Originally published on National Public Radio’s NPR.org

by Valentina Pasquali

On a recent afternoon, nearly 100 people gather at Istanbul’s Galatasaray Square for the weekly demonstration of a group known as the Saturday Mothers.

Kneeling on the pavement, they protest the disappearance of their relatives, mostly ethnic Kurds, caught up in a decades-long fight between the Kurdish separatist movement and the Turkish government.

The protesters hold red carnations and photos of their loved ones, most of whom disappeared in the early to mid-1990s. They hold the Turkish government responsible for the disappearances of about 1,200 Kurds.

The protests started about 15 years ago, but they were halted in 1999 and resumed only recently.

This year, a court case brought by state prosecutors against high-level military and government officials inspired the Saturday Mothers to come back. The prominent Turks are accused of plotting a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Sebla Arcan, an economist and a leading member of Turkey’s Human Rights Association, believes that some of the military people on trial in the plot to overthrow Erdogan’s government are also responsible for the disappearances in the 1990s.

“We want the people now under custody to also be tried for the disappearances,” Arcan says.

Turkish judges are yet to be convinced of the link between the disappearances and the court case. But the uproar generated across Turkey by the trial has given the families of the disappeared renewed courage to speak out.

“We thought of this case as an opportunity. And that’s why we started the protests again — to show we haven’t forgotten the people who were made to disappear and the people who were responsible for these disappearances,” Arcan adds.

The Kurdish movement has spent decades fighting for the rights of Turkey’s largest minority: Kurds account for about 18 percent of Turkey’s population of 77 million. In the 1980s, a splinter group — the Kurdistan People’s Party, or the PKK — took to the mountains in the Southeast and started an armed struggle against Turkey’s central government, with the intent of carving out a separate state for Kurds. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization in the United States and Europe.

Turkey’s security apparatus responded forcefully to the PKK, raiding villages throughout the Kurdish region.

Many Kurds, such as Kasim Alpsoy, were caught in the middle of that fight. Kasim went missing in 1994 from Adana, a city in southern Turkey, where he was a worker in a leather factory. His son, Mehmet, recalls the day.

“There was a police raid at 6 a.m. on our house, and my father was taken into custody,” Mehmet says. “He was questioned and tortured. But then he was released. Only they kept his identification card and told him to come get it the next day.”

According to Mehmet, when Kasim Alpsoy went back for his ID, he disappeared inside the secret services building. His brother-in-law, who had accompanied him, waited outside for hours, to no avail.

“My uncle came back home but not my father. We never saw him again,” Mehmet adds.

Mehmet says his father was sympathetic to, but was not a member of, the Kurdish movement. He also says he believes the government took his father because of his ethnicity.

When the protests to prod the government to investigate the disappearances first started in the mid-1990s, they quickly attracted national attention. As the state took notice, however, things soon got ugly.

“We were dragged on the streets, were attacked with pepper gas,” says Arcan, whose organization co-sponsors the Saturday Mothers’ sit-ins. “It came to the point where it started to threaten the health of the relatives of the disappeared people. That’s why we had to stop [in 1999],” she adds.

Since the demonstrations have restarted, one missing person’s case is presented each week during the rally.

This day it is the turn of Seyhan Dogan, a Kurdish boy rounded up during a police raid in his home in the city of Mardin-Dargecit in southeastern Turkey.

“Seyhan was 13 years old on Oct. 29, 1995,” says an activist reading the boy’s story into a loudspeaker. “He was arrested at 3 o’clock in the morning along with his brother Hazni, who was 9 years old at the time.”

Dogan, the activist says, was never seen again.

For Mehmet Alpsoy, who lost his father in 1994, the matter is simple.

“I am here because even after 15 years, the people who are responsible for the disappearances are still free,” Mehmet says. “I want them to be found and tried.”

Originally published in the Miami Herald’s blog dedicated to LGBT issues

Istanbul – Mirroring Turkey’s difficult yet unyielding progress towards equality for all its citizens, Istanbul’s sixth annual gay pride parade took place successfully Sunday after policemen in combat gear initially threatened to prevent the participants from marching down Istiklal Caddesi, the city’s central pedestrian street. After much quarreling and an hour’s delay, the marchers – numbering about 3000 – were finally allowed onto Istiklal. Colorful but definitely not as bold as fellow demonstrators in New York or San Francisco, they chanted political slogans and sang cheerful songs, while holding signs and the traditional rainbow flag. Tourists and curious spectators watched the parade making its way to Galatasaray Square. Heavy humidity leftover from the afternoon’s quick Mediterranean storm had everybody gasping for air, while the old-time tram that still whistles along Istiklal struggled to find a breach in the crowd.

Key to the resolution of the initial dispute with the police force was, perhaps, the intervention of two foreign g

uests attending the parade. The presence of Mechtild Rawert, Social Democrat (SPD) MP from Germany’s National Parliament, and Stuart Milk, nephew of Harvey Milk – the slain gay-rights leader from the ‘70s –and himself an internationally renowned gay rights activist, lent an international touch to the event and made sure that the police relented eventually.

Between Turkey’s bid to gain full European Union membership and its overall effort to present itself as the beacon of modernity in the greater Middle East, authorities here certainly did not want international headlines on the country’s controversial human rights record. “The fight for human rights in Turkey is a key issue towards EU membership. I have personally witnessed the progress achieved in the last few years, but there is more to be done,” said Rawert, the MP from Germany.

For Milk — who attended other events part of a weeklong series of panel discussions, award ceremonies, and film screenings culminating in Sunday’s parade — Turkey represents a great opportunity for the LGBT movement worldwide. “I think Turkey has a tremendous potential to act as a modern, civil and human rights bridge between west and east,” Mr. Milk said. “I came because I believe that success of the LGBT community here will resonate throughout the world,” he added.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey — the country’s Ottoman rulers legalized it in 1858 — it remains a taboo in this conservative Muslim-majority society. Gay men and women who choose to come out of the closet risk being shunned by their families and friends, and fear discrimination. As a result, most Turkish homosexuals still choose not to disclose their true sexual preferences.

In 2005, a survey of the LGBT community in Istanbul conducted by LAMBDA – one of the two oldest gay rights organizations in Turkey — found that 83% of those interviewed preferred to hide their sexual orientation from all or some of their family members. 40% of interviewees also confessed to reluctantly forcing themselves into heterosexual relationships.

“There is discrimination everywhere, it’s hard to describe. It’s in the insults and the general unwelcoming atmosphere,” explained pride participant Zefer Çeler. A thirty-five years old professor of politics at Istanbul’s Yildiz University, Çeler has even seen friends lose their jobs due to their sexual preferences.

“When I walk down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand, or if I ever kiss her in public, people will always comment, sometime they can even try to hurt you,” said Burcu Ersoy, a twenty-nine years old activist who came from Ankara to attend the parade.

Turkey’s LGBT movement has achieved some success in the last couple of decades and they are now better able to organize. “I’d call the 1990s the decade of the movement’s foundation-building, when we created a platform for LGBT people to come together and discuss their experiences with one another,” explained Oner Ceylan. Ceylan, thirty-seven years old, is an interpreter by day and gay rights activist by night. The 2000s became, always according to him, “the years of visibility,” with gay rights organizations sprouting up in many Turkish cities and the community finally taking to the street with the g

ay pride parade, which began in 2004.

But there is little doubt that the movement is only at its inception. The LGBT community has achieved relatively little in terms of human and civil rights. There is no law on the books that protects homosexuals from discrimination in employment, education, housing, health care, public accommodations or credit. Turkey’s family law does not recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions or domestic partnership. The Turkish Council of State has ruled that homosexuals should not have custody of children. And the military bars LGBT people from serving in its ranks.

Members of the LGBT community here also continue to suffer from various forms of persecution. For example, when the country’s vague ‘public order, obscenity and morality’ laws are used by the police force to harass transsexuals on the streets. And hate crimes, particularly stabbings of gays are still not officially recognized by Turkey’s legal system as a form of especi

ally heinous crime. Rather, offenders often get reduced sentences for having harmed or killed a member of the LGBT community, with the courts open to accepting the defense’s claim of “provocation” under article 29 of the Turkish Criminal Code.

While coming out into the open was the key to Harvey Milk’s success — he relentlessly pushed all of California’s closeted gays to declare themselves to their relatives, friends and colleagues — his nephew Stuart thinks that this message might be premature here in Turkey, because of the particularly frightening consequences members of the LGBT community could face.

But there are other ideas that the Turkish gay movement can take from its American counterpart, for example active political engagement. “After the 1980 military coup, most progressive opposition groups in Turkey opted out of the system, giving up on elections and politics,” said Cihan Hüroglu, twenty-eight years old gay pride parade organizer. To this day, Hüroglu believes, the political left in Turkey does not encourage its youth to get involved. “The American tradition is different, more open to civil and political participation at the grassroots level,” Hüroglu continued, explaining that they invited Stuart Milk “to give us inspiration.”

The fact that three MPs from the National Parliament in Ankara attended a panel discussion held as a part of Gay Pride Week on Friday is testimony to the fact that Turkey’s LGBT movement is moving in the right direction. Two came from the left-leaning Kurdish-friendly Democratic Society Party (DTP) and one from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition party. However, nobody was there to represent the AKP (Justice and Development Party), the moderate Islamist ruling party.

Washington D.C. – In an effort to identify the causes of, and possible solutions to the growing divide between public opinions in the United States and the Muslim world, Juan Cole discussed his most recent work, Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), at a book launch hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Assessing the damage on Muslim perceptions of America inflicted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, Cole argued that a withdrawal, albeit slow, of U.S. troops will contribute significantly to improving relationships with the region at large.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, fluent in several Middle Eastern languages, and a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Cole tried to extricate the causes of the growing disenchantment with the United States among the Muslim public, despite the many alliances the U.S. entertains in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. Take Indonesia for example, suggested Cole. According to a series of polls conducted over time by the Pew Charitable Trust and Gallup, in 2000 75% of Indonesians held a positive view of the United States. This figure fell to 15% in 2004 and has now regained some ground hitting 37% in 2009, still only half of what it was nine years earlier.

Cole believes that, alongside the languishing stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Iraq devised by the Bush Administration is heavily responsible for this dramatic change in attitudes. In Cole’s most conservative estimate, 300,000 Iraqis have been killed during the war, as a result of fighting and infrastructure failures caused by military operations. Not to count the orphans, the widows and the millions of displaced citizens the war left behind. Additionally, scandals like that of the prison at Abu Grahib became major issues for Muslims around the world. “In an effort to curb the insurgency using harsh questioning techniques and torture, the Bush Administration ended up creating huge new numbers of insurgents,” Cole said at the Middle East Institute.

According to Cole, the U.S. needs to accept blame for a sort of idleness, the lack of a prompt and effective response to the deterioration of the situation on the ground (Cole reported that Sweden, for example, without having anything to do with the invasion, has already accepted 40,000 Iraqi immigrants.) Cole holds the American corporate media partially responsible for the some of the disinformation that kept the American people from understanding more about the tragedy that was unfolding. “We are not well served by our corporate media. I don’t think the U.S. public was ever aware of what the Iraq war really was for the Iraqi people,” lamented Cole. TV networks in particular had a tendency to sanitize the war, showing images of the craters that would be left by the bombs, but not of the blood and the corpses and the spare limbs that dominated the scene immediately following the explosion. This imagery, instead, made it regularly on outlets such as Al Jazeera. Because of the sanitization of the more gruesome aspects of the war, Cole believes that the human costs of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq were never fully recognized at home.

As all of this is on the minds of the Iraqis, and of people across the Muslim world, U.S. military presence in Iraq has, according to Cole, become utterly unacceptable. Yet, while polls show a certain amount of support among Muslims for violent retaliation against the U.S. armed forces based in the Middle East, even those who feel more strongly about the issue do not express any desire to ever hit the United States homeland. Mostly what people want is withdrawal, which is good news according to Cole, especially since President Obama seems determined to go through with it. To be fair, Cole did not argue that all Americans must necessarily disappear from Iraq at once, something that those he nicknamed “withdrawal extremists” are calling for. Cole simply claimed that Muslims would welcome a steady and consistent reduction of armed forces deployed in Iraq.

While being extremely critical of the policies of the Bush Administration, Cole also recognized that the situation in Iraq has improved and that U.S. forces exercise today far more command and control then ever before. However, he insisted that the relative stabilization of the country should not be understood as vindicating the invasion. “It would be like saying that, when the black plague began subsiding in medieval Europe, the Norwegian rat had been vindicated,” Call remarked ironically.

Overall, Cole’s present assessment is that Iraq has been building some fundamental capabilities and that there is increasing promise that it might come back together and at least provide for its own security. “I’m somewhat optimistic that Iraq might get its act together and that a U.S. withdrawal could actually be possible without ensuing disaster,” Cole suggested. The one issue that remains unresolved and that could create hurdles in the years ahead is the Arab-Kurd relationship, which is again showing signs of distress. The new American Administration should also be aware that, even in the best-case scenario of a fully recovering Iraq that maintains a positive relationship with Washington, relations between Baghdad and Teheran will continue to be warmer than the U.S. would like. “I think the U.S. will have to suck it up, because the Bush Administration created an Iran that is more powerful in the Middle East than it used to be,” argued Cole. What the U.S. can and should do, according to the University of Michigan’s professor, is to ensure a more hands-on leadership than the previous administration was able to practice. “I hope President Obama and Vice-President Biden will take more active control of what happens including in trying to tackle the case of the Kurds,” explained Cole.

Asked only in the Q&A session his opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cole did not even try to hide the hopelessness he feels about the situation: “I’m very pessimistic about the conflict. I really don’t see an end to it,” he admitted. Describing the newly formed Israeli government as the “farthest right we have seen in history,” Cole predicted that it could be decades before a solution is reached. Cole foresees three possible scenarios. He finds it unlikely that an agreement will be found on a variation of the two-state solution. Also unlikely, but not as much as one might think, is the apocalyptic view that Israelis will proceed with the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, which would trigger a conflict of enormous proportion throughout the region. Finally, and more likely, Cole believes that we are about to witness a long period of, what he described as “apartheid,” which could continue for two to three decades. This would not be a stable long term solution, and it would probably attract increasingly strict sanctions on Israel, maybe not from the U.S. but certainly from the Europeans. But, according to Cole, Israel is really not capable of surviving without trading with Europe and, at some point, the conflict would just end with a one-state solution, where Palestinians will be granted Israeli citizenship. Apparently, one-third of Palestinians already appear willing to accept it, showing that this third scenario might be the more likely, albeit in the very long run.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Marina Ottaway is the Director of the Middle East Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues, particularly on problems of political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and African countries. Before joining the Endowment, Ottaway carried out research and taught at universities in Africa and in the Middle East, including the American University in Cairo. She is the author of nine books and has edited another five. Her most recent work, Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World (edited with Julia Choucair-Vizoso), was published in January 2008. In her interview with Washington Prism, Ottaway explores issues of political transformation and democratization in the Middle East.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): You have studied political transformation in the Middle East for a long time. Why would you say democracy has not flourished in the region, at least so far?

Marina Ottaway (MO): This is a complicated issue and there is certainly more than one factor in play. I think that a very important element in impeding this transformation has been the nature of the ideas and of the political movements that have been at work in the Arab world.

There have been three main ideological currents in the modern Arab world. The first was nationalism, starting in the early 1930s. Egypt was the more important example. This type of nationalism had a democratic connotation. This kind of democratic, liberal nationalism emerged because it was driven by the educated elites, the bourgeoisie. These managed to win the support from the masses, not because the masses were democratic or liberal, but because they were nationalist. By doing so, they created a combination of nationalism and democracy that was successful for a certain period of time.

The nationalist-democratic trend died in the 1950s. In the post-war period socialism became the dominant ideology. Nationalism became coupled with socialism, whereas earlier on it had been connected to ideals of democracy.

In the 1970s, the socialist wave also started dying out, beginning with the death of Nasser. Ever since then, the liberals, the educated, the intellectuals who have always been behind the liberal trend, failed to find a language that would speak to the Arab population. One of the tragedies in the Middle East is that Arab intellectuals have been unable to turn their message of democracy into something that the masses can relate to. To this day, it remains an elite ideology. As a result, once socialism died, liberals lost out the Islamists in terms of popular language and popular message.

As a result, I think the reasons should be found in this history of the political movements in the Arab world and the failure to ever make democracy into a relevant ideology in and of itself, and not merely as an attachment to nationalism. I honestly don’t buy the argument that Arab countries don’t have a democratic culture. We can say that no country has a democratic culture before it turns into a democracy. All countries that became democratic were first authoritarian governments.

VP: There has been widespread criticism of the Bush Administration’s approach to democracy promotion. What is your assessment?

MO: The Bush Administration never stopped to think about what they were really looking for. In one sense, one could say that they wanted instant transformation, which turned out to be a very naïve expectation. They thought that if the United States put its foot down, if it told governments in the Middle East what to do and what they needed to change, all of a sudden change would happen.

However, they never paused to ask themselves whether movements existed in these countries that could make the idea of democracy relevant. One must remember that democratic transformation needs a political process. It is not a question of individual thinking but rather of group activity. The Bush Administration never inquired whether there were organizations in the Arab world ready to put up the democratic agenda. And it is quite clear that these organizations didn’t exist.

Secondly, the Bush Administration failed to recognize which were the best organized political movements and the best organized political parties and, therefore, who was likely to benefit the most from the democratic agenda. As soon as they faced the rise of the Islamists, they turned back. I still don’t understand how this happened. To me it’s a mystery that nobody ever predicted some of the outcomes.

At the time of the elections in Iraq, the Administration was really upset at the emergence of religious parties. And I never understood why that would be, since, if you looked at the parties that made up the Iraqi National Congress, you’d have seen that they were all religious parties, like the Dawa or the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. It was all spelled out in black and white. But the Bush Administration did not know what it was doing and the mistakes were blatant.

VP:  Is there anything in the agenda of democracy promotion that you think might be worth salvaging for the future?

MO: The really important question now is whether the new Obama Administration can do something useful to promote democracy, but in a different way from Bush’s. I’m not sure that anybody knows what the U.S. can do. I think it would have to look for solutions on a country-by-country basis, searching for feasible next steps.

For example, I think it would make sense for the U.S. to put pressure on Egypt so that it opens up the process of registering political parties. At this point it is impossible to have meaningful elections there, because the government has killed all the relevant parties. The only ones that are still registered, and are allowed to participate, are unable to win votes and their leadership has not been rejuvenated in a long time. The government has allowed them to survive precisely because they don’t represent a threat.

But clearly, you can’t have meaningful elections if you don’t have working political parties. It seems to me that one concrete step we could take is to put pressure on the government to open up the registration of political parties and allow parties to function.

However, this is not a recipe that is good for all countries. If you take the other extreme, the most difficult case, what exactly does it mean to promote democracy in Saudi Arabia? In the realm of what is conceivable, what could be a meaningful step that the Saudi Government could take in the direction of democracy? They, of course, are not going to proclaim a constitutional monarchy tomorrow. Honestly, I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that question. I don’t know. I find it amusing to hear all these people saying that Obama should not drop the democracy agenda, that he should continue promoting democracy in the Middle East in a different way. That is nice. But what should he actually do? This issue is very nebulous. I don’t have the answer. To me, it is a question of keeping a low profile and seizing opportunities when they arise, but it is nothing like the democracy agenda of the Bush Administration.

VP: You have recently published a paper on Islamist movements and their demand for political participation in the Middle East. You see this as one of the strongest indications that there is a desire for democracy in the region. Do you see hope that some form of peaceful integration of these movements in the legitimate political sphere can occur? What are the steps that should be taken to achieve this goal?

MO: In the paper you mention we were referring to a specific category of political parties — Islamist political parties that already participate in the legal political process of the country. In other words, these are the parties that present candidates for elections.

The best example would be Morocco, where the PJD, Party for Justice and Development, is the second largest in the country. Recently it started talks with the USFP, the socialist party, as they began to see that they might have something in common as far as their political agenda and, that cooperating in parliament would make them more effective.

The Obama Administration should start treating these political parties like all other political parties. They should talk to them and maintain the same contacts they have with the other political organizations. They should make it clear that the U.S. recognizes parties that are non-violent political entities playing by the rule of the game, such as they are in their own countries. And this last caveat is important because one of the paradoxes of the U.S. policy toward the Middle East is that we expect these parties to be democratic when the countries in which they operate are not democratic. In any case, I think the US should make it clear that it considers them normal and legitimate movements. This would certainly help, it wouldn’t change everything, but at least it would represent a tangible step in the right direction.

This is important as ever because many governments in the region are making it increasingly difficult for these political parties to compete. If this continues, the danger is that the more moderate voices within the Islamist parties, the ones pushing for open political participation, will be silenced. At which point we are going to have a more radical leadership emerging, which I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest.

VP: What does the U.S., and the new Administration of President Obama, need to understand about the Middle East that it hasn’t so far?

MO: It is hard to say what will happen with the Obama Administration because we don’t know yet who is going to control the Middle East portfolio. Certainly the Bush Administration did not get that these movements are not going to disappear. They are too popular for a number of reasons and they are not going to go away simply because the U.S. ignores them. The idea that merely supporting Fatah in Palestine while allowing Israel to fight Hamas — because Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel — would cause Hamas to disappear is just not proving to be true.

Now, one must add that Hamas is an extreme example, for two reasons.

First of all, Hamas is a political party but also an armed movement. To be clear, Hamas did not win the elections because it was an armed movement, it won the elections because it is more popular than Fatah. Nevertheless it is an armed movement. Secondly, Hamas does not recognize the state of Israel. Again for clarity, the truth is that none of the other Islamist parties recognize the state of Israel as such, but the issue is only raised with regard to Hamas because we are wary of its influence.

VP: Do you see any chance that Islamist political parties might at some point decide to recognize Israel?

MO: Yes, absolutely, at least, within the framework of political movements, not the Jihadists. If there was an overall peace agreement, Islamist parties would accept Israel’s existence. I don’t think any Arab will ever accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel but they will adapt to its existence and to the fact that it is not going anywhere. Egyptians have not recognized the legitimacy of Israel, but they have recognized that, like it or not, there is a state there and that it is there to stay. They have learned to deal with it.

But this is true only if there is a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only with the execution of the so-called Arab initiative — the proposal by Arab countries to recognize Israel once the problem of the refugees is solved and once the two-state solution is implemented. I think in those circumstances, most Islamist political movements would accept the existence of Israel.

VP: Tensions in the Gaza Strip are once again reaching new heights. Following the end of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas on December 19th, the Israeli government began carrying out air-strikes on the Palestinian territories, while Hamas responded firing rockets into Israel. Finally, Israel launched the currently ongoing ground invasion of Gaza. What do you think this means for the future of Israel-Palestine relationships? Is this invasion a game-changer or just yet another chapter in an already all too tragic story?

MO: This is essentially another chapter in the long saga, not a game-changer. Even Israel has been careful not to state that it is a game changer in the sense that Hamas will be eliminated. They hope to weaken it and slow down raw firing of missiles, but are not willing to pay the political and economic price of halting the missiles completely and destroying Hamas, which would require a long term occupation.

The operation postpones a serious peace process indefinitely, because it weakens not only Hamas but also Fatah, which would be seen as negotiating with the Israelis at the expense of the inhabitants of Gaza.

VP: In the last six years or so, Iraq has been at the center of the storm. Where do you think it is going now?

MO: It really depends on whether they find a way to reach an agreement amongst them, once the U.S. withdraws. It is already quite clear that they are not going to reach an agreement along the lines proposed by the Americans.

The U.S. has in mind a step-by-step process according to which a series of laws will be passed in order, one after the other. That is just simply not going to happen. It is possible that with a smaller U.S. presence, different groups will have to come to terms with each other and maybe reach an agreement. But at this moment there really is no agreement. The tensions with the Kurds are increasing. The same is true not only across confessional lines. Within each group there are tremendous tensions. The Sawha groups and the Sunni Islamist Party don’t see eye to eye. On the Shi’aa side, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council don’t see eye to eye. We are very far from a political pact.

VP: What lessons from Iraq should the new US. Administration apply to Afghanistan?

MO: I think there are two lessons that are relevant. First of all, the number of troops on the ground is crucial. All the experts I hear claim that 20.000 more troops in Afghanistan are not going to make a difference. Everybody says it is just a drop in the bucket considering the overall situation.

The second lesson is that you are not going to have any long lasting gain without a political settlement. The problem in Iraq now is that there is no political settlement, and the same is true for Afghanistan. But I honestly don’t see anybody having a clue of what a political settlement in Afghanistan might look like. This is probably the reason why they are beginning to talk to the Taliban. But any success in that department really is a long way off.

VP: It has been argued that Iran emerged from the two U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a significantly more powerful player than it was before. Do you agree? Do you think the U.S. could ever use a more powerful Iran to its advantage?

MO: It is absolutely accurate that Iran has become more powerful. Just take a look at the countries around Iran. Iraq is now essentially a collapsed state. We might not talk about it in these terms because we rather talk about the progress that has been made. But the simple fact that there is a debate in this country about what would happen in Iraq if the U.S. withdrew is enough of an indication: a country that cannot fully function without the presence of U.S. troops is a collapsed state.

Saudi Arabia, which is the only country of any size in the Gulf, has never developed a strong foreign policy, it has no military experience, and the king has no desire for confrontation.

The other countries in the Gulf are midgets; what in the world can Bahrain do, except hoping not to be overrun? Egypt is also out of the picture, until at least after the succession. Whether after Mubarak dies and there is a succession Egypt will become a regional power once again I don’t know, but it is quite clear that, until all of that takes place, Egypt is completely out of the picture.

So, yes, Iran is in pretty good shape.

I think this would be tremendously beneficial to the U.S. if it could develop a working relation with Teheran. You have to remember that the U.S. benefited a great deal during the days of the Shah from the fact that Iran was a regional power. But we are a very long way from there.

I think the U.S. should aim to create some sort of regional pact, in which Iran and Iraq and the Gulf countries are all working together. Instead the Bush Administration tried to create an anti-Iranian alliance in the Gulf, which is something that the Gulf countries are not interested in because they don’t want to provoke Iran.

So I wouldn’t go as far as saying that a stronger Iran is a blessing in disguise. The question is, rather, could there be a positive outcome of this situation? Perhaps, but we are a very long way from there.

VP: Finally, do you think it is important to have democracy in the Middle East? Why?

MO: I would say that it is very important to have political systems that can actually govern the countries. One of the problems of many Middle Eastern countries, particularly in the Gulf but not exclusively, is that the political systems were designed for societies that were completely different from what they are now. The Saudi ruling family was put in charge of a very chaotic informal system meant to control a population of only about 4 millions and mostly Bedouins living in the desert. This political system has never evolved. These totalitarian rulers in the Gulf are completely outdated, if one considers the reality on the ground. Even in the case of Egypt, its cumbersomely bureaucratic system holds the country back. This is not a question of democracy; it is simply that the country cannot run itself.

What really is crucial is that these countries find more functional and efficient systems of governments. If they were also more democratic, it would be even better. As of now, the only way for an opposition to bring down a government that is unpopular is by an insurrection; they must overthrow the government. Such a system prevents these countries from ever achieving real stability.

I’ll just make one point to put my comments into perspective. I think that democracy is a pretty good political system. But at the same time I don’t think we have any evidence that allows us to say that it should be the inevitable destiny of all countries.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Dennis Kux is Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A retired State Department South Asia specialist, who served in Pakistan from 1957 to 1959 and 1969 to 1971 and became the U.S. ambassador to the Ivory Coast from 1986 to 1989, he has written histories of U.S.-India and U.S.-Pakistan relations. The New York Times called his book India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991 “the definitive history of Indo-American relations.” Ambassador Kux spoke with Washington Prism about the current situation in Pakistan, the historical roots of today’s problems and the future of the country.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, the novelist Salman Rushdie said that the roots of modern Pakistan’s problems can be traced back to partition. Rushdie says, “What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You’re all Muslim, so now you’re a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: Oh no, we’re not… It’s much more important for Punjabis to be Punjabi and Sindhis to be Sindhi . . . Religion doesn’t offer enough of a common basis.” Do you agree with this assessment? Are ethnic and religious identities the most important hindrances to Pakistan’s development?

Dennis Kux (DK): I think that this is overstated. It is true that there are strong regional feelings but I don’t think the place is going to come apart. Moreover, the one virtue of the current national government is that all the regions are included, so that nobody can say they were left out.

Pakistan’s main problem has been its lack of self-identity, of a positive self-identity. Pakistan has always acted on the basis of a negative identity, on the premise that A) it is not India and B) it is terribly threatened by India. In short, the rivalry with India is still a major driver. It has been the rationale for heavy military spending, which has diverted important resources from basic infrastructure.

This has allowed the military to run foreign policy, and also to some extent interfere in domestic policy. Since the late 1970s the army has seen itself as not only the protector of Pakistan, but also as the protector of a Pakistani ideal, which they have defined as an Islamic state – not necessarily a Taliban state but one with a heavy dose of Islam. Basically, one can say that this approach, and the effort in using different terrorist groups as proxies in the struggle with India and for Afghanistan, has backfired. Pakistan has raised hell in Kashmir, but it hasn’t moved things toward a settlement. And in Afghanistan getting the Taliban in was hardly a positive achievement. But Pakistan thinks that the US is not going to stay in Afghanistan and fears that if the US leaves the place will fall apart again and the Iranians will come in with their friends, the Russians with their friends and above all the Indians. So they want to have their friends there, the Taliban.

Nonetheless, one can argue that supporting the Taliban now, which certainly some elements of the military are doing, is undercutting what you think Pakistan would aim at, trying to find a modus vivendi with India and having better relations with Afghanistan.

VP: Given this history of Pakistan’s spasms of democracy, and the military’s periodic intervention, how do you assess Pakistan’s national elections that took place in January? How solid do you think the new coalition government is?

DK: The elections provided a new opportunity for Pakistan. The people rejected President Musharraf and picked two parties, Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), which are secular, middle-of-the-road, slightly left of center.

The PPP and the PML-N said they were going to get together, and they did, forming a grand coalition. They also brought in the local party who won the elections in the Northwestern frontier provinces, which is a secular party that beat the religious leaders. And they are trying to bring in the secular party from Karachi.

They agreed on two main points: they would be for a more democratic government and that they would reinstate the judges that Musharraf had fired. But they disagreed on how to do that. I think part of the disagreement is that Sharif, who was in jail for treason and was thrown out of the country by Musharraf, has an issue with the President and just wants him out. Zardari, on the other hand, is someone who may suffer personally if some of Musharraf’s decisions are rolled back, because he was given an amnesty and there are questions on whether the amnesty was legal.

Nawaz Sharif’s ministers recently pulled out of the cabinet, but his party remains part of the coalition for now. It is important to note that the PML-N has formed the government in the Punjab, the largest province. Punjab is very important — it has 60% of the population and even more of the economy. If Nawaz Sharif was to pull out of the central government, it would make the situation very complicated with two different parties ruling Lahore and Islamabad. It’s a recipe for troubles.

There is also the added complication that the lawyers, who sparked the difficulties for Musharraf last year when they protested the firing of the Chief Justice, are now protesting again because the judges haven’t been reinstated. They have the support of Nawaz, but only partial support from the PPP.

The role of the army also remains unclear. Musharraf, to some extent, is on his own, the army did pull back at the time of the elections, which is why we had free elections. But it’s not clear exactly what they are going to do, they are feeling that their image is tarnished by the Musharraf years and they feel this was good time to pull back and let other people hold the bag. Especially since the economy, which was supposedly in good shape, has gone very bad: inflation is way up, there are power shortages, and food prices have increased significantly.

In general the situation is fairly unstable, which is too bad because what Pakistan needed was stability, political stability.

VP: Do you see this current government as a potentially trustworthy partner for the US?

DK: We don’t know if Pakistan is a trustworthy partner. It is especially unclear when it comes to terrorism and civilians-dictated policies to fight it. If you look at the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban, you’ll notice that different people say different things and it is hard to predict where these are headed.

The US certainly doesn’t like that Pakistanis say, “This is a political question and we can work something out that will take care of the problem of people crossing over the border.” The fear here is that they will make a deal which will provide peace in Pakistan but then leave it open for the Taliban and Al Qaeda to continue attacking Afghanistan from the sanctuaries in Pakistan. That’s a big worry here in the United States.

Now, the difficulty is to getting Pakistanis to do what you want them to do and the dilemma is; “How do you apply pressure, should you apply pressure?”

VP: How do you evaluate President Musharraf’s position today? How much longer do you think he will remain a key political figure in Pakistan? What is his relationship to the United States?

DK: President Bush called Musharraf last week. We’ve been criticized for supporting Musharraf too much, but I think now it comes down to Bush’s loyalty to his friend.

Musharraf’s position is much weaker. He doesn’t command all the levers of power anymore, the situation is more fractured.

It all depends on what sort of an agreement the coalition parties reach, if any. If they don’t, he may well stay on, just because he is there. Nawaz Sharif talks about impeaching him, but that is possible although the military might not want to see their former chief put through that process, it reflects badly on the army as well.

Basically Musharraf is one of the three big players. You have Zardari, you have Sharif and you have Musharraf. One of them is going to go. It is not entirely clear who it will be. It is not going to be Zardari. More likely we will see Musharraf ease out or retire, (there were rumors last week that he was thinking of retiring), or we will see Sharif quitting the government. If this is the case, then the PPP will have to try forming a coalition with the former Musharraf group, which will make for a strange affair.

VP: Would it be accurate to say that for the stability of Pakistan the best solution would be that Musharraf voluntarily retires?

DK: It would be good for the country if the government stays together and tries to work through this next term. No political government has last through a whole term, ever.

VP: In recent years, the Bush Administration has chosen Musharraf as its direct interlocutor in Pakistan. How do you judge such policy? And considering the new government and Musharraf’s increasing difficulties, what do you think the new Administration should do?

DK: There has been the feeling that the Bush Administration has put a lot of his currency on Musharraf. Part of the reason was that they liked him, but they also feared that, a fear that Musharraf himself promoted, if he went out the religious parties would be the big gainer. The good news out of the recent elections is that the religious party did very badly, much worse than what they did in 2002. They won 60 seats in parliament then, and this year they only won 5. They went from 11% to 2.2% of the vote. This showed that the public in Pakistan is not pro-Islamist at all. However, the Islamist parties are still able to make a lot of noise, and they are all in part affiliated with the various terrorist groups.

Today, of the two predominant personalities, Zardari is seen as the more accommodating to the United States, in part because the US helped arrange an agreement between President Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto when she came back and was granted amnesty. But Nawaz Sharif was not part of it and he was, wrongly I think, seen as being anti-American. He is perhaps more nationalist than Zardari, but really he is more of a smart politician than anything else.

In any case, both of the parties have been pushing for talks with the militants claiming this to be the best way to try to solve these problems. The US doesn’t see it in the same light. Our concern is that in the negotiations, as in the deal that Musharraf worked out two years back, the government simply agrees to pull out and let the militants and the terrorists do whatever they want as long as they leave the Pakistanis alone. The US is concerned about an agreement which does not end the use of Pakistan as a safe-haven. The government spokesman just said that they will take care of that but so far it hasn’t happened.

In Pakistan we are faced with a real problem. The US is dependent on the Pakistanis, and they partly help, but they are also a part of the problem at the same time. The question is,
“how do you balance this off, with your aid? Should you be more discriminating, should you put more conditions on the aid?” I think what we should be trying to do is to strengthen the institutions, but you can’t do it until they settle down and stop fighting.

VP: The International Herald Tribune recently wrote, “The car bomb that went off Monday at the Danish Embassy in Islamabad was only the latest of several recent signs pointing to Pakistan as a nexus for terrorism and religious extremism.” What shall the US and the international community make of such nexus? How dangerous is Pakistan with regard to international terrorism?

DK: It is a complex situation. One can say that Musharraf either played a double game or he wasn’t able to deliver on at least part of his agreement with the US and, although he provided help and did a lot of things against Al Qaeda, he didn’t do much against the Taliban. And he allowed them to reestablish themselves.

This is partially due to the fact that the military has used these terrorist groups as proxies for Pakistan over the years, not unlike what the US did in the 1980s with the Mujaheddin. Today’s militants belong to the same groups, in various and different forms, that were used against India in Kashmir. Then there is the Taliban, which although not a creature of Pakistan was greatly supported by Pakistan.

Musharraf had a lot of strong words but the actions haven’t been as strong and now we see the consequences. By not acting more firmly earlier and then by acting unwisely a couple of years ago when he sent a lot of soldiers into the tribal areas where they hadn’t been before, and did very badly, we have a situation now which is very troubling, and an area that provides a sanctuary for all sort of terrorists.

Now, the new government claims that it wants to change its approach, but their first move is to try to negotiate. The US keeps repeating that the negotiations have failed. There is significant lack of communication and of agreement between us and the Pakistanis.

VP: Speaking of security-related issues; how do you view the situation in the tribal areas? How should we understand the relations between terrorist organizations and their militants and tribal leaders who simply do not abide by constitutional rule? Are those inherently connected, or are they two separate problems facing the Pakistani government?

DK: I think the situation varies from place to place. The tribal areas, both culturally and legally, are in fact not fully part of Pakistan. The laws that apply elsewhere don’t apply there, so they are used to this independent existence. People see them simply as they are — an autonomous part of Pakistan. They have a long history of fighting against outside authority. Many live off smuggling. The region is perceived as backward and the economic situation there is much worse than the rest of Pakistan.

As far as their links with terrorism, I think it is all one big challenge. And I also don’t think there is much difference among the different groups and organizations in the various parts of the country. They are different but they work together. It is hard to differentiate between the Pakistan Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, Al Qaeda, other groups working from Uzbekistan.

VP: Much of the international debate on Pakistan revolves around security issues. However, the country has been struggling with rising food prices, energy shortages, and an economy that for the first time in years is expected to grow less than 6%. How serious do you think these issues are? Is the new government addressing them effectively?

DK: The economic difficulties are very important. We see, right now, 12-13% inflation. The present government will start to be blamed for this if they don’t do a better job. To some extent they are prisoners of what happened in the rest of the world. But they are, in a way, the victims of the failure of the past military government. This did a good job at a macro level, but they didn’t take advantage of it to tackle some of the underlying problems — education, health, infrastructure, etc.

Moreover, they continue to have only limited trade with India, which means they have lost the opportunity to gain access to the Indian market, which would be good because the Pakistanis have a comparative advantage in certain areas.

The civilian government should really be focusing on this rather than to keep fighting among themselves. Recently they put out a budget, but it wasn’t very realistic. On paper it balances everything but it’s hard to say whether it will prove effective. It withdrew a lot of subsidies, it supposedly raised taxes, increased the tax base, but it’s not clear what kind of effect it will have. The trouble is that they say they are going to implement the reforms, they pass laws, and then nothing happens.

VP: In the same interview mentioned above, Salman Rushdie speaks about his 1983 novel Shame, which he wrote about Pakistan, and says that it is even more relevant today; “Corruption, power, generals, the whole thing. Pakistan is not different, it’s just worse.” Do you agree? In conclusion, are there reasons to be optimistic and what instead are the biggest hurdles ahead for Pakistan?

DK: “Pakistan is not different, it’s just worse,” I would agree with that.

The thing that is clearly worse is this threat of terrorism. In 1983 we didn’t have entrenched terrorist groups that were ruling parts of the country and now we do have that. They are trying to assert themselves, mainly in the Pashtu areas. That’s certainly an important threat and something that we didn’t have in 1983.

We also have insurgencies in Baluchistan. They have existed for a while and they rarely have accommodated well within the national government. Recently the biggest grievance is about the big blue-water port that is being built in the city of Gwadar. The Baluchis say that they are not going to get any benefit out of it. Moreover, the military was very heavy handed in dealing with the tribes, which helped cause uprisings in Baluchistan. However, it was a political insurgency and not a movement to try to separate from the state or to impose Sharia law; they were looking for more autonomy.

I guess one has to be pessimistic. Pakistan just has continuing problems. I don’t think the state will collapse but I don’t see the civilian government doing what they really need to do. In the end, we will have to see how they come out on the courts issue. This is a fairly important problem, how they deal with the Constitution, with issues that are still on the table and haven’t been resolved. They agreed together that they would solve the court problem but they have missed the deadline.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

In spite of the fact that water covers more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, 97.5% of it comprises of salt-water. For the most part, the fresh water supply is either stored as ice at the poles, in underground beds that are inaccessible to humans or retained as soil moisture. As a result, only a small fraction of the planet’s water resources, approximately 1% of the total, is available for human use. With the world population growing exponentially, issues of water scarcity are becoming increasingly pressing.

A UNDP report from 1999 predicted that access to water was likely to be the single biggest cause of conflict in Africa in the following 25 years. Almost a decade later, the global pressure on water supplies has increased due to population growth, continued deforestation and climate change, making water an increasingly scarce and precious commodity. According to the World Bank, 1.1 billion people today lack access to safe water, normally calculated as a minimum of 20 liters per day from an improved source within one kilometer of the home.

“Africa’s Lake Chad,” writes Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, “once a landmark for astronauts circling the earth, is now difficult for them to locate.” The lake, surrounded by fast-growing countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, has shrunk 96% in 40 years. “The shrinkage of Lake Chad is not unique,” notes Dr. Brown, one of America’s leading environmentalists and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. “The world is incurring a vast water deficit.” The flow of the Jordan River is also steadily diminishing – along with those of the Yellow River in China, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Amu Darya in Central Asia and the Colorado River in the United States. And, as the Jordan River decreases, the Dead Sea is also shrinking. Over the past 40 years, its water level has dropped by some 25 meters and it is estimated it could disappear entirely by the year 2050.

Moreover, with demand growing, several countries are exploiting their groundwater to the point of exhaustion and water tables in parts of China, India, West Asia, the former Soviet Union and the western United States are dropping. According to Dr. Brown, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with a population of over 62 million, wells are going dry almost everywhere because of the depletion of underground water tables. Similarly, Iran is over pumping its aquifers by an average of five billion tons of water per year, causing “water refugees” to abandon their villages in the eastern part of the country as wells dry up.

Considering the extent of the problem, it shouldn’t be surprising that the 1999 UNDP study forecasts that should water wars occur, they would most likely break out in regions where rivers or lakes are shared by more than one country. Lester R. Brown agrees. “Nowhere is this potential conflict (over water) starker than among Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia in the Nile River valley.”

The Nile River Basin

The Nile River Basin is a reservoir of water covering 1.3 million square miles, a surface slightly larger than the territory of India. There are ten riparian countries to the Nile River, the longest running in the world: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Eritrea. However, three of them – Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia – account for 85% of the territory that constitutes the hydrologic boundaries of the basin.

Whereas 95% of Egyptians rely exclusively on the Nile for their water supply and 77% of Sudan’s fresh water comes via the river, the Nile originates in Ethiopia and controls 85% of its headwaters. “Ethiopia is an interesting case,” says an economist with the Ministry of Water Resources in Addis Ababa who asked not to be identified by name, “since its economic fate is closely tied to unreliable rainfall and since 90% of its water resources are ‘trans-boundary,’ which means that rivers flow into other countries that inevitably oppose upstream development that might reduce their own resources.”

The already high demand for water in the region is projected to increase steadily through the next forty years. The population in Egypt, today at 75 million, should reach 121 million by 2050. Sudan is expected to have 73 million people by 2050, almost double today’s 39 million. And the number of Ethiopians is projected to grow from 83 million to 183 million.

Population growth is not the only factor of stress on the region’s water resources. David Shinn, former ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia and professor of International Affairs at George Washington University, told Washington Prism in an interview, “Irrigation projects are the greatest threat to the future of amicable Nile water usage.  Big irrigation projects simply use so much water that never returns to the river system.”

Deforestation and soil erosion also represent a threat. According to Mongabay, one of the most influential climate and environment websites, Ethiopia lost 14.0% of its forest cover between 1990 and 2005. Fewer trees could result from less rainfall. They could also cause worsening soil erosion, which in turn would increase sedimentation and reduce the lifespan of water storage infrastructure.

Competition vs. Cooperation

“Since there is already little water left in the Nile when it reaches the Mediterranean,” Lester Brown writes in Plan B 3.0 , “if either Sudan or Ethiopia takes more water, then Egypt will get less.” Moreover, international agreements grant Ethiopia only a minuscule share of water. “Given its aspirations for a better life, and with the headwaters of the Nile being one of its few natural resources, Ethiopia will undoubtedly want to take more,” Dr. Brown believes.

Possibly the biggest problem with the Nile River Basin is the lack of reasonable agreements among riparian countries on the equitable share of water rights. The most recent one was signed by Egypt and Sudan in 1959 and resulted in a virtual Egyptian monopoly over Nile water. Based on an annual flow at Aswan of 84 billion cubic meters, it allocated 55.5 billion cubic meters, or three-quarters, of the water to Egypt and 18.5 billion cubic meters, one-quarter, to Sudan. “The 1959 treaty remains in effect but is only accepted by Egypt and Sudan.  This is the big problem,” Ambassador Shinn told Washington Prism. The other eight riparian countries do not accept the agreement, but unfortunately there is no formal structure in place for handling such political contentions. “There are periodic bilateral and even regional discussions on water-related issues, but they have not yet achieved a breakthrough on redistribution of Nile water.  That is why this situation could, not will but could, result in conflict some day,” said Ambassador Shinn.

The one example of an attempt at cooperative development of the Nile is the 10 year-old Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). The World Bank-led NBI provides a framework through which its member states can cooperatively make use of the resources of the Nile Basin to fight poverty and promote socio-economic development in the region. Each member has agreed to share information with other riparian states on the projects it intends to launch and, if possible, to undertake joint studies to ensure the sustainability of such projects. The initiative has been regarded as generally successful and the parties to the NBI appear very committed to it. However, Ambassador Shinn believes that the “NBI is an organization that deals primarily with technical and practical issues and not controversial political ones.  It is easier to cooperate on technical matters than political ones.” What remains to be seen is whether the riparian states of the Nile River can find a way to approach the hard-button issues of water rights and water equitable shares.

Responses

The story of the Nile River Basin illustrates the challenges confronting people and policymakers around the world. Current trends in population growth, deforestation, agriculture and the general inefficiency in the way we use available water signal that conditions of water scarcity are only destined to worsen and suggest that conflicts over water resources are becoming increasingly likely.

According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, world population is projected to grow from six billion in 1999 to nine billion by 2042. In the meantime, while more than one-fifth of the world’s tropical forests have been cleared since 1960, tropical deforestation continues at rates averaging about 0.7% per year. As for agriculture, close to 70% of the Earth’s freshwater already go towards irrigation projects. The Food Policy Research Institute projects that irrigated cropland area for grains will grow 11% worldwide between 1995 and 2025. Finally, wasteful consumption of water, especially in developed countries, is also contributing to the gradual depletion of global supplies. For example, a report published by the European Union Commission in 2007 estimates that water usage in the EU alone could be reduced by about 40%. As a result, water becomes a more precious resource each day.

If financial markets are any indication of the value of a commodity, a new movement toward the trading of water reinforces the idea that this will be the next most sought after good. It was recently reported that a wave of water purification companies are going public in hopes of increasing their value. “Water companies have become prized acquisition targets as a result of growing concerns over shortages of clean water, the increased infrastructure needs of developing countries, more stringent regulations and an aging water distribution system in the United States,” wrote Euan Rocha for Reuters.

The British economist Roger Bate, currently a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington D.C., explained to Washington Prism: “Water is traded amongst farmers, municipalities and industries in many semiarid countries: Australia, Chile, United States, South Africa. It is either literally transferred or the rights to use the water are transferred, much like a contract for many commodities.” Dr. Bates, an expert on water policy, believes that water trading “improves efficiency by allocating water to the most efficient uses, and as such it is also better for the environment.” The premise is that there is enough water in the world for everyone, but it is being used wastefully almost everywhere. What is needed then is a system for allocating water shares more efficiently and an increasingly large number of experts believe that markets can provide such a system.

Trading in water shares is becoming popular even among small investors. Ronald Saville told Washington Prism in an interview, “Water is already a limited resource just when considering it for consumption. Add into the mix the fact that we are going to rely more on it for energy, and its importance for the future is readily apparent.” Saville is a young professional employed in the field of international education in Washington D.C. “I think water will become the next oil and these companies will stand to make huge profits on it, similarly to the way oil companies are making them now,” said Mr. Saville, who has decided to buy shares of a “water mutual fund” known as Powershares Global Water.

Although markets can help allocate a commodity more efficiently by determining the price at which offer meets demand, questions arise as to how they can help distribute equitably a resource such as water, which is equally indispensable to all human beings independent of income, and as to whether or not finance can help preserve it for the future. Oil will be traded at higher and higher prices until it runs out. Unfortunately, while mankind can survive without oil, the same cannot be said for water.

According to Roger Bate, while oil is only slowly replenished, water is a renewable resource. “Water can be commoditized successfully without it ever having to run out,” Dr. Bate says.. “Water markets are based on tradable quotas calculated on supplies. If you set the quotas at below the total amount you will not run out.”  According to Bate, it is crucial then to set the right quotas. “It often happens that a government sets more quotas then there is water to fulfill,” he concedes. However, he believes that “this is not the fault of the market; it is the fault of the quota allocation, in this case the government”.

Even those like Bate who strongly believe in the efficiency of the market as a system of resource allocation see a role for governments and politics in the process. “Making sure people have the funds to be able to afford water is the job of a government, creating a safety net. It is much better that the poor pay for water and get used to paying for it so its not wasted, but that simultaneously they are subsidized to do so. For too long too many users, and notably farmers, have not paid enough for water and wasted it,” explained Bate.

Ethiopia is a very good example of the need for both investments and a political response. Since at an aggregate level Ethiopia still has an abundance of water, the biggest question for Addis Ababa is how to store it, manage it and, if necessary, transfer it.  The economist with the government’s Water Ministry told us: “This is the major concern, since it requires massive finance which of course is not readily available.  In the medium to long term, if investment keeps coming the improved ability to manage water resources will likely more than offset the reduced total quantity of water due to climate and localized factors.  But that may be a big if.”

Since water is a public good and one of the fundamental sources of life, and since it inherently raises trans-national issues, a concerted global political effort at managing and preserving it may be the best strategy for confronting water scarcity and the conflicts that could potentially arise. “I think that there is not much that can be done at a national level, other than more of the same,” the economist with the Ethiopian government told us. “The major solutions will need to be international.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Last month, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented her most recent book, The Mighty and the Almighty, at a conference organized in Washington DC by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In this latest work she analyzes the role of religion in foreign policy making. “Although I still strongly believe in the separation of church and state, we must know that it is impossible to separate the people from their faith and as such we must understand religion to understand motivation,” Albright said.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, has profound religious roots; “If Jerusalem was only a real-estate issue, we would have solved it a long time ago. But the fact that both sides believe that the land was given to them by God makes things far more complicated,” former Secretary of State pointed out.

In the same way, President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq was inherently influenced by his religious beliefs. “There is some sense of a mission in him,” Albright said.

The problem, the book argues, is not that religious convictions are a constant presence in foreign policy decision-making. As former President Bill Clinton writes in the introduction; “Religious convictions, if they are convictions, can’t be pulled on and off like a pair of boots. We walk with them wherever we go”. The problem is instead, according to Albright, the absolute sense of certitude that sometimes comes with such convictions. When mixed with a lack of understanding for other people’s faith, this sense of certitude easily translates into conflict.

Acknowledging the important role that religion plays in foreign policy making, Madeleine Albright advocates for greater efforts on the part of the policy making community at understanding different faith and beliefs, so as to avoid what some believe to be the inevitable clash of civilizations.  “I have not turned into a religious mystic,” the former Secretary of State made clear. “I am a problem-solver and I look at ways how we can deal with the religious issue in today’s international politics.”

While presidents are surrounded by a variety of experts in all domains, from the economy to transportation to national security, there is no such a thing as an advisor for religious affairs. Albright suggests, for example, that this could be changed by incorporating religious expertise in the present structure of policy-making.

“It has to be said that Madeleine Albright is not the first one to have said that” Dr. Timothy Shah, fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life – a nonpartisan research center in Washington D.C. – pointed out in an interview with Washington Prism.
Congress must be given credit for having already taken some steps to incorporate religious understanding in foreign policy making. Because of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the State Department is now mandated to produce a highly detailed annual report on the state of religious freedom in every country in the world.

“These reports are meant to be on religious freedom but they end up covering almost every aspect of religious life all over the world” Dr. Shah said.
As such, although the explicit intent of the report is to monitor the persecution of religious groups and to offer Congress the basis to act upon violations of freedom of religion via the imposition of sanctions, one important side effect is that understanding of religious conditions in foreign countries has become a learning necessity, much like understanding political and social structure of those nations, throughout the State Department.

“In a sense the report has forced large parts of State Department, whether they want to or not, to become experts on religion” Timothy Shah argues, “one could assert that, and I’m not stating my position here, but one could argue that the legislation does what Ms. Albright wants done even better than how she would want it done.”

Interestingly, Madeleine Albright, and the Clinton administration as a whole, was among the strongest opponents of the bill at the time when it was going through the initial legislative process.

Partially, the apparent contradiction between former Secretary of State’s position then and now can be explained simply by a change in her thinking on the importance of religion in world affairs.

However, the history of the legislation shows what a fine line there is between promoting religious freedom and mutual understanding and trying instead to export specific values abroad.

In fact, the bill (known as the Wolf-Specter Bill) as it was first put forward, was specifically designed to protect Christians around the world; it originally made no reference to the persecution of other faiths and came under attack as an effort at trying to promote Christianity in disguise.

Since then the legislation has gone through several rounds of revisions and has become far more inclusive of all faiths. As Mr. Shah told us, one of the most controversial policy decisions that the bill spurred followed the violent repression of demonstrations by Indian Muslims in the state of Gujarat, India, in 2002 and involved the revoking of the Indian State’s Governor, and very popular personality, Narendra Modi’s US visa.

However, the controversies surrounding the International Religious Freedom Act exemplify how complicated it is to strike a balance between understanding and protecting all religions, faiths and beliefs and imposing one own values on others.
Achieving such balance becomes even more complicated in times when more fundamentalist religious movements are booming across the world. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life recently released a survey titled the Rise of Pentecostalism that reports how the Christian renewalist movement has been gaining support world wide in recent years.
Pew Forum’s director Luis Lugo, recently discussed the results of the study in another gathering at the CFR with the noted scholar and author, Walter Russell Mead.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Introduction

In 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended existing copyright protections for 20 more years, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The act spurred an intense debate over the issues of copyrights, free speech, and the need of society to protect and encourage creativity and the production of cultural works. Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times of October 7, 2002: “[the case] has become a touchstone in an increasingly acrimonious debate over how to balance the rights of consumers with those of big media companies at a time when digital technology is threatening both.”[1] The stakes were high.

An Internet publisher by the name of Eric Eldred disputed the CTEA’s constitutionality. The case picked up steam as it came closer to the Supreme Court hearing. 38 friend-of-the-court (amicus curiae) briefs were filed, signed by intellectuals, economists, copyright lawyers, law professors, artists and activists, sometimes defying traditional party lines. The case finally landed in the Supreme Court of the United States and on January 16^th 2003 the Justices found that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act adhered fully to constitutional provisions. The challenge was dismissed.

This paper will review the history of the CTEA, the lawsuit that brought it before the Supreme Court, and the Court’s decision itself. Particularly, my goal is to examine the government’s claim that the act, among other things, would harmonize American laws with those enforced in the European Union, an argument which seems to have swayed the Justices. In fact, Justice Ginsburg, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, stressed forcefully in several passages that the CTEA had the important function of harmonizing the American legislation to that passed by the European Union in 1993, so as to grant American authors the same protection that their Europeans counterpart enjoy, as well as to encourage more authors, either American or foreign, to register their works in the United States.

My intention is to verify the validity of such an assertion, by analyzing the European Union Directive 93/98/EEC on Copyright Term of Protection, the law as it is now applied in the European Union, and the diverse interpretations that were offered during the proceedings. Furthermore, through an examination of the Supreme Court’s decision itself, a secondary goal is to understand how important a role this claim played in the Supreme Court’s ruling in respect to other issues at stake.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act

The long story of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act began in 1995 when a first draft of a legislation that extended the existing copyright protection was introduced to the House and the Senate. Both chambers subsequently held hearings and this first bill never made it out of committee. Special interests, most vocally restaurant and bar owners, demanded special exemptions so that they would not have to pay royalties for the music played in their establishments. Three years later, in 1998, the bar owners were granted the exemption, and the bill cleared the House in March. Yet it stalled in the Senate and it wasn’t until October, at the end of the congressional term, that a compromise was reached. A similar version passed in the House was presented to the Senate and the bill was approved by unanimous consent. On the same day, it went back to the House and it was affirmed by a voice vote, meaning that no member of Congress had to go on record with his or her vote[2].

On October 27, 1998, President Clinton signed the CTEA into law. Under the new law the protection for those works that had been copyrighted by individuals since 1978 was extended to 70 years after the death of the author rather than the existing fifty; for those works made by or for corporations, known as “works made for hire,” the protection was increased to 95 years from the existing 75. Works copyrighted after January 1^st 1923 and before 1978 were shielded for 95 years, regardless of how they were produced.

As a result of the extension, thousands of works copyrighted from the 1920s and ’30s that were scheduled to enter the public domain in the following years remained protected for an additional 20 years, even if they were out of print or had no commercial value.

The Lawsuit

Eric Eldred, a technical analyst for a computer magazine with a passion for literature, decided in 1995 that he was going to publish for free on the Internet books that had fallen into the public domain. Unusual and out-of-print books, he thought, were hard to find in libraries and used bookstores, and the other electronic editions he found on the web were often not satisfying, they had typos and especially were difficult to read because they had been scanned improperly. He dreamt of creating a global library to preserve these precious cultural works and make them available to the public at large. His website soon began attracting an increasing number of visitors and the daily hit count grew to 20,000. He also started receiving acknowledgments. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Humanities recognized his Eldritch Press as one of the 20 best humanities sites on the Web. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and the William Dean Howells Society followed.

However, with the introduction of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 Eldred’s project was threatened. Many of the works he had planned to upload on the web had now been granted copyright protection for 20 more years, making his job risky. If sued he was liable to up to six years in prison for this hobby. On the other hand, embarking on an effort to trace back authors or, most likely, their heirs to ask for permission to publish was going to be a very long and challenging job, if not impossible. “In 1930, 10,027 books were published,” writes Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who took up the legal challenge on behalf of Eldred[3]. “Today, 174 of those books are still in print. What would it take to put the remaining 9,853 out-of-print books onto the Internet? […] To track down the current status of the 9,853 creative works, you would have to hire an army of Sherlock Holmeses. And as Holmeses don’t come cheap, no matter how easy it is to post 9,853 out-of-print books on the Internet technically, the lawyers’ fees would make it practically impossible. Until the copyright expires, these works are trapped in a regulatory black hole.”[4]

Faced with the prospect of having to shut down his electronic library, throwing out hours and hours on the job, Eric Eldred decided to fight back. “I don’t want to let big companies privatise our culture,” he said[5]. Lawrence Lessig, at the time a Harvard Law School professor, noticed some news articles about Eldred. Lessig contacted him to offer to take the case pro-bono. Eldred accepted the offer and Lessig filed a complaint against the government on Eldred’s behalf with the US District Court for the District of Columbia in January 1999. A few of Lessig’s colleagues from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society joined the legal team, along with Hale & Dorr, one of Boston’s most prestigious firms, accepted to handle the technical details. Furthermore, nine co-plaintiffs were enlisted, including Higginson Books and the American Film Heritage Association, strengthening the lawsuit.

The lawsuit had started off quietly without attracting much attention, but as the journey through the various courts proceeded, more and more people were drawn to the cause. New York University professor Siva Vaidhyanathan noted: “Back in 1998, when legal scholars and librarians tried to make [their] arguments, they found they had no army of CD burners and TiVo users behind them […] Since that time, public awareness of copyright has blossomed. In just the past month the New York Times has run three stories on its front page about copyright. […] Bill Moyers’ program “Now” will examine the copyright battles in depth. And several important books about copyright have found their ways onto library shelves[6].”

Following two losses in lower courts, Lessig presented a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States asking to review the case. The Court agreed to it in February 2002 and on the following October 9^th, the two parties, Lawrence Lessig and the solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, representing the government, finally presented their arguments before the Justices.

The Decision

There were three main issues before the Supreme Court.

First of all, considering that the Constitution of the United States says that copyrights are to be for “a limited time” does the CTEA, by issuing the 11^th and by far the longest of a series of extensions over the last 40 years, show that Congress has exceeded its powers by, in effect, giving copyright holders what amounted to a permanent monopoly over the use of their material[7]?

Secondly, does the bill infringe on Free Speech rights, as protected by the 1^st Amendment, by overly protecting material that would otherwise have fallen into the public domain, thus taking away would-be-users right to incorporate it in their speech[8]?

And lastly, is it true that the Copyright Term Extension Act harmonizes U.S. laws with those currently applied in the European Union?

The Supreme Court on January 16^th 2003 delivered its opinion and seemed to agree on all of the three issues with the U.S. Government.

The question about free speech was the easiest one for the Justices to dismiss. The majority opinion, in referring to what the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed, reads: “Copyright, the court reasoned, does not impermissibly restrict free speech, for it grants the author an exclusive right only to the specific form of expression; it does not shield any idea or fact contained in the copyrighted work, and it allows for “fair use” even of the expression itself.”[9] And later it adds more directly: “The First Amendment securely protects the freedom to make – or decline to make – one’s own speech; it bears less heavily when speakers assert the right to make other’s people speeches.”[10]

The centrepiece of the lawsuit was the question about the CTEA transgressing the limitation imposed by the Constitution on Congress when extending copyright protections to old works. In the opening brief the petitioners made a clear point: “Rather than granting authors a fixed (i.e., “limited”) term of copyright, Congress has repeatedly extended the terms of existing copyrights—eleven times in the past forty years […] These repeated, blanket extensions of existing copyright terms exceed Congress’s power under the Copyright Clause.[11]” First of all, Eldred’s argument asserts, if Congress repeatedly extends the terms of protection, these terms are, by definition, not limited anymore. Secondly, granting prolonged shelter to old works does not promote the “Progress of Science” as prescribed in the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. And thirdly the quid-pro-quo requirement of the Clause, that monopoly can only be granted in exchange for public benefit in return, is violated.

But the Justices did not buy this argument. Justice Ginsburg wrote in delivering the opinion of the Court[12]: “The CTEA’s baseline term of life plus 70 years, petitioners concede, qualifies as a “limited Tim[e]” as applied to future copyrights. Petitioners contend, however, that existing copyrights extended to endure for that same term are not “limited.” Petitioners’ argument essentially reads into the text of the Copyright Clause the command that a time prescription, once set, becomes forever “fixed” or “inalterable.” The word “limited,” however, does not convey so constricted a meaning. At the time of the Framing, that word meant what it means today: “confine[d] within certain bounds,” “restrain[ed],” or “circumscribe[d] […] In accord with the District Court and the Court of Appeals, we reject petitioners’ challenges to the CTEA.[13]”

European Union Directive 93/98/EEC

European law also seems to have played a central role in the Supreme Court’s decision over the CTEA. In several passages of the majority opinion, Justice Ginsburg refers to the important role of such legislation in harmonizing U.S. copyright protections to those applied in the E.U. by citing the Court of Appeals’ decision: “Rather, the court [of appeals] noted, the CTEA ‘matches’ the baseline term for ‘United States copyrights [with] the terms of copyrights granted by the European Union.” And “ ‘[I]n an era of multinational publishers and instantaneous electronic transmission,’ the court said, ‘harmonization in this regard has obvious practical benefits’ and is ‘a ‘necessary and proper’ measure to meet contemporary circumstances rather than as a step on the way to making copyrights perpetual.’” [14]

The government in its Brief for the Respondent, pointed strongly to the CTEA as a means to promote American progress through international trade. Citing a report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Brief reads: “Uniformity of copyright laws is enormously important to facilitate the free flow of copyrighted works between markets and to ensure the greatest possible exploitation of the commercial value of these works in world markets for the benefit of U.S. copyright owners and their dependents.[15]” And since in 1995 the European Union adopted a common resolution extending copyright protection to life-plus-70-years and decided, consistently with the Berne convention, “to apply ‘the rule of the shortest term’, under which protection for foreign (e.g., United States) works is ‘not [to] exceed the term fixed in the country of origin of the work […] Consequently, if Congress had not altered the United States copyright term for subsisting works, American authors of such works would receive less protection in Europe than their European competitors.[16]”

Eric Eldred and Lawrence Lessig also had their clear take on the matter: “The government has yet to demonstrate any meaningful sense in which CTEA ‘harmonized’ copyright terms. Nor could it, for CTEA does no such a thing.[17]”

So, what is it exactly that the European Union Directive 93/98/EEC prescribe?

Article 1, which lays down the duration of authors’ rights, commands a protection of life-plus-70-years for literary and artistic works by individual authors, regardless of when the works were lawfully made available to the public. In the case of joint authorship this term is to be calculated from the death of the last surviving author. In the case of pseudonymous or anonymous works, instead, the protection is of 70 years from the day the work is lawfully made available to the public, unless the identity of the author is clearly recognizable or revealed. In such an event the protection is to be that of life-plus-70-years. As far as collective works or when a legal person is designated as the copyright holder for a particular work, which can be considered equivalent to the term “works made for hire” appearing in the CTEA, the protection is to last 70 years from publication, or life-plus-70-years in the event that the individual author’s identity is made public as such in the versions of the work made available to the public[18].

A Comparison

So far I have outlined the main provisions of both the Copyright Term Extension Act and the European Union Directive 93/98/EEC. How, then, do they differ?

It is immediately clear how the directive passed by the European Union is much simpler in its structure than the CTEA. Life-plus-70-years is the term granted to all of the works by individual authors and 70 years from publication is that established for all works made for hire. There is no differentiation depending on the year of publication, which shapes instead the whole of the American legislation.

This fact, what might appear at a glance as just a superficial dissimilarity, does, instead, influence the different connotations and implications of the two directives. For instance, the novel Carrie by Stephen King, published in 1974, will, under the CTEA, pass into the public domain in 2069. Under the European Union Directive instead, it would be protected, like any other, for 70 years after the death of the author. Considering that Stephen King is still alive and well, the protection would expire much later in Europe than it will in the United States.

Professor Dennis Karjala, an expert in copyright issues from the Law School at Arizona State University, compiled in May 2002 a chart that compared the protections for copyrighted works offered in the United States and the European Union after the CTEA was passed. The chart shows both divergence and harmonization[19].

Essentially, when Congress passed the CTEA, it only ensured that U.S. copyright protections matched their European counterparts in the case of individual authors of works published after 1978. Today, indeed, in both the United States and in the member-countries of the European Union these works are shielded for 70 years after the death of the author. In all of the other cases the two legislations still differ completely. In some, as in the case of works made for hire, the American law protects copyrights much longer than the European Union (95 years from publication in the U.S. rather than just 70 in the E.U.). In other, as with natural persons whose works were published before 1950, it’s the E.U. that guarantees the longest protection with a term of life-plus-70-years instead of just 95 years from publication.

Conclusion

The public domain is an invaluable resource for all society; regular people, artists, thinkers, all of us benefit from its vast and diverse state. It is the place where ideas are shared freely, where inspiration nurtures, and new precious creations are conceived.

Media companies seem to have always been aware of the possibilities inscribed in the public domain. Disney works are, for instance, one of the best examples of how old works can turn into something new and exciting. “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” was inspired by a work by Victor Hugo. “Cinderella” and “Snow White” came out of tales by the Brother Grimm.

Nonetheless, these same corporations that have build their fame and success in part on works in the public domain have lobbied heavily in favour of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Media companies and their Political Action Committees have been extremely active contributing to members of Congress during the legislative year 1997-1998, when the CTEA was passed. According to the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics, in Washington, more than $6.5 million was donated that year. And Disney was among the most enthusiastic contributors[20]. The Boston Globe Magazine reported that “eight of the Senate bill’s 12 sponsors received contributions from Disney, as did 10 of the original House bill’s 13 sponsors[21].”

Lynda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times of February 19, 2002: “The 1998 extension was the result of intense lobbying by a group of powerful corporate copyright holders, most visibly the Walt Disney Company, which faced the imminent expiration of copyrights on Mickey Mouse and its other famous cartoon characters[22].” And indeed they were about to lose millions of dollars to the public domain; “Mickey Mouse, copyrighted in 1928 as Steamboat Willie, would have entered the public domain in 2004; Mickey – through Disney’s consumer products division and theme parks – helped bring in $8 billion in 1998, according to the New York investment bank Salomon Smith Barney[23].”

Justice Breyer wrote in his dissenting opinion: “One might conservatively estimate that 20 extra years of copyright protection will mean the transfer of several billion extra royalty dollars to holders of existing copyrights[24].” And he easily foresaw where this enormous amount of money would come from: “The extra royalty payments will not come from thin air. Rather, they ultimately come from those who wish to read or see or hear those classic books or films or recordings that have survived.” [25]

It is important not to overlook this aspect of the CTEA. Special interests pushed Congress to pass the legislation and of course they did not want to see it overturned by the Supreme Court. The government, in presenting the case as it did, must have kept this in mind.

The position that the CTEA did not violate the limitations imposed on Congress by the Constitution in extending copyright protection was a tough one to defend. Common sense and logic suggest that if a limited term is extended over and over, a bit by bit, continuously, that term is not limited anymore. What if Congress passes new legislation in 15 years extending existing copyright for another 20 years? Will these copyright protections ever expire?

The issue of free speech was touchy in the case. Even though at a first it might seem reasonable that the 1^st Amendment only protects the right to one’s own speech and not the use of someone else’s, we must still remember and balance the importance a vast public domain has in creating and encouraging speech. And, as I have discussed above, those same corporations that are now so eager to protect their copyrights have also been enthusiastic users of public domain works.

The choice the government made to focus discussion about the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act on the assumption that the Act would harmonize American laws with their European counterparts, promoting free trade and protecting the rights of American authors seems to add a patina of honorability that would be hard for most people to question. Whereas the first two issues spurred public debate and disagreement, the theme of harmonization appears to have been much safer.

However, Justice Breyer acknowledged in his dissenting opinion that CTEA would not bring American and European copyright protections any closer: “despite appearances, the statute does not create a uniform American-European term with respect to the lion’s share of the economically significant works that it affects—all works made “for hire” and all existing works created prior to 1978.” [26] But this fact never really made it out of the Court and into public discourse. The discussion that preceded and followed the decision was centred on the first two issues (whether copyright protection could still be considered as being for a limited term and the question of free speech) and everybody just seemed to assume that harmonization had indeed been achieved.

Here are just a few examples from the many were harmonization was assumed: Daren Fonda wrote in the Boston Globe Magazine: “Perhaps the lobbyists’ most effective argument was that American copyright law should be made to conform with that of the European Union, where most American culture is consumed.” [27] And Amy Harmon in the New York Times: “The 1998 law also aligns the United States’ copyright terms with those of European countries.” [28] Brian Kelcey went along on the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail: “Using its Constitutional power to ‘promote the progress of Science and the useful art’ with copyrights ‘of limited times,’ Congress matched Europe’s standard with the CTEA.” [29]

However, as I have hopefully demonstrated with this paper, this is simply not accurate. Harmonization has not been achieved, apart from the case of the subset of works published after 1978. So maybe Professor Karjala is right when he says that the theme of harmonization was just a smokescreen[30]. It was an ingenuous device giving the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act an appearance of inevitability. After all, the argument suggests, it was the European Union that put Congress in the position of needing the latest copyright extension. The government and the Justices had to go along with protecting American interests around the world. What harmonization really was, though, is “simply a high sounding word behind which the special interests supporting the U.S. extension bills are hiding to keep the royalty streams flowing for another 20 years, during which time they will keep working toward their ultimate dream of perpetual copyright.” [31]