This article was orginally published on Syria Deeply.
By Khaled Al Khatib and Mais Istanbelli
Jonathan Power: Where To Go on Holiday…. Travel Tips from a “Mad Dad”
My eighteen-year-old daughter asked me recently about where she can safely travel when she finishes school in June and starts a three-month holiday before going to university in September.
“The Muslim countries or Japan,” I replied.
She was quite taken aback. At school her friends talk about the United States, Australia, Thailand, or South America. But I emphatically said, “no, I don’t want you to go there,” and then explained why her mother and I felt so strongly.
I pulled out the figures from the new 2009 United Nations World Development Report, which compares murder rates from all the countries. Every country—apart from those in the European Union—measure rape, theft, break-ins, and other crimes in different ways. Some figures are accurate, some seem like they’ve been drawn out of a hat.
But most countries report their murder rate pretty accurately. There may be under-counting in places with civil strive, as in Sri Lanka, where murder and the killings of war can blur into each other. Yet, even in most difficult cases, like Russia, press reports can help balance the official figures.
To cut a long story short, I would gladly let her go to Egypt, which has the world’s lowest murder rate—at 0.4 per 100,000 population, although Japan closely follows at 0.5. Other Muslim, mainly Arab, countries follow next, all with less than 1 murder per 100,000 people: the United Arab Emirates, including Dubai and Oman at 0.6; Saudi Arabia at 0.9; Bahrain at 1; and Jordan at 0.9. Indonesia, with all its political troubles, has but 1.1 murders per 100,000 citizens.
Outside the Arab countries, the Scandinavian countries are the safest. Norway and Denmark come in at 0.8 and Iceland at 1. Sweden breaks the Scandinavian success rate with a poor 2.4, but in Europe, Holland and Ireland score well too.
So, daughter: there’s the list that I approve—and that your mother has been persuaded to approve. Ironically, for us, many of countries with high murder rates are of a Christian heritage—the United States at 5.6 murders per 100,000; Mexico at 13; Russia at 19.9; South Africa at 47.5; and Colombia at a staggering 62.7.
We can put India on the positive side of the ledger: it’s a big, very diverse country, and parts of it, like West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta, are very safe despite its rating of 3.7 murders per 100,000 population.
You might argue that I’ve underestimated, bent, or stretched the statistics—everyone knows there have been many killings of tourists in Egypt—because I’m not including terrorist killings. Egypt although, I admit, has real risks. So let’s strike that out. (It reminds me of Northern Ireland during the “troubles,” when it had the lowest crime rate in Europe but the fighting was pretty horrendous.)
Your “mad dad” has been to them all, I know, but journalists are stupid and take too many risks.
Peter Wilson: Those in Glass Houses…
Hopes that an Obama presidency could thaw ties between the United States and Venezuela are quickly receding after President Hugo Chávez called the U.S. president an “ignoramus” this past weekend.
Chávez went on the offensive Sunday, during his weekly broadcast over remarks President Barack Obama made two months ago criticizing the Venezuelan leader for supporting Colombian guerillas and being an obstacle to regional progress.
The new Chávez offensive coincides with stepped up attacks against the country’s opposition and fresh overtures to Moscow, including the offer of Venezuelan airfields for Russian long-range bombers. It also dents rumors of an impending thaw in ties between the two countries after Chávez’s meeting last week with U.S. Congressman William Delahunt.
Chávez’s blunt talk may be intended to take away some of Obama’s thunder at next month’s Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, when the two leaders will be jockeying for position and press attention.
The Venezuelan head of state, who wants to be acknowledged as a regional leader, may also be smarting after Obama met Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva earlier this month, signaling that the new U.S. administration’s principal focus in Latin America is, for now, Brazil.
Chávez, who just won voter approval last month to abolish the country’s presidential term limits, may also be attempting a preemptive strike as differences with Washington are bound to increase in the coming weeks. (The de facto leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Manuel Rosales, is expected to be arrested for alleged corruption within days, which will inevitably raise political tensions in the country and raise charges of political repression.)
Chávez has also sought to limit the power of opposition governors, who won five states in last year’s election, taking control of the three largest, as well as Caracas and Maracaibo, the two biggest cities. Now, however, the country’s National Assembly, which is overwhelmingly controlled by the president’s followers, has talked about creating a post of vice president to oversee the country’s capital—which would in effect strip a major Chávez critic, Mayor Antonio Ledezma, of any real power.
To further bind the hands of the opposition, the assembly also rewrote the country´s Decentralization Law, stripping local states of their control over ports, airports, and highways, an important source of revenue. Chávez seems to be hoping that the cut off in revenue to opposition-led states will lead to a voter revolt and the possible recall of anti-Chávez governors.
Meanwhile, the president is stepping up efforts to dampen dissent as the economy falters in the face of falling revenue from oil sales. He earlier removed police, hospitals, and schools from control of regional authorities. Such steps, which have been widely criticized by the country’s opposition as well as international organizations, will likely be questioned by President Obama in future international forums.
Given the war of words that may ensue, Chávez may think it better to step away now from pursuing any thaw in ties, especially as the chances of success seem to be diminishing.
Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape
When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.
Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.
The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.
Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming.
Zachary Karabell: Enough Already
The financial markets are again getting pummeled, both domestically and globally. The nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed with fanfare by President Obama has done little to alter the mood. In fact, if you read through financial websites and assorted blogs on politics, economics, or anything related to those, you will find a nearly endless sea of misery. The level of anger, pessimism, despair, and sheer hopelessness seems to reach new highs every week, in inverse relation to the movement of global equity prices and the size of individual retirement accounts.
But bad fundamentals are only one aspect of what is going on. What makes the present that much worse is a complete meltdown of confidence about the very possibility of a more balanced future. And it’s not just an erosion of confidence. It’s the flourishing of our destructive instincts, the opposite of the “better angels of our nature,” the demons, the whispers in the night that all is about to go up in flames.
We all have our fears, whether we admit them or not. But this has gone too far. In the financial world, there is a game of one-upmanship to find more dire adjectives, and any who dissent and suggest that yes, there will be a tomorrow, and yes, there will be a future of growth, moderate and different but still motion forward and movement upward, they are treated with contempt. Indeed, contempt on the order of those made to walk the streets during the Cultural Revolution with dunce caps and signs of shame around their necks.
Those who bet that the market will go down until there’s nothing left to lose, who are convinced that value will be permanently wiped out—the shorts and the traders—they are enjoying their moment in the sun, and some are undoubtedly profiting from the collective misery. There’s nothing wrong with that in small doses, and almost everyone can benefit from hedging their bets in the market. But you can’t be short forever, and you can’t ultimately profit from everything going down. A few can make money for a while, and if you believe that it’s all survival of the fittest, then you probably don’t care if 99 percent suffer as long as you’re part of the 1 percent that prospers. The sheer delight in “burn, baby, burn” is hardly unique to our age. We’ve been there before, and it leads nowhere, except to a whole world in flames.