UN Iran sanctions vote on Wednesday. Politico’s Laura Rozen reports:
“The goal is Wednesday,” one European diplomat said of the anticipated vote date. “Vote is likely Wednesday,” another diplomatic source in New York said.
The text of the sanctions resolution has been agreed on and the accompanying annexes to the resolution detailing the specific entities that will be subject to sanctions under the new resolution are expected to be agreed to today, the European diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Twelve votes on the 15-member council have been secured. Unclear as yet is whether Brazil, Turkey and possibly Lebanon will vote against the resolution or abstain. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to meet with her Brazilian counterpart on the sidelines of an Organization of American States taking place in Peru on the issue.
The draft resolution has been leaked, it can be downloaded on Rozen’s blog: here.
Options for Gaza. Martin Indyk (Brookings) talks with Spiegel:
Q: Will the Americans insist on an end to the Gaza embargo, a step Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already ruled out?
Indyk: That is unlikely because the US does not have something that it could put in its place to deal with Israel’s genuine security concern about Gaza again becoming a launch pad for attacks. The short term solution is rather to get Israel to allow more goods to flow into Gaza through overland passages while maintaining the naval blockade. But the longer term answer should be to try to work out a package deal in which the Hamas regime commits not to smuggle arms into Gaza and to prevent violent attacks against Israel from Gaza. In return, Israel would open the passages and allows the free flow of goods and people. If Hamas breaks its commitments, it would then be to blame for Israel closing the passages again.
See also a brief by Michele Dunne (Carnegie) about how the West should handle Palestinien politics.
Plus: the EU Observer on how EU states are competing over Israel policy.
US getting deeper involved in Sudan. Washington fears a return of civil war. Josh Rogin reports at Foreign Policy:
On Wednesday, Biden will become the senior-most Obama administration official to meet with Southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir. The purpose of the meeting will be “to talk about the necessary steps to fully implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and to plan for post-referendum Sudan,” a senior administration official told The Cable, adding that the conversation will be “mostly about the future of southern Sudan.” That’s an indication that the Obama team is getting concerned that the January 2011 elections, when the South is widely expected to vote to separate from the North, a result that could spark violence or even a return to civil war.
There are Sudan meetings woven throughout Biden’s seven-day journey through Africa. He already spoke about the future of southern Sudan with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Monday in Sharm el-Sheikh, it’s sure to come up in his Tuesday meetings with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, and the vice president’s office has said Sudan will be at the top of the agenda during Biden’s meeting Thursday with former South African President Thabo Mbeki.
The elevation of the Sudan issue to the top levels of the White House is exactly what leading Sudan activists have been demanding of the administration for months. They are fed up with what they see as deep divisions inside the Obama team about how to approach Sudan. (…)
The divisions inside the administration are not new, but were reinforced last month during what multiple administration sources describe as a vigorous and heated internal debate over whether or not to send a U.S. government representative to the re-inauguration ceremony for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
According to UN, Darfur sees the bloodiest month in two years, Reuters reports.
Meanwhile, the European Commission has announced that it will provide €46 million to the World Food Programme to address urgent humanitarian needs in Sudan (press release here). Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Kristalina Georgieva said:
“Humanitarian needs have increased dramatically in Sudan, so additional funding is vital. I am deeply concerned about the situation of civilians affected by the recent fighting in some areas of South Darfur, particularly Jebel Marra, and parts of West Darfur. Several thousands of people have been displaced and urgently need our assistance and, worryingly, humanitarian agencies have no access to them.”
The allocation of €46 million is part of the Commission’s 2010 Global Plan for Sudan, worth €114 million.
Misreading Iran? Foreign Policy has asked “seven prominent Iranian-Americans, deeply immersed in both the English- and Persian-language media, to look through the fog of journalism at what actually happened in Tehran — and why so many of us got it so wrong”. Read their contributions here.
EU leaders confused? The Economist’s David Rennie (Charlemagne) writes:
Much-maligned markets are sometimes right even when they are wrong. And where markets are right is that Europe is sending confused signals about whether it thinks the euro can be saved with belt-tightening and discipline, or whether the currency will only survive if Europe moves to a whole new level of integration, including pooled borrowing and big fiscal transfers. And that is because EU leaders themselves are confused.
I have been spending a lot of time in recent days talking to senior officials from different countries, asking them to clarify what they think is meant by the “European economic governance” that everyone says is needed. None of them can give a clear answer because, so far, nobody knows.
EU’s austerity measures. The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt says:
That is the unknown risk: will these cutbacks choke off a fragile recovery in Europe where growth is currently running at an anaemic 0.2%? Economists disagree on what impact these measures will have.
What has changed in Europe. John Vinocur writes in the New York Times:
Most significantly, markets have become the daily judges of European policy, probity and sovereign debt. (…) Because E.U. members were caught misrepresenting their finances with the passive acceptance of France and Germany for a decade, no response or solution that is based on a statement of intention rather than a legally binding undertaking — the highly improbable establishment of an independent E.U. agency’s control of national budgets, for example — is likely to lead the markets away from their hair-trigger surveillance of the euro and Europe’s solidity.
New EU-Russia security committee. The joint German-Russian proposal gets a mixed reception in Brussels, according to the EU Observer :
Senior officials in the EU Council and the EU Commission told EUobserver that they had not been formally consulted by Germany or Russia prior to the announcement. But the idea did not come out of the blue either. “We had heard things vaguely from Berlin over the past couple of weeks,” one official said.
A senior diplomat from one EU state said that Russia’s willingness to work more closely with the EU on conflict resolution is “very positive.” The source pointed to Russian air support for EU member states’ soldiers in Chad last year and noted that the recent EU-Russia summit in Rostov-on-Don also made progress in the field by securing a bilateral agreement on sharing classified documents.
The German-Russian proposal would another layer of meetings to an already heavy EU-Russia diplomatic agenda, prompting some EU countries to question its added value, however. The EU and Russia already meet twice a year at summit level. Ms Ashton and Mr Lavrov meet at least three times a year. The chair of the EU’s Political and Security Committee meets with Russia’s ambassador to the EU once a month. Numerous expert-level events, such as a twice yearly human rights dialogue, also contribute to making the EU-Russia bilateral calendar the busiest of all its relations with third countries. “It [the new proposal] is interesting. But we already have multiple formats,” a diplomat from another EU country told this website.
See also an earlier article on the proposal at the EU Observer.
New diplomatic service ready in December? The EU Observer reports:
Officials working on the creation of the EU’s diplomatic service believe it could be on its feet by 1 December (…), several months later than the original timetable. The lengthy delay has been due to the difficulties of getting agreement from all the different sides – member states, the European Commission and MEPs – on the new body, which is meant to give coherency to EU foreign policy.
The European Parliament is last party still to agree to the blueprint for the corps, first published by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in March and endorsed by the commission and member states the following month. Sources close to the negotiations, due to continue on Tuesday (8 June), believe that MEPs may be ready to signal their broad agreement on Thursday at a meeting of the EU assembly’s political leaders.
“At this stage, what success would look like is some sort of signal from the conference of presidents [on Thursday] that this is the right ball park and these are the ‘grandes lignes’ of the eventual deal,” said the contact, adding that “talks have been going well.”
This would allow Ms Ashton to start advertising some of the senior jobs that are coming up for grabs. These include 32 heads of delegation to be filled in July and a further 22 such jobs, part of the 2011 rotation of delegation heads, to be decided in November.
A decision also has to be taken on the EU’s 11 special representatives (EUSRs) to regions such as central Asia and countries such as Sudan. The group’s mandate, already extended once, runs out at the end of August. Ms Ashton is keen to rejig the system, keeping some special envoys and creating new ones, but scrapping others where the job could equally be done by the heads of the EU embassies. (…)
An European Parliament official close to the talks expressed irritation that parliament is being portrayed as dragging its feet. “We only got the 10-point political declaration [on accountability] from [Ms Ashton] three weeks ago when we asked for for it three months ago,” said the official. He also noted that while there have been several of these talks at technical level, the EU foreign policy chief has only herself been present once. “There are several issues that are important to us still open,” he added.
DPA adds that, according to a diplomat, “Ashton is considering appointing an envoy for the whole Balkan region, and scrapping EUSRs for the South Caucasus region, Moldova and the Middle East process.”
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