In just over a year, Macedonia’s former ruling VMRO DPMNE party spent over $1 million on lobbying services in the United States, a BIRN investigation has revealed.

Former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski med Joe Biden in January 11, 2016. Photo: MIA

Between November/December 2015 and January 2017, Macedonia’s former ruling VMRO DPMNE party spent more than a million dollars on US lobby groups, according to records published through the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA.

Records made available by the FARA show that the VMRO DPMNE made most payments to lobbyists in one trimester, between November 2015 and January 2016, when VMRO DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski resigned as prime minister and handed over the position to his close associate and party secretary-general Emil Dimitriev.

This coincided with the publishing of several promo articles in the US media which praised the VMRO DPMNE’s policies to the US readers. The timing also coincided with the intensification of telephone and electronic communication with representatives of the US government, the senate and the congress, as well as with Gruevski’s visit to Washington on January 11, 2016.

The second period of intensive lobbying occurred before and after the early parliamentary elections held in December 2016.

http://www.balkaninsight.com

By Burak BekdilJune 9, 2017

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 491, June 9, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Discounting the sincerity of Turkish President Erdoğan’s fiercely anti-western rhetoric ahead of the April 16 referendum is akin to disregarding bitter facts about once staunch NATO ally Turkey. NATO’s deepening “Turkey problem” is contained in the country’s Islamist ideology, conspicuous “un-likemindedness”, and democratic anomalies, which stand against NATO’s founding values of safeguarding freedom and the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and rule of law. 

Turkey-optimists in the western world tend to minimize President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s explosively chauvinistic, anti-western rhetoric before the April 16 referendum, which gave him sweeping new powers. They argue that he was merely attempting to appeal to an increasingly anti-western audience. That view is misleading, to put it mildly.

Erdoğan’s deep-rooted Islamist ideology and slavery to the anti-western populism he has so vigorously created make Turkey the odd one out in the West, including in NATO.

A few years ago, as NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan came to a close, some of the conventional challenges the alliance faced included:

• A transatlantic austerity that sparked major cuts in defense budgets, pruning allied conventional force and operational capabilities
• A need, after Afghanistan and with Georgia and Ukraine still bitterly fresh, to shift focus towards conventional forces and move from a security understanding towards a defense understanding
• The reality that some members were liabilities rather than assets and that the adjustment of new members was taking place very slowly
• The risk of disruptive technologies that could enable individuals or small groups to use force in ways previously exclusive to states
• Shifting demographics, like aging populations and diminishing recruiting pools
• Rising powers in Asia and Eurasia and their future trajectories
• A paradigm shift from deterrence towards prevention and resilience

The Turkey-optimists were never particularly concerned about Ankara, but even the realists largely failed to predict that as Eurasia rose, Turkey’s corresponding perception of NATO as a weakened security alliance would turn it from a staunch member into an “a la carte” member. Ankara’s political goals have diverged from those of NATO, leaving the alliance with a serious “Turkey problem”.

Taking refuge from the August heat at Alexei Kosygin’s Kremlin banquette back in Cold War-stricken 1965, Turkish Prime Minister Suat Hayri Urguplu said “he was very pleased to be witness to the gradual and confident development of mutual understanding with the Soviet Union.” The next day, an Istanbul daily commented, “Improvement of Turkey’s relations with the Soviets is fine on one condition: that we always remain an ally of the United States and in NATO.”

Forty-two years later, in 2007, bigwigs in Turkey’s defense bureaucracy were seriously considering a non-aggression pact with Russia. In April 2009, military teams from Turkey and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria crossed the border and visited outposts during joint military drills. That was the first time a NATO army had exercised with Syria’s.

In September 2010, Turkish and Chinese aircraft conducted joint exercises in Turkish airspace. That, too, was a first for a NATO air force. In 2011, a Transatlantic Trends survey revealed that Turkey was the NATO member with the lowest support for the alliance: just 37% (down from 53% in 2004). The same year, before finally providing NATO forces with logistical support, then prime minister Erdoğan angrily asked, “What business can NATO have in Libya?”

Also in 2011, the Turkish government announced plans to build a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. In 2012, Turkey joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a dialogue partner. (Other dialogue partners were Belarus and Sri Lanka; observers were Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia.) Since then, Erdoğan has said more than once that Ankara will abandon its quest to join the EU if it is offered full membership in the SCO.

In September 2013, Turkey announced it had selected a Chinese company for the construction of its first long-range air and anti-missile defense system. Turkish officials said local engineering would make the Chinese system interoperable with the US and NATO assets deployed on Turkish soil. (Later, this contract was scrapped.)

And in 2014, the Financial Act Task Force, an international body setting global rules and standards for combating terrorist financing, ruled that Turkey should remain on its gray list, along with Algeria, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. Experts said troubling questions remained about Ankara’s relationships with Iranian gold traders, Hamas leaders, al-Qaeda in Syria, and persons designated under the US sanctions regime.

Beginning in 2015, Turkey came under international suspicion for systematically and clandestinely extending support to various jihadist groups in Syria, including, allegedly, Islamic State (IS). That support is speculated to have included logistics and arms. In the Syrian theater, Turkey and its NATO allies have divergent goals: the West’s primary goal has been to fight IS, while Turkey’s has been to topple Syria’s Nusaryi (non-Sunni) president, Bashar al-Assad, and install a Sunni, pro-Turkey regime of Islamists in his place.

The US has made clear that it will fight IS, especially in Raqqa, its so-called capital, with the help of ground troops made up of Syrian Kurds – people Ankara considers terrorists. In northern Syria, NATO and Turkey have different aims: NATO wants to help in the allied fight against IS, while Turkey wants to fight the Kurds, now part of the anti-IS campaign. Ankara’s objective is to halt the construction of a Kurdish belt along Turkey’s southern border with Syria.

The West praised Ankara when it stopped contract negotiations with the Chinese for its air defense architecture, and Western lobbyists were cheered when Turkey discreetly negotiated with US and European weapons makers for the same purpose. But all of a sudden, Turkey announced early this year that it was close to a deal to buy Russian-made S-400 air defense systems. (Iran could have been an attractive choice for co-production were it not a Shiite enemy in the eyes of Turkey’s Sunni elite.)

NATO experts have at long last begun to ask: Can Turkey, with its huge democratic deficit, be a reliable partner? After all, the founding values of NATO are the safeguarding of freedom and the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and rule of law. In today’s Turkey, the upholding of these values can earn one a “terrorist” tag and a long jail sentence.

NATO’s Turkey problem got deeper at the alliance’s Brussels summit in May, when Ankara vetoed NATO’s cooperation with Austria, a move that blocked the alliance’s partnership activities with 41 countries. The move was in retaliation against Austria’s objection to Turkish membership in the EU. Erdoğan said of the Turkish veto, “Those who veto get vetoed.” In other words, he thinks he can fairly punish NATO because an EU member state objects to Turkey’s membership due to its democratic anomalies.

On June 7, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that Germany will pull all of its 270 troops stationed at the Incirlik base, as well as Tornado reconnaissance aircraft and a refuelling plane, out of Turkey. All German assets, including troops and platforms, will be removed to Jordan over the next two months.

With a completely different, religious (pro-Sunni), and revisionist (neo-Ottoman) agenda, Turkey – once an important ally in Cold War NATO – has become a liability for the alliance. Blame it on its newfound un-likemindedness.

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Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist. He regularly writes for the Gatestone Institute and Defense News and is a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

Friday, June 9, 2017

Romania surpassed Greece according to the adjusted value of the GDP in Q1 this year and has all the chances to close 2017 with a value of the GDP higher than that of Greece, becoming the biggest economy in the Balkans, excluding Turkey, after almost four decades of Greek supremacy.

The series of data published on Wednesday by the European Office of statistics, Eurostat, and consulted by News.ro shows that in Q1 of this year, the value of the GDP of Romania, adjusted depending on the seasonal influences, was of 44.2 billion  euro, while the value of the Greek GDP was of43.96 billion euro.

It is for the first time since there are statistics series available regarding the quarterly GDP when the value of the adjusted GDP of Romania surpasses the value of the Greek GDP.

Similarly,  the value of the adjusted GDP of Romania in Q1 got closer to the level of the Czech Republic, 44,85 billion euro and that of Portugal of 47,37 billion euro.

In 2016, Romania had a GDP of 169,6 billion euro,under the level of that of the Czech Republic (174,4 billion euro), Greece (175,9 billion euro) and Portugal (184,9 billion euro), states which have between 10 and 11 million inhabitants according to the revised series published by Eurostat.

The three states are the only ones that Romania can surpass in the next years according to the value of the GDP, the main indicator used at the level of the world to measure the dimension of an economy.

In non-adjusted data against seasonal influences, the value of the GDP of Romania was bigger than that of the Greek GDP in the last quarter of 2016 (50.8 billion euro vs.44,2 billion euro) but lower  in Q1 of 2017 (35,3 billion euro vs.40.3 billion euro) but the figures are less relevant due to the volatility of the Romanian economy by comparison to the more mature economies.

Thus, in 2016, for unadjusted value, the Romanian GDP of Q4 was bigger by 56% against the GDP value of Q1 if 32,6 billion euro, while the difference was only 18% in the case of Greece.

According to the economists, Romania could surpass Greece in 2017 according to the value of GDP and in the years to come it could surpass the economies of the Czech Republic and Portugal getting from the 17th place to the 14th (or13th after Brexit) place among the economies of the EU.

Greece surpassed Romania according to the value of the GDP in the 1970’s according to some estimates, as the series regarding the value of the Romanian GDP exist starting with 1987.

According to the data of the World Bank in 1989, the last year of communist regime, Romania had a GDP  of 42,1 billion dollars, half the level of Greece, which had 79.2 billion dollars that same year.

The difference was reduced after the fall of communism but it was still significant  for two decades. In 2008, the historic peak for the Greek economy the Greek GDP was 242 billion euro with 70% higher than the Romanian GDP of the same year, of 142.4 billion euro.

Later, Greece got into a long period of recession, and the value of the gross GDP  of the country was reduced by 27% between 2008 and 2016 as a result of the crisis of  debts.

During the same period, despite the crisis and the recession of 2009 -2010, the Romanian GDP increased by 19%.

Besides Romania and Greece and excluding Turkey (which controls only a small portion of the Balkans with the biggest part in Asia), the other states of the Balkans have smaller economies.

Thus, Bulgaria had in 2016 a GDP of 47.4 billion euro and the next, Serbia has a much smaller economy with a value of 34 billion euro.

For 2017, the National Commission for Prognosis(CNP) estimates that the Romanian GDP will get at 182,8 billion euro, and for 2020 they estimate a level of the GDP of 229.4 billion euro.

The estimates rely on economic growth rhythm of over 5% per year for the next years which are considered non-realistic by independent economists.

http://actmedia.eu/daily/romania-surpassed-greece-according-to-the-gdp-adjusted-value-in-q1/69871

The joint drill, which involves 400 Israeli soldiers, has ruffled feathers in Ankara

Gili Cohen Jun 08, 2017 7:25 PM

A file photo showing Israeli commandos training. IDF Spokesperson

Israeli commandos will be undergoing training in Cyprus next week, the biggest joint military exercise ever undertaken between the two countries in the island nation.
Sqaudrons of Black Hawk helicopters will head to Cyprus for the joint exercise, which starts Sunday, Haaretz has learned.
The Israeli commando forces will be spending a week in the Troodos Mountains. According to Cypriot media sources, the training will involve 400 Israeli soldiers.
Cyprus and Israel have held joint exercises before, mainly in the air and sea. This time ground forces are also involved.
The exercise has ruffled feathers in Ankara, according to media reports in Cyprus.
The IDF refused to give a detailed account of the drill at this time. It could be assumed that the reason for the flying of hundreds of combatants to an overseas drill, in the Troodos Mountains of all places, is that they are similar to mountainous regions in and around Israel. The IDF has recently increased the frequency of drills conducted by its land forces, and has been trying to improve the quality of these so that they will be is similar as possible to the areas were combat could potentially take place.

Gili Cohen/ http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.794599