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Spain to Get 3rd Government in 4 Years as PM Calls for Early Election

Spain will elect its third government in less than four years after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s fragile socialist government acknowledged Friday its support had evaporated and called an early general election.

Sanchez’s eight-month-old administration met its end after failing to get parliament’s approval for its 2019 budget proposal earlier this week, adding to the political uncertainty that has dogged Spain in recent years.

“Between doing nothing and continuing without a budget, or giving the chance for Spaniards to speak, Spain should continue looking ahead,” Sanchez said in a televised appearance from the Moncloa Palace, the seat of government, after an urgent Cabinet meeting.

The ballot will take place on April 28. It is expected to highlight the increasingly fragmented political landscape that has denied the European Union country a stable government in recent elections.

The 46-year-old prime minister ousted his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy last June, when he won a no-confidence vote triggered by a damaging corruption conviction affecting Rajoy’s Popular Party.

But the simple majority of Socialists, anti-austerity parties and regional nationalists that united against Rajoy crumbled in the past week after Sanchez broke off talks with the Catalan separatists over their demands for the independence of their prosperous northeastern region.

Sanchez saw the Catalan separatists join opposition lawmakers to vote down his spending plans, including social problems he had hoped would boost his party’s popularity.

Sanchez had the shortest term in power for any prime minister since Spain transitioned to democracy four decades ago.

Without mentioning Catalonia directly, Sanchez said he remained committed to dialogue with the country’s regions as long as their demands fell “within the constitution and the law,” which don’t allow a region to secede. He blamed the conservatives for not supporting his Catalan negotiations.

Popular Party leader Pablo Casado celebrated what he called the “defeat” of the Socialists, attacking Sanchez for yielding to some of the Catalan separatists’ demands.

“We will be deciding [in this election] if Spain wants to remain as a hostage of the parties that want to destroy it,” or welcome the leadership of the conservatives, Casado said.

Catalonia’s regional government spokeswoman, Elsa Artadi, retorted that “Spain will be ungovernable as long as it doesn’t confront the Catalan problem.”

Opinion polls indicate the April vote isn’t likely to produce a clear winner, a shift from the traditional bipartisan results that dominated Spanish politics for decades.

Although Sanchez’s Socialists appear to be ahead, their two main opponents — the Popular Party and the center-right Ciudadanos (Citizens) — could repeat their recent coalition in the southern Andalusia region, where they unseated the Socialists with the help of the far-right Vox party.

Vox last year scored the far-right’s first significant gain in post-dictatorship Spain, and surveys predict it could grab seats in the national parliament for the first time.

Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, vowed to use the election to “reconquer” the future, a term that refers back to how Spanish Catholic kings defeated Muslim rulers in 15th-century Spain.

Meanwhile, the Socialists are unlikely to be able to form a new government even if they come to a coalition deal with the anti-establishment Podemos [We Can] party, so a third partner will likely be needed.

Sanchez’s options are limited. On the right, a deal with the Citizens party seemed off the table, as its leader Albert Rivera has vetoed any possible agreement with a Socialist party led by Sanchez himself.

And the prospect of Catalan nationalists joining any ensuing coalition is remote, both in the light of the recent failed talks and the ongoing trial of a dozen Catalan politicians and activists for their roles in an independence bid two years ago.

“The Socialists don’t want an election marked by Catalonia because the issue creates internal division, but right-wing parties will use it as a weapon,” said Antonio Barroso of the Teneo consulting firm.

He said polls have erred in recent elections and that clever campaigning could swing the vote significantly.

“The only certainty … is that fragmentation is Spain’s new political reality,” he said.
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Women Recall ‘Hell’ of Soviet War in Afghanistan

Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-and-white photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse’s coat and smiles sheepishly at the camera; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them.

The pictures don’t show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff during the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war.

As Russia on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the memories are still fresh for the nurses, clerks and shopkeepers, predominantly young, single women who were thrust into the bloody conflict.

Rybalchenko enlisted on a whim. In 1986, she was 33, working in a dead-end nursing job in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and was going through a breakup. One day, she joined a colleague who went to a military recruitment office. The recruiter turned to Rybalchenko and asked if she would like to work abroad — in Afghanistan.

She recalls that she was fed up with her life in Kyiv, “so I told him: ‘I’d go anywhere, even to hell!’ And this is where he sent me.”

Family and friends tried to talk her out of it, telling her that Afghanistan is where “the bodies are coming from.” But it was too late: She had signed the contract.

At least 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting that began as an effort to prop up a communist ally and soon became a grinding campaign against a U.S.-backed insurgency. Moscow sent more than 600,000 to a war that traumatized many young men and women and fed a popular discontent that became one factor leading to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

Rybalchenko, who worked as a nurse at a military hospital in Gardez, was stunned by the many casualties — men missing limbs or riddled with shrapnel. But there was so much work that she found herself shutting off her emotions.

“At the end, I did not feel anything anymore. I was like a stone,” Rybalchenko said, shedding her normally perky persona.

Friendships helped, and she befriended a young reconnaissance officer, Vladimir Vshivtsev.

He once confided to her that he was not afraid of losing a limb, but he would not be able to live with an injury to his eyes. She recalled him saying “if I lose eyesight, I’ll do everything to put an end to it.”

In November 1987, the hospital was inundated with casualties from a Soviet offensive to open the road between Gardez and the stronghold of Khost, near the Pakistani border.

One of the wounded was Vshivtsev, and Rybalchenko saw him being wheeled into the ward with bandages wrapped around his head. She unwrapped the dressing and gasped when she saw the gaping wound on his face: “The eyes were not there.”

She persuaded her superior to let her accompany him to a bigger hospital in Kabul as part of a suicide watch. She stayed friends with Vshivtsev, and he later became a leading activist in the Russian Society for the Blind. Decades later, he briefly served in the Russian parliament.

Raising awareness

Alla Smolina was 30 when she joined the Soviet military prosecutor’s office in Jalalabad near the Pakistani border in 1985. It wasn’t until 20 years later that Smolina started having nightmares about the war.

“The shelling, running away from bullets and mines whizzing above me — I was literally scared of my own pillow,” she said.

She put her memories on paper and contacted other women who were there, telling the stories of those who endured the hardships of war but who are largely absent from the male-dominated narratives.

She is trying to raise awareness of the role the Soviet women played in Afghanistan, believing they have been unfairly portrayed or not even mentioned in fiction and nonfiction written mostly by men.

The deaths of Soviet women who held civilian jobs in Afghanistan are not part of the official toll, and Smolina has written about 56 women who lost their lives. Some died when a plane was shot down by the Afghan mujahedeen, one was killed when a drunken soldier threw a grenade into her room, and one woman was slain after being raped by a soldier.

In an era when the concept of sexual harassment was largely unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, the women in the war in Afghanistan — usually young and unmarried — often started a relationship to avoid unwanted attention from other soldiers.

“Because if a woman has someone, the whole brigade won’t harass you like a pack of wolves,” Rybalchenko said. “Sometimes it was reciprocal, sometimes there was no choice.”

She said she found boyfriends to “protect” her.

Denied war benefits

While the war grew unpopular at home, Soviet troops and support staff in Afghanistan mostly focused on survival rather than politics. While Afghans largely saw Moscow’s involvement as a hostile foreign intervention, the Soviets thought they were doing the right thing.

“We really believed that we were helping the oppressed Afghan nation, especially because we saw with our own eyes all the kindergartens and schools that the Soviet people were building there,” Smolina said.

After Rybalchenko came home, she could hardly get out of bed for the first three months, one of thousands with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

When she asked officials about benefits for veterans and other personnel in Afghanistan, she faced hostility and insults. She said one told her: “How do I know what you were actually up to over there?”

In 2006, Russian lawmakers decided that civilians who worked in Afghanistan were not entitled to war benefits. Women have campaigned unsuccessfully to reinstate them.

Rybalchenko eventually got an apartment from the government, worked in physiotherapy and now lives in retirement in Moscow, where her passion for interior decorating is reflected by the exotic bamboo-forest wallpaper in her home.

Smolina, who lives in Sweden, is wary of disclosing all the details about her own Afghan experiences after facing a backlash from other veterans about her publications.

“Our society is not ready yet to hear the truth. There is still a lingering effect from the harsh Soviet past,” she said. “In Soviet society, you were not supposed to speak out.”
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Families of British IS Brides Plead for Repatriation

Pressure is mounting on the British government to decide whether it will repatriate — and prosecute when possible — dozens of the Islamic State group’s surviving British-born recruits, currently held by U.S.-led Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.

Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to take back IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called jihadi brides as well as their children. A small number have been repatriated to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for help have largely been ignored.

The discovery this week in a refugee camp of a pregnant 19-year-old British woman who joined the militant group along with two girlfriends in 2015 has reignited a furious debate in Britain about what to do with surviving IS recruits, especially those who joined when still teenagers.

Public pleas for repatriation of male fighters, as well as IS brides languishing in overcrowded refugee and detention camps in northern Syria, weren’t helped this week by the defiance of Shamima Begum, who is nine months’ pregnant with her third child. She was a schoolgirl when she sneaked off from her home in east London and joined IS in Syria. She and two friends married IS fighters, in her case a Dutchman who converted to Islam.

She expressed no remorse in an interview with The Times newspaper for joining IS, telling a reporter, “I don’t regret coming here.” She said the sight of a severed head of a captured fighter that had been discarded by a jihadist “didn’t faze me at all.” The pregnant teenager did speak of the deaths from malnutrition and illness of her first two children, saying she fled to the Kurds hoping to be returned to Britain for the sake of her still-to-be-born child so her infant can receive proper medical care in Britain’s national health service.

“I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child,” she said. She said IS deserved to be defeated. “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they [IS] deserved victory.”

Her family, along with the relatives of her friend Amira Abase, have called on the British government to allow both of them back, saying they represent no threat and should be forgiven for their youthful errors. They say they were groomed by IS and too young to be held responsible. Kadiza Sultana, the third girl, was killed in an airstrike in 2016.

“I have no doubt the government should let them back in and teach them, so they learn from their mistakes,” said the father of Amira Abase. She is believed still to be with IS forces. Begum’s elder sister, Renu, told a British broadcaster she hoped her sibling would be allowed back to Britain. She added that her sister is “pregnant and vulnerable,” adding “it’s important we get her … home as soon as possible.”

Warning from Britain

There’s little public sympathy for the girls’ plight, however, and Begum’s interview has prompted a media firestorm. In a poll by Britain’s Sky News, 76 percent of respondents said the girls should be barred from returning.

Britain’s security minister, Ben Wallace, has said the government won’t help with Begum’s repatriation, although as a British citizen she has the right to return.

But he warned in a statement, “Everyone who returns from taking part in the conflict in Syria or Iraq must expect to be investigated by the police to determine if they have committed criminal offenses, and to ensure that they do not pose a threat to our national security. There are a range of terrorism offenses where individuals can be convicted for crimes committed overseas and we can also use Temporary Exclusion Orders to control an individual’s return to the U.K.”

London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that Begum should not be allowed back into Britain, if the security services believe she poses a risk to national security.

But the reporter who interviewed her, Anthony Loyd, said he believes Begum is an “indoctrinated jihadi bride” and urged against “judging her too harshly.”

In December, a Belgian judge issued an order for the repatriation of half a dozen children and a pair of Belgian mothers, both IS recruits, from a Kurdish-controlled camp in northeast Syria. The women, Tatiana Wielandt and Bouchra Abouallal, both in their mid-20s, are being held in the al-Hol camp, one of several housing about 584 jihadi brides and 1,250 children, the offspring of IS fathers, most of them foreign fighters.

​US  position

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are now threatening to transport British IS fighters detained by the Kurds to the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay for prosecution before military commissions. Washington is especially keen to prosecute two alleged members of the so-called “Beatles” terror gang, Londoners El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, for their suspected participation in the torture and beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers, including American reporters James Foley and Steve Sotloff. 

An estimated 800 captured IS foreign fighters are being held by the Kurds. Officials from France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have said for more than a year that they are highly reluctant to accept the repatriation of IS foreign fighters or their wives, despite appeals by the Kurds and the Trump administration to do so. U.S. officials fear the fighters will be able to slip away, if they are not returned to their home countries.

European officials say they represent security risks and that there would be technical and legal difficulties in prosecuting them. Repatriated foreign fighters and their wives would try to use the courts for propaganda purposes, if prosecutions were mounted, they fear. Official British figures show that only one in 10 British IS fighters who managed to return home has been prosecuted. Most have been required to join rehabilitation programs.
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Ireland Under Pressure Over Border Plans for No-Deal Brexit

The European Union will give Ireland some leeway to establish new border arrangements with Northern Ireland in case of a no-deal Brexit, sources in the bloc’s political hub Brussels said.

But they said Dublin would soon have to come up with a plan to ensure the integrity of the EU’s single market or face checks on its own goods coming into the rest of the bloc.

“Ireland can get transition periods or some temporary opt-outs on the border in the worst-case scenario,” a senior EU diplomat said.

“But soon enough it will have to face up to the fact that either there is a border on the island or a border between Ireland and the rest of the EU,” the person added.

EU diplomats and officials dealing with Brexit admit it is impossible to set up full border controls overnight as should theoretically be the case if the United Kingdom leaves the bloc without a divorce settlement on March 29.

The issue of a “hard border” on the island of Ireland has hung over Brexit negotiations from the start and is threatening to sink the divorce deal put together over months of painstaking EU-U.K. talks as the British parliament opposes the Irish “backstop” part of it.

The “backstop” is meant as a last resort, a way to prevent full-blown border controls on goods crossing between EU-state Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

But without a U.K.-EU free trade deal, yet to be negotiated, that would tie the latter to the bloc’s trade rules — anathema to hardline pro-Brexit supporters in Britain and British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Northern Irish allies who say it would weaken the province’s links with the rest of the country.

Many in Britain, Ireland and the rest of the EU also fear the return of border checks could reignite violence and make checkpoints a target.

In 1998, Britain and Ireland made the Good Friday Agreement to end 30 years of sectarian violence over whether Northern Ireland should remain British or join the Irish Republic. With both states in the EU, checks along the 500-km (300-mile) land border ended.

“The Irish-Irish border is a European border. The Brexit issue is not a bilateral question between the Republic of Ireland and the U.K. It’s a European issue,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said after talks with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Brussels this month.

Asked to comment on the matter in the Irish parliament Thursday, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said: “Deal or no deal, there is an obligation on the Irish and British governments, and the EU to try and work together to find a way of avoiding physical border infrastructure on this island.”

Hard choice

But an EU official familiar with the bloc’s preparations for a no-deal Brexit said: “In a no-deal scenario, Ireland would have to choose between setting up a physical border with Northern Ireland and de facto leaving the single market.

“If there is no physical border, the customs checks would have to take place on all goods coming from Ireland.”

The EU has made a point of publishing contingency plans for areas from transport to social benefits to university exchanges as the risk of an abrupt split grows. But it has kept silent on the Irish border.

Varadkar’s stark warning last month that the army may have to be deployed to the border “if things go very wrong” highlighted the risks.

The threat that Ireland could lose at least some access to the EU market is not lost on Varadkar who in Brussels spoke of Dublin’s readiness to protect the bloc’s common economic area.

“It’s core to our economic and industrial strategy, core to our prosperity,” he said standing side-by-side with Juncker, promising Ireland would not become a “back door” to the EU.

But while Ireland is promising the EU it would implement border checks, Varadkar also said: “We are making no preparations, no plans for physical infrastructure on the border.”

EU and Irish sources say the only way to ensure customs controls while avoiding border infrastructure is the backstop.

It envisages that many checks would be carried out away from the actual frontier — in market places or production sites.

“It is not possible to erect a border. It’s just impossible and a different solution needs to be found,” said a second EU official dealing with Brexit. “The backstop is our template. It is a solution that is ready and it works.”
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EU Lawmakers to Saudis: End Women’s Guardianship

The European Parliament urged Saudi Arabia on Thursday to abolish its male guardianship system, under which women have to seek permission from their guardian on issues such as getting married, saying it and other rules reduce women to second-class citizens.

Parliamentarians also expressed concern over “government web services” that allow male guardians to track women when they cross borders. A Saudi application called Absher notifies men when women travel.

Although male guardianship has been chipped away at over the years it remains in force. Under the system, every Saudi women is assigned a male relative — often a father or husband but sometimes an uncle, brother or even a son — whose approval is needed if she is to marry, obtain a passport and travel abroad. In their resolution, approved by more than two thirds of the assembly, EU lawmakers urged the Saudi government to immediately abolish the system.

Current rules in the kingdom effectively make women “second-class citizens,” the document said. EU states should continue pressuring Riyadh on improving women conditions and human rights, lawmakers said.

Resolutions by the parliament are not binding but can influence decisions made by EU governments and EU institutions. The resolution passed a day after the EU executive commission added Saudi Arabia to its blacklist of countries that pose a threat because of lax controls on money laundering and terrorism financing.

The bloc’s relations with Saudi Arabia have cooled since the murder of Washington-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate on October 2.

Despite reforms introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that have reduced discrimination, such as the lifting of the driving ban for women, lawmakers said “the Saudi political and social system remains discriminatory.”

They urged the release from Saudi prisons of women’s rights defenders, including some who were arrested after campaigning to end the ban on women driving.

Lawmakers also called for an immediate moratorium on the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, where it is still applied to punish non-violent offenses, such as drug smuggling, treason, adultery and apostasy, they said.

The EU parliament passed a resolution in October urging an international investigation into Khashoggi’s killing and called on EU states to stop the sale of weapons to the kingdom.
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Tensions Surfacing at Trilateral Summit on Syria

Tensions appear to be surfacing between Russia and Turkey just hours into a three-way summit on the Syrian conflict being hosted in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

According to Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Russia has told Turkey it lacked authorization to create a “safe zone” inside Syria without the express consent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“The question of the presence of a military contingent acting on the authority of a third country on the territory of a sovereign country, and especially Syria, must be decided directly by Damascus,” she told reporters during a press conference. “That’s our base position.”

While Russia and Iran, whose president also is participating in the summit, are close allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—Turkey, like the United States, which already is beginning to withdraw equipment from the country as part of a recently announced troop withdrawal—supports differing Syrian rebel factions.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has long insisted that Syria’s territorial integrity will be compromised so long as U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militants, whom Ankara considers terrorists, remain in the area.

All three countries have made efforts to coordinate military forces on the ground, but contradictory military objectives—and competition for natural resources in Syria’s oil-rich northern regions, has created friction between Moscow and Ankara in particular.

President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of a U.S. troop withdrawal has been welcomed by Russia, Turkey, Iran and Syria, though the sudden shift has left Astana trio leaders unclear about how to reconfigure their objectives in the absence of U.S. forces.

Some high level U.S. officials have anticipated that diplomatic differences between Ankara and Moscow could undermine progress at the summit.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday the three presidents would discuss the formation of a committee that would be tasked with drafting a postwar constitution for Syria.

Lavrov did not discuss whether Syrian officials would be involved in that process.

Pete Cobus is VOA’s acting Moscow correspondent.
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Catalonia Trial Reopens Spain’s Painful Debate On Identity, Democracy

The trial began in Madrid this week against the leaders of Catalonia’s independence movement, who face up to 25 years in jail if found guilty. The semi-autonomous Catalonia region, whose capital is Barcelona, attempted to declare independence from Spain in 2017 but Madrid imposed direct rule and arrested its political leaders. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the trial risks reopening wounds that threatened to tear Spain apart, and the prospect of an imminent snap election is adding to the tension.
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EU Adds Saudi Arabia, Others to Dirty-Money Blacklist

The European Commission added Saudi Arabia, Panama, Nigeria and other jurisdictions to a blacklist of nations seen as posing a threat because of lax controls on terrorism financing and money laundering, the EU executive said Wednesday.

The move is part of a crackdown on money laundering after several scandals at EU banks but has been criticized by several EU countries including Britain worried about their economic relations with the listed states, notably Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi government said it regretted the decision in a statement published by the Saudi Press Agency, adding: “Saudi Arabia’s commitment to combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism is a strategic priority.”

Panama said it should be removed from the list because it recently adopted stronger rules against money laundering. Despite pressure to exclude Riyadh from the list, the commission decided to list the kingdom, confirming a Reuters report in January.

Financial relations complicated

Apart from damage to their reputations, inclusion on the list complicates financial relations with the EU. The bloc’s banks will have to carry out additional checks on payments involving entities from listed jurisdictions.

The list now includes 23 jurisdictions, up from 16. The commission said it added jurisdictions with “strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and countering terrorist financing regimes.”

Other newcomers to the list are Libya, Botswana, Ghana, Samoa, the Bahamas and the four United States territories of American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam.

The other listed states are Afghanistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and Yemen. Bosnia, Guyana, Laos, Uganda and Vanuatu were removed.

Bad for business?

The 28 EU member states now have one month, which can be extended to two, to endorse the list. They could reject it by qualified majority. EU justice commissioner Vera Jourova, who proposed the list, told a news conference that she was confident states would not block it.

She said it was urgent to act because “risks spread like wildfire in the banking sector.”

But concerns remain. Britain, which plans to leave the EU March 29, said Wednesday the list could “confuse businesses” because it diverges from a smaller listing compiled by its Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which is the global standard-setter for anti-money laundering.

The FATF list includes 12 jurisdictions — all on the EU blacklist — but excludes Saudi Arabia, Panama and U.S. territories. The FATF will update its list next week.

​Saudis lucrative for EU

London has led a pushback against the EU list in past days, and at closed-door meetings urged the exclusion of Saudi Arabia, EU sources told Reuters.

The oil-rich kingdom is a major importer of goods and weapons from the EU and several top British banks have operations in the country. Royal Bank of Scotland is the European bank with the largest turnover in Saudi Arabia, with around 150 million euros ($169 million) in 2015, according to public data.

HSBC is Europe’s most successful bank in Riyadh. It booked profits of 450 million euros in 2015 in the kingdom but disclosed no turnover and has no employees there, according to public data released under EU rules.

“The UK will continue to work with the commission to ensure that the list that comes into force provides certainty to businesses and is as effective as possible at tackling illicit finance,” a British Treasury spokesman said.

Missing ‘washing machines’

Criteria used to blacklist countries include weak sanctions against money laundering and terrorism financing, insufficient cooperation with the EU on the matter and lack of transparency about the beneficial owners of companies and trusts.

Five of the listed countries are included on a separate EU blacklist of tax havens. They are Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago and the three U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam and U.S. Virgin Islands.

Critics said the list fell short of including several countries involved in money-laundering scandals in Europe. 

“Some of the biggest dirty-money washing machines are still missing. These include Russia, the city of London and its offshore territories, as well as Azerbaijan,” said Greens lawmaker Sven Giegold, who sits in the European Parliament special committee on financial crimes.

Jourova said the commission will continue monitoring other jurisdictions not yet listed. Among the states that will be closely monitored are the United States and Russia.

 
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Ex-Vatican Prelate Convicted of Corruption in Smuggling  Case

Italian news agency ANSA says a monsignor who had worked years as a Vatican accountant has been convicted of corruption in connection with a failed cash-smuggling plot

Italian news agency ANSA says a monsignor who had worked as a senior Vatican accountant has been convicted of corruption in connection with a failed cash-smuggling plot. 

ANSA said a Rome appeals court Wednesday convicted the Rev. Nunzio Scarano of corruption and sentenced him to three years in prison.

In 2016, a lower court had acquitted Scarano, who had worked for years at a Vatican office that handled Holy See investments. Italian prosecutors in 2013 accused him of plotting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) into Italy from Switzerland aboard an Italian government plane. 

Scarano’s lawyer has said friends asked the monsignor to help them recover funds given to a broker to invest. But the alleged scheme never was realized, purportedly when the broker reneged on the arrangement.
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UK Government Downplays Suggestion it will Seek Brexit Delay

The British government on Wednesday downplayed a report that its chief Brexit negotiator said lawmakers will have to choose between backing Prime Minister Theresa May’s unpopular divorce deal and a delay to the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.

An ITV News correspondent, Angus Walker, said he overheard negotiator Olly Robbins in a Brussels bar saying the government would ask Parliament in late March to back her agreement, rejected by lawmakers last month, or seek an extension to the Brexit deadline.

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay insisted the government was not planning a delay, saying “the prime minister has been very clear that we are committed to leaving on March 29.”

Lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected May’s Brexit deal with the EU last month, and she is now trying to secure changes before bringing it back for another vote. The EU insists it will not renegotiate the legally binding withdrawal agreement.

If a deal is not approved by the British and European parliaments before March 29, the U.K. faces a messy sudden Brexit that could cause severe economic disruption.

Barclay said the government wants to secure a deal, but is also preparing for a “no-deal” Brexit.

Opposition politicians have accused May of trying to fritter away time as the clock ticks down, in order to leave lawmakers with a last-minute choice between her deal and no deal.

On Tuesday, May urged lawmakers to give her more time, promising Parliament a series of votes on the next steps in the Brexit process on Feb. 27 if she has not secured changes to the Brexit deal by then.

“What the prime minister is up to is obvious,” Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said Wednesday. She’s coming to Parliament every other week, pretending there’s progress and trying to buy another two weeks, edging her way toward March 21, when the next EU summit is, to try to put her deal up against no-deal in those final few weeks.

“Parliament needs to say ‘That’s not on.'”

 
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US, Poland Launch Mideast Conference Despite Uncertain Aims

The United States and Poland are kicking off an international conference on the Middle East on Wednesday amid uncertainty over its aims and questions about what it will deliver.

Initially it was billed by President Donald Trump’s administration as an Iran-focused meeting, but the organizers significantly broadened its scope to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fight against the Islamic State group, Syria and Yemen. The shift was designed in part to boost participation after some invitees balked at an Iran-centric event when many, particularly in Europe, are trying to save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal after last year’s U.S. withdrawal and re-imposition of sanctions in its self-described “maximum pressure campaign.”

Yet the agenda for the discussions contains no hint of any concrete action that might result beyond creating “follow-on working groups,” and many of the roughly 60 countries participating will be represented at levels lower than foreign minister.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will attend along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his counterparts from numerous Arab nations, France and Germany are not sending cabinet-ranked officials, and E.U. foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini is staying away.

Russia and China are not participating, and the Palestinians, who have called for the meeting to be boycotted, also will be absent. Iran, which is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution this week, has denounced the meeting as a “circus.”

Pompeo predicted that the conference will “deliver really good outcomes” and played down the impact of lower-level participation. He told reporters in Slovakia on Tuesday that this “is going to be a serious concrete discussion about a broad range of topics that range from counterterrorism to the malign influence that Iran has played in the Middle East towards its instability.”

According to the agenda, Pence will address the conference on a range of Mideast regional issues, Pompeo will talk about U.S. plans in Syria following Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops and Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner will speak about his as-yet unveiled Middle East peace plan.

“We think we will make real progress,” Pompeo said. “We think there’ll be dozens of nations there seriously working towards a better, more stable Middle East, and I’m hoping by the time we leave on Thursday we’ll have achieved that.”

He did not, however, offer any details about specific outcomes.

Pompeo’s co-host for the conference, Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz, also steered clear of describing potential results. And, he made note of differences between the United States and Europe over the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, that also exist among Washington and Warsaw.

“Poland is a part of the E.U., and hence we are of the opinion and we accept the policy of JCPOA,” Czaputowicz told a joint news conference with Pompeo on the eve of the conference. “We consider this to be a valuable element on the international arena.”

In a joint opinion piece published Wednesday by CNN, Pompeo and Czaputowicz said they did not expect all participants to agree on either policies or outcomes but called for an airing of unscripted and candid ideas.

“We expect each nation to express opinions that reflect its own interests,” they wrote. “Disagreements in one area should not prohibit unity in others.”

In fact, three of America’s main European allies, Britain, France and Germany, have unveiled a new financial mechanism that the Trump administration believes may be designed to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is attending the Warsaw conference, but his main interest is in a side meeting on the conflict in Yemen, according to diplomats familiar with the planning.

Since Pompeo first announced the conference as a vehicle to combat increasing Iranian assertiveness during a Mideast tour in January, he has steadily sought to widen the program’s focus with limited success. Despite his efforts, Iran is still expected to be a major, if not the primary, topic of discussion, notably its nuclear ambitions, ballistic missile program, threats to Israel and support for Shiite rebels in Yemen and Bashar Assad’s government in Syria.

The Trump administration has repeatedly denied allegations that it is seeking regime change in Iran. And yet, mixed messages continue to come from Washington.

Earlier this week, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton released a short video on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution in which he called Iran “the central banker of international terrorism” and accused it of pursuing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them and of “tyrannizing its own people and terrorizing the world.” The video ended with a not-so-veiled threat to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: “I don’t think you’ll have many more anniversaries to enjoy,” Bolton said.

Such rhetoric has prompted criticism from Europe and elsewhere but also from Obama administration veterans who have vocally opposed Trump’s attempts to wreck the nuclear deal, which was one of their signature foreign policy achievements. One group of former Obama officials, National Security Action, said the Warsaw conference was little more than an “anti-Iran pep rally” that underscored Trump’s isolation.

“We expect to see again this week an American approach to Iran that will showcase our alienation,” it said in a statement. “More than merely embarrassing, the administration’s stated ‘maximum pressure’ approach is incoherent, as America lacks allies willing to support such a strategy. Not a single E.U. country has endorsed pulling out of the Iran deal, unsurprising given that the Trump administration’s own intelligence chiefs testified earlier this month that Iran remains in compliance.”

 
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Forced Evictions, Discrimination Continue to Afflict Bulgaria’s Roma

On a cold day in January, Ivanka Angelova was at home with her daughter and four grandchildren when the village mayor arrived and advised them to leave.

Two neighbors – brothers aged 17 and 21 – were accused of beating up a local resident. The victim, a soldier, had been hospitalized.

Angelova, who like the brothers is from Bulgaria’s minority Roma community, said the mayor told her that villagers were out for revenge. He was concerned her family might be attacked.

She and most of the 76-strong Roma community fled Voyvodinovo village that evening, Jan. 6, and headed 10 kilometers to Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city.

“We were spread all over the place like a broken egg,” said Angelova, a widow, wiping away tears.

Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007 and is its poorest member, has one of the bloc’s largest Roma minorities.

As in other EU countries, many Roma live on the fringes of society and struggle for work – with those in small settlements facing legal problems when it comes to land ownership, says the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC), a human rights group.

After Angelova and her family fled, the authorities started to demolish the cluster of 17 small homes at the village’s edge.

When the Thomson Reuters Foundation visited three days later, three houses had been destroyed and several others damaged.

Notices were pasted to the other homes to notify residents that theirs would be demolished too.

No Title, Few Rights

According to the 2011 census, there were 325,000 Roma people comprising about 5 percent of Bulgaria’s 7.3 million people. The European Commission, however, estimates there are more than twice as many Roma – about 750,000 people.

In the week following the assault on the local resident, nationalist and far-right groups held nightly gatherings in Voyvodinovo.

And at a Jan. 8 press conference, Krasimir Karakachanov – the deputy prime minister and head of the nationalist VRMO party – referred to the incident when he said “gypsies … have grown exceedingly insolent.”

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the BHC expressed “grave concern about multiplying cases of racist hate speech from Bulgarian government officials and frequent collective punishments for Roma communities.”

The BHC said the local authorities’ treatment in this case mirrored “many similar cases” of forced evictions of “illegal Roma settlements without providing adequate alternative housing, leaving those people homeless.”

Election Links

Other rights groups are also concerned about how the Roma people are treated in Bulgaria.

The Equal Opportunities Initiative Association (EOIA), which works on Roma development and rights issues, said in a 2017 study that one in four Roma homes were “illegal” – lacking land title, building permits or both. It noted other researchers had put the figure far higher.

Between 2012-2016, the EOIA said, information provided by three in every five municipalities revealed that 399 out of 444 housing demolition orders affected the sole residences of Roma families.

Daniela Mihaylova, a lawyer who co-authored the report, said in an interview that the data showed a correlation between the timing of elections and the number of demolition orders carried out – with nationalist parties using “the general anti-Roma trend in society to motivate more voters.”

Such targeting of the Roma by the right-wing alliance of United Patriots were “part of a strategy of distraction” and a way to deflect attention from corruption scandals, said Ognyan Isaev, country facilitator for The Roma Education Fund, and a Roma rights activist.

Retaliation

BHC chairman Krassimir Kanev said he was shocked that residents were chased from their homes in sub-zero temperatures, and that the demolitions were hastily carried out without allowing time for residents to gather their belongings. 

He said Bulgarian law required residents be given notice, time to prepare an appeal, and the right to demolish their own homes and salvage the materials.

He said the BHC had helped residents appeal the removal orders. In the meantime, the municipality was forced to stop demolishing homes until the court considers the appeal. That could take weeks, he said.

In a case brought by the BHC to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the court ruled in 2012 that in seeking to evict Roma from a community in the capital Sofia, the Bulgarian authorities had violated one’s “right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”

Kanev said the ECHR recognized that “you cannot evict people on an arbitrary basis leaving them without any shelter.”

In 2015, the ECHR called on the Bulgarian authorities to halt forced evictions of Roma families or provide them with alternative housing, the Open Society noted at the time.

However, they have repeatedly failed to do so, said Kanev.

Meanwhile, he added, a number of other cases brought by Roma are pending adjudication at the ECHR.

‘Nowhere to Go’

Angelova said she had lived in her home since childhood.

But, said the mayor of Voyvodinovo, Dimitar Tosev – a former police chief – the land belonged to the municipality, and the Roma families had been warned they would have to move.

And, he added, villagers had demanded the municipality solve what they regarded as a long-standing problem.

“There have been a lot of issues – issues like integration,” he said.

“(Villagers) wanted to see action from the municipality,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that the Roma had been left alone until the fight sparked outrage, and he felt compelled to act.

Those whose homes had been demolished, he said, “have places to go, and they will go where they should go.”

In Angelova’s case, she headed to Plovdiv’s Stolipinovo district, where 50,000 people inhabit densely-packed apartment blocks and small houses.

She and her family are staying at a friend’s apartment that is now crowded with 18 people.

In the village, she said, she and her Roma neighbors worked on an occasional basis earning 2.50 Bulgarian levs ($1.45) an hour harvesting crops. There she had a home and a life.

“(Now) we have nowhere to go, we have no work and no money … I don’t know how I will survive,” she said.
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