Romanian President wants legislator prosecuted

BUCHAREST, Romania — President Traian Basescu urged a Romanian legislator on Thursday to surrender his parliamentary immunity so he can be prosecuted on corruption charges.

The European Commission said Wednesday that Romania is not doing enough to fix its flawed justice system. It also said the parliament shows little commitment to pursue the fight against high-level corruption.

On Thursday, Basescu told reporters that legislator Adrian Nastase, who served as Romania's prime minister from 2000 to 2004, is damaging the credibility of the country and its parliament by refusing to face a trial.

There was no immediate reaction from Nastase. In the past, he has said charges against him were politically motivated.

Nastase faces charges in two separate corruption cases.

In one, prosecutors allege that companies and state agencies were forced to pay fees to attend a conference, and the money was then used to pay for Nastase's unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2004. Parliament lifted his immunity in that case, and a trial began in February. But it was indefinitely adjourned for technical reasons.

In June, Parliament refused in to lift Nastase's immunity in the second case about alleged corruption in a real estate deal.

In Romania, legislators have parliamentary immunity from being tried while serving in Parliament. It can only be lifted if a lawmaker surrenders his immunity, or Parliament votes to withdraw it.

Romania also has other politicians suspected of corruption who have managed to avoid trial.

Source: AP

Decades of Suicidal Policies Vis-à-vis Russia and China

Two critically important (and crucially intertwined) events that concern our national security — and our survival — occurred during the week of July 5-11, but you almost certainly didn’t hear a peep or read a word about either one of them. Apparently, our political and media elites think it’s not important for us to know about such things.

Here is the first event to which I refer, as presented by the Sino-Soviet “news” agencies.

“Russian troops are getting aboard a Chinese train Wednesday to take part in joint anti-terrorist exercises Peace Mission 2009, that will be held on the Chinese territory,” the Russian agency ITAR-TASS reported on July 8, 2009. In addition to a Russian motorized rifle battalion and an airborne company, the Chinese train also transported 150 Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks. Some 20 Russian aircraft — bombers, fighter jets, transports, and helicopters — were flown to the exercise site in northeast China.

The headline of a July 12 story for Communist China’s Xinhuanet news agency reported, “More Russian military forces arrive in China for joint anti-terror exercise.” The massive five-day war games, held July 22-26 in the Shenyang Military Area Command, are a repeat of similar China-Russia joint military exercises in 2005 and 2007, which also took place under the name of “Peace Mission.” A shorter two-day joint “anti-terror” drill took place in April of this year. The operation, dubbed Norak-Antiterror 2009, was conducted in Kazakhstan on April 17-18 with units from the armed forces of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO): Russia, China, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

These military operations (which have gone virtually unreported in the United States) underscore the extensive and growing military, economic, technological, and political cooperation between Moscow and Beijing over the past decade and a half. They also demolish the supposed wisdom of the prevailing “experts” at the CIA and State Department, who contended that the “Sino-Soviet split” was “permanent,” and that the United States should encourage this perceived split by wooing both communist regimes with diplomatic overtures, aid, and trade.

Four decades of this bipartisan wisdom by U.S. policymakers has resulted in the transfer, virtually, of America’s entire manufacturing base to China and the transformation of Mao’s “People’s Republic” from a weak and hopelessly primitive Third World state into a global economic and military superpower.

The second event to which I referred above took place in Moscow about the same time as the Sino-Russian military operations were being set into motion in China: President Barack Obama and his entourage landed in Russia on July 6 for a three-day state visit. In addition to meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Obama met with former President Mikhail Gorbachev and Gennady Zyuganov, chairman of the Russian Communist Party, who said he complimented President Obama on his economic stimulus program. “I said that I had thoroughly studied [Obama’s] anti-crisis program, that I liked it, as well as that it is socially oriented and primarily aimed at supporting poor people and enhancing the state’s role,” Zyuganov told Interfax, a Russian news agency. “I said all this to President Obama.”

These two events illustrate two fatal fallacies that underlie our decades of suicidal policies vis-à-vis Russia and China, as implemented by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“Splits” and Scissors
Belief in a strategically exploitable Sino-Soviet split became not only the foundation for U.S. policy toward Communist China, but also provided the rationale for our relations with all communist regimes. If the world communist monolith was fragmenting owing to internal fissiparous forces, the argument ran (and continues to run today), then why not speed the process? Thus we saw policies aimed at courting communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, with the announced aim of wooing them from the Soviet orbit.

From the strategic “split” doctrine came a corollary: besides working to create cleavages between communist countries, why not also work to create cleavages within communist countries by supporting “liberal” and “democratic” political factions among the ruling communist elites?

Of course, that is what the bipartisan strategists such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski claim to have done. Communism has collapsed, they say; the former Soviet Union has fragmented, with the former Warsaw Pact nations joining the European Union and NATO, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) no longer holds sway in Russia. Yes, China is still ruled by the Communist Party of China (CPC), but the “hardline” Marxists in Beijing have lost out to the regime’s pragmatic capitalists, goes the argument.

Unfortunately, the delusional acceptance of these fatal fallacies has achieved the exact opposite of the benefits promised by the “wise men” of foreign affairs. The supposed permanence of the Sino-Soviet split — as noted above, and as could be demonstrated by hundreds more examples — has proven as evanescent as a popsicle in Hades. The new Sino-Soviet axis, thanks to our aid, is far more dangerous now than ever it was during the Cold War.

As far as Russia goes, even many of the erstwhile enthusiasts of the so-called sea-change events of 1989-1991 have been forced to admit in recent years that Vladimir Putin has, in many ways, reinstated the Soviet model of dictatorship. In fact, by 2006 much of the western media had finally awakened to the reality that KGB veteran Putin had stacked the top levels of the Russian government with comrades from the KGB (and its successor, renamed the FSB) to the tune of 80 percent — a higher percentage than had ever been seen in Soviet history. The iron fist is now showing through the velvet glove in ways that were predictable, and were indeed predicted.

When the delusions of the Sino-Soviet split and “democratization” were being sold to the American people and U.S. policymakers a generation ago, there were many who soundly warned against accepting such dangerous deceptions. The most cogent and authoritative analysis exposing the looming danger came from KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. For the past nearly 50 years he seems to have been destined to experience the agony of Cassandra, who in vain warned her disbelieving countrymen against bringing the Greeks’ gift horse inside Troy’s impregnable walls. In a series of memoranda to the CIA, which were later published as two books — New Lies for Old (1984) and The Perestroika Deception (1995, U.S. edition) — Golitsyn provided a remarkably detailed exposé and penetrating analysis that is probably without parallel in human history.

Over the past 90 years, there have been many defectors (both genuine and false) from communist countries, some of whom have provided us with very valuable information and insights. What makes Golitsyn so unique? Golitsyn was a member of the super-secret “inner” KGB — Department D — which planned long-range, strategic disinformation. Other members of the “outer” KGB did not even know of Department D’s existence. It was a crucial creation engineered during the 1959 reorganization of Soviet intelligence by KGB Chairman Alexander Shelepin. Shelepin and the top Soviet leaders determined to undo much of the damage caused by the recently deceased Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose paranoia and bloody purges had devastated not only the USSR but the entire global communist system. The KGB would be redirected away from Stalin’s ham-fisted use of the agency primarily for espionage and brutal police-state oppression, into Lenin’s conception of the “Cheka” (NKVD, predecessor of the KGB) as an instrument of strategic deception that would manipulate and control the Soviet Union’s enemies (the United States and the West) by manipulating and controlling the enemy’s perceptions of geo-strategic realities. Shelepin and the Kremlin strategists set out to recreate and test two of Lenin’s most successful strategic deceptions of the 1920s: the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the “Trust.”

Lenin’s Models
Under Lenin’s NEP, limited private enterprise was allowed. This was heresy to communists, of course, but Lenin the pragmatist explained that this was just a temporary step backwards in order to gain strength for the next steps forward in the socialist revolution. The NEP was necessary both to provide the Russian people with incentives to produce and to lure western capital to the Soviet Union. It worked: Ford Motor, DuPont, General Electric, U.S. Steel, and other western companies flocked to Russia, providing the essential wherewithal and technical assistance needed to reindustrialize the Bolshevik regime. When the Kremlin strategists determined that the NEP had finished its usefulness, they shut it down, renationalized all private enterprise and reinstituted the harsh Bolshevik program. The NEP deception would be repeated again (and again) to win further western concessions and aid under new labels: “peaceful co-existence,” “détente,” “glasnost,” and “perestroika.”

Lenin’s “Trust” was the forerunner to the KGB’s fake revolutions and dissident movements that would be unleashed later in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. The Trust, supposedly, was a powerful, secret anti-communist group within Russia that had widespread support among the people and even among leading officials. The Trust carried out spectacular raids and guerrilla activities throughout the USSR and convinced western intelligence agencies to support it. But after several years of this elaborate charade, the Trust was revealed to have been purely an invention of the Cheka, and is the case study par excellence of what the KGB terms the “scissors strategy.”

The term derives from the application of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic methodology, which allows communists to achieve victory by creating phony struggles in which they control both sides. The unwitting adversary is lured into making alliance with the ersatz “dissidents,” “liberals,” or “democrats,” only to be trapped and cut in half by two sides he thinks are opposed to one another. Through its adroit use of the Trust, the Cheka manipulated western government policies regarding the Soviet Union and lured many true Russian anti-communists into the open, so they could be arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and executed.

According to Golitsyn, the Kremlin strategists used the newly reorganized KGB (of which he was a key “inner” member) to launch a succession of Trust and NEP deceptions that would be part of a decades-long process to implement “a strategy for ‘restructuring’ the whole world.” In The Perestroika Deception, Golitsyn argues:

The Soviets are not striving for genuine, lasting accommodation with the Western democracies but for the final world victory of Communism.... They intend to exploit the same illusion to induce the Americans to adopt their own ‘restructuring’ and convergence of the Soviet and American systems using to this end the fear of nuclear conflict.

According to Golitsyn, Gorbachev (and his predecessors and successors) is pursuing an incredibly intricate “global strategy … to lure the United States into convergence and World Government.”

The charge would be too fantastic even to contemplate except for two things: 1) Anatoliy Golitsyn has correctly called the shots — often years in advance — on some of the most astounding geo-political events of our age; and, 2) The verifiable facts on the ground more accurately fit his analysis than all the wishful thinking and deceit peddled by the acclaimed (but always colossally wrong) “experts” of the disinformation axis in Washington and Moscow.

Concerning the first point, we should note that author Mark Riebling (Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, Knopf, 1994) conducted a systematic analysis of Golitsyn’s book New Lies for Old, and found that out of a total of 148 falsifiable predictions, 139 had been verified by 1993, giving Golitsyn an accuracy rating of 94 percent. And his predictions were not small matters; they included details of the forthcoming fake liberalizations throughout Eastern Europe, followed by similar developments in the Soviet Union. He predicted the removal of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the admittance of former communist Warsaw Pact nations into the European Union.

Facts on the Ground
Concerning the second point, the facts today argue more strongly than ever that Golitsyn’s analysis was — and is — correct. Among the literally hundreds of examples that could be cited that have been barely mentioned, completely ignored, or misreported in the western media:

• Contrary to the claims of the “end of communism” school of thought, “former” KGB and Communist Party leaders continue to dominate the former USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, occupying the crucial centers of power: the military, the security services and police, the main political parties, the media, the financial institutions, the educational institutions, virtually all economic sectors, and all branches of government.

• This overwhelming dominance by unrepentant and unchastened communists accounts for the fact that “lustration” laws aimed at ferreting out those responsible for murder, torture, imprisonment, and oppression on a scale never previously seen in history have been almost completely thwarted. Nothing remotely comparable to the post-World War II de-nazification of Germany has occurred; only a handful of communists have been prosecuted.

• Russian Orthodox Christians continue to suffer horrible betrayal by their KGB-controlled clergy, who fully support Putin and the Kremlin leadership. The death in 2008 of Patriarch Alexy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church (and a dedicated KGB agent since 1958), showed the continuity of the Soviet state. All three replacement candidates were identified KGB operatives, including Archbishop Kirill I, who was chosen to be the new patriarch.

• In Russia, Putin has been able to use his KGB-FSB siloviki to harass, intimidate, kidnap, torture, imprison, and assassinate his opponents, whether journalists, politicians, businessmen, or activists.

• The European Union is being drawn ever tighter into Moscow’s noose of energy dependency through the Russian state oil and gas mega-corporations — Rosneft, Gazprom, Nord Stream — run by Putin’s “former” KGB-FSB comrades.

• The United States is traveling the same path, with the KGB-run LUKoil taking over more than 2,000 gas stations on our eastern seaboard that formerly were owned and operated by Mobil and Getty Oil.

• KGB operatives who have been exposed in top positions of the “post-Soviet” European countries include Polish Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy; Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski; Lithuanian Prime Minister Antanas Valionis; Lithuania’s head of State Security, Arvydas Pocius; Hungarian Finance Minister and Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy; Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn; and Bulgarian President Georgi Sedefchov Parvanov.

• Hungarian KGB agent Sandor Laborc was made head of Hungary’s secret services and then intelligence chief for NATO, where he was put in charge of the West’s most sensitive secrets. Estonian Defense Ministry official Herman Simm was recently exposed as an FSB asset who has passed many NATO secrets to Moscow.

• While pretending for decades to oppose the European Union, the KGB’s most trusted moles played major roles in building the “Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic.” Two key French KGB agents on the EU project were Alexandre Kojeve and Charles Hernu. Kojeve wrote that a world socialist state could be realized through the gradual expansion of European integration across the globe.

• Lifelong Marxist-Leninist Mikhail Gorbachev has approvingly described the EU as “the new European Soviet.” Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has disapprovingly warned that “having just buried one monster, the Soviet Union, another remarkably similar one, the European Union, is being built.... The EU is the old Soviet model, presented in Western guise.”

• Western politicians and intellectuals may insist that Beijing has abandoned Mao’s communist ideology, but Hu Jintao, Chinese president and general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and other top CPC officials regularly affirm their commitment to Marxism-Leninism and point to market “reforms” as a temporary expedient along the lines of Lenin’s NEP.

• Before he was murdered, former KGB-FSB Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko revealed that al-Qaeda’s No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawihiri, was an operative of the FSB, as are many of the other so-called “Islamic” terrorists. “The bloodiest terrorists of the world were or are agents of the KGB-FSB,” he said.

Written by William F. Jasper
Wednesday, 22 July 2009

Romania interested in exploration for gas in Turkmenistan

Romania is looking for an opportunity to participate in natural-gas exploration in Turkmenistan.

Romanian president Traian Basescu said so yesterday (Tues) before leaving on a two-day visit to that country.

"Our intention is to explore for gas deposits in Turkmenistan and to provide the Turkmen side with drilling equipment," Basescu declared.

Basescu said his visit would be in line with Romania’s foreign policy to improve political and economic ties with states in the Caspian region and in Central Asia.

The visit takes place at an anniversary moment for Romanian-Turkmen relations since it has been 17 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations and 16 years since the Romanian embassy in Turkmenistan began to operate.

Basescu and his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov will sign an agreement providing for future bilateral cooperation, mainly in the energy sector.

Turkmenistan, with a population of around five million people, has some of the largest natural-gas reserves in the world.

Euro Parliament Sending Romanian-Led Mission To Moldovan Elections

STRASBOURG -- The European Parliament has said the seven-member delegation that will monitor Moldova's parliamentary elections on July 29 will be led by a Romanian, RFE/RL's Moldovan Service reports.

Conservative Romanian parliamentarian Marian Jean Marinescu, who has been critical of Moldova's handling of the crisis that followed the controversial elections of April 5, will head the group.

Two other Romanian members of the European Parliament will be in the delegation, which is scheduled to be in Chisinau from July 26-31.

The other four members of the team are from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Bulgaria.

Moldova's Communist government -- which won the spring elections -- has accused Romania of meddling in its internal affairs and fomenting unrest in Chisinau after the vote.

Romania denies the accusations, but several Romanian officials have expressed concern over the way the last Moldova elections were held and have asked Chisinau to ensure free and fair polls this time around.

RFE/RL

Romania unveils digital strategy

Romania’s Ministry of Communications has produced a strategic plan for the transition to digital broadcasting. According to Media Expres, it envisages a maximum of five national UHF multiplexes, a national VHF multiplex and a multiplex allocated to regional and local services, all in accordance with the ITU Geneva Conference RRC-06.

DTT services will make their debut in Romania this December, and given the short timeframe it seems almost certain that the state-owned transmission company Radiocom will operate the first multiplex.

It is expected the first two multiplexes will reach 60% of the population and cover 50% of Romania by the end of 2010, with the figures rising to 90% and 80% respectively at the end of 2011.

ASO will take at the beginning of 2012 at the latest.

Source: broadbandtvnews.com

Romanian President Says Moldova Protests Reminiscent Of 1989

Romanian President Traian Basescu at RFE/RL's headquarters


Romanian President Traian Basescu has said that April's post-electoral clashes in Chisinau were a sign that Moldova’s young generation wants real political and economic change. In an interview at RFE/RL's Prague headquarters with correspondent Eugen Tomiuc, Basescu strongly rejected Moldova’s accusations that Romania was behind the violence, and said that Romania's stance toward Moldova will always be “one people, two countries.” The president also spoke about the EU’s eastward expansion plans and about relations with Russia and the United States.

RFE/RL: Romania’s relationship with the Communist leadership of Moldova has gone from bad to worse over the past couple of months, particularly after President Vladimir Voronin accused Romania of being behind the post-election violence in early April. Chisinau introduced visas for Romanians, expelled the ambassador, and restricted Romanian media access to the republic.

The day-to-day economic and social ties between the two states have all but come to a standstill. What can EU member Romania do to help Moldova out of its current political crisis without being blamed for undue “interference in Moldova’s internal affairs?”

Basescu: We will always reject such accusations -- that Romania was involved in the post-election uprising, or that it would get involved in the domestic affairs of the Republic of Moldova. What I can tell you with certainty is that we have seen such events before. We saw them in December 1989, when another Communist leader [Nicolae Ceausescu] failed to understand his own people, and furthermore failed to understand the younger generation.

Mr. Voronin might want to take a look at the footage taken in December 1989 in Bucharest. He will see that there were young people on those streets who wanted liberty, young people who were looking toward Europe, not those voting for Ceausescu.

RFE/RL: This year we mark 70 years since the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. You have stated that you will not sign a bilateral treaty with Moldova which would enshrine the pact. There is actually a region called Moldova in eastern Romania, which sometimes adds to an outsider's confusion regarding what exactly a Moldovan identity represents.

Millions of Romanians consider themselves Moldovan -- but only as a regional identity subsumed to their Romanian national identity. Moldova’s leadership, however, has promoted the notion of a separate Moldovan identity, language, and history -- reminiscent of Stalin’s concept of a Moldovan “people.” How can a modern, European Romania hold on to its ethnic and language ties with Moldova without risking being accused of revisionism, chauvinism, and other evils?

Basescu: We will not fall into the trap of timidity when it comes to accusations or political games played by Chisinau toward Romania. We have a policy of explaining to all our European and NATO allies the history of these places and the history of these people. Our concept is clear: one people, two countries. Therefore, in this respect the propaganda coming from Chisinau will not fool anybody.

Furthermore, Romania will not watch events passively. We have increased the number of vacancies in Romanian universities and high schools for Moldovan youths; we will try and support Romanian-language democratic media [in Moldova]; and we will not hesitate to fight within the European Union to convince our friends and allies that Moldova shouldn't be left in the integration package with Ukraine, but packaged together with the Western Balkan countries as far as integration objectives are concerned.

These are but a few examples to show that we are not being intimidated by Chisinau's brutal behavior. With regard to trade, we have given instructions that no exports from Moldova to Romania be hampered in any way. You may remember that when Mr. Voronin was in big trouble because Moscow had blocked Moldova's wine exports to the Russian market, I brought Mr. Voronin to Bucharest and organized a big Moldovan wine exhibition, and since then, the Romanian market has absorbed a large part of Moldovan wine production.

Currently, Moldova is exporting more wine to Romania than to Russia, which has eventually reopened its market to Moldovan wines. Therefore, we will not do anything that could resemble hostility toward Moldova. Furthermore, we are ready to offer any kind of assistance that Moldova might need, in every economic area.

RFE/RL: Who should ask for such assistance?

Basescu: The [Moldovan] government. But we are also trying to stimulate a different way to keep in touch with the Romanians from the Republic of Moldova by stepping up ties at the local community level, and with intellectuals from Moldova.

I had a meeting recently in Bucharest with civil society representatives from Moldova. We have increased the number of places in summer camps for Moldovan youths. Therefore, we are doing our job both as good neighbors and brothers to the Moldovans, although for the moment we do not communicate with Moldova's leadership.

RFE/RL: Romania’s usually cool relations with Russia seem to have become even cooler since the beginning of the Moldovan crisis. Some analysts argue that Moscow is promoting the idea of a “Romanian threat” to Moldova’s feeble statehood to gain even more influence over Chisinau. Can Romania improve its ties with Moscow and hold on to its interests in the region at the same time?

Basescu: I do not believe that those who say Romania has bad relations with Moscow are right. Our commercial exchanges are on the rise, political contacts are very frequent -- this year alone there were five or six visits by Romanian ministers to Moscow to improve cooperation.

And I will tell you one other thing: I don't think Moscow is so engaged in backing Voronin that it's going to become hostile to Romania because of Moldova's relations with Romania. And I know all the details when I am saying this. On the other hand, Moscow definitely has interests in Moldova, and of course Romania has an interest in Moldova's citizens.

We want the citizens of Moldova -- our brothers from the Republic of Moldova -- to have the chance to strive for prosperity. This cannot happen unless Moldova vigorously and steadily chooses the path toward integration into the European Union.

And I would like to clarify this -- you spoke about the confusion between Moldova and the Republic of Moldova. This is a valid issue for those who do not understand that Romania has several historical regions: Moldova, which, if we are to talk about Romanian regions, stretches to the Dniester River -- Banat, Oltenia, Bucovina, Transylvania -- all these are regions inhabited by Romanians, regions where the same people have lived -- and will live -- for many millennia.

RFE/RL: Ever since you became president, you have been a strong proponent of a strategic partnership with the United States. Romania has contributed troops to Afghanistan -- and until recently, to Iraq -- and has offered Black Sea air bases to the United States. Can Romania do more to consolidate its strategic partnership with Washington under the new U.S. administration?

Basescu: It definitely can, and I can tell you that the new U.S. administration gave us all the signals that its policy toward Romania remains unchanged. The objective of both countries is the consolidation of the strategic partnership in two directions -- [military and economic].

Under the security or military dimension, we have offered facilities to the U.S. military at Romanian military bases such as Kogalniceanu, Babadag, and others. Furthermore, we are participating together with troops in missions outside our borders.

But there are [also] U.S. investments in Romania such as those of [automaker] Ford, or investments in the food industry or in agriculture, and many others. This partnership is developing well, in all its dimensions, including the political dimension, where Romania has enjoyed U.S. support and has been a partner of the United States on foreign policy issues.

And, I can tell you that we are developing an equally strong partnership with France within the European Union. It is a partnership that is rapidly gaining ground. And for us, the two strategic partnerships -- with the United States and France -- are two extremely important pillars of our foreign policy.

RFE/RL: Mr. President, thank you.

Basescu: I thank you too, and I wish all the best to the Moldovans!


Source: RFE/RL (Jul 16)

Ethnic Hungarians boo Romanian president

BAILE TUSNAD (Romania) -- Romanian President Traian Basescu was treated to boos and hisses as he spoke during an open university event organized for his country's ethnic Hungarians.

Those gathered in the town of Baile Tusnad reacted negatively to his statement that Romania is a national, united, sovereign and independent state.

Basescu first received the boos when he said that autonomy should be equal in all parts of the country, including in the region of Transylvania, where ethnic Hungarians live.

After he quoted from the Romanian Constitution to say that the country is "a national, united, sovereign and independent state", there was another expression of disapproval.

He then proceeded to twice again repeat the same quotation, and added that he believed that dialogue was possible, but that he recognizes that those present "do not know it".

The 20th open university in the town was also attended by former Hungarian PM and opposition leader Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Parliament's Foreign Policy Commission chairman, and other Hungarian officials and citizens.

Source: BETA

Conference of foreign ministers of Serbia, Romania and Hungary

In Timisoara (Jul 18, 2009), Serbian, Romanian, and Hungarian foreign ministers, Vuk Jeremic, Christian Diaconescu and Peter Balasz respectively, discussed the European integration of the Balkan countries, cross-border projects, the Nabucco pipeline and the EU strategy for the Danube.

Cooperation of the tangential regions of the three countries sends an important message to Europe and it is extremely important for five million people who live in this area, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Balasz told the press conference. Balasz mentioned projects such as the joint industrial park and expansion of trans-European transport and energy supply networks in the region.

The Euro-regional cooperation may become a model for the period following Serbia’s EU integration, said Balasz. He pointed that Hungary and Romania could jointly mobilize EU funds for Serbia and added that cooperation of the two EU member states and their neighbour is ideal from the EU point of view.

The Serbia-Romania-Hungary trilateral was launched in Belgrade in May 2003 at the meeting of foreign ministers of the three countries, who are having their fourth gathering on Saturday.

On Monday (Jul 13, 2009), the EU’s "pipeline politics" took another step forward with the signing in Turkey's capital, Ankara, of an agreement to build a new, 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline called Nabucco, running between eastern Turkey and Vienna, Austria.

MIDEAST: Turkey Gets Boost from Pipeline Politics

The political geography of the modern Middle East has been affected for one hundred years by the appetite of Westerners and other outsiders for the region's hydrocarbons.

On Monday (Jul 13, 2009), the region's "pipeline politics" took another step forward with the signing in Turkey's capital, Ankara, of an agreement to build a new, 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline called Nabucco, running between eastern Turkey and Vienna, Austria.

The project underlines the new influential role that Turkey, a majority Muslim nation of 72 million people, is playing in the Middle East, and far beyond.

The new project's name was chosen, Austrian officials said, after the Verdi opera that representatives of the five participating countries - who include Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, along with the two terminus states - saw together during an earlier round of negotiations in Vienna.

But the name also gives clues to two intriguing aspects of the project's geopolitical significance. The theme of the opera is the liberation from bondage of slaves held by the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar ('Nabucco') - and it is a widely discussed feature of the Nabucco project that many European nations want access to a gas source that is not under the control of Russia.

Last winter, several European nations suffered severe gas shortages after Russia, locked in a tariff dispute with transit-country Ukraine, closed off the spigots completely.

But the other implication of the name is more strictly Middle Eastern. The modern-day home of Nebuchadnezzar is Iraq. Washington has given strong support to the Nabucco project - and one of the reasons U.S. officials give for this support is their hope that once Nabucco is up and running in 2015, Iraq can be one of the nations that reaps large profits by feeding gas into it.

However, construction of the pipeline is estimated to cost some eight billion dollars, and many officials in the participating countries are still unclear where they will get enough gas to make it economically viable.

The Nabucco participants had been hoping that a key feeder state would be one of Turkey's eastern neighbours, Azerbaijan. But on the eve of the project's inauguration in Ankara, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took the CEO of the vast Russian gas company Gazprom to Azerbaijan, where they signed a contract with the state gas company that will force Nabucco to compete hard against Gazprom for any purchase it wants to make from Azerbaijan.

One fairly evident other source for Nabucco's would be Iran, which is reported to have considerable amounts of new gas coming online in the next five years.

Paul Stevens, an energy specialist with London's Chatham House think-tank, recently told the Christian Science Monitor that an Iranian deal alone could put the Nabucco project close to operating in the black. But he noted that the current political crisis in Iran makes that less do-able and thus, "makes the immediate commercial goals dimmer for Nabucco".

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department's special envoy for Eurasian energy, Richard Morningstar, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington that, "This would be the absolute worst time to encourage Iran to participate in a project like Nabucco, when we have received absolutely nothing in return."

He did, however, argue that the prospect of inclusion in Nabucco could be one incentive used to help persuade Iran to cooperate with the international community.

Regardless of whether that comes about or not, this week's formal birth of the long-negotiated Nabucco project underlines modern Turkey's steady emergence as a significant player in Middle East politics, as well as its continuing role as a bridge between Europe and the countries of the Middle East and the Caucasus.

In many of the Arab countries of the Middle East, as in Bulgaria and some other countries in the Balkans, there was until recently much lingering hostility towards Turkey, based on the resentment earlier generations felt about the harsh way they were treated by the former Ottoman Empire.

But the present-day Turkish republic replaced the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and in the Arab Middle East, the earlier hostility towards Turkey now seems largely to have dissipated.

Even in Syria, which for several decades nursed a strong sense of grievance against Turkey for its 1938 annexation of the north-western province of Alexandretta (now Hatay), that grievance has now been replaced by generally warm ties - and much admiration of Turkey's recent economic progress.

In Iraq, there was also for decades strong resentment of Turkey, among both the country's majority Arab population and from its minority of Kurds, who are concentrated along Iraq's mountainous northern border with Turkey.

But the moderately Islamist 'Justice and Development' Party (AKP) that has governed Turkey since 2002 has built good relations with Iraq's central government in Baghdad.

It has also built a decent working relationship with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) - in spite of the sympathy that many Iraqi Kurds feel with their fellow Kurds inside Turkey, who for a long time were treated very badly by Ankara. (In Turkey's 2007 general election, however, the AKP attracted a clear plurality of support from Turkey's Kurds.)

Turkey now holds several significant levers of power over Iraq. It controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which together are vital to the wellbeing of Iraq's people. It provides an important existing pipeline that takes Iraqi oil to a shipping terminal on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

It is the only one of Iraq's neighbours apart from Iran that has a military capable of deterring other powers - inside or outside Iraq - from launching aggressive military adventures inside the country as the U.S. military draws down its presence there.

Turkey also projects considerable "soft power"- both in Iraq and in the rest of the Muslim Middle East. It strongly opposed the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, a stance that most Iraqis today strongly appreciate. But it also remains on good terms with Washington, as a much-valued member of NATO. And most Iraqis probably appreciate that pragmatism, too.

The AKP also provides an interesting example, to Islamist parties both in Iraq and further afield, of how an intelligent Islamist party can succeed both at home and abroad.

At home, the AKP government has shown moderation and toleration. In foreign affairs, it remains committed to strengthening Turkey's ties with the west, including by continuing Turkey's push to join the European Union.

Now, with the launching of the Nabucco project, Turkey has added to the influence it can exert with many Middle Eastern - as well as European - countries.


Analysis by Helena Cobban - veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org