Germany’s Merkel is Paying Turkey to Keep Refugees

Posted on November 29, 2015November 29, 2015 by Denise Simon

Merkel forges new alliance on refugees

German chancellor upstages EU-Turkey summit with talks on resettling asylum-seekers.

Politico: EU leaders agreed Sunday to give significant political and financial incentives to Turkey in exchange for its cooperation in stemming the flow of refugees from the Middle East to Europe.

The deal includes an initial payment of €3 billion from the EU to improve conditions for Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, an agreement to loosen visa restrictions on Turks traveling in Europe, and a promise from Brussels to “speed up the tempo” of negotiations on Ankara’s bid to join the EU, as European Council President Donald Tusk put it.

“We do not expect anyone to guard our borders for us,” Tusk said after the meeting between all 28 EU leaders and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. “That can and should only be done by Europeans. But we expect a major step towards changing the rules of the game when it comes to stemming the migration flow that is coming to the EU via Turkey.”

But there were divisions among some countries about how far to go in securing Turkish support in dealing with the refugee crisis, including the reopening of accession talks, as well as on how quickly asylum-seekers could be resettled from Turkey to the EU.

And the deal was partly upstaged by an effort from German Chancellor Angela Merkel — holding her own mini-summit earlier Sunday afternoon — to convince several countries to speed up implementation of a resettlement scheme for refugees from Turkey to the EU.

Merkel held talks with a breakaway group of leaders in an attempt to sideline those countries reluctant to take in asylum-seekers. She was joined by the leaders of Sweden, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Greece at the talks, held two hours before their EU counterparts arrived for the full summit.

“The aim was to bring the implementation of the EU-Turkey action plan forward,” Merkel told reporters Sunday night. “We will start with this implementation within the next days, in cooperation with the Commission. We have no time to lose.”

No figures were discussed during the meeting, Merkel said, calling it a “question to decide in the future.”

Some of the countries involved in the group were reluctant to take part in new refugee resettlement programs because they are politically unpopular, a diplomat said.

Earlier on Sunday the German newspaper FAZ reported that Merkel hoped to convince the countries to agree to the resettlement of 400,000 refugees from Turkey to Europe, a figure that none of the participants would confirm upon arrival in Brussels.

The “coalition of the willing,” as it was branded by some diplomats, has asked the European Commission to put forward a proposal before the next scheduled summit of EU leaders in mid-December for a voluntary resettlement scheme, an EU official said, adding that also other countries could take part in it.

The EU-Turkey action plan, which was presented by the European Commission in October, offers Turkey €3 billion to improve the situation of refugees.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who was at the pre-summit talks, said he was “very much in favor” of the resettlement of Syrian refugees from Turkey to EU countries willing to accept them.

“Turkey hosts 2.5 million refugees today,” he said. “We must come to a system under which Turkey provides a maximum of border securing,” while Europe provides money and relieves part of the strain by taking some refugees. The aim would be to create “legal migration,” Juncker said.

Juncker was at pains to point out that the “group of the willing” was not evidence of a two-speed Europe.

Germany is frustrated by the lack of support for a new resettlement scheme for Syrian refugees from Turkey. At a meeting of EU ambassadors Friday, Berlin wanted a stronger commitment to resettlements in the final conclusions, the document that wraps up the decision of the summit, but its line was rejected, a diplomat said.

The final summit agreement offers to re-energize Turkey’s accession process, but makes no specific reference to any new areas of negotiation — known as chapters —being opened in Turkey’s EU accession bid, apart from one on further economic integration.

An earlier proposal to open several new areas of the accession talks, including on energy, judiciary and fundamental rights, and foreign, security and defense policy, had been taken out of the final conclusions because of objections from Cyprus, a diplomat said. The eastern Mediterranean island has blocked Turkey’s accession talks for years, citing the presence of Turkish troops in the north of the island.

During the summit Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and other leaders expressed concern over human rights issues, including the jailing of two prominent journalists in Turkey, said one EU official with knowledge of the talks.

The journalists, Cumhuriyet newspaper’s editor-in-chief Can Dundar, and the paper’s Ankara representative Erdem Gul, were charged with spying after reporting on alleged arms smuggling by Turkish security forces into Syria.

The final summit conclusions also state that €3 billion in aid that the EU will give Turkey is an “initial” payment, meaning that further financial support is likely.

European Council President Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, one of the countries most reluctant to take in refugees, warned EU states not to “be naive.”

“Let me stress that we are not re-writing the EU enlargement policy,” Tusk said. “The negotiating framework and the relevant conclusions continue to apply, including its merit-based nature and the respect for European values, also on human rights.”

*** Meanwhile, as the Iraqis do some meager fighting against Islamic State, other mass graves have been located.

AssociatedPress: Iraqis find 3 more mass graves in formerly IS-held Sinjar

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — Kurdish officials said Sunday three more mass graves have been found in the northern town of Sinjar, where Kurdish forces backed by heavy U.S.-led airstrikes drove out Islamic State militants earlier this month.

The discovery brings the total number of burial sites in the area to five and the total number of bodies uncovered to between 200 and 300, according to local officials.

While experts say proper excavation and identification of the bodies could take months, Sinjar residents are expressing frustration with the process so far, complaining that their requests from the Kurdish Regional Government for expert help have gone unanswered.

Residents are seeking a faster identification process and assistance in rebuilding the town, much of which is uninhabitable after more than a year of clashes and airstrikes.

The graves found over the weekend are believed to contain 80 to 100 bodies, Qasim Simo, the head of security in Sinjar, said on Sunday. Two were uncovered to the east of the town and one was found within the western edges of Sinjar town itself.

Experts caution however, that properly counting and identifying the dead is a process that could take months and requires a controlled environment.

Local media reports showed some of the burial sites being excavated with heavy construction equipment. At others, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were seen moving what appeared to be human remains into plastic garbage bags.

“The important thing is that the site is secure,” said Kevin Sullivan of the International Commission on Missing Persons, an organization that specializes in war crimes documentation, including the excavation of mass grave sites.

“The site needs to be controlled, for example, by police or under authority of a prosecutor and the bodies need to be exhumed in a systematic way with any identifying artifacts,” as wallets and scraps of clothing, he said. Careful record taking is key to being able to initiate war crimes proceedings in the future, he added.

The proximity of many of the sites in Sinjar to active front lines makes circumstances particularly difficult, Sullivan said.

The first suspected mass graves were uncovered over two weeks ago within days of IS forces being pushed out of Sinjar. One, near the town’s center was estimated to contain 78 elderly women’s bodies, and another, about 15 kilometers (10 miles) outside of Sinjar, contained between 50 and 60 bodies of men, women and children, according to Qasim Samir, the Sinjar director of intelligence.

The Islamic State group captured Sinjar during its rampage across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014 and killed and captured thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority, including women forced into sexual slavery. The group’s rapid expansion in Iraq’s north, which included a push toward the city of Erbil, spurred the U.S.-led coalition to launch a campaign of airstrikes against IS in Iraq and later Syria.

On Sunday the Pentagon said coalition aircraft carried out 19 airstrikes in Iraq, three of which struck targets near Sinjar and neighboring towns in Iraq’s northwest.

Europe Warned Months Ago to Plug the Border Holes

Posted on November 21, 2015November 21, 2015 by Denise Simon

The United States had better take a reality check especially when it comes to visa waiver countries, vacation visas and student visas. Those are easier to obtain that any refugee status.

EU border agency warned of migrant terror threat 18 months ago – but nothing was done

After years of inaction, sources warn it will take “months, if not years” to plug holes in Europe’s sieve-like borders.

Between France and Belgium

By Peter Foster, Europe Editor and Matthew Holehouse in Brussels

3:51PM GMT 21 Nov 2015

TheTelegraph: Frontex, the European border agency warned more than 18 months ago that radicalised European jihadis could exploit the migrant crisis in order to return to Europe and commit terrorism, but systematic checks on migrants only began last Friday, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The failure of Europe’s border bureaucracy to respond to the terror threat emerged as security sources told The Sunday Telegraph that it will still be “months, even years” before Europe’s borders are fully capable of screening arrivals.

Frontex’s own risk assessment for April 2014 said that the numbers of foreign fighters travelling to Syria and Iraq for jihad had “risen threefold”, with some would-be fighters as young 15 years old.

The report noted that EU representatives were “increasingly discussing ways” to monitor and prevent young people moving to Syria, while clearly acknowledging that the fighters could return to Europe “ideologically and militarily trained, thus posing a terrorist threat to societies.”

A Frontex helicopter flies over an overcrowded raft with refugees and migrants approaching the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

“Overall, there is an underlying threat of terrorism-related travel movements especially due to the appeal of the Syrian conflict to both idealist and radicalised youths. It is possible that foreign fighters use irregular migration routes and/or facilitation networks (irrespective of whether this is recommended by terrorist structures or not), especially when the associated risks and costs are perceived as low in comparison to legal travel options,” the report said.

“It will take many months – and realistically years – before we screen everyone entering Europe.”

Security source to Sunday Telegraph

The cost of inaction over securing Europe’s external borders were displayed to devastating effect this week, when it emerged that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the Paris attacks, had slipped into France unchecked – via Greece – without setting off alarms.

He had previously joked in the Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, how he had once been stopped by Belgian police but not arrested.

The inability of Europe to protect its borders has been blamed on a combination of a lack of resources in poorer members like Greece, Romania and Bulgaria and privacy concerns that have stalled necessary legislation in the European Parliament.

Mohamad Nouv Khanji, a Syrian doctor waits to register with the police in refugee center in the southern Serbian town of Presevo. Khanji traveled with his passport, but the EU border security agency Frontex says most migrants enter Europe with no valid documents. Photo: AP/Darko Vojinovic

Timothy Kirkhope, a Tory MEP and former immigration minister, blamed “political correctness” and the view that “people should be allowed to go anywhere they like” for the failure to adequately stand up Frontex.

“The external border has to be protected, and if the Greeks and Italians can’t do it we have to beef up Frontex. We’ve got to put the money in,” he added. “I’ve been pressing them to get on this: to not let anyone go anywhere without being processed.”

“Frontex has no access to operational intelligence,’

Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex

In a sign of the glacial rate of progress, the same warnings on the potential security risk posed by migrant were repeated almost word-for-word in the 2015 version of the Frontex report.

As recently as September Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex, admitted to a House of Lords committee that Frontex had “no access to intelligence” since it was an EU agency.

Mr Leggeri said that Frontex could find “no evidence” that potential terrorists had used migrant routes to cross back into the EU, but was forced to admit that this was probably because it was not connected with anti-terror databases.

A Frontex helicopter flies over refugees and migrants seen on a beach, moments after arriving on a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

“FRONTEX, as an EU agency, has no access to this kind of operational intelligence,’ he admitted, “This may be why we cannot trace evidence of people who might be involved in terrorist activities.”

France has been demanding tough new controls ever since last January’s terror attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which were finally agreed to a meeting of EU home ministers in Brussels last week.

These include that European passenger name records (PNR) data should be collected and available for scrutiny by intelligence agencies, and that EU citizens should also be subjected to “systematic” checks when re-entering Europe.

However, senior officials have admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that it will take “months, if not years” to secure the EU borders, even as richer EU nations were offering to send small ‘hit squads’ to plug the most obvious gaps in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.

“This kind of capacity cannot be stood up overnight,” said the source close to the discussions over securing Europe’s borders, “it will take many months – and realistically years – before we really do screen everyone entering Europe against databases of known terrorists and criminals.”

The scale of challenge was revealed in the official communique from the EU Home Ministers meeting, that admitted that many EU border posts still required “electronic connection” to relevant Interpol databases.

As a sign of the depth of concern, Dutch officials this week even floated the idea of a “mini-Schengen”, that would dramatically cut Europe’s 26-member open-frontier zone, taking it back to its original core of group of Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Germany and the European Commission have rejected the idea, arguing the answer must be to focus on fixing Schengen as it currently exists, perhaps even by creating an EU-wide intelligence agency, an idea that was quickly shot down by member states.

Even before the Paris attacks, Donald Tusk, the European Council president had acknowledged that the EU was in a “race against time” to stop the collapse of Schengen. “The clock is ticking, we are under pressure, we need to act fast,” he said.

In the meantime, Europe remains at risk of further terror attacks that analysts warn could shatter confidence in a Schengen free-movement system whose credibility has already been seriously damaged by two major terror attacks on Paris in the space of nine months.

Carsten Nickel, Europe analyst with Teneo Intelligence, compared the existential nature of the Schengen crisis with that of the Euro crisis earlier this year, but warned that the security issues would be even harder to fix at a European level.

“The reality is that it is going to take a while to build up the administrative and physical capabilities required to protect Europe’s external borders,” he said.

“As with the Eurozone crisis, there is a logic to creating a centralized, supra-national institutions – like, say in the case of the Eurozone, the ECB – to tackle the problem; but when it comes to security it is just not clear there is the same administrative and political capacity to deliver,” he said.

Lisbon Treaty and Confirmed Bomb on Russian Plane

Posted on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

BBC: France has mobilised 115,000 security personnel in the wake of Friday’s Paris attacks by Islamist militants, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.

Mr Cazeneuve said 128 more raids on suspected militants were carried out. French air strikes also hit Islamic State in Syria overnight.

IS has said it carried out the attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a stadium in which 129 people died.

A huge manhunt is under way for one of the suspects, Salah Abdeslam.

He is believed to have fled across the border to his native Belgium. Belgian police have released more pictures of the wanted man. More here including recent facts, timeline and target locations.

***

John Kerry is in Europe working as a mediator and is guiding discussions on Europe’s offensive measures. Belgium is on high alert as is the UK but Germany appears to be passive. France has deployed a carrier group and has launched a second night of sorties, striking 19 targets and provided by U.S. intel sources. Meanwhile, officials have confirmed there was a bomb on board the Russian commercial aircraft that was brought down over the Sinai by the Islamic State faction in that province. The bomb was 1.5 kilos of TNT, which is more than what brought down PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie. Russia has offered a $50 million dollar reward and the Egyptian security services have detained 2 airport suspects.

Meanwhile, what is on tap with Europe is a new security discussion not under NATO but rather the European Union Lisbon Treaty which John Kerry is participating.

BRUSSELS—Defense ministers gathered in Brussels Tuesday to discuss a French decision to invoke the mutual defense clause of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

The clause of the Lisbon Treaty has never been invoked, pushing the European Union into new territory.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian declined to speak as he entered the European Union Council building Tuesday.

Two French officials said that the EU treaty provision, 42-7, was being invoked to try to prod the union to move forward on border control issues and increased intelligence sharing.

French officials said there needs to be agreement on stronger background and passenger name record checks on the European Union’s external borders — something that EU member states have been pressing for well over a year. The French also want more cooperation on illegal arms sales within Europe.

“Cooperation has not moved forward for years,” said a French official. “We are asking the EU to move forward on a number of issues that have been stuck for years,” said a French official..

Another French official said the use of the EU treaty could also help prompt better, and faster, intelligence sharing within the union.

French officials don’t want to invoke the NATO treaty, arguing the current coalition is a more nimble organization with which to strike at Islamic State targets.

While French requests carry great weight within the European Union, it isn’t clear whether the move will be able to resolve the disagreements over border control or other issues.

Measures to increase passenger name record screening have so far been blocked because of resistance to the measures in the European Parliament, forcing rounds of negotiations between capitals, lawmakers and the EU’s executive, the European Commission.

There have also been frequent calls since the migrant crisis began to tighten external border controls but apart from Hungary’s move to build fences on its border and a greater effort to register people entering the bloc in Italy and Greece there has been limited progress.

In a news conference late afternoon Monday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it was too early to react to the French request, which she said she would discuss Tuesday morning with Mr. Le Drian.

“Obviously we will take a careful look at that politically with the French authorities first of all, with the rest of the European institutions including the legal services and obviously we’ll come up with a follow up to that,” Ms. Mogherini said. “Obviously we have started to work on this.”

On Tuesday, most defense ministers declined to comment on the proposal in advance of the French presentation, but expressed support for France in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

“We will defend our security, our freedom, our way of living and we will not be intimidated,” said Jeanine Hennis- Plasschaert, the minister of defense for the Netherlands.

CIA’s Fugitive Banker in Idaho

Posted on November 11, 2015November 11, 2015 by Denise Simon

This is a story that makes for a great movie script but there are some that would push back especially those involved during the Reagan years and the Contra arms deal.

The newspaper article found here expands even further, naming more names.

A Nugan Hand branch in the Thai opium-producing country, for example, abutted the office of the American Drug Enforcement Administration – and even shared a receptionist with it. Important American companies in Saudi Arabia backed Nugan Hand’s aggressive sales there to American workers; big investment money was raked in, sometimes being carried away in plastic garbage bags, much of it disappearing forever. In 1979, Nugan Hand hoped to gain United Nations money to settle Indochinese refugees in the Turks and Caicos Islands, seen as ideal Caribbean transshipment points on the narcotics routes from South America.

FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker

How Michael Jon Hand, who founded an Australian bank with ties to American military and intelligence officials that defrauded depositors and investors, was tracked to Idaho.

By Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica

It was one of the greatest disappearing acts of modern times.

Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.

Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.

If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.

Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”

Two years after fleeing Australia, in 1982, when the CIA was involved in a covert operation to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Hand was working as a military adviser in the region where the anti-Sandinista “contras” were based, according to an Australian intelligence document, which was declassified earlier this year.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The CIA has previously denied it had any links to Hand.

Hand had been a Green Beret in Vietnam and a CIA operative in Laos before moving to Australia, where he and Frank Nugan, a wealthy playboy, established the Nugan Hand Bank in 1973, with $80. Hand fled Australia seven years later, after Nugan was found dead inside his Mercedes-Benz, his left hand holding the barrel of a .30-caliber rifle a few inches from his head, his right hand near the trigger.

During an inquest into Nugan’s death, Hand testified that the bank was insolvent, owing investors large and small some $50 million. The inquest ruled Nugan’s death a suicide, a finding many Australians found dubious.

With depositors and law enforcement authorities in pursuit, Hand, with assistance from a former CIA officer, secured a forged Australian passport, donned a false mustache and beard, and fled Australia in June of 1980. He flew to Fiji, then on to Canada, from which he could cross into the United States without a visa.

The Sydney Morning Herald first reported on Butt’s findings on Monday. In a segment that aired Sunday night, Australia’s 60 Minutes filmed Hand/Fuller emerging from a pharmacy at a shopping mall in Idaho Falls. He has a full beard and neck brace, and was wearing sunglasses and a blue checked shirt. He refused to answer any questions or speak at all when confronted by 60 Minutes reporter Ross Coulthart.

Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.

Colby was forced to resign when it was reported that the agency had been engaged in illegal spying on American citizens. He became a legal adviser to Nugan Hand, and on the back of his business card were handwritten dates when someone, presumably Colby, would be in Hong Kong and Singapore.

As reporters began digging into Nugan Hand, they found that Colby wasn’t the only individual with an intelligence or military background involved with the bank.

“Nugan Hand had enough generals, admirals, and spooks to run a small war,” Jonathan Kwitny, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, wrote in the definitive book about the bank, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA.

Egypt: Flight Data-Recorder Points to Explosion/Bomb

Posted on November 6, 2015November 6, 2015 by Denise Simon

Paris (AFP) – An analysis of black boxes from the Russian plane that crashed in Egypt point to a bomb attack, sources close to the probe said Friday, as Moscow halted flights to the country

The flight data and voice recorders showed “everything was normal” until both failed at 24 minutes after takeoff, pointing to “a very sudden explosive decompression,” one source said.

The data “strongly favours” the theory a bomb on board had brought down the plane, he added.

Another source said the plane had gone down suddenly and violently.

Meanwhile, British airlines were scrambling to evacuate passengers in Sharm el-Sheikh after cancelling flights to the Red Sea resort from which the doomed Airbus had taken off Saturday.

One of the black boxes recovered from the crash site showed that the plane suffered “a violent, sudden” end, a source close to the case in Paris told AFP.

The flight data recorder showed that “everything was normal during the flight, absolutely normal, and suddenly there was nothing”. There is more.

*** ISIS has taken full responsibility for downing the aircraft due in part to Russia’s air and ground campaign in Syria. All the while, Russia has said there are no Russian ground troops in Syria but facts say otherwise.

WASHINGTON: Moscow’s military force in Syria has grown to about 4,000 personnel, but this and more than a month of Russian air strikes have not led to pro-government forces making significant territorial gains, U.S. security officials and independent experts said.

Moscow, which has maintained a military presence in Syria for decades as an ally of the ruling Assad family, had an estimated 2,000 personnel in the country when it began air strikes on Sept. 30. The Russian force has since roughly doubled and the number of bases it is using has grown, U.S. security officials said.

The Russians have suffered combat casualties, including deaths, said three U.S. security officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reporting, adding that they did not know the exact numbers.

The United States has extensive intelligence assets in the region, along with satellite imagery and electronic eavesdropping coverage and contacts with moderate Sunni and Kurdish rebels on the ground in Syria.

Russia’s foreign ministry declined to comment on the size of the Russian contingent in Syria or any casualties it has suffered. It referred questions to the Russian Defense Ministry, which did not respond to written questions submitted by Reuters.

The Kremlin has said there are no Russian troops in combat roles in Syria, though it has said there are trainers and advisers working alongside the Syrian military and also forces guarding Russia’s bases in western Syria.

Then there is the Egypt component:

Sharm al Sheik has been an elitist resort for many years and is one of the crown jewels in Egypt for tourism. Resorts in the area include the Four Seasons, Hyatt, Marriott and others, The area is rich in coral reefs, golf and yachts.

One must wonder where the full and disclosed passenger manifest from the downed aircraft is. Egypt needs tourism to survive for economic revenue and was getting some help from the UK in this endeavor. The Brits had in fact dispatched a large security team to the Sharm al Sheik airport to upgrade all security measures and ten months ago gave an all clear but did suggest additional steps be taken with particular regard to searching via x-ray all luggage and cargo. This was never completed, pointing to Egypt’s security systems at that airport failed. This is key as that resort has previously been used by worldwide government leaders for diplomatic meetings and as a playground. The southern part of the Sinai since the 1980’s has also been victim of several yet intermittent Islamic attacks.

al Sisi is quite anxious to rebuild the country with good reason such that there are plans on the drawing board to expand tourists locations and a new Middle East capitol.

‘A Global Capital’

Spiegel: The Egyptian government has decided to build a new capital city east of Cairo, smack in the middle of the desert. “A global capital,” the building minister announced at a conference on the Red Sea in March. At the event, investors from the Gulf states, China and Saudi Arabia gathered around a model of the new metropolis, admiring the business quarter, with its Dubai-style skyscrapers, the small residential homes in greenbelts and the football stadium. The city is to be situated on 700 square kilometers of land, with an airport larger than London’s Heathrow. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi even wooed investors himself. He recently announced that construction would begin in January.

It is to be a capital created in accordance with the wishes of the country’s leadership elite. It may not fit well with the country as it currently exists, but it will conform to their vistions of Egypt’s future — a planned, manageable city conceived from the top down in the same way the pharaohs once created the pyramids. The new Cairo will be a beautiful place, an “innovation center,” environmentally sustainable, with a high quality of life, city planners are pledging. They want it to be a city where people can breathe without having to cough.

The old Cairo is an ugly city, an affront to the senses. Even as you begin heading into the city from the airport, the buildings are already blackened from pollution. The cacophony of car horns is painful to the ears and during winter months, the smog hangs like thick fog over the Nile. The city suffers from thrombosis, with streets so crammed with cars they’re like clogged arteries. Yet women in high-heel shoes saunter along the banks of the Nile smiling. Even though the place seems unbearable, Cairo is loved.

It is a city of contradictions, created from the bottom up, even though that had never been the intention. It has been growing wildly since the 1960s — from 3.5 million back then to 18 million now — against the will of the country’s rulers. Fully 11 million people live in structures that were built illegally and new residential districts continue popping up around the city like weeds in a field. The city center is becoming increasingly dense, to the point that, in one of the city’s largest cemeteries, people have even converted burial chambers into their living quarters. Cairo is dirty and chaotic, and, of course, it’s a city that gave birth to a revolution. More here.