In a joint editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nikolas Sarkozy called for new overarching price regulations in the international crude oil market. Pointing to oil price volatility as a main cause for the global economic downturn, the two world leaders argued that any further instability in the near future, “could undermine confidence just as we are pushing for recovery.” Both Brown and Sarkozy are currently in Italy for the G8 summit, where they are expected to push for full cooperation on setting an acceptable price range for oil—one that would neither be high enough to risk “destroying economic growth potentials” nor low enough to “to lead to a slump in investment, as happened in the 1990s.” Specifically, they called upon the International Energy Forum, the world’s largest group of energy ministers, to take up the project. The plea from Brown and Sarkozy comes just a day after U.S federal regulators announced that they were considering new limits on speculative trading in oil futures, something the Obama administration hopes might also calm the market.
According to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, a militant warlord and a 20-person gang were captured by a joint Ingushetian and Chechen police operation aimed at constricting a recent upsurge of violence in the Northern Caucasus. The announcement draws attention to recent attacks in both Russian republics. Yesterday, a bomb planted in a garbage can in Grozny, the Chechen capital, killed nine individuals, including two police officers. On Saturday, nine policemen were killed and ten others wounded in a militant attack on a police motorcade in Ingushetia. Several experts have speculated that the rise of attacks “threatens to undermine the whole system” of Russian governance in the Northern Caucasus, but that any Moscow-led involvement in combating militants would only lead to “a worsening of the situation.” Russian news agency Ria Novosti notes that the violence in the Caucasus has spiked since Moscow’s decision on April 16 to formally end a decade-long counterterrorism operation in Chechnya.
The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate human rights violations that occured during Liberia’s 14 years of on-and-off civil war, recommended that President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf be barred from public office for three decades for financial support she gave to rebel groups. In a February hearing before the commission, Sirleaf admitted to giving up to $10,000 to former president and warlord Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, a controversial militant organization responsible for countless massacres and political assassinations throughout the years of fighting. Sirleaf asked the commission for leniency, noting that she had never been a member of Taylor’s party and, as an expatriate when she sent the money, naïvely thought it would be designated for humanitarian assistance. “If there is anything that I need to apologize for to this nation, it is to apologize for being fooled by Mr. Taylor in giving any kind of support to him,” said Sirleaf. The first democratically elected female president, Sirleaf established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to, “promote national peace, security, unity, and reconciliation.”
Read more about Liberia and the presidency of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Ruthie Ackerman’s article, Rebuilding Liberia, One Brick at a Time, in the Summer ’09 issue of World Policy Journal.