Month: September 2018

Italy and Austria issued sharp retorts to the new U.N. human rights chief Tuesday over her plans to send in teams to investigate the treatment of migrants, with Italy saying the move is “inappropriate, unfounded and unjust.”

A foreign ministry statement recalled all the praise Italy has received over the years for rescuing migrants, providing assistance projects in migrants’ home countries and cracking down on Libyan-based smuggling networks that have greatly reduced the number of arrivals.

The ministry said it hoped the data “will help the newly installed high commissioner” understand Italy’s commitment and its track record.

Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who took over as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights last week, announced plans to send teams to Italy and Austria to examine the treatment of migrants after her first major address Monday.

In Vienna on Tuesday, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz demanded “clarification” from the U.N. of “what human rights violations” are suspected in Austria, the Austria Press Agency reported.

“It is particularly important to clear up how and why the decision came about that Austria in particular should be examined,” he added. Kurz said he would defend Austria against any unjustified suspicion.

Amid such protests, Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office, said it was “not unusual at all” for it to deploy teams to countries, saying they often conduct “working-level visits to various countries where we see that there are human rights concerns for them to look at.”

She told reporters in Geneva that rights office teams were dispatched to Bulgaria, France, Greece and Macedonia as well as Italy in 2016.

Shamdasani said she did not have precise dates for the visits to Austria and Italy, but “I’m told it’s a matter of weeks.”
…

Russian President Vladimir Putin is hosting his Chinese counterpart at an economic forum in the far eastern port city of Vladivostok today as armed forces from both countries descend on eastern Siberia to launch Moscow’s largest-ever military drills.

Russia’s week-long deployment alongside Chinese and Mongolian troops, known as “Vostok-2018” (East-2018), comes at a time of heightened tensions between Moscow and the West over accusations of Russian interference in Western affairs and ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.

Comparing this week’s show of force to the Soviet Union’s 1981 war games during which between 100,000 and 150,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers took part in “Zapad-81” (West-81)—the largest military exercises of the Soviet era—Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said these exercises will be even larger, with 300,000 soldiers, 36,000 military vehicles, 1,000 planes and 80 warships taking part in the drills.

China’s participation in the quadrennial war games, while comparatively modest with only 3,200 men and 900 weapons units, is also unprecedented, leading some to view it as an unequivocal warning to the United States and Europe.

“It sends a signal to Washington that if the U.S. continues on its current course by pressuring Russia and imposing more sanctions, Russia will fall even more into the firm embrace of China, America’s only strategic competitor in the 21st century,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Institute in Moscow recently told The Associated Press, adding that Beijing’s participation indicates that Russia and China no longer view each other as military threats.

Other experts, however, disagree, questioning both the transparency of Vostok-2018 troop estimates and the political significance of China’s inaugural participation.

“Numbers and figures for these kinds of exercises are typically what we might call to be true lies, in that they’re statistical lies whereby the Russian army’s General Staff tallies every single unit-formation that either sends somebody to the exercise or has some tangential command component in it,” said Michael Kofman, Russia and Eurasia security and defense analyst at the Washington-based Kennan Institute.

“This basically means that if a brigade sends one battalion, then they count the whole brigade,” he told VOA. “So these numbers are not entirely fictional, but you have to divide them by a substantial amount to get any sense of how big the exercise actually is.”

“And they typically revise the numbers after the fact,” Kofman added. “For example, originally after Vostok 2014, they said that they had 100,000 participants, and then I guess they decided it wasn’t impressive enough, because they later posted an official figure of 155,000.”

Different methodologies for calculating troop numbers further complicate efforts to assess troop counts.

“It’s very hard to tell beforehand just how big these exercises are going to be,” said Jeffrey Edmonds of Arlington-based CNA Analysts. A former Russia director for the National Security Council and CIA military analyst, Edmonds told VOA that while some observers may tally only uniformed troops, others might include deployment of military-civilian reserves.

“It could also be, you know, ‘Is perhaps this other unit that’s operating along the Western front actually part of the operation in the East?’ Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. So, different people can come up with different figures.”

The purpose of the nearly week-long drills, however, is unambiguous. Like top NATO officials who have denounced Vostok-2018 as an “exercise in large-scale conflict,” multiple experts described the event as a first-of-its-kind rehearsal for a post-Cold War global confrontation.

“The point of the exercise is really to test Russia’s ability to conduct a large-scale conflict, and one that may involve a nuclear component,” Kofman told VOA. “It’s also designed to stress-test the entire Russian political-military network in terms of mobilization, dealing with reserves and assessing how civilian-military authorities would react and respond in the event of a large-scale conventional war.”

Despite the seemingly more imminent risk of conflict across eastern Europe—Baltic nations have been on high alert since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and some 2,200 Ukrainian, American and NATO soldiers recently conducted drills in western Ukraine—the Russian military’s Achilles Heel, geographically speaking, lies to the far east.

“The far east is unique compared to the other [Russian] military districts because it is so distant from Russian infrastructure and population centers,” said Kofman, who described the sparsely populated military jurisdiction as “designed and intended to fight as its own, almost separate military, which is why it has so many ground-force formations.”

“That’s another part of this exercise: to test how well that district can hold a potential fight and be reinforced from the central military district in the event of a large-scale conflict or horizontal escalation against Russia,” he said. “That even though much of the security conversation on Russia is focused in Europe, the majority of U.S. power projection and most of America’s strongest allies are in the Asia-Pacific region.”

And although Russia and China have increased military-to-military contact in recent years, annually engaging in smaller snap military drills, few analysts equate Chinese participation in Vostok-2018 with the emergence of a formal military alliance between the two countries.

“Russia has no chance of a formal military alliance with China, and not because Russia doesn’t want it,” said Moscow-based military analyst Aleksander Goltz. “This China very clearly and resolutely refuses any military alliances and commitments. And while Beijing may be ready to develop some military cooperation with Russia, as well as with other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization”—an economic and security pact between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—”it is only in very limited ways defined by Beijing parameters.”

Edmonds described Vostok-2018 as part of Russia’s ongoing efforts to modernize its forces.

“Maybe the announcements of how big it’s going to be is a reaction to hostilities with the West, but the actual exercise itself is a pretty standard Russian military activity.”

Kofman, too, suggested China’s involvement has less to do with emerging geopolitical dynamics than with regional necessities.

“If you’re going to do large-scale military exercises like this today in the far east, especially when considering Russia’s set strategy of trying to form a balancing entente with China on the basis of mutual antagonism toward and shared security concerns about the United States, the only logical course of action is to invite the Chinese to participate in this exercise,” Kofman told VOA. “Otherwise, [China would] will inherently view this exercise as having to do with them, or at least they would be suspicious.”

“Another part of it, of course, is that both sides are signaling to the United States that their military cooperation is not only growing but that their individual bilateral problems in their respective relationships with the United States are driving them toward greater cooperation, which is definitely not in America’s interest,” he added. “So, the joint military exercises are not necessarily signs that some sort of formal alliance is forming, but these are incremental steps, so it’s important to view them in aggregate.”

Which is to say, he suggested, the longer term trend-line of Russian-Chinese cooperation may reveal more than the drills themselves.

“Over time, an entente between these two countries could be more likely to become a reality than not.”

Wire news outlets have reported that Vostok-2018 will see Russian forces field Su-34 and Su-35 fighter planes, T-80 and T-90 tanks, and nuclear-capable Iskander missiles. At sea, the Russian fleet is expected to deploy several frigates equipped with Kalibr missiles that have been used in Syria.

Last week, Russia held military exercises in the Mediterranean, where more than 25 warships and some 30 planes took part in the drills, as Russia increased its military presence in Syria where it intervened to help the Bashar al-Assad regime in 2015.

Upon publication, NATO officials were still considering Moscow’s invitation to send observers to the drills, which will wind down September 15.

The Russian president is scheduled to observe the drills after the Vladivostok forum, where Putin, President Xi Jinping and other regional leaders are expected to discuss trade and North Korea.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Yulia Savchenko contributed original reporting. Some information is from AP and Reuters.
…

European countries must not rush to repatriate Afghan refugees to their increasingly insecure homeland or blame their community for isolated crimes such as recent deadly attacks in Germany and in France, the top U.N. refugee official said on Monday.

Two Afghans have been detained in Germany on suspicion of killing a 22-year-old German man, the public prosecutor’s office said on Sunday.

French police detained a man who wounded several people in a knife attack in central Paris on Sunday, police and judicial sources said on Monday. The attacker, who a police source said was from Afghanistan, stabbed tourists and passersby.

Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that sending Afghan refugees home was a “complex issue in Europe” — despite a spate of suicide bombs and attacks across Afghanistan, including by the Taliban and Islamic State.

“There is a lot of pressure for Afghans to return. Our advice is to carry out this process with great caution because conditions from the security point of view are deteriorating,” he told a news conference on return from Afghanistan.

Grandi, asked whether he feared any backlash against Afghan nationals in Europe, said: “If anybody who is either an asylum seeker or a refugee commits crimes, this person has to be excluded from the (asylum) process or from refugee status.”

UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming later clarified that such exclusion applies only when a serious crime has been committed before the asylum seeker enters a country, and is then taken into account during the asylum process, before the person is determined to be a refugee. Refugee status is retained when a refugee commits a crime in the asylum country, but that person is subject to prosecution.

Grandi said suspects must bear the full force of law, but voiced concern that an entire community could be blamed for the crimes of an individual, or the issue manipulated for political purposes.

“This is very dangerous, because asylum seekers and refugees in their overwhelming majority do not commit crimes, and are particularly vulnerable to discrimination.”

Pakistan and Iran together host some 2.5 million Afghan refugees, but only 12,000 returned home so far this year against 40,000-50,000 at this time in 2017, according to his agency.

Some 40,000 people were killed or maimed in the past 4 years of conflict in Afghanistan and 170,000 people newly-displaced this year alone, U.N. emergency humanitarian coordinator Mark Lowcock said.

He welcomed talks between the government of President Ashraf Ghani and Taliban insurgents, saying they needed to be supported.

“That probably is also the single biggest thing that will contribute to better economic prospects and people feeling more confident about the prospects and then that is what will be biggest driver in Afghans feeling they can go home,” he added.
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Hundreds of thousands of Catalans are expected to fill the streets of Barcelona on Tuesday for the Spanish region’s first commemorative day since its leader declared independence last year and pitched the country into constitutional crisis.

Supporters of splitting the wealthy northeastern region from the rest of Spain have in recent years used the September 11 “Diada,” the anniversary of the fall of their coastal capital to Spanish forces in 1714, to promote the cause.

This year, Catalonia’s leader Quim Torra, who took over from his exiled predecessor after Madrid ended an unprecedented period of direct rule, has called for a mass rally in support of his bid for a binding referendum on independence.

“Our government has committed to making the republic a reality,” Torra said in a televised address to mark the occasion. “I wish you all a very good Diada. Long live free Catalonia.”

He wore a yellow ribbon signifying support for nine politicians whose jailing for their role in the independence bid is one of the Catalan government’s biggest grievances.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who took power in June, has taken a softer approach to one of the thorniest issues in national politics than that of his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy, but he has stood firm against allowing a vote on secession, or any unilateral attempt by Catalonia to secede.

Last year’s Diada, in which marchers often climb on each other’s shoulders in shows of the traditional sport of forming human towers, fell as the regional government was preparing to hold a referendum in defiance of Madrid, which ultimately sent riot police to try to stop the vote.

Torra’s predecessor and ally Carles Puigdemont then declared independence, prompting Madrid to impose direct rule on the grounds that Barcelona had violated the 1978 constitution which states that the country is indivisible.

Extra police will be deployed during the anniversaries of events in the independence bid. The government’s regional delegate, asked last week about 600 agents being sent as reinforcements, said this was the normal approach to scheduled rallies.

Divisions over the question of secession are stark in Catalonia, which makes up around one fifth of Spain’s economic output and already has a high level of autonomy in areas including education and health, and its own police force.

A poll by the Centro d’Estudis d’Opinio in July showed 46.7 percent of Catalans surveyed saying they wanted an independent state, just ahead of 44.9 percent who did not.

Last year’s banned referendum delivered a majority vote for independence, but turnout was low.

A pro-secession coalition regained control of the regional parliament at a regional election in December that Rajoy had hoped would put paid to the independence bid, but a staunchly pro-union party emerged as the single biggest winner.
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Final results from Sweden’s parliamentary election Sunday are expected later in the week, but preliminary results have one of Europe’s most liberal nations making a turn to the right and wondering how it will form a government.

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats that wants the country to leave the European Union and impose a freeze on immigration, appears poised to become the third largest party in parliament.

With most ballots counted, the ruling center-left Social Democrats have 28 percent of the vote, trailed by the Moderates with 19 percent and the nationalist Sweden Democrats with almost 18 percent.

The Social Democrats and the Moderates have said they will not consider the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in the neo-Nazi fringe, as a coalition partner.

The Moderates say they will form a coalition government and have called on Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, a Social Democrat, to step down.

Lofven said the election presented “a situation that all responsible parties must deal with,” and added that “a party with roots in Nazis” would “never ever offer anything responsible, but hatred.”

Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Akesson declared victory at a supporters’ rally saying, “We will gain huge influence over what happens in Sweden during the coming weeks, months and years”.

Ahead of the election, Lofven had warned, “The haters are mobilizing in Sweden and are egging on people against people. … We will resist. We will stand up for equality.”

Sweden, like most of Europe, has been hit by an influx of asylum-seekers, who are fleeing mainly from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

The influx of 163,000 asylum-seekers in Sweden in 2015 has polarized voters and fractured a cozy political consensus.

Pollsters had warned that the far-right Sweden Democrats could end up winning veto power over which parties form the next government.

Magnus Blomgren a social scientist at Umea University, said, “Traditional parties have failed to respond to the sense of discontent that exists.”

 
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French police have arrested a man who wounded seven people, including two British tourists, in Paris late Sunday.

Reuters news agency quoted a judicial source saying there was no indication the attack was terror related. It also reported that four of those wounded were in serious condition.

Witnesses told Agence France Presse the man was also carrying an iron bar.

The incident reportedly took place at 2100 UTC in northeast Paris.
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Thousands of Russians rallied against government-backed pension reforms and hundreds of them faced arrest Sunday, as Kremlin-backed candidates for the powerful mayor’s post in Moscow as well as a majority of regional governorships appeared headed to easy victory in elections scattered across the country.

The split screen images of smiling voters on TV, and protesters facing down baton-wielding police on the internet, once again raised questions about Russia’s system of so-called “managed democracy” in which political freedoms are tolerated, but only to a degree.   

Indeed, while the day saw unexpected results in a handful of races, Sunday’s vote was far more reminiscent of Russia’s March presidential elections, which saw President Vladimir Putin dominate the field after Russia’s Elections Commission weeded potential rivals from the race well in advance of election day. 

“This is not an election.  We see this as a reappointment,” said Dmitry Gudkov, the leader of the Party of Change, whose own candidacy to compete against Moscow’s incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin was derailed by “municipal filters” aimed at keeping critical voices off the ballot.

With only Kremlin-approved challengers allowed into the race, even seasoned political observers admitted they found it hard to identify Sobyanin’s competition.

“Honestly, I’m a political analyst and even I don’t know who the other candidates are,” said Anton Orekh, Echo of Moscow’s resident political observer, in an interview with VOA.

“And the majority of residents feel exactly the same,” he added. “It’s always been clear who will win these elections.  It is not even necessary to falsify the results. ”

Preliminary results showed Sobyanin receiving about 70 percent of the vote.

The new Moscow beckons

Mayor Sobyanin’s reelection bid was buoyed by years of Kremlin-funded urbanization projects that have transformed Moscow’s appearance, despite an economy weighed down by Western sanctions and persistent low world oil prices.

New parks and pedestrian walkways, glistening stadiums built for the World Cup 2018, and dozens of new metro stations have increasingly given the city, if not Western-style values, a more Western-style feel.

Sobyanin made a Moscow’s renewal the centerpiece of an otherwise lackluster campaign that featured few appearances and a refusal to participate in debates. President Putin, in turn, has backed Sobyanin’s urbanization projects and urged other regions to follow Moscow’s lead in creating what the Russian leader says should be more “citizen friendly” environments.

Protests and Arrests

Even amid what appeared to be landslide victories for a majority of pro-Kremlin candidates, Russia’s growing economic problems were also on display Sunday.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, currently serving a 30-day term for violating the country’s stringent protest laws, called nationwide protests against a proposal to raise the pension age that is deeply unpopular with the public.

The reform has sparked a wave of protests and sent Putin’s polling numbers on a downward slide, despite a televised address by the Russian leader to explain the move as a longterm fiscal necessity. Independent polls find 90 percent of Russians are opposed to the changes.

In Moscow, several thousand protesters gathered in downtown Pushkin Square to chants of “Impeachment,” “Putin is a Thief” and “It’s not reform, it’s robbery.”  Similar rallies were held in dozens of other cities.  They followed nationwide protests organized by Russia’s Communist Party last week.

“The government is robbing from my parents and from my generation as well,” said Andrei Kiripko, 22, a marketing student protesting in Moscow. “All I can do is fight for my country and my children’s future.”

“Unfortunately, many of my generation didn’t show up,” said Sergey, 51, a private business owner who declined to give his last name.  “Everyone I know doesn’t agree with the reform, but they’re not here because they’re scared of what will happen.”

More than 800 arrests were reported in cities across Russia by OVD-INFO, a local rights monitoring group.  Police routinely rounded up Navalny regional supporters in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Khabarovsk. In Yekaterinburg, former mayor Evegeny Roizman, a Navalny ally recently removed from his post, was detained by OMON troops for marching with demonstrators.

The authorities response was most aggressive in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where demonstrators were beaten by baton-wielding OMON troops. The images immediately raised the specter of potential criminal charges and harsh prison sentences to follow.

The battle online

Political battles surrounding the day, meanwhile, extended far beyond the streets and onto social media.

In another sign the Kremlin was taking public discontent seriously, the government exerted pressure on opposition activities through Youtube, which Navalny has effectively harnessed to spread his political ideas, despite being largely banned from state media.

At the request of Russia’s internet governing body Rozkomnadzor, the U.S.-based video service blocked paid Navalny video advertisements in support of the protest, apparently agreeing the videos violated Russia’s “day of silence” law 24 hours ahead of voting.

“We consider all justified appeals from state bodies.  We also require advertisers to act in accordance with the local law and our advertising policies,” explained Google Russia, in an email published by Reuters.

“What Google did presents a clear case of political censorship,” countered Navalny aide Leonid Volkov, who addressed Google’s actions in a post to Facebook.  

Volkov was right, in part. Navalny’s Youtube channel continued to operate throughout Sunday’s events. But the blocked ads again raised questions about Western tech companies’ ability to find a balance between their oft-stated support for free speech and pursuit of business interests in repressive political environments.

 
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Kosovo has barred Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic from visiting a Serb-populated enclave after dozens of protesters blocked the road to the village he had planned to travel to.

Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said on Facebook on September 9 that the revocation of Vucic’s permission to visit the village of Banje was made in the interests of the safety of citizens.

President Hashim Thaci said on Facebook that he supported the decision but called protests and roadblocks unhelpful as Kosovo and Serbia make efforts for “peace and reconciliation” after the 1998-99 war between the two sides.

Thaci added that the blockade “shows that the pain and war injuries are still fresh.”

The protesters used cars and trucks to block the main road between the city of Mitrovica and the village of Banje, which Vucic was scheduled to visit later on September 9.

They also burned tires and displayed banners that read “Vucic will not pass here” and “You have to apologize for the crimes.”

NATO peacekeepers from Hungary wearing full riot gear and backed by Swiss Army bulldozers were stationed close to the barricade and said they were ready to intervene if they are asked by Kosovar authorities to clear the road.

The NATO-led peacekeeping mission, known as KFOR, said in a statement that it was working with Kosovar authorities to remove the barricade on the road to the Serb-populated village without incident.

“KFOR is working to do it peacefully, but it is ready to intervene…if required,” the mission said in a statement to the Associated Press.

It added that “nobody is threatening Mr. Vucic and his safety was guaranteed.”

Vucic arrived in Kosovo on September 8 for a two-day visit that began a day after a meeting between him and Thaci was canceled because the Serbian president refused to meet.

The failed meeting adds further doubt to a possible land swap between the two countries that was floated by both Belgrade and Pristina last month.

While some EU and U.S. officials have said they support the exchange of territories, Germany and many analysts have said it is a bad idea that could renew old ethnic hostilities throughout the Balkans.

The land swap is also opposed by Kosovo’s ruling coalition and the opposition.

Serbia lost control over Kosovo in 1999 after NATO bombed to stop the killing and expulsion of Albanians by Serbian forces during a two-year counterinsurgency war.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and has been recognized by more than 100 countries, but not by Serbia. Normalizing bilateral ties is a key condition for both countries to move toward EU membership.

​Speaking in northern Kosovo on September 8, Vucic said he would continue talks with Kosovar officials but warned it would be difficult to reach a deal that could normalize relations. 

Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini, said in a statement that the EU “regrets the decision” to cancel Vucic’s visit to Banje.

“We ask all those responsible to maintain order and provide secure passings throughout the day. Full commitment to preserving peace and security of the people of Kosovo and the people of Serbia, wisdom and calm is what is needed now,” Kocijancic said.

Kosovo police on September 9 stopped Vucic and his entourage on the road to the Drenica region and informed they would not be allowed to proceed due to security concerns. The region was the site of Serbian forces’ first bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in 1998.

Vucic, once a fiery ultranationalist, told members of the Serbian ethnic minority in Mitrovica on September 9 that he would “not hesitate for second when it comes to the need to defend our nation in any part of Kosovo and Metohija if our nation is attacked.”

Belgrade continues to refer to the country as “Kosovo and Metohija,” its official name when it was an autonomous Serbian republic.

“We want Serbian children and schools, teachers, and kindergartens for them,” Vucic said. “I want you to have enough reasons to want to have children. I want maternity wards, playgrounds, roads, and factories, so that in the end you can have everything that will let you stay here.”

But Vucic said that he did not “want to incite war” and “won’t promise arms and ammunition.

“I wish to believe that we can now have an era of rational, and why not in 50 years, friendly relations with the Albanians,” he said.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP
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Turkey’s arrests of an American pastor and other Western citizens have thrust its troubled judicial system to the forefront of ties with allies, reinforcing suspicions that the Turkish government is using detainees as diplomatic leverage.

Turkey scoffs at the idea that it treats detained foreigners as foreign policy pawns, and points the finger at the U.S. for cases against Turks in American courts. Turkey’s top appeals court judge weighed in this week, saying only “independent” courts can free pastor Andrew Brunson.

The reality is more complex in a nation where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tightened his grip on the state, including a judiciary purged of thousands of judges and prosecutors after an attempted coup in 2016. Constitutional changes have since expanded Erdogan’s control of judicial appointments, undermining Turkey’s avowals that it wants to mold impartial courts.

There is no evidence that jailed foreigners in Turkey were arrested to be used as “hostages,” and Erdogan could genuinely believe they were acting on behalf of foreign governments against Turkey, said Nicholas Danforth, an analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

“In taking and holding prisoners to combat the West’s presumed hostility, Ankara ends up creating the kind of hostility it imagines,” Danforth wrote in a blog post last week.

Recent Turkish court rulings seemed to align with diplomatic outreach to Europe. Two Greek soldiers held for months were freed; Taner Kilic, an Amnesty International representative, was released; and a judge lifted a travel ban on a German of Turkish descent accused of terror offenses.

Conversely, the courts ruled against freeing Brunson, who is accused of links to Kurdish rebels and the 2016 coup plotters, after U.S. economic penalties deepened the Turkish currency’s slide.

A coincidence? Some analysts don’t think so.

“As the crisis with the U.S. heated up and as the economic crisis heated up, Erdogan saw a need to speed up the process of normalization with Europe,” said Howard Eissenstat, an associate professor of Middle East history in Canton, New York.

Eissenstat, also a fellow at the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy, speculated that President Donald Trump’s focus on freeing Brunson had backfired, encouraging Turkish officials to think: “‘This guy’s really valuable and we can get a lot for him.'”

For Turkey, “a lot” would be the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and denies Turkish allegations that he engineered the coup attempt, which killed nearly 300 people.

Turkey has also criticized the case against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, an official at Turkey’s state-controlled Halkbank who was jailed in the U.S. for helping Iran avoid American sanctions.

Last year, Erdogan floated a possible trade in which the U.S. sends Gulen to Turkey in exchange for the release of Brunson, now under house arrest in the city of Izmir. However, comments on Monday by Ismail Rustu Cirit, the Turkish judge, reflected an official view that Turkey’s sovereignty in the matter is paramount.

“The only and absolute power that can rule on the arrest of a foreign citizen in Izmir and decisions about his trial are the independent and impartial courts,” Cirit said.

The European Union has urged Turkey to guarantee the impartiality of its courts, a key requirement in an EU candidacy bid that stalled years ago.

Judicial reforms more than a decade ago, in the early years of Erdogan’s rule, reduced the power of the military and moved Turkey closer to European standards. But backsliding followed, amid increasing accusations that the ruling party was using the courts to muzzle opponents.

In another twist, internal conflict erupted at the end of 2013 when prosecutors launched an investigation of alleged corruption at the top of the government, a move described by Erdogan’s camp as a power grab by Gulen supporters.

Detainees remain an irritant between Germany and Turkey, which freed Die Welt journalist Deniz Yucel and activist Peter Steudtner. But Turkey still holds a number of Germans for what Berlin considers political reasons.

Turkey, meanwhile, has bemoaned a Greek court’s decision to grant asylum to some servicemen who fled to Greece a day after Turkey’s coup attempt. In a reverse scenario, Turkey would never “shelter” coup plotters acting against Greece, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

Turkey doesn’t have “very much” to show for what may be opportunistic attempts to use detainees as leverage with other countries, according to Eissenstat.

He said there could be a parallel with similar cases in Iran or the former Soviet Union, in which “local officials would sometimes make decisions and then the central government would decide, ‘OK, how does this fit into a larger policy?'”
…

Former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has compared Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for Brexit to putting the country’s constitution in a “suicide vest” and handing the detonator to the European Union.

The attack, and Johnson’s choice of language, widened the divide in the governing Conservative Party over Brexit.

Johnson, a strong supporter of Brexit, quit May’s government in July after rejecting her proposal for close economic ties with the bloc after the U.K. leaves next year. His article in the Mail on Sunday ramped up speculation that he plans to challenge her leadership.

But some Conservative colleagues condemned his language.

Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan tweeted that the comments marked “one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics” and should be “the political end of Boris Johnson.”
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Combined support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative alliance and its partners, the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), has hit a

record low for any such “grand coalition” government, according to a survey published Sunday.

Germany’s two biggest and most established parties have had a difficult summer, blighted by infighting over immigration that is flaring up again after violent right-wing protests in the eastern city of Chemnitz followed the fatal stabbing of a German man, for which two migrants were arrested.

The survey by pollster Emnid for the weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag had support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), down by 1 percentage point on the week, to 29 percent.

In last September’s federal election, the CDU/CSU bloc won 32.9 percent of the vote.

The poll put support for the SPD down 2 percentage points to 17 percent. In the last election, the SPD won 20.5 percent of the vote.

Their combined score of 46 percent was the lowest for any CDU/CSU/SPD coalition — a combination that also held power in 2005-09 and 2013-17 — in Emnid’s poll for the Bild am Sonntag.

The pollster surveyed 2,472 voters between August 30 and September 5.

Support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) was unchanged from the previous week at 15 percent, the poll showed. The far-left Linke gained a point to 10 percent.

The ecologist Greens were unchanged at 14 percent and the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) remained at 9 percent.

Support for other parties rose 2 percentage points to 6 percent.
…

Swedes vote on Sunday in a tight election dominated by fears about asylum and welfare, with the populist, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats vying to become the biggest party in a country long seen as a bastion of economic stability and liberal values.

Far-right parties have made spectacular gains throughout Europe in recent years following a refugee crisis sparked by civil war in Syria and conflicts in Afghanistan and parts of Africa.

In Sweden, the influx of 163,000 asylum seekers in 2015 has polarized voters, fractured the cozy political consensus and could give the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in the neo-Nazi fringe, a veto over which parties form the next government.

‘Sense of discontent’

“Traditional parties have failed to respond to the sense of discontent that exists,” Magnus Blomgren, a social scientist at Umea University. “That discontent maybe isn’t directly related to unemployment or the economy, but simply a loss of faith in the political system. Sweden isn’t alone in this.”

The center-left bloc, uniting the minority governing Social Democrat and Green parties with the Left Party, is backed by about 40 percent of voters, recent opinion polls indicate, with a slim lead over the center-right Alliance bloc.

The Sweden Democrats, who want the country to leave the European Union and put a freeze on immigration, have about 17 percent support, up from the 13 percent they scored in the 2014 vote, opinion polls suggest.

But their support was widely underestimated before the last election and some online surveys give them as much as 25 percent support, a result that would most likely make them the biggest party, dethroning the Social Democrats for the first time in a century.

That could weaken the Swedish crown in the short term, but analysts do not see any long-term effect on markets from the election as economic growth is strong, government coffers are well-stocked and there is broad agreement about the thrust of economic policy.

Euroskeptic voices

Sweden has flirted with populism before. New Democracy, founded by an aristocrat and a record producer, won nearly 7 percent of the vote in 1991 promising strict immigration policies, cheaper alcohol and free parking, before crashing out of parliament only three years later.

But if the Sweden Democrats get a quarter of the vote, it would be a sensation in a country described as a “humanitarian superpower” by then-Moderate Party Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in 2014.

It would also make them the biggest populist party in the Nordic region, topping the Danish People’s Party, which got 21 percent support in 2015, and trump the 12.6 percent for the far-right Alternative for Germany, which swept into the Bundestag in 2017.

With an eye on the European Parliament elections next year, Brussels policymakers are watching the vote in Sweden closely, concerned that a nation with impeccable democratic credentials could add to the growing chorus of euroskepticism in the EU.

Sweden took in more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe in 2015, magnifying worries about a welfare system that many voters already believe is in crisis.

Lengthening queues for critical operations, shortages of doctors and teachers, and a police service that has failed to deal with inner-city gang violence have shaken faith in the “Swedish model,” built on a promise of comprehensive welfare and social inclusion.

Akesson’s objectives

Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson has labeled the vote a choice between immigration and welfare.

He has also promised to sink any government that refuses to give his party a say in policy, particularly on immigration.

Mainstream politicians have so far rebuffed him. But with some kind of cooperation between parties in the center-left and center-right blocs the only other alternative out of the current political deadlock, analysts believe Akesson may yet end up with some influence on policy.

With both options unpalatable to the traditional players, forming a government could take weeks.

Polling stations open at 8 a.m. (0600 GMT) and close at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), with exit polls set be published by Sweden’s two main broadcasters around that time. Results from the vote count will become clear later in the evening.
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British anti-terrorism officers were helping to investigate a knife attack in a northern English town Saturday in which one man was injured, although police said they were keeping an open mind.

A 28-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, they said, after what officers earlier called a “serious incident” in Barnsley that resulted in the man suffering minor injuries.

A kitchen knife had been recovered and was being forensically examined, South Yorkshire police said.

“At this stage we are keeping an open mind as to the motivation … we are receiving support from detectives at Counter Terrorism Policing North East,” the police said in a statement.

“The woman is currently being assessed from a mental health perspective,” the police said.

An investigation had begun to establish whether it was an isolated incident and whether the suspect acted alone.

Sections of the town center shopping area where the incident occurred were still cordoned off Saturday as forensics officers clad in white suits gathered evidence.

Police released no further details of the incident, but urged the public to remain vigilant and appealed for witnesses.

“We understand that this morning’s incident will have been distressing and shocking for those in the town center,” said Assistant Chief Constable Tim Forbes. ” … Rest assured we are working relentlessly to piece together

what happened.”
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