Turkey’s renewal By A.G. Noorani - Analysis

NEARLY nine years in office as prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has already carved his name in history by his domestic and foreign policies.

The economy has registered phenomenal growth. It grew at 8.9 per cent last year. Civil society is articulate in universities, trade unions, business associations and human rights groups. The press is assertive. Last June, he won his third electoral victory in a row — 87 per cent of a 15 million electorate cast its vote. He won 326 seats in the 550-member parliament. This is less than the 367 he needs to amend the archaic constitution of 1982 and the 330 he needs to put his own draft for vote in a referendum.

The AKP escaped a ban by the Constitutional Court on July 30, 2008 by just one vote. The charge was that it was an Islamist party out to overturn the ‘secular’ ideology of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal. Its two powerful ‘guardians’ are the court and the army. In an article entitled ‘What is behind headscarf ruling of the Turkish Constitutional Court?’ published in 2010 Prof Abdurrahman Saygili of the University of Ankara exposed the court’s usurpation of political power in the guise of judicial adjudication. The army has used ‘Kemalist secularism’ as a weapon to control politicians it dislikes.

Recently, Erdogan invited to dinner leaders of religious minorities, including the chief rabbi of Istanbul, and promised to return thousands of properties, confiscated in the past, to the Jewish and Christian minorities. He proudly declared: “In this city the [Muslim] call to prayer and church bells sound together. Mosques, churches and synagogues have stood side by side on the same street for centuries.”

Erdogan, aided by the able foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, charted a new course in a foreign policy of ‘zero problems’ with neighbours. Bridges were built with Armenia, Greece and Georgia. It was on Israel that the change was most pronounced.

Even before he became prime minister, Erdogan had attacked the Israeli Defence Force for its outrages against Palestinians in Jenin and Nablus.

In 2009, in Davos he famously walked out on Israel’s President Shimon Peres declaring “You know very well how to kill”.

Relations between the two countries were all but broken last year when Israeli commandos attacked the Turkish freighter Mavi Marmara, which sought to break the Gaza blockage. Nine Turkish civilians were killed.

Erdogan praises the Hamas as “resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land”. Last month, he said on Egyptian TV: “I told Abbas to come with me so that we can all go together [to Gaza] Mahmoud Abbas, Erdogan and Ismail Haniya (the Hamas leader).” He made a remark which echoed all over the region because it is so very true: “Israel is the West’s spoiled
child. To this day, it has never executed a decision by the international community.”

Erdogan’s trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in September was a resounding success. He has warned Syria’s President Bashar al Assad against suppression of peaceful agitations. It is a carefully calibrated foreign policy. In 2003, Turkey’s parliament voted against permitting American troops to use its territory to invade Iraq. Last year, it tried, along with Brazil, to mediate a
nuclear deal between Iran and the US. But Turkey also joined Nato’s US-designed missile shield against Iran, though it was careful not to name Iran.

Radical changes in policies could not have been brought about unless they were rooted in long-felt aspirations. What we are witnessing is the people’s revolt against the perverted secularism forcibly imposed on them by Mustafa Kemal, despite their respect for him.

One learns of the depths of the revolt from a work of seminal importance by an erudite Turkish columnist and a committed Muslim, Mustafa Akyol, aptly entitled Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. He recalls that Kemal’s “vision was not the only alternative for the Turkish Republic during its genesis. The preceding war of liberation [1919-22] was led by a democratic parliament convened in Ankara”. Kemal founded the Republican People’s Party. Others, including war heroes, founded the Progressive Republican Party, which believed in “respect for religious beliefs and ideas”. In 1925, Kemal crushed the PRP. From 1925-46, Turkey was a one-party state actively anti-religion, closing religious institutions, banning religious symbols and suppressing religious leaders. A personality cult was sponsored. As a rising politician Erdogan asked, “In Europe there is respect for worship, for the headscarf. Why not in Turkey?” This earned him 10 months in prison.

The new direction that the AKP embraced has its roots among the Islamic liberals of the Ottoman Empire as well as in the centre-right tradition of Turkish politics represented by the Progressive Republican Party in 1924; by Adnan Menderes between 1950 and 1960; and by Turgut Ozal between 1983 and 1993.

“Classical liberalism, an idea so popular in the late Ottoman Empire but denounced by the Kemalist Republic, was rediscovered in the late 1980s, thanks to the reforms of Ozal and the efforts of new organisations such as the Ankara-based Association for Liberal Thinking. Books and academic works addressing liberal philosophy, extremely rare before the 1980s, became ubiquitous.”

Erdogan said in Cairo on Sept 12: “The Turkish state is in its core a state of freedoms and secularism.” He prays daily and his wife wears a headscarf; so does the wife of President Abdullah Gul, a respected academic. Akyol’s book is a plea for a liberal interpretation of the Islamic tradition. He praises Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts. “The modernist tradition in the subcontinent would later be continued, and much refined, by Muhammad Iqbal, the wise philosopher-poet of the early 20th century who
articulated an Islamic form of individualism and empiricism.”

Turkey is well set on the path of renewal.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/turkeys-renewal.html

Is circular debt the real issue?

By Salman Khalid and Kamal Munir 

PAKISTAN has been facing a series of power crises over roughly the last two decades. However, since 2007, the situation has deteriorated rapidly.

As a result of severe electricity shortage, industry, commerce and agriculture have all taken serious hits with the country’s growth prospects dimming significantly. At the same time, residential consumers have had to endure over eight-to-12-hour blackouts in major cities. The situation is even worse in rural Pakistan.

Surprisingly, the total energy produced in the country has actually decreased nearly 10 per cent between 2007 and 2010.
This is primarily due to lower-capacity utilisation, which in turn has been the result of ‘circular debt’, a concept that has been bandied around freely over the past few years as the primary problem that besets energy production in Pakistan.

However, despite its dominance of policy discourse, circular debt is not the fundamental issue here. The two most glaring reasons behind the present mess Pakistan finds itself in are the 1994 energy policy and the resultant extreme over-reliance on expensive imported fuel mix.

It is easy to forget that the roots of the present power crisis can be traced to almost two decades back with the advent of the highly generous 1994 power policy for independent power producers (IPP). At that time the country’s electricity generation relied on a fuel mix of approximately 70:30 in favour of hydro versus thermal. This changed dramatically over the next decade with the fuel mix going to 30 per cent hydro and almost 70 per cent thermal by the end of 2010.

This dramatic shift in generation source occurred because the 1994 power policy (and later the 2002 power policy) did not discriminate on fuel source being employed and made the country hostage to fluctuations in international oil and gas prices (the country does not possess either commodity in sufficient quantity).

The cost of this strategic policy-level folly can be understood with the following comparison. As per the National Power System Expansion Plan 2010-2030, as of 2010, Wapda (employing hydro production) generated electricity at Rs1.03/kWh ((1.2 cents/kWh) while public-sector thermal power plants provided the same at Rs8.5/kWh (10 cents/kwh).

However, the IPPs (primarily thermal) provided the same at Rs9.58/kWh (11.2 cents/kWh). As a result, the average blended cost of generation was Rs6.6/kWh (7.7 cents/kWh) in 2010 which further increased to Rs9.81/kWh (11.5 cents/kWh) for the end consumer due to line losses and theft in the transmission and distribution systems.

It should be noted that the above numbers underestimate the true cost because the cost of energy from old power plants is substantially lower due to repayment of debt. Most new thermal IPPs are charging in the range of 15-18 cents/kWh at current oil prices. As a result, tariffs will substantially increase further as the world economy comes out of recession over the next few years and oil/gas prices jump (with the US trying to print its way out of recession).

Even after adjusting for debt repayment, power production through indigenous hydro resources comes out much better than what we are given to believe.

The estimated cost of energy stands at 1.6 cents/kWh for Kalabagh dam with a vast majority of new hydros expected to come under 4.5 cents/kWh as per a recent NTDC (National Transmission and Despatch Company) report. Furthermore, the country has so far completely failed to develop its coal reserves (only 30MW coming from coal) which are estimated at 175 billion tonnes (the second largest in the world). Engro estimates a tariff of 10-12 cents/kWh for Thar coal-based power production based on the current policy. Incredibly, the world average for coal-based power production in the energy mix is 40 per cent while it is only 0.1 per cent in Pakistan.

To make matters worse, many of the thermal IPPs set-ups under both the 1994 and 2002 power policy are of inefficient design (single cycle rather than more efficient combined cycle) since these policies provided cost plus equity return of 15 per cent irrespective of the efficiency of the technology/fuel source being used in the power plant.

Many of these IPPs would normally be used for load-balancing (matching sudden jumps in demand etc) in other countries and would fall low in the merit order for power plants used but are instead employed for satisfying standard base demand in Pakistan. One begs to question the wisdom and/or sincerity of the policymakers of the country who completely ignored two of the biggest energy resources available locally which cost substantially less than the options they opted for.

Some people provide the excuse regarding the political deadlock over the Kalabagh dam and hence the need for Pakistan to go to the oil/gas-based IPP route. But what stopped the policymakers from going down the coal route, let alone hydro projects apart from the Kalabagh dam? Why couldn’t the Diamer-Bhasha dam or the Bunji or Doyian dam be commenced in the early 1990s instead of a Hubco?

Circular debt is a red herring. The core problem lies in wrong policy choices made in the early 1990s that have continued since then. These choices, made for whatever reasons (pressure from the World Bank, corruption, incompetence) have shifted Pakistan away from self-reliance in energy generation and landed us at the mercy of daily fluctuations of the international oil/gas markets and choked industrial progress in the country.

Taking subsidies away is not the solution. Electricity should not only be available to the wealthy! The provision of affordable electricity is the basic right of every citizen.

In a country that has unparalleled resources to generate electricity the present situation is unacceptable. Printing money to clear circular debt will hardly deliver us from this problem. For Pakistanis to be able to get an affordable, sufficient, long-term energy supply, the sustainable solution lies in revisiting the ridiculous power policies of 1994 and 2002 and exploiting other, more sensible sources of generation.

Salman Khalid has managed investments in power generation in Pakistan, Turkey, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. Kamal Munir teaches Strategy and Policy at the University of Cambridge.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/10/is-circular-debt-the-real-issue.html

More Syria deaths as dissidents urge Assad isolation

DAMASCUS: Thirty-eight people were killed in clashes in two days in northwest Syria, a rights activist said on Sunday, as dissidents meeting in Brussels called for the isolation of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Thirty-eight people were killed in shootings in the region of Jisrash Shughur, 10 yesterday and 28 today,” Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.

The updated toll includes six members of the Syrian security forces.

Rahman earlier gave a toll of 25 – 19 civilians and six security agents – but warned that number could rise as military and security forces continued operations in the northwest Idlib province.

Residents of the central city of Hama, where at least 53 people were reported killed during anti-regime protests on Friday, said nearly 100,000 people were staging a protest during a three-day strike that began on Saturday.

On Saturday, an activist in Jisrash Shughur said “security forces opened fire to scatter more than 1,000 demonstrators protesting after the funeral of a civilian killed on Friday” in protests at the nearby village of Has.

Syria’s official SANA news agency reported at the time that “a member of the army was killed and a policeman injured in clashes” in Jisrash Shughur.

“Armed groups attacked a police station and military barracks in the area” and one assailant was killed, SANA said.

Rights groups say more than 1,100 civilians have been killed and at least 10,000 arrested in Syria since protests erupted in mid-March.

Damascus insists that the unrest is the work of “armed terrorist gangs”backed by Islamists and foreign agitators.

Syria has freed more than 450 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience since Tuesday as part of a general amnesty announced by Assad, Rahman told AFP on Sunday.
Most of the released are Islamists or Kurds, he added.

Syrian Prime Minister Adel Safar, meanwhile, ordered the creation of a committee tasked with drafting a law on political parties, SANA reported.

The current constitution stipulates that the ruling Baath party is “the leader of state and society” and political pluralism has been at the forefront of demands by pro-reform dissidents.

In Europe, Syrian opposition activists urged the international community to increase pressure on Assad and called for an independent investigation into his regime’s deadly crackdown.

The roughly 200 activists gathered in Brussels also said charges should be laid against those responsible for violations of human rights in the repression, and cases brought before the International Criminal Court.

“There needs to be more pressure on the regime,” organisers of the Brussels meeting said in a statement.

“It is very important to impose diplomatic isolation on the Syrian regime, and to not allow it to be represented in international bodies,” added the grouping, called the National Coalition of Support for the Syrian Revolution.

The European Union and the United States have already imposed sanctions on Assad and his inner circle.

The coalition dismissed as a “farce” Assad’s creation of a body tasked with creating a national dialogue.

A final resolution from the Brussels meeting announced the creation of a commission to evaluate human rights violations by the regime with the purpose of laying charges and sending cases to the International Criminal Court.

It said the coalition also wanted to “communicate with international organisations with the aim of coming up with a resolution condemning the violence by the Syrian regime.”

At a similar meeting in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya in Turkey on Wednesday and Thursday, opposition groups urged Assad’s immediate resignation and the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections within a year.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, meanwhile, made a brief visit to the United Arab Emirates where he met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahayan.

“The demands of reform and the need for stability can go hand in hand as they can be reconciled,” the official WAM news agency reported Sheikh Mohammad as saying.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/06/more-syria-deaths-as-dissidents-urge-assad-isolation.html