UN Security Council member states China and Turkey have reiterated commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran’s civilian nuclear program.
“We will do everything possible to build trust between Iran and the United States and Iran and the West to avoid a military confrontation and possible sanctions,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying by London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.
Davutoglu went on to call for “more diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran in order to build trust between (all) sides.”
The remarks come one day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an address before the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN headquarters in New York, confronted the United States for refusing to exclude Iran from the list of countries that could become the target of US nukes.
Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters on Tuesday that the permanent UNSC member state was in favor of “relevant measures” to help resolve the issue through talks.
“Dialogue and negotiations are the best way out to resolve this issue and relevant discussions are still under way,” she added.
Washington and its allies are rallying support for tougher UNSC sanctions against Iran. However, the imposition of sanctions requires nine affirmative votes including those of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council.
Permanent UNSC member China and temporary members Turkey and Brazil are among the countries that support Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program.
While the West accuses Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program, Tehran has repeatedly rejected the allegation and argues that as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to the peaceful use of the technology for electricity generation and medical research.
President Ahmadinejad offered an itemized proposal to the NPT review conference, calling for measures to limit the power held by nuclear armed states in the UNSC.
Israel has been dealing one blow after another to the rest of the world. While China has still not recovered from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s absence from the reception at its Tel Aviv embassy – a serious punishment for China’s support for the Goldstone report – France is licking its wounds after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “vetoed” a visit by the French foreign minister to Gaza. And Israel has dealt another blow: Its ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, will boycott the conference next week of the new Israel lobby J Street.
China, France and J Street will somehow get by despite these boycotts, Turkey will also recover from the great vacationers’ revolt, and we can expect that even the Swedes and Norwegians will recover from Israel’s loud reprimands. But a country that attacks and boycotts everyone who does not exactly agree with its official positions will become isolated, forsaken and detestable: North Korea of today or Albania of yesterday. It’s actually quite strange for Israel to use this weapon, as it is about to turn into the victim of boycotts itself.
Israel strikes and strikes again. It strikes its enemies, and now it strikes out at its friends who dare not fall exactly in line with its official policies. The J Street case is a particularly serious example. This Jewish organization rose in America along with Barack Obama. Its members want a fair and peace-seeking Israel.
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That’s their sin, and their punishment is a boycott.
Oren, meanwhile, is a devoted representative: He also is boycotting. After criticizing Israeli columnists, including this one, in an article in The New Republic for daring to criticize Netanyahu’s speech at the UN – an outrage in its own right – the ambassador-propagandist uses the boycott weapon against a new and refreshing Jewish and Zionist organization that is trying to battle the nationalistic and heavy-handed Jewish-American establishment.
In whose name is Oren doing that? Not in the name of Israeli society, whose ambassador he supposedly is. The former ambassadors from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would have acted the same way.
Such aggressiveness is a bad sign. It will drive away our last true friends and deepen our isolation. “A nation alone” has turned into our goal, our isolation has become an aspiration. Whom will we have left after we attack and boycott everyone? Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League? Our propagandist-attorney Alan Dershowitz?
Dividing the world up between absolute good and evil – our side and our enemies, with no middle ground – is a sign of despair and a complete loss of direction. It’s not just our ambassador in Washington, who knows nothing at all about democracy and pluralism and only wants to please his masters. Such behavior – kicking and barking crazily in every direction – is destroying Israel.
Without giving us a chance to voice our opinion, Israel is falling to the status of an international pariah, the abomination of the nations. And whom can we thank for that? Operation Cast Lead, for example. Only the United States remains our automatic and blind ally for all our mistakes. Another democracy that saw its status deteriorating so much would ask itself first and foremost what mistakes it had made.
In Israel our approach is exactly the opposite: The rest of the world is guilty. The Scandinavians are hostile and the Turks are enemies, the French and British hate Israel, the Chinese are only Chinese and the Indians can’t teach us anything.
Any legitimate criticism is immediately labeled here as anti-Semitism, including Richard Goldstone, the Jewish Zionist. We are pushing everyone into a corner roughly and hope they will change their opinions and suddenly be filled with a deep understanding for the killing of children in Gaza. Now America too, even its Jews, are no longer immune to this aggressive Israel mad with grandeur.
The damage is piling up from Beijing all the way to New York. After the J Street boycott even American Jews will know that Israel is not a tolerant, open-minded or liberal country, despite what they are being told.
Now they will know that “the only democracy in the Middle East” is not exactly that, and whoever does not repeat and proclaim its propaganda messages will be considered an enemy – they may also be punished severely.
They should just ask the billion Chinese who are licking their wounds from the mortal blow the Israeli Foreign Minster dealt them personally.
You can date the end of dollar hegemony from China’s decision last month to sell its first batch of sovereign bonds in Chinese yuan to foreigners.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
06 Oct 2009
The Chinese yuan: friends take a photo in front of a sculpture of a one-hundred yuan banknote in Beijing
Beijing does not need to raise money abroad since it has $2 trillion (£1.26 trillion) in reserves. The sole purpose is to prepare the way for the emergence of the yuan as a full-fledged global currency.
“It’s the tolling of the bell,” said Michael Power from Investec Asset Management. “We are only beginning to grasp the enormity and historical significance of what has happened.”
It is this shift in China and other parts of rising Asia and Latin America that threatens dollar domination, not the pricing of oil contracts. The markets were rattled yesterday by reports – since denied – that China, France, Japan, Russia, and Gulf states were plotting to replace the Greenback as the currency for commodity sales, but it makes little difference whether crude is sold in dollars, euros, or Venetian Ducats.
What matters is where OPEC oil producers and rising export powers choose to invest their surpluses. If they cease to rotate this wealth into US Treasuries, mortgage bonds, and other US assets, the dollar must weaken over time.
“Everybody in the world is massively overweight the US dollar,” said David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC. “As they invest a little here and little there in other currencies, or gold, it slowly erodes the dollar. It is like sterling after World War One. Everybody can see it’s happening.”
“In the US they have near zero rates, external deficits, and public debt sky-rocketing to 100pc of GDP, and on top of that they are printing money. It is the perfect storm for the dollar,” he said.
“The dollar rallied last year because we had a global liquidity crisis, but we think the rules have changed and that it will be very different this time [if there is another market sell-off]” he said.
The self-correcting mechanism in the global currency system has been jammed until now because China and other Asian powers have been holding down their currencies to promote exports. The Gulf oil states are mostly pegged to the dollar, for different reasons.
This strategy has become untenable. It is causing them to import a US monetary policy that is too loose for their economies and likely to fuel unstable bubbles as the global economy recovers.
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a board member of the European Central Bank, said China for one needs to bite bullet. “I think the best way is that China starts adopting its own monetary policy and detach itself from the Fed’s policy.”
Beijing has been schizophrenic, grumbling about the eroding value of its estimated $1.6 trillion of reserves held in dollar assets while at the same time perpetuating the structure that causes them to accumulate US assets in the first place – that is to say, by refusing to let the yuan rise at any more than a glacial pace.
For all its talk, China bought a further $25bn of US Treasuries in June and $25bn in July. The weak yuan has helped to keep China’s factories open – and to preserve social order – during the economic crisis, though exports were still down 23pc in August. But this policy is on borrowed time. Reformers in Beijing are already orchestrating a profound shift in China’s economy from export reliance (38pc of GDP) to domestic demand, and they know that keeping the dollar peg too long will ultimately cause them to lose export edge anyway – via the more damaging route of inflation.
For the time being, Europe is bearing the full brunt of Asia’s currency policy. The dollar peg has caused the yuan to slide against the euro, even as China’s trade surplus with the EU grows. It reached €169bn (£156bn) last year. This is starting to provoke protectionist rumblings in Europe, where unemployment is nearing double digits.
ECB governor Guy Quaden said patience is running thin. “The problem is not the exchange rate of the dollar against the euro, but rather the relationship between the dollar and certain Asian currencies, to mention one, the Chinese Yuan. I say no more.”
France’s finance minister Christine Lagarde said at the G7 meeting that the euro had been pushed too high. “We need a rebalancing so that one currency doesn’t take the flak for the others.”
Clearly this is more than a dollar problem. It is a mismatch between the old guard – US, Europe, Japan – and the new powers that require stronger currencies to reflect their dynamism and growing wealth. The longer this goes on, the more havoc it will cause to the global economy.
The new order may look like the 1920s, with four or five global currencies as regional anchors – the yuan, rupee, euro, real – and the dollar first among equals but not hegemon. The US will be better for it.
Turkish Airlines has signed a new code share agreement with Asiana Airlines from South Korea as part of an expansion program.The new code share agreement which will go into effect on October 25th, 2009 will enhance the flow of trade and tourism between Turkey and Korea.
As an outcome of the new code share agreement signed between Turkish Airlines and Asiana Airlines, passengers from Seoul will be able to connect on Turkish Airlines’ network to any of its 119 international destinations including routes to Turkey, Europe, North America, South America, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Passengers from Istanbul will also be able to enjoy the convenience of Asiana Airlines’ wide network of connections to South Korea, and other popular destinations in Japan, China and South-East Asia. Asiana Airlines’ network covers 82 international destinations.
Beijing urged Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to retract his statement that China is committing “genocide” against its Muslim minority.
Istanbul – Developments in China’s restive Xinjiang Province and the attacks against the minority Muslim Uighurs there may not have led to vocal protests in most of the Muslim world. But in Turkey, the events in western China have led to large protests in the streets and strong words from Turkish officials.
The comment raising the loudest outcry has been Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s accusation last week that China is committing “genocide” against the Uighurs, a statement that Beijing is now pressuring him to retract.
Experts say that taking its criticism of China too far could backfire on Ankara, which has been working to improve both its diplomatic and trade relations with Beijing.
An estimated 184 people have died in the recent violent clashes between Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Chinese officials have claimed that most of those killed have been Han.
Turkey’s minister of industry and trade, Nihat Ergun, last week called for a boycott of Chinese goods, while Mr. Erdogan, speaking on television last Friday, said: “The incidents in China are, simply put, tantamount to genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise.”
Uighurs as ‘brothers’
“There is a lot of sensitivity among the Turkish public about the Uighurs. They consider them as real brothers,” says Sami Kohen, a political affairs columnist for Milliyet, a Turkish daily.
“Turks originally came from that part of Asia to Anatolia, and the language that Uighurs use is much closer to the language that Turkey speaks than others in Central Asia,” he continues.
The Turkish president’s official flag, for example, has 16 stars on it, representing “Turkish states” established throughout history. One of the stars commemorates the Uighur state that existed around the 8th century.
Adds Mr. Kohen: “There is quite a large Uighur community in Turkey, and they are quite strong. They have a lobby and they have been quite strong in defending their cause.”
Turkey raises its global profile
Turkey has, in recent years, been working to raise its foreign policy profile and establish itself as a regional political and economic power. Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, actually visited Urumqi as part of a recent state visit shortly before the violence broke out there. Turkey signed a reported $1.5 billion worth of trade deals during the visit.
But analysts say Ankara’s criticism could lead to a rupture with Beijing.
“The Turks really have a tough decision to make, whether they keep this going or back off. This is a major test for Turkey’s new foreign policy,” says Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This is a serious problem for the Turks from every angle.”
Ankara now also needs to decide if it will grant a possible request to visit Turkey by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur diaspora activist based in the United States whom China has accused of being behind the violence in Xinjiang.
“All hell is going to break loose if she shows up in Turkey, especially after the comment that Erdogan made,” Mr. Aliriza says.
Take it back, China says
The Chinese government now appears to be pushing back against Turkey. A Tuesday editorial in the government-controlled English-language China Daily urged Erdogan to “take back his remarks … which constitute interference in China’s internal affairs.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, in a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart, blamed the violence in Xinjiang on “three evil forces,” state news agency Xinhua said, referring to “extremism, separatism, and terrorism.”
For Turkey, which has had its share of domestic violence and terrorism, both from Islamic extremists and Kurdish separatists, these are not meaningless words.
Baku – APA. Turkish Prime Minister Racab Tayyib Erdogan took stance on bloody events taking place in Xinjiang-Uighur autonomous region of China, APA reports quoting Haberturk.
Turkey is closely following the developments there: “Our Uighur brothers living in Turkey and Turkish people feeling this pain in their hearts hold protest actions condemning these events. We have always seen our Uighur brothers as a bridge between Turkey and China, the country we have always had normal relations with throughout the history. Necessary measures must be taken to prevent this brutality. We are temporary member of the UN Security Council for 2009-2010. We will also take these events into consideration there”.
