Category Archives: Globalization

Nuclear Protests in India and Foreign-Funded NGOs

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This week police in Kudankulam, in southern Tamil Nadu, fired at thousands of anti-nuclear protesters on the beach, killing a fisherman. The locals were opposing a new, Russian-designed, 2,000MW nuclear plant, India’s biggest, which is now being filled with fuel. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 10,000 Indians. Now fears grow of another big wave that could bring a Fukushima-style disaster.  Protesters also claim harassment, saying officials have slapped sedition notices against 8,000 who have dared speak out. Opposition has flared before. The state’s chief minister, Jayaram Jayalalitha, once backed the protests but has now swung in favour of the plant—perhaps betting that anger over power shortages trumps anti-nuclear outbursts.

The reaction of the national government, under the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has been mixed. Committees of investigation called the plant safe. The High Court in Chennai heard, and ruled against, a petition by locals over safety. The Supreme Court will hear an appeal.  The government’s argument that politicians not protesters should decide the country’s energy mix is reasonable. But, twitchy at criticism, it veered off in suggesting opponents merely did the bidding of a foreign hand. Mr Singh, in an interview with a science magazine in February, blamed protests on NGOs, “mostly I think based in the United States”. A tough new law is in force, severely restricting foreign money going to local NGOs.  Mr Singh’s frostiness is best understood in the context of America’s moans that a civil-nuclear deal signed with India has not led to American investors getting energy contracts. Strict liability laws scare its private investors, whereas government-backed ones, such as Russians, feel more secure. Could Mr Singh be implying that American activists are stirring the trouble in Kudankulam because the plant is Russian-built?

Nuclear Power in India: The Kudankulam conundrum, Economist, Sept. 15,2012, at 39

Oil, Somalia and the Fnal Frontier

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Canadian oil and gas exploration company Horn Petroleum said  it had encountered only water in a well it drilled in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, the first to be sunk in the country since civil war erupted two decades ago.  The well, Shabeel North-1, reached a total depth of 3,945 metres and is now being plugged, Horn said.  Because there were no shows of oil and gas, Horn Petroleum determined a second well it drilled earlier in the year, Shabeel-1, also was dry and said the company would not test it further for hydrocarbon potential

“While we were disappointed that we were not able to flow oil from the first two exploration wells in our Puntland (Somalia) drilling campaign, we remain highly encouraged that all of the critical elements exist for oil accumulations, namely a working petroleum system,” Horn’s chairman Keith Hill said in a statement.  While there has been speculation about finding oil in the anarchic Horn of Africa country for decades, it has no proven hydrocarbon reserves. The prospect of oil beneath Dharoor’s sandy, arid plains has elicited excitement among officials of the impoverished region. The companies estimated there could be as much as 300 million barrels of recoverable oil in the northern part of Somalia.  Somalia, mired in conflict since warlords in the early 1990s and then Islamist militants reduced the government to impotence, represents one of the final frontiers in Africa to be explored.

Horn Petroleum’s Somali wells come up dry, Reuters, Aug. 28, 2012

The Essence of Imperialism: Australia in the Pacific

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Nor is it the first time Vanuatu has clashed with the Australian Federal Police (AFP). In 2004 its government closed down the AFP offices in the capital, Port Vila, and expelled officers, after allegations that they were spying and interfering with domestic politics. The AFP’s main concerns in Vanuatu have been over the country marketing itself vigorously as an international tax haven, and over the risk posed by the volatile Vanuatu Mobile Force, the paramilitary wing of the local police force. Protecting Australia’s national interests under the guise of so-called capacity-building can quickly lead to tensions.

The AFP’s activities in Vanuatu have been part of a broader expansion over the past decade of Australian policing across the Pacific. Peacekeeping missions to Timor-Leste since 1999 and to the Solomon Islands, beginning in 2003, boosted police numbers. In the past decade, the AFP has trebled in size and increased its budget fivefold. The AFP commissioner now has an influential role on the Australian cabinet’s national-security committee. In Australia most domestic policing is carried out by state police forces, leaving the federal force largely free, outside aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, to focus on international deployments.

Their efforts have often led to accusations of heavy-handedness. In 2005 a mission to Papua New Guinea was abandoned after that country’s Supreme Court ruled that legal immunities granted to AFP officers were unconstitutional. In 2006 the Solomon Islands’ police chief, Shane Castles, an Australian, was sacked and declared an “undesirable immigrant” after a raid by his police officers on the office of the prime minister. That raid was connected with the AFP’s long-standing pursuit of the Solomon Islands’ then attorney-general, Julian Moti, on charges of sex with an underage girl. Mr Moti was deported to Australia in 2007, arrested and brought before the courts. In December 2011 the High Court threw the case out, finding that Australian officials had colluded in Mr Moti’s illegal deportation.

The Australian Federal Police in the Pacific: Booting out big brother, Economist, May 19, 2012, at 49