EU foreign ministers to give green light for tough Iran sanctions. AFP reports:
The European Union will hit Iran with tough sanctions against its vital oil and gas industry on Monday in a bid to lure Tehran back to the negotiating table over its disputed nuclear programme. (…)
The new EU sanctions include a ban on the sale of equipment, technology and services to Iran’s energy sector, hitting activities in refining, liquefied natural gas, exploration and production, diplomats said.
The EU will ban dual-use goods that can be used for conventional weapons. It will also step up vigilance of the activities of Iranian-connected banks operating in the EU and bar them from setting up branches.
“A number of (EU) member states have had to overcome considerable problems with their economic interests in order to adopt this package,” the European diplomat said. “It will be in some way the most substantive and far-reaching autonomous sanctions package which the EU has adopted against Iran or any other country,” he added. (…)
“These sanctions are surprisingly strong,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the nonproliferation programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “They go much further than the UN sanctions.”
See also a report at the EU Observer.
Iran chief nuclear negotiator to meet with Ashton. The New York Times reports:
Iran has agreed to meet with the European Union’s foreign affairs chief in early September, after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Speaking before a lunch on Sunday with his counterparts from Brazil and Iran, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said that Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, would meet the European Union official, Catherine Ashton, most likely in Istanbul, according to Turkey’s semi official Anatolian News Agency.
Ms. Ashton extended the invitation to meet Mr. Jalili last month, after Turkey and Brasil negotiated a nuclear swap deal with Iran that foresees the return of 2,646 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Turkey for 265 pounds of 20 percent-enriched uranium. Ms. Ashton will represent a group known as the P5+1 nations — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany — all of which remain highly suspicious of the intent of Iran’s nuclear program.
EU foreign ministers seek to end division on Kosovo, AFP reports. The ICJ ruling has put pressure on the five EU member states that do not yet recognise Kosovo. EU foreign ministers will discuss the issue today:
The European Union hopes to finally speak with one voice on Kosovo after a UN court backed Pristina’s independence claim, piling pressure on the five EU states that still refuse to recognise it. Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia and Romania are the only countries in the 27-nation bloc to have refused to recognise Kosovo’s secession from Serbia, fearing it would inspire other separatist movements. (…)
The ruling has “put European nations that still do not recognise Kosovo in a difficult position,” a high-ranking European diplomat said on condition of anonymity. Another diplomat said: “The debate on the recognition of Kosovo will restart with the conclusions of the court.” “There is now room for manoeuvre for a recognition (by the five EU states),” the diplomat said ahead of a meeting of foreign ministers on Monday during which Kosovo will be discussed.
Spain, Cyprus and Romania reiterated their refusal to recognise Kosovo, but pressure is mounting.
“Kosovo has been functioning as an independent state for two-and-a-half years. I encourage other states that have not so far recognised Kosovo now to do so,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague urged.
The EU’s 27 states did overcome their differences to release a single statement after the UN court ruling saying the future of Serbia and Kosovo alike “lies in the European Union” and offering to broker talks. “The clear message which comes out of that statement… is that the accession paths of both countries are linked and the EU wants to help them both move forward,” another EU diplomat said. Getting to an agreement on the wording of text “wasn’t easy,” he said. “But I think the fact that in the end we got the agreement of the 27 shows that difficult though it is, the EU recognises… it needs to get its act together on Kosovo and on Serbia.” (Read the statement here.)
It will take time before any of the five EU stragglers will join the rest of the bloc since they are not legally-bound to follow the UN court’s opinion, an analyst said. “They still have the option. They can stay in their status quo position or they can move. It’s an open question,” said Michael Emerson, senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think tank.
The UN court’s opinion could help to resolve the debate in the five countries. “Of those countries, if some of them have internal debates for or against, this could encourage them to take a new and positive decision to recognise Kosovo,” Emerson said. “One or two of them may follow this course in a year or so,” he said, arguing that Slovakia and Romania could be the first to change their minds since they do not face the same separatist pressures as the others.
Moving towards a recognition of Kosovo would be hardest for Cyprus, an island divided between a Turkish south and Greek north, and Spain, which faces its own separatist pressures in Catalonia and the Basque region, he said.
European governments sought to ease concerns that other separatist movements could seize on the UN court opinion. “It’s a unique decision in a unique situation with a unique historical background,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters in Nicosia after talks with his Greek Cypriot counterpart, Markos Kyprianou. “It has nothing to do with any other cases in the world,” he said.
EU foreign ministers to put pressure on Sudan. AFP reports:
The European Union will urge Sudan on Monday to cooperate with the International Criminal Court which has warrants out for the arrest of President Omar al-Bashir, according to a draft text. The draft, obtained by AFP and expected to be approved by EU foreign ministers Monday, comes after Bashir travelled to Chad this week in defiance of warrants for his arrest on charges of genocide and war crimes in Darfur.
The document “recalls that war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide are the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and that impunity for these crimes can never be accepted.” “The council (of foreign ministers) reiterates its support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and calls upon the government of Sudan to cooperate fully with the ICC in accordance with its obligations under international law,” it says. (…)
The EU will also urge all parties to speed up preparations, including voter registration, for a referendum on the independence of south Sudan in January 2011.
The ministers want to send an EU election observer mission and will voice “concern about a pattern of increasing political repression and the deteriorating environment for civil and political rights in all areas of Sudan.” “It is, in this respect, deeply concerned about the recent closure of newspapers and the arrests of a number of journalists,” according to the document.
Other topics on the agenda of today’s EU foreign ministers meeting (”Foreign Affairs Council”): Besides Iran sanctions, Kosovo in the light of the ICJ’s ruling and Sudan, EU foreign ministers will discuss Bosnia, Georgia and the Middle East peace process, as well as the strategic partnerships with India and Brazil.
New documents on Pakistani cooperation with Taliban. The New York Times reports:
Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.
Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.
Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place. But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable. While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.
The classified documents on the Afghan war have been leaked to Spiegel (a short summary here), the Guardian (a comprehensive special here) and the New York Times (special here). In a first reaction, Laura Rozen writes at Politico:
Some 92,000 secret U.S. military documents on Afghanistan and Pakistan acquired by a controversial whistleblower site earlier this year have emerged – in reports published Sunday night in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The takeout, from a first, fast reading: the U.S. is frustrated by evidence of continued Pakistani support for Afghan insurgents, and the war is not going well, according to the soldiers fighting it.
Neither of those facts is breaking news to anyone who’s been paying attention to the war, but the coordinated delivery of the stories to outlets in three of the largest troop-contributing nations to Afghanistan and sourced by the media-savvy WikiLeaks suggests the goal here is to catalyze an emerging consensus against the war.
Leslie Gelb comments at the Daily Beast:
What do the secret documents released by WikiLeaks tell us about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan? It has to be said right off that they don’t tell us anything important we didn’t already know. There have been “informed” stories for years detailing how Pakistani military intelligence has been providing arms, money, and intelligence to the Afghan Taliban, who in turn have been killing American soldiers.
So, why are these leaked military and intelligence documents now threatening to shake the very foundations of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan? Because it’s now much more difficult to deny or dodge the truths that we’ve all been well aware of.
Character of EU foreign policy. Timothy Garton Ash in a discussion at Chatham House (transcript here):
We’re actually light years away from the point at which the EU foreign policy mechanisms will actually stop people doing things they want to do. If major European member states in a matter important to them in the course of relationships, they won’t be stopped, they’ll go on doing what they want. What these institutions give you is the potential on a whole slate of sort of sort of middle range issues where most member states either broadly agree or don’t know what they think. And many member states on many, many issues don’t really know what they think. That’s the nature of the European Union, to forge a common analysis, to identify your common interests, your common instruments, and then to go forward. So it will be an enhancer in that respect.
From the think tanks: J. Scott Carpenter, Racing Against Time: Reform in North Africa and Transatlantic Strategies. GMF, here — Nicoletta Pirozzi, The EU’s Contribution to the Effectiveness of the UN Security Council: Representation, Coordination and Outreach. IAI, here.
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