«Sometimes I think that life is becoming no more than staring at a screen. We stare at a screen all day at work. We stare at screens at the gym…Then we go home and stare at our computer screen before staring at the TV screen. For entertainment, we stare at cinema screens…Screens make us into passive receivers.»
(Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Free)
Impromptu escapist bloc in the May Day 2010 parade in Oslo. I’m the guy with the gas mask and the Russian army cap walking under the banner.
Click on the image for more photos by Li Xin.
This Christmas, I have been reading the latest report on the conflicts in Eastern DR Congo by Global Witness. It documents how “all the main warring parties are heavily involved in the mineral trade in North and South Kivu”, both rebels and the national Congolese army (FARDC). Their involvement includes the use of forced labour, systematic extortion, illegal “taxes” on the civilian population, as well as outright violence. In the Bisie mine in North Kivu, an army brigade operated as rogue feudal landlords for almost three years, reaping huge profits by taxing the miners. Their commander, Colonel Sammy Matumo, has not faced any disciplinary or legal action.
The FARDC and the FDLR (remnants of the old genocidal regime in Rwanda), who are supposed to be enemies, sometimes cooperate on this lucrative business, “carving up territory and mining areas through mutual agreement and sometimes sharing the spoils”.
Natural resource rents are keeping the conflict in Eastern Congo alive, providing various armed groups both with a means and a motive to keep fighting. Foreign companies play their part, as do various intermediaries Global Witness, having contacted more than 200 companies doing business in the DRC, reports “a lack of a sense of urgency and limited commitment to applying checks throughout the entire supply chain” of the major electronics companies. Minerals such as coltan, cassiterite and wolframite are used in the manufacture of electronic goods such as telephones and gaming consoles. Watch NRK’s excellent documentary “Connecting people” to learn more (in Norwegian).
The results? A decade of conflict. Millions dead. GDP at below 1975 levels and a HDI of 0.389. In July this year, there were around two million internally displaced people. When I visited the DRC in April this year, an Oxfam aid worker told me that none of the IDPs he had interviewed were on the run for the first time, nor the second. A few for the third time, while most were fleeing from their homes for the fourth or fifth time in a few years.
What is happening in Congo is an example of what economists have dubbed the “resource curse” – a somewhat broad term referring to the observation that countries endowed with natural resources tend to perform worse than others in terms of economic and human development. This is why oil has been dubbet “the Devil’s excrement” – a description which would be just as fitting for Congolese minerals. This happens through various mechanisms – promotion of corruption and clientalism, dutch disease, volatility of prices – and armed conflict. Natural resource reserves are both an attractive prize to claim and a means to fund an army, and therefore work to increase the chance of civil war.
Or do they?
World Bank economist Paul Collier, one of the big shots on this field of research, has found a correlation between resource dependence and war. He is being challenged by Christa Brunnschweiler and Erwin Bulte, who in a recent paper claim that the relation might be just the opposite:
Countries with more abundant natural capital appear to have a lower probability of becoming engaged in civil war. However, civil war tends to disrupt manufacturing and scare investors away, thus leading to increased dependence upon natural resources. The relation appears not to be natural resource dependency -> civil war, but civil war -> natural resource dependency.
(Look to Norway! To Botswana! To the admittedly undemocratic, but nevertheless stable petrostates of the Middle East!)
Why do Collier and Brunnschweiler/Bulte arrive at different conclusions? Basically, because they measure resource dependency differently. Collier looks at resource dependence, measured as natural resource exports as a percentage of GDP. This measure may be problematic. A poor country will be counted as being more resource abundant than a rich country with the same amount of resources. Brunnschweiler and Bulte use resource abundance as a starting point, the net present value in US dollars per capita of the natural resource stock of a country, and derive resource dependence through a more complex equation.
As a consequence, Brunnschweiler and Bulte argues, the label ‘resource curse’ may be misplaced, and common sense as we have leaned to know it could be turned upside down. Maybe. But some of the most conflict-promoting resources, such as diamonds, are not included in their dataset, and the final verdict is yet to be issued on the resource/war link.
To the people dying in the coltan mines of Congo, however, the resource curse is very much a reality. While the results of a generalized statistical regression may point in one direction or another, natural resources clearly has the potential both to fuck up a country (DRC) and make it filthy rich (Norway). As Ragnar Torvik writes, «[t]he most interesting aspect of resource abundant countries is not their average performance, but their huge variation. Resource abundant countries constitute some of the richest and some of the poorest countries in the world». Can we get closer to the answer by looking more closely at different policies and institutions?
I was intrigued enough by this to make it the subject of my term paper in political economy and macroeconomics. You can read it here. This has also been the subject of a recent article in New York Times.
Arriving the day after a hundred thousand people marched through the streets of Copenhagen feels a little like coming to a party early in the morning, when the booze is gone and everyone’s asleep, except for a couple of hardliners bullshitting over the last drop of whisky they have been able to hold on to. As we walked off the boat, the streets were silent and empty, except for a few carloads of riot police in case the NCA should decide to go on a rampage before church.
During our brief stop in Copenhagen, I had the time to observe
And then we went home, while the COP15 continued its long march towards the abyss, and people continued to take to the streets with demands of climate justice. As Han Solo would have put it, I have a bad feeling about this.
Edit: But I’m also impressed. By the people who have travelled across a continent or more to make their voices heard. By the folks selling eco-waffles as the alternative climate summit. The Christian campaigners gathering at church to pray for the future. The demonstrators being arbitratily arrested, sitting handcuffed for hours on a wintery Copenhagen street, and smiling as they are let go. The negotiators appealing in tears for a fair and effective agreement. Even by (some of) the journalists. Amidst all the cynicism, there is much love here.
I’m on a boat, heading for Copenhagen and the COP15 negotiations.
The climate cruise of the NGOs Norwegian Church Aid and Framtiden i våre hender is a bizarre cross between two worlds. DFDS Seaways’ floating hotels are normally reserved for booze cruises for people who want to get pissed in the bar, listen to campy music and stock up on duty free alcohol and tobacco, or for people with kids who want a cheap getaway for a couple of days. Now, it is filled with concerned people off to save the world. The dance band musicians are replaced by debates with climate scientists and politicians, and we will be demonstrating instead of shopping in Copenhagen. Still, political activism seems strangely out of place among the tax-free stores, the “gastronomic highlights featuring (…) exclusive six-xourse meals accompanied by an impressive choice of wines” and “freshly made delicacies from the lavish buffet accompanied by a panoramic ocean view hard to beat”. Or maybe not. I have, after all, worked for the trade union movement. It’s a little of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, except that it’s not very chic, and not very radical.
- If this boat sinks, the whole of the Norwegian climate establishment will go down with it, commented my tablemate at dinner today. In addition to the good Christians of NCA and the concerned bourgeois of FIVH, there are climatologists, NGO activists, bishops, politicians, oilmen and the troubadours of DeLillos. I’m here with the good people of Global Migrants for Climate Action. The buses with the hard-core activists left a day earlier. We have missed the big demo today, which may or may not have happened because of the respectability of the organizers, concerned about getting into fights with the police. While I might question this decision, it also says something about the diversity of people going to Copenhagen this week. These are not people who regularly spend their weekends bumping into polics shields. There is big stuff at stake, and people of all political and non-political orientations are engaging it it.
This is good. But it also means that we should not ignore the risk of burying our fragile climate in well-mannered talk and good intentions. Concider this debate that i listened to at the boat tonight (quoted freely from memory).
Arild Hermstad, FIVH: Substantial emission cuts is in the long run not compatible with beina a large oil nation. It is absolutely possible to stop giving out more oil exploration licenses. Why are we in such a hurry to pump up all this oil? What’s the big risk in waiting?Øystein Johanessen, director of communication, Statoil: We agree about the goals[!], but differ about the means [so I don't have to reply concretely to your challenges]. The Norwegian oil industry is one of the most advanced in the world. We can’t save the world without it.Marianne Marthinsen, Arbeiderpartiet: As our oil runs out, shall we replace it by searching for more? Or shall we try do do something different? [Don't look to me for an ansver.]Nicolai Astrup, Høyre: We must do more on renewables. There is no doubt about that. The oil industry is a part of the solution, but we must do more.Marthinsen: I think no one thinks it is wise to turn off the taps in the North Sea [an idea nobody suggested, but still the oilman and both politicians spent considerable energy attacking it].Einar Steensnæs, Kristelig Folkeparti, former minister of oil and energy: As minister, I was responsible for the production of three million gallons of oil every day. I have made some decisions I now regret, being too blinded by cost-effectiveness. We must phase out all production from vulnerable areas such as the Arctic areas in the North and Statoil’s tar oil project in Canada.(Thundering silence filled with chatter about other things.)
We are all very worried, and we need to do something, we all agree on that, greenhouse gas emissions are eight percent up instead of down from 1990 levels, but out oil industry is the cleanest in the world (and don’t think too hard about oil drilling in vulnerable Arctic areas). I walked from the debate unsure whether I had actually learned anything, and with no faith whatsoever that the biggest parties in our parliament will understand anything before they stand knee-deep in melted polar ice.
We need to talk, but we need to smash a few windows as well.
Stopping for three days in Riga on my way from Oslo, I met up with the Latvian tribe of role-players, who were happy to share their city, their beer and their company with some random Norwegian. One guy even handed me the keys to his appartment and let me stay there, alone, without ever having met me before. His girlfriend spent a whole day showing me around the city. What genuinely hospitable and generous people.
(My only previous connection with the Latvian larpers is two articles written by Agnese Dzervite, edited by me, in the anthology Larp, the Universe, and Everything, published in conjunction with the Knutepunkt live roleplaying conference in Oslo earlier this year. If you want to know more about Latvian role-playing, check it out.)
Judging by the laid-back, chilled-out ambience in the city, one would not believe that Lativa competes closely with Iceland as the one country that thas been most thoroughly fucked over by the global financial meltdown. But resigned complaints about the SNAFUness of it all were never far away, much like Norwegians complains about the weather.
Here are some numbers for you. In an economy where perpetual growth is concidred ‘normal’, Latvia’s economy shrank 18.7 percent in the second quarter of 2009. Public budgets have been slashed. 68 percent of working people have had their wages cut, and over 67 percent of the private sector has let staff go in Latvia, according to Baltic Times. Unempoyment figures have risen to 17,4 percent. This summer, stories began appearing in Baltic newspapers about patients being turned away from hospitals.
Scandinavian banks cheerfully contributed to driving public debt to unsustainable levels – money which was, by and large, used for blowing hot air into real estate prices rather than for investment. Among the culprits are Swedish SEB and Swedbank and DnB NORD (a joint operation between Norddeutsche Landesbank and DnB NOR, both of them partly government-owned). Foreign-owned financial institutions hold the huge majority of Latvian loans, and Scandinavian banks are sometimes jokingly referred to as the real central bank authorities of the country.
When I arrived, Latvia had just been granted more crisis cash from €7.5bn rescue package of the IMF. This will not save them from making ”substantial corrective measures, including additional fiscal consolidation”, which is IMF-speak for cuts in wages and public services.
The Latvian government has, in conjunction with the European Union and the IMF, decided to maintain Latvia’s pegged exchange rate with the euro. Critics (such as Paul Krugman, Edward Hugh, Center for Economic and Policy Research et al) allege that thish as made recovery from the crisis all the more difficult. As far as my limited knowledge of the situation allows, I think I agree.
With the currency fixed rate, the only way to reduce the country’s current account imbalance is through shrinking the economy, which reduces imports faster than exports and may also reduce real wages. This is similar to the IMF-sponsored policies in the deep Argentine recession of 1998-2002, where a fixed, over-valued currency worsened and prolonged the downturn until the Argentine currency collapsed in 2002.
(If you to know more about this, you could check out this paper from the CEPR. Or the short version, courtesy of Bloomberg.)
Meanwhile, I hung out in the park in the late summer sunshine with the Latvians. Zhanete showed me the most charming used bookshop you’ll find anywhere. At night, the city came alive with the White Night culture festival, with art exhibitions and performances being held all over the city centre. There were jugglers, puppets, paper cranes, nude men, music and lightshows. It was beautiful.
And then I went home, to Oslo.
The OSCE has expressed concern about human rights activist Yevgenii Zhovtis, after visiting him in the detention centre where he is held outside Almaty. Kazakhstan is chairing OSCE from 2010, but apparently the organization is less than convinced that the country is able to give its own dissidents a fair trial.
“We already conveyed our concerns to the Kazakh government about reports of numerous violations of Zhovtis’ right to a fair trial in the run-up to his conviction,” says first deputy director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Douglas Wake, in this press relase.
“While we are not suggesting that Zhovtis should receive any special treatment, it is essential that fair trial standards are fully respected during the appeals process, in line with national legislation, OSCE commitments and Kazakhstan’s other international obligations,” he says.
Zhovtis was recently sentenced to four years in jail for manslaughter after a car accident which took the life of a young man. His supporters claim that the trial was ”politically motivated” and did not give him a fair proceeding, but rather meted out “punishment for his 20 years of human-rights work”, according to the Economist.
The trial did not meet basic fair trial standards, claims Human Rights Watch, who describes it as a “choreographed political trial” and “a terrible blow for everyone promoting human rightsin Kazakhstan”. This shows, according to Central Asia researcher Andrea Berg at Human Rights Watch, that Kazakhstan clearly is not ready to take on the OSCE chairmanship in 2010.
Also check out this assessment of the human rights situation in Kazakhstan, written by Human Rights Watch four months back, and a call for a strengthening of human rights in Kazakhstan by the Almaty Hensinki Committee.
Just a quick photo update this time, from Charyn canyon, about 200 kilometers east of Almaty and a popular trekking spot. The Charyn River is running through the Valley of the castles, with Grand canyon-style rock sculptures, good climbs and a guardsman with the lamest excuse ever for overcharging us (“You see, I was drunk yesterday when I told you didn’t have to pay”).
It also had some surprises in store. I discovered that when I suddenly became stuck on a ledge, with no way to go but four or five meters horizontally downwards and my arm still bandaged.
(Yes, I know. But I wasn’t really climbing, just walking, and it suddenly became very steep. So steep, in fact, that I couldn’t go back.)
As I tore of my bandage, grabbed what holds I could find and tried not to apply to much pressure on the broken parts of my hand, it started raining and everything beame slippery. I was saved only by my own badassery and, perhaps even more important, my steady climbing companion, Christian.
Anyway. Nice canyon. See for yourself.
(No, I’m still not in Kazakhstan anymore.)
Fyllesjuk.no
