Noam Chomsky: U.S. Must Improve Relations with Russia and Challenge the Expansion of NATO

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited President Trump to Moscow just days after the White House postponed a planned meeting between the two leaders in Washington until after the midterm elections. The invitation to Moscow comes after Trump and Putin met for a summit in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this month. For more about U.S.-Russian relations, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, author, and linguist Noam Chomsky. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

Transcript:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited President Trump to Moscow just days after the White House postponed a planned summit between the two leaders in Washington until after the midterm elections. To talk more about U.S.-Russian relations and much more, we’re spending the hour with the world-renowned political dissident, author and linguist, Noam Chomsky. He is now laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years. His recent books include Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy and Requiem for the American Dream: the Ten Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. He joined us from Tucson, Arizona, last week. I asked him about the recent Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki and played for him a short pinwheel of U.S. media coverage of the summit.

ANDERSON COOPER: You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, certainly that I’ve ever seen.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: All of you who are watching today will be able to tell your friends, family, your children, your grandchildren, you were watching a moment of history. It may not be for the right reasons.

NORAH O’DONNELL: This Helsinki summit was one for the history books. President Trump’s refusal to challenge the Russian strongman drew widespread condemnation from members of his own party and administration. The summit that might have been about U.S. condemnation instead ended with President Putin giving President Trump a soccer ball from the World Cup and Mr. Trump handing Putin a gift of absolution.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper reporting after the July 16th joint press conference with Trump and Putin. I asked Noam Chomsky for his response to the Helsinki summit.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Trump has basically one principle: me first. That’s almost all of his policies, and wild statements and so on are perfectly well explicable within—under the assumption that that’s what’s driving him. Now, that—crucially, for him, he has to ensure that the Mueller investigation is discredited. Whatever they come up with, if it implicates him in any way, the way the media and political culture function, that will be considered of enormous significance, much more significance than his pursuing policies on the environment which may destroy human civilization. But given that, those highly skewed circumstances, he has to make sure that the Mueller investigation is discredited. And that was the main core part of his interview with Trump. Putting aside the way he behaved—you know, the soccer ball, which apparently had a listening device embedded in it and so on—yes, that was strange and unpleasant and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually, that World—that soccer ball, that particular ball has that little device in it, and that’s how it’s sold. It was a World Cup soccer ball, and that’s what it—that’s one of its attributes that people like, that they can put their iPhone next to it and get information.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, well, Putin was plainly treating Trump, more or less, with contempt, so whatever you think about that. Nevertheless, his main concern was pretty obvious, and that was the central part of the Putin-Trump interviews. And so, yeah, I think—I just don’t see the great significance of his acting in a silly and childish way in an interview. OK, let’s—he did. Now let’s go to the important issues which are not being discussed. The issue of improving relations with Russia is of overwhelming significance as compared with the remarks saying, “Well, I don’t know whether to trust my own intelligence agencies.” Saying that for perfectly obvious reasons: to discredit the Mueller investigation and to ensure that his fervently loyal base stays supportive. That’s not an attractive policy, but we can understand very easily what he’s doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Those intelligence agencies—former CIA Director John Brennan tweeted, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???” Again, the former CIA Director John Brennan’s tweet. Noam?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, his remarks were certainly incorrect. Whatever you think of Trump’s behavior, it has nothing to do with high crimes and misdemeanors or treason. That’s just not true. But again, the same point I’ve been trying to make throughout—we are focusing on issues of minor significance and putting aside problems of enormous importance and significance, whether we’re thinking of how to deal with immigration or whether we’re dealing with the question of survival of organized human life on Earth. Those are the topics we should be thinking about, not whether Trump misbehaved in a press conference.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to ask you about NATO. President Trump has questioned a key provision of the NATO military alliance, the mutual defense of NATO member countries. He made this remark during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He made his remarks during an interview with Tucker Carlson just a week ago.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that…?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I’m not against Mont…or Albania.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. By the way, they’re very strong people. They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.

AMY GOODMAN: There is President Trump questioning the whole idea of NATO. Well, if you could specifically address this. Interesting he chose Montenegro, where, well, many months ago, when he was with the G7, the G8, he pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro. But the bigger point about—well, he wasn’t making this point, but I’d like to ask you—about whether you feel NATO should exist.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s the crucial question, not whether Trump made an ugly and demeaning comment about a tiny country. But what is NATO for? From the beginning, from its origins, we had drilled into our heads that the purpose of NATO was to defend us from the Russian hordes. We can put aside for the moment the question whether that was accurate. But in any event, that was the dominant theme, overwhelming, in fact, unique theme. OK, 1991, no more Russian hordes. So, the question is: Why NATO?

Well, what happened was very interesting. There were negotiations between George Bush, the first; James Baker, secretary of state; Mikhail Gorbachev; Genscher and Kohl, the Germans, on how to deal with the—this was after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev made an astonishing concession. Astonishing. He agreed to allow Germany, now unified, to join NATO, a hostile military alliance. Just look at the history of the preceding years. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia, at an extraordinary cost, several times during the preceding century. But he agreed to allow Germany to—a rearmed Germany to join NATO, a military alliance that was set up to counter Russia. There was a quid pro quo, namely that NATO not—meaning NATO means basically U.S. forces—not expand to East Berlin, to East Germany. Nobody talked about anything beyond that. Baker and Bush verbally agreed to that. They didn’t put it in writing, but they essentially said, “Yeah, we will”—in fact, the phrase that was used was “not one inch to the east.” Well, what happened? NATO immediately moved to East Germany.
Under Clinton, other countries, former Russian satellites, were introduced into NATO. Finally, NATO went so far, as I mentioned before, 2008, again in 2013, to suggest that even Ukraine, right at the heartland of Russian strategic concerns—any Russian president, no matter who it was, any Russian leader—that they join NATO.

So, what’s NATO doing altogether? Well, actually, its mission was changed. The official mission of NATO was changed to become to be—to control and safeguard the global energy system, sea lanes, pipelines and so on. And, of course, on the side, it’s acting as an intervention force for the United States. Is that a legitimate reason for us to maintain NATO, to be an instrument for U.S. global domination? I think that’s a rather serious question. That’s not the question that’s asked. The question that’s asked is whether NATO made—whether Trump made some demeaning comment about Montenegro. It’s another example of what I was talking about before: the focus of the media and the political class, and the intellectual community in general, on marginalia, overlooking critical and crucial issues, issues which do literally have to do with human survival.

Donald Trump viewed from Russia: A potential friend

Russian state media make no secret of who Moscow wants to win the US presidential election.

 by Rory Challands

Source: Al Jazeera News

"Trump Soars Over Clinton Week Before US Election Amid FBI Scandal" ran a headline on Sputnik's website on Tuesday.

I'd followed a tweeted link to the article, which also included a GIF of Trump pulling one of his most self-satisfied facial tics. It's a face I imagine many in Moscow are wearing at the moment.

The article encapsulated the surge of hope within Russia's largely state-controlled media that maybe, perhaps, possibly the US election might work out after all.

The reopening of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server could easily damage her support. At least one US poll quickly put Clinton trailing Trump for the first time in months.

Ironically, Russia didn't even have to do much. This saga had its origins in Washington DC, not Moscow.

The 2016 US election has been a wild ride. And much US establishment thinking - particularly in intelligence circles - has detected Russia's destabilising hand in everything from the hacking of the Clinton campaign's emails to the potential Kremlin recruitment of Trump himself as some kind of inside agent.

'No banana republic'

Sorting the signal from the noise in all this is no easy task. The Russian president has dismissed it as far-fetched hysteria.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Vladimir Putin said at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi last week, "but America is a great nation - not some banana republic."

If the US is as mighty as it thinks it is, the president was saying, then there's nothing that Russia could do to mess around with its democracy.

It was a classic Putin line. An insult wrapped in a compliment, tied up with a bow that could easily be interpreted as a geopolitical challenge. He was also partly dissembling, as he often does.

The hacking allegations seem credible enough. Cyber security investigators Crowdstrike say of the hackers (COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR):

"Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government's powerful and highly capable intelligence services."

Watch Russian TV for any length of time, and it's pretty obvious who Moscow wants to win.
"Trump’s leading in the race. His ability to state things as they are, and his intention to end the recent extreme Russian-American tensions - all this puts him in a very risky situation,” said TV host Dmitry Kiselyov on his prime-time news show mid-September.

"Now they may just kill him," he concluded, ominously.

Coverage of Clinton in the state-controlled Russian media is largely negative. She's viewed as ideologically anti-Russian, and Trump as a pragmatist and potential friend.
And even cosmopolitan, middle-class Russians you'd expect to think differently are wary of the Democrat, and find Trump's candour and novelty refreshing.

One friend of mine here told me recently that under Clinton, the US-Russia relationship would stay the same - ie, bad. A Trump presidency, by its very unpredictability, would at least offer options for change. Essentially, she was saying, better the devil you DON'T know.

An opinion poll done in Russia recently found the following: 57 percent of Russians asked said the US election results would be important to Russia; 38 percent thought not. One in three said Trump’s victory would better match Russia’s national interests; 6 percent said they'd prefer Clinton; 22 percent replied that both were as bad as each other.

For most Russians, politics in their own country seem remote enough. US politics are remoter still.
What they want is largely what the president and the Kremlin-controlled TV channels want - a leader in the White House who will smooth balm on the gangrenous wound that is the current US-Russia relationship.

They don't think Clinton will do that.

Clinton, Trump, and the ends of great power hypocrisy

The hypocrisy of the politicians stinks almost as much as the corpses of the dead.

Mark LeVine

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California.

US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry rail against Russia's support for the Syrian government's horrific bombing of hospitals and other crimes of war. Meanwhile, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen to Israel, the US and its allies have either yet to account for or continue to engage in wars and pursue policies that have killed hundreds of thousands of people and ruined the lives of tens of millions more. 

Truth be told, the Middle East is an intricate wheel of war and oppression whose spokes stretch across the Middle East into Africa and Central Asia, and which rolls roughshod over most every attempt by citizens across these regions to achieve a measure of democracy, accountability, development and dignity.

Why are are western leaders surprised when those crushed under the wheel ride the spokes across the water in the desperate hope of arriving at a better, or at least livable, future.

Overlap in policies

Last Monday's presidential debate has no doubt revealed the stakes involved in choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, at least in terms of their differences in temperament and treatment of women. 

But as we rightly condemn Trump's so-called "fat-shaming" and his lack of command of life-or-death issues, the overlap in policies between the two candidates when it comes to supporting massive levels of violence across the Middle East is as troubling as it is depressing.

True, Clinton isn't crazy enough to try to steal Iraq's oil (let's face it, neither is Trump); but she had no problem hijacking that country's future (and ours) in 2003, and continuing to support every brutal government  that serves the American elite's consensus of the country's "national interest" since then.

[Clinton's] 'sober' hand hardly seems less dangerous than Trump's recklessness from the point of view of those caught under the wheels of US foreign policy, or that of the other major powers, allies and adversaries alike.

Her "sober" hand hardly seems less dangerous than Trump's recklessness from the point of view of those caught under the wheels of US foreign policy, or that of the other major powers, allies and adversaries alike. 

 

Yet whatever their past, or allegiances or entanglements, we can assume that both Clinton and Trump would, each in their own way, like to be remembered as having in some fundamental sense significantly improved the United State's standing, and global security with it.

Trump's cowboy imperialism is not that far from the attitudes that his favourite president, Ronald Reagan, brought to office. And yet Reagan produced several of the boldest foreign policy tacks of the post-War era, including calling on Soviet President Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" as well as completely abolish nuclear weapons.

Global peace

Neither Trump nor Clinton has Reagan's rhetorical and ideological genius. But both Clinton and Trump could call for a major change in the architecture of world politics and diplomacy that would have an equally profound effect on global peace and security: namely, an end to the veto power of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

It is hard to overstate the harm the P5 veto has done to the cause of world peace. Rather than shore up stability and a balance of power between the emerging two global blocs, the Security Council veto ensured a shared a balance of terror and the ability of the great powers and their most favourite allies and clients to get away with literally anything, no matter how gravely their actions violate international law and norms.

From the US invasion of Iraq, to Israel's continual violations of international law, and the even more egregious actions of the Syrian government and its Russian patrons, hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer because the world community has almost no leverage to prevent systematic violations of the UN Charter and fundamental international laws by one of the P5 or their allies.
While it is true that an end to the veto - or at least increasing the number of permanent members necessary to wield it - would prevent the US and its friends from violating international law at will, as a fundamental rule of the international game it would in fact impact all the major powers more or less equally. 

It would also hamstring Russia, China and their allies from pursuing policies such as supporting Assad, that are destabilising the global system.

An end to the veto

Indeed, calling for an end to the veto would offer two major advantages to the next president. 

First, if enacted it would clear the diplomatic slate for the new administration and draw a line under the failed policies of Obama and his predecessors, offering unprecedented freedom of action to reshape US priorities in line with either Trump's or Clinton's core foreign policy goals.

Second, because changing the UN Charter in this manner would, according to Article 109, requires approval of all five current permanent Security Council members (as well as two thirds of the General Assembly), a US call to abolish the veto would put the new president squarely on the right side of history without constituting an act of immediate and unilateral strategic disarmament.

Either Russia and China would agree to raise the bar for international law to a much higher level for all international actors, and in so doing profoundly improve the global security climate, or they would look like obstructionists to a much more just and humane order, while the United States under President Clinton or Trump would assume the mantle of leadership for envisioning that order.

Needless to say, such a position would greatly improve America's standing in the very regions where decades of hypocrisy and callousness have caused such harm - both to citizens there and ultimately in the United States. 

Given the desperate state of American and global politics today, it would be nice to imagine, if only for a moment, an American president with the vision and courage to make such a call.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Chinese man wins 'gay conversion' case

Clinic ordered to compensate man who sued it for administering electric shocks intended to make him heterosexual.

Source:Al Jazeera 

A Chinese psychological clinic has been ordered to pay compensation to a gay man who sued it for administering electric shocks intended to make him heterosexual, in what is believed to be China's first case involving so-called conversion therapy. Lawyer Li Duilong said the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing on Friday ordered the clinic to pay $560 to compensate Yang Teng for costs incurred in the therapy. Li said the court also ruled that there was no need to administer shocks because homosexuality did not require treatment. A suit against search engine giant Baidu for advertising the Xinyu Piaoxiang clinic in the western city of Chongqing was dismissed. Homosexuality is finding increasing acceptance in China but many openly gay men face pressure to undergo sexuality "treatment" or marry a partner of the opposite sex. Yang told the Associated Press he was "very satisfied with the results, which I didn't expect. The court sided with me, and it has supported that homosexuality is not a mental disease that requires treatment". Yang said the therapy included hypnosis and electric shocks that harmed him both physically and emotionally. He said he voluntarily underwent the therapy in February following pressure from his parents to marry and have a child. Homosexuality was de-classified as a mental disorder in the country in 2001 although no laws outlaw discrimination against sexual minorities and same-sex partnerships are not recognised. Conversion therapy has more than a century of history around the world, but has fallen out of favour with medical authorities. Nonetheless the lucrative industry persists in countries from Singapore to Britain and the United States - where reports of electro-shock use have added to momentum for a ban.

Is democracy wrong for China? (Video)

Mehdi Hasan challenges Chinese scholar Dr Zhang Weiwei on whether China can afford Western-style democracy.
   

Source:Al Jazeera
"Liberal democracy may be great or less great for the West, but it would be miserably wrong for a country like China," argues Dr Zhang Weiwei, the author of the controversial book The China Wave and outspoken defender of the Chinese political model.

If others think our model is good, you can learn from us. If you think our model is not good, we don’t care.

But is a lack of human rights and freedom of expression really the unavoidable cost of China's development? And will China's rise as a superpower change the world as we know it?

In this episode of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan challenges the public intellectual Dr Zhang Weiwei on the trends, myths and realities of modern-day China, and asks why he thinks a meritocratic one-party system is the only way forward.

Joining this discussion are Dr Diane Wei Liang, a business professor and novelist who participated in the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989; Dr Martin Jacques, the author of the bestselling book When China Rules the World and co-founder of the think-tank Demos; and Professor Stephen Chan, a professor of International Relations at SOAS in London and former international civil servant.

Obama's miscalculation

Marwan Bishara

Source: Al Jazeera

And the greater lesson from the Middle East.

President Barack Obama, who by any measure is a smart and shrewd politician, must be feeling rather foolish nowadays. Not only have his predictions proved wrong about Iraq and al-Qaeda, but, under his watch, America is also being drawn back into the Iraq quagmire three years after it withdrew.

The president was all optimistic when he secured US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. But his claim of "extraordinary achievement", of leaving behind a "sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq", was soon shown to be, at best, wishful thinking - indeed a grave error.

Despite retaining eyes and ears on the Iraqi ground, the advance of the Islamic State group, over the last few months has clearly taken Washington by surprise. It's yet another terrible failure of US intelligence services.

How much of this can be said to be Obama's fault? Of course, he cannot be blamed for the follies of his predecessor, nor is he responsible for half a century of foreign policy that compromised America's values in favour of its short-term interests.

Still, the president does share major responsibility for the present failures after serving five years in office.

Obama might be careful, calculating and nuanced, but his foreign policy has produced one blowback after another from Libya to Afghanistan through Iraq and Syria.

Obama's mistakes

Miscalculation and myopia have seemingly marked the execution of the Obama doctrine of leading from far and behind.

Four major miscalculations stand out:

Inside Story - Islamic State 'beheading': A challenge to US?

First, the president rightly promised to "end the mindset" that produced the Iraq catastrophe, but instead he only reformatted it. He played it safe, not wise, staying below the radar by using, for example, remotely run drones instead of foot soldiers on the ground. Every attack has sown death and produced new recruits for the jihadi groups. Just ask the Afghans, Pakistanis and Yemenis.

In effect, President Obama wasted a historic mandate granted by the American people to "un-Bush" America's foreign policy by ending the hawkish unilateral militarism.

Second, Obama was right to downsize US regional commitments and lower regional expectations, but he did not help bring about multilateral alternative to US influence.

Obama lectured US allies and global powers about why they need to a play greater role in regional affairs, while preserving the US military and strategic dominance in the Middle East. In other words, as Washington projects overwhelming power from the Mediterranean to the Gulf - but forgoes its strategic commitments there - expect more not less trouble in the explosive region.

In that way the fragmentation of Iraq that started with the US invasion in 2003, has only escalated with US withdrawal in 2011. The same goes for the likes of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya etc.

Third, President Obama might have succeeded in tracing and killing Osama Bin Laden, but he has grossly underestimated the consequences of further decentralisation of al-Qaeda Central that Bin Laden once commanded on the borders of Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Only a few months ago, the president offered a blithe basketball analogy in response to questions about the rise and proliferation of jihadi groups affiliated with al-Qaeda: "If a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant."

Alas, the Islamic State group has proved more powerful, more strategic and even deadlier than al-Qaeda Central, with far reaching ramifications for the US and its allies. Its leader, Al-Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has outperformed Bin Laden and has become a rallying symbol for many al-Qaeda affiliates throughout the region.

Lastly, the Obama administration has misjudged the tenacity of its nemeses, just as it underestimated the dependency of its regional allies on its protection.

Obama's attempts to remove the White House, albeit partially, from the region's disputes, has left behind more than just a major strategic void. These are the conditions for a perfect storm, the eye of which is the void left by the US.

For example, the Obama administration remained conspicuously silent as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki cracked down on his Sunni rivals, alienated the Kurds and undermined the unity of the country. This was made easier when the US media largely abandoned the country in an attempt at collective amnesia about the scars of the war.

The same goes for Syria. When Bashar Assad's regime was challenged by a popular revolt in 2011, Washington's allies looked to the US to intervene, preventing Assad from carrying out genocide against his own people, given that no other power had the capacity to do so. And of course the same goes for Washington's continued support for the Netanyahu government, as it expanded illegal settlements in Palestine and carried out a horrific offensive against Gaza.

The greater lesson

The lesson from all of these mishaps can be found, partly, in President Obama's own admission regarding Libya. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the president acknowledged that it was a mistake not to follow the war to dislodge Qaddafi with a real multilateral effort to stabilise the country and secure its unity.

Not so different from former Secretary of State Colin Powell's advice: if you break it, you own it.

Islamic Group claims control of Raqqa province

More importantly, removing the lid on any sort of hegemony, be it a dictatorship like Saddam's, a terrorist organisation like Bin Laden's, or even a superpower power like the US, can only open a can of worms, if it is not contained through the establishment in its place of a viable alternative power system.
Once the can has been opened, it's been proven impossible to close. Removing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of sectarian hell in Iraq. Assassinating Bin Laden empowered new jihadist leaders to step in to take up the mantle of al-Qaeda.

Whether evil or benevolent, a superpower is also a system of patronage with many stakeholders dependent upon it. Failure to change, meet or manage their expectations is sure to make US' clients pricklier, less secure, and, as a consequence, less cooperative.

For all these reasons, the US must ensure a viable multilateral alternative to its hegemony in the Middle East. It must use its super-power status to empower allies and regional players to assume greater authority. Europe and the countries of the region should be invited to take part and emboldened to step up to the plate if there's a genuine attempt at extracting the US from the Middle East's challenges.

US deniability over its hegemony in the Middle East would've been terribly amusing if it weren't terribly tragic. It's bad enough to behave like an empire in the 21st century, but to act irresponsibly is far worse.

High/Low

Source: Al Jazeera

An emotional search for belief and identity in modern China as gamblers deal with debt and addiction.

 

Gambling has long been part of life in China, but in a society increasingly divided by rich and poor, the Chinese have become obsessed with winning easy money.

And as gambling is illegal in China, so Hong Kong and Macau have become top destinations for Chinese gamblers.

In this Witness film, four gamblers who pin their hopes on games of luck and fortune, take us on an emotional search for belief and identity in money-centric modern China.

Filmmaker's View

By Jean-Louis Schuller and Sam Blair

Jean-Louis Schuller and I became intrigued by Hong Kong’s obsession with money and wealth whilst we were making another film there.

Hong Kong is built on and bloated by banking, trade and consumer culture. We wondered how that affected the lives that we saw in the never-ending lines of tower blocks and the daily crush on the streets. We found our answer in the obsession with gambling that is endemic in the city and even more so in neighbouring Macau, which had recently overtaken Las Vegas as the casino capital of the world – discovering a deeply troubling culture of increasing speculation, addiction and debt. We were compelled to return and make a film that got beneath Hong Kong and Macau’s surface gloss and into the heart of this phenomenon.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in making the film was finding people willing to talk about their lives.

In China, “saving face” (maintaining personal reputation and honour) is incredibly important so opening up and telling the world about your problems is not the norm, quite the opposite. Obviously for documentary filmmakers this is problematic.

We started out by visiting the numerous church-based groups set up to try and counter the wave of gambling addiction. These churches, tucked away in true Hong Kong style on the 15th floor of a tower block, offered counselling and spiritual guidance to the increasing number of people who were in incredibly perilous situations after gambling away extraordinary amounts of money.

Michael, a taxi driver, was one such character. He had his quiet family life shattered as he gambled away tens of thousands of dollars by speculating on the stock exchange - in Hong Kong playing the stocks is simply another way to gamble for some. We were intrigued to find out how a modest man like Michael lost control and risked so much. We also wanted to find out what motivated him to act in this way. Michael’s recent religious conversion compelled him to open up to us and share his amazing story.

Our biggest challenge was finding a young character, someone who was still gambling and was willing to be filmed. After many false starts, Wu, who ran a counselling centre for gamblers, introduced us about Ji, a young man he had started to help. And fortunately for us, he agreed to be filmed.

Ji worked in a kitchen but spent most of his restless energy gambling or talking about gambling. It seemed to be his only dream, his only idea of how to escape the limits of his life. Wu tried to reason with Ji and told him to find meaning in his life away from gambling. But for Ji, like so many others in Hong Kong and Macau, the allure of gambling is in the fantasy it offers – the chance to reach for a life tantalisingly out of reach, the opportunity to be one of the lucky few.

A world built for the rich

Our cities are adapting to a new reality, from which the poor are forcibly exiled.

Yiannis Baboulias

Source: Al Jazeera

 

It's very much obvious for anyone following public discourse in economics that Thomas Piketty's best-seller Capital in the Twenty-first Century has brought the problem of inequality to the forefront, with mixed results. US President Barack Obama vowed to make it a central issue for his administration before backing down and doing absolutely nothing. The British government has been trying its best to play down the fact that it's a problem for Britain, blaming immigrants instead.

They ignore the plethora of evidence offered by, among others, the Office of National Statistics, which revealed  in May that the wealthiest 10 percent of households in the UK own 44 percent of the country's total aggregate household wealth while the least wealthy half own just nine percent.

But inequality has entered the conversation and there's very little governments can do to hide what is self-evident. As a result of this change in consciousness, a new-found awareness has grown among the public and the media, who are now very quick to pick up on, and scrutinise examples of the ever-growing income disparity across the globe.

It has also brought to light the many ways in which our societies grow hostile towards the less fortunate. There is now a vast array of ways in which social classes try their best to keep those underneath them completely out of sight, a desire hard-wired in city planning and architecture.


 Such an example was reported by the New York Post last month, the last in a chain of eyebrow-raising news on the subject. The city council gave the green light to plans for a block of luxury apartments, coming with a selection of "affordable units", a way for the developer to get some substantial tax cuts and for some lucky, less well-off families, to get houses in "a fantastic new building".

  But it also came with something else: a separate entrance for those families.

The entrance, now dubbed "the poor door", will be located in the opposite side of the building and it will basically make sure that the two categories of residents never meet.

There is a practical argument to this: It is to exempt the less well-off families from the really high maintenance costs the richer residents will be paying for the various amenities.   

While it's true that you shouldn't burden affordable apartments with high costs, essentially negating the point of them, let us ponder on the wolds "poor" and "affordable" for a second.

For a working class family, like the one I grew up in, there is nothing affordable about most affordable apartments. If the UK - where poor doors are quite widespread - is anything to go by, these properties cost 80 percent of the average rent in the area they are in, according to the latest ruling . That translates to an average of £18,000 ($30,300) per year for a three bedroom apartment, when families who consider themselves middle class in Britain make on average £43,592 ($73,000).

This is an optimistic scenario, as the bar of entry for new, "affordable" housing, is thought to be around £70,000 ($117,800) for a family, while last year, even the Conservative Westminster council warned London Mayor Boris Johnson that plans to set new rent levels at up to 80 percent of market rent would require council tenants in a three-bedroom home in the borough to have an annual income of £109,000 ($180,000) in order to be considered affordable, reported The Guardian .

Just how far have the rich pulled away from the rest of us? With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the US defining middle class as anyone with household incomes up to $250,000, our views on the issue may have become more than a little skewed.

This is not of course the only instance of something that was built to exclude. The "poor door" may enflame liberal sensibilities, but it's a distinctly middle class issue. Other dramatic changes are reshaping our environment in ways that project extreme hostility towards the less fortunate.

What goes on behind walls
 
Hail the rise of the gated community. While not as inhumane as those meant to keep people in, like the Roma ghettos in Slovakia, we have witnessed the proliferation of such developments across the globe. The rich shut themselves away in safety and luxury. They are a definitive sign of how far income inequality has taken our societies in the past three decades.

From luxurious condos resting next to the slums of Rio and other big South American cities, to the new developments in Spain, the US, India, Russia, South Africa and elsewhere, all examples of the haves removing themselves from society, declaring not only that the poor "are not like us" but that "they will never be like us". 

Even Greece, a relatively classless and overwhelmingly safe society, saw the opening of the first such community in Crete, an event that conveniently escaped the Greek media.
 
When the haves can't remove themselves due to lack of space, plans are put in place to remove the unwashed masses from sight. In Singapore, they are considering floating neighbourhoods for foreign workers only, to keep them away from their cities.

Do all of these countries face such grave security issues that require the most affluent to hide away behind walls or sending the poor away? Surely not. If not in all countries, crime is definitely on the decline in most of the world, so is poverty. But what is on the rise is inequality and the unwillingness of those who benefit from it, to cohort with those that don't.

Tom Clark, author of Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump , wrote recently : "Among those substantially hit by austerity, 62 percent told YouGov last year that they rejected the coalition's cuts as too hasty; among those not much affected, a similar majority of 65 percent felt that the cutting should be maintained or stepped up."

This change in speeds has taken hold across the spectrum and across the globe, shaping the way classes interact with public space and subsequently its evolution. It is the subtle ways in which our urban landscapes are changing that show the true cruelty born out of the slump.

Hostility as the new normal
 
In what used to be the gritty side of Southwark in South London, now newly gentrified, anti-homeless spikes were installed outside a building where homeless people took shelter at night. A picture of it was posted online and the reaction was strong enough to make the owner of the building promise to remove them.

The number of rough-sleepers has swollen since the UK introduced severe penalties, including imprisonment, for anyone squatting empty properties. In parallel, so have measures such as anti-homeless spikes. Bus stops with arm rests designed to discourage sleeping. Benches with a tilt such as those installed in London's Camden district - asymmetrical surfaces made out of small stones, disguised as decoration, pointy blocks of cement underneath bridges.

All these are weapons against the already most hard-hit category of people, the homeless, who already suffer disproportionately from addiction, mental health issues and malnutrition,in some of the richest countries in the world.

As Rowland Atkinson, co-director of the Centre for Urban Research at the University of York, told The Guardian : "If you were being a bit cynical but also realistic, it is a kind of assault on the poor, a way of trying to displace their distress. You have various processes coming together, including economic processes that are making people vulnerable in the first place, like the bedroom tax and thresholds on welfare, but the next step seems to be to say: 'We are not even going to allow you to accommodate yourself in the most desperate way possible.'"

This trend, visibly present since the 1990s, is dubbed "hostile architecture".

Where more inclusive societies, like that of Denmark, build parks and public spaces with a view to invite and be enjoyed by as many as possible, countries where extreme inequality is becoming the norm, such as the UK and the US, opt for hostile and disengaging urban scenery.

We are right to be worried about these new realities. Gated communities and hostile architecture are brushed aside as temporary issues at best, to be fixed when "times are better". But what we should be worried about is not solely if we are building a world to be enjoyed only by the rich in the short term, but also what that world might look like in the long term.

To us, such city furniture may look simply as a temporary manifestation of bad character, brought on by a prolonged economic crisis. But to those that will inherit them, they may look like no more than war zones; financial battlefields, from which humanity is totally absent.

Yiannis Baboulias is a journalist, writer and founding member of Precarious Europe, examining issues of precariousness, new nationalisms and independence movements across Europe. His work has been featured in the New Statesman, Vice and The Guardian among others.

 

Egypt's Lost Power

Source:Al Jazeera

EGYPT IS FACING A GAS CRISIS DESPITE IT HAVING BEEN, UNTIL AS RECENTLY AS 2010, ONE OF THE LARGEST GAS PRODUCING COUNTRIES IN AFRICA. HOW DID IT REACH THIS POINT?

AL JAZEERA INVESTIGATES THE HIDDEN STORY OF EGYPTIAN ENERGY, HOW TYCOONS CASHED IN AS A NATION LOST OUT, AND HOW EGYPT MAY BECOME DEPENDENT UPON ISRAEL FOR ITS ENERGY

Egypt and Israel's energy deals

 

After Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula in 1967, it extracted oil from the territory throughout the 1970s. In 1979, the Camp David Accords returned the Sinai to Egypt, but it also ensured that Egypt would supply oil to Israel in the years to come.

“Those Accords guaranteed Israel the right to bid on oil supplies from the Sinai Peninsula,” Professor James Stocker of Trinity Washington University told Al Jazeera. Because Israel became increasingly dependent on oil from the peninsula during the 1970s, “they wanted to ensure that they continue to meet their energy needs using those oil fields,” he said. In addition to this energy supply, the Accords brought together the two countries’ military and intelligence services, in a relationship that has now lasted for decades.

In 1994, following the Oslo Accords, in which the Palestinians formally recognised Israel, Egypt and Israel were in an even easier position to further the normalisation process. That year alone, Israeli investments were made in a $1.2bn petroleum refinery in Alexandria, called the Middle East Oil Refinery or “MIDOR”. The deal brought together individuals from Egyptian and Israeli intelligence.

Hussein Salem, a former intelligence officer on the Egyptian side, conducted deals with Yossi Maiman, a former intelligence agent with Israel’s Mossad. Hussein also assigned his protégé, an engineer named Sameh Fahmy, to oversee MIDOR.

Following this initiative, Fahmy, with the help of Salem, became Egypt’s petroleum minister. “The presence of Sameh Fahmy as minister defines a new era for the energy sector in Egypt, where the resources were managed by the Intelligence of Egypt,” Hatem Azzam, who was a member of parliament in Egypt in 2012, told Al Jazeera.

With Fahmy as oil minister, Salem was able to establish a private company, the East Mediterranean Gas company (EMG) with his Israeli counterpart, Maiman. EMG would build a pipeline connecting the Egyptian coastal city of El Arish to Israel’s Ashkelon with one purpose: to supply Egyptian natural gas to Israel.

Through Salem’s strong connections to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Fahmy, he was able to secure a contract that would entitle EMG to Egyptian gas at a price well below market rate, to then sell to the Israelis cheaply, with the help of his business associate, Maiman.

“In the same year [2008], gas was being exported in other countries for...vastly more, up to eight times more than what the Egyptians were receiving,” Mika Minio-Paluello, an energy analyst, told Al Jazeera. By 2010, he continued, EMG owners Hussein Salem and Yossi Maiman “were receiving [the gas] from the Egyptians for $3 and then selling it on to the Israelis for $4.50 and basically pocketing the difference”.

The price of power

Using confidential documents obtained by Al Jazeera, energy analyst Mika Minio-Paluello calculated the amount of money the Egyptian people lost in these gas deals.

Energy

A wide coalition of demonstrators, eventually backed by Egypt’s military, forced President Hosni Mubarak out of office on February 11, but not before Hussein Salem was able to flee the country to avoid arrest.

The egyptian uprising

Egypt Faces

In the lead-up to the July 3, 2013 military coup that overthrew President Morsi, the country’s energy shortage was an issue that gave way to much resentment against Morsi’s government among Egyptians.

“Egypt’s desperate. There are queues outside petrol stations. Almost every night there’s a blackout. You never know when it’s going to be,” Mika Minio-Paluello, an energy analyst, told Al Jazeera. But the shortages during Morsi’s tenure appear to have been intentionally set up.

The egyptian uprising

Anger at the export of gas to Israel remained even after the daily protests culminated with Mubarak’s forced resignation. At least 15 bombings of pipelines in the Sinai eventually brought the flow of gas into Israel to a halt in 2011.

“The Egyptian military used the supply of gasoline in the gas station as a weapon to throw off Morsi,” Azzam said. “One day after the coup, all these queues have disappeared and everything goes back to normal.”

The Egyptian army’s supreme military council, which was overseeing the post-Mubarak transitional period, was forced to acquiesce to the calls by revolutionary forces to halt gas exports to Israel.

After Mohamed Morsi entered office in June 2012, following the first free and fair presidential election in Egypt’s history, he sought to confront the rampant corruption in the energy sector. Sameh Fahmy and Hussein Salem, who had already left to Spain where he has been living in exile, were sentenced to 15 years in prison for their roles in selling natural gas to Israel at below market rates.

Just as Morsi’s tenure in office was short-lived, so too was his attempt to confront the corruption in the energy sector. “President Morsi was facing a lot of pressure with all this network of corruption that exists in the intelligence, in the military,” Hatem Azzam, the Egyptian MP in 2012, told Al Jazeera. “This energy corruption network was one of the strongest reasons why the leaders, the army generals, decided to make the coup over Morsi.”

Egypt Faces

 An energy crisis
In the lead-up to the July 3, 2013 military coup that overthrew President Morsi, the country’s energy shortage was an issue that gave way to much resentment against Morsi’s government among Egyptians.

“Egypt’s desperate. There are queues outside petrol stations. Almost every night there’s a blackout. You never know when it’s going to be,” Mika Minio-Paluello, an energy analyst, told Al Jazeera. But the shortages during Morsi’s tenure appear to have been intentionally set up.

“The Egyptian military used the supply of gasoline in the gas station as a weapon to throw off Morsi,” Azzam said. “One day after the coup, all these queues have disappeared and everything goes back to normal.”

Although the widespread energy shortage was initially created to increase popular resentment against Morsi and support for his removal by the military, Egypt’s energy sector has continued to struggle in the past year. As the general who led the coup in July 2013, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, assumes office as Egypt’s new president, he is faced with a massive energy crisis across the country.

To make matters worse, after the Egyptian military in 2012 acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionary forces and cut off gas supplies to Israel, Yossi Maiman, through EMG, filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian government.

In it, EMG accuses the government of violating the contract signed years earlier under Mubarak’s presidency that entitles EMG to 15 years of uninterrupted gas exports to Israel. The lawsuit was raised in international courts rather than in Egyptian national courts, leading some analysts to question the role of Egypt’s sovereignty in the dispute.

EMG is seeking $8bn in alleged losses caused by the Egyptian government. This is in addition to a $6bn lawsuit by a Spanish firm, Union Fenosa, against the Egyptian government for their alleged failure to adequately supply gas to Spain.

The Egyptian government now faces lawsuits in international courts due to alleged violations of contracts detailing gas deals signed under Mubarak’s presidency, as well as debts claimed by foreign companies that total $20bn in international courts.

A new power dynamic

Following the recent discovery of natural gas in the Mediterranean, most of which has been claimed by Israel, Sisi is now attempting to secure gas imports from Israel, at a less amicable price than Israel enjoyed from the Egyptians only a few years ago.

In January 2014, Sisi took the first step toward this initiative, when his military-backed government lifted restrictions on private oil and gas companies operating in Egypt, allowing them to import gas from any foreign entity.

These gas imports would be done through another private firm currently leading Israel’s exploration in the Mediterranean, the US-based Noble Energy.

Just a few months after the Egyptian government lifted the trading restrictions, Noble Energy and the Spanish firm Union Fenosa issued a joint letter of intent stating that the former would supply natural gas from “offshore Israel to [the latter’s] gas liquefaction facilities” in Egypt. These facilities would be used to freeze the gas into a liquid, so that it could then be transported by tanker rather than pipeline, and sold in far greater volume elsewhere.

To make any future commercial deals with Israel, the Egyptians would be required to give more than just access to these plants. Israel is also seeking a commitment for ships to have access to the Suez Canal to transport gas to lucrative markets in Asia.

“Under the Morsi government, there was no confidence that Egypt would allow such shipments to go through the Suez Canal,” said Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy program at the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs. “The change in government has meant that this potential can be re-examined.”

Facing public pressure due to widespread energy shortages that resulted from years of mismanagement during and after the Mubarak era, as well as lawsuits on the international stage, the Egyptian government, led by Sisi, seems to be heading in a direction that will allow private firms to begin importing gas from Israel. “That seems like more of a compromise that lets Hussein Salem and Maiman keep making lots of money,” Mika Minio-Paluello, an energy analyst, told Al Jazeera.

Former petroleum minister Sameh Fahmy has been released from custody after an Egyptian court ruled that there should be a retrial, while the charges against Hussein Salem are expected to be dropped, at which point he is likely to return to Egypt. Meanwhile, Egypt’s hidden energy industry is back on track.

Identity and Exile

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel examines why so many American Jews defend Israeli policies regardless of the issue or cost.

Source:Al Jazeera 

Identity and Exile: an American's struggle with Zionism is a two-part series following Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel.

In part one, he asks why so many American Jews defend Israeli policies regardless of the cost. In part two, he travels to the Middle East to examine what effect Israel's policies have had on people in the region.

Part one

Part Two

In the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of Jews migrated from Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia to the US, settling across the country's big cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago where they found opportunity and established strong communities. Those communities continued to grow in the subsequent decades as more Jews fled anti-Semitism across Europe.

A growing number of Jews also migrated to Palestine at the turn of the century, part of a nascent Zionist movement. Migration to Palestine increased after World War I. At the end of World War II, following the horrors of the holocaust, the state of Israel was created in what had previously been British-controlled Palestine. In the process, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, exiled into neighbouring countries and refugee camps.

 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the land continues to this day. How does this contentious issue affect Judaism in the US? Why is there such strong support for Israel in the US irrespective of the issue or cost? 

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel travels back to his native Chicago where he was raised Jewish. He talks to local rabbis, friends and family about why so many in the Jewish-American community believe it is important to maintain support for Israel … no matter what. 

And he travels back to Palestine to retrace his steps as a young man. At that time, during the second Intifada, he was shocked to discover the impact Israeli policies were having on Palestinians. 

He tries to understand how Jewish religious beliefs have turned into a political cause that he does not agree with - but that the US actively accepts and supports.

Kerry: Israel risks becoming apartheid state

Secretary of state says Israel risks becoming an "apartheid state" if two-state solution fails, US website reports.

Source: Al Jazeera, The Daily beast 

US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that Israel risks becoming "an apartheid state" if there is no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kerry's comments were published on Sunday by The Daily Beast news website, which obtained a recording of his remarks on Friday to the Trilateral Commission, a non-governmental organisation which includes senior officials and experts from the US, Western Europe, Russia and Japan. "A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second class citizens - or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state," said Kerry. "Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to." The US-based The Daily Beast reported that senior US officials have rarely used the term in reference to Israel. Jen Psaki, the spokesperson for the US State Department, said: "Secretary Kerry, like Justice Minister Livni, and previous Israeli Prime Ministers Olmert and Barak, was reiterating why there's no such thing as a one state solution if you believe, as he does, in the principle of a Jewish State." "[Kerry] was talking about the kind of future Israel wants and the kind of future both Israelis and Palestinians would want to envision. The only way to have two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution. And without a two state solution, the level of prosperity and security the Israeli and Palestinian people deserve isn't possible," she added. Kerry has been conducting more than a year of intensive shuttle diplomacy trying to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace. Earlier in April, he urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to prevent the negotiations from collapsing, saying it was regrettable that both sides have taken steps recently that are not helpful in promoting peace and ending the decades-long conflict between the two sides. The "crime of apartheid" include "inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime," according to the 1998 Rome Statute. Apartheid was insitutionalised from 1948 to 1994 in South Africa, and was a means of racial classification and segregration.

Bulgaria: Wrestled to the ground

People & Power investigates why Bulgarians have been protesting against corruption in the heart of government.

 

Source: Al Jazeera 

For over a year now Bulgaria, a modern EU member state, has been struggling with its troubled history and torn over where to go next. But what lies behind these divisions, and can they ever be reconciled? Are they really, as many Bulgarians seem to think, the consequence of a toxic legacy from its communist years?

People & Power  sent filmmaker Glenn Ellis to investigate repeated claims of corruption in high places, and the reason for months of sporadic demonstrations.

Filmmaker's view

By Glenn Ellis

I flew into Sofia at night. The short drive from the airport through well-lit boulevards to a picturesque centre gave the impression of an affluent city.

I’d been sent to Bulgaria to look into a story that sounded, on the face of it, somewhat improbable: that even now, 24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, power in this farthest outpost of the European Union was still largely in the hands of former communist secret service agents. Was this really possible, and could this be the key subtext to more than a year of anti-government protests, which still sporadically rock the country today?

A steady stream of compromising revelations flow from the Commission for Declassification of Communist Intelligence Records, a body set up when Bulgaria joined the EU. It transpires that many of those who have risen to prominence in the years since the Cold War share a past – their previous roles as spies and informers for the hardline and murderous Soviet-era dictator, Todor Zhivkov. Former collaborators include prime ministers, presidents, bishops, businessmen and top journalists.

In the morning, I got my first look at the wintry capital. A dilapidated splendour pervades Sofia: A beautiful Russian church, the 16 th -century Banya Bashi Mosque, the magnificent Nevsky Cathedral, and all an easy walk from an equally delightful parliament building that looked more like a provincial opera house than a seat of power. Even the solid Socialist Realist housing blocks a little farther out seemed easier on the eye than their brutal counterparts in Berlin or Bucharest -- and all of it under the shadow of snow-capped Mount Vitosha. It was hard not to be charmed by Sofia and its beauty but I wasn’t here to sightsee – there was work to be done.

'A good driver looks ahead' 

One of the people I was most curious to meet was Bulgaria’s once-exiled King Simeon II, and I’d arranged to interview him at Vrana palace on the outskirts of the city.  A solitary sentry opened tall, wrought-iron gates, bearing the Saxe Coburg Gotha family crest, and waved us through. We drove through wooded parkland towards the main building, an extensive pile of Balkan battlements and towers.

"I suddenly realised that my father was no longer with us because of the way they addressed me," the king told me with a sigh. "Instead of ‘your highness’ it was 'your majesty' - then I thought, my god, now I’m the King."   
As the war neared its bloody conclusion the Soviet Red Army marched into Bulgaria, seized power and executed the three regents along with many others. The boy king and his mother were put on a train, given $200, and sent into exile. They were lucky to escape with their lives. It was 50 years before Simeon was able to return.   
 
Given this history I was taken aback by his attitude towards the former communist spies who had recently been unmasked:

“A good driver looks ahead - only occasionally in the mirror - you can’t spend your whole life looking in the rear view mirror and seeing whose done wrong to you because then you never finish.”

It was a surprisingly conciliatory response, but then the king is also a politician, in fact he’s probably the only monarch ever to be elected prime minister – a post he held some 15 years ago.

I wanted to know what he felt about the periodic protests which have engulfed his country over the last year, demanding the resignation of the government.

"My own innermost law is that it’s by voting that you change things not by political tricks or demonstrations or riots. Unfortunately voting is not so active here. I’ve always been disappointed because I felt that after 50 years, when our people were not allowed to vote, they would go for each opportunity to vote with both hands. Instead for some reason or another there’s a sort of almost disbelief - or saying, well one vote won’t change anything so I might as well stay home and not vote."

Made of champions 

Back at my hotel, a giant 4x4 car with blacked-out windows was waiting for us. It had been sent by one of Bulgaria’s leading oligarchs, Slavi Binev, who had generously insisted on buying me dinner at a traditional Bulgarian restaurant. The car took me out of the city and up the slopes of Mount Vitosha towards one of his favourite eateries.

"The only possibility to go abroad in the communist time was to be a celebrity in some socialist way " Slavi Binev, member of European Parliament

As we entered the restaurant dozens of well-heeled diners were being serenaded by a Balkan bagpipe ensemble. Binev arrived about an hour later, making a showman’s entrance with a throng of costumed waiters hanging on his every word. Over numerous glasses of rakia he told me ominous stories of how other politicians, mostly his enemies, had resorted to liquidating their opponents. Were it not for Bulgaria’s well-documented tradition of assassinations, it would have been hard to take him seriously.

But Binev is also, curiously enough, a member of the European Parliament and was about to hit the campaign trail for the forthcoming Euro elections. So I was keen to ask him if there was any truth in a US intelligence cable released by WikiLeaks, which listed his company’s allegedly criminal activities as "prostitution, narcotics, and trafficking stolen automobiles." He assured me that Julian Assange had admitted to a colleague of his that there was no substance in the report.

Next morning as we prepared for the interview at one of Binev’s houses, the oligarch showed me a Picasso, one of a number of artworks in a collection that also includes works by Salvador Dali.

I asked him to explain his political agenda.

"For me, democracy is the dictatorship of the law, not of somebody who wants to introduce his ideas -- no there should be a dictatorship of the law; and the law should not be two levels, it should be one law for everybody -- not a step-mother for one and a very caring mother for the other."

I changed tack and asked about his sporting background, for like many of Bulgaria’s leading political and corporate figures, Binev had been a sportsman during the communist period, in his case a taekwondo champion.

"The only possibility to go abroad in the communist time was to be a celebrity in some socialist way," he tells me, "That is, to be an artist, a high level professor or a sportsman, there was no other chance to live like a normal man: to go abroad, to be in the media or something like this, that life was reserved for people from the Communist party."

And so was this sporting background a good preparation for politics?

“Sport has given me a lot: discipline, a social network; to sacrifice everything for one, to know what the target is, and to run for the target and don’t think for nothing else. I think I learned much from sport. Confucius said you’re not a son of your father, you’re the son of your time -- I was a son of the time of the sport.”

'Bulgaria: Wrestled to the ground' 

My next appointment was with Philip Gounev, a senior analyst, at Bulgaria’s Centre for the Study of Democracy.

"In Bulgaria the major crime syndicates were run by former secret service agents and former law enforcement officials. The front men for some of these criminal groups were athletes. Athletes clubs were part of law enforcement structures; the police and the army had sports clubs associated with them and so the foot soldiers of organised crime came from these athletes’ clubs.

"In Bulgaria, just like in Russia, we had special athlete high schools. These were high schools where martial arts, weight lifting and wrestling students became close friends -- they often became the seed of organised crime groups."
 
I couldn’t help wondering what impact all this had had on a country which many fear has become the most corrupt in the EU. Gounev was reading my thoughts:

"In the 90s our economic elite at the national and international level was being run by such individuals,” he told me, "and because money laundering has never really been investigated this has allowed for all these criminal syndicates to create legitimate business empires -- which partially explains why we have the problem of corruption. It makes it very difficult to counter organised crime when the same people are part of economic elites and are the major supporters of political parties."

If that’s the case, then it’s hard to imagine how Bulgarians, despairing of ridding their country of corruption, will ever see the total severance of links between the criminal and political classes.

'A bitter pill to swallow' 

Next day was Sunday; we rose early and headed for the cathedral. It was the first anniversary of the accession of the patriarch, the supreme authority of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and there he was surrounded by bishops and acolytes in all their glittering finery. It was an astonishing spectacle, like walking into a Rembrandt. I had to remind myself that out of the 15 current bishops in Bulgaria, 11 of them - including the patriarch - had been revealed to have once been communist agents and informers, telling tales on their flock and helping to blight the lives of any who did not toe the party line. I couldn’t help feeling that there was something absurdly hypocritical in the display of piety and pageantry in front of me, given the misery caused to so many by the regime that used to run this country.    

"That former supporters of the regime and members of its oppressive security apparatus went on to accrue great personal wealth and power is an even bitterer pill to swallow." Glenn Ellis,  filmmaker

One of those was Nikoli Dafinov. Now in his mid-70s, he had been sent to the Lovech Concentration Camp as an undergraduate – his crime: speaking with a French student who was on an exchange trip to Sofia – an absurd charge given that Dafinov was studying languages at the University. It was the early 1960s, and people were sent to camps like Lovech to “disappear”, to die from being worked to death.

Dafinov, like the other prisoners, carried endless heaps of rubble with his bare hands from the quarry to the railway line half a mile away while guards stood over them with whips, knives and rifles – many died from exhaustion, many more from beatings - but this was the whole idea. “They died here in the quarry and in the evening we brought them to the place where we slept, and these dead bodies, they stayed for about four or five days in an open toilet, and after that in the night, some truck came and they take them 60km to Belene, where they put it to the pigs to eat them.” I have to double-check I’m hearing him right – "You mean the pigs ate the dead bodies?" I ask him. "Yes!" he replies emphatically.

Of course, this particular kind of barbarism was swept away with Communism years ago, but it still rankles here that no-one has ever been tried and convicted for the crimes and human rights abuses of that era.

That former supporters of the regime and members of its oppressive security apparatus went on to accrue great personal wealth and power is an even bitterer pill to swallow.
Many believe that the protests that have been such a feature of Bulgaria for most of the last year were ignited by one man who had simply had enough.
.
'The right price' 

In an act akin to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader in Tunisia who sparked the Arab Spring, Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old campaigner walked calmly up to the County Hall in the Black Sea resort of Varna, carrying a banner which called for the mayor, Kiril Yordanov, to resign.

Goranov then poured petrol over his body and set fire to himself.
His complaint was that during the mayor’s 14-year tenure in Varna, more and more municipal assets were signed over to a company which now accounts for five percent of the Bulgarian economy. That company is a conglomerate set up by special service officers after the fall of the communist dictatorship.

For years Goranov had campaigned against the growing power that this enterprise wielded in Varna, but its malign influence has so far proved unstoppable.  
I had asked Gounev about the company.

“Just like any other oligarchic structure they’ve been using corruption and it’s most visible on the local level,” he told me.

“The local mayor who has been supported by them remained unchanged for many years regardless which party came to power - he would switch sides in order to get the votes - he would always remain in power. And I think the state of Varna deteriorated so badly over the past decade that local citizens became outraged.”

Nick Todorov, a friend of Goranov’s agreed to meet me outside the County Hall. He takes me to see a makeshift memorial marking the spot where Govanov took his own life, a shrine where people now leave flowers in memory of the martyr. His sacrifice coincided with the mass resignation of the centre-right government of Boiko Borisov. Since then daily protests have become a feature in the country.

If anything, Borisov’s successor, Plamen Oresharski, is even less popular. The belief for many is that corruption is now so rampant in Bulgaria that anyone or anything can be bought for the right price. Ordinary people are desperate for change.