By Roy Lie A Tjam. Eight Ambassadors are vying for the post of Director General, each of who have been put forward by their respective governments for the post. The candidates come from the following countries: Burkina Faso, Denmark, Hungary, Iraq, Lithuania, Spain, South Korea and Tanzania (candidate withdrew).

The following reaction has been received when asked for a one-liner on their country’s candidacy. Denmark,  HE Ole Moesby, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Denmark to the Kingdom of the Netherlands has high esteem for what OPCW is and stands for.

Denmark has been affiliated with OPCW from the outset onward and has been actively involved with the situation in Syria and Libya. A top person needs to take the lead in this high-level organization. Obviously, the Danish candidate is the person. Hungary, Ambassador Tibor Tóth, Executive Secretary Emeritus of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, has been nominated for the OPCW DG post. He has served the international community in elected multilateral leadership positions on the prohibition of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons for 30 years. His commitment to the OPCW is supported by the fact that as a lead negotiator, he was an architect of the Chemical  Weapons Convention. He served  as head of CTBTO for two terms while it addressed the challenge of nuclear test  by the DPRK.  His leadership experience, knowledge, and stature in the field of WMD prohibition regimes make him an excellent nominee. South-Korea, the South-Korean candidate has over 10 years of experience in directing UN matters. No doubts, the South Korean candidate holds the best papers to become the OPCW’s next Director-General.

Spain is deeply committed with disarmament affairs and has worked intensively in the Security Council in order to update the UN Security Council Resolution 1540. With H.E. Ambassador Fernando Arias’s candidacy for the position of Director-General of the OPCW, Spain wishes to continue contributing to international peace and security. Tanzania is applauding the great accomplishments of the OPCW thus far, Tanzania desires to share her experience even wider by leading the Organization and contributing to the global endeavor to forever eliminate the use of chemical weapons, which continues to be a threat. Being Party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and Member of the OPCW since 1998 is a clear testimony that Tanzania is committed to the goals of the Convention. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was established two decades ago after a horrific mustard gas attack in the Iraqi Kurdistan city of Halabja in 1998. This prompted the French First Lady Madam Danielle Mitterrand to urge her husband the French President, H.E. François Mitterrand, to put a plan together that will endeavor to prevent similar attacks from reoccurring.

A highly interesting and thought-provoking conversation took place at the Iraqi Chancellery in The Hague on June 14, 2017, with H.E. Saywan Sabir Mustafa Barzani, Ambassador of Iraq to the Netherlands. Among the topics discussed was the upcoming OPCW election of a Director-General in the autumn of 2017. However, the Director General-elect will not be taking office until 2018. H.E. Ambassador Saywan Sabir Mustafa Barzani is the official Iraqi candidate for the position of Director General, due to his exceptional past achievements, expertise and experiences acquired as a diplomat for over 25 years, both in the international arena as well as in Iraq, qualifying him to be a strong contender for the post of OPCW Director-General. Furthermore, Mr. Barzani is a visionary, he can effectively lead an organization like OPCW that has a defined mission, he is someone unafraid to take risks, the OPCW needs someone who is willing to make proposals in order to overcome the problems that lie ahead for the OPCW. Up until now, Iraq has not held a high-level UN position, however, the New Iraq from 2003 onwards should be perceived positively on the international stage. It would, therefore, be more than appropriate and proper for the Iraqi candidate to be designated for the August office of Director-General of the OPCW. Moreover, Mr. Barzani has had first-hand experience with the impact of chemical attacks and could therefore easily recognize and empathize with the victims’ suffering. So far, it is Iraq and the Middle East in particular that often have been the playing field for chemical weapons attacks. During the first years of his career, Mr. Barzani was at the helm of the after-war reconstruction scheme of his country, where he was assigned to direct and manage the northern part of Iraq at a time when the country lacked funds, constitution and there was an absence of law and order. Whilst also having to deal with the execution of two conflicting UN resolutions. In 1998 he became Kurdistan’s envoy to France. He subsequently served as Iraq’s Ambassador to Italy, Malta, San Marino, the Netherlands, and UN agencies in Rome. If Mr. Barzani succeeds in becoming Director General, he aspires to make the OPCW be structured in such a manner that it becomes an institution of diplomacy and technology. The Executive Council of the OPCW is preparing to meet for the eighty-fifth session, which will be held from 11 – 14 July 2017.The agenda for the meeting will decide on the next Director General, should no consensus be reached, then the ballot will produce the outcome. Mr. Barzzani comes from Erbil Iraq, is married with four children and is fluent in Arabic, English, French, Kurdish, Italian and Persian. He is also a diplomat, a scholar in political science, international relations, diplomacy, and law. Mr. Barzani can be described as a very cordial and hospitable person, and above all, he is an advocate of the Mesopotamian and Iraqi patrimony. Under Barzani’s direction, Iraq has donated a historical statue of a Mesopotamian lion to the WFP in the city of Rome and designed the Iraq Room, the third largest conference hall in the FAO headquarter with Mesopotamian artifact and statues. Donations of a commemorative monument have also been made to the OPCW by Iraq. For the OPCW’s twentieth anniversary, Ambassador Barzani designed a peace monument, which has been placed in the Iraqi embassy garden, the inauguration of this monument took place on 16th March 2017 by the current Director-General and the Permanents representatives to the OPCW. The Leiden Museum in collaboration with the Iraqi Embassy envisages organizing a mega Mesopotamia exposition in the Netherlands, to be shown in 2017 – 2018.    

An upcoming book by Supriya Vani.

By Supriya Vani. Socrates says, “All men’s souls are immortal but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine”. The righteous souls achieve divinity because they strive hard to remove all dross from within and empty themselves like a flute to weave magical stirrings of divine love and blissful consciousness and take in their warm clasp the lowliest of the low, the neglected, the abandoned, the orphaned, in fact; the whole of humanity just in the same way as the sun spreads its canopy of warmth on everyone under the sky or the dewdrops leave no petal untouched. They are pained on finding others in pain. They are aggrieved when they find others in grief. They do not find themselves at peace on finding others in trouble. They find joys in others’ joys. They instantly reach out to others in need of care, of love, of succor or of solace. They are self-abnegated souls and always full of empathy for fellow human beings. They are zealously venerated by one and all. A peep into the life of all the sixteen women Nobel Peace prize laureates gives this revelation. What led me to foray into the lives of these magnificent women is my father’s motivation. In my early childhood, he would often relate to me stories of valour, of self-effacing sacrifices, of stoic sufferings of great men and women who helped in making the planet earth a place of peaceful co-existence for mankind. The quintessence of the lives of sixteen women Nobel peace laureates is running the gauntlet of adversity and myriad challenges in life with never-to-yield attitude. After interviewing many Nobel Peace laureates, I have found that each one of them has scripted a saga of rare activism and also of building bonds of love with the suffering humanity. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates like Bertha von Suttner, Jane Addams, Emily Green Balch, Alva Myrdal, Wangari Maathai and Mother Teresa laid the foundation of peace for us and have faded away from the Earth. Other Nobel Peace Laureates like Malala Yousafzai, Betty Williams, Mairead Maguire, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Tawakkol Karman, Leymah Gbowee are all activists who dared to fight the unjust systems and never dithered even when death stared at them menacingly. Each one of us can lead a life of ecstatic fulfillment if we borrow a leaf from their book. They say it is never too late. They have scripted a saga. When will we ? We need to always remember that life’s most persistent and important question is, “What are we doing for others?”. ——— About the author: Supriya Vani  is a 28 years old human rights activist and an author. She has interviewed several Nobel Peace Laureates for her  upcoming book- Battling Injustice-The Stories of sixteen Women Nobel Peace Laureates.  

By Mr. Andrei Prokopchuk, Trade and Economic Counsellor of the Embassy of the Republic of Belarus in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Economic diplomacy is getting more important within the frameworks of the diplomatic community. All diplomatic representations are trying to be active in this significant area of cooperation. Belarus Embassy in the Hague is not an exception from this tendency. Nowadays, in the day to day business diplomats are more involved in trade, economic and investments relations trying to bridge companies, agencies, and business people. Among the tools for promoting economic diplomacy could be named meetings on a high level between officials particularly in charge for the development of foreign economic relations, business forums and seminars, trade missions, bilateral and multilateral commissions, linking of the companies based on their interests. Economic section of the Embassy is trying to apply a maximum of these tools aiming at the achievement of the practical results. Our philosophy in the Embassy in a relation of trade and investment promotion is to bridge the Dutch companies with their potential partners in Belarus using the knowledge of the economic system of Belarus as well as the market possibilities and leading branches of the economy. The above approach led to the result that today all major well-known Dutch companies operate in Belarus where they implement a number of joint projects: production of pharmaceutical products based on blood plasma (Imres), assembly of milking robots and other agricultural machinery (Lely Industries, APH Group), agricultural production (Adama, Bejo Zaden), LED (Philips), beverages (Heineken) as well as in the field of logistics and construction. The importance of economic dimension in our bilateral relations with the Netherlands could also be outlined by the statistic indicators. The Netherlands are traditionally among top-10 trade and investment partners of Belarus. In 2016 bilateral trade turnover was 1,15 bln USD. Export of Belarus amounted to 924 mln USD. This indicator stated that the Netherlands became our 4th largest export partner after the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. The historic record in terms of trade was fixed in 2012 when the bilateral turnover reached 8 bln USD and the Netherlands became the second major trading partner of Belarus after the Russian Federation. In 2016 the Netherlands became the 4th largest FDI investor (followed by the Russian Federation, Cyprus, and Lithuania) to Belarus. The total volume of Dutch investments for the last five years (2012-2016) to Belarus amounted to 4,5 bln USD. As of January 1, 2017, there are 114 entities registered in the Republic of Belarus with the participation of Dutch capital (39 are joint ventures, 75 are foreign representative offices), the share of Dutch investors in the statutory funds of these organizations is 270 mln USD. In 2016, the authorized capital of organizations was increased for 52 mln USD. As of January 1, 2017, the total amount of cumulative foreign investments from the Netherlands in Belarus amounted to 640 mln USD (5th place after the Russian Federation, Cyprus, the United Kingdom and Turkey). The Belarusian-Dutch economic relations also lie on formidable legislation, such as agreements on facilitation and protection of investments, on avoiding double taxation, on air communications and on international automobile communications. To the addition of the above foundational agreements, the Government of Belarus is also constantly amending legislation aiming at creation the most favorable conditions in the region for the international companies to do business in Belarus. Belarus success in this area is proved by the World Bank ranking. Belarus jumped to the 37th standing from No. 50 among 190 countries in the World Bank Doing Business-2017. The position of Belarus is one of the strongest among CIS countries. In the sub-ranking of the above report, Belarus took the 5th place by Registering Property index, the 31st place by Starting a Business index and the 30th place by International Trade index. I would like to conclude that 25 years which have passed since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Belarus and the Netherlands allowed to set up, develop and enrich bilateral economic contacts as well as to build mutual trust. I have no doubt that the next quarter of the century will be marked with further boosting of bilateral economic relations including the implementation of new remarkable projects which will lead to the new level of partnership between Belarus and the Netherlands.

By Barend ter Haar.

Almost three years have passed since, on 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down above eastern Ukraine and all the 298 people on board were killed. As I argued in an article published shortly after the disaster, it was the result of the unfortunate coincidence of the following four factors:

• weak governance leading to internal conflict
• Russian interference
• a long-range surface-to-air missile in separatist hands
• a civilian airplane flying over the conflict area

Since that time a lot of additional information has come available, in particular as a result of the thorough investigations by the Dutch Safety Board and by an international Joint Investigation Team. The goal of the Dutch Safety Board was to draw safety lessons from the accident for future use, whereas the criminal investigation by the Joint Investigation Team is aimed at identifying the people that were responsible for the crash. I have incorporated their findings in a revised version of my article.

The investigations of the Dutch Safety Board and the Joint Investigation Team both deal with the technical questions: What exactly happened? Who is responsible? and How to avoid the risks of flying above a country in conflict? These are important questions, but they should not make us lose sight of the other factors that made the disaster possible and to make an effort to draw lessons from them.

What can governments do to prevent such a disaster from happening again? The easy answer is to avoid the airspace above Eastern Ukraine. But what about the other factors? What can be done to prevent armed groups in, for example, the Middle East or North Africa from getting long-range surface-to-air missiles? How to stop Russian brinkmanship? And, finally, what can be done to prevent countries from slipping into civil war as a result of bad governance?

These are questions without easy answers, but they deserve at least as much attention as the technical questions surrounding the crash. However, so far these questions have received far less attention of the Dutch government. It is interesting to compare the enormous effort of the Dutch government to reconstruct the crash into the smallest technical detail with the limited effort it has put in addressing the political and strategic problems that made the disaster possible.

At least one lesson seems obvious: MH17 broke the illusion that the Dutch government cherished for some time that foreign policy is little more than promoting short term national interests and that diplomacy is something of the past. However, building up a foreign policy that actively promotes a just and sustainable international order, not as a matter of charity but as a strategic goal, might be more difficult than reconstructing an airplane out of thousands of pieces.

Refeudalisation of Europe – III Part

By Professor Anis H. Bajrektarevic. Is the new Containment and its Cold War on our doorstep? Who does it need now and why? To answer that question is to grasp how the previous one ceased. The end of the Cold War came abruptly, overnight. Many in the West dreamt about it, but nobody really saw it coming. The Warsaw Pact, Red Army in DDR, Berlin Wall, DDR itself, Soviet Union – one after the other, vanished rapidly, unexpectedly. There was no ceasefire, no peace conference, no formal treaty and guaranties, no expression of interests and settlement. Only the gazing facial expression of than Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who circles around and unconvincingly repeats: “we now better understand each other”. On the contrary, Bush (the 41st US President) calmly diagnosed: “We win, they lose!” His administration immediately declared that US policies, including all military capabilities, will remain unchanged but with a different pretexts – to respond to the ‘technological sophistication of the Third world powers’ and to ‘radical nationalism’ (meaning; any indigenous emancipation). The World-is-Flat mantra sow the non-West Rest still enveloped in the Huntigtonian clash. Hence, the so-called normative revolution from the Atlantic followed shortly, in which the extensive, to say assertive, rights were self-prescribed on the (political process of NAM, derogated into geographic) global south. Thus, the might-makes-right interventions were justified through the new (de facto imperial) doctrines: humanitarian intervention, R2P (incl. Kouchner-Lévy bombing for a noble cause), doctrine of preemption, uninhabited access to or beyond the grand area, as well as the so-called Afroasia forward deployment, as a sort of the enlarged Brezhnev and Monroe doctrines combined together, etc. Simultaneously, Washington’s darling, Francis Fukuyama, published his famous article The End of History? and the book which soon followed. To underline the prevailing climate in the States, he even dropped the question mark in the title of the book. Was this sudden meltdown of the Soviet giant and its Day After intrinsic or by design?   Brutality respected ? The generous support, the lavish and lasting funds that Atlantic-Central Europe extensively enjoyed in the form of Marshall Aid has never reached the principal victim of WWII – Eastern Europe. Despite the weak ethical grounds, this was so due to ideological constrains in the post-WWII period. Total WWII devastation of the East and their demographic loss of 36 million people (versus only 1,2 million in the West), was of no help. Moreover, only eight years after the end of WWII, the West brokered the so-called London Agreement on German External Debts (Londoner Schuldenabkommen). By the letter of this accord, over 60% of German reparations for the colossal atrocities committed in both WW were forgiven (or generously reprogramed) by their former European victims, including – quite unwillingly – several Eastern European states. The contemporary world wonder and the economic wunderkind, Germany that dragged world into the two devastating world wars, is in fact a serial defaulter which received debt relief like no one else on the globe – four times in the 20th century (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953). Despite all the subsidies given to the West, the East recovered remarkable fast. By the late-1950s and in 1960s, many influential western economists seriously considered communism as better suited for economic advancements, along with a Soviet planned economy as the superior socio-economic model and winsome ideological matrix. Indeed, impressive Soviet results were a living example to it: A backward, semi-feudal, rural country in 1920s, has won WWII and in parallel it evolved into a highly industrialized and urbanised superpower – all that in just 30 years. Spain needed over two centuries (and never completed), Holland 130 years, the UK 110, Germany 90, Japan 70 years to revolve from a backword agricultural cultivator into an industrial giant. Moscow achieved that in only 30-35 years, all alone. Thus, by the mid-1950s – besides its becoming a nuclear power – the Soviet Union grew up in a pioneer of cosmos exploration, and a pivot that moves the final frontier of mankind deep into the outer space. Sending a woman into orbit while many in the West still struggled with elementary gender equality was an ethical and technological blaster. Morality of communist narrative as well as its socio-economic advancements appealed globally.   Master-blaster If all the above is true, why then did the Soviet Union collapse? Was it really a global overstretch; bankruptcy caused by the Afghan intervention, along with the costly Space program (orbital station Mir)? And finally, if the US collapsed earlier with the so-called Nixon shock, why did America turn stronger afterwards, while after the Gorbachev-era bankruptcy of Moscow, the Russian historical empire melted away so rapidly? There are numerous views on it. Still, there is nothing conclusive yet – neither a popular nor scientific consensus is here. Some years ago, I had the honour to teach at the famous Plekhanov University of Economics in Moscow. It was a block-week with students of the Plekhanov’s elite IBS program. Twelve days in Moscow proved to be an excellent opportunity to ask these questions to some of the most relevant economic authorities among academic colleagues. The line of answers was quite different to anything I’ve usually heard or read in the West. Furthermore, their clarity and simplicity surprised me: Muscovites claimed that right after Nixon shock the Soviet Politbureau and Gosplan (the Soviet Central Planning Economic Body – overseeing the entire economic performance of the Union, and indirectly its satellites) sat jointly in an extensive closed session. They debated two items only: Could we prevent chaos and global instability by filling the gap after the collapse of the United States (and it eventual partition into 4 to 6 entities). Meaning to put the allied countries – previously under the US sphere of influence – under the Soviet effective control; Could we viably deter Chinese economic (and overall Asia’s socio-demographic and politico-military) advancement alone, without the help of the US (or its successors) and its western satellites. After thorough and detailed talks, answer to both questions was a unanimous NO. Consequently, the logical conclusion was: Moscow needs to save the US as to preserve balance of power. Without equilibrium in world affairs, there is no peace, stability, and security over the long run – a clear geostrategic imperative. Indeed, right after the Nixon shock, an era of détente has started, which led to the Helsinki process and its Decalogue (that remains the largest and most comprehensive security treaty ever brokered on our planet). The NAM (Non-Aliened Movement) gained ground globally as the Third, way of moderation, wisdom and stability. The US was left to re-approach China (so-called Triangular engagement). Soon after, it recognised the Beijing China (One-China policy), and closed the chapter on Vietnam and Indochina. Simultaneously, Americans (re-)gained a strategic balance elsewhere, like in Latina America and (horn of and western) Africa, with a brief superpowers’ face-off in the Middle East (Yom Kippur War) which – though bloody and intensive – did not damage the earlier set balances. Why goodbye? Why, then, the instability in today’s world? Apparently, Washington did not really consider these two questions when it was their turn. Soviet planetary stewardship was misused and Gorbachev’s altruism was ridiculed. As a consequence of today, the edges of the former Soviet zone – from Algeria to Korea and from Finland to the Balkans – are enveloped in instabilities. On top of it, Chinese powerhouse is unstoppable: Neither of the Western powers alone nor a combination of them is able to match Sino-giant economically. Even the cross-Pacific TPP cannot deter China, and therefore is silently abandoned. Asia itself, although the largest and most populous continent, is extremely bilateral. Its fragile security structures were anyway built on the precondition of a soft center. *          *          *          * A Bear of permafrost worried about global balance and was finally outfoxed, while a Fish of warm seas unleashed its (corporate) greed and turned the world into what it is today: a dangerous place full of widening asymmetries and unbalances. Climate, health, income parity, access to food and water, safety and security – each regionally and globally disturbed.  Exaggerated statement? For the sake of empirical test, let us apply the method of sustainability on this short story of 20th-21st century geopolitics. As per tentative definition, Sustainable Development is any development which aims at the so-called 3Ms: the maximum good for maximum species, over maximum time-space span – comprehensive stewardship. (The beauty of the 3M principle is that it makes SD matrix very easily quantifiable. Hereby, we certainly leave aside other methods of quantification – all reporting rather disturbing figures: the Oxfam study, Paris Accord/IPCC, Gini coefficient, Database of Happiness, Tobin Tax initiative, Ecological Footprint – CDI/SDI, WTO’s Doha round, etc.) Hence, how did our superpowers behave? Was our 3M better off before or after 1991? The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi (in the just released Global Trends Report) notes the unprecedented asymmetries of today’s world. Facts are heart-freezing like my Moscow winter years ago. The UNHCR states: “Every 113th person on this planet is the displaced. Of the 65.6 million people forcibly displaced globally, 10.3 million became displaced in 2016… This equates to one person becoming displaced every 3 seconds – less than the time it takes to read this sentence.” “You are either with us or against us” is a famous binary platform of Bush (the 43rd US President). Indeed, our planetary choice is binary but slightly broader. An End of history in re-feudalisation or a dialectic enhancement of civilisation. Holistic or fractionary. Cosmos (of order) or chaos (of predatory asymmetries) – simple choice. Vienna 22 June 2017. ———— About the author: Professor Anis H. Bajrektarevic   is chairperson and professor in international law and global political studies, Vienna, Austria. He authors four books: FB – Geopolitics of Technology (Addleton Academic Publishers, NY); Geopolitics – Europe 100 years later (DB, Europe), Geopolitics – Energy – Technology (Germany, LAP). Europe and Africa – Security structures (Nova, NY) is his latest, just released book. anis@corpsdiplomatique.cd