European Politics > Serbia - Kosovo Ink Deal; Europe's Record Gas Prices; Emigration Doubles in Lebanon; Eurozone Inflation Highest Since 2008

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Serbia inks deal with breakaway Kosovo region to end spat

that featured jet flyovers and tanks at border

30 Sep, 2021 13:54

Kosovo special police with armoured vehicles are pictured as hundreds of Kosovo Serbs protest against a government ban on entry of vehicles with Serbian registration plates in Jarinje, Kosovo, September 20, 2021. © Reuters / Laura Hasani

Chief negotiators for Serbia and Kosovo have formally reached agreement to conclude the latest round of escalation. “We have a deal,” tweeted EU special representative Miroslav Lajcak after two days of “intense negotiations.”

The recent disagreement had seen Kosovo order its police to force any cars attempting to cross the border to remove Serbian license plates, arguing that a 10-year-old deal between the nations had expired. Serbia had responded by sending military planes to fly near the border, while footage from the area showed tanks and military vehicles deployed to the area.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen had previously urged the two sides to work to “de-escalate” and “return to the negotiation table to find a sustainable solution.” The European bloc has been trying to facilitate talks between Serbia and its breakaway region for the past decade, as Kosovo unilaterally proclaimed independence in 2008.

The deal comes after the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, called on the European Union to “convey a clear message that Europe has an interest in a European Balkans” after the bloc warned it can’t guarantee “six countries” (as most of the EU recognize Kosovo’s independence) future membership, as had once been promised.

Speaking ahead of a summit next week, Schmidt urged the EU to work to bolster “closer cooperation” between the bloc and Balkan nations, working on improving economic and infrastructure ties. The countries had all previously been promised they would be ultimately admitted to the EU bloc, with officials promising 18 years ago to give their “unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans.”

The High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina is a role that was established in the wake of the Dayton Agreement, signed at the end of the Bosnian War, to oversee the peace process in the region. Schmidt ascended to the role after his predecessor resigned despite some international opposition to his appointment, with Russia arguing he should have been approved by the UN Security Council.

Gas price keeps climbing in Europe as Brussels delays

Russian supplies via Nord Stream 2

30 Sep, 2021 08:20

© AP / Joerg Sarbach

The price of natural gas in Europe exceeded an all-time high of $1,100 per 1,000 cubic meters on Thursday, trading data from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) shows.

The cost of November futures on the TTF hub in the Netherlands reached $1101 per 1,000 cubic meters in morning trading. This is nearly $106 per megawatt-hour in household terms. The overall rise in gas prices was about 5% by 8am GMT.

European gas prices exceeded $1,000 per 1,000 cubic meters for the first time in history on Monday. Analysts attribute rising costs to inadequate supplies held in Europe’s gas storage facilities to meet the post-pandemic increase in demand. The current energy crunch has already resulted in higher costs for consumers, while still far from the peak winter season, and forced some industries to curb production, threatening to stall the continent’s economic recovery. 

Russian experts recently warned that gas prices could surge further due to a number of factors, including demand in Asia, the weather in Europe with winter on the way, as well as the timing of the launch of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Some view Nord Stream 2 as a means to stabilize the situation on the European energy market, with the pipeline capable of delivering the extra gas the continent needs. However, the project is still awaiting EU certification, which could take months due to bureaucratic setbacks and pressure from Washington and some Eastern European countries, which are opposed to increasing energy imports from Russia.

So, it appears some would rather freeze in the dark than buy gas from Russia.

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Emigration on the rise in crisis-ridden Lebanon

By Dalal Saoud

Activists and families of the victims of the port blast in Beirut, Lebanon, protest in front of the Justice Palace on Wednesday. The aftermath of the explosion is one of many crises driving a mass exodus from the country. Photo Nabil Mounzer/EPA-EFE

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Mounting economic hardships are pushing a growing number of Lebanon's population to seek a better life abroad in another mass exodus.

"We are planning to leave... We are working on an exit plan," Mira Mabsout, a landscape architect who is married with one daughter, told UPI.

It's a common refrain.

Mabsout and her husband are "lucky and blessed." They have good jobs and are well paid, mostly in U.S. "fresh dollars," worth 17,000 Lebanese pounds at the market trade, compared to 1,500 LL at the official exchange rate and 3,900 LL at the banks.

"But financial reasons are not everything... We don't feel safe," Mabsout said. She mostly fears for her 3-year-old daughter and the inability to secure proper medical care with the collapse of the health system.

Besides the dramatic economic and financial deterioration, the massive explosion at the Beirut port in August 2020 was a turning point. The blast killed more than 200, wounded 6,000 and damaged the homes of more than 300,000.

"We are looking anywhere outside [Lebanon]. We tried to go to Athens ... but it didn't work," Mabsout said. "We are not leaving just to leave ... without securing jobs outside."

However, she is longing to "live a normal life," and not to worry every day about electricity and gasoline. Lebanon has been facing crippling fuel and electricity shortages that increased power blackouts and led to hours-long queues at the gas stations.

"My daughter knows that there is a fuel crisis and that gasoline is a big problem to us... and this is something that kills me. Even if I want to hide it, she is living that," Mabsout said. "Also, I want to grow my family and have other children, but I cannot because I cannot find diapers, baby milk or basic needs."

"I don't feel like to be resilient, and I don't want to adapt.. I simply want normal things," she added.

Passport applications increase

Last month, Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, head of Lebanon's General Security Directorate, disclosed that his agency, which usually handles 3,000 passport applications per day, has been receiving 7,000 and 8,000 every day.

"But this does not mean that all [applicants] are actually leaving the country," said Dal Hitti, president of Moubadarat Wa Kararat (Initiatives and Decisions) Association, who has a doctorate in human resources.

Although no official statistics are available, Hitti estimated the number of those who left the country since the economic crisis broke out in 2019 to range between 400,000 and 500,000, including students, doctors and other highly skilled workers. They are now being followed by families heading mainly to Canada.

The 1975-90 civil war witnessed the largest exodus, with the emigration of nearly 980,000 people. Between 1990 and 2019, some 750,000 people have left, Hitti said.

"We have been living in a bubble since the 1990s, and we lost the feeling of belonging, contrary to the time of the civil war, when people remained steadfast and stayed in the country more than now, despite the difficult situation then," he said.

Dubai, an attractive but expensive spot, is hosting 70,000-75,000 Lebanese who left. But 50,000 of them haven't found jobs, and "some are accepting meager salaries barely reaching $1,000 a month just to help their parents or hoping to get a better job, while the minimum wage there is $4,000."

"This is no more about desperation. This is suicide," Hitti said.

The Crisis Observatory at the American University of Beirut recently warned that Lebanon is entering a third wave of mass emigration, citing three alarming indicators: the high percentage of Lebanese youth who want to leave (77% based on a survey last year, the highest percentage among Arab countries), the mass migration of medical and education staff and the expected chronicity of the current crisis.

"The last wave of emigration was not a reaction to a conflict, a war. It was genuinely because of the conditions that deteriorated so much," said Dr. Jasmin Diab, assistant professor of Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University.

'Intersection crisis'

Lebanon, Diab explained, always had "intersection crisis," and the current one was not just about the COVID-19 pandemic, constraints about the politics and economy but also the Beirut port blast, and people having lost their homes and not having access to their money frozen at the banks.

Moreover, the recent fuel crisis has "so much humiliated" the population to the point that "getting bread or gasoline becomes an achievement."

"There are so many intersections why people want to migrate in this period," Diab told UPI, adding that COVID-19 exasperated the situation further. Then came the port explosion, which "was definitely a major push factor ...that put the Lebanese on a high level of emergency."

Many countries, like Canada and across Europe, became more lenient in their emigration policies, facilitating migration of the Lebanese for a short time as a reaction to the explosion, Diab said.

"Our country is not in a state of conflict or violence. So, the Lebanese could not seek asylum like the Syrians, although interestingly, things are very similar on both ends," she said. "Lebanese want to leave, but the international community does not consider Lebanon in a state of emergency."

Eurozone inflation highest in 13 years, surging to 3.4% in September

By Zarrin Ahmed

Euro sign at European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.

File Photo by canadastock/UPI

Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Eurozone inflation surged to 3.4% in the month of September, hitting its highest level in 13 years.

German consumer prices hit their highest levels in 30 years, rising to 4.1% in that month and prompting protests from workers demanding higher pay.

Rising energy prices have driven the increase, which isn't expected to end until 2021 before easing next year. Economists are debating whether the central bank needs to change its monetary policy.

Of the 19 countries affected by rising energy prices, France is the latest to increase measures to mitigate costs. Prime Minister Jean Castex said Thursday that the government will block natural gas price increases and rises in electricity taxes. Italy, Greece, and Spain have also announced measures to counteract inflation.

Energy prices may continue to increase with the transition from fossil fuels to other sources of energy.

"Things have picked up faster and that is true for growth, that is true for inflation, and that is true for employment," European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told CNBC last month. "So, in a way, it is a package of good news because it means that our economies are responding."

Gas prices have reached record highs (see story above) while Russia's Nordstream II pipeline has just been completed. The EU is resisting buying Russian gas even as they run out of it. Go figure!

Pakistan Blasphemy Case: Asia Bibi Freed From Jail

Will this young Christian woman be able to escape

the Islamic Insanity that is Pakistan?

A Pakistani Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy after spending eight years on death row has been freed from prison, her lawyer says.

Some reports say Asia Bibi has boarded a plane but its destination was not known.

The Supreme Court ruling sparked protests from Islamists and the government had said it would bar her from leaving Pakistan.

Her husband had said they were in danger and pleaded for asylum.

Asia Bibi, a mother-of-five, was released from prison in the city of Multan, her lawyer Saif Mulook said.

Also known as Asia Noreen, she was convicted in 2010 of insulting the Prophet Muhammad during a row with neighbours.

Several countries have offered her asylum.

The Pakistani government has said it will start legal proceedings to prevent her going abroad after agreeing the measure to end the violent protests.

Many of the protesters were hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws and called for Asia Bibi to be hanged.

One Islamist leader said all three Supreme Court judges also "deserved to be killed".

Yes, because you would not want Pakistan to enter the 2nd millennium, let alone the 3rd. I have hopes for the new Prime Minister, but he has an extraordinary problem in dealing with Islamic Insanity.

A spokesman for the hardline Tehreek-e-Labaik (TLP) party said Asia Bibi's release was in breach of their deal with the government.

"The rulers have showed their dishonesty," TLP spokesman Ejaz Ashrafi told Reuters.

The deal also saw officials agree not to block a petition for the Supreme Court to evaluate Asia Bibi's acquittal in the light of Islamic Sharia law.

What was Asia Bibi accused of?

The trial stems from an argument Asia Bibi had with a group of women in June 2009.

They were harvesting fruit when a row broke out about a bucket of water. The women said that because she had used a cup, they could no longer touch it, as her faith had made it unclean.

Prosecutors alleged that in the row which followed, the women said Asia Bibi should convert to Islam and that she made offensive comments about the Prophet Muhammad in response.

She was later beaten up at her home, during which her accusers say she confessed to blasphemy. She was arrested after a police investigation.

Acquitting her, the Supreme Court said that the case was based on unreliable evidence and her confession was delivered in front of a crowd "threatening to kill her".

Why is this case so divisive?

Islam is Pakistan's national religion and underpins its legal system. Public support for the strict blasphemy laws is strong.

Hard-line politicians have often backed severe punishments, partly as a way of shoring up their support base.

But critics say the laws have often been used to exact revenge after personal disputes, and that convictions are based on thin evidence.

How many do not ever make it to trial as mass hysteria sometimes results in the immediate murder of the accused, often in the most horrific manner?

The vast majority of those convicted are Muslims or members of the Ahmadi community, but since the 1990s scores of Christians have been convicted. They make up just 1.6% of the population.

The Christian community has been targeted by numerous attacks in recent years, leaving many feeling vulnerable to a climate of intolerance.

Since 1990, at least 65 people have reportedly been killed in Pakistan over claims of blasphemy.

Please pray for Asia and her family, that they will indeed escape Pakistan and find refuge in a safe country, if one exists. 

Antisemitism on Rise Across Europe 'in Worst Times Since the Nazis'

Experts say attacks go beyond Israel-Palestinian conflict as

hate crimes strike fear into Jewish communities

Jon Henley

Note this article was written in 2014 but is intensely applicable today.

I have updated some statistics.

Mother of Miriam Monsonego, seven, at funeral of her daughter and three other victims of Toulouse school shooting. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France's Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats". That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one banner.

In Germany last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews … Count them and kill them, to the very last one." Bottles were thrown through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared Israel's actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: "Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone," and "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

Across Europe, the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the three weeks of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in anti-Jewish graffiti. 

But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a decade.

"These are the worst times since the Nazi era," Dieter Graumann, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the Guardian. "On the streets, you hear things like 'the Jews should be gassed', 'the Jews should be burned' – we haven't had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticising Israeli politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it's not just a German phenomenon. It's an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it's very clear indeed."

Roger Cukierman, president of France's Crif, said French Jews were "anguished" about an anti-Jewish backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and humanitarian opposition to the current fighting: "They are not screaming 'Death to the Israelis' on the streets of Paris," Cukierman said last month. "They are screaming 'Death to Jews'." Crif's vice-president Yonathan Arfi said he "utterly rejected" the view that the latest increase in antisemitic incidents was down to events in Gaza. "They have laid bare something far more profound," he said.

Nor is it just Europe's Jewish leaders who are alarmed. Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has called the recent incidents "an attack on freedom and tolerance and our democratic state". The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has spoken of "intolerable" and clearly antisemitic acts: "To attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply antisemitism and racism".

Police at the site of a shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, where four people were killed.

Photograph: Eric Vidal/REUTERS

France, whose 500,000-strong Jewish community is one of Europe's largest, and Germany, where the post-war exhortation of "Never Again" is part of the fabric of modern society, are not alone. In Austria last month, a pre-season friendly between Maccabi Haifa and German Bundesliga team SC Paderborn had to be rescheduled after the Israeli side's previous match was called off following an attempted assault on its players.

The Netherlands' main antisemitism watchdog, Cidi, had more than 70 calls from alarmed Jewish citizens in one week last month; the average is normally three to five. An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jewish women were attacked – one beaten, the other the victim of arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies. In Belgium, a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: "We don't currently sell to Jews."

In Italy, the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: "Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade"; another: "Jews, your end is near." 

Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews.

There has been no violence in Spain, but the country's small Jewish population of 35,000-40,000 fears the situation is so tense that "if it continues for too long, bad things will happen," the leader of Madrid's Jewish community, David Hatchwell, said. The community is planning action against El Mundo after the daily paper published a column by 83-year-old playwright Antonio Gala questioning Jews' ability to live peacefully with others: "It's not strange they have been so frequently expelled."

Studies suggest antisemitism may indeed be mounting. A 2012 survey by the EU's by the Fundamental Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight European countries – between them, home to 90% of Europe's Jewish population – found 66% of respondents felt antisemitism in Europe was on the rise; 76% said antisemitism had increased in their country over the past five years. In the 12 months after the survey, nearly half said they worried about being verbally insulted or attacked in public because they were Jewish.

Jewish organisations that record antisemitic incidents say the trend is inexorable: France's Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community says annual totals of antisemitic acts in the 2000s are seven times higher than in the 1990s. French Jews are leaving for Israel in greater numbers, too, for reasons they say include antisemitism and the electoral success of the hard-right Front National. The Jewish Agency for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on the previous year. Between January and May this year (2014), 2,254 left, against 580 in the same period last year.

Between 6,000 and 7,5000 Jews left France in each of 2014, 2015 and 2016. Since then the number leaving has decreased from that level by almost half.

In a study completed in February, America's Anti-Defamation League surveyed 332,000 Europeans using an index of 11 questions designed to reveal strength of anti-Jewish stereotypes. It found that 24% of Europeans – 37% in France, 27% in Germany, 20% in Italy – harboured some kind of anti-Jewish attitude.

So what is driving the phenomenon? Valls, the French prime minister, has acknowledged a "new", "normalised" antisemitism that he says blends "the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the devastation of Israel, and hatred of France and its values".

Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a London-based charity that monitors antisemitism both in Britain and on the continent, also identifies a range of factors. Successive conflicts in the Middle East he said, have served up "a crush of trigger events" that has prevented tempers from cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, and the three Israel–Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have "left no time for the situation to return to normal." In such a climate, he added, three brutal antisemitic murders in the past eight years – two in France, one in Belgium, and none coinciding with Israeli military action – have served "not to shock, but to encourage the antisemites", leaving them "seeking more blood and intimidation, not less".

Experts said anti-Jewish attacks were not only down to Israel-Palestinian conflict. 

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In 2006, 23-year old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead in Paris by a group calling itself the Barbarians Gang, who subsequently admitted targeting him "because he was a Jew, so his family would have money". 

Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead seven people, including three children and a young rabbi outside their Jewish school. 

And in May this year Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian descent thought to have recently returned to France after a year in Syria fighting with radical Islamists, was charged with shooting four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels.

If the French establishment has harboured a deep vein of anti-Jewish sentiment since long before the Dreyfus affair, the influence of radical Islam, many Jewish community leaders say, is plainly a significant contributing factor in the country's present-day antisemitism. But so too, said Gardner, is a straightforward alienation that many young Muslims feel from society. "Often it's more to do with that than with Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police station as a synagogue. Jews are simply identified as part of the establishment."

Yeah... I don't think so!

While he stressed it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Muslims, Peter Ulrich, a research fellow at the centre for antisemitism research (ZfA) at Berlin's Technical University, agreed that some of the "antisemitic elements" Germany has seen at recent protests could be "a kind of rebellion of people who are themselves excluded on the basis of racist structures."

Arfi said that in France antisemitism had become "a portmanteau for a lot of angry people: radical Muslims, alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left". But he also blamed "a process of normalisation, whereby antisemitism is being made somehow acceptable". One culprit, Arfi said, is the controversial comedian Dieudonné: "He has legitimised it. He's made acceptable what was unacceptable."

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

Almost every observer pointed to the unparalleled power of unfiltered social media to inflame and to mobilise. A stream of shocking images and Twitter hashtags, including #HitlerWasRight, amount, Arfi said, almost to indoctrination. "The logical conclusion, in fact, is radicalisation: on social media people self-select what they see, and what they see can be pure, unchecked propaganda. They may never be confronted with opinions that are not their own."

Now this was written in 2014, before the exodus of Middle-East Muslims into Europe. As bad as the writer of this piece makes it out to be, it is far worse now with millions more Muslims in Europe and far-right extremism growing exponentially, and 4 more years of Palestinian propaganda. 

If the political backlash against the absorption of millions of Muslims doesn't continue, you will see another round (referring to Nazism) of Europe turning its back on Jews as Arabs attempt to annihilate them. 

Yesterday, an American entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, and murdered 11 people, injuring several more. His intent was to kill all Jews. He was not Muslim, but he had the same hatred for Jews and the same determination to see them exterminated as radical Islam, and the same a Nazism. 

It is more than just propaganda that is driving this madness, although the propaganda certainly contributes significantly. There is, I sincerely believe, a spiritual element to this hatred. An element that will just grow stronger (dare I say it again, Sin is Progressive) until all Hell breaks loose. At that point, God will prove once again that He will not allow His people to be utterly destroyed.