Singapore and neighbors just can't get along

SINGAPORE: Some countries have strategic oil reserves; others stockpile rice or wheat. The island nation of Singapore has emergency reserves of imported sand.

The sand is there to secure Singapore's insatiable demand for concrete, a reminder of Singapore's vulnerability as a nation without a hinterland to supply it with vital resources.

Singapore's government is now being forced to tap its sand hoard after its usual supplier, Indonesia, abruptly banned exports in February, citing the impact of a recent Singapore construction boom on its beaches and island environments.

The ban touched off the latest in a string of disputes between Singapore and its neighbors over water, land reclamation, satellite concessions, corporate takeovers and the flight patterns of the Singaporean Air Force ― just to name a few.

A Malaysian politician has blamed Singapore for worsening floods in his constituency. A top Indonesian politician has appealed for the recall of Singapore's ambassador. The general in Thailand who led the coup there last September has accused Singapore of tapping his phones.

Tiffs between Singapore and its neighbors are nothing new, and analysts say the latest dust-ups are unlikely to seriously harm relations.

But the analysts say that the recent quarrels highlight the fissures that continue to thwart the region's ability to compete collectively against the economies of India and China.

If Singapore and its neighbors cannot agree to share such basic resources as sand and water, they say, the dream of a single market by 2015 ― the stated goal of the 10-member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ― may be illusory.

Singapore's problems with its neighbors are as old as the country itself. Independence in 1965 came about after it was ejected by Malaysia.

Singapore's leaders took advantage of their city's historic role as a trading post to lure investment and manufacturing, vaulting Singapore within 20 years to the ranks of the world's most affluent nations ― and breezing past Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand along the way.

While its shrewdness has prompted frequent comparisons to Switzerland, some say its assertiveness places it closer to Israel. In his memoirs, Singapore's founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, said his goal "was to leapfrog the region, as the Israelis had done."

Like Israel, Singapore is an ethnic anomaly, a predominantly Chinese population in a predominantly Malay region. Indeed, Singapore even sought advice from Israel on how to build its defenses after independence. As such, Singapore has become a magnet for ethnic Chinese talent and wealth from around Southeast Asia.

The rising animosity in Thailand toward Singapore is especially troubling for the city-state because the two countries were Cold War allies with little history of rancor. The mood began to change when Singaporean banks took over Thai banks after the 1997 financial crisis, adding to a general resentment among the Thai elite about selling off distressed assets.

In 2004, when Singapore struck a 15- year deal with the Thai military for use of one of its military bases, activist groups in Thailand said the deal violated the country's sovereignty.

More recently, Singapore became a national punching bag in Thailand after Temasek led a group of investors in buying the telecommunications empire of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister ousted in the coup last September. The Thai government says the transaction was illegal, an accusation Singapore denies.

As for Indonesia, it remains unclear what brought the new ban on sand exports. However, Indonesia's maritime affairs minister, Freddy Numberi, later said the ban was aimed at pressuring Singapore into signing a long-stalled extradition treaty. Many Indonesians suspect that Singapore is harboring white-collar criminals, though there have been no publicized cases of fugitives living here.

Indonesia's foreign minister denied Freddy's claim, but Singapore bristled, calling Indonesia's mixed signals "puzzling and disappointing."

Singapore says the two countries had already agreed that the extradition treaty would be negotiated, together with a defense cooperation pact. Foreign Minister Yeo told Singapore's Parliament last week that an agreement was near.

The confusion over Indonesia's policy is only growing, though. In late February, the Indonesian Navy detained 13 tugs pulling barges full of granite, another widely used construction material, saying they were searching for smuggled sand.

Iraq Intensifies Efforts to Expel Iranian Group

BAGHDAD -- For three years, thousands of members of a militant group dedicated to overthrowing Iran's theocracy have lived in a sprawling compound north of Baghdad under the protection of the U.S. military.

American soldiers chauffeur top leaders of the group, known as the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or MEK, to and from their compound, where they have hosted dozens of visitors in an energetic campaign to persuade the State Department to stop designating the group as a terrorist organization.

Now the Iraqi government is intensifying its efforts to evict the 3,800 or so members of the group who live in Iraq, although U.S. officials say they are in no hurry to change their policy toward the MEK, which has been a prime source of information about Iran's nuclear program.

The Iraqi government announced this week that roughly 100 members would face prosecution for human rights violations, a move MEK officials contend comes at the request of the Iranian government.

"We have documents, witnesses," Jaafar al-Moussawi, a top Iraqi prosecutor, said Monday, alleging that the MEK aided President Saddam Hussein's campaign to crush Shiite and Kurdish opposition movements at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Moussawi said the criminal complaint would implicate MEK members in "killing, torture, [wrongful] imprisonment and displacement."

The group denied involvement in Hussein's reprisals.

"These allegations are preposterous and lies made by the Iranian mullahs and repeated by their agents," it said in a statement issued this week.

The MEK, also known as the People's Mujaheddin of Iran, was founded by students at Tehran University in 1965 as an opposition movement to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's U.S.-backed dictator. The group clashed with that government and later with the Islamic Republic established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

In 1986, the MEK moved its headquarters to Iraq, where Hussein welcomed the organization. MEK fighters have been widely accused of backing Hussein's suppression of the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings, but MEK officials say Kurdish leaders have absolved them of playing a role in the crackdown on Kurds.

In 1997, during a period of warmer relations between Washington and Tehran under the Clinton administration, the State Department added the MEK to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The group's leader, Maryam Rajavi, lives in Paris. She has a cultlike following among members, some of whom set themselves on fire to protest her brief arrest in 2003 after French officials raided the group's offices. Rajavi has led efforts to have the group's terror label removed in the United States and Europe. In December, a European court overturned an E.U. order freezing the group's assets. The European Union has not removed the group from its terrorist list.

The MEK says it has several thousand members in Iran, but the extent of its support base is unclear. Most exiled members live in the camp at Ashraf, north of Baghdad.

After Hussein was toppled, the MEK agreed to turn over its weapons to U.S. military officials. In 2004, the U.S. military granted its members the status of "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions and has since provided security for the camp.

EU calls on Syria to help in Lebanon and Iraq

The EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, today urged Syria to help stabilise Lebanon and Iraq during a visit that marked a thaw in EU relations with Damascus.

Mr Solana said the EU supported Syria's long-held goal of regaining the occupied Golan Heights after meeting its president, Bashar al-Assad.

"We would like to work as much as possible to see your country, Syria, recuperate the territory taken in 1967," he told a joint news conference with the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moualem.

Syria has made it clear that its cooperation to help end violence in Iraq is tied to western - especially US - backing for its peaceful campaign to regain the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied four decades ago.

The EU has avoided high-level contracts with Syria since the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005.

A UN inquiry implicated Syria in the killing - an accusation Damascus rejects. The EU wants the country's government to back the creation of a tribunal to try suspects.

Ma Ellen is delivering Liberia

It has been a year since "Ma Ellen," the first woman elected president in Africa, began to lay a solid foundation for her country. Johnson-Sirleaf has shown that one of her principle themes is elevating women in all sectors of society. And as she reflects on her first year in office, she can point to success.

Despite 14 years of civil war, Johnson-Sirleaf demonstrated that she is capable of leading Liberia into new possibilities. Her government embraces minorities and opposition members. She has initiated sweeping anticorruption reforms as well as initiatives to reintegrate tens of thousands of refugees and ex-combatants. Sanctions on timber have been lifted. Her administration has begun training new security forces, restored electricity and water to parts of the capital, substantially increased primary school enrollment, and begun to rebuild roads. She has increased government revenues by more than 40 percent; and not only is foreign aid streaming in, there's even a growing trickle of foreign investment.

Although countries that are ruled with guns tend to marginalize women, Liberians are optimistic that Johnson-Sirleaf will fulfill her promise to deliver their country from ruin to renewal. The president has shown tough love, confronting 80 percent unemployment and $3.2 billion in debt. But Liberia is in shambles, literally and metaphorically.

Johnson-Sirleaf is blending the themes of female leadership and self-responsibility. As she does, she is changing the way Liberians, and the rest of us, view women and power. She has appointed women ministers of finance, defense, sports and youth, commerce, and justice, as well as chief of police and president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Iraq leans on longtime enemy Iran for trade

Some Iraqi cities, including the oil- producing enclave of Basra, buy electricity from Iran. The Iraqi government is relying on Iranian companies to bring gasoline from Turkmenistan to alleviate a severe shortage. Iraqi officials are reviewing an application by Iran to open a branch of an Iranian national bank in Baghdad, and Iran has offered Iraq $1 billion in soft loans.

The economies of Iraq and Iran, the largest Shiite countries in the world, are becoming closely intertwined, with Iranian goods flooding Iraqi markets and Iraqi cities looking to Iran for basic services.

After the two countries fought a bitter war from 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein maintained tight control over cross-border trade, but commerce has exploded since the American invasion. Much of the money is heading in one direction, though: Iraq is becoming dependent on imports from Iran and elsewhere because industries here have been gutted by the economic sanctions of the 1990s and the current turmoil.

Iraqi leaders from the governing Shiite bloc say that political and economic ties with Iran, which is governed by Shiite Persians, will inevitably strengthen. As driving factors they cite the hostility of Sunni Arab nations to a Shiite-run Iraq and the ambivalence of the White House toward the devout Shiite parties here.

"If the Shiites do not feel protected," said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite legislator who advises Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, "if they feel what they've achieved can't be maintained, much of the leadership will have to work with Iran."

Askari, a religious Shiite with close ties to Iran, added: "The Arabs and the Americans are saying Iran is bad, but it's the only recourse."

According to one commonly cited statistic, trade between Iraq and Iran has grown by 30 percent a year since the American invasion in 2003. But American officials in Iraq say that there are no accurate numbers because Iran refuses to release figures.

Statistics from the U.S. Embassy's economic section show that Syria accounted for 22 percent of Iraqi imports in 2005 and Turkey 21 percent. Iran, which has the longest border with Iraq of any neighboring country, would likely fall in that range, officials said. The CIA World Factbook estimates Iraq's total imports in 2006 at $20.8 billion.

America's friend

ON THE whole, life in Uganda has been improving. In the past year, the Lord's Resistance Army, a sadistic rebel militia which had made a hell out of the north of the country for two decades, retreated to Congo and has been drawn into peace negotiations, albeit fitfully, with the government. For the first time in a decade, 1m or so northerners may be able to leave the dismal camps where they had been forced to take shelter. The rains have been plentiful, alleviating a drought. And, perhaps best of all, the country came through an election unscathed, though President Yoweri Museveni arm-twisted his parliament into changing the constitution to let him have a third term in office.

Indeed, Mr Museveni bent just about every rule to stay in power. He meddled with the courts, muzzled the press and brought out his own presidential guard to stymie protests. There were fears that Uganda might slip back into the bloody ways of its past. But it has not happened. Despite a big ego, Mr Museveni is no megalomaniac. Nor has he resorted to the spying tactics and wholesale imprisonment of dissidents that his counterpart to the north-east, in Ethiopia, has done.

So hard to reconcile

Three years ago the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI), a think-tank in Jerusalem, conducted studies of some school textbooks on both sides. It found gradual improvements over previous years, but still a lot of problems. Israeli books sometimes contained stories that promoted pluralism and co-existence and contained positive images of Arabs. But there were also portrayals that were paternalistic and played on stereotypes and fears. Descriptions of the 1948 war tended to suggest that Palestinians either left their homes voluntarily, selling them to Jews, or were encouraged to leave by other Arabs―rather than, as sometimes happened, being forced out violently. Maps of pre-1948 Palestine sometimes underplayed the extent of Arab habitation, while maps of modern Israel never included the “Green Line”, the pre-1967 border; this makes the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank look as if they were an integral part of Israel.

Palestinian books, similarly, had a mixed record on portraying people from the other side. IPCRI's researchers noted that they contained no calls for Israel's destruction or incitements against Judaism, but sometimes glorified “martyrdom” and the need to liberate the national homeland, while being vague about just how much of it to liberate. Their maps, too, suffered from geographical amnesia―often showing all of Palestine without Israel's borders, or displaying Arab cities in Israel but not Jewish ones.

And neither side makes much attempt to explain the other society and its history. “You learn the Israeli side of the story, where the Palestinians are present as an incomprehensible actor that sometimes upsets the apple cart,” says Dov Khanin, an Israeli parliamentarian from the far-left Hadash party. Israeli textbooks also do not cover the recent history of the Oslo peace process, in which Israel began to accept the Palestinians' right to a state: a previous education minister vetoed the attempt to introduce it.

The current minister, Yuli Tamir, is pushing for improvements, says Gershon Baskin, IPCRI's co-director. She recently ordered Israeli schoolbooks to show the Green Line, and seems more serious about enforcing the mandatory teaching of Arabic, which has been allowed to lapse. On the other side, however, Hamas's election to the Palestinian Authority seems to have brought some backtracking: where the Green Line had started appearing in recent editions of a textbook for older children, in the latest issue it has disappeared again, and a mention of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a notorious anti-Semitic text, was put in―only to be removed after howls of international protest.