International New York Times số ra ngày 24/2/2014

Trang 1

FOR SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION, CALL:

00800 44 48 78 27

or e-mail us at inytsubs@nytimes.com

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014

Andorra ¤ 3.00 Morocco MAD 25 Antilles ¤ 3.00 Senegal CFA 2.500 Cameroon CFA 2.500 Tunisia Din 3.900 Gabon CFA 2.500 Reunion ¤ 3.50

NEWSSTAND PRICES France ¤ 3.00

’:HIKKLD=WUXUU\:?k@m@c@e@a"

IN THIS ISSUE

No 40,730 Books 10 Business 16 Crossword 15 Culture 10 Opinion 8 Sports 13

GAINS RESPECT

PAGE 10 |CULTURE

SIDE OF THINGS

PAGE 11 |FASHION MILAN

TOBACCO ROAD?

PAGE 16 |BUSINESS

O N L I N E AT I N Y T CO M

I N S I D E TO DAY ’S PA P E R

New push against gay marriage

Opponents of same-sex marriage have

a new chance this week to play one of their most emotional and, they hope, potent cards: the claim that having parents of the same sex is bad for children.nytimes.com/us

Defining the crunch factor

How should General Mills gauge the texture of its granola bars? A young inventor has come up with the answer:

He calls it an organoleptic analyzer

nytimes.com/technology

Test case: Is college football a job?

In a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago,

Northwestern players have laid out an argument that they are employees entitled to unionize.nytimes.com/sports

Robots as U.S border sentinels

Drug smuggling has remained stubbornly common along the United States-Mexico border, where robots are

a new tactic in the battle.nytimes.com/us

Taliban launch bold attack

Taliban insurgents overran an Afghan Army base on Sunday and killed 21 soldiers, one of the worst single blows

to government forces.nytimes.com/asia

An industry behind asylum fraud

Recently unsealed court filings offer a look at asylum fraud among Chinese in New York, where applicants are regarded with suspicion.WORLD NEWS, 6

What many Scots really want

David Cameron’s praising the United Kingdom to Scotland missed the point that for many Scots, independence is not about nationalism, but democracy, Kathleen Jamie writes.OPINION, 9

Lawmakers take control in Ukraine

KIEV, UKRAINE

BY DAVID M HERSZENHORN

A day after President Viktor F Ya-nukovych fled the Ukrainian capital and was removed from power by a unani-mous vote in Parliament, lawmakers moved swiftly on Sunday to dismantle the remaining vestiges of his govern-ment by firing top cabinet members, in-cluding the foreign minister

With Parliament, led by the speaker, Oleksandr V Turchynov, firmly in con-trol of the federal government — if not yet the country as a whole — lawmakers began an emergency session on Sunday

by adopting a law restoring state own-ership of Mr Yanukovych’s opulent presidential palace, which he had privatized

Parliament voted to grant Mr

Turchynov authority to carry out the du-ties of the president of Ukraine, adding

to his authority to lead the government that lawmakers had approved on Satur-day

On Saturday, after signing a peace deal with the opposition that he had hoped would keep him in office until at least December, Mr Yanukovych fled Kiev to denounce what he called a viol-ent coup His official residence, his vast, colonnaded office complex and other once-impregnable centers of power fell without a fight to throngs of joyous cit-izens stunned by their triumph

While Mr Yanukovych’s archrival, former Prime Minister Yulia V Ty-moshenko, was released from a peniten-tiary hospital, Parliament found the president unable to fulfill his duties and exercised its constitutional powers to set an election for May 25 to select his replacement

A pugnacious Mr Yanukovych ap-peared on television Saturday after-noon, apparently from the eastern city

of Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s eastern bor-der with Russia, saying he had been

forced to leave the capital because of a

‘‘coup,’’ and that he had not resigned, and had no plans to

The president’s departure from Kiev capped three months of protests and a week of frenzied violence in the capital that left more than 80 protesters dead It turned what began in November as a street protest driven by pro-Europe chants and nationalist songs into a mo-mentous but still ill-defined revolution

Ms Tymoshenko, who was jailed by

Mr Yanukovych after losing the presi-dential election in 2010, was released Saturday evening from the hospital in Kharkiv where she had been held and quickly made her way to Kiev Many Ukrainians — and virtually all of the pro-Western protesters — believe her conviction was politically motivated and regard her as something of a mar-tyr to their cause

Late Saturday she appeared on the stage in Independence Square in a wheelchair and delivered a speech that was greeted by cheers and chants of

‘‘Yulia! Yulia!’’

She addressed her audience as ‘‘he-roes,’’ and told them, ‘‘I was dreaming

to see your eyes I was dreaming to feel the power that changed everything.’’ Depending on her health, Ms Ty-moshenko, who has complained of chronic back problems since she was jailed in 2011, may run for president in vote scheduled for May, and many of

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Olympic finale At the closing of the Winter Games at Sochi on Sunday, dancers whirled and Russia celebrated its contributions to the world of culture.PAGE 13

As golden spell ends, Sochi faces reality

SOCHI, RUSSIA

BY DAVID SEGAL

Now comes the hard part

After the closing ceremony Sunday,

Sochi is confronting life after the

Olympics and the aftermath of a building

boom that, for a time, made it the world’s

largest construction site The area is

now home to more than 40,000 hotel

rooms, four ski resorts, dozens of

restau-rants and retailers, five sports arenas,

one stadium, and enough roads and

rail-ways to handle 20,000 visitors an hour

That made sense during the Games,

but what will happen when fans and ath-letes leave? This question confronts every Olympic city, but it seems acutely problematic in Sochi, experts say, in part because the scale of overbuilding vastly exceeds what occurred in Vancouver, London and elsewhere, and in part be-cause the area will face competition from resort towns in other countries

It also seems that few people in the upper echelons of the Russian govern-ment have given the future of Sochi much thought

‘‘I don’t think anyone is sure what to

do with it,’’ said Sufian Zhemukhov, co-author of a coming book on the Sochi Games ‘‘I say that because President Putin and Prime Minister Medvedev have changed the concept many times

First, it was going to become a kind of capital of southern Russia Then they talked about dismantling the arenas and taking them north A few months ago, Medvedev said they were going to open casinos there.’’

Virtually everything about the Sochi Games has been improvised, it seems, and their aftermath will not be any differ-ent Russia’s primary goal in 2007 was to

submit the winning bid to the Interna-tional Olympic Committee, and one of the appeals of Sochi to the I.O.C was that the area was largely undeveloped, meaning that Russia would have to produce lots of spiffy new buildings and infrastructure

ANDREA BRUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Latha Reddy Musukula’s husband killed himself because of debts, which have passed to her She has promised the money lender to repay what she owes by April.

From farmers’ suicides,

a legacy of debt in India

BOLLIKUNTA, INDIA

BY ELLEN BARRY

Latha Reddy Musukula was making tea

on a recent morning when she spotted

the money lenders walking down the

dirt path toward her house They came

in a phalanx of 15 men, by her estimate

She knew their faces, because they had

walked down the path before

After each visit, her husband, a

farm-er named Vefarm-era Reddy, sank deepfarm-er

in-to silence, frozen by some terror he

would not explain Three times he cut

his wrists He tied a noose to a tree,

re-lenting when the family surrounded him, weeping In the end he waited until

Ms Musukula stepped out, and then he hanged himself from a pipe supporting their roof, leaving a careful list of each debt he owed to each money lender She learned the full sum then: 400,000 ru-pees, or about $6,400

A current of dread runs through this farmland, where women in jewel-colored saris bend their backs over wa-tery terraces of rice In Andhra Pra-desh, the southern state where Ms

Musukula lives, the suicide rate among farmers is nearly three times the

na-East and West clash

in leader’s hometown

DONETSK, UKRAINE

BY ALISON SMALE

A few hundred fearful pro-democracy activists turned out on Sunday in this hardscrabble city in eastern Ukraine, the region where the deposed president, Victor F Yanukovych is believed to have fled

Within an hour, they were jeered by mobs, mostly young men, masked and carrying clubs Eventually, the police maneuvered between the two groups, escorting away the activists and

cor-ralling but not arresting their har-anguers, some clearly inebriated The two gatherings illustrated the forces still tugging at Ukraine’s future and which have yet to be reconciled — Ukraine’s pro-European west and its Russian-leaning east — even now that

Mr Yanukovych has been removed from office

Mr Yanukovych hails from the mean streets of Donetsk, where in his youth

he went to prison twice for assault Where he is now is not known

He went into hiding Sunday, a day after a senior aide of the border protec-tion forces, Sergey Astakhov, an-nounced that a charter plane had been prevented from taking off Saturday night at Donetsk airport Mr Ya-nukovych was spotted leaving the plane

SOCHI, PAGE 13

DONETSK, PAGE 4 UKRAINE, PAGE 4

INDIA, PAGE 5

SOCHI OLYMPICS

CANADIAN MEN GLIDE TO GOLD

A 3-0 victory over Sweden in hockey capped an undefeated run in Sochi for Canada, which defended its title.PAGE 13

NEXT GENERATION IS ON THE MOVE

Veteran Alpine skiers held their own at the Sochi Games, but a youthful group

is showing clear advances.PAGE 14

Mexicans capture No 1 cartel chief

Dozens of Mexican marines and police officers, who were aided by information from the United States, seized Joaquín Guzmán Loera over the weekend in the beach resort of Mazatlán without firing

a shot.WORLD NEWS, 5

Stakes high as E.C.B tests banks

A lot is riding on the cleanup of euro zone banks, and clarity is needed to ensure that lenders really do get a good scrubbing — and are able to support the fragile economic recovery.BUSINESS, 20

THE OPULENCE YANUKOVYCH LEFT BEHIND

His compound included a golf course, a private zoo, classic cars and a restaurant

in the form of a pirate ship.PAGE 4

Yahoo steps up advertising efforts

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo,

is trying to make the company’s ads more compelling and to integrate them with the news and information people seek from the company’s websites and mobile applications.BUSINESS, 17

President’s allies fired;

Parliament speaker gets power to act in his stead

Deposed president finds

a tug of war in his native eastern Ukraine

DAVID MDZINARISHVILI/REUTERS

Yulia V Tymoshenko in Kiev, Ukraine She addressed her audience as ‘‘heroes.’’

JOE KLAMAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

A MESSAGE FOR CHINA A Japanese officer monitoring maneuvers in Southern California last

week as Marines and Japanese soldiers held an annual joint exercise The forces practiced how

to invade and retake an island captured by hostile forces.WORLD NEWS, 6

Trang 2

2 | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014 INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

page two

Find a retrospective of news from 1887 to

2013 in The International Herald Tribune

atiht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com

See what readers are talking about and

leave your own comments atinyt.com

1914 Storm Drives Cruiser Ashore

A terrific gale raged over the western

Mediterranean during the early hours of

yesterday morning Considerable

dam-age was caused to shipping, the force of

the hurricane being such that many

ves-sels dragged their anchors, while others

were driven ashore or dashed against

the quays near which they were lying

The French armored cruiser

Waldeck-Rousseau was driven ashore at Golfe

Juan, near Cannes, off which the French

Mediterranean squadron is anchored

The cruiser is lying in a sheltered

posi-tion in nearly two fathoms of water

1939 Machado, Spanish Writer, Dies

COLLIOURE, FRANCE Antonio Machado,

Spanish poet and playwright, died

yes-terday [Feb 22] in the tiny hotel of this

French village which was his home in

war-enforced exile He was 64 years old

A month ago M Machado, with his

fam-ily, had fled from Barcelona with

thou-sands of other Spanish Loyalists and had

taken refuge here With his brother, M

Machado wrote ten plays, including

‘‘Phoenix’’ and ‘‘Juan de Manana.’’ Two

volumes of poetry, ‘‘Soledades’’ and

‘‘Campos de Castilla,’’ won him a

Euro-pean reputation Throughout the civil

war in Spain he fought with his pen for

the Loyalist government

vard Business School professor and the author of ‘‘Beauty Imagined,’’ a 2010 history of the beauty industry

Mr Rechelbacher’s line of luxury products ultimately included lip gloss, hair conditioners, mascara, fragrances, herbal teas, coffee beans, nontoxic household cleaners, nutritional supple-ments, jewelry and books, all carried by 25,000 stores and salons worldwide

He did not originate the idea of organic cosmetics; they had been manufactured since the late 1950s by niche firms like Yves Rocher But with a few other ‘‘really good entrepreneurs,’’ Professor Jones said, including Anita Roddick, who foun-ded The Body Shop in Britain in 1976, Mr

Rechelbacher helped make ‘‘natural’’

health and beauty products ‘‘totally cool, fashionable and expensive’’ and the fast-est-growing sector of the industry

After selling Aveda, Mr

Rechelbach-er started Intelligent Nutrients to pro-duce cosmetics with organic ingredi-ents He grew most of the ingredients on his 570-acre organic farm in Osceola

Horst Martin Rechelbacher was born

in Klagenfurt, Austria, on Nov 11, 1941, the son of Rudolf and Maria

Rechelbach-er His father was a shoemakRechelbach-er His mother was an herbalist and apothecary

BY PAUL VITELLO

Horst Rechelbacher, an Austrian-born

hairstylist who went on to found Aveda, a

company whose pledge to eliminate toxic

chemicals from its products helped give

rise to a vast market for so-called natural

cosmetics in the United States, died on

Feb 15 in Osceola, Wis He was 72

The cause was complications of

pan-creatic cancer, a family spokesman said

Mr Rechelbacher championed

cam-paigns to raise public awareness of

po-tentially cancer-causing ingredients in

beauty supplies

He started Aveda in 1978, when

mak-ing fragrances and hair-care products

from herbs and other plants was widely

seen as an ephemeral pursuit, doomed

to vanish with the receding tide of the

counterculture He made batches of his

first product, a clove shampoo, in his

kit-chen sink in Minneapolis

By 1997, when he sold the company to

Estée Lauder for a reported $300

mil-lion, Mr Rechelbacher had ‘‘put natural

cosmetics on the map in the United

States,’’ said Geoffrey G Jones, a

Har-whose work inspired Mr Rechelbach-er’s interest in medicinal plants At 14, facing diminished opportunities in Aus-tria after World War II, Horst was ap-prenticed to a local hairdresser’s shop

He proved talented; by 17, he was working in a hair salon in Rome After that, he moved to salons in London and then New York Mr Rechelbacher was attending a hairstyling competition in Minneapolis in 1965 when he was seri-ously injured in a car accident After a six-month recovery, he decided to settle there and open a salon It grew to become

a small chain known as Horst & Friends

His childhood interest in herbal medi-cine was rekindled in 1970 by an Indian guru he had met in Minneapolis when he attended his lecture on the ancient prac-tice of Ayurvedic medicine, which uses herbs and plants (The name Aveda was derived from the Sanskrit word Ay-urveda, which means ‘‘science of life.’’) The encounter, he told interviewers, inspired him to spend six months in In-dia, where he learned about the herbs, oils and plants used in the Ayurvedic tradition of health care and aromather-apy — skills he later applied in formulat-ing his clove shampoos, cherry-bark hair conditioners and lip glosses of açaí

berry and purple corn

Mr Rechelbacher’s signature pitch was, ‘‘Don’t put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t put in your mouth.’’

At sales conventions and in videotaped interviews, he often demonstrated that principle by drinking hair spray and other products made by his company

Hair spray made by some major man-ufacturers can contain solvents, glues, polymers and propellants, said Janet Nudelman, director of program and policy at the Breast Cancer Fund, one of

a dozen nonprofit environmental and health groups that joined forces in 2004

to start the Campaign for Safe Cosmet-ics Mr Rechelbacher helped finance it

‘‘Horst was in many ways the father

of safe cosmetics,’’ Ms Nudelman said

‘‘He took action to address the problem long before most of us knew there was anything to even worry about.’’

Since the 1990s, consumer groups have raised alarms about scant govern-ment oversight of cosmetics made with risk-laden ingredients like formalde-hyde resin (used as a nail strengthener

in polish), camphor (a common ingredi-ent in aromatherapy products), dibutyl phthalate (a solvent in nail products) and parabens (compounds used as pre-servatives in fragrances)

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics re-cently helped persuade Johnson & John-son to remove two ingredients linked to cancer from its baby shampoo

‘‘Horst believed so deeply in our work,’’ the group said in a statement after his death ‘‘Much to the chagrin of his more mainstream peers,’’ it added,

he often handed out copies of the cam-paign’s literature at industry meetings

Its headline: ‘‘Free gift of toxic chemic-als with every cosmetic purchase.’’

JENN ACKERMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Horst Rechelbacher raised awareness about potentially toxic beauty supplies.

Turmoil in Ukraine

All I’ve read about the Ukrainian people

during their crisis has impressed me Their

bravery, pride, discipline and focus on their

ideals have been incredible The fact that

there was no looting, wanton destruction or

further violence after they’d achieved their

goals earns my lasting respect I wish

these fine people the very best in their new

future as a productive and successful nation

TOMMY2TONE,EDEN PRAIRIE, MINN.

I am American, and I have lived in Ukraine

for 20 years Almost everybody I know is

shocked and many appalled by Yulia

Tymoshenko’s being freed, and that her

first action was to go to Independence

Square and say she will run for President

Yulia Tymoshenko is not a martyr for

freedom As prime minister, she was as

corrupt as Yanukovych and his team

Everybody I know agrees that the charges

were political — but she deserved to be in

jail — and should be joined by Yanukovych

and his henchmen Ukraine needs new

leaders There are many deserving a

chance

ANDREW KINSEL,KIEV

I’m afraid that if Tymoshenko gets to

become president, we’ll be here again in

five years talking about protesters in the

streets of Kiev, protesting her corrupt

government

LOU ANDREWS,PORTLAND, ORE.

This is only the first act I wish these people

well, living in the midst of such corruption

But I’m afraid for their lives as this tragedy

continues to spiral Poor Ukraine, so far

from God and so close to Russia

L BRAVERMAN,NEW YORK

Who would have dreamed that this could

have happened during Putin’s PR

extravaganza, the Sochi Olympics? Oh, he

must have a very bad taste in his mouth

CDC,MASSACHUSET TS

Albert R.

Hunt

L E T T E R F R O M WA S H I N GTO N

Any suspicion that the political right, after suffering a defeat on the debt ceil-ing and facceil-ing threats from business donors, is losing its clout can be dis-missed by the fight over the United Na-tions Convention on the Rights of Per-sons With Disabilities

The treaty has been ratified by 141 countries In the United States, it is backed by the White House, former President George H W Bush, the ma-jor disability and veterans’ advocacy groups and many businesses

Senate Republicans, however, already defeated the treaty in 2012, and

it now faces an uphill slog to get the two-thirds vote needed for ratification Right-wing critics — led by former Sen-ator Rick Santorum, the Heritage Foun-dation and some home-schoolers — said that adopting it would allow global enforcers to determine the treatment of Americans with disabilities and the permissibility of home schooling, and

that it would ease ac-cess to abortion

In reality, the treaty is modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act of

1990 It states that nations must ensure that people with dis-abilities get the same rights and are treated with the same dignity as all others It might well pres-sure other countries to adopt American standards

Proponents say American leadership

is important, a demonstration of the soft power of ideals and values If passage emboldens other nations to elevate their standards, it will make life easier for Americans with disabilities when traveling outside the United States De-spite strong opposition from Senate Re-publicans, led by Bob Corker of Tennes-see, the treaty has a distinctively Republican flavor The Americans With Disabilities Act was the signature do-mestic achievement of Mr Bush’s presi-dency, and the treaty was negotiated and supported at the United Nations by his son’s administration The most im-portant champion of the treaty is the former Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, a disabled World War II veteran;

it is supported by another former party leader, Bill Frist, a physician Its chief backers in the current Senate are John Barrasso of Wyoming, another physi-cian who is one of the most conserva-tive members of the chamber, and John McCain of Arizona, a disabled veteran Veterans’ groups backing the treaty include the American Legion, the Vet-erans of Foreign Wars, the Iraq and Af-ghanistan Veterans of America and the Wounded Warrior Project It is em-braced by the United States Chamber

of Commerce and companies like Nike, Walmart Stores, Coca-Cola and IBM The opposition from Mr Santorum, the Heritage Foundation, a slice of the home-schooling movement and a few right-wing Catholic organizations would seem a mismatch Yet these groups are vocal, and they capitalize on many Re-publicans’ fears of challenges from the right The disabilities community is not that well organized, nor does it rank among the big campaign contributors

Mr Corker says his opposition is based solely on the dangers the treaty would pose to national sovereignty and the threat that it would supersede United States law and states’ rights He cites a 1920 Supreme Court ruling on a migratory-bird treaty as precedent

In the Senate, supporters are writing

in ‘‘reservations, declarations and un-derstandings,’’ attesting that nothing in the treaty would affect current law This

is a common practice, The Economist magazine notes, for treaties ratified by the United States and other countries

It makes the Corker argument spe-cious, says Richard L Thornburgh, who was attorney general during George H W Bush’s administration and is an advocate of the treaty

‘‘These reservations attached to a treaty are part of the treaty,’’ he said

‘‘There is nothing in this treaty that would allow what critics allege.’’

Mr Dole says that when he ran the Senate, ratification ‘‘would have passed by voice vote.’’ He remains op-timistic that it will pass, though he says

he is worried because ‘‘a few senators aren’t returning my calls.’’

This astounds Tim Shriver, the chair-man of the Special Olympics ‘‘What val-ues here do these opponents not believe in?’’ he asked ‘‘This treaty brings to the table a place where America is the shin-ing light on the hill.’’(BLOOMBERG VIEW)

EMAIL:pagetwo@nytimes.com

Right sets its sights on

a U.N treaty

IN OUR PAGES

IN YOUR WORDS

Horst Rechelbacher, 72; founded natural cosmetics company

Cheering for the home team

O B I T U A RY

In reality, the treaty is based on the Americans With Disabil-ities Act.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

D O N N I N G T H E CO LO R S — A N D F U R Olympic fans traveled to the Sochi Games from all over Russia A few wore bear costumes and capes — as much for the television cameras

as for the tourists — and they were usually sporting the national colors.

sochi2014.nytimes.com/photos

Trang 3

World News middle east europe

ANTAKYA, TURKEY

BY BEN HUBBARD

AND KARAM SHOUMALI

It appeared to be a huge step forward

for the scattered rebel groups fighting

to topple President Bashar al-Assad of

Syria: the creation of a central body of

top insurgent commanders who would

coordinate military campaigns, direct

foreign support and serve as a unifying

force for their diverse movement

But 14 months after its creation, the

body, the Supreme Military Council, is

in disarray Islamist groups have seized

its weapons storerooms, its members

have stolen or sold its supplies, and one

commander it armed and equipped has

publicly joined an offshoot of Al Qaeda

The council’s full dysfunction spilled

into public view recently when a group of

its members decided at a secret meeting

to remove its chief of staff, Gen Salim

Id-ris, and put another man in his place

While the opposition’s exiled

leader-ship, the Syrian National Coalition,

quickly congratulated the new leader,

the move baffled many in the

opposi-tion, including the new leader himself,

who had not even known he was in the

running for the top job

‘‘My friend called and told me,

‘Con-gratulations,’ ’’ the new leader, Brig

Gen Abdul-Ilah al-Bashir, said in an

in-terview after his appointment ‘‘I asked

him, ‘Good news?’ He said to turn on

the television.’’

‘‘I swear to God, no one was in touch

with me,’’ he added ‘‘I knew nothing

about it.’’

The chaos within the opposition

coun-cil reflects the wider mistrust and

intern-al rivintern-alries between Syria’s rebels and

their powerful foreign backers that have

consistently undermined their ability to

form a united front against Mr Assad

While rebels across Syria share the

goal of regime change and often

cooper-ate in battle, recent interviews with

nearly 20 rebel commanders, fighters,

activists and logistics officers paint a

picture of a movement handicapped by

infighting, with many players accusing

their colleagues of choosing the

expan-sion of their own power over the fight

against the government

The new chaos in the rebel leadership

comes as internationally backed talks

aimed at ending the war have failed to

make progress and as the Obama

ad-ministration searches for ways to put

more pressure on Mr Assad

The disorder within the council, the

umbrella group for moderate,

Western-backed rebels, leaves the United States

and its allies with one fewer reliable

partner to work with to try to affect the

course of the war

Since its formation in December 2012,

the Supreme Military Council has never

lived up to its name Although it served

as a conduit for foreign military support

flowing into Syria, it never received

enough aid to fully equip its brigades

This left fighting groups scrambling for

support and developing independent

networks of wealthy Syrians or Persian

Gulf patrons, granting them

indepen-dence from the council’s leadership

Throughout the war, the Syrian

gov-ernment has called the rebel movement

a terrorist plot backed by foreign

powers The Supreme Military

Coun-cil’s operations lend some credence to

this argument Qatar and Saudi Arabia,

the uprising’s two largest backers,

pushed for the body’s creation and

provided most of its support And

Tur-key has allowed fighters and regular weapons shipments to cross its south-ern border

But many rebels said foreign support has often exacerbated tensions between groups Persian Gulf states earmarked portions of each shipment for their pre-ferred brigades, making others jealous and giving the council little control

The Supreme Military Council ‘‘be-came nothing more than a storeroom,’’

said Col Ziad Obeid, a council member who helped receive foreign support ‘‘It was a distribution point, not a military institution operating on its own.’’

As the council failed to turn the tide against Mr Assad, many rebels blamed General Idris, accusing him of failing to prevent rebel losses and the rise of groups with links to Al Qaeda

Ibrahim al-Hamwe, an arms coordi-nator for the Syrian Muslim Brother-hood, said, ‘‘There was no battle you could point to and say, ‘The S.M.C did this,’ or a force you could say was fun-ded by the S.M.C.’’

Others accused the group’s members

of distributing arms to their friends or selling them

Safi al-Safi, who leads a rebel brigade near Hama, said he had bought 22,000 bullets and 80 assault rifles from a Su-preme Military Council member and sold them for a profit of more than

$20,000 ‘‘How else was I supposed to feed my men?’’ he said

Even prominent council members sometimes helped themselves to its arms Last summer, fighters loyal to Jamal Maarouf, a rebel commander based in Idlib, seized a shipment of weapons from the council’s storehouses

on the Turkish border, according to people present at the time While Mr

Maarouf did not respond to requests for comment, one of his allies, Mohammed Zaatar, confirmed the account

Notable defections have also marred the council’s image Late last year, Sad-dam al-Jamal, a commander who had received arms from the group, publicly announced that he had joined the

Islam-ic State in Iraq and Syria, an offshoot of

Al Qaeda

General Idris’s aides declined to make him available for an interview, but Col Fateh Hassoun, his deputy, ac-knowledged the criticisms

‘‘All of that talk is 100 percent true,’’

he said ‘‘The S.M.C didn’t give the fighters what they needed because it never got enough support.’’

For now, the future of the Supreme Military Council remains unclear

Last week, a group of its members met while General Idris was abroad and made the announcement that he had been replaced, citing the ‘‘dysfunction that the S.M.C has gone through in re-cent months.’’ General Idris called the move ‘‘illegal’’ and a ‘‘coup.’’

The move was backed by Ahmed al-Jarba, the president of the Syrian Na-tional Coalition, and his supporters have said it will pave the way for a re-structuring of the council to make it more effective

After his appointment to replace Gen-eral Idris, GenGen-eral Bashir said he would cooperate with anyone fighting to topple the regime But he had no con-crete plans that might turn the council’s fate around

‘‘We’ll do what we can,’’ he said, ‘‘and we’ll talk to the fighters on the ground and, God willing, we’ll live up to our re-sponsibilities.’’

Forensics help Naples battle sidewalk nuisance

NAPLES, ITALY

BY JIM YARDLEY

Problems? Yes, conceded Tommaso

Sodano, the vice mayor here, Naples

has problems Debts have reportedly

topped $2 billion Many streets are

pocked with potholes The police

de-partment is underfinanced, organized

crime operates like a shadow state, and

illegal dumps are scattered around

what is still a grittily beautiful port city

And then there is what dogs leave

be-hind on the sidewalks

Naples has no shortage of that, either

Yet to the surprise of some people,

in-cluding more than a few Neapolitans,

the municipal administration is trying

to stake out a reputation as a civic

inno-vator by positioning Naples at the

cut-ting edge of dog-waste eradication By

taking DNA samples Of dogs

‘‘I know some people find it funny,’’

Mr Sodano said, smiling, ‘‘that with all

the problems the city has, we would

fo-cus on dog poop I know that.’’

Well, yes, maybe it is a bit funny But

another thing also appears to be true:

For the Neapolitans who navigate the

city’s sidewalks, the initiative is not

un-welcome In the affluent neighborhood

of Vomero, which is serving as a testing

ground for the cleanup campaign, many

residents are quite pleased, if surprised, that it is happening in Naples

‘‘This seems more German or Finnish than Italian,’’ said Virpi Sihvonen, a Finn who moved to Naples in the late 1980s after marrying a local man In the mornings, Ms Sihvonen said, she often watches a man release his three dogs

in-to the streets in-to run off in-to do their busi-ness He whistles, the dogs return, and their waste is left behind ‘‘He’s not the only one,’’ she added

The problem is as universal as cock-roaches, and seemingly as unsolvable

Urban dog ownership demands a bal-ance of love and duty, and not everyone

is dutiful about cleaning up after a walk

Cities have tried everything from the postal service (a Spanish mayor mailed the stuff back to dog owners) to sham-ing (some cities have publicized the names of offending owners) to bribery (some parks in Mexico City offered free Wi-Fi in exchange for bags of waste)

Naples has opted for science and tech-nology The idea is that every dog in the city will be given a blood test for DNA profiling to create a database of dogs and owners When an offending pile is discovered, it will be scraped up and subjected to DNA testing If a match is made in the database, the owner will face a fine of up to 500 euros, about $685

The DNA initiative might seem a tad

ambitious for Naples, a city that struggles to collect the garbage Apart-ment complexes and condo associations across the United States are increas-ingly using similar programs, but Naples represents a much bigger ca-nine population, with estimates of more than 80,000 dogs in the city

Mr Sodano and other city employees are confident that the program will work, noting that a similar campaign has been successful on the nearby re-sort island of Capri In Naples, the cam-paign so far is limited to Vomero and the adjacent neighborhood of Arenella, and costs more than $27,000 Teams of police officers and health workers started joint patrols in January to spread awareness

of the program and hand out a few fines

At the city’s veterinary hospital, techni-cians have taken blood samples from about 200 dogs, many of them accom-panied by owners who were appalled by the problem

One drizzly morning, Capt Enrico Del Gaudio of the Municipal Police led a patrol down Via Luca Giordano, a major commercial street in Vomero, where several residents were walking their dogs before work Dressed undercover

in jeans and hiking boots for the patrol, Captain Del Gaudio is diplomatic — he describes dog waste as ‘‘presences’’ — and finds nothing silly about the

cam-paign At his children’s school, he is known as the dog-waste cop

‘‘I’m a hero,’’ he said, laughing

Captain Del Gaudio was especially proud of the condition of Via Luca Giord-ano, which was unscathed for blocks

Even though the city is still building its DNA database and has yet to start test-ing what it finds, he said, the program is already influencing public behavior

‘‘Now, when I walk the streets, the presences have greatly diminished,’’

Captain Del Gaudio said ‘‘Before, it was like an obstacle course Every day, a child would walk into school with a little gift under her shoe.’’

Daniele Minichini, an official with an independent police union, is not amused

by this use of policing resources,

espe-cially in a city that is the headquarters

of the Camorra mafia For two decades, Officer Minichini has argued that money should be spent on better equip-ment or even uniforms for officers He said Naples must improve the sewage system, the roads and other infrastruc-ture — not focus on what dogs leave be-hind He also predicted that costs would rise sharply once the program was ex-panded to other parts of the city

‘‘When you have a house to restore,

do you first build a parquet floor?’’ he asked ‘‘Or do you repair the walls and the windows?’’

Mr Sodano, the vice mayor, said the concerns about finances and administra-tive focus were understandable but mis-placed He said city officials were already trying to claw out of debt and address the city’s major problems But Mr Sodano said the cleanup enforcement program was a chance to demonstrate municipal problem solving and to remind citizens that they have responsibilities, too

‘‘The main goal is respect for the rules,’’ he said Nor, he added, should the city’s huge problems preclude Naples from doing the small things that keep it beautiful

‘‘Governing Naples,’’ he said, ‘‘cer-tainly requires a sparkle of madness.’’

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

Syrian rebels backed

by West face disarray

Renzi, taking office, vows

a stable Italy

ROME

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Matteo Renzi was sworn in over the weekend as Italy’s youngest prime min-ister, and he promised a new era of stable government after engineering the removal of Enrico Letta, a fellow Democratic Party member he deemed too timid to revive the country

In a Twitter message before being sworn in on Saturday, Mr Renzi, 39, said accomplishing his goals would be tough, but ‘‘we’ll do it.’’

The main challenge for Mr Renzi’s broad coalition is the ailing economy, which is just beginning to show signs of rebounding after several years of stag-nation Youth unemployment is hover-ing around 40 percent Mr Renzi resigned as the mayor of Florence this month to take up his first national gov-ernment job

He has vowed to push electoral changes through Parliament in hopes of ending chronic political instability by reducing the influence of Italy’s tiny parties

GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The cutting edge of dog-waste eradication:

a ‘‘vet card’’ that stores a dog’s DNA.

Replacement of general

underscores Supreme

Military Council’s chaos

The council’s disorder leaves Washington and its allies with one fewer reliable partner

in confronting Damascus.

Haute Joaillerie ring, L’Odyssée de Cartier

Trang 4

INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

4 | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014

her supporters are eager to build a

cam-paign

In a sign of her still formidable

politic-al influence, Ms Tymoshenko spoke by

telephone on Sunday with the German

chancellor, Angela Merkel, as well as

with Stefan Fule, a top European Union

official, and with Senators John McCain,

Republican of Arizona, Richard J

Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and

Chris-topher S Murphy, Democrat of

Con-necticut Ms Tymoshenko also met with

ambassadors from the United States

and European Union countries

In Kiev, Ms Tymoshenko received an

enthusiastic but not overly exuberant

reception from the crowd in

Indepen-dence Square The response

demon-strated her continued popularity and

status as a symbol of opposition to Mr

Yanukovych but also underscored the

apprehension that many Ukrainians

feel toward politicians deeply

connect-ed to a government with a long history

of corruption and mismanagement

Mr Yanukovych, meanwhile, whose

whereabouts remained unknown,

ap-peared to be losing the support of even

his former allies On Sunday, his Party

of Regions, which days ago enjoyed a

majority in Parliament, released a

state-ment blaming him for the recent

vio-lence

In the statement, the Party of Regions

said it strongly condemned what it

called ‘‘criminal decrees,’’ which

result-ed in ‘‘human casualties, emptiresult-ed

cof-fers, huge debts and shame in the eyes

of the Ukrainian people and the whole

world.’’

‘‘All attempts to convince the

presi-dent to act differently were ignored,’’

the statement said ‘‘The party was

vir-tually the hostage of one corrupt

fam-ily.’’

While Parliament has dismissed a

number of senior officials, the defense

minister, Pavlo Lebedev, told Ukraine’s

Channel 24 that he intended to remain in

his post, and the military issued

state-ments that seemed to offer assurance

that no steps would be taken to interfere

with the provisional government

A statement posted on the Defense

Ministry website on Saturday, after Mr

Yanukovych’s departure, and attributed

to the ministry and the military, reaf-firmed the military’s commitment to the Constitution and expressed sorrow over the deaths in Kiev last week

‘‘Please be assured that the Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot and will not be involved in any political conflict,’’ the statement said

It is not yet clear whether Ukrainians

in the southern and eastern regions of the country, which host the bulk of the country’s industrial infrastructure as well as the heaviest concentration of pro-Russian sentiment, would resist the change of government in Kiev In

Kharkiv, pro-Russian demonstrators took to the streets on Sunday, and there have been scattered reports of clashes between pro-Russian Ukrainians and supporters of the protests in Kiev

Several lawmakers expressed rising alarm over Ukraine’s perilous economic situation The Russian government in December had come to Mr Ya-nukovych’s rescue with a $15 billion bailout and an offer of cheaper prices on natural gas

A $2 billion installment of that aid was canceled as part of the deal reached on Friday between Mr Yanukovych and opposition leaders Western officials have said they hope to offer assistance, but it is unclear how quickly that help might arrive

Among the reasons Mr Yanukovych turned away from signing political and trade accords with Europe in November was his unwillingness to carry out pain-ful austerity measures and other re-forms that had been demanded by the International Monetary Fund in ex-change for a large assistance package

On Sunday, the Fund’s managing di-rector, Christine Lagarde, said that there was concern about the political in-stability in Ukraine and that the fund could only provide assistance in re-sponse to a formal request

Speaking at the end of a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Sydney, Aus-tralia, Ms Lagarde said, ‘‘If the

Ukrain-ian authorities were to ask for I.M.F

support, whether it is policy advice, whether it is financial support together with economic reform discussions, we would be ready to do that.’’

But, she said, ‘‘We need to have some-body to talk to because any discussion takes two.’’

Susan E Rice, President Obama’s na-tional security adviser, said Sunday that the United States was prepared to work with the European Union and the Inter-national Monetary Fund, as well as Rus-sia, to shore up Ukraine’s nascent gov-ernment Speaking on the NBC News program ‘‘Meet the Press,’’ Ms Rice

Ukraine lawmakers move fast to cement power

UKRAINE, FROM PAGE 1

said that the United States hoped to see constitutional change and democratic elections in Ukraine ‘‘in very short or-der,’’ and she added that it ‘‘would be a grave mistake’’ for Russia to interfere militarily

‘‘It’s not in the interests of Ukraine or

of Russia or of Europe or of the United

States to see the country split,’’ she said

‘‘It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence return.’’

Oksana Lyachynska contributed report-ing from Kiev, Michelle Innis from Sydney and Brian Knowlton from Wash-ington.

and getting into one of two armor-plated

vehicles that drew up to the craft

Rumors that the president, who fled

Kiev overnight Friday, was in a local

Oleksiy Matsuka, editor in chief of the

newspaper Donetskiye Novosti

While this region, a bastion of support

for his pro-Russian policies, might be a

good place to hide, it still seemed

un-likely that the president could use the

area as a rallying point

The exact stance of the army and

se-curity forces is murky But influential

politicians were turning away from Mr

Yanukovych The head of his party’s

parliamentary faction denounced

mis-takes The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s

second city, called him history,

accord-ing to the Interfax news agency

A senior Donetsk member of the

pres-ident’s Party of Regions broke publicly

with Mr Yanukovych, while Donetsk’s

mayor, Alexander Lukyanchenko, a

Ya-nukovych ally who has railed against

‘‘fascists’’ and even ‘‘Nazis’’ battling

ri-ot police in Independence Square in

Kiev, put on his own, very east

Euro-pean display of strength

Striking a note of a benign city father, the mayor appeared near a monument

to the poet Taras Shevchenko as crowds dispersed, plunging in to shake hands,

reassure a man waiting years for a new apartment that the problems would be solved and warning against a breakup

of Ukraine in the pattern of Yugoslavia

in the 1990s

It was the final act in an elaborate two-hour drama, carefully managed by the police, that included the twin rallies

First, about 300 activists gathered for

a wreath-laying ceremony at noon at the memorial to Shevchenko, one of Ukraine’s most revered heroes In a statement, they emphasized that they would neither try to storm administra-tive offices, as in Kiev, nor tear down other memorials

The Ukrainian media have reported

16 Lenin statues have been torn down across the center and east of the coun-try in recent days, though on Sunday in this coal-mining town a Communist flag flew defiantly over a bust of Lenin

Just an hour later, the second scene unfolded Hundreds of men massed on a sidewalk, separated from the memorial crowd by various police units, from black-clad riot units to militia in navy uniforms

The taunting crowd chanted ‘‘glory’’

— not to the ‘‘heroes of Maidan’’ as the Kiev masses do but to the Berkut, the elite police units widely held respon-sible for violence against Kiev demon-strators

After the police separated the groups, some of the rowdy young men ran down the street to ‘‘protect’’ the monument of Lenin

Vsevolod Volosnoi, a 53-year-old doc-tor watching the scene with his wife, Svetlana, a nurse, mirrored this general

confusion, which clouds so much of Ukraine’s politics

On the one hand, he assured a

report-er, ‘‘We want to live in a civilized place, with the leaders of the democratic movement of all the world.’’ But ‘‘not all that came from Kiev is the voice of the people,’’ he added

And for sure, he said, in this heavily Russian-speaking region adjoining Rus-sia, one cannot be deprived of one’s own language

That was an allusion to the move already voted by Parliament in Kiev to

cancel the official status of the Russian language

Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Rus-sian Parliament’s committee on dealing with former Soviet lands, told Interfax:

‘‘They are trying in every possible way

to tear Ukraine away from Russia,’’ while counseling caution — for now Moves to deprive various peoples of their languages over centuries of shift-ing government in Eastern Europe have always sparked the fiercest of disputes

— as, say, in the Balkans in the 1990s

In a sign that Ukraine’s political tur-bulence is dividing even families, a well-dressed doctor, who identified herself only as Yelena, confided that her hus-band and mother-in-law were strongly opposed to her attendance at the pro-de-mocracy protests here, muted as they are compared with those in Kiev She hovered nervously on the edge Sunday Two friends, both teachers, and, like her, in their 40s, came up and joked

‘‘Fascism won’t advance!’’ chanted their opponents ‘‘I ask you,’’ said one of the trio, a teacher, also named Yelena, and wrapped in a lilac parka ‘‘Are we three fascists?’’

URIEL SINAI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Supporters of Viktor F Yanukovych rallying on Sunday in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.

DONETSK, FROM PAGE 1

For deposed leader, a home region but not a rallying point

Ukrainians take stock of the opulence that a president left behind

SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Near Kiev, the golf course at the former residence of Viktor F Yanukovych was considered open to the public over the weekend.

KIEV, UKRAINE

BY ANDREW E KRAMER

An eerie calm and a light mist shrouded

sprawling residential compound just

outside the capital over the weekend as

street fighters from the center of Kiev

made their way inside, gingerly passing

a wrought-iron gate and cautioning one

another about booby traps and snipers

They found neither on Saturday

morn-ing but discovered instead a world just as

surreal as the charred wasteland of

bar-ricades and debris on the central plaza

that they have occupied for months It

was a vista of bizarre and whimsical

at-tractions on a grand scale, a panorama of

waste and inexplicable taste

They saw about a half-dozen large

residences of various styles, a private

zoo with rare breeds of goats, a coop for

pheasants from Asia, a golf course, a

garage filled with classic cars and a

private restaurant in the form of a pirate

ship, with the name ‘‘Galleon’’ on its

bow and stern

One man in the 31st Lviv Hundred, the

small band of antigovernment militants

that took control of the compound, hung

a Ukrainian flag on a lamp post A few

dozen others walked about, seemingly

dazed by what was happening Some

raised their clubs, pipes and bats into

the air and yelled, ‘‘Glory to Ukraine!’’

and ‘‘Glory to its heroes!’’

Whether it was the toppling of

Ferdin-and Marcos of the Philippines or of Col

Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, the

breaching of the presidential palace

gates is a milestone of a revolution But

Kiev on Saturday was unusual in one

sense There was no sacking The

oppo-sition unit that took control of the presi-dent’s complex, called Mezhigorye, kept

it intact, at least for now On Saturday the president fled and the presidential guard melted away But members of the Lviv Hundred, who had repeatedly confron-ted Mr Yanukovych’s security forces on the streets, posted guards around his residential compound and prevented looting even as swarms of gawking Kiev residents strolled through its grounds

The reason, the street fighters said, was to preserve evidence of the deposed leader’s lavish lifestyle for his prosecu-tion One of the Lviv militants walked onto a gazebo ringed with plaster urns, removed his green military helmet and gazed out at the park and the Dnieper

soot-smeared clothing from the square and carrying baseball bats, walked into an outbuilding, sat in chairs with plush blue and gold upholstery, pulled large yellow drinking glasses from a cabinet and began to photograph one another

on their cellphones as if raising toasts

‘‘We hoped for this but didn’t expect it,’’ said one, Roman Dakus Mr Dakus said he had been in Kiev at Indepen-dence Square, or Maidan as it is known here, off and on for three months ‘‘It was very, very difficult to stay on the square

in the cold at night But we warmed one another with our hearts and our souls

He added: ‘‘People really changed their mind-set because of these events

Before, people thought, ‘Nothing really depends on me.’ They preferred to say that and to think like that But after this situation, they think differently They believe in their struggle when they are all together.’’

Within a short time, a crowd gathered outside the gates The street fighters

threw them open, and Ukrainians, who were arriving by the thousands by early afternoon, flowed into the compound

‘‘What a nightmare,’’ one man said in disgust, looking at the dining room of

Mr Yanukovych’s pirate ship, moored

at the river bank, all oak and brass trim

The complex was once a modest gov-ernment site that Mr Yanukovych turned into a private residence and then expanded, saying acquaintances had built or paid for many amenities Previ-ous Ukrainian presidents had not lived

at the residence

The street fighters decided not to open the buildings, saying they would wait for prosecutors and experts on valuable art to arrive and assess their contents

Autocrats seem to have a propensity for private zoos, and Mr Yanukovych’s

palace complex contained multiple en-closures for exotic animals Rare pheas-ants with magnificent, iridescent red tails scratched about in their cages, nervous from the crowds walking past and snapping pictures The labels on the cages identified them as ‘‘Diamond pheasant’’ and ‘‘Japanese long-tailed pheasant.’’ Other cages held dogs, and there were pens for goats and what ap-peared to be rare breeds of pigs The street fighters also found a heap

of ash from burned documents, and used a raft to fish others from where they had been thrown into the river, lay-ing them out carefully to dry

The complex extended well over a mile along the river and was immacu-lately landscaped with hedges, lawns and birch trees, and a golf course of graceful swales, sand traps and pools of crystalline water Even as the crowds grew, there was no sign of looting

By evening, a vast traffic jam formed

on the highway from the capital, and people walked along the road’s shoulder

to see the open palace The grounds filled with Ukrainians who said they were awed by what they saw ‘‘I’ve

nev-er seen luxury like this,’’ one man said Speaking of Mr Yanukovych, Ihor Knyazov, a cook, said: ‘‘He couldn’t stand up and tell the people, ‘I give up.’

So he just ran away, the coward.’’ Svetlana Gorbenkova, a real estate agent walking about, said: ‘‘It’s beauti-ful here It’s so peacebeauti-ful But why all this for just one person? This was all stolen from us It’s obvious now how much he stole Why didn’t he give anything to the people? When he was running for pres-ident, one of his slogans was, ‘I will listen to every one of you.’ But he didn’t listen to any of us.’’

‘‘We want to live in a civilized place, with the leaders of the democratic movement of all the world.’’

SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bouquets and candles adorned barricades in Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday, a day after the president’s departure capped three months of protests and a week of deadly violence in the capital.

Trang 5

asia americas world news

tional average; since 1995, the number

of suicides by India’s farmers has passed 290,000, according to the

nation-al crime records bureau, though the sta-tistics do not specify the reason for the act

India’s small farmers, once the coun-try’s economic backbone and most reli-able vote bank, are increasingly being left behind With global competition and rising costs cutting into their lean profits, their ranks are dwindling, as is their contribution to the gross domestic product If rural voters once made their plight into front-page news around elec-tion time, this year the large parties are jockeying for the votes of the urban middle class, and the farmers’ voices are all but silent

Even death is a stopgap solution, when farmers like Mr Reddy take their own lives, their debts pass from hus-band to widow, from father to children

Ms Musukula is now trying to scrape a living from the four acres that defeated her husband Around her, she sees a country transformed by economic growth, full of opportunities to break out of poverty, if only her son or daugh-ter could grasp one

But the trap that closed on her hus-band is tightening around her Like nearly every one of her neighbors, she is locked into a bond with village money lenders — an intimate bond, and some-times a menacing one No sooner did they cut her husband’s body down than one of them was in her house, threaten-ing to block the cremation unless she paid

Her appeals to officials for help have been met with indifference Lately, her fear has been getting the better of her

‘‘Sure, they will pay, otherwise it would be as if someone has broken into our house and stolen our money,’’ said Sudhakar Ravula, a slight man who lives

in a village about two miles away He in-troduces himself as a fisherman, but, un-der questioning, fishes out a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses and unfolds a promissory note signed by Veera Reddy

Four years ago, he said, he used bor-rowed money to lend Mr Reddy $800, at

an annual interest rate of 24 percent Re-minded of Mr Reddy’s suicide, Mr

Ravula looked impatient ‘‘I always feel sad for the man,’’ he said, ‘‘but commit-ting suicide is not the right way to go

about it.’’

Stories of farmers committing suicide may prompt shudders in gatherings of sociologists, but the local officials have heard it all before When market re-forms were introduced in 1991, the state scaled down subsidies and import barri-ers fell, thrusting small farmbarri-ers into an unforgiving global market Farmers took on new risks, switching to commer-cial crops and expensive, genetically modified seeds, paying more to educate their children in the hopes they would land government jobs

They found themselves locked in a white-knuckle gamble, juggling ever-larger loans at exorbitant interest rates, always hoping a bumper harvest would allow them to clear their debts, so they could take out new ones This pattern has left a trail of human wreckage

On a recent afternoon, Ms Musukula was one of 18 women waiting outside a

Nearly every woman carried a police re-port, identifying debt as the cause of a farmer’s suicide — a fact that should en-title them to a one-time payment of 150,000 rupees, to be split between the money lenders and the bereaved family, pledged by the state government around election time in 2004

To receive it, they needed a designa-tion from the district revenue officer

They had come to see one of the officer’s subordinates, a local revenue officer who might act as a gatekeeper

They crowded into the back of his office and took a good look at him: P Bhiksham,

a middle-aged man in rimless glasses, a green towel tucked behind his back to soak up sweat Mr Bhiksham listened to two women recite the details of their hus-bands’ deaths, and then began to speak

The real problem, he said, was that their husbands drank too much

‘‘In India we have a lot of problems, and we have to live with them,’’ he replied ‘‘You have problems, and you have to live with them Drinking is a ma-jor problem for most of the families One has to learn to run the family with whatever resources one has.’’ He went

on to say that he had never in his career encountered a genuine case of farmer suicide ‘‘We all have freedom to choose our own livelihoods,’’ he said, primly,

‘‘and the land here is fertile.’’

The women listened silently and filed out They were disappointed by what

Mr Bhiksham had said, but not sur-prised Many local officials blame farm-ers for mismanaging their finances

‘‘The family will always tell you it’s a farmer suicide,’’ said G Satyanarayana, the chief inspector at the precinct that had registered Veera Reddy’s suicide in

2012 After glancing through the case file, he said Mr Reddy had been undone

by ‘‘his bad habits,’’ by which he meant drinking The real problem, he said, was that local farmers were overspending

on their children’s education

‘‘Some of the farmers are getting

‘‘These are small farmers from villages, but they don’t send their kids to govern-ment schools, but to private schools

They are going for false prestige, they don’t really take note of their own finan-cial status The mother, instead of going out to the fields at 5 a.m., she is waiting for the school bus at 9 a.m.’’

As for money lenders harassing wid-ows after a suicide, he said the police had never received any reports of this happening, so were powerless to take any action Probably, he said, villagers

do not go to police about money lenders because they are afraid they will need a loan in the future

‘‘Nobody approaches the police,’’ he said ‘‘You always wish they would come and complain.’’

Latha Musukula is beginning to be undone by fear On the morning when the money lenders had come to her doorstep, she tried to do what her hus-band had always done — chitchat, put them off for a month or two But then one of the money lenders described the

house he planned to build on Ms Musukula’s land, and addressed her as

‘‘whore.’’

Ms Musukula was so thrown off bal-ance that she repeated the words the money lender asked her to say, prom-ising to repay the whole amount by April She had no idea how she was go-ing to do it

Selling the farmland, as Mr Ravula is urging, would leave the family without a source of income, and force her to return penniless to her brother’s household Because they cannot repay their loans,

Ms Musukula said, only one family in the village is willing to talk to them Fingers of fear climb up her neck as she walks to her cornfields in the morn-ing The corn is shriveling for lack of wa-ter, she can see that, and one of the farm’s two generators was just disconnected for nonpayment When she went to the doc-tor the other day, she said, he ‘‘told me that my nerves may break soon.’’ Something similar happened in the months before her husband killed

frightened to leave the house Always a drinker and an expansive host, he seemed to retreat into himself

‘‘He told me, ‘I am going to die I don’t know how you are going to take care of the loans, because I am going to die,’’’ she recalled A week before he killed himself, he said, ‘‘How will you manage things if I die? Will you cry a lot? You’ll

be harassed by everyone.’’

We’ll scrape by, she told him then A couple of good harvests and we can pay them all off

These days it is she who disappears into silences, and her son and daughter who watch from a distance, uncertain of the exact amount that the family owes

Ms Musukula tries to shield them from this information, telling them to focus

on their studies, but Srilekha is 18, and she knows ‘‘Mommy hopes to delay the loans and repay what we make from the farm, but we suffer losses almost every year,’’ she said ‘‘My brother and I wish that the money lenders would wait until

we finish school and get a job, but it is not possible.’’

She added: ‘‘The money lenders will not stop What has to happen, will hap-pen.’’

Harsha Vadlamani contributed report-ing from Hyderabad, India.

ANDREA BRUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Anitha Amgoth, center, at the funeral in Gundenga, India, of her husband, who committed suicide A market overhaul in the 1990s reduced subsidies and increased risk for small farmers.

A legacy of debt after farmers’ suicides

INDIA, FROM PAGE 1

DIA INDIA IN

CHINA PAKISTANTAAANANN

Bay of Bengal

DHRA DH ANDHR R RADESH PRA

ikun Bollikun unta a Bolliku

800 km

Mexicans capture

No 1 cartel chief

MEXICO CITY

BY RANDAL C ARCHIBOLD

AND GINGER THOMPSON

Just before 7 a.m., dozens of soldiers and

police officers descended on a

con-dominium tower in Mazatlán, Mexico, a

beach resort known as much as a

hangout for drug traffickers as for its

seafood and surf

The forces were following yet another

tip about the whereabouts of one of the

world’s most wanted drug kingpins,

Joaquín Guzmán Loera — known as El

Chapo, or ‘‘Shorty’’ — who had eluded

such raids for 13 years since escaping

from prison in a laundry cart With an

army of guards and lethally enforced

loyalty, he reigned over a worldwide,

multibillion-dollar drug empire that

supplied much of the illicit cocaine and

marijuana to the United States despite a

widespread, yearslong manhunt by

American and Mexican forces

This time, however, Mr Guzmán,

be-lieved to be in his mid-50s, did not slip

out a door, disappear into the famed

mountains around his home in

north-western Mexico, or prove to be absent,

as he had in so many previous attempts

to apprehend him He apparently had no

time to reach for the arsenal of guns and

grenades he had amassed or dash into a

storm drain or specially dug tunnel, as

the authorities said he recently did

minutes ahead of pursuers

Mexican marines and the police,

aided by information from the United

States Drug Enforcement

Administra-tion, immigration and customs officials

and the United States Marshals Service,

took him into custody on Saturday

with-out firing a shot, according to American

and Mexican officials

Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús

Mur-illo Karam, said a later forensic exam

made it ‘‘100 percent’’ certain the man

was Mr Guzmán; the tests were done to

avoid the kind of embarrassment

Mexic-an officials faced in June 2012 when they

announced the arrest of Mr Guzmán’s

son, only to later discover it was not him

He faces many drug trafficking and

organized crime charges in the United

States, which had offered $5 million for

information leading to his arrest

Mr Guzmán’s organization, the

Sin-aloa Cartel, is considered the largest and

most powerful trafficking operation in

the world, with a reach as far as Europe

and Asia, and has been a main

com-batant in a spasm of violence that has

left tens of thousands dead in Mexico

‘‘Big strike,’’ said a Twitter posting by

former President Felipe Calderón, who

had made cracking down on drug gangs

a hallmark of his tenure

But it was the forces under the control

of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who

has sought to steer the image of Mexico

away from drug violence, that produced

the biggest arrest in a generation While

Mr Peña Nieto has not allowed

Ameri-can law enforcement officials the kind of

broad access in Mexico that Mr

Calder-ón had permitted, the United States and

Mexico have continued to work

togeth-er on big cases

Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican

ambassador to the United States, said

the two governments had been working

together on the case for months But

whether Mr Guzmán would be

extra-dited to the United States has not been

worked out

Representative Michael McCaul, a

Texas Republican and the chairman of

the Homeland Security Committee, on

Sunday welcomed the arrest of Mr

Guz-mán as a ‘‘huge event’’ akin to the

cap-ture or killing of the Colombian drug

king Pablo Escobar or that of the

Chica-go gangster Al Capone

‘‘This is an exceptional case,’’ he said

on the ABC news program ‘‘This Week.’’

‘‘This is the largest, biggest drug lord

we’ve ever seen in the world.’’

Mr McCaul praised the antidrug ef-forts of Mr Peña Nieto, saying: ‘‘This is

a significant victory for both Mexico and the United States — this is the world’s most notorious drug lord that got taken down; he’s really the

godfath-er, if you will, of the cartels.’’

Noting that Mr Guzmán had escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001, however,

Mr McCaul said he favored Mr Guz-mán’s extradition to the United States, where he could be kept in a highly se-cure prison

It remains to be seen if the arrest will interrupt Mexico’s thriving drug trade

The capture or killing of a drug lord sometimes unleashes more violence as internal feuds break out and rivals at-tack And given the efficiency of the Sin-aloa Cartel, it is possible that the group will manage a smooth transition to a new leader and continue with business

as usual

Over time, as Mr Guzmán eluded cap-ture, his legend and the mystery of his whereabouts grew But in the end, he was captured not long after doing what

so many cartel bosses do: having a party in Mazatlán

In the years since he escaped arrest,

Mr Guzmán took on near-mythic status

He landed on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people He picked up the tab for entire restaurants, or so the sto-ries go, to ensure that diners would re-main silent about his outings According

to a leaked diplomatic cable, he sur-rounded himself with an entourage of

300 armed men for protection

Although Mr Guzmán had remained the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, security analysts have long suspected that much

of the day-to-day management fell to subordinates still at large

Still, Mr Guzmán’s fall carried a po-tent, symbolic boost for Mexican

securi-ty forces, which have killed or captured

25 of the 37 most-wanted organized crime leaders announced in 2010

Mr Guzmán was born in poverty in the foothills of the Sierra Madre in Sin-aloa State and dropped out of school by third grade His first foray into drug smuggling came in the late 1980s, when, the State Department said, he began working for Miguel Ángel Félix Gal-lardo, once Mexico’s biggest cocaine dealer, as an air logistics expert

Mr Guzmán astutely exploited the co-caine boom in the United States at the time, making valuable contacts along the transport chain from Colombia to Arizona By the time the Mexican au-thorities captured Mr Félix Gallardo in

1989, Mr Guzmán had already begun forming his own cartel

In 1993, he was charged in the United States with money laundering and rack-eteering, and three months later, he was arrested and convicted in Mexico on drug and homicide charges and sen-tenced to 20 years in prison

Then, in January 2001, Mr Guzmán’s criminal career took a stunning turn with his escape in the laundry cart that was wheeled out of the prison In what was considered further proof of his broad-based power, the authorities suspected that prison officials helped him escape

Randal C Archibold reported from Mex-ico City, and Ginger Thompson from New York Damien Cave, Paulina

Villeg-as and Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Brian Knowlton from Washington.

Troops and police, aided

by U.S intelligence, seize

leader of Sinaloa group

Planned Pentagon cuts would take military off war footing

WASHINGTON

BY THOM SHANKER AND HELENE COOPER

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans

to shrink the Army to its smallest force since before World War II and eliminate

an entire class of Air Force attack jets in

a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror at-tacks of 2001

The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its official re-lease Monday, takes into account the fis-cal reality of an era of government aus-terity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly land wars The result will be a military capable of defeating any adversary but too small to carry out protracted foreign occupations, officials said

‘‘You have to always keep your insti-tution prepared, but you can’t carry a large land-war Defense Department when there is no large land war,’’ a se-nior Pentagon official said

The official said that despite budget reductions, the military would have the money to remain the most capable in the world and that Mr Hagel’s propos-als, which have the endorsement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were designed to protect money for a continued Ameri-can presence in Asia and the Middle East Money saved by reducing the number of personnel also would assure that those remaining in uniform would

be well-trained and supplied with the best weaponry, they said

The new American way of war will be underscored in Mr Hagel’s budget, as money for Special Operations forces and cyberwarfare is protected And in an in-dication of the priority given to overseas military presence that does not require a land force, the proposal will — at least for one year — maintain the current number of aircraft carriers, sidestepping another potential area for budget cuts

Over all, Mr Hagel’s proposal, the of-ficials said, is designed to allow the American military to fulfill President Obama’s national security directives: to defend American territory and the na-tion’s interests overseas, to deter ag-gression — and to win decisively if

again ordered to war

‘‘We’re still going to have a very sig-nificant-sized Army,’’ the official said

‘‘But it’s going to be agile It will be capa-ble It will be modern It will be trained.’’

But Pentagon officials do acknowl-edge that budget cuts will impose

great-er risk on the armed forces if they are again ordered to carry out two large-scale military actions at the same time:

Success would take longer, they say, and there would be a larger number of casu-alties Officials acknowledge that a smaller military also risks inviting ad-venturism by adversaries

The defense secretary’s budget plans, subject to Congressional approval, most significantly reshape America’s land forces, both active-duty soldiers and those in the National Guard and Re-serve

The Army, which took on the brunt of

the fighting and the casualties in Af-ghanistan and Iraq, already was slated

to drop to 490,000 troops from a post-9/11 peak of 570,000 Under Mr Hagel’s proposals, the Army would drop over coming years to between 440,000 and 450,000 That would be the smallest Army since 1940, a year before the United States joined World War II

The cuts proposed by Mr Hagel fit the Bipartisan Budget Act reached by Mr

Obama and Congress in December to impose a military spending cap of $496 billion for fiscal year 2015 However, if steeper spending reductions kick in again in 2016 under the sequestration law, then even more significant cuts would be required in later years

The budget to be presented on Mon-day will be the first sweeping initiative that bears Mr Hagel’s full imprint Al-though Mr Hagel has been in office one year, most of his efforts in that time have focused on initiatives and prob-lems that he inherited In many ways his budget provides an opportunity for him to begin anew

Outlines of some of the budget initia-tives had surfaced in advance of Mr

Hagel’s budget unveiling, an indication

that even in advance of its release, the budget is certain to come under political attack Veterans’ organizations are ex-pected to argue against efforts to rein in personnel costs; arms manufacturers and some in the services will probably work to reverse weapons cuts; some members of Congress will seek to block base closings in their districts

Although consideration was given to retiring an aircraft carrier, the Navy will keep its fleet of 11 — for now The George Washington would be brought in for a overhaul and nuclear refueling — a lengthy process that could be terminated

in future years under tighter budgets Lawrence Korb, former assistant de-fense secretary in the Reagan adminis-tration, and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, noted that the budget can be viewed as

realist-ic given guidance from the White House

— but he is among those who said the cuts are truly not that significant

Mr Hagel ‘‘basically is a team player,’’

Mr Korb said ‘‘Before he came into of-fice he talked about the bloated defense budget But even with this number, we’re still spending in real terms more than we spent on average in the Cold War.’’

Big rally is held

in Caracas after

Kerry’s remarks

CARACAS, VENEZUELA

BY WILLIAM NEUMAN

Antigovernment demonstrations

con-tinued to grow over the weekend in

Venezuela after Secretary of State John

Kerry markedly stepped up his criticism

of the government over its response to

more than two weeks of protests

‘‘I am watching with increasing

con-cern the situation in Venezuela,’’ Mr

Kerry said in a statement on Friday

night ‘‘The government’s use of force

and judicial intimidation against

cit-izens and political figures, who are

exer-cising a legitimate right to protest, is

un-acceptable and will only increase the

likelihood of violence.’’

On Saturday, thousands of people in

Caracas attended one of the largest

op-position rallies yet, a sign that the

protests, which began this month with

student demonstrations against high

crime, might continue to gain strength

‘‘You have to always keep your institution prepared, but you can’t carry a large land-war Defense Department when there is no large land war.’’

EDUARDO VERDUGO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Joaquín Guzmán Loera had evaded arrest since escaping from prison in January 2001.

Trang 6

Asylum fraud in Chinatown: A New York industry

BY KIRK SEMPLE,

JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

AND JEFFREY E SINGER

A Chinese woman walked into a law

of-fice in New York’s Chinatown and asked

to see her lawyer She had applied for

asylum, claiming that she had been

forced to get an abortion in China to

comply with its family-planning laws,

and she was anxious about her coming

interview with immigration officials

She had good reason to be worried:

Her claim, invented by her lawyer’s

as-sociates, was false But the lawyer, John

Wang, told her to relax The process, he

said, was straightforward, and as long

as she memorized a few details,

every-thing would be fine ‘‘You are making

yourself nervous,’’ he said in Mandarin

Chinese ‘‘All you would be asked is the

same few rubbish questions.’’

‘‘Just make it up,’’ the lawyer added

The conversation, in December 2010,

was secretly recorded by federal

offi-cials conducting a wide investigation of

Chinese population The inquiry has led

to the prosecution of at least 30 people —

paralegals, interpreters and even an

employee of a church, who is accused of

coaching asylum applicants in basic

tenets of Christianity to prop up their

claims of religious persecution All were

charged with helping hundreds of

Chinese immigrants apply for asylum

using false tales of persecution

The transcript of the conversation in

Mr Wang’s office, which was disclosed

in a court filing, offered a rare look at the

hidden side of the Chinese asylum

in-dustry in New York

More Chinese immigrants apply for

asylum in the United States than any

Chinese population in New York leading

the way Over the past six years, about

half of all applications filed by Chinese

immigrants not facing deportation were

submitted in New York City

(Compara-ble data for asylum applications from

those in deportation proceedings was

not available.)

In fiscal year 2012, Chinese

immi-grants filed more than 62 percent of all

asylum cases received by the federal

asylum office in New York, which in

re-cent years has received more Chinese

applications than the next 10

nationalit-ies combined

Although the prevalence of fraud is

unknown, federal officials appear to

re-gard the applicant pool in New York with considerable suspicion In fiscal year 2013, asylum officers around the country granted 40 percent of all Chinese asylum requests, according to government data

In New York City, asylum officers ap-proved only 15 percent

Peter Kwong, a professor at the City University of New York and an expert

on the Chinese population in the city, said it was an open secret in the Chinese community that most asylum applica-tions were at least partly false, from fab-ricated narratives of persecution to counterfeit documents and invented witness testimony

To asylum seekers, he said, ‘‘it’s not

an issue of right or wrong It’s an issue about whether they can get it and their means to get it.’’

The growth in the Chinese asylum in-dustry over the past decade has coin-cided with an increase in Chinese mi-gration to the United States and in the number of Chinese arriving on tempo-rary visas, some with the intention of staying Many have made New York City their primary destination

From 2000 to 2011, the foreign-born Chinese population in New York City grew by a third, to more than 350,000 from about 261,500, and is now on the verge of overtaking Dominicans as the city’s largest immigrant group, accord-ing to the city’s Plannaccord-ing Department

As an increasing number of Chinese have sought permanent immigration status here, asylum has become a popu-lar way to achieve it: Asylum recipients are granted immediate permission to work and can apply for a green card a year later

Amid this rising demand, an ecosys-tem of law offices and other businesses specializing in asylum — not to mention

a darker subculture of forgers and fake lawyers — has flourished in the crowded office buildings of Manhattan’s Chinatown and above storefronts along the bustling streets of Chinese enclaves

in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn

The trade has generated healthy rev-enues Some firms ask $1,000 to handle a case, then they add incremental fees that might total more than $10,000 — steep for most of the applicants, many of whom are restaurant and construction workers, nannies and manicurists

But some involved in the business say they are motivated more by politics and moral principles than by money

‘‘We are doing work like the last stop

on the Underground Railroad,’’ said David Miao, the owner of an immigra-tion law office in Chinatown, referring to the network of routes that helped slaves

in the American South escape to free states in the 19th century He was among those indicted in the investiga-tion that also implicated Mr Wang; the case became public with the unsealing

of nine indictments and a series of raids

in December 2012 He has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit immigra-tion fraud ‘‘If we didn’t do this, they will

be sent back to China,’’ he said in an in-terview ‘‘We save lives.’’

The United States has a long tradition

of offering refuge to foreigners fleeing persecution Whether in the country le-gally or not, immigrants can petition for asylum within one year of arriving

They must show they are unable or un-willing to return to their country be-cause they have ‘‘a well-founded fear of

persecution’’ based on their race, reli-gion, nationality or membership in a particular social or political group

In fiscal year 2012, about 56,400

asylum offices or in courts across the United States In the same year, about 29,500 people were granted asylum, the most since 2002, when 37,000 received it

False asylum petitions are among the most common forms of immigration fraud, in part because they are difficult

to detect, experts said Since many claims are based on events that took place amid armed conflict or political turmoil, the narratives and supporting documents can be hard for the Ameri-can authorities to verify

And while the Chinese asylum pool has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years, asylum fraud cuts across all im-migrant groups, officials said, cropping

up among populations from societies in turmoil such as Guineans seeking

refuge from political upheaval, Afghans fleeing war, Russians looking for sanc-tuary from homophobia and Mexicans running from drug violence

Among the Chinese, the vast major-ity of applicants claim they were either forced to endure abortions or steriliza-tion under China’s family planning laws or that they fear persecution based on their adherence to Christian-ity or their participation in banned groups like the Chinese Democracy Party and Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been labeled a cult

by the government

And while many such claims are legit-imate, officials and industry specialists said, an untold number are not Mr

Kwong said the cases were easy to fake

Sometimes the fraud consists of little more than embellishing stories to make them seem more believable Other times, the accounts are complete fiction

Narratives and documents are

re-cycled from client to client, with the names and dates changed — though sometimes the lawyers forget to do even that

Several immigrants said in interviews that while their cases were based on true stories of persecution, some of the documents supporting their claims were false (Many Chinese immigrants inter-viewed for this article agreed to talk only

on the condition of anonymity.) The dozens of people rounded up in

2012, including employees of at least 10 law firms, were accused of ‘‘weaving elaborate fictions’’ on behalf of hun-dreds of clients and coaching them on how to lie during their asylum inter-views and in court One of the lawyers would sign blank asylum petitions and let others fill them out with stories he never reviewed, prosecutors said Victor You, a star witness for the pros-ecution who worked as an assistant at several law firms and pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, said he would craft a story based on characteristics like cli-ents’ ages and schooling He would feed the Falun Gong narrative to uneducated immigrants because it was easiest to re-member, he said in court testimony this month Christianity claims went to young immigrants with at least a high school education

When clients veered off-script during interviews with asylum officers, prose-cutors said, some interpreters would falsely translate the client’s words

Of the eight lawyers indicted, officials said, Mr Wang was one of the most pro-lific From 2010 to 2012, his office filed more than 1,300 asylum petitions with the New York asylum office

His methods were revealed in the re-cording of his discussion with the Chinese client, who was preparing to tell immigration officials that she had been forced to get an abortion because she had become pregnant out of wedlock

Mr Wang and a paralegal briefed her

on the sequence of fictitious events she had to memorize: the missed period, the knock at the door, government officials hauling her to a clinic, the feeling of a medical tool inside her, the dates of her trip to the United States

He said asylum was nearly a foregone conclusion: Cases like hers were getting approved without a problem ‘‘It’s too easy,’’ he said

More than half of the defendants have pleaded guilty, including Mr Wang, who was sentenced in December to two years of probation

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A federal agent at a New York law office during a raid in December 2012, when the F.B.I arrested lawyers and other employees of the firm.

U.S.-Japan exercise serves notice to China

CAMP PENDLETON, CALIF.

BY HELENE COOPER

In the early morning along a barren stretch of beach here this month, Japa-nese soldiers and American Marines practiced how to invade and retake an island captured by hostile forces

Memo to Beijing: Be forewarned

One Marine sergeant yelled for his men, guns drawn, to push into the right building as they climbed through the window of an empty house meant to simulate a seaside dwelling The Mar-ines had poured out of four amphibious assault vehicles as another group of smaller inflatable boats carrying Japa-nese soldiers landed in an accompany-ing beachhead assault

There were shouts in Japanese There were shouts in Marine English There was air support, from Huey and Cobra helicopters hovering above Then Navy hovercraft roared in, spitting up a spray

of seawater before burping out Hum-vees and more Japanese troops, their faces blackened with camouflage paint

American military officials, viewing the action from a nearby hillside, in-sisted that the annual exercise, called Iron Fist, had nothing, nothing to do with last fall’s game of chicken between Tokyo and Beijing over islands that are largely piles of rocks in the East China Sea But Lt Col John O’Neal,

command-er of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said that this year, the Japanese team came with ‘‘a new sense of purpose.’’

‘‘There are certainly current events that have added emphasis to this exer-cise,’’ Colonel O’Neal said, as Japanese soldiers made their way up into the rocks before disappearing into the hills above the beach ‘‘Is there a heightened awareness? Yes.’’

In the United States military, com-manders are increasingly allied in alarm with Japan over China’s flexing of military muscle Capt James Fanell, di-rector of intelligence and information operations with the United States Pa-cific Fleet, recently said in San Diego that China was training its forces to be capable of carrying out a ‘‘short, sharp’’

war with Japan in the East China Sea

In a sign of continuing concern, Gen

Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, was in China over the weekend seeking

to improve the limited relationship be-tween the American and Chinese milit-aries, perhaps through exchanges of top officers In recent years, the Pentagon

has worried about the buildup of China’s military and a lack of transparency among its leaders

The islands at the center of the dis-pute, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, are a seven-hour boat ride from Japan, and even farther from China Japan has long ad-ministered the islands, but they are also claimed by China and Taiwan

Last year, China set off a trans-Pacific uproar when it declared that an ‘‘air de-fense identification zone’’ gave it the right to identify and possibly take mili-tary action against aircraft near the is-lands Japan refused to recognize China’s claim, and the United States de-fied China by sending military planes

in-to the zone unannounced — even as the Obama administration advised Ameri-can commercial airlines to comply with China’s demand and notify Beijing in advance of flights through the area

A few weeks later, Japan’s prime min-ister, Shinzo Abe, approved a five-year defense plan that took his pacifist nation further toward its most assertive mili-tary posture since World War II

This year, when Japanese troops showed up for the exercise with the Marines at Camp Pendleton, they came bulked up Instead of the platoon of 25 soldiers they sent to the exercise in 2006, the first year it was conducted, nearly

250 arrived They brought along their own Humvees, gear and paraphernalia for retaking islands — or, in Marine par-lance, ‘‘amphibious assault with the in-tent to seize objectives inland.’’

The monthlong exercise, which ends

on Monday, has been spread over a wide section of Southern California There was the amphibious assault at Camp Pendleton, mortar shoots at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms and live firing exer-cises at San Clemente Island There was

a nighttime raid at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, presumably out of sight

of guests sipping Champagne on the verandas of the Hotel del Coronado a short distance away

This year’s Iron Fist, Colonel O’Neal said, is the most involved operation so far The exercise included drones and the kinds of air support that would be needed to protect Japanese and Ameri-can troops retaking an island

For Japan, the exercise is a ‘‘valuable opportunity where we can learn tech-niques from the U.S forces,’’ Col

Matushi Kunii, commander of the West-ern Army Infantry Regiment, said at the opening ceremony last month

Tokyo sends bigger force

to annual military drills

in Southern California

ONLINE: SEEKING BETTER MILITARY TIES

As tensions rise in Asia, an American general is working on improving contacts with China’s military.

Explosions near protest sites kill 3

in Thailand

BANGKOK

BY THOMAS FULLER

Three people were killed near antigov-ernment protests in Thailand over the weekend as the country’s protracted power struggle devolved further into vi-olence

Two attacks — one on Saturday in an eastern province bordering Cambodia, which left one person dead, and the second on Sunday in one of this city’s busiest shopping areas — were carried out with what the authorities said were

grenades

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra condemned the attacks as ‘‘terrorist acts for political gains’’ while protesters is-sued a statement saying that the attacks were an attempt to justify the govern-ment’s continuation of the emergency se-curity measures it imposed last month The explosions here on Sunday, which killed two people and wounded 22, were set off near a major intersection that protesters have blocked for several weeks A courthouse here was also the target of an attack, but the grenade that was used failed to detonate

The protest movement, which is seek-ing to overthrow Ms Yseek-ingluck’s govern-ment, is allied with shadowy armed groups whose members engaged in gun battles with the police last week

A United Nations statement issued after that round of violence said it was

‘‘alarming that armed clashes with high-powered weaponry can occur in the middle of Bangkok.’’ It called on both sides to ‘‘disassociate themselves from armed groups.’’

Suthep Thaugsuban, a former deputy prime minister who is the main protest leader, warned government supporters, the so-called Red Shirts, that they would

be ‘‘served popcorn’’ if they came too close, a reference to a gunman allied with the protesters who fired an assault weapon at government supporters this month that he had partially concealed inside a corn-seed bag

Charupong Ruengsuwan, the head of Pheu Thai, the governing party, told a gathering of Red Shirts on Sunday that

in the ‘‘fight this time death will be real.’’

Mr Charupong, the government’s in-terior minister, said 10 million guns are registered in Thailand

‘‘These are guns for self-defense,’’ he said ‘‘If anyone underestimates the power of the people, you’ll know about it.’’

Celebrate the Winter Games with this special offer for a digital subscription

to the International New York Times Discover a wealth of exclusive stories,

opinion, video and multimedia as well as insight and inspiration from the finest

reporters, editors and columnists in news bureaus around the globe.

Get started now at inyt.com/celebrate

WINTER GAMES

CELEBRATION

SALE

SCORE

50% OFF

FOR 26 WEEKS

ON A DIGITAL

SUBSCRIPTION

LIMITED TIME OFFER | SALE ENDS FEB 26

Offer expires 2/26/14, 9 a.m E.T Smartphone and tablet apps are not supported on all devices.

Does not include e-reader editions, Premium Crosswords or The New York Times Crosswords apps Other restrictions apply.

Trang 7

CAIRO

BY URSULA LINDSEY

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The indictment here of a well-known

professor on charges of espionage has

sparked new concerns about academic

freedom in Egypt The military-backed

government is carrying out a

wide-spread crackdown on the Muslim

Broth-erhood, the Islamist group that until last

year governed the country Some

polit-ical scientists say they can no longer

speak freely for fear of being accused of

supporting the Brotherhood

That is what Emad el-Din Shahin, a

professor of public policy at the

Ameri-can University in Cairo, said happened

to him Mr Shahin, editor in chief of The

Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and

Poli-tics and a former visiting professor at

Harvard University, is a defendant in

what prosecutors have dubbed ‘‘the

greatest espionage case in the country’s

modern history.’’

Mr Shahin’s co-defendants are mostly

senior members of the Muslim

Brother-hood, including former President

Mo-hamed Morsi, who was ousted by the

army following mass protests last

sum-mer Among the specific charges against

the professor are espionage, leading an

illegal organization, providing a banned

organization with information and

finan-cial support, calling for the suspension of

the Constitution, preventing state insti-tutions and the authorities from per-forming their functions, harming

nation-al unity and socination-al harmony, and trying

to change the government by force

‘‘It was a shock I never thought they would go this far,’’ Mr Shahin told The Chronicle from the United States, where

he was attending a conference when news of the charges became public, in late January The professor, who has re-mained abroad ever since and who denies all the charges, said the accusa-tions were payback for his criticism of the military-backed government

‘‘It is part of a deliberate attempt to stifle any type of independent or critical position with regard to the coup,’’ said the professor ‘‘They are widening the scope of the crackdown against any type of opposition.’’

The Committee on Academic Free-dom of the Middle East Studies Associ-ation of North America issued a state-ment this month calling on the Egyptian government to drop the charges ‘‘The members of our committee know Dr

Shahin to be a person of the utmost

in-tegrity and an Egyptian patriot who would never harm his home country,’’

the statement said

The case has raised concerns among Western academics who study the Middle East, said Nathan J Brown, the association’s president, a professor of political science and international af-fairs at George Washington University

‘‘When someone like Emad is treated like a threat to the state, you wonder what kind of a state it is,’’ he said

‘‘Academics are beginning to think twice about visiting Egypt,’’ he added

‘‘They think they can be harassed for who they meet with and for public state-ments.’’

Last year two Canadian academics were detained for nearly two months after being accused by Egyptian prose-cutors of ‘‘participating with members

of the Muslim Brotherhood’’ in an at-tack on a police station While neither is

a political scientist, their case showed the risks facing visiting professors

Mr Shahin’s case has drawn the most public attention, but other academics also face prosecution for public state-ments Amr Hamzawy, a professor of political science, also at the American University in Cairo, has been charged with ‘‘insulting the judiciary’’ for a post

on Twitter criticizing a court ruling Mr

Hamzawy has played a prominent polit-ical role in the last three years, winning

a seat in Parliament and leading a

liber-al party He has liber-also criticized the mili-tary’s ouster of Mr Morsi last summer and the crackdown on Islamists that has left more than 1,000 dead and tens of thousands in prison

Faculty members and students at the American University in Cairo have cir-culated a statement in support of Mr

Shahin, saying that he ‘‘advocates for a free and democratic Egypt

‘‘He, like all Egyptians, has a right to his opinions and beliefs,’’ it adds ‘‘The Egyptian government responded to Dr

Shahin’s beliefs by charging him with crimes he did not commit.’’

Egyptian academics at other institu-tions have been less outspoken Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University, brushed aside ques-tions about the charges against Mr

Shah-in and Mr Hamzawy, sayShah-ing he was not aware of the particulars of their cases

‘‘In this moment the country is facing

an exceptional situation,’’ Mr Nafaa said ‘‘The university is not really busy with so-called academic freedom.’’

The priority, said Mr Nafaa, is ending the chaos on Egyptian campuses, where Islamist students have led protests and tried to disrupt examinations, and have been violently repressed by the police

The deep divisions in Egypt have made some political scientists hesitate

to speak publicly on current events Mr

Shahin said one Egyptian colleague de-cided not to attend a Georgetown Uni-versity conference in late January — en-titled ‘‘Egypt and the Struggle for Democracy’’ — for fear of reprisals

‘‘At least Mubarak’s regime was aging, less centralized, so there was room for dissent,’’ he said, referring to

‘‘This regime is very brutal and trying

BY CHRISTOPHER F SCHUETZE

This month’s Swiss referendum vote for tighter immigration laws is already af-fecting the country’s role in, and access

to, some European education programs

Erasmus+, the newest iteration of the popular European student exchange program, and Horizon 2020, an 80-bil-lion-euro, or about $110 billion, research program led by the European Union that started in January, have become bargaining chips in bilateral negoti-ations between the Union and Switzer-land that have taken place on the heels

of the Feb 9 Swiss vote

A week after the referendum, the Swiss government backed away from an agree-ment to allow citizens of Croatia, which joined the Union in July, to work freely in Switzerland Last week, the Union sus-pended planned talks on Swiss participa-tion in Erasmus+ and Horizon 2020

‘‘For the moment, negotiations that would have extended Horizon 2020 and Erasmus to Swiss researchers and stu-dents are put on hold,’’ said Pia Ahrenk-ilde Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union

Switzerland, which is not a member of the European Union, has a series of in-terlinked bilateral agreements with the bloc, signed over the past few decades, that provide for reciprocal freedoms of movement and trade, and access to labor markets, education and other services

Immigration quotas, mandated by the referendum vote, would contravene some of those freedoms Under a mutual dependency clause, a breach of any of the treaties would require all of them to

be renegotiated

While the details of Switzerland’s fu-ture immigration laws are still being hashed out, any curtailment of the exist-ing bilateral agreements for free cross-border movements may jeopardize the country’s participation in the European Union’s higher education programs

Swiss universities hosted some 41,809 foreign postsecondary students in 2011, according to the most recent figures from Unesco, including 27,940 from European Union countries

Of these, about 3,000 were in Switzer-land as Erasmus exchange students, while about the same number of Swiss

students were studying elsewhere in Europe under the program

On Jan 1, Erasmus was beefed up

Erasmus+ Switzerland, an associate member of Erasmus, was expected to segue into the successor program Horizon 2020, the latest iteration of a Europe-wide research program, also of-ficially started last month As with Erasmus, it was assumed that Swiss participation would be sealed in formal talks this month That is assumed no longer

Horizon 2020 is important as a source

of European funding for research and as

a catalyst for cross-border academic collaborations

Swiss researchers are already less present in such collaborations than

Loprieno, the president of the Rectors’ Conference of the Swiss Universities, told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in an in-terview after the referendum ‘‘If, be-cause of the withdrawal of Horizon 2020, the dialogue is reduced even further, it could become quite difficult,’’ Mr Lopri-eno said

Some foreign students already living and studying in Switzerland fear that when the immigration overhaul is final-ized they may not be able to stay on for further degrees, or to work

‘‘In the long term, it all depends on how it is implemented,’’ said Carl Thomas Bormann from Germany, a third-year chemistry student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

Mr Bormann said that like many of his foreign classmates, he could have imagined a future working in Switzer-land after completing his degrees His future is less certain now

‘‘I can’t say what it is going to look like for me in 10 years,’’ he said The European Students Union, an umbrella organization that represents

47 national student unions in 39 coun-tries, has publicly demanded that the

stu-dents

‘‘Switzerland is on a slippery slope of isolating its students and academics from the outside world,’’ said Elisabeth Gehrke, the vice chairwoman of the European Student Union, in a state-ment

Ms Gehrke said that the union would

do everything to support Swiss mem-bers, but added: ‘‘We will stand behind the E.U if they take a strong stance on this.’’

TORONTO

BY ELAINE R SMITH

Student internships have come in for

criticism in Canada, as elsewhere, over

the past year, drawing fire for putting

pressure on students to work long hours

for little or no pay

Matthew Ferguson, the brother of an

Alberta man who died while driving

home from an unpaid internship, began

a grass-roots campaign last summer to

protect interns from exploitation His

brother, Andrew Ferguson of St Albert,

Alberta, a student at Northern Alberta

Institute of Technology, died after a

16-hour day at a radio station where he was

doing his internship, supplemented by

additional paid shifts

In another case, Jainna Patel, a

stu-dent who was an unpaid intern with Bell

Mobility in 2012, filed a complaint with

the federal government, alleging that

the terms of the internship had violated

labor laws Ms Patel sought back pay,

provided her with no educational

bene-fit and had required her to do the same

work as paid employees

The complaint was rejected in October

and Ms Patel has since filed an appeal

Meanwhile, her case and that of Mr

Fer-guson have touched a nerve among

stu-dents and employers nationwide

Brent Rathgeber, a member of

Parlia-ment for Edmonton-St Albert, supports

Mr Ferguson’s campaign to close the

federal regulatory gap and presented

Mr Ferguson’s petition in Parliament

last fall

Mr Rathgeber maintains that the

total hours of work, paid and unpaid,

should be considered when using

stu-dent labor Paying a stustu-dent makes him

or her an employee, so the Employment

Standards Act would need revision to

provide interns with the same

protec-tions as other employees

‘‘We should amend the federal

regula-tions,’’ he said ‘‘Once an

employer-employee relationship exists, the total

hours of work should be covered.’’

Unpaid internships are another

mat-ter As an offshoot of post-secondary

education, they fall under provincial

ju-risdiction While Mr Rathgeber has no

direct oversight, he said he would be

re-luctant to see unpaid internships

disap-pear entirely because of the learning

op-portunities they provide

COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO (LEFT); HANAFY/DEMOTIX, VIA CORBIS (ABOVE)

Amr Hamzawy, above, has been charged with ‘‘insulting the judiciary’’ for a post on Twitter criticizing a court ruling Emad el-Din Shahin, left, has been indicted on charges of espionage.

Political scientists say

they face prosecution for

criticizing government

Cross-border exchanges become bargaining chips

in European Union talks

Concern grows over academic freedom in Egypt

Drawing boundaries around internships

www.chronicle.com

‘‘I don’t want to see too much regula-tion that would result in a lack of avail-able internships,’’ he said ‘‘but there should be some regulation required re-garding how hard employers work these young men and women

‘‘There should be some sort of rules

or contract in place between the spon-soring employer and the institution that prevent indentured servitude.’’

Jessica McCormick, who heads the Canadian Federation of Students, which

across Canada, said that her organiza-tion supported the idea of paid intern-ships, especially since many students were already working to help pay for tu-ition

‘‘When students are expected to pay higher tuition fees and work for free, it’s increasingly difficult for them to take on that burden,’’ she said ‘‘I would say it’s exploitative for students to give their labor for free, especially given the cli-mate where post-secondary education

is increasingly unaffordable.’’

The economic climate has helped draw attention to the injustices created

by unpaid internships, said Angella MacEwen, a senior economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, an um-brella organization for Canadian labor unions and provincial federations

‘‘Employers are able to exploit youth because the situation is so dire that people are literally willing to work for free to get into the Canadian labor mar-ket,’’ said Ms MacEwen ‘‘It’s a symp-tom of broader problems.’’

The University of Waterloo in Ontario

is renowned for its system of co-op pro-grams that offer students work experi-ence and remuneration

Students in Waterloo’s cooperative education program have an entire or-ganization supporting them

Co-ops are not the same as intern-ships, said Peggy Jarvie, the executive director of cooperative education and career action at Waterloo

The two terms ‘‘are often used inter-changeably, but I think they are quite different,’’ she said ‘‘Internships are one-time wonders, but a co-op is a re-peated experience in a program that is part of an academic program.’’

The university has been offering co-operative work experience to its stu-dents since its founding in 1957 The founders, a group of forward-thinking business and industrial leaders, chose a co-op model to allow students to altern-ate classroom terms with work terms

The model helped to meet Canada’s need for engineers at the time, while giving students on-the-job experience

‘‘Co-op first and foremost was created

as a learning methodology,’’ Ms Jarvie said ‘‘The students learn what they study better if they get to practice it a few times They see the relevance and are more engaged in subsequent terms.’’

All six faculties at Waterloo offer

co-op programs, with 123 to choose from in total, she said The whole system is ac-credited by the Canadian Association for Co-operative Education

Of Waterloo’s 30,000 undergraduates,

58 percent are involved in the co-op pro-grams, which call for them to allocate at least 30 per cent of their schooling to work experience courses There are more than 19,000 work terms scheduled for 2014, and Ms Jarvie points to the

provides to the university’s students

‘‘They learn about the type of work they want to do after graduation and the environment that makes them most sat-isfied, from huge multinationals to tiny start-ups and everything in between,’’

she said

to consolidate power and assert its con-trol over the political arena.’’

‘‘I won’t publish anything critical while I’m here,’’ said a political scientist currently working in Egypt who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from the authorities The foreign re-searcher, who had previously done work on the Muslim Brotherhood, said that under Mr Mubarak, even though the Islamic group was an illegal organi-zation, the authorities did not object to academics meeting with its members Now ‘‘they don’t want anyone to present anything that is sympathetic or humanizing’’ of the Islamist group, which the government has officially designated a terrorist organization, the researcher said

‘‘They also make an enormous net-work of wonderful connections at the workplace and among other students by the time they graduate.’’

Co-op students are eased into the workplace by many helping hands Dur-ing the academic term leadDur-ing up to their first work term, they are required

to take an online cooperative funda-mentals course that teaches them how

to search and apply for jobs and how to ensure success once they’ve entered the workforce

‘‘It coaches them on typical things like organizational culture, workplace norms, understanding expectations and being part of a team,’’ said Kerry Ma-honey, Waterloo’s director of career ac-tion and internaac-tional employment

During each work term, the students are also required to take an online profes-sional development course that

address-es useful workplace skills such as prob-lem solving and project management

Weian Zhao, an assistant professor of stem cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, has seen the benefits

of all this coaching firsthand He first encountered Waterloo co-op students during a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University When he set up his own research lab, he advertised avail-able co-op positions on JobMine, a web app where Waterloo students can post resumes and search for jobs posted by employers

‘‘They’re dedicated, smart and they work hard,’’ he said

‘‘They start doing co-ops from their first year, so when we get students in their third year, they are mature and professional The school really prepares them well.’’

Mr Zhao, a native of China who graduated from Shandong University in

2000 and earned a doctorate at McMas-ter University, in Ontario, said he tried

to give students whom he took on a valu-able career experience

‘‘I prefer to assign them individual projects, just like I do for Ph.D students,’’

he said: ‘‘For most of the kids, it’s a very good investment for their future careers

It builds their C.V.’s nicely and helps them really make their career decisions.’’

Akash Kapoor, now a master’s degree student in accounting at Waterloo, fin-ished his undergraduate studies there with three work terms under his belt

‘‘I’m grateful for the program for sure,’’ he said ‘‘We actually get to graduate with experience that will help

us attain full-time positions.’’

Students and lawmakers

say exploitation is being

sold as work experience

Swiss referendum poses threat to study programs

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

A student, Payal Gandhi, learning on the job The University of Waterloo builds paid work experience into its study courses.

ONLINE: MORE COVERAGE

Past articles and education news:

‘‘Employers are able to exploit youth because the situation is

so dire that people are literally willing to work for free to get into’’ the labor market.

Trang 8

8 | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014 INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR.,Publisher

JILL ABRAMSON,Executive Editor

DEAN BAQUET, Managing Editor

TOM BODKIN, Deputy Managing Editor

LAWRENCE INGRASSIA, Deputy Managing Editor

RICHARD W STEVENSON, Editor, Europe

PHILIP McCLELLAN, Deputy Editor, Asia

ANDREW ROSENTHAL, Editorial Page Editor

TRISH HALL, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

TERRY TANG, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company

STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, Président et Directeur de la Publication

STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN, Senior V.P., International Operations ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences CHANTAL BONETTI, V.P., International Human Resources JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, V.P., International Advertising CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Marketing & Strategy PATRICE MONTI, V.P., International Circulation

RANDY WEDDLE, Managing Director, Asia-Pacific SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer

Immeuble le Lavoisier, 4, place des Vosges, 92400 Courbevoie France POSTAL ADDRESS: CS 10001, 92052 Paris La Défense Cedex Tel: +33 1 41 43 93 00 E-Mail: inyt@nytimes.com Internet address: inyt.com Subscriptions: inytsubs@nytimes.com Tel: +33 1 41 43 93 61 Classified: +33 1 41 43 92 06 Regional Offices: Asia-Pacific: #1201, 191 Java Road, Hong Kong Tel +852 2922 1188 Fax: +852 2922 1190 U.K.: 1 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1NU Tel +44 20 7061 3500 Fax: +44 20 7061 3529

The Americas: 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10018 Advertising Tel +1 212 556 7707 Fax: +1 212 556 7706, Circulation Tel (toll free) +1 800 882 2884 or +1 818 487 4540 Fax: +1 818 487 4550 ihtus@espcomp.com

IHT S.A.S au capital de 240.000 ¤ RCS Nanterre B 732021126 Commission Paritaire No 0518 C 83099 ©2014, The New York Times Company All rights reserved ISSN: 2269-9740 Material submitted for publication may be transferred to electronic databases.

To submit an opinion article, email opinion@nytimes.com To submit a letter to the editor, email inytletters@nytimes.com.

Opinion

President Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s head of state, has now joined Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the government’s assault on free speech On Tuesday, Mr Gul approved a new law, passed earlier by Parliament, that is intended to help protect Mr Erdogan and his allies from a widening corruption scandal by tightening government control of the Internet It would allow the authorities, without a court order, to block web pages under the guise

of protecting personal privacy, and to collect users’

browsing histories

Even before Mr Gul acted, Turkey already had tough laws blocking thousands of websites, including gay dating sites and news portals considered favorable to Kurdish militants According to Reuters, Google reported in December that requests from Turkish authorities to remove content from its sites had risen nearly 10 times during the first half of 2012 In the first six months of 2013, Google was asked to delete more than 12,000 items, making Turkey the No 1 country seeking to excise Google content

The new law is a transparent effort to prevent social media and other sites from reporting on a corruption scandal that reportedly involves bid-rigging and money laundering In one audio recording, leaked last month to SoundCloud, the file-sharing site, Mr Erdogan is said to be heard talking about easing zoning laws for a construction tycoon in exchange for two villas for his family

The law is just the latest blow to Turkey’s democracy

After more than a decade in power, Mr Erdogan has become more authoritarian and, as a result, increasingly embattled

The legislature has done little to stop him Last Saturday, the Parliament, in a 20-hour session that involved a bloody fistfight, approved a bill that would tighten the government’s grip on the judiciary On Thursday, Reuters reported that

Mr Erdogan had drafted a new law that would expand powers for his intelligence agency, including eavesdropping

The European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have spoken out against these developments The United States has also weighed in but not strongly enough President Obama, who once had a close relationship with Mr Erdogan, finally spoke to him

on Wednesday after months of indirect communication It was unclear from a White House statement, however, whether Mr Obama had explicitly pointed out the perilous course Mr Erdogan is on, a message he needs to hear

Dmitri Trenin

MOSCOW Viktor F Yanukovych of Ukraine and the Ukrainian opposition leaders signed an agreement on Friday that ended the deadly protests in Kiev

by promising a new constitution and early elections But the Russian presi-dent’s envoy to Kiev refused to co-sign

it While Moscow welcomed an end to the violence, it basically viewed the agreement as a diktat by the Western-backed Ukrainian opposition The op-position has seized power in Kiev, and Moscow is wary that the crisis will not end anytime soon Some radical groups remain well-armed; there are deep political, cultural and regional cleav-ages in Ukrainian society; the coun-try’s elites are in disarray; and its eco-nomic situation is rapidly deteriorating

The mess is very much Ukraine’s own, and Russia has far less influence on it than is commonly appreciated

The most popular myth about Mos-cow’s role in the Ukrainian crisis is that

Mr Yanukovych has been but a puppet

of President Vladimir V Putin In real-ity, Mr Putin has been very frustrated with his Ukrainian counterpart To Mr

Putin, Mr Yanukovych is unreliable, forever vacillating between the Euro-pean Union and Russia; and now, a totally spent force, he has fled from Kiev to Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine Moscow knows that the Ukrainian oligarchs, most of whom used to support Mr Yanukovych, are largely anti-Russian Though they

in effect rule Ukraine, they fear being taken over by the richer business gi-ants next door Even those who made

their money in Russia, like the protest-funder Petro Poroshenko, prefer to keep it in the West

The protests erupted when Mr Ya-nukovych refused to sign the so-called association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, which would have established a free-trade area, among other things Despite what he claims, it wasn’t the Kremlin that made him do that Moscow had clearly signaled it did not want Kiev to sign the deal when it introduced de facto

sanc-tions on Ukrainian products last year, but ultimately Mr Ya-nukovych was guided

by his own calcula-tions, rather than Mr

Putin’s admonitions

or advice The funda-mental reason Mr Ya-nukovych demurred was fear that he would not be

re-elect-ed in 2015 if he signre-elect-ed the agreement At some point he realized that the deal would bring no financial support from the European Union and so

no way to offset the inevitable drop in trade with Russia or cushion the blow to Ukraine’s Soviet-era heavy industry

During the months of standoffs in Kiev, Russia’s actual role was much more modest than advertised by the in-ternational media or the rumor mill in Kiev The Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, was con-spicuously absent from public view

The Kremlin ordered all Duma mem-bers to stay out of Ukraine Dmitry Ro-gozin, a deputy prime minister and a former Russian ambassador to NATO with a knack for making in-your-face comments about the West, has largely

remained silent on Ukraine The only Russian official to display any continu-ous interest in Ukraine was Sergey Glazyev, Mr Putin’s adviser for

Eurasi-an integration, who spoke at confer-ences and wrote articles about the high costs of Ukraine’s turn to the European Union

Mr Putin did receive Mr Yanukovych several times, in Sochi and Moscow And

in December Russia did offer to buy $15 billion in Ukrainian-government bonds

— dwarfing any conditional aid the European Union could cough up via the International Monetary Fund — and lower by one-third the price of its gas shipments to Ukraine This financial support was extended without any strings attached, with the dual purpose

of helping Ukraine avoid a likely default and building goodwill for closer

econom-ic relations in the future

But it was a risky proposition, given the political uncertainties in Kiev And the move may be ineffectual Moscow’s gesture of support was built on the be-lief, which Mr Putin himself has ex-pressed, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people This obviously is not true, if only because Ukrainians them-selves are not — at least not yet — one people Just compare Lviv and Se-bastopol: Western Ukraine, which was annexed by the Soviet Union only un-der Stalin, is vehemently anti-Russian;

the east and the south are Russophone, with the Crimea mostly Russian ethnic-ally To the vast majority of the elite in Ukraine, the country’s independence from the Soviet Union meant, above all, independence from Russia There are virtually no Ukrainian politicians who can be called pro-Russian: This simply goes against the grain of Ukraine’s na-tional idea

Thus Mr Putin’s offer that Ukraine and Russia forge closer economic inte-gration by way of a customs union are not very compelling to many Ukraini-ans The idea also is potentially hazard-ous for Russia Under that scheme, Moscow would need to pump a lot more money into Ukraine and give it a large say in joint bodies such as the Eurasian Economic Commission, with little guar-antee that Ukraine wouldn’t break away again once it recovered from its current financial crunch

Ukraine’s ‘‘February Revolution’’ may be a blessing in disguise for Mos-cow, as it could help debunk the notion that Russia cannot be a great power without Ukraine as its junior partner Moscow does not need to govern more people; it needs to raise the health, edu-cation and work standards in its own people’s lives

Despite what some Ukrainians sus-pect, Moscow is unlikely to try bringing about the breakup of Ukraine in order

to annex its southern and eastern parts That would mean civil war next door, and Russia abhors the idea Moscow’s best option at this point is to stand back and wait, while quietly favoring decen-tralization in Ukraine Although feder-alization is seen in Kiev and western Ukraine as a step toward ultimate par-tition, it could in fact help hold Ukraine together With more financial and cul-tural autonomy, the country’s diverse regions could more easily live and let live, and keep one another in check Promoting decentralization in Ukraine would be a realistic long-term strategy for Russia, something Moscow has lacked so far

DMITRI TRENINis director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

A developer

wants to get

rid of a

fa-mous

bull-fighting

scene.

The largest and most endangered Picasso many of us have never seen lives on Park Avenue, in the Seagram Building

To get to it, walk to East 52nd Street, past the idling Town Cars, through the door of the Four Seasons restaurant Give

a nod to the friendly coat-check guy, then head up the stairs, into the soaring space of the Grill Room, where the city’s uppermost crust is having lunch or drinks Keep going into the corridor that leads to the Pool Room Look right, and up

‘‘Le Tricorne,’’ a bullfighting scene painted in 1919, was part of a stage curtain for the Ballets Russes It is 19 feet by

20 feet and has hung in that space since the Four Seasons opened in 1959, though for how much longer, nobody knows

Aby Rosen, the developer who controls the building, wants to get rid of it There’s not much he can do to the rest

of the restaurant’s interior, a masterwork of Modernism designed by Philip Johnson and declared a landmark in

1989 But the Picasso is not protected, because it is not considered integral to the architecture Mr Rosen does not own the curtain — the New York Landmarks Conservancy does — but he may be able to evict it

Mr Rosen, saying the curtain needed to go so he could repair the limestone wall around it, tried to have the curtain taken down on Feb 9 The conservancy sued, arguing that removing the brittle 95-year-old curtain would likely destroy it A State Supreme Court judge agreed to halt any move pending a hearing on March 11

The conservancy and its supporters may not have the legal grounds to defeat Mr Rosen, but they are clearly hoping that public sentiment will soften his heart They fear not just harm to the curtain, but aesthetic damage to Johnson’s magnificent space, which critics note was designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an artistic whole dependent upon all its parts, from the walls and lights down to the flatware and plates A writer in The New York Review of Books, sharply questioning Mr Rosen’s taste and decency, recently rhapsodized about the Picasso’s

‘‘dusky mauve and ochre tonalities’’ and ‘‘palpable Iberian duende,’’ which — so you don’t have to look it up —

is what flamenco music and Javier Bardem also have

TURKEY’S INTERNET CRACKDOWN

A PICASSO IN TROUBLE

A new curb

on free

ex-pression is

an assault

on

democ-racy.

What the West must do for Ukraine

Why Russia won’t interfere

Ulrich Speck

BRUSSELS Thanks in part to the coor-dinated efforts of Germany, Poland, France and the United States, irrevoc-able change has finally come to Ukraine, with President Viktor F Ya-nukovych’s flight from Kiev and Parlia-ment’s vote to call for new elections in May

But the powers still have urgent work

to do Ukraine could either descend into chaos or right itself on a path toward a new democratic stability The Euro-pean powers and the United States must offer the country all possible sup-port to move toward the latter

The first and most urgent step for Western leaders is to send unequivocal messages to Moscow that any support

by Russia for the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine to break away from the rest of the country would be met harshly, and result in a general recon-sideration of relations with Russia on all levels

In parallel, they must make sure that their own resources, and those of the European Union institutions in Brus-sels, are available to political leaders in Kiev to assist them in their transition to

a new regime

Moreover, Ukraine’s crisis isn’t just political: The country faces economic default without support It had been re-lying on Russia for that help, and now Europeans and Americans must quickly work with the International Monetary Fund to provide a financial lifeline to Kiev and to prepare longer-term

eco-nomic-assistance programs; they must also be ready to give direct emergency aid by themselves, if needed

Simply by announcing a readiness to commit to these steps, they would be providing enormous help to the forces committed to change in Ukraine

Besides getting through the first days and weeks, there are two great political risks the West must help Ukraine to ad-dress One is the inevitable attempt to undermine an emerging order The protest movement that began last No-vember, centered in Kiev’s Indepen-dence Square, has won But it is quite possible that the forces that supported the former regime, especially in the east and south of the country, are going

to contest the new order

And it is questionable whether the Kremlin will accept a loss of influence in Ukraine Mr Putin had high hopes of making Ukraine a key ally in his planned Eurasian Union He may have decided that Mr Yanukovych was too unreliable an ally, but that does not mean he will accept a revolution against him (Mr Yanukovych, who reportedly fled to the eastern city of Kharkiv, near the border with Russia, said he had been forced to leave the capital because

of an illegal ‘‘coup d’état.’’) The second risk is that the new re-gime will look like the one installed after the Orange Revolution in 2004:

years of painful stalemate, political in-stitutions blocking each other, perma-nent infighting and no clear separation between political and economic power

It is primarily up to the Ukrainian people to put their still-young country on

a new path Many have demonstrated incredible courage over the last weeks

But a post-Yanukovych Ukraine will still

be a fragile state with weak institutions

Since it declared independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has lived uncomfortably be-tween the European Union and Russia

Despite some progress, it failed to build stable and trustworthy institutions

That’s why so much of the country has put its hopes in the European Union;

Ukrainians saw that their neighbors who had joined it — Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia — were doing very

well All the bloc offered last year was

an ‘‘association,’’

which does not in-clude the promise of membership, and a free-trade agreement

Because the offer was so weak, the door was open for

Mr Putin to sabotage

it and for Mr Ya-nukovych to reject it Now the Euro-pean Union needs to come back with a better offer — not just association, but membership

Doing so would unleash a new dy-namic It would embolden a new leader-ship in Kiev and give them enough au-thority to push through painful but necessary economic and government reforms A process of transformation would kick off Urgently needed foreign investment would rush in It would sig-nal to the entire country that a better future is possible

The key to this approach lies in Berlin

In the 1990s, it was Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel’s mentor, who pushed through the enlargement of the

European Union to include former mem-bers of the Soviet bloc as a way to stabi-lize Germany’s Eastern neighborhood His successor, and Ms Merkel’s pre-decessor, Gerhard Schröder, continued

on that path But Ms Merkel, in office since 2005, has been reluctant to follow

in their steps so far Wary of Russian opposition and unwilling to press a more active foreign policy, Berlin in re-cent years has been reluctant to provide leadership in eastern Europe

Ms Merkel must now show courage and strategic competence If Eastern Europe becomes unstable, Germany will be affected too — and deeply so Only Berlin has the necessary weight and connections to bring all key players

on board to make significant change possible

Seen by many as the European Un-ion’s leading power, Germany can bring France on board, a necessary condition for getting the bloc fully behind a new approach to Ukraine Moreover, Berlin, with its strong economic ties with Mos-cow, is able to keep the West’s relations with Moscow on track And Berlin pulls enough weight in Washington to put to-gether a common trans-Atlantic strategy

In the last weeks and days in Ukraine

we saw how fast things can deteriorate

in Eastern Europe Germany and the European Union must significantly step up their engagement and be ready

to take more risks If Berlin does not take the lead, nobody else will

ULRICH SPECK,a foreign policy expert, is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, the European center of the Carnegie Endow-ment for International Peace.

Moscow should stand back from the mess in Ukraine while quietly favoring the country’s de-centralization.

The E.U.

should offer full member-ship to Ukraine, and Germany must take the lead.

REUTERS

Trang 9

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick

WASHINGTON Last week, a Pakistani Taliban commander reported the exe-cution of 23 Pakistani frontier troops held hostage; two weeks ago, a suicide bomber killed nine Shiite Muslims in Peshawar In response, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government has conducted retaliatory airstrikes but has only suspended, not abandoned, its foolhardy strategy for peace: keep try-ing to talk the Pakistani Taliban into disarming, in exchange for halting mili-tary operations against them

These peace talks will fail They are

an effort to surrender, and they ignore what most Pakistanis want: to regain control of their country from this deadly insurgency

So Mr Sharif should end the talks definitively and have the army mount a strong land offensive to drive the Paki-stani Taliban out of their mountainous stronghold south of Peshawar once the snows melt this spring It is there that the group poses the greatest risk to Pa-kistan’s people, and to America’s sup-ply line to Afghanistan The United States should help the army prepare

In the last decade, the Pakistani Taliban and associated groups, operat-ing from the northwest, have terrified much of Pakistan They have killed more than 18,000 civilians, including more than 2,000 Shiites and 5,500 police officers and soldiers A sense of siege prevails west of the Indus River, even though that area is garrisoned by Paki-stan’s military

Much of the problem can be laid at the feet of Pakistan’s leaders For de-cades, with government acquiescence, Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency have used radical Islamist groups to foment insurgencies in Af-ghanistan and Kashmir The groups re-cruit and train ideologues and fighters;

raise funds; run seminaries and busi-nesses; broadcast hatred of their polit-ical and religious enemies; and get hos-pital treatment when they are

wounded The military’s original goal was to counter Indian regional influ-ence, but the cost to Pakistanis has been the failure of their state Now the extremists increasingly target the very military that armed and encouraged them

In other words, Pakistan’s luck has run out You can sway an insurgent to fight ‘‘injustice’’ in a neighboring coun-try like India, but once his leaders feel they have impunity, you can’t stop them from acting independently or exploiting local grievances These days, as much as the Pakistani Taliban hate Indians and Americans, they hate other Pakistanis

more Acting in tandem with Al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other lethal groups, the Pakistani Taliban has slaughtered Shiites, Christi-ans, IndiChristi-ans, AmericChristi-ans, Afghans and polio prevention workers, often with the state looking the other way

Pakistan’s decade-long response has been based on a fallacy: that the military could target ‘‘bad’’ insurgents (those fighting Pakistan’s army and citizenry), while it worked with ‘‘good’’ ones (those fighting India) In reality, the two types are increasingly indistinguishable and have killed a great many times more

Pakistanis than Indi-ans For example, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai at-tacks, also has sup-ported anti-Shiite death squads And the Haqqani network, which has fought In-dian influence in Af-ghanistan, has also helped Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban kill Pakistanis

Last year, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project found that 93 percent of Pakistanis said terrorism was a big problem, while only

45 percent worried that much about In-dian influence in Afghanistan Never-theless, peace efforts have kept chasing the dream of compromise In 2004, 2006 and 2008, Pakistan’s army signed deals that gave insurgents territory, am-nesty, reparations, exemption from constitutional rules — along with time

to rearm, regroup and resume their at-tacks The record of mayhem, which has included attacks on major military headquarters, has left one mediator de-fending the current talks with this lo-gic: ‘‘If America, with all its might, couldn’t win in Afghanistan, how can

we win against the Pakistani Taliban?

They have scores of suicide bombers

We must negotiate.’’

But that is nonsense Of course Paki-stan’s army can’t expect to win the war

by simply killing enough of the enemy

It must also focus on winning over the local populace by assuring their safety But the army showed in 2009 that it could do this: After the Taliban seized the peaceful Swat Valley and proceeded

to behead policemen, flog women and keep girls like Malala Yousafzai from attending school, the army swept in Aided by new training and tactics, and with an infusion of American dollars and equipment, the troops took back the area and then kept control of it — a first for them since 9/11 And most of the two million displaced residents re-turned home

Today, most Pakistanis want to apply the ‘‘Swat Valley model’’ to North Waziristan, the nerve center of the Pa-kistani Taliban Prime Minister Sharif,

in a Jan 29 speech defending negoti-ations, admitted as much ‘‘I know if the state today decides to use force to elim-inate the terrorists, the entire nation will support it,’’ he said

What he should have added was that peace talks would make the most sense after Pakistan’s troops took the area from the insurgents Today, the Taliban demand nothing less than blanket im-munity, a return of prisoners, the exit of all Pakistani troops, an end to Ameri-can drone strikes, the abandonment of secular education and the severance of ties between the United States and Pa-kistan Defeating them in battle might allow Pakistan to demand, instead, that the Taliban accept the rule of law That outcome would benefit the United States We need Pakistan as a strategic ally, and we need both its sta-bility and a good working relationship with its leaders to help keep its 100 or so nuclear warheads from falling into ter-rorist hands Nevertheless, our rela-tionship has been strained for decades

by mutual distrust — largely traceable,

on the American side, to Pakistan’s re-luctance to directly confront the dan-gerous partners it has coddled for so long

So in preparation for a spring offen-sive, America should now offer Paki-stan intelligence, surveillance and re-connaissance support, as well as humanitarian assistance for those cit-izens whom fighting would inevitably displace It is an opportunity to start building trust between our two coun-tries by helping Pakistan take on its worst internal threat, one that menaces the democracy that Pakistanis crave

HAIDER ALI HUSSEIN MULLICK,an adjunct professor at the Naval War College, is ed-itor in chief of The Fletcher Security Re-view.

Ross

Douthat

The last time geopolitics intruded into

an Olympics, during the 2008 Beijing

Games, Vladimir Putin was the crisis’s

winner: his military delivered a

decis-ive spanking to Russia’s neighbor

Georgia, whose government had fatally

overestimated the West’s willingness

to intervene on its behalf The mini-war

sent a clear message: after a long

peri-od of retrenchment, the Russian bear

still had an appetite for power politics,

and the claws to satisfy it

Today the Olympics are on Russian

soil, and violence is convulsing another

nation in Moscow’s traditional orbit

But the crisis in Ukraine is sending a

rather different message So far, events

in Kiev have been a lesson in the limits

of Russian influence, and the

implaus-ibility of Putin’s claim to offer a rival

civilizational model to the liberal

demo-cratic West

That such a rivalry is Putin’s goal

seems clear enough After a century in

which Russia styled itself a

revolution-ary power fighting the West’s

reaction-ary capitalists, the former K.G.B man

has sought a return to the ideological

role his nation played under the czars

— as a conservative bulwark against

the West’s revolutionary liberals

As The Week’s Michael Brendan

Dougherty has pointed out, this back

flip has been visible across the post-9/11

era But it’s been thrown into relief by

Putin’s recent domestic gambits — the

blasphemy trial for Pussy Riot, the

crackdown on gay rights, the rhetoric

contrasting Russia’s ‘‘traditional

val-ues’’ with American and Western

Euro-pean relativism

Crucially, this rhetoric isn’t just for domestic consumption: it’s also pitched

to the developing world In the British Spectator, Owen Matthews argues that just as it did in the Communist era,

‘‘Moscow is again building an interna-tional ideological alliance,’’ with Putin offering himself up as a potential leader for ‘‘all conservatives who dislike

liber-al vliber-alues,’’ no matter what country they call home

But there is a vast difference be-tween Putin’s grand strategy and both its Czarist and its Soviet antecedents

The czars sought a ‘‘Holy Alliance’’

to defend a still-extant ancien régime —

a rooted, hierarchical system that still governed many 19th-century European societies But today’s Russia,

brutal-ized by Communism and then taken over

by oligarchs and grifters, is not a tra-ditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no sim-ilar mystique around his client dicta-tors, be they Central Asian strongmen

or Bashar al-Assad

The Soviets’ claim to be in history’s vanguard, meanwhile, earned them al-lies and fellow travelers not only in Latin America, Asia and Africa, but among the best and brightest of the liberal West No comparable Western fifth column seems likely to emerge to enable Putin’s goals

A few voices on the American right have praised his traditionalist rhetoric — but only a few As beleaguered as America’s social conservatives sometimes feel, we’re a long distance from signing up as useful idiots for a thuggish, obviously opportunistic ‘‘family values’’ crusade

Which is not to say that Putin’s geo-political approach is all folly On the contrary, he often plays the great game far more effectively than his European and American counterparts

But the weakness of Russia, its gov-ernment’s corruption and the unat-tractiveness of its alleged traditional-ism all combine to foreclose his grandest ambitions

This is basically what we’re watching happen in Ukraine Despite the blun-ders of the European Union — which courted Kiev without seeming to real-ize that Russia might make a counterof-fer — Putin is struggling to win a battle for influence in a country that both the Romanovs and the Soviets dominated with ease

And the struggle is particularly telling given that the Great Recession exposed the E.U as a spectacularly misgoverned institution, whose follies consigned many of its member states to economic disarray Yet even that record hasn’t persuaded the majority of Ukrainians to warm to Moscow’s em-brace instead It takes much more than mere misgovernment to make the European project less attractive than Putin’s authoritarian alternative

For an interesting parallel to Putin-ism’s problems, consider what’s hap-pening halfway around the world, in Venezuela, where the laboratory Hugo Chávez built for ‘‘Bolivarian Revolu-tion’’ is descending into the same kind

of violence as in Ukraine

Like Putin’s traditionalism, Chávez’s neosocialism was proposed as an ideo-logical challenger to the American-led world order (And Chávez had more American cheerleaders than does Putin.) But like Putinism, Chavismo lacks basic legitimacy absent the threat

of violence and repression

The lesson in both cases is not that late-modern liberal civilization neces-sarily deserves uncontested domi-nance

But 25 years after the Cold War, from Kiev to Caracas, there is still no plausi-ble alternative

Sylvie Kauffmann

Contributing Writer

Brussels may call them the villains, but

we should be grateful for the Swiss

Their Feb 9 vote in favor of reintrodu-cing immigration quotas for citizens from the European Union, by a very narrow margin of 50.3 percent, could well prove to be a salutary shock

The trouble over migration within Europe has been brewing for months, but it finally took a small, very rich country outside the union, with a dreamlike unemployment rate of 3.5 percent and a tradition of politically in-correct referendums, to force us to take

a hard look at this crucial issue

In fact, the Swiss have succeeded where David Cameron failed The Brit-ish prime minister tried to kick-start a debate in the European Union when he called last November for immigration restrictions, but he framed it in the wrong terms

When Europeans talk about immigra-tion, it can be confusing Immigrants are people arriving from outside the European Union, mostly from Africa and Asia; their movement is heavily regulated by the union’s member states

Migration refers to citizens of the Euro-pean Union moving from one member state to another Free movement of people is a cornerstone of the European Union; Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, even described it

as one of the union’s ‘‘greatest suc-cesses.’’ Latvian electricians can live and work in Britain, Spanish engineers can move to Germany and Dutch pen-sioners can retire to the south of France

And they have, by the millions

Free movement worked beautifully

as long as the European Union was small and prosperous With a big wave

of enlargement in 2004, when eight former east bloc nations joined the un-ion, came the first tide of migrants, as Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and others began to move around in search of bet-ter wages In 2007, two more countries, Romania and Bulgaria, were allowed

in, on the condition that their citizens wait another five years, until Jan 1,

2014, to look for work elsewhere At the time, nobody paid much attention

Then came the sovereign debt crisis, changing everything As recession hit

several euro-zone countries and unem-ployment soared, foreigners no longer felt as welcome as before Native anxi-ety began to spread The extreme right became more vocal Anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic movements took off

Mainstream political parties panicked

Under pressure from the U.K Indepen-dence Party, Mr Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on Britain’s mem-bership in the European Union

This is how one of Europe’s ‘‘major successes’’ turned into a political

liabili-ty Politically speaking, the Swiss refer-endum is a disaster because elections to the European Parliament are just three months away, and fears are growing

that anti-European Union parties could collect as much as one-third of the vote

Just look at who re-joiced first after the Swiss poll: Nigel Far-age, the U.K Inde-pendence Party lead-er; Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front in France; and Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands

(A tweet by Mr Wilders said it all:

‘‘What the Swiss can do, we can do too:

cut immigration and leave the EU.’’)

In a way, the free movement of people is like the euro: an achievement

of historic proportions but politically ill-conceived On a continent where 70 years ago people were still slaughter-ing one another, today 500 million cit-izens can live wherever they wish in 28 countries Yet, even if the free move-ment of people was rightly seen as a pil-lar of a new European community, its proponents could not foresee either the fall of the Iron Curtain or the euro crisis, both of which put millions of people on the move Like the common currency, free movement is an attribute

of federal systems — but the European Union is not a federal state

Many of the arguments used by politicians opposed to immigration are not supported by the facts Last month the British government shelved a re-port on ‘‘benefit tourism’’ for lack of ev-idence The Financial Times reported government statistics showing that the number of European Union migrants moving to Britain were balanced by those of Britons living abroad

When Mr Cameron calls for rules to stop ‘‘vast migrations’’ within the un-ion, he has in mind the 600,000 Poles liv-ing in Britain But he forgets to mention the 2.2 million Britons living in Europe, nearly 800,000 of whom chose Spain Mobility, after all, is a two-way street

As regards benefits, migration experts have found that citizens from Eastern Europe who move to Western Europe are mostly young and trained — and so less likely to use national health or so-cial services, and more likely to work and pay taxes

A new Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study shows that, since the beginning of the financial crisis, mobility inside the European Union has been even higher than in the United States Migration has in effect become an adjustment me-chanism in response to labor market shocks This is why Germany has wel-comed not only cheap factory workers from the East but also unemployed graduates from Southern Europe, whom Der Spiegel dubbed ‘‘The New Guest Workers.’’ And why the British, French and German public health sys-tems, hit by shortages of physicians, have welcomed Romanian doctors, 14,000 of whom have left their country since it joined the union

The Romanian and Bulgarian inva-sion of Britain after Jan 1 predicted by

Mr Farage hasn’t materialized: Those people left their countries years ago, mostly for Italy and Spain Bulgaria saw its population drop from 9 million

in 1989 to 7 million in 2012 as people either moved away or stopped having children

But perceptions do matter, and the Swiss vote can’t be dismissed If the overdue debate on migration finally happens, European politicians should eschew an all-or-nothing mind-set and focus on correcting the migration im-balances within the union As for the euro, they may well find that the solu-tion is more integrasolu-tion, not less And any discussion about the consequences

of the free movement of people within the union can’t be a substitute for a new and much-needed approach to external immigration which, judging by the number of boats tragically sinking off Lampedusa, shows no signs of abating

SYLVIE KAUFFMANNis the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde.

The games Putin plays

Pakistan mustn’t surrender

The Swiss wake-up call

The events in Ukraine offer

a lesson in the limits of Russia’s grand strategy.

If the overdue debate on mi-gration finally happens, European politicians should eschew

an all-or-noth-ing mind-set.

opinion

The disunited kingdom

Kathleen Jamie

ORKNEY, SCOTLAND With a

referen-dum on Scottish independence from the

United Kingdom only seven months

away, political rhetoric is escalating,

and so is fear-mongering

In recent weeks George Osborne, the

chancellor of the Exchequer, warned

that an independent Scotland might not

be able to use the British pound as its

currency, and the European

Commis-sion president, José Manuel Barroso,

suggested that it would be ‘‘extremely

difficult, if not impossible’’ for Scotland

to remain in the European Union These

assertions are highly contestable

Other leaders are trying for a softer

touch

Earlier this month, Prime Minister

David Cameron entered the fray, with a

speech intended to remind Scots of the

many virtues of staying in the United

Kingdom He called on the people of

England, Wales and Northern Ireland

to urge us Scots not to leave ‘‘Get on

the phone, get together, email, tweet,

speak Let the message ring out from

us to the people of Scotland — let the

message be this: We want you to stay.’’

The address has been called the

‘‘love-bomb’’ speech, but even though

it was directed to the Scottish people, it

wasn’t delivered on Scottish soil It

came from the Olympic velodrome built

for the 2012 Summer Games in London

Mr Cameron chose the stadium as his

venue because of its symbolism: The

cyclist Chris Hoy, a Scot, won two gold

medals here in 2012 as part of ‘‘Team

G.B.’’ This sporting triumph unleashed

something Mr Cameron calls

‘‘patriot-ism.’’ And there we have it: Team G.B.,

‘‘patriotism’’ and U.K flags This was

his pro-Union stall, belatedly set out

But the trouble with addressing

Scot-land from London is that you have to

shout very loud And many of us Scots have grown weary of being shouted at

by ministers of governments we have emphatically not elected and whose policies we have rejected over and over again

Mr Cameron told us that a move by Scotland for independence would undo

‘‘centuries of history.’’ Actually, it’s only three: England and Scotland entered into a political union in 1707 Mr

Cameron also appealed to something

he called ‘‘fusion of bloodlines,’’ as if we were racehorses He reminded the cit-izens of the U.K that we are united by family ties Of course we are, but that won’t change if Scotland becomes inde-pendent My own family is typical: My husband is English (and plans to vote

an enthusiastic

‘‘yes’’ for Scottish in-dependence); my sister-in-law is Welsh; my brother and his family are settled in the Repub-lic of Ireland, which

is of course an inde-pendent state — and

so what?

The prime minister also appealed to the security of being part

of ‘‘something bigger’’ and argued that

a disunited United Kingdom would no longer be a ‘‘major global player.’’ We would no longer have ‘‘the finest armed forces on the planet.’’ We would no longer be ‘‘world-beating’’ — whatever that means

Many Scots believe an alternative narrative: That even though the refer-endum was brought about by the Scot-tish Nationalist Party, it is less about nationalism than about a crisis of de-mocracy that has built up over the last

30 years Scotland gets what the south

of England wants, regardless of its own aspirations and its own votes (Cur-rently that means a government

domi-nated by Conservatives, even though only one of the 59 Scottish MP’s is a Conservative) Westminster imposes policies that many Scots consider irrel-evant at best, and self-serving and cruel at worst

Many believe that under ‘‘Team G.B.’’ our industries have been swept away (under a Cameron predecessor, Margaret Thatcher), our social con-tract torn up, the fabric of our commu-nities assaulted, our poor demonized, our immigrants deported, and our so-cial services starved, withdrawn, privatized

I’m writing from the Orkney islands

in the far north of Scotland, a place of sea and hills, with a dynamic economy based on agriculture and oil, with as many links to Norway as to London

Here the terms ‘‘British’’ and ‘‘United Kingdom’’ already feel remote It is odd

to hear them used as rallying cries;

they awake no sentiment any more

Those of us who want Scotland’s in-dependence want it because we have

no further interest in being part of a U.K ‘‘brand’’; we no longer want to punch above our weight We seek a fresh understanding of ourselves and our relationships with the rest of Europe and the wider world If Scotland were independent, we would have con-trol over our own welfare and immigra-tion policies, look more to our Scandina-vian neighbors and rid ourselves of nuclear weapons

We want independence because we seek good governance, and no longer think the Westminster government of-fers that, or social justice or decency

We find the prospect of being a small, independent nation on the fringe of Europe exciting, and look forward to making our own decisions, even if that means having to fix our own problems

We’ll take the risk

KATHLEEN JAMIEis a poet and essayist and the author, most recently, of ‘‘Sightlines.’’

Cameron’s

‘‘love-bomb’’

speech missed the point For many Scots, independence

is not about nationalism, it’s about democracy.

With terrorist killings rising, Pakistan must stop talking to the Taliban and attack it instead.

MOHAMMAD SAJJAD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Women near the site of a Peshawar attack.

Trang 10

Russians.The People Behind the Power By

Gregory Feifer Illustrated 372 pages.

Twelve $28.

Words Will Break CementThe Passion of

Pussy Riot By Masha Gessen 308 pages.

Riverhead Books Paper, $16.

BY JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN

Gregory Feifer’s ‘‘Russians: The People Behind the Power’’ joins a list of classic books by Western correspon-dents who have covered the politics and culture of what was once the Soviet Union Hedrick Smith, Robert G

Kais-er, David K Shipler and David Rem-nick, among others, wrote acclaimed accounts of what they witnessed as the Soviet Union first challenged the West and then gradually collapsed under the weight of a sclerotic regime

In August 1991, Mr Feifer was a uni-versity student spending a summer in Moscow when a group of hard-line Communist officials tried to carry out a coup in a last-ditch effort to prolong So-viet rule Their failure only sped up the process of dissolution and led to an ini-tial period of such euphoria that many people inside and outside the country believed — as did Mr Feifer himself — that ‘‘the U.S.S.R would be a part of the international community, enjoying the West’s previously unimaginable free-dom and prosperity.’’

It was not to be Boris Yeltsin, who succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev and in-tended to preside over a democratic renaissance, failed to hold the Commu-nist Party accountable for its crimes, to create institutions guaranteeing the rule of law and to ensure that the coun-try’s vast mineral and energy resources would be administered for the benefit of the entire Russian people His failures gave democracy a bad name and sapped whatever confidence a majority

of Russian citizens might once have en-tertained about the virtues of a more Western-oriented political system

It seemed like a miracle when the So-viet Union fell apart with hardly a whiff

of violence, but the first Chechen war, which Yeltsin initiated in December

1994, was only a harbinger of the con-tinuing ethnic violence and acts of ter-rorism that have marred the Russian political landscape ever since — all of which made it easier for a former K.G.B officer like Vladimir Putin to as-sume power and pick up the pieces

Mr Feifer returned to Russia in 1999

as a journalist and stayed for eight years, many of them as the Moscow correspondent for the radio station NPR His upbringing — his father is a distinguished writer and historian and his mother a rebellious Russian-born bohemian — instilled in him a deep at-tachment to the country’s culture and history Mr Feifer’s fluency in Russian and his academic training in history prepared him well for his work The particular strength of his account is how he places his reporting of the coun-try’s myriad and devastating problems within a broad understanding of Rus-sian (and not just Soviet) history

Mr Feifer loves Russia, making his depressing account all the more poignant: He records a relentless de-cline in population; a staggering level of alcoholism and domestic violence; in-creasing rates of AIDS and

tuberculos-is It is hardly surprising that Russian men have a life expectancy of only 64 years, on a par with Belarus and Ukraine and among the lowest in Europe But in the face of these demo-graphic and societal challenges, Mr

Putin focuses on the assertion of geo-strategic influence ‘‘Putin has used control over the energy sector to pursue his goal of restoring Russia to the ranks

of the great powers,’’ Mr Feifer writes

This pursuit of international prestige, including the holding of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, cannot substitute, however, for democratic reform

As Mr Feifer details corruption from Moscow to Kamchatka and Vladivos-tok, he concludes that ‘‘Putin is chief among a collection of officials whose roles more closely resemble those of Mafia dons than public servants.’’ The exploitation of Russia’s mineral and en-ergy reserves has made a number of people extraordinarily wealthy, includ-ing government and corporate

ONLINE: THE LITERARY LIFE

Read reviews, profiles of authors and more atnytimes.com/books

B O O K R E V I E W

crats, but the prevalence of Bentleys on Moscow streets — Mr Feifer observes that ‘‘displays of extravagance can be

as appalling as Communist deprivation was grim’’ — cannot camouflage the de-cay that is undermining society at large

Mr Feifer writes that ‘‘the wealthy also know in their bones that their power is fragile, as do the rulers about their own.’’ But there is room for dis-agreement here: Mr Putin, his associ-ates and the compliant oligarchs around them continue to behave with overbearing confidence

The Russia of Yeltsin provided a modicum of hope for the country’s fu-ture But Mr Putin has been pressuring groups that monitor elections or human rights, branding them as ‘‘foreign agents.’’ Mr Feifer concludes his book

by introducing a lonely group of democ-racy activists who continue to docu-ment abuses and challenge the Kremlin Masha Gessen complements Mr Feifer by concentrating on some of these Russian activists — the ones who em-ploy humor and street theater to chal-lenge officialdom The significance of

‘‘Words Will Break Cement’’ — the title

is drawn from the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — is its demonstration that Pussy Riot’s rambunctious confronta-tions with the authorities are the result

of several years of growing frustration with Mr Putin’s rule Not for them the respectful protests, vigils and appeals by dissidents like those of the Brezhnev era The genius of the Russian punk band

and the performance art group Voina (meaning War), to which some of Pussy Riot’s members also belonged, has been

to employ guerrilla street theater and a sense of humor along with unbridled profanity — all the better to skewer the pretensions of power and privilege that

Mr Putin insists are his due Who is to say that the action of Voina in June 2010, when it painted the image of an erect phallus on a drawbridge in St Peters-burg, which pointed to the headquarters

of the secret police, was any less effec-tive an expression of moral outrage than

a book by Solzhenitsyn?

In the case of Pussy Riot, their protests culminated in February 2012, when five women dressed in balaclavas and colorful clothing danced and sang inside the Cathedral of Christ the Sa-vior, calling for Mr Putin to go They chose this Moscow church because Rus-sian Orthodox leaders had grown close

to the Kremlin The ‘‘performance’’ las-ted hardly a minute, was poorly video-taped and left the band discouraged about its success But when the regime issued an indictment against them five days later, they went into hiding It took another week or so for security officials

to track them down

If the Kremlin had not decided to pros-ecute members of the band so severely

— two of the women were sentenced to two years in a labor camp — it would have been easy to dismiss their perfor-mance as a sophomoric prank But the overreaction of the regime and the church hierarchy put them on the world stage

‘‘Words Will Break Cement’’ makes clear that Pussy Riot is more than just a small group of disorderly anarchists akin to the American Yippies of the late 1960s, who once dropped dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Ex-change To understand their courage and thoughtfulness, you need only to read their statements in court or the ones they issued after their early re-lease from prison last December With humor, passion and no small risk to themselves, they intend to continue con-fronting the Putin regime, pressing for the release of other political prisoners With the irrepressible band on hand, the dour and autocratic Vladimir Putin can expect to have his hands full

Joshua Rubenstein was a longtime staff member of Amnesty International USA His latest book is ‘‘Leon Trotsky: A Revo-lutionary’s Life.’’

Tragedy and farce

in Putin’s Russia

‘‘The wealthy also know in their bones that their power is fragile, as do the rulers about their own.’’

JASON SZENES/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Maria Alyokhina, left, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot With humor, passion and no small risk, the group intends to continue confronting the Russian government.

Global reach for smaller fairs

MADRID

BY SCOTT REYBURN

There are, according to the latest reliable

estimate from The Art Newspaper, 278

art fairs in the world For cash-rich,

time-strapped contemporary art buyers, fairs

have an obvious appeal: New artists can

be discovered in an afternoon; hundreds

of dealers can be met in just a few days

But most buyers can’t get to all of

them ‘‘Must attend’’ fixtures — like Art

Basel, Frieze London and Art Basel

Miami Beach — remain locked in the

busy collectors’ electronic diaries,

leav-ing a mass of ‘‘might attend’’ fairs

com-peting for the attention of the art

world’s globe-trotting clientele

Arco Madrid, whose 33rd edition

opened to V.I.P visitors on Tuesday, is

one of the more highly regarded The fair

has the challenge of taking place not

only in a soulless exhibition multiplex on

the outskirts of the Spanish capital, but

in an economy that’s still battered by

Arco’s solution, under the directorship

of Carlos Urroz, has been to

internation-alize its exhibitor list and program —

this year the focus was on Finland — and

to spend 4.5 million euros, or about $6.2

million, on inviting 500 selected

collect-ors and curatcollect-ors from all over the world

to the event

Even though the fair pays for the trips,

plenty of international megagallerists

and their billionaire clients still give

Madrid a miss Yet Spain’s links to the

emerging economies of Latin America

have encouraged a growing number of

dealers and collectors from that region to

attend, and the fair is growing in stature

‘‘We sell mostly to museums and

foundations at Arco,’’ said Marina

Buen-dia, a director of Vermelho, one of 10 São

Paulo dealers among the 219 exhibitors

at the fair Her cutting-edge

contempor-ary gallery also exhibits at Frieze

‘‘We’ve been at Arco for six years and

things are getting better,’’ she said

‘‘Otra Frontera,’’ a 2013 conceptual

wall sculpture made out of a sieve by the

Argentinian artist Nicolás Robbio, was

among Vermelho’s early sales, to a

Colombian collector for $4,000 (Dealers

at art fairs can choose in which currency

to price their works Vermelho opted for

U.S dollars, the international currency

of the art market.)

Arco is ‘‘an important event for Latin

American dealers,’’ said the São

Paulo-based gallerist Luciana Brito, who was

showing 2009-2010 landscape

photocol-lages by the German-trained Brazilian

artist Caio Reisewitz, priced from ¤4,000

to ¤20,000 ‘‘We get to meet a lot of

mu-seum curators and directors.’’

Early purchases at the five-day fair,

which ended on Sunday and which last

year attracted 100,000 visitors, tended to

be at modest price-points Galería Elvira

González, from Madrid, sold the 1984

‘‘Pheasant’’ to a Spanish foundation for

¤13,000 On the second day of the fair

González sold the 2008 Miquel Barcelo

canvas, ‘‘Dogon - 2,’’ reminiscent of a

cave painting, for about ¤430,000, one of

the few confirmed bigger ticket sales

Before and after that appointment he was an active private buyer himself, putting together his own ‘‘Kabinet van tekeningen,’’ or cabinet of drawings

About 1,000 of Mr Altena’s purchases will be sold by his family at Christie’s in

a series of four auctions in London, Am-sterdam and Paris this year and next, estimated at £10 million

‘‘Altena was one of those collectors who had an amazing reputation as a connoisseur,’’ said the London-based specialist dealer Stephen Ongpin, who underbid Mr Black on the Raphael

to sell for at least £1.5 million It will be the most highly valued lot in a 70-lot sale

at Christie’s in London on July 10 of Dutch and Flemish drawings from the collection

A pen-and-ink study of a mutilated hand by the 16th-century Dutch Man-nerist artist Hendrick Goltzius is

anoth-er desirable trophy, priced at £300,000 to

£500,000 Goltzius, at the age of 1, burned his hands on burning coals, and the after-effects were also recorded in a similar, much-admired drawing in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, in Holland

‘Mona Lisa’ of philately

Though they’re no longer collected in quite the same quantity as they once were by short-trousered schoolboys, stamps can still be worth serious amounts of money

The British Guiana One-Cent Magenta

is among the most valuable This British colonial penny issue from 1856, resem-bling a hexagonal red blob, became the most expensive stamp in the world in

1922 when it sold at auction for $35,000

It has remained the Mona Lisa of phil-ately since then, selling to the American chemical heir John E du Pont for a re-cord $935,000 in 1980 Du Pont died in prison in 2010, after being convicted in

1997 of the murder of an Olympic wres-tling champion

The One-Cent Magenta will be sold by

Du Pont’s estate at Sotheby’s New York

on June 17 with an estimate of $10 mil-lion to $20 milmil-lion, far in excess of the current auction record of about $2.2 mil-lion for a single stamp No work of art has consistently broken auction records

in this way

Arco Madrid extends

influence with focus on

Latin American market

CHRISTIE’S

during the early stages of Arco

This week brings another smaller fair, Art14 in London, and the Armory Show

in New York follows the next The art fair merry-go-round keeps turning, and for the moment at least, there’s no sign

of it slowing down

Demand for drawings

Drawings are becoming an unlikely hot stock these days Long regarded as a slightly arcane category of art collect-ing, they’ve nonetheless sparked some exceptional auction prices during the last 18 months

The New York-based private equity magnate Leon Black paid 29.7 million pounds, or about $49.5 million, for Raphael’s ‘‘Head of a Young Apostle’’ at Sotheby’s London in December 2012

Earlier this month, the Jan Krugier col-lection of 19th- and 20th-century draw-ings raised £74.8 million, almost three times the modest low estimate (also at Sotheby’s London)

With big-beast collectors like Mr

Black spending millions at the top end of the market, now is as good a time as any

to announce the sale of the collection of

I Q van Regteren Altena (1899-1980)

Mr Altena was head of the department

of prints and drawings at the Rijksmu-seum in Amsterdam from 1948 to 1962

Spain’s links to Latin America’s emerging economies have drawn a growing number

of dealers and collectors from that region.

GÉRARD JULIEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Above, a sculpture by the Venezuelan artist Manuel Mérida at the Arco art fair in Madrid Below, figure studies by Peter Paul Rubens for his painting ‘‘Samson and Delilah.’’

drawing ‘‘He was buying when there were hundreds of auctions and he could easily make discoveries.’’

One of Mr Altena’s discoveries, back

in the 1920s, was Peter Paul Rubens’s only known drawing for his 1609-10 painting, ‘‘Samson and Delilah,’’ now in the National Gallery in London That early masterpiece, produced in Antwerp soon after he returned from Italy in 1608, shows what an innovative artist Rubens could be before he made a fortune out of decorating the royal palaces of Europe

The pen-and-ink drawing is estimated

GALERIA VERMELHO

‘‘Otra Frontera,’’ a 2013 conceptual wall sculpture by Nicolás Robbio, which the Brazilian gallery Vermelho sold at Arco for $4,000.

Định dạng
Số trang	20
Dung lượng	8,3 MB