EU, Arab Spring favorites for Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO, Norway (AP) — Arab Spring or European Union? Speculation ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement on Friday is split after cryptic comments by the award committee's chairman.

Thorbjoern Jagland, General Secretary of the Council of
Europe and Norwegian chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize
award committee gestures during an interview with the
Associated Press at his office at the Council of Europe in
Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011.
Jagland says his panel has already decided on its laureate
for this year and he is confident that the selection will be
well-received. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)

Many Nobel watchers have seen the revolutions against autocratic regimes in North Africa and the Middle East as the most likely subject of this year's prize. An American 

professor who wrote a guide to nonviolent protests was a bookmaker's favorite Thursday.

But Norway's TV2 expected the prize to go to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, while remarks by Thorbjoern Jagland, who has led the five-member Norwegian panel 

since 2009, have fueled speculation the prize could go to the EU.

Even though Norway is not a member, Jagland is a strong supporter of the 27-nation bloc, which many consider a peace-building project as much as an economic union.

In 1990, Jagland wrote a book titled "My European dream" about European unity following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Aside from his Nobel duties he serves as 

secretary-general of the Council of Europe, a European human rights organization that is separate from the EU.

Jagland told The Associated Press this week that the prize — decided last Friday — would go to something "obvious" that he considered "the most positive development" in the world right now.

On Thursday he told Norwegian newspaper VG that this year's winner "is involved with something that has been important to me my whole life."

In several interviews he's suggested that Norwegian media are looking in the wrong places — and most of them have speculated about the award going to someone linked to the Arab Spring.

The deadline for nominations was Feb. 1, and committee members could add their own suggestions until Feb. 28. Jagland told AP that was "not necessarily" too late for consideration of leaders of the Arab Spring revolutions, which toppled regimes in Tunisia in January and Egypt in February.

But he added "that doesn't mean that the prize goes in that direction, because there are many other positive developments in the world."

The EU, or some institution within it, could be a strong candidate if the committee views the prize as a booster shot, like it had intended with the 2009 award to Barack Obama in the first year of his presidency.

The European debt crisis has put the bloc under heavy pressure, with Greece, Portugal and Ireland needing bailouts from international creditors including other nations in the 17-nation eurozone that uses the common euro currency.

But Sverre Lodgaard, a deputy member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee who didn't take part in its deliberations, told reporters Wednesday that he didn't believe in an EU award because it's a divisive issue in Norway.

Leading Nobel-guesser Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, also doubted that the EU would get the prize.

His top picks are Egyptian activists Israa Abdel Fattah, Ahmed Maher and the April 6 Youth Movement, a pro-democracy Facebook group they co-founded in 2008.

He also suggested Wael Ghonim, a marketing executive for Google, for re-energizing the protests on Cairo's Tahrir Square after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, and 

Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni who started criticizing the Tunisian regime before the uprising began in December.

Another candidate could be Turkey's Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Harpviken said, to honor Turkish peace efforts "as a bridge builder between east and west."

Betting site paddypower.com gave the lowest odds Thursday to retired American scholar Gene Sharp, whose writings on nonviolent resistance are believed to have inspired some protesters in the Arab world. The second-lowest odds were given to Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar, a recurring name in Nobel speculation over the years.

Others getting bets include the Russian human rights organization Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina, and the social networking site Facebook.

Norway's TV2 predicted that Johnson Sirleaf would get the prize for promoting peace, democracy and economic growth in her country and advocating for women's rights at the U.N.

Source: 
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Saudi Arabia opens its wallet to stave off protests

As Saudi Arabia's 86-year-old monarch returned home from back surgery, his government tried to get ahead of potential unrest in the oil-rich country Wednesday by announcing an unprecedented economic package that will provide Saudis interest-free home loans, unemployment assistance and sweeping debt forgiveness.

The total cost was estimated at 135 billion Saudi riyals ($36 billion), but this was not largesse. Saudi Arabia clearly wants no part of the revolts and bloodshed sweeping the already unsettled Arab world.

Saudis wave and cheer to welcome the convoy of the King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as he passes them from the Airport and through the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011. King Abdullah returns from a three-month absence for back surgery in New York and convalescence in Morocco
(AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Saudi officials are "pumping in huge amounts of money into areas where it will have an obvious trickle-down by addressing issues like housing shortages," said John Sfakianakis, chief economist for the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based Banque Saudi Fransi. "It has, really, a social welfare purpose to it."

The most prominent step was the injection of 40 billion riyals ($10.7 billion) into a fund that provides interest-free loans for Saudis to buy or build homes. The move could help reduce an 18-year waiting list for Saudis to qualify for a loan, Sfakianakis said.

Another 15 billion riyals ($4 billion) was being put into the General Housing Authority's budget, while the Saudi Credit & Savings Bank was to get 30 billion riyals ($8 billion) in capital. The bank provides loans for marriage and setting up a business, among other things, and is supported by the Saudi government.

Other measures included a 15 percent cost of living adjustment for government workers, a year of unemployment assistance for youth and nearly doubling to 15 individuals the size of families that are eligible for state aid. The government also will write off the debts of people who had borrowed from the development fund and later died.

While Saudi Arabia has been mostly spared the unrest rippling through the Middle East, a robust protest movement has risen up in its tiny neighbor, Bahrain, which like others around the region is centered on calls for representative government and relief from poverty and unemployment.

There are no government figures in Saudi Arabia that provide a national income breakdown, but analysts estimate that there are over 450,000 jobless in the country. Despite the stereotype of rich Saudis driving SUVs, large swaths of the population rely on government help and live in government-provided housing. The nation has a rapidly growing population of youths — about two-thirds of the population is under 29 — many of whom are chaffing under the harsh religious rules that keep the sexes largely segregated.

A Facebook page calling for a "March 11 Revolution of Longing" in Saudi Arabia has begun attracting hundreds of viewers. A message posted on the page calls for "the ousting of the regime" and lists demands including the election of a ruler and members of the advisory assembly known as the Shura Council.

King Abdullah returned to the situation Wednesday after spending three months in the United States and Morocco getting treatment for a bad back. The economic sweeteners were announced before his plane landed.

The unrest in Bahrain, a Gulf Cooperation Council member state, is what has most worried Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations. Their worries, in turn, translate into concerns in the broader global oil market since most of those nations are key OPEC members. Saudi Arabia, alone, sits atop the world's largest proven reserves of conventional crude.

A disruption in crude supplies from the Gulf would make the current, two-year-high levels of over $100 per barrel, appear cheap. Oil prices have already spiked because of Libya's unrest.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a research report that the Bahrain protests spotlight how the Gulf states are also vulnerable, noting that the unrest in the island nation and in Libya "increase the risks of major supply disruptions."

While analysts largely discount the kind of wide-scale protests in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates that have rocked the rest of the Arab world — and it's not possible to know if the Facebook campaign has much support from within Saudi Arabia — leaders need to pay attention to the issues raised by the demonstrators, they say.

Abdullah, viewed as a reformer, has sought to address similar complaints before.

He has worked to ensure that the government has first and final say on all religious edicts — a step aimed at weeding out the conflicting and often increasingly austere messages put forward by competing clerics.

He has also set up a coed postgraduate university, and is pushing hard to complete a series of mega-projects to help diversify the country's economic base and provide jobs for young Saudis.

Boosting the financing for development and housing funds will help address a key gripe of many Saudis, and the cost of living adjustment will help offset inflation in the kingdom, which stood at about 5.3 percent in January. Banque Saudi-Fransi, in a research note released late Wednesday, said the country is trying to stem the spiraling cost of housing by building 200,000 new units per year through 2014.

But few other Arab nations have had much success in using money to quash the protests.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak offered it as a carrot in the first days of the protests, but was ousted shortly thereafter. The 15 percent pay and pension raise he promised, however, remains in effect for public sector employees. Others, like Jordan and Yemen have looked to boost subsidies, and Jordan is reviving a government body that ensures the prices of basic commodities are within reach of the poor.

But Jordan, like other Arab countries where the protests are still ongoing, is not in the clear, and Saudi Arabia's leaders are watching closely, hoping to stave off a contagion within their borders.

Source: Yahoo! News

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Follow Egypt's example, Obama tells Arab world

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama urged autocratic Middle Eastern allies to look to Egypt's example on Tuesday and encouraged the Iranian people to pursue their quest for democracy.

"You can't maintain power through coercion," Obama said in a stark message to Arab allies of the United States as protests raged in Algeria, Bahrain and Yemen following the ouster of presidents in Egypt and Tunisia.

"At some level, in any society, there has to be consent," Obama told a White House press conference.

Obama also condemned the crackdown in Iran, where lawmakers have demanded the hanging of opposition leaders who called the protests that left two people dead.

US President Barack Obama urged autocratic Middle Eastern allies to
look to Egypt's example on Tuesday and encouraged the Iranian people
 to pursue their quest for democracy (AFP/Jim Watson) 

Iranian MPs singled out Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who had called for protests in Tehran on Monday in support of the Arab uprisings that quickly turned into anti-government demonstrations and ended in clashes.

"People should be able to express their opinions and their grievances and seek a more responsive government," Obama said. "What's been different is the Iranian government's response which is to shoot people and beat people and arrest people.

"Real change in these societies is not going to happen because of terrorism. It's not going to happen because you go around killing innocents. It's going to happen because people come together and apply moral force to a situation," Obama said.

"We have sent a strong message to our allies in the region saying let's look at Egypt's example, as opposed to Iran's example."

Obama said that Egypt was moving in the right direction after the country's military pledged to work toward political reforms and elections, days after protests toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.

"Egypt's going to require help in building democratic institutions and also in strengthening the economy that's taken a hit as a consequence of what happened," he said. "But so far at least, we're seeing the right signals coming out of Egypt."

Obama also praised the military leadership for reaffirming Egypt's international treaties, including with US ally Israel.

"Obviously there's still a lot of work to be done in Egypt itself. What we've seen so far is positive."

Political unrest, meanwhile, has spread across the Middle East.

Thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated Tuesday in the capital Manama, where two protesters died. The rally called for regime change in the Gulf kingdom like that in Egypt and Tunisia.

And in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, pro-regime supporters armed with batons and stones waded into anti-government protesters trying to march on the presidential palace, sparking clashes dispersed by police.

Obama tried to answer critics who suggest his administration was caught flat-footed by the events in Egypt, arguing that he wanted to ensure that the United States did not become the story.

"I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history," Obama said

"What we didn't do was pretend that we could dictate the outcome in Egypt because we can't," he said. "So we were very mindful that it was important for this to remain an Egyptian event, that the United States did not become the issue."

But Obama insisted that, if anything, he was actually ahead of the curve.

"If you look at my statements, I started talking about reform two weeks or two and a half weeks before Mr. Mubarak ultimately stepped down, and at each juncture, I think we calibrated it just about right.

"I would suggest that part of the test is that what we ended up seeing was a peaceful transition, relatively little violence, and relatively little, if any, anti-American sentiment or anti-Israel sentiment or anti-Western sentiment."

Source: Yahoo! News

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Protests Expand Across Arab Nations

Protesters and security forces clashed in cities around the Middle East and North Africa over the weekend and Iran geared up for the first significant anti-government demonstrations there in a year Monday, as the popular revolt that forced out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak threatened to spark a new round of uprisings in the region.

In recent weeks as protesters swarmed Egypt and Tunisia, where the longtime ruler also was toppled, scattered large-scale protests have flared elsewhere and other Arab leaders have scrambled to defuse unrest by offering political and economic concessions.

Crowds in Cairo react to word that Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak has resigned on Friday, Feb. 11, 2011. (MyFox DC)

Many protest efforts had begun to dwindle. But Mubarak's Friday-night resignation appeared to boost momentum for opposition forces around the region and raise the stakes for regimes trying to head them off.

Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain and Jordan all were sites of new protests and clashes. The Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank ordered the dismissal of its cabinet, officials said Sunday, after calling new elections Saturday following Mubarak's departure.

In Iran, despite pre-emptive crackdowns and warnings by the government, long-quiet political opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi -- the latter under house arrest -- issued a statement Sunday supporting a protest that already had the backing of labor unions and student activist groups.

The opposition Green Movement -- which sprung up after the contested presidential election in 2009 -- issued a map of protest routes in 35 cities.

They also made available software for Iranians to be able to upload pictures and videos despite slow internet connections. A Facebook page for the protest had more than 52,000 people pledging support and attendance by Sunday. They were being asked to each call 10 people randomly and encourage them to join in.

Already on Sunday night in Tehran, residents were heard chanting "God is great" and "Death to the dictator," according to witnesses and videos posted on YouTube. Meanwhile, the government deployed antiriot police across main squares in Tehran, suggesting the potential for violence.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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