edition prints the two words of the title together, i.e., theothers, suggesting an intimate coupling.

The American publisher also quotes Al Hayat, the daily pan-Arab newspaper published in London, stating, “[This book] could be the most controversial novel to emerge in our times, not just from Saudi Arabia, but from the whole of the Arab world.” All that is quite a mouthful, especially when juxtaposed to added remark—also from the American publisher—that lesbianism in Saudi Arabia is “punishable by death if discovered.”

To muddle the issue, the translator in her/his lengthy “Afterword” throws the entire issue of the novel’s sexual deviancy into a quasi-backlash caused by the Saudi Sunni majority against the minority Shi’is. “The [unnamed] narrator and her friends are wired in every way, but they are only comfortable in their pseudonymous internet existences, or in clandestine relationships that carry other tensions and self-questioning…. Marginalized and disallowed from strengthening religious institutions such as mosques, Saudi Arabia’s Shi’is have turned to alternative institutions,” and, by implication, sexual lifestyles. I don’t doubt the importance of any of these contexts, but the novel is clearly about more than forbidden sexuality.

The unnamed narrator–an undergraduate at a woman’s college–describes her erotic awakening during an encounter with another, more-worldly student and the subsequent world of illicit parties, group encounters, and personal tensions from engagement in the forbidden. These relationships often turn ugly, possessive, if not masochistic, as young women quickly alter their loyalties, aware of the danger of their activities. Yet, not too far into an often boring narrative, the main character provides a clue about the eventual outcome of her story: “Ever since I was a semi-boy or a sexless child, I have gotten used to the idea, never challenged, that children do not gain the qualities of their sex until after marriage, when the girls give birth to children and the boys go out to work.” To wit, a certain amount of sexual exploration is biologically natural though obviously much more unlikely in repressive societies.

I can’t get too excited about the lesbian journey of The Other’s main character.

But there is something buried in the story that seems much more profound and psychologically interesting: the narrator’s self-loathing because of her body. Nor is this the body in a state of sexual arousal but, rather, obsessive embarrassment because of an inherited affliction. The narrator suffers from seizures, epilepsy, genetically explained, but turned into an obsession so overwhelming that she often can’t sleep, is filled with loathing about her imperfect body, can love no one for fear that that person will become aware of her abnormality. It would be fascinating to see how a psychiatrist would react to the following passage:

“My body hurts me…. My body pains me, the kind of pain that Panadol pills do not take away, an ache that does not disappear when I try to ignore it. Pain that is like heaviness, as if I am pushing forward with difficulty across a terrain of mud and green creatures that stick to me, pain that urges me to abandon the whole idea of life altogether; a deceptive and complex pain. My head is a bullet hole around which voices buzz and the wind whips. Pain gallops through my head like wild horses….”

The narrator’s self-loathing and inescapable pain result in a longing for death, described in great detail in lengthy passages toward the end of the narrative. One such passage: “I want Death to be a little bit nice to me, to take me without hurting me, to take me gently and lightly, to take me without stuffing me into a space smaller than my body, to take me with my filth and black spots and the mire in my soul, to take me and raise me on his wings, to lift me outside and above my body, above the world, above, where God is. I want to say goodbye to my body, but without death I will never be able to leave it.”

It isn’t the forbidden sexuality that is fascinating in The Others but, rather, the exploration of an obsessed mind unable to relinquish her belief in a perfect body. Yes, the lesbian encounters may have triggered the narrator’s sense of imperfection, but by the end of the story, sexuality has moved off-stage.

The Others
by Seba Al-Herz
Seven Stories Press, 320 pp., $17.95

Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C.

Counterpunch

By Vanguard

Venezuelan Ambassador to Nigeria Enrique Fernando Arrundell could not have offered his advice on Nigeria’s management of its petroleum resources at a better time. The anchor of government’s argument is that higher prices would draw foreign investors to the down stream sector of the industry.

Professor and Minister of Information Dora Akunyili had solicited Venezuelan investments for our refineries.

Mr. Arrundell’s response was without diplomatese. He launched a profound lecture on Nigeria’s oil and gas.

“In Venezuela, since 1999, we’ve never had a raise in fuel price. We only pay $1.02 to fill the tank. What I pay for with N12,000 here [in Nigeria], in Venezuela I’ll pay N400. What is happening is simple. Our President [Hugo Chavez] decided one day to control the industry, because it belongs to Venezuelans. If you don’t control the industry, your development will be in the hands of foreigners.

“You have to have your own country. The oil is your country’s. Sorry I am telling you this. I am giving you the experience of Venezuela. We have 12 refineries in the United States, 18,000 gas stations in the West Coast. All we are doing is in the hands of Venezuelans.”

“Before 1999, we had three or four foreign companies working with us. That time they were taking 80 per cent, and giving us 20. Now, we have 90 per cent, and giving them 10. But now, we have 22 countries working with us in that condition.

It is the Venezuelan condition. You know why? It is because 60 per cent of the income goes to social programmes. That’s why we have 22,000 medical doctors assisting the people in the community. The people don’t go to the hospital; doctors go to their houses. This is because the money is handled by Venezuelans. How come Nigeria that has more technical manpower than Venezuela, with 150 million people, and very intellectual people all around, not been able to get it right? The question is: If you are not handling your resources, how are you going to handle the country?

“So, it is important that Nigeria takes control of her resources. We have no illiterate people. We have over 17 new universities totally free. I graduated from the university without paying one cent, and take three meals every day, because we have the resources. We want the resources of the Nigerian people for the Nigerians. It is enough! It is enough, Minister!”

Do Nigerian authorities not know the truth? Is the answer really in deregulation?

Venezuela Analysis for more

By JILLO KADIDA

Each morning a 35-year-old Zimbabwean refugee wheels his young disabled sister to the city centre. He parks her wheelchair at a busy intersection and they start begging for money and food.

But Tapfuma* doesn’t only need food to keep him alive. He also needs antiretrovirals (ARVs).

Tapfuma discovered his HIV status early this year. He went to Médecins San Frontières (MSF) for help and doctors sent him to a clinic in Hillbrow, saying that he would be given treatment there. But it was not that simple.

“One of the health workers said: ‘You foreigners! We don’t have time for you. Go seek help elsewhere.'”

In despair Tapfuma returned to the one-room flat he shares with his sister and wondered what to do next. He didn’t know that the Hillbrow nurse was disobeying a government directive when she refused to treat him.

Under the directive, issued by the Department of Health in 2007, all refugees and asylum seekers — whether they have documentation or not — have the right to access primary and emergency healthcare. This includes ARVs.

Luckily for Tapfuma, a friend recommended another clinic that agreed to treat him. Now, at least, he is given ARVs. He also receives a monthly allowance of R200 from the Jesuit Refugee Service. It all helps, but only a little.

“Some days I am too weak even to wheel my sister, but I have no option. I don’t have a job and I am taking strong medication that can work only if I have a proper diet. That is why I need to beg to survive.”

Few people understand Tapfuma’s predicament. Sometimes he and his wheelchair-bound sister are harassed by the police. Once a motorist told them they were a “nuisance” and threatened to run them over.

M&G for more

By Phillip Knightley

In the early days of the Vietnam War, according to the American author William Blum, the Vietcong captured an American officer and were interrogating him. “I want to ask you an important question,” the Vietcong soldier said.

“You were our heroes after the Second World War. We read American books and saw American films. We all wanted to be as rich and wise as Americans. What happened?”

Blum does not record the American officer’s answer but poses a further question of his own. How did the United States dissipate the remarkable international goodwill and credibility it enjoyed at the close of the war. His answer: the activities of the military-industrial complex were responsible. “The military and the CIA need enemies because that is their reason for being. Defense contractors because enemies are to be fought with increasingly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft systems because this makes these corporations wealthier than many countries in the world.” But the military-industrial complex needed an excuse for its constant interventions around the world. Blum advances the theory that communism provided the excuse. But he says that “communist” was often no more than the name ascribed to those people who for other reasons stood in the way of the realisation of its ambitions: “if communists did not exist, the United States would have had to have invented them”.

It is Blum’s thesis that the word communist has been so over-used and abused by American leaders as to be virtually meaningless. (The Left could also be accused of abusing the term “Fascist”.) So no land has been too small, too far away, or too poor to pose a communist threat to the United States. This has meant that virtually every case that has involved American intervention has been concerned with a desire of a country to make itself free from political and economic subservience to the US, to pursue an independent foreign policy. If this has involved a refusal to minimise relations with the Socialist bloc or to suppress the Left at home or welcome an American installation on their soil, this was interpreted as a hostile act to America.

It did not matter that the threat was minimal. The United States still felt it was necessary to stamp it out, to maintain the principle, and as a warning to others. “For what the US has always feared from the Third World is the emergence of a good example — a flourishing socialist independent of Washington.” Blum says that tied up with this, of course, was that old seducer of men and nations: the lust for power, the acquisition, maintenance, use and enjoyment of influence and prestige, “the incomparable elation that comes from molding the world in your own beloved image.” The end result of this was that the United States became known around the world for establishing or supporting the vilest tyrannies whose outrages against their own people confronted us in our daily newspapers.

Almost as bad was the attitude of the old Soviet Union. It stood by doing little as progressive movements and governments, even Communist Parties in Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia and the Philippines went to the wall with American complicity.

I found the most interesting point Blum makes in his thesis concerns the one-time head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. In the 1960s the National Commission on the causes and prevention of violence found that Hoover had helped spread the view among police ranks that any kind of mass protest was due to a conspiracy promoted by agitators, often communists, “who misdirected an otherwise contented people”.

The idea that no people could be so miserable and discontented to resort to mass protest and that if they did it was because agitators had stirred them up reveals the conspiracy mentality of many of our leaders.

Phillip Knightley is a veteran London-based journalist and commentator. For feedback, write to opinion@khaleejtimes.com

Khaleej Times

By Sheila Malone

World population has grown from 2.5bn in 1950 to 6.8bn in 2007. By 2050 it is predicted to reach 9.2bn, and then stabilise (UN figures). This estimate assumes rates in many countries in the North will continue to decrease, and that the South will gradually follow suit.

Are such numbers ecologically and socially sustainable? The huge problems posed by climate change have reignited this debate.

In Britain the Optimum Population Trust says a firm ‘No’, claiming that our planet is already beyond carrying capacity, and we would need yet another one to support 9.2bn people. They want governments in both North and South to address this issue with measures like the ‘Stop at Two’ family planning policy of the 60s and 70s in Britain. They also want controls on migration.

Capitalist states in general (both the rich North and the ‘catch-up’ South) look to advances in technology and market competition to take care of both sustainability and population growth. So switches to alternative energy, agribusiness (like the misnamed ‘green revolution’) and genetic engineering will heat, cool, feed and transport the world. There is no need for population policies. Actually it is increased life expectancy, rather than high birthrates, which currently accounts for large populations in the North. Hence all the talk going on now about retirement age and pensions.

Nevertheless, birth rates also remain a factor. Historically high fertility rates have been seen as a positive accompaniment to high economic growth – ensuring an expanding, flexible, mobile workforce and carers within the home. So now that rates are dropping in the North, governments in Europe are offering financial incentives to women to have more babies to bump it up again (£1,650 per child recently in Spain).

By contrast, many governments in the South, unable or unwilling to aid their huge and growing poor (resulting from inequitable, export-led development), are adopting population controls to reduce these numbers. These have sometimes been coercive, inhumane and damaging to women’s health. So, perversely, in the high carbon-emitting rich North, with its huge average carbon footprint, we have policies to increase the birthrates. But in the low-emitting poor South they are being restricted. Apart from economic issues, there are the morality, justice and rights aspects of population growth and control.

Many religious leaders oppose any restrictions on human numbers as interfering with divine purpose. They may oppose both government policies and women’s individual reproductive rights (the Vatican position). On the other hand liberals (and others) may oppose limits as going against natural law, human rights, migrants’ rights, women’s rights. In the 60s and 70s many greens did consider rates of population growth ecologically unsustainable, particularly after the publication of the UN Limits to Growth report. But they later dropped the issue.

Reds also tended not to talk about it. Both are now returning to the issue, especially as public opinion often links it to climate change. Reds and greens support the rights arguments and are against the top-down social control and engineering aspect of population policies. But they see the unfettered profit-driven growth models of both the rich North and dependent South as the problem. Alternative, sustainable growth models and the elimination of inequality and poverty are seen as the main issues. Concerns about population growth are seen largely as a diversion.

International Viewpoint

While the details remain dim and unfocused, we see a special and unique role emerging for Turkey in the global debate unfolding in Copenhagen on climate change.

A glance through yesterday’s Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review reveals a few observations:

Global energy use, which will be down a bit when all the accounts for the crisis year of 2009 are in, will quickly resume its consumption-based march upward.

Demand will increase by at least 40 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. In Turkey, the percentage increase will be dramatically greater.

There is just one challenge: The needed increase in oil production over that period will be equivalent to four times the current production of Russia.

Turkey, if it can lose the mind-bending shackles of entrenched bureaucratic thinking and acting, has a significant hand to play in this energy game. Obviously, the country will be a critical transit hub in just about any scenario one can contrive; some accounts estimate 8 percent of the world’s carbon-based energy will be transiting through Turkey in less than a decade.

But the emerging scramble for alternatives, driven by the dire concerns of climate change, is an area where Turkey wields a serious hand of cards as well.

As negotiators in Copenhagen yesterday were hearing visions of electric cars and smart grids, it is instructive that an international conference on wind energy was wrapping up in Istanbul.
Windy Turkey could well become a major world center of wind-energy production within five years, predicted Alexis DeBeaumont, vice-president of the energy firm Alstrom.

Hurriyet for more

By Alexandros Petersen

Azerbaijan’s ongoing dispute with Turkey about transit terms and revenues for natural gas heading to Europe across Anatolia, as well as uncertainties about the Nabucco pipeline project, have compelled highest-level officials at Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) to publically consider the option of exporting hydrocarbons eastward, potentially to China and other East Asian markets. However, as Baku would have to surmount significant hurdles to make that proposition a reality, it remains to be seen whether a reorientation of Azerbaijan’s energy posture is in the cards, or whether this is just rhetoric to spur the development of Western-oriented projects. That said, the prospect of increased Azerbaijani gas exports to Russia and Iran supplanting westward flows should not be ruled out.

BACKGROUND: Since independence from the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan’s energy policy has largely been Western-oriented. Former president Heydar Aliyev’s energy and foreign policies were closely linked. Their common objective was to bolster Azerbaijan’s independence and diversify its international links away from Russia and the post-Soviet space, to Western and world markets. The “Contract of the Century” to develop Azerbaijan’s Caspian hydrocarbons and the construction of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey (AGT) projects, including the famed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, were keystones in an energy posture that not only afforded land-locked Azerbaijan the opportunity to export its natural resources, but did so in a way that allowed Baku to garner new international partners and greater independence of action in Eurasia and on the world stage.

The logical continuation of this trend was to do with Azerbaijan’s gas what had been done with its oil. The European Union’s vision of a Southern Corridor for energy would link EU consumers to Azerbaijan and potentially other Caspian producers of natural gas through Turkey and Georgia. The most discussed project of this Corridor was and is still the Nabucco gas pipeline, which would link Turkey’s border with Georgia to Austria’s European gas hub at Baumgarten. However, the geopolitics of gas are very different from those of oil, and power politics in Eurasia have drastically altered from those of the late 1990s when BTC was on the table.

The Southern Corridor faces a number of challenges: slow-motion progress on Nabucco due to political and commercial concerns, competition from Moscow-backed projects such as the South Stream and Nord Stream pipeline projects, and lackluster diplomatic support from the EU itself. However, the most pressing obstacle at the moment is the dispute between Baku and Ankara regarding transit revenues and gas pricing for Azerbaijani gas transiting Turkey to fill another Southern Corridor pipeline: the Turkey-Greece-Italy Interconnector.

This frustrating picture recently compelled highest-level SOCAR officials to publically air the option of exporting gas eastward, across the Caspian to China. SOCAR’s President, Rovnag Abdullayev, said on November 20 that Azerbaijan is seriously considering exports to China as part of the country’s energy diversification strategy. This is a direct message to the Nabucco consortium and Western companies and governments involved in the development of the Southern Corridor to step up their game and achieve results, such as a coordinated strategy with Turkey, along with project financing and comprehensive and clear offers to producers such as Azerbaijan. Also speaking in mid-November, SOCAR Vice President Elshad Nassirov could not have put it more clearly: “If Europe takes too long putting together a solution, then all the gas in the Caspian will go to Asia. It’s more serious than it seems”.

CACI for more