Tag: deputy prime minister

West acting ‘like a monkey with a grenade’

Dmitri Rogozin
Dmitry Rogozin

Russia has begun to evacuate its citizens from Syria and its deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, has said the West is acting in the Islamic world like “a monkey with a grenade”.

Envoys from the US and its allies have told rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad that Western powers might attack Syria within days.

US forces in the region are “ready to go”, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said, as Washington and its European and Middle East partners honed their plans for punishing Assad for a major poison-gas attack last week that killed hundreds of civilians.

Several sources who attended a meeting in Istanbul on Monday between Syrian opposition leaders and diplomats said that the rebels were told to expect military action and get ready to negotiate a peace.

“The opposition was told in clear terms that action to deter further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime could come as early as the next few days, and that they should prepare for peace talks in Geneva,” one of the sources said.

Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition, met envoys from 11 states in the Friends of Syria group, including Robert Ford, the US ambassador to Syria, at an Istanbul hotel.

UN chemical weapons investigators, who finally crossed the frontline to take samples on Monday, put off a second trip to rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.

But Washington said it already held Assad responsible for a “moral obscenity”.

However, with Russian and Chinese opposition complicating efforts to satisfy international law – and Western voters wary of new, far-off wars – world leaders might not pull the trigger just yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron called parliament back from its summer recess for an emergency session on Syria tomorrow.

He and US President Barack Obama, as well as French President Francois Hollande, face tough questions about how an intervention, likely to be limited to air strikes, will end – and whether they risk handing power to anti-Western democracy Islamists if Assad is overthrown.

In an indication of support from Arab states that might help the Western powers argue the case for war against UN vetoes by Moscow and Beijing, the Arab League issued a statement holding Assad’s government fully responsible for the chemical-weapons attack.

Asked if US forces were ready to strike Syria just “like that”, Hagel told the BBC: “We are ready to go, like that. We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfil and comply with whatever option the president wants to take.”

Hagel said the US would have intelligence to present “very shortly” about last week’s mass poisoning. But he noted, after speaking to his British and French counterparts, that there was little doubt among US allies that “the most basic … international humanitarian standard was violated”.

Turkey, Syria’s neighbour and part of the US-led Nato military pact, called the Damascus deaths a “crime against humanity”.

The Syrian government, which denies using gas or obstructing the UN inspectors, said it would press on with its offensive against the rebels. Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said: “We have means of defending ourselves; we will surprise them.”

Russia has criticised Washington for cancelling bilateral talks on Syria that were set for today. A Russian aircraft is about to evacuate Russians and citizens of former Soviet states from Syria. The jet landed at the Latakia airport with 20t of humanitarian aid .

About 180 people who “have expressed a desire to leave Syria”, 100 of them Russian, are to be flown out. Russia evacuated its defence personnel from Syria in June.

Dutch fear rise in immigration after EU law changes

schengenLodewijk Asscher, deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, this month warned that migration from eastern Europe threatened his country’s wages and social welfare policies.

In his home country Bulgaria, Viktor, a logistical engineer, earned €350 a month as head of an emergency response unit at the national railway company. In the Netherlands, he works as a handyman, making up to €100 cash a day – less than his Dutch counterparts – and paying no taxes or social insurance.

The Netherlands, Britain and several other western European countries have maintained work permit requirements for Bulgarians and Romanians since they joined the EU in 2007. But even with that restriction, there has been a steady rise in immigration from those countries. Those requirements will expire on January 1, intensifying fears about a further rise in immigration and what this could mean for wages and services.

Mr Asscher compared the situation with a “Code Orange”, the warning Dutch authorities issue when high water levels threaten to overwhelm the dikes.

Sitting in his sister Maria’s smoky kitchen in a heavily eastern European neighbourhood near Amsterdam, an immigrant Viktor however said such concerns are overblown. “There are only seven million people in Bulgaria, and two million have emigrated since the fall of communism. Most of the people who want to leave have left already,” he said.

The Netherlands once boasted of its history as an asylum for immigrants, such as the refugee Jews and Protestants who flocked there in the 16th century.

But over the past decade, it has been wracked by debates over assimilation, with the rightwing populist Geert Wilders denouncing the country’s Muslim immigrants, mainly ethnic Moroccans and Turks. More recently he has turned his fire on immigrants from eastern and central Europe, setting up a controversial website last year to solicit complaints about their behaviour.

Such attacks play on fears that eastern Europeans are prone to crime and compete for Dutch jobs, driving down wages, particularly for unskilled labour.

With the Netherlands in the midst of a year-long recession and unemployment up from 4.4 per cent in 2010 to 7 per cent, such concerns have sharpened.

The government, a coalition between the centre-right Liberals of Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Mr Asscher’s centre-left Labour party, has mainly played down the immigration issue. But with polls showing the Socialists and the Freedom party pulling ahead, they are starting to feel the pressure.

The numbers of eastern Europeans in the Netherlands have indeed grown rapidly since EU expansion. Since 2005, the official Polish-born population in this country of 17m has more than doubled to 110,000, while the Bulgarian and Romanian communities have quadrupled to a combined 30,000.

Such figures count only those immigrants who have officially registered as residents; unofficial residents may add another 50 per cent to those figures.

Most economists think such immigration is a boon to the economy. A recent study by the Dutch think-tank SEO Economic Research found that labour migration from eastern Europe was mainly temporary, and that it had little or no effect on local employment or wages while contributing a net €1,800 a head to the government treasury.

But that study assumed that employers who hire foreign workers observe Dutch labour law, including the national sector-wide wage agreements between employers and unions.

“On the big energy plant construction projects we researched in the north, we found that scarcely any firms were sticking to the wage agreements,” said Herman Pol, an organiser for the main Dutch metalworkers’ union. Contractors, he said, typically won bids with offers that required them to undercut wage norms by several euros an hour.

Europeans are braced for a new age of austerity as governments across the region take action to eliminate unsustainable budget deficits

There is no realistic chance that the government will maintain work permits for Bulgaria and Romania after January 1, as it would explicitly violate EU law.

“The end of the work permission won’t be a big difference,” said one immigrant, who plans to return to Bulgaria in a year or two anyway. “Whether you have a permit or not, the main question is, where can I work?” – FT