Prime Minister Gordon Brown believes the world financial crisis offers the opportunity to establish a “truly global society”.
Mr Brown will use a high-profile speech in the City of London to say that Britain, the US and Europe should join together to provide leadership in the creation of a “stronger and more just international order”.
He wants this weekend’s emergency summit of world leaders in Washington to reach consensus on a new framework for the international financial system, featuring a reformed IMF which will act as a global early-warning system for financial problems, he will say.
The Prime Minister promised to work with US President-elect Barack Obama to build a new global society in which the markets are subjected to morality and ordinary people’s interests are put first.
In his annual foreign policy speech to the Lord Mayor of London’s Guildhall banquet, Mr Brown will say that the transatlantic relationship between Britain and Europe and the USA can be the driving force behind the creation of a new international order.
“The alliance between Britain and the US – and more broadly between Europe and the US – can and must provide leadership, not in order to make the rules ourselves, but to lead the global effort to build a stronger and more just international order,” Mr Brown will say.
“The transatlantic relationship has been the engine of effective multilateralism for the past 50 years.
“As America stands at its own dawn of hope, so let that hope be fulfilled through a pact with the wider world to lead and shape the 21st century as the century of a truly global society.
“And I believe the whole of Europe can work closely with America to meet the great challenges which will test our resolution and illuminate our convictions.”
“The alliance between Britain and the US – and more broadly between Europe and the US – can and must provide leadership” – Gordon Brown
Between Russia and the Middle East, the Caucasus is one of the world’s most diverse regions – and as recent fighting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia showed, still boiling with ethnic tensions. Norman Stone reviews a history which makes sense of this complexity
The surrender of the Circassian leader Sheikh Shamil to the tsarist forces in 1859
The Ghost of Freedom: a History of the Caucasus
Charles King
OUP, 219pp, £17.99
A Georgian professor came to my (Turkish) university a few years ago and said: “People who live in mountains are stupid.” You probably hear such things often enough in the Caucasus, but it is not the sort of remark that you expect professors to pass. However, there is maybe something in it, a point made by the crazy loyalism of the Jacobite Highlanders of the Forty-Five, or for that matter of the Navarrese Carlists: brave and romantic, certainly, with their own codes of honour, but not very bright.
A French sociologist, André Siegfried, developed this theme a century ago, because he had noticed that voting patterns depended on altitude; in the valleys, people got on with normal lives, but, the further up you went, the less this was true. The diet was very poor, the economy was sheep-stealing or smuggling, resentment simmered against the valley settlers, and religion of a wild sort reigned. The Caucasus also fits Siegfried’s pattern, with the difference that, the further uphill you went, the more weird languages you hit on. In Charles King’s words, “the north-east harbours the Nakh languages . . . as well as a mixed bag of disparate languages that includes Avar, Dargin and Lezgin”.
He has missed out the Tats, who are mountain Jews, and he has mercifully missed out a great deal else, because the whole region is a kaleidoscope, and the ancient history is very complicated, with an Iberia and an Albania in shadowy existence; the Ossetians, of whom the world recently heard so much, are apparently what is left of the Alans, one of the barbarian tribes that swept through the later Roman Empire (and ended up in North Africa).
Charles King’s great virtue is that he is a very proficient simplifier and misser-out; he writes well, and can read the languages that matter (for some reason, quite a number of the important sources are in German; Germans were especially interested in the Caucasus, and in 1918 even had plans to shift U-boats overland to the Caspian). All the important themes are here, with some interesting additions.
King concentrates on the modern history of the Caucasus, roughly from 1700, when Russia began to take over the overlordship from Persia and the Ottoman Empire. In 1801, she annexed much of Georgia. This was relatively easy, since it is a very divided country (and the language – so difficult that even Robert Conquest, writing his biography of Stalin, found it impossible – itself sub-divides). It was also Christian, the nobility on the whole glad to come to terms with the tsar, and it could easily be reached from the sea, whereas other parts of the Caucasus, given the very mountainous and forested terrain, were much more difficult. The various Muslim natives of the northern Caucasus were then generally known as “Circassians” (the present-day Chechens are related) and they put up an extraordinary resistance to Russian penetration.
Cossacks came in, as the 19th century went ahead, and a line of forts was established; but a ferocious tribal-religious resistance grew up, under a legendary figure, Sheikh Shamil. Combining mystical-religious inspiration with an extraordinary astuteness as to guerrilla tactics, Shamil kept the Russians pinned down for a whole generation. (King’s bibliography is very solid and useful, but he might have mentioned a classic book about this, Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch, who went on to write The Wilder Shores of Love about the erotic Orient.)
In the event, the Russians “solved” the problem of the Circassians by mass-deportation. About 1,250,000 of them were forced out, and King is very good at describing their fate, as a third of the deportees died of disease or starvation or massacre, and the rest scattered over the Near and Middle East. Settling in eastern Anatolia, they encountered the Armenians, and bitter conflict resulted. A generation later much the same fate occurred to the Armenians of eastern Turkey. King quite rightly makes the parallel.
Shamil was at long last captured, but the Russians treated him well, and part of his family faded into the tsarist aristocracy. This is incidentally a dimension of matters that King could have explored: the relations of Russia and Islam. He has a good chapter about the image of the Caucasus in Russian literature (Lermontov and Tolstoy especially) but both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky were fascinated by Islam, and the Russians, whether tsarist or communist (and even nowadays) were quite adept at dealing with Muslims. The Tatars have turned into rather a plus: Nureyev and Baryshnikov, whose names mean “light” and “peace” in Turkish, being a case in point.
In fact, as the 19th century went ahead, the Caucasus was opened up, and many of the Muslims became loyal subjects of the tsar. Tiflis, the Georgian capital (why must we use these wretched “Tbilisis” and “Vilniuses” for places so well marked on the historic map?), was the seat of a viceroyalty that stretched from Kars in eastern Anatolia to the Caspian, and the railways, or the military roads, snaked ahead. Oil was struck on the Caspian side, and Baku, the capital of today’s Azerbaijan, grew up as a boom town, much of the architecture rather distinguished in late- Victorian style. One of the great mansions has been spectacularly restored as a historical museum.
To this day, the solid architecture of Kars, now in eastern Turkey, is impressive, and though the town went through a very bad period, when the Cold War was going on, it is doing much better now, as the oil pipeline to Baku pumps away, and the old railway links are restored. Even now, despite the gruesome climate, the inhabitants of Kars are notably sharper and better-educated than those of Trabzon or Erzurum, which remained under Ottoman rule. According to Orhan Pamuk’s novel on the town, Snow, its theatre was very good, but if you needed Islamic female costumes you had to send off to Erzurum, which was (and is: the calls to prayer are frequent and deafening) very provincial-pious. In its way, Kars shows in miniature that pre-1914 period which is the great might-have-been of Russian history: 1914 aborted a period of growing prosperity even, if you like, a bourgeois revolution. The revolution of 1917 finished all of that.
There was a pathetic episode, as the three nations of Transcaucasia – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – established a shadowy independence, even though the peoples of each were (and to some extent still are) intermingled. Baku and Tiflis had large Armenian populations, and Yerevan, the territory of today’s Armenia, was roughly half Muslim, whether Azeri or Kurdish. “Ethnic cleansing” then went ahead, the Armenians especially becoming megalomaniac, and even, as a first act on independence at Christmas 1918, invading Georgia. To this day, much of the Armenian diaspora seems never to have forgiven the west for failing to support their cause: hence these strange and persistent demands for the tragedy to be recognised as genocide. Perhaps it was, but as King shows, Armenians were not the only victims – not by any means – and it is rather to the credit of the Circassians’ (and others’) descendants that they are not demanding similar recognition of genocide from Congress or the Assemblée Nationale or Cardiff City Council or the Edinburgh City Fathers etc.
Sovietisation of the Caucasus then happened, and it was the communists’ turn to find out just how difficult the national question was going to be: eventually, it destroyed them. Communism had a very strong appeal to begin with when it came to the national question: who, looking at the Caucasus (as with Yugoslavia) would not be desperate for anything that would stop the rise of vicious tinpot nationalism? Many stout communists, beginning with Stalin himself, came from the Caucasus, and Stalin in the end had recourse to deportation (of the Chechens and many, many other peoples) as the only solution. That created the counter-hatreds that have made post-Soviet life so difficult. The Armenians repeated their fantasy of 1918 and invaded a neighbour – Azerbaijan – in pursuit of a fantasy. They victoriously set their standards afluttering over Karabakh, with much swelling of diaspora bosoms. The effort, and the isolation it brought them, caused nothing but economic trouble to what was already a poor, land-locked little place, and the original population, three million, is now, from emigration, below two: independence, in other words, having done more damage than ever the Turks did. The Georgians had an 18th-century ruler who described himself as “The Most High King, by the Will of Our Lord King of Kings of the Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians and Armenians and Master of All the East and the West”: more megalomania with a contemporary ring, in other words. Charles King has written a very instructive and interesting book about it all.
Norman Stone’s most recent book is “World War One: a Short History”, now available as a Penguin paperback (£7.99)
The World Today – Friday, 7 November , 2008 12:34:00
Reporter: Stephanie Kennedy
ELEANOR HALL: The Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, has sparked a diplomatic row between Britain and Turkey with a documentary she filmed on state run orphanages in Turkey.
The Turkish government is threatening the Duchess with legal action over the film which has just aired in Britain.
The film is an expose of the conditions that disabled children are forced to endure in Turkish orphanages.
But the Turkish Government has accused the Duchess of using the film to run a smear campaign against Turkey, just it is trying to join the European Union.
In London, Stephanie Kennedy reports.
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: Wearing a black wig and scarf, the undercover Duchess secretly filmed in some of Turkey’s orphanages for children with mental disabilities to see firsthand the conditions.
(Extract from documentary)
SARAH FERGUSON: But it is also the smell. It is that smell. It gets into your bones.
REPORTER: Terribly overwhelming.
SARAH FERGUSON: It was, wasn’t it?
REPORTER: It really was overwhelming.
SARAH FERGUSON: I think it was really important that we went into that place upstairs. It was just so degrading – the whole thing for these poor people.
(End of extract)
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: The documentary shows one boy who is kept in a box because he’s hyperactive.
SARAH FERGUSON: And I saw children with suffering from Down Syndrome and other kinds of disabilities. They are fed on their backs and given no love and no support.
There was one child when I was walking through the orphanage which was crawling on his back to get a gleam of sunlight from an open window. When I passed him he said good morning to me. He speaks English. There was nothing wrong with this boy. He just had a disability in his legs.
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: 18-year-old Princess Eugenie accompanied her mother to some of the orphanages and she was clearly moved by what she saw. Tears well up in her eyes and she says she feels angry.
PRINCESS EUGENIE: Well, I was completely overwhelmed. I mean I walked outside and there was a lady who was looking at me with these huge eyes. Just smiling from ear to ear and I was just, she was just so kind and I came in here looking like just, you know to be nice, see what is happening and she was the one who gave me my day.
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: Even before the documentary went to air Turkey accused the Duchess of smearing Turkey’s image. Authorities say she is trying to sabotage their European Union membership bid.
Turkey’s Minister for Women and Family Affairs is Nimet Cubukcu. She says Turkey has nothing to hide and she’s accused the Duchess of York of deception.
NIMET CUBUKDU (translated): Recently representations from the Council of Europe visited these orphanages without warning. Sarah Ferguson wanted to go there too but her request was declined politely because of on-going repair works at the orphanages.
Still she went there – circumventing Turkish law – violating our legal system and our constitution by doing so. She abused the trust of the volunteers and charity workers there.
She deceived these people by saying she would pay substantial donations.
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: While the duchess is no longer a member of the Royal Family her daughters are, and this diplomatic spat is an embarrassment for their grandmother, the Queen. But Sarah Ferguson denies any political motives.
SARAH FERGUSON: This is my personal point of view. I am not a member of the Royal Family. I am not a politician. I went in there to highlight the plight of children and I have.
Now it seems that I have embarrassed the Turkish Government. Well, let’s hope that I have embarrassed them enough in order for them to make changes in the welfare of their children.
I think it is important for the children that are locked in those cages. I really do. I think it is vital. They have got no-one standing up for them and they can’t stand up for themselves. Will somebody please do something? OK, I will.
STEPHANIE KENNEDY: Turkey’s Foreign Minister plans to raise the issue during talks with his British counterpart in London later today. In London this is Stephanie Kennedy reporting for The World Today.
On October 27 Edward Nalbandian started his visit to the United Kingdom.
Edward Nalbandian and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom David Miliband discussed a broad range of bilateral, regional and international issues.
Turning to bilateral relations, Minister Nalabndian said Armenia attaches great importance to the development of comprehensive and all-embracing relations with Great Britain – one of the leading countries of Europe, and his visit is an evidence of Armenia’s determination.
Minister Nalbandian said the Armenian-British political dialogue and the trade-economic relations have a great potential for development, and the activation of the Armenian-British relations in the above-mentioned sphere is one of the primary issues of cooperation between the two countries.
Minister Nalbandian and Foreign Secretary Miliband discussed in detail the settlement of regional conflicts. In this context Minister Nalbandian presented Armenia’s stance on the resolution of the Artsakh issue. He expressed hope that the parties can reach the resolution of the issue in case there is corresponding political will.
At the request of David Miliband, Edward Nalbandian presented the opportunities of normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations, underlining that the aim of the process is their full normalization and Armenia is resolute to continue the steps in this direction. The British Foreign Secretary highly assessed Armenia’s steps targeted at the improvement of relations with Turkey.
Armenia’s Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian and British Minister of State for Europe Caroline Flint discussed the Armenia-European Union cooperation, particularly the process of implementation of the Action Plan of the European Neighborhood Policy, the bilateral cooperation between Armenia and Great Britain within the framework of the ENP. Ministers Nalbandian and Flint turned to regional issues, especially the perspectives of normalization of relations, as well as the activation of bilateral relations.
Minister Nalbandian visited the House of Lords, where he met with members of the Armenian-British Friendship Group. The meeting was attended by representatives of the main political parties of the United Kingdom – the Laborites, the Conservatives and the Liberals, as well as other parties.
On the same day, Minister Nalbandian visited Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), where he made a speech on “Regional Security in the Caucasus – an Armenian Perspective”. Political analysts, representatives of research centres and universities, diplomats accredited to London, representatives of UK official bodies, journalists attended the meeting. After the speech Edward Nalbandian answered to the number of questions on Armenia’s foreign policy.
Afterwards Armenian Foreign Minister left for the Headquarter of BBC Radio – World Service and thus became the first high-ranking Armenian official who visited BBC Headquarters. Edward Nalbandian gave an interview to the correspondents of BBC World Service.
Edward Nalbandian’s next meeting was with the representatives of UK’s Armenian community in Great Britain. In the course of the meeting which lasted more that two hours Edward Nalbandian presented the main directions and priorities of Armenian foreign policy, perspectives of the settlement of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) issue, the steps undertaken by the Government for the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations. Speaking on Armenia-Diaspora relations Minister Nalbandian said to the representatives of British Armenian community that Armenian authorities seek to cooperate with the Diaspora to a definitely new level and establishment of the Ministry of Diaspora is one of the steps towards that goal. Edward Nalbandian answered a lot of questions of British Armenian Community’s concern.
The last meeting of Armenian Foreign Minister was with Sir Brian Fall, Special Representative of the United Kingdom for the South Caucasus. Minister Nalbandian and Ambassador Fall had a detailed discussion on the steps aimed at development of bilateral relation in different areas, recent regional developments and perspectives of settlement of the conflicts.
On October 28 Minister Nalbandian concluded his visit to UK and returned to Yerevan.
An Anglican bishop says the credit crunch is God’s way of punishing Britain for being too materialistic.
The Rt Rev Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, thinks the country is obsessed with cash, which has a ‘stranglehold’ over our lives.
The credit crisis has been caused by greed and ‘God has allowed it for good’, he writes in a newsletter.
The Adam Smith Institute think-tank criticised the comments, saying: ‘Many people who have not worshipped materialism have seen their lives made poorer.’
Islam should be treated more sensitively by the media than Christianity, according to the director general of the BBC
By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:39PM BST 15 Oct 2008
Mr Thompson had earlier warned of a “growing nervousness about discussion about Islam”Photo: OLI SCARFF
Mark Thompson claimed that because Muslims are a religious minority in Britain and also often from ethnic minorities, their faith should be given different coverage to that of more established groups.
His comments come after the comedian Ben Elton accused the BBC of being scared of making jokes about Islam, while Hindus have claimed it favours Muslims over other religions.
But Mr Thompson, speaking at the annual public theology lecture of the religion think-tank Theos, insisted the state broadcaster would show programmes that criticised Islam if they were of sufficient quality.
The director general, whose corporation faced accusations of blasphemy from Christians after it allowed the transmission of the musical Jerry Springer -The Opera, also said his Christian beliefs guided his judgments and disclosed that he had never watched the Monty Python film Life of Brian which satirises the story of Jesus.
In his speech last night, Mr Thompson claimed there are now more programmes about religion on BBC television and radio than there have been in recent decades, whereas coverage has declined on ITV.
But asked whether it was correct that the BBC “let vicar gags pass but not imam gags”, as Elton claimed, he admitted it did take a different approach to Islam, which has 1.6million followers in Britain, compared to its approach to the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church.
Mr Thompson said: “My view is that there is a difference between the position of Christianity, which I believe should be central to the BBC’s religion coverage and widely respected and followed.
“What Christian identity feels like it is about to the broad population is a little bit different to people for whom their religion is also associated with an ethnic identity which has not been fully integrated.
“There’s no reason why any religion should be immune from discussion, but I don’t want to say that all religions are the same. To be a minority I think puts a slightly different outlook on it.”
However he pointed out that he had commissioned the comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, which he claimed had made fun of many religions, and claimed the BBC had shown more of the controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed than other newspapers and television channels had done.
Earlier this year Mr Thompson had warned of a “growing nervousness about discussion about Islam” and said no debate about religion should be censored.
Mr Thompson said the broadcast of Jerry Springer – The Opera, which features Jesus as a talk show guest who admits to being “a bit gay”, had been the most controversial programme he had dealt with during his time at the corporation.
“No political issue has so far come near Jerry Springer in terms of anger and emotion. It wasn’t politics that put a security guard outside my house, it was a debate about how the BBC handles religion.”
However despite the storm over the programme, Mr Thompson, a practising Catholic, said his beliefs do play a part in the editorial judgments he makes and disclosed that he dislikes watching shows about the Bible.
“I’ve never seen Life of Brian,” Mr Thompson said. “I’ve taken a personal choice very seldom to watch programmes that have depictions of Jesus.
“I’m very sensitive about depictions of the Gospel story.”
He also dismissed the idea that television is a “wellspring or accelerant” of immorality in society, and also that the BBC gives too much weight to the secular ideals of science or employs “moral relativism” when covering contentious issues such as medical ethics.
Mr Thompson defended programmes that have been accused of promoting selfishness or nastiness, such as The Apprentice and The Weakest Link, claiming that viewers know they are only entertainment and do not ape the behaviour shown on them.
He said that programmes such as EastEnders and The Archers deal with the consequences of people’s actions, even when they cover controversial topics, and claimed even science-fiction series such as Doctor Who have a moral backbone.
“Doctor Who is not just about Daleks and Cybermen, it is about mothers and families and friendships,” he said.
However Mr Thompson did admit the corporation had given over too much coverage last month of the launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
“I must say that by the end of that week, even for those of us who share my love of the Higgs-Boson, there did seem to be an awful lot of it on the air.”
A BBC spokesman said Mr Thompson did not mean Islam should be given preferential treatment, just that all religions are different.
He said: “People should look at his actual comments rather than trying to infer additional meaning that isn’t there. What Mark Thompson said is that all religions are not the same – he did not say Islam, or indeed any faith, should be treated more sensitively than Christianity. In fact he made it crystal clear that no religion should be regarded as off limits for the BBC.”
