Walk like an Egyptian or an Indian in Cairo

While comfortably sitting down for a coffee at the pool side of the Mena House, the idea burst upon me. My editor wanted me to write about something relating to international affairs, history or culture from an Indian angle for a high class glossy magazine aimed at American-Indians and I was racking my brains on what to write about? It was like the muse suddenly descended upon me and I got my Eureka moment. I will write about Indians in Cairo. Now that is globalization for you. An Indian origin British citizen, living in London, working then for a Dutch bank, writing about Egypt (Cairo) for an American magazine, while staying in an old British colonial era hotel, which is now managed by an Indian firm, while being served Turkish coffee by an Egyptian waiter. Funny or what? These are my impressions, disjointed, ranging widely across time and space. But let us start at the beginning.

Having to come to Cairo on business, I asked my assistant to book me one of those modern hotels which are in the middle of Cairo’s city centre. One of my colleagues overheard her speaking to me and he suggested another hotel, Mena House. I didn’t pay any attention and absent-mindedly agreed; not realizing that it was about 20 kilometres outside the city, right next door to the pyramids. I did grumble when I found out while suffering through heavy Cairo traffic to get there, but as it turns out, it was the right choice after all. Mena House has its antecedents in old British colonial history when an old hunting lodge of the then Khedive was converted into a hotel by a British couple. Many moons later, many international conferences (World War I, World War II, the Israeli-Arab conflict), many celebrities (Nick Faldo, Jimmy Carter, Julio Iglesias, Barbara Bush, Pierre Balmain, Grateful Dead band members, Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat, Charlie Chaplain, Montgomery of Alamein, Richard Nixon and other assorted presidents kings, queens, emperors and princes) later, it was nationalized by the Egyptian Government in 1953. In 1971, it was handed over to the Oberoi Hotel group of India to be its managing agent, and if you excuse the pun, the rest is history.

I love the Oberoi Hotels, having stayed at them in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore and Mumbai. They have this wonderfully evocative old charm and perfect service. The rooms are big enough for a large man like me to walk about without feeling like an elephant in a porcelain shop, the bathrooms are large, well lit and decorated nicely. Plus, they usually are in old properties, with high ceilings, arched doorways and long well decorated corridors. They have excellent landscaped gardens, and you don’t feel like a sardine. So they come very highly recommended. No, they aren’t your cheap and cheerful hotels, but if you can afford it, you get a sense that you are finally home. Here’s a related quote, “its amazing how people want hotel service at home and home feelings at hotels”, while I dare not say anything about the former, but Oberoi Hotels, very uniquely, manage to carry that off. It is indeed a pleasure to walk inside any one of their wonderful hotels. Having had experience of hotels in more than fifty countries around the world, give me one of these any time. So it was with pleasure that I walked in and I have to admit that I was not disappointed at all. So started my little journey.

Sitting in the breakfast room the next day, I could see the Great Pyramid through the bead curtains. It is a short ten minute walk away. The Great Pyramid is something which can be read about, but it has to be experienced to feel the immensity of this structure. Standing next to it makes you feel tiny and insignificant but at the same time, feel wonder and awe at how the ancient Egyptians created this edifice. I wouldn’t bore you with the statistics and check out the national geographic site for more details. There are three big pyramids, countless smaller ones, and then there is the Sphinx. If you can manage to keep away the innumerable offers for horses, camels and donkey rides, kitsch tourist statues and avoid stepping into one of the animal offerings, you have a wonderful time.

One has to consciously remember that these are tombs; they are monuments to the Pharaoh’s desire to attain immortality.

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

These are thousands of years old, and took decades and armies of workers to put together. And for a person born as an Indian, the feeling is faintly comforting. Two cultures whose origins are steeped in ancient times, two cultures which rose next to rivers, two cultures which are separated by thousands of miles, but both have mysteries galore, countless gods and wonderful monuments. While the ancient Egyptian culture has died away unlike in India where it still lives on, the signs of Ancient Egypt are all around us: on the Egyptian currency notes, in the large murals which you see lining the road from the airport, the driver of tourism – the major economic sector in the country, the hordes of tourists who are busy clicking away with their digital cameras, etc. etc.

So here I was, the quintessential globalised Indian, sitting in an Indian managed hotel, sipping Karkade, a dark burgundy drink made out of hibiscus flowers (wonderful stuff, very nourishing and soothing not to forget its calming effect), speaking with the Executive Housekeeper, Ms. Veneeta Rikhy, a very polished lady, who came over to Cairo in 2003, after long years of experience in Oberoi Hotels in India. She said that after the commercialized, hustle bustle, rush-rush of working in Mumbai, the Mena House in Cairo came as a soothing palliative. Although she had some reservations at the start, about moving away from India to a third world country, she found that life in Egypt is as slow, deep and steady as the Nile. The Egyptians were very warm, patient and laid-back and very welcoming to her and her family. While she only knows a few words in Arabic, just about enough to get along, her daughter speaks Arabic fluently. She and her family have settled down and integrated well, with an extensive social network of friends.

She mentioned that quite a lot of Indians from India, Europe and America have now started coming to Egypt. They do so primarily for two reasons, first is if they love history (and Indians do love history), and second is if they love sea sports and diving. While I have never been to the Egyptian part of the Red Sea, I have dived in the Saudi part of it, and I can easily say that the Red Sea is the most beautiful of them all, even better than the Great Barrier Reef. The main reason I loved the Red Sea is that it has corals, a living breathing wall of colour, unlike other places like the West Indies, Mauritius, Hawaii or Australia. But I digress; obviously you cannot dive in Cairo. Well, you can dive into the lovely Mena House Swimming pool, but you won’t find corals or groupers gaping at you.

The swimming pool is very nice, one of the largest Hotel pools in the country, surrounded by very well kept grounds and lawns and with very good service too. I would highly recommend taking a good book and ordering either Karkade or their lovely ice cold mint tea. It just hits the spot. The only problem was that the fertilizer they use on that lovely lawn is organic and when they watered the lawns and the wind was right (or wrong), you did get a bad whiff. But now I am quibbling. A lovely way to spend a lazy afternoon, with the Great Pyramid as a backdrop, the turquoise water of the swimming pool, the hum of insects.

I asked Veneeta about other Indians working in the hotel and there are a few senior personnel, but one gentleman caught my attention, Mr. Rais Ahmed, the head Chef, who has been here ruling over his domain every since the Oberoi took over the Mena House. A stripling of 23 years of age back then, he has been producing divine Indian meals ever since. The Moghul Restaurant is considered to be the best Indian restaurant in the Middle East, and I have to admit that his food is par excellence. Even though I have been spoilt by my recent trips back home, his Mughlai food is excellent. Have a taste of his Murgh Makhani, Shahjani and if you are particularly adventurous, try his Murgh Vindaloo (woof, blew my head off, I tell you). The desserts are divine as well, and his Kulfi is also excellent, the piquant taste of the spices is just the perfect end to a magical night. To get to eat such wonderful food west of Mumbai, in such a great location was perfect.

Rais speaks Hindi, Arabic, English and Bengali fluently, and it was with pleasure I spoke to him in Hindi and Bengali. We talked about spices, the right heat of the tandoor, the fact that he has trained almost 30 other Egyptians into very well qualified chefs who are in great demand in the other hotels, restaurants and cruise ships of Egypt and the Middle East. Taking a peek at the kitchen, it was large, very well equipped, lots of space and surprise surprise, smiling under chefs and staff. A very genial and polite man, Mr. Rais, who personally understands his guests coming for meals, finds out their nationality and then freshly cooks to suit their respective palates. For example, he said that Americans and the British like their food very hot and spicy, while the Japanese prefer it delicately spiced. I asked him about what Indian visitors thought about his food, and he hummed and hawed. But I persisted and with a very enduring shy modesty, he said in a strangled tone, they said that it’s better than in India!!!! And this Indian agrees! A man truly in love with his job and happiest when his clients are replete with excellent food. For a man to do this for over 36 years, day in - day out, is a monument which is comparable to the Great Pyramid. It was indeed a pleasure to meet him.

While bumbling around in the lobby, which, according to my feelings, is a tad bit overdone with gold paint (I suppose it is made to resemble ancient Egyptian palaces), I bumped into Mohamed Eiweida, the Lobby Manager, who is Egyptian. He took me around and showed me many photographs of the celebrities, part hidden in an alcove behind an imposing statue of Ismail Pasha, the Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt. Guess what? Brooke Shields also stayed here! Interesting enough, Mohamed studied hotel management in India. Go figure, but an Oberoi Graduate can be seen from afar. A very smart, professional and genial man, full of tidbits of fascinating factoids.

It was a short visit, but I can just see myself coming back here again with my kids. My son would enjoy the history, while my little munchkin would most certainly prefer to frolic in the pool. The wonder of this place is that it appeals and can cater for all kinds of tourists, whether they are interested in history, or are just wanting a calm peaceful family holiday away from the bustle of daily life or just vegging out next to the pool, the Mena House has it all. The place just cocoons you with its ambience, its history, the play of lights and shadows borne out of the intricately carved chandeliers, the excellent food and above all, the majestic backdrop of the Pyramids. As the local saying goes, anybody who has drunk the water of the Nile will return, and I most certainly WILL.

Further information

It was a business trip and i didn't remember to take my camera. So had to rely on one of those dinky disposable ones.

The breakfast room.

Lovely view, no? to see the great pyramid while having your breakfast?

In the hotel garden

This part of the garden was a bit manky, but who cares…

Next to the pool having dinner

The pool was lovely. The water was a bit cold, but still lovely. And then they had a wedding in the main hotel ballroom. I heard a haunting local wedding song with a very lilting rhythm. I have been trying to find that song on YouTube for many moons but without knowing the lyrics, its very difficult. I have asked couple of friends, so if I find out, will post it.

The Bar

I had many glasses of karkade, a hibiscus flower drink, in this lovely place, very nice comfortable chairs., but the gold paint was a bit too much.

The main restaurant

Quite a nice restaurant. Can you imagine seeing a painting of Krishna in Egypt in a public restaurant? With very traditional Mughal oriented architecture and arches and stuff? Weird or what? But the food was great.

The Kitchen

Out and About. Had a few hours before catching the flight so decided to go check out the mouldy old buildings.


Old Scarface himself.

Then went over to see Saqqara, the step pyramid

Here is the painting which got the GBLT folks quite excited, apparently this showed 2 boys kissing. The chap who was there got very excited as well and said, it was certainly not 2 gay men kissing but 2 brothers, twins in fact. This was inside one of the tombs near Saqqara.


Here’s the Bent Pyramid. Looks a bit sad, no?

Yours truly totally like a male model, no? I know, I know, modelling trucks.

I went down the bent Pyramid. I was severely bent out of shape, if you ask me.

Full Slide show here.

The African Union’s African Standby Force Resolving and aligning threat assessment fault-lines

Introduction

One of the advantages of setting up an international or multilateral organisation these days is that one can understand and learn from the mistakes of the past. For example, because of the Cold War, ideological and religious differences, linguistic and imperialistic backgrounds, bureaucratic tensions, etc., the United Nations never managed to acquire its own security force. The result? Avoidable genocide, massacres and killings. As it is a joint responsibility, nobody loses their sleep over a few million Africans killed. But the African Union has learnt from the mistakes of the United Nations and has decided to set up a permanent African Standby Force (ASF), reporting to the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU). While this is a very good step, it is crucial that the African Union members understand the issues around the political fault lines in Africa. An Army or armed force, after all, is a political technique (a blood-spattered and terrifying technique, but a technique none the less) and the usage as well as the success of this technique is heavily dependent upon an understanding of the political fault lines inherent in Africa. Without this understanding, the setup, use and deployment of the ASF will be a regrettable non-starter, because the early warning system, as well as the mandate process, will not work.

What is the African standby force and what is it supposed to do?

It is early days as yet, but the contours and shape of the ASF are emerging. It is a permanent force, under the control of the PSC, which will be used for a variety of missions (explained below) as mandated by the PSC. The force is expected to be a combination of a core element as well as additional mission specific element, which can be requested depending upon the requirements at the time. The core element is to provide advice to the political missions of the PSC or AU; participate in observer type missions (either separately or jointly with NATO, EU, UN, or other multilateral organisations); provide peacekeeping operations and the final one, peace enforcement operations. More formally, these are the functions which an ASF will do:[1]

a. Observation and monitoring missions.

b. Other types of peace support missions.

c. Intervention in a Member State in respect of grave circumstances or at the request of a Member State in order to restore peace and security, in accordance with Article 4(h) and (j) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union (CAAU).

d. Preventive deployment.

e. Peace-building, including post-conflict disarmament and demobilisation.

f. Humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of civilian population in conflict areas and support efforts to address major natural disasters; and

g. Any other functions as may be mandated by the PSC or the Assembly.

There is a crying need for this force. Much of the recent history of Africa has been a continuous litany of killings, disasters, external interventions and dashed hopes. There is a long and sad tendency of well meaning outsiders imposing their views and actions on Africa, ranging from the old colonial mindset of the “white man’s burden” to the current, “Africa cannot develop without aid and our help”. What is more, this habit of relying on outsiders means that Africa is unable to help itself. More importantly, when humanitarian and/or military help is really needed, Africa is then at the mercy of these outsiders, whose work is motivated by other incentives. This is the reason why over the past few decades, we have had minimal help, to say the least, when major disasters such as floods, drought, famine, desertification and locust swarms struck. There has been genocide, for example in Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo, with no effective interventions. There have been kleptocratic tendencies in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe and nobody has raised a hue/cry. There have been civil wars in Sudan and the Ivory Coast and nobody much cared. Zimbabwe, the bread basket of Africa, is undergoing a slow death and nobody seems to be bothered.

Given these problems and the lack of continent or even international institutions willing and able to help, it is impossible for even one country to lend a hand, even if they are able to do so. Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt come to mind, but there is no structure in place, no institutional ability and frankly, up until recently, no desire to help others. Given a very good desire for Africans to help themselves and push for better transparency and governance, etc., a good strong African police force will seriously facilitate if not assist in avoiding many of the issues mentioned above. If there had been an ASF in existence with political backing, then quite a lot of the tragic events could be, at best avoided and at worst, have a reduced impact.

But why didn’t the external world intervene sooner if at all? Well, the main reason why the external world didn’t respond was because of political fault lines (such as issues around communist USSR and capitalist USA, Christian West and Arab Sudan, weak liberal ‘unable-to-take-casualties’ West and non-intervention in third world countries etc.). While having an ASF can address the last issue, the first issue is important. If the political fault-lines are not understood and managed, then the ASF will be less than effective and five years from now, we might again see a PSC press release about genocide, massacres, deaths and killings in Africa.

There is another reason which is lesser than the political will, and that is the rather regrettable issue that the powers that be simply didn’t know what was going on. In other words, the early warning system didn’t work in a way that was conducive to a quick deployment of forces, which could help avoid massacres, for example in Rwanda.

What are the current fault lines?

Before we talk about how to handle African political fault lines, we need to understand the types of these fault lines. At an initial glance, one can identify five major types of fault lines.

1. Geographic: (North Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and West Africa). While these are arbitrary divisions and one may indeed question or even suggest alternative geographical sets, this is still an important fault line. For example, we have existing geographical organisations such as the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). The European Union looks at the North African region (more broadly defined than just the Arabic speaking region) as a bloc from an immigration perspective. The francophone community, while not formally established, does exist with discreet management from France. USA’s State Department has a completely different way of splitting up Africa in terms of its desks, such as West Africa, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. For example, northern Africa is not handled by the Bureau of African Affairs, but is handled elsewhere in the Middle East Desk. So if there is an issue which transcends these regional groupings, there can be challenges in getting the political wind behind any mandate. For example, if there is another civil war, something along the lines of what we saw in Ivory Coast, would one expect the French to intervene, while the AU troops from say Southern Africa stand by? Say the French troops do take the side of a francophone country involved in a political issue with say a non francophone country? How does the ASF react or handle it? How would the PSC and AU handle it and what mandate does it give to the ASF?

1. Religious: Imported religions (Islam and Christianity) and Native religions. Some of the biggest massacres and stress points within Africa relate to religions. Whether we are talking about the eruptions between imported religions such as Christianity and Islam versus native religions, or between Islam and Christianity, this is a huge political stress point. Take again the main troop and equipment contributors to a potential ASF, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria and South Africa. Egypt and Nigeria suffer from serious religious sectarianism. South Africa has also been known to have this. So an ASF will have tiny seeds of religious divisions inside it. So if it needs to be deployed, say for example in Ethiopia or Somalia, it will invariably be faced with a political fault line because of religion. Would a Southern African force, mostly comprised of Christians, be considered to be deployed in Muslim Somalia? Look at what happened when the AU force was going to be deployed in Sudan, there were harsh and strong words uttered by various Sudanese religious leaders on how Christian crusaders were coming to break up a Muslim country.

1. Imperialism: The colonised and independent kingdoms, the sub-fault lines from the colonisers: Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and France. For some reason, some of the old colonisers get very excited about what’s happening in their former colonies. To state an example, you will have the United Kingdom ready to intervene in Sierra Leone, but will hold back if an issue blew up in a francophone country and same with France which won’t mind Nigeria having issues, but will be ready to deploy immediately if a francophone country is in danger. The United Kingdom criticises Zimbabwe, but the same level of interest isn’t shown by Germany or Belgium or the UK on any of the francophone countries. So the colonial history is very important, especially when an ASF might need legal, political, military etc. help.

1. The ideological fault line (and the hangover from the cold war): Capitalism and Socialism. While the idea of free markets and capitalism is relatively well established across the world, there is still a fault line running down this ideological divide. Many of the African states are headed by leaders who implemented policies in the socialist era of the 1960’s and 1970’s.Many states suffer from inefficient public sectors, state control over economies, bureaucracy and corruption etc. While by itself this should not be an issue, when we are talking about the deployment of an external armed force, then that force needs to work with public institutions. And generally, if it is a socialist economy, reconstruction is weak. Capitalist societies have the human stock of people accustomed to getting up and fixing problems themselves, rather than relying on the state to do things for them.

1. The cultural fault line: This is more difficult to explain, but could perhaps suffice with a couple of examples. Africa is a continent and the AU is based upon a geographically based identity. When there is another grouping which transcends this geographical grouping, then you have the emergence of a fault line. For example, the Arab identity amongst the Arab speaking North African countries is stronger than the African identity. Say there is an attack on or a situation in a clear African country such as say Chad or Ethiopia, due to say an Arab country’s intervention and the ASF is asked to intervene. As one can see, the political mandate for the ASF will be very difficult to achieve, as the PSC will be split internally between the North African Arab members and the others.

There can be other fault lines as well, but the above adequately show that there are indeed existing fault lines. So how does this matter? The main reason is that these fault lines will cause the political mandate for the ASF to be less than efficient. While advisory or observer missions for the ASF are comparatively less reliant on a clear political mandate, the lack thereof will definitely impact peace keeping and peace enforcement missions.

To have a clear political mandate, the PSC needs to know that there is a problem. The PSC has established a Continental Early Warning System (EWS) according to Article 12 of the Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9^th July 2002. This EWS is expected to avoid issues around unclear directions, information and delayed information as was evidenced in the case of Rwanda, where the UNSC did not even know that there was genocide in progress, until it was too late to stop it and hundreds of thousands had already died.

How do the political fault lines impact the EWS? This is because the EWS findings are directly related to the political mandate, which in turn is directly related to what the ASF will do on the ground. To a lesser extent, the EWS findings also influence and drive what the world understands about a particular conflict situation. Again, it is usually via the media that the world gets its information. The media reports on the intelligence reports tabled or submitted to the various international bodies such as European Union, United Nations Security Council, US Congress, etc. To understand why this is so important, see the innumerable drafts made of any submission to the UNSC, with various members spending long days and hours on drafting such a submission. And this is not even a resolution. This delay in having the right words for a submission can be deadly in case of fast moving events.

This is, of course, assuming that there is a continent wide structure which gathers and processes information and then feeds it into the PSC’s EWS. Once the EWS acquires the information, political fault lines of the type mentioned above can, in the best of times, delay the submission to the PSC and in the worst of times; degrade the severity or urgency of the issue under submission. This will mean that the ASF will have a wrong mandate, if at all and will therefore not be able to address the issue.

This brings us to the issue of the political will. Again taking the Rwandan matter, which was analysed by Touko Pipparinen[2], where Kofi Annan, the then Under Secretary-General of Peacekeeping said, “If there was a problem, it was not one of information or intelligence. The problem was lack of political will”. The then UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali is reported to have said that, “member states were opposed to intervention in Rwanda, with early warning and without early warning. So the real problem is this: if there is no political will among the major actors in the Security Council, any UN system which we try to improve will be useless”. Besides serious disagreements over the comments about the problem being solely due to political will (or rather the lack thereof) and not caused by faulty or insufficient intelligence shows what the heads of multilateral institutions think of their major political stakeholders and bosses with respect to their political will to resolve issues.

Recommendations:

The main issue comes from the fact that very few countries are willing to put their soldiers in harm’s way if there is no direct national interest involved. Even when there is altruism involved, such as with Canada, when it became clear that genocide was planned and was being executed in Rwanda, the Canadian troops were not used to stop it. So the establishment of an ASF is a very good step, as it removes the need for asking for troops. But the issue around the EWS and its political mandate being affected by these fault lines remain.

Starting with the EWS, there are three issues. One is the reporting line to the PSC chairperson, second is the lack of formal mechanisms for incorporating external bodies into the intelligence gathering exercise and finally is the lack of transparency.

Unfortunately, the PSC protocol has set up the EWS to report directly to the Chairperson of the PSC. While this might be done for organisational reasons, this assigns far too much power to the chairperson and allows the chairperson’s personal biases and allegiances to influence the intelligence sifting, summarising, prioritisation and reporting. The reporting of the intelligence should be done to a sub-committee of the PSC (from different countries and geographical locations within Africa) and the reports / minutes of the meetings published regularly after a suitable time delay (if appropriate).

The second issue is the explicit non inclusion of the media and secondly the NGO sector. Ostensibly and by and large, both these types of organisations are independent. The media is obviously interested in uncovering issues and transmitting them. If sufficient numbers of different media outlets (TV, Bloggers, newspapers, Radio, etc.) are consolidated, then issues around independence, bias and other aspects can be averaged out and can provide a very important counter-weight to formal military and governmental information channels. The second sector, the Non-Governmental Organisations, is frequently providing services on the ground where the government is unwilling or unable to do so. A framework which brings this NGO sector into the intelligence gathering framework would be useful.

This does not mean that the information is taken from the media and NGOs and not used. These bodies are - and should be - incorporated into some mechanism for the drafting of a weekly or monthly (or some periodic) intelligence report. This brings us to the third point, namely transparency. When there is a transparent and public report, backed by independent multiple sources of information and intelligence, political fault lines are covered because the argument moves from being defined by narrow nationalistic, linguistic, cultural or geographical factors to purely humanitarian grounds.

Given reasonable operationalisation of the above points, we will end up with a situation where there are multiple sources of independent information, an open debate around current and emerging issues, and a joint public and transparent recommendation from the EWS to the PSC. Once this recommendation is tabled on the PSC chamber, one would expect the political fault lines to engage, depending upon the location and type of the issue. Again, it is vital that the debates and discussions of the PSC are open and transparent.

Conclusions

In the protocol which established the PSC of the AU, the participants were clearly concerned about the “variety of conflicts on the continent and realised that these conflicts have killed millions and have forced millions of their countrymen into becoming refugees and unable to pursue happiness”. And they voted overwhelmingly to be “determined to address the scourge of conflicts on the continent by setting up and use the ASF”[3].

While saying that, amongst the multiple active current conflicts on the continent, three are of particular interest. These are having the biggest impact on ordinary Africans. Sudan and Somalia, because African Union troops are currently deployed there under a less than efficient mandate. The third example is Zimbabwe. While relatively speaking, the political fissures mentioned above have been resolved to a certain extent in Sudan and Somalia, political fault lines have made sure that millions of Zimbabweans are in dire straits. It will be a reflection of the capacity of the AU/PSC to see how it improves situations such as Darfur and Somalia and actually engages in Zimbabwe, overcoming narrow nationalistic, religious or kleptocratic tendencies which have bedevilled Africa for so long.

The End

---

[1] Policy Framework for the Establishment of the African Standby Force and the Military Staff Committee, Document adopted by the Third Meeting of African Chiefs of Defense Staff 15-16 May 2003, Addis Ababa, www.africa-union.org

[2] Piiparinen, T, 2006, “Beyond the mystery of the Rwanda ‘Black Box’: Political Will and Early Warning”, International Peacekeeping, Vol 13, No. 3, 334-249

[3] Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9^th July 2002, page 2-5

Here’s the devilishly sweaty angle to regulation

The past few months saw the financial and economic hills coming alive with the call to regulate financial institutions. There is a very good reason for this, as the financial institutions are blamed for leading us all into recession, making awful decisions, lending badly, being greedy and so on and so forth. So as usual, the public squeals and the sundry governments reach for the regulations. And in many cases, these new regulatory proposals are ingenious. But very rarely do you hear about the implementation side. I am reminded of two quotes, (1) Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and (2) the devil is in the detail. So here is a perspiring salty devil on the joys of actually implementing these proposals.

First of all, I want to give a bit of a background about my experience and then talk about the limitations of this essay, then delve deeper into the joys of implementation from the technical perspective, operationalisation, implementation, cost of implementing these proposals, impact and influence on executive remuneration, actual interface with and influence on trading, market risk, impact on counterparties and credit risk, links with other regulatory regimes all around the special case of international banks. Finally, this is strictly my own opinion, nothing to do with my current and future employers. If you point to me, I will blame my sister for this.

Over the past 15 odd years, I have seen many regulatory initiatives come and go into production, whether it is Basel 1; CAD; MiFID; Basel II; Y2K; transaction and trade reporting; initial and variation margin; and so on and so forth, and these from the perspective of trading, risk management, technical, operational (actually running the sausage machine which produces the reports and deals with the fallout with regulators and compliance). These initiatives are normally just from the perspective of international global banks of various ilk's. So this essay would perhaps offer a very limited, tiny dimensional view of a gigantic universe, hence should be taken with an equivalent grain of salt.

But first let us look at the regulatory impulses. I had the privilege of listening to senior members of the Financial Services Authority of the UK talk about how they see the regulation of liquidity risk. If you check their website, they have a whole section relating to liquidity risk, provide discussion papers and show that they are working heavily on it. The proposals boil down to a very firm specific approach (rather than a purely model based approach) which combines quantitative models, a clear measure of the risk appetite, a review of senior management, a seriously upgraded stress testing system and very aggressively tested contingency funding plans.

There are other regulatory initiatives relating to either tweaking or enhancing or even discontinuing Basel II, to establish a common contingency / liquidity funding pool (almost akin to the mother of all deposit insurance schemes); to firmly fix the executive remuneration to something which approximates the actual risk born by the institution over a different time period; to actually go and make the regulator’s pay being market and risk aligned; control bank asset growth and tie the Tiered capital to some function of that bank asset growth; control the trading books much better; put in punitive capital and transparency measures on banks warehousing instruments for internal liquidity pools or for future sale; look after the financial system rather than concentrate on the individual financial institutions; and finally fix the way the regulators work themselves.

I am a firm believer that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and in this case, the road to regulatory gridlock is paved with requests for information. The problem I have is this. The underlying concept behind all these proposed solutions is that if more information was given to the regulators, then the regulators would have been better able to control the risk and could have headed it off before the crash happened. Now I am not convinced that it is clear to the regulators that they know what they are asking for.

At this current moment, financial institutions produce a gigantic amount of reports and information for a bewildering variety of regulators, examiners, auditors, reviewers, exchanges and other bodies. Ranging from trade and transaction information to cash information, from accounting information to capital information, a huge amount of information is collated and collected and shipped over to the regulator. While it is difficult to prove a negative, I am beginning to wonder what they did with the existing information. Was it used or filed away and forgotten or what? And if the data provided was not useful to provide information on proper regulation, then what is the mechanism to fix it? A word to the wise, as they say, generals are always prepared to fight the last war. Asking for more information just to fix the last crash might indeed not be very useful.

But let us get back to the implementation details. Let us start with the obvious one and get everything under one umbrella, none of these off balance sheet vehicles or faffing around with regulatory arbitrage. If the off balance sheet vehicles and special purpose vehicles are brought back on the books of the financial institutions and their clients, they will be creaking at the seams if not bursting at them. So if I had to show all these vehicles under one umbrella, which is tatty, the next question would be, where all do I report to and in which manner? Software, technology, people, process and places are already under an intolerable strain to produce sufficiently robust and accurate information (such as under SOX), and to stress it even further will mean a mass of incomprehensible information which is very difficult to produce much less comprehend.

Do I report a British SIV created in Switzerland for an Indian client under US rules or what? And how do they link in with any derivative transactions carried out under its rubric in Milan with some hedging done in Yen? You will get an answer to this question if you go to a tax advisor or a corporate lawyer. But once you pile hundreds of thousands of millions of transactions, products, SIVs, regulators, trades, hedges, etc. on top of each other, the pile becomes so complex that it is very difficult to structure and report. It is like flying the space shuttle perched on top of a Boeing 747 transport. It can be done, but is very difficult. So my question would be, you might want to go back to basics and wonder why you wanted the information in the first place. Surely that will not help so much rather than understand the motives (sell automobile stocks, buy credit, lend to car buyers…) behind the transaction in the first place. So going after the motive rather than the end result might actually provide better protection. And motives can be summed up rather neatly on a qualitative basis, and human beings are much better in dealing with complexity on a qualitative basis rather than a quantitative basis.

Ok, no worries, let's say that you do manage to report this entire structure to one person. Leaving aside the fact that I do not believe that it will be possible for one person or even one team to understand the full structure, you will tell me, ok then, now come up with sufficient capital to protect against this entire or part of this structure failing. When things are going fine, I can reasonably predict the future trajectory of this structure. So while the weather is fair, I can tell how the Space Shuttle on the Boeing 747 will fly but if there are gusts of wind, I will find it very difficult to predict what will happen to the combined structure. Now if you want 100% certainty, ground the plane and make sure it does not fly at all. In other words, make sure that the banks hold 100% of capital for any exposure at all. That will make you very cushiony, but not very attractive as an economic model. People have to realise that risk has to play a role and will live on.

So what is a good level of capital? Well, you do have Basel II which is trying to come up with a good way of describing the capital required, and by and large, it seems to be giving good results. But the mechanism to collect and report that capital required is done on a monthly basis. And by the time the entire sausage machine gets into full gear into the top of the corporate food chain, and then to the various regulators, it can take quite a lot of time to know if capital changes are required. And when you do know if capital changes are required (usually increase in capital), it will take another few months before that can actually happen. How long do you think the markets are going to stay put and do nothing while this juggernaut is trying to calculate the capital required? Not long, firms can go belly up in a matter of days, not months and years. Perhaps a simple question to the bank chiefs will suffice, once a mathematical level of capital has been established. Are you comfortable with betting your pension on that level of capital? If yes, then fine. If not, then top it up, mate.

And what of liquid assets or liquidity risk management? I heard the regulator say that liquidity risk management is poorly understood. Yes, it is poorly understood because of very good reasons. It is like you are a salmon looking up a white water rafting river and estimating what is the best way to go up stream while being able to breathe, avoid bears and fishermen, as well as not get bashed against rocks. Every salmon does not survive, but the species does. Similarly, liquidity risk is so difficult to comprehend, because it is beset with so many factors that it is perhaps humanly impossible to comprehend and calculate all the factors together. One indicator could be that every time there has been a liquidity crash, nobody saw it coming. Well, that should tell us something. The number of data points, transactions and dimensions which can potentially lead to a bad liquidity eddy in the water which will bash your head against a bankruptcy rock are just too many to model with any exactitude and I am not sure one can achieve it. Best case scenario, it will lead to over confidence and worst case scenario, it will not catch anything at a very high implementation cost.

Let us not forget the problem for the regulators. By asking for more and more information and more and more oversight, their responsibilities are increasing as well. In other words, if they do get all this information and are again not able to prevent the next crash, will their salaries and bonuses be docked? The bankers who were paid munificent sums in bonuses are being asked to return their money, well, at least control the sums of money going forward. But does this relationship cut both ways? Will the regulators resign if their regulated markets do not behave in the way they asked the market to behave? Say the business cycle is five years, will the regulators and bankers enter into a pact to say that their bonuses and a proportion of their pensions will be linked directly to the performance of the financial system and the financial institutions, which will only be paid after six years? I can hear the gasps, but hey, it can be done. We already do it over one year, so why not over six years or 10 years?

One hears that instead of independent private rating agencies, there should be a government one. This is specially coming from the Europeans. Yes, the crop of private rating agencies do have problems, but here’s a question, how independent will the government rating agency be when some of the largest participants in the financial markets are the governments themselves? And if there is a conflict, who judges?

So here are just some thoughts about the regulatory pressures and the joys of the implementation of it. People are asking for more data and more models to fix problems that came up because of more data and more models existing. Perhaps I am getting old and cranky, but piling yet more models on top of more models does not seem to be the right way forward for me. What it ends up doing is to produce loads of perspiration but no inspiration.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Sniping in the crosshairs

Hunting is an atavistic human activity which is now falling into disfavour. One can understand why it is so, because one cannot hunt animals that have been over-hunted, food does not need to be hunted any more. The view, that the only reason why one would hunt an animal is because it is posing a danger to humans, is increasing now. However, there is still one animal which is hunted these days and that is man. You might very well ask why I talk about hunting men? Well, in a particular case, hunting men is no different from hunting animals. I refer to the art of sniping. Let us take a look!

First the usual disclaimer! I love hunting although I haven’t done so for a long time now. It goes back to those old halcyon pre-teenage and teenage days of hunting with a slingshot and pebbles/marbles and then graduating to a pop air gun and then to a rifle and the very rare shotgun/high powered rifle. Mainly I went after large birds, squirrels, rabbits and the rare boar or antelope. Quite a lot of the shooting was to do with target shooting and practice. I have even managed to shoot couple of humans as well, but with a dinky air rifle. The chances of actually doing big damage with that are fairly well limited. I got one in the calf, which was an accident and one was by design and I got the boy in the patootie. But I have had experience of shooting off the big rifles as well and using scopes. Those are big men’s toys and you can see a man being brought down. Not that I have bought a man down, mind you, but I can see the similarities.

This brings me to sniping. If my memory serves me right, the first time I read about sniping was when I read ‘Dogs of War’ by Fredrik Forsyth. In that book, the hero talks about how it would have been so much easier to get a mercenary with a sniper rifle to expend a bullet costing ½ a shilling to take out Adolph Hitler rather than go through the whole headache that was World War II. That piqued my interest and it has become more and more of an interest since then. I read with deep concentration how Navy SEAL snipers took out three Somali pirates with three shots. Now those were absolutely great shots. Can you imagine taking a pot shot from the pitching and unstable USS Bainbridge’s stern at a tiny target, where only the head and shoulders were exposed, and that also rather hazy and wavering in the dark, at least 300 meters away, in a pitching lifeboat? Not touching the captive at all - but just pops – pop-pop-pop, and the captive was free. And totally coordinated, all three pirates had to be brought down at the same time; otherwise the captive’s life was in danger. I simply cannot imagine the skill and ability of the snipers and I suspect that a vast majority of people on this planet cannot get that done either. I hope the SEAL’s get due recognition for totalling those pirates. Down through the ages starting from Julius Caesar and Cicero all the way to now, that has unfortunately been the only way to deal with pirates.

By and large, people are very uncomfortable about sniping as a weapon of war. The main objection seems to be that it offends the rules of fair play. I suppose it’s the same feeling that the samurai or the Red Indians were faced with in the 17^th century when being confronted with rifles and guns. These would smell, stink and kill without honour. But killing is killing, I guess. That said the feeling that if you do want to kill and fight, then you do it face to face. We still use terms such as “back stabber” or “sneak up behind”, all sounding very bad and dishonourable. We do not like anonymous strangers and we think it’s a sign of courage and morality that fighting should be like fencing, one to one. So the idea that somebody can be a kilometre away and using a high powered rifle to kill a target, who does not even have a chance to react, is sort of anathema to normal folks. You don’t give a warning, you don’t allow any chance of defence, you don’t provide any retreat clause, and you just kill. But life is brutal and sniping is a way of life. When humans would sneak up on animals to kill them, hundreds of thousands of years ago, they were doing the same. But then, it was for food, now it’s for “war”. I can understand this, I still do not have a good explanation why this would be so, but I can see the military need for it.

If you can, from long distance, avoid the need to engage with the enemy and just quietly and safely take out an enemy leader who is directing his men to fight against you, why wouldn’t you do that? Take for example this book ‘Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group Under Siege’ (ISBN-10: 0141029013) by Sergeant Dan Mills of the 1^st Battalion, Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. Sergeant Dan Mills lead a group of British Army Snipers deployed in the field in Al Amarah, Iraq with Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, the first Victoria Cross holder in the Iraq War. But the book is not about Lance Corporal Beharry, it’s about the group of men whom Sergeant Mills lead for months. They were snipers, based on the top of a low building, for months on end.

And what they would be doing is taking out suicide bombers, jihadis, various Shia militiamen, assorted RPG and mortar holders, men planting IEDs on the road side, and so on and so forth. All of them were using their British Army sniper rifles and in some instances a 50 calibre rifle. By safely dispatching these assorted fundos out from a kilometre or more distance, they literally saved their fellow soldiers’ lives - hundreds if not thousands of times. They fired over 33,000 rounds and are credited with 200 kills (that they know of, very difficult to confirm kills in urban conditions). It is a very good book, highly recommended. The author was mentioned in dispatches even. Very brave man and very brave soldiers. It feels pretty good to read about it as well. Yeah, I know, I am being childish now!

What about counter sniper operations? This is something that people engaged in urban warfare face all the time and it was and is currently happening in large areas in Iraq. What do you do with enemy snipers who are going to pick your tank, APC or other commanders off while they are on patrol? (Please keep in mind that this isn’t the place to talk about whether or not they should be in Iraq in the first place!) Then rules of engagement come in. Rules of engagement are in place to define how, where, why and when etc. of how soldiers should fight. The rules differ from place to place, time to time, regiment to regiment, commander to commander, etc. Basically, the bottom line is, that it depends upon how risky you want the battle to be. If you are very risk averse, then you will have stringent rules of engagement. So in this case you will say to your counter sniper teams, you cannot shoot an enemy sniper till the enemy sniper has actually fired.

Now as you can imagine, that means that you can only fire in self defence or fire after a fellow soldier has already been killed, wounded or targeted. What if the enemy soldier is just doing reconnaissance? Can you still kill him? How about a commander or a Colonel? What about an unarmed, not in uniform mullah who is ordering his men to commit suicide attacks? What about a sniper nest up in the minaret of a mosque? Can you fire at the sniper nest in a minaret? You know that if you fire at the minaret, the uglies and the idiots will come out boiling and create more problems. What if the shot is worth it?

What about you having just observed a group of men triggering a roadside bomb in a heavily built up area and then suddenly you have a whole bunch of people running away from the explosion? The perpetrators aren’t nicely sign posted, you have dust, blood, smoke, debris and body parts flying all over the place resulting from the explosion and you hear the screams of the wounded all around you. Then you are asked to take out the chap who triggered the explosion, despite the fact that there are usually two men in each sniper team, you are both still looking through a very narrow telescope or binoculars. How do you decide whom to kill and whom to spare? It is such a difficult decision, but you know that you better take the chaps out because they are also carrying the triggering device which will trigger additional IEDs to take out the follow up ambulances or APCs which are going to come to check on the first ambulance. What a tough decision to make!

What about you taking out a man you know is an insurgent leader, has been seen and known to be a master bomber? You have now found out where he lives and have been informed that he is plotting an attack. You also know that there is no court in Afghanistan or Iraq which will ever convict him or any prosecutor brave enough to prosecute him and no policeman brave enough to arrest him? But you know he is alive and he is directing operations which are killing your men and other innocent civilians. Well, a real life case such as that has happened when Green Beret Master Sgt. Troy Anderson took out Nawab Buntangyar and was prosecuted for unlawful killing. He was acquitted of the charges on the grounds that it was justifiable homicide, which is a good thing in my humble opinion. But now you see the problem for snipers. They have to be very careful. You don’t have hotheads in the sniper teams, at least not in the professional armies. You cannot say much about this for the snipers in militant and terrorist groups.

Sniping is more of an art than a science. The entire exercise of getting to a place, settling down there for ages, having almost inhuman patience to stalk, to keep zillions of things in mind, and then, phut, the target is pushing up daisies. The ingress and egress from the ultimate shooting position would be nerve wracking. You will need to be very careful; you cannot just stand anywhere and shoot. You need to think about getting in, taking the shot and then getting safely out. And once you are in situ, can you imagine the patience it requires? You cannot move, cannot just take a break at any time, cannot eat properly, cannot do the bodily functions easily And all that for hours and in some cases, days on end, where the sniper team just sits there and waits.

All that can end up only for one chance which might exist for 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds you have to make a judgement call on whether or not it is legal or ethical, whether the situation is under the rules of engagement and then worry about the physical act of taking the shot. Just one shot from hundreds of meters away, relying on a controlled explosion inside your barrel which will propel the bullet over hundreds of meters, battling smoke, wind, heat waves and then hitting the head or a vital part of the body for a proper kill. Bloody hell, that’s one hell of a difficult way to top somebody.

But I have rambled on long enough and the best way to close this essay is to write four quotes which encapsulate this secretive and strange world of sniping.

Reporter to sniper in Iraq. "What do you feel when you shoot an insurgent?" Sniper to reporter, "Just a little recoil."

Another one is, I am a whisper, a shadow, I don't exist. By the time you realize I'm there it's already too late and by then I'm long gone.

Then you have the "one man’s fate comes from another man’s wait" and the final rather gallows humour one, "a sniper is the worst romancer, they never make the first move."

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

No man should ever have to see his child die!

I believe that one of the most poignant emotions that are evoked inside of one is when one reads or hears about a parent facing the death of his/her child. Whether it is burying his child, or lighting the funeral pyre or laying the child out for a vigil or wrapping the child in a shroud, the feeling is perhaps much more powerful than any other death. Compared to the deaths of any of other relatives and family members, the death of your child might be the most heart wrenching one. But why on earth am I talking about this? This topic came from a strange source and made me think about it, so as usual I jotted down some thoughts on this.

First, I have to explain that I am a bit of a science-fiction geek and have been reading this particular genre for the best part of 30 years now, starting way back when I got my little hands on HG Wells' books, like ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Time Machine’, ‘Island of Doctor Moreau’, ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘God The Invisible King’, ‘Wheels of Chance’, ‘Research Magnificent’, etc. Second, I usually haunt charity shops, flea markets and websites such as abebooks, Alibris, eBay and other places where second hand books are sold. The idea being, just because it’s a second hand book that doesn’t mean that the book is bad. Words are amazing things whose worth does not diminish with frequent use. Just because it’s a bit yellowing or has a broken spine, that doesn’t mean that it cannot be read again or anymore. But more importantly, second hand books come with an idea already built in that somebody found it good enough to put it back into circulation. Generally, you always win that way.

So now we get back on the topic. It was surprising that I have not come across this book anywhere else before other than when I saw it in one of those charity shops I mentioned. This book, ‘Hyperion’ by Dan Simmons, was originally published in 1990 and won a whole bunch of awards, like the Hugo and Locus Awards for the best science fiction novel). Naturally, I scooped it up and finally got to reading it and found its basic premise to be quite interesting. The story deals with a group of seven travelers, who have joined to go together on a pilgrimage to another planet, which seems to have a God like creature in residence called as Shrike. The pilgrimage is embarked on to beg for Shrike’s assistance to save mankind’s galactic civilisation. Never you mind the overall structure of this galactic civilisations under threat which is rather popular, but not what I want to get into in this essay. What made this book very interesting is the fact that the story is actually not just one story, but it comprises the individual stories of the seven pilgrims.

I am not going to say much about the other six sub-stories except to say that each of them was fascinatingly imaginative and amazingly creative and uniquely different. But it was one of those seven stories which really tugged my heart strings and made me want to write about it. It is the story of one of the pilgrims mentioned above, who is carrying a baby of about 6 months of age. And that bewildered me at the beginning. What on earth is this? Did you ever hear of a hero going off on a galactic quest carting a baby around along with the essential nappies and vital baby formula milk, favourite blanket and other assorted vital accessories?

The story of that baby is amazing. As it so happens, a young woman was trained as a scientist and went off to research Shrike. But then something happens to her that is not really explained very well (nor am I going to try to explain it here), but the effect of that event or happening is that she starts regressing in age rather than growing older. Every day, she loses one day’s worth of life and memory attached to it or knowledge gained during it. The doctors cannot figure out neither the illness, nor a cure for it and so she finally ends up with her parents. Physically she is doing just fine, but she grows young and younger every single day instead of growing old.

You might say that this sounds brilliant, to grow young again! But I don’t think we have really thought this through properly. In popular fiction, you would have somebody who is old and then grows younger for some reason till they reach an ideal age and then they stick to that age. This ideal age is say around 25 or so, when people are at the prime of their lives. Shades of “She” by Haggard, no? But you don’t really believe that this is good, do you? There is this recent movie now: ‘The curious case of Benjamin Button’, which has a similar theme, but that still doesn’t talk to me the way this particular story does.

I refer, obviously (or perhaps it is still not that obvious) to the feelings of the parent, in this case here the father, which is precisely what I was thinking about and what pulled so violently on my heart strings. As somebody once said, the worst experience in human life is to have a father bury his child. In other words, no parent should have to outlive his children.

I have a young daughter of my own and while I obviously cannot (and hope to hell not) imagine to ever go through this, but reading about how this father managed to go through each day shook me. Every single day that father was teaching his daughter everything all over again starting from zero or square one, knowing that tomorrow, they will still have to do everything all over again, because she would have forgotten all that she had learnt the previous day.

Still, going back from an age of 25 to 24 is bearable, despite it being 365 days of utter pain and enormous loss. From 24 to 23 is also ok, and perhaps it’s acceptable untill you reach say 12 or 10 years of age. 15 long years of seeing your child shrink, lose maturity and knowing that the end is inexorably coming. Yet still rushing about, trying everything and anything to get her cured and failing miserably.

And then childhood comes, where some of the basic human functions start failing. And then finally the dreaded day comes, when your daughter forgets language and the ability to speak and she also can no longer walk, but moves into helpless babyhood again, which is where the story ends. It was a frightening read for me and Scared the bejesus out of me. It sort of gave me a better appreciation of what your children really are. Emotional? Too crazy? Allowing what is science-fiction to become kind of real in my mind? You bet your bottom dollar On all of the above!

It did impact me and despite it being just a story, I was ended up putting myself in that father’s shoes. I am not sure if I would have the discipline and courage it definitely would take to live my life all over again, but this time in reverse. What do I do with the photographs that I had taken? The toys that she played with? How about the sleepless nights I spent walking up and down in the hallway with her in my arms trying to get her to sleep? Or the days I spent out in the garden with her, playing with her dolls or on the trampoline? Or reading a book with her? I can do it now, because we have a bright future in front of us together. It’s a joyful time. But would I be able to do the exact same thing knowing that there is no real future for her, because she is not progressing but is actually regressing and heading inevitably towards her death?

I know I will have to do it, but can I? I do not know, so I thought of asking you who also have children about what you think. Could you?

PS: This book was brilliant, a good read and comes highly recommended. There is a second part to the book also, but more on that one perhaps later…

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

 

 

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