Ecofund Did Its Job

While I was Science Counselor at the Amrican Embassy in Warsaw, we worked out a deal whereby Poland would pay part of its debt to the US to an enviornmental fund, Ecofund in English, Ekofundusz in Polish.  Just look around on a Polish newspaper web site, I found that the fund had endured until the debt payments ran out in 2010.  So at least one thing that I worked out appears to have done some good,  A Google translation of a Polish Ministry of Environment statement follows.

EKOFUNDUSZ - END OF THE MISSION
PROF. NOWICKI AWARDED THE COMMANDER'S CROSS

After more than 18 years of environmental activities EkoFundusz completes his mission. Almost 1500 for $ 8 billion investment zł (including EcoFund 2.5 billion zł) and strategic role in civilization leap that has been made in Poland in the environment after 89 on the shortest summary of the activities of the foundation. During the ceremony, Professor. Maciej Nowicki, a longtime president of the EcoFund, and two-time environment minister, received the Commander's Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Polish for outstanding achievements in the field of environmental protection. Congratulations and thanks for making the hands of Professor. Maciej Nowicki by Janusz Zaleski, Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Environment.
EkoFundusz managing funds from the conversion of the Polish foreign debt for investment in environmental protection, ceases to trade. In the 18 years of existence, the Foundation spent nearly 2.5 billion zł to finance projects related to environmental protection.
November 17 gala dinner on the occasion of termination EkoFundusz saying goodbye to the most significant for its business personalities, including former ministers Donald Tusk's government, including Waldemar Pawlak, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economy. Among the guests were also prof. Leszek Balcerowicz and the representatives of the donor countries: USA, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Norway. The Ministry of Environment was represented by Janusz Zaleski, Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Environment.
Minister Andrzej Kraszewski, commenting on the event emphasized:
- Eco-Fund is an initiative which was created thanks to the personal commitment of prof. Maciej Nowicki and during its operation significantly improved the state of the environment in Poland. It would not, however, without an understanding of the needs of the Polish governments of the donor countries, so we first need to thank them. The words of recognition and congratulations for making the Foundation for Polish environmental protection is filed in the hands of the former longtime president EcoFund, prof. Maciej Nowicki and current President of Stanislaus Sitnickiego. To all those who contributed to the success EcoFund - thank you very much.
President EcoFund Stanislaw Sitnicki thanking donors and colleagues emphasized:
- Eco-Fund participated in the financing of nearly 1,500 key projects for Polish output of ecological collapse. According to an independent evaluation of the program ecoconversion Foundation contribution to the improvement of the environment in Poland is far greater than its financial participation in the process. It would not, however, the chance of these projects or the staff were not magnanimous gesture of the donor, who took a risk and gave Poland the possibility of using part of the debt repayment from the 70's to invest in environmental protection.
During the ceremony, the Minister Jacek Michalowski, head of the President's Office on behalf of the President Bronislaw Komorowski gave prof. Maciej Nowicki Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta Polish for exceptional service to the environmental achievements undertaken for the benefit of the country and public work. This is the second highest civilian honor Polish state.
Minister Maciej Nowicki in a statement after ticking said:
- This high state award I receive as a culmination of my 47 - year career in the service of my homeland, as a scientist, minister, president EcoFund and an expert in international forums. I saw before my eyes changed Poland, and improving the state of the environment and was glad that his work could also contribute to this improvement. I am grateful to President Komorowski that recognizes the importance of protecting the environment for citizens and accept this order as a symbol of appreciation for the progress they have made in Poland in the last 20 years.
EkoFundusz was established in 1992 by the Minister of Finance, to administer foreign aid funds (so-called eco-conversion means). They were given to Poland on the basis of an agreement on debt reduction and reorganization of the Polish Republic, which concluded in 1991, representatives of the Polish Government and the 17 creditor countries grouped in the Paris Club.
The program ecoconversion joined the six countries: USA, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Norway. Their total contribution to the Foundation for Eco-Fund amounted to $ 573 million. They formed the main source of revenue for the Foundation. For 18 years, the Minister of Finance on a quarterly basis were sent to the account EcoFund installments as debt repayment.
The Foundation's purpose was to finance projects in the field of environmental protection, which are not only important for the region or the country, but also affect the achievement of environmental objectives in a European or even world-recognized as a priority by the international community.
Statute EcoFund identified five sectors identified as priority areas. Applicants may receive grants for projects related to the protection of air, water protection, climate protection, nature conservation and waste management. Area of activity within each sector was narrowed according to the urgency of needs and the availability of mature project proposals.
President of the Foundation, 1992-2007 prof. Maciej Nowicki, Minister of the Environment twofold.
In 2010, the year of the Polish debt is repaid in full under an agreement with the Paris Club, is the date of cessation of EcoFund.

No Moral Authority

It seems pretty clear that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, behind their front man Colin Powell, have destroyed the moral authority of the United States by invading Iraq under false pretenses and fake intelligence.  Obama now pays the price because he has to rely on the same discredited intelligence agencies, who bowed to political pressure and issued intelligence analyses requested by the White House, rather than supported by facts.

Because we have no moral authority, Obama is wasting his time trying to marshal intelligence to support his invasion of Syria.  It's not clear what he will do, but it certainly appears that it will be a military strike of some kind that would constitute an act of war.  Syria seems unlikely to respond militarily, but would have a legal right to do so under international law.  Syria may have committed unspeakable offenses against its own people, but it has not attacked the United States.  And there is no provision under the Chemical Weapons Convention which makes the US the unilateral enforcer of the Convention.

Under the circumstances, Obama should just go ahead and do whatever he and his advisers think is appropriate "punishment" for Syria, without worrying about whether Syria really should be punished and if so, how.  Act and get it over with!

Don't Intervene in Syria

President Barak Obama is looking at two types of precedents for his intervention in Syria.  There is Bill Clinton who waited too long to intervene in the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda resulting in thousands of additional deaths.  And there is George W. Bush who jumped into Iraq and Afghanistan too soon, without adequate planning, resulting in wasted deaths of US soldiers and outcomes that probably will be detrimental to the US, rather than advantageous.  The Clinton example urges him to get in; the Bush example urges him to stay out.

For me, the Bush example urging him to stay out is more apposite than the Clinton example.  In both Bosnia and Rwanda there was a pretty clear villain carrying out the genocide.  That is less clear in Syria.

The first question is to be resolved is whether the Syrian government used chemical weapons.  It’s pretty clear that chemical weapons were used, but it’s less clear who used them.  Given Obama’s “red line” it would appear stupid for Assad to use chemical weapons; he would just be inviting the US to intervene.  But maybe Assad is stupid, or maybe he is counting on that appearance of stupidity to discourage retaliation.  On the other hand, the rebels have been pleading for the US to intervene against Assad.  Because of Obama’s “red line,” the rebels have a strong motivation to make it look like Assad used chemical weapons, but do they have access to chemical weapons?  It seems possible that they might, either brought from Syrian stockpiles by defectors to the rebels, or given to them by sympathizers in other countries.  However, I know of no evidence that the rebels to have such weapons, except for some suspect photos circulated by the Syrian government.

If the Syrian government did use the chemicals, then what were the circumstances?  Was it a top level government decision by Assad himself, someone lower but still senior, or were they used by a low level person without permission from the government.  The New York Times said that the intelligence it knew of did not show a “smoking gun” linking Assad to the weapons’ use, although it did link someone in the government to their use.  If the weapons were used by some low-level person, an American attack on Syria’s command and control network might actually increase the likelihood of CW use.  Because of defections, I would be leery of communications intelligence; defectors might have Syrian government radios, for example.  The intelligence would have to be good, in light of the disastrous intelligence presented to the UN to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

On balance, I think the US should stay out of the Syrian civil war at this time.  Condemn the use of CW, but don’t intervene militarily.

Recent Letter to Congerss

I am writing to you because of a program on the new Al Jazeera cable news network.  I turned it on just to see what it was like, and happened upon a David Frost interview of the Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta.  I knew nothing about Acosta, but the interview made me reflect on US-Cuban relations.  As a Vietnam veteran, I find it odd that after a hot, fighting war, we have become best friends with Vietnam, while because of a small guerrilla action in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, we are still consumed with virulent hatred of Cuba.  I think it is time to change this policy and develop a rapprochement with Cuba.

American policy toward Cuba is a legacy of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.  The Helms-Burton Amendment restricting visas for people connected in almost any way with Cuba was one of the reasons I retired from the State Department Foreign Service.  I was serving as science officer in Rome where my job required me to attend a cocktail party celebrating the launching of an Italian satellite by the US.  I was chatting with an executive of the Italian telephone company, who said something like, “You Americans must really hate us.  My daughter was just denied a visa to go to Disneyland because I work for the telephone company.”   I was totally surprised, and the next day went to ask the Consul General, who oversaw visa issuance, about it.  She said it was true.  Because the Italian telephone company had some connection with the Mexican telephone company, which had some connection to the Cuban telephone company, they were prohibited by Helms-Burton from issuing visas to family members of people who worked for the Italian telephone company.

Many years ago, I had read Herman Wouk’s books on World War II: Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.  At some point somewhat late in the books, I think the Jewish heroine is trying to get to Israel from Rome.  The Germans who controlled the visas said they would give her a visa, but they would not give a visa to her daughter, in effect preventing her from leaving.  I realize that these books are fiction, but the idea of punishing parents through their children was one of the worst things Wouk could think of to tar the Nazis with.  I found abhorrent the idea of the United States doing the same thing to penalize Cubans rather than Jews.  Why should the Bay of Pigs make Americans act like Nazis?  We need to put this hatred of Cuba behind us.

This was only part of the reason I retired because of my disappointment with the US government.  The main reasons had to do with government funding, which promises to be an issue again in the next few months.  I hope that you will not shut down the government as I happened to be scheduled to transfer from the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, to the American Embassy in Rome on the day that Speaker Gingrich closed down the government.  I was saying goodbye to friends at the Warsaw Embassy and was in the military attaché’s office, when my Polish assistant (who could not enter that classified area) called and said Embassy Rome was on the line.  They said that because of the government shutdown I could not leave Warsaw for Rome.  We had left our house; our car was packed, including two dogs, and we had planned to leave as soon as the Embassy closed for the day.  The State Department had a few weeks earlier asked me to curtail my assignment in Warsaw, because Italy was about to assume the Presidency of the European Union, and as a result of some dustup with the State Department personnel system, the Science Counselor in Rome had just resigned or been fired.  When a country assumes the EU presidency the workload for the embassy more or less doubles, because it has to maintain a dialogue about EU-wide issues, as well as the usual dialogue about bilateral issues.

Most Foreign Service officers fight for an assignment in Rome, but in this case I was doing it because the State Department said it needed me.  I didn’t know it until I got that 5:00 pm call, but I found out that the Deputy Chief of Mission (deputy to the Ambassador) was a friend I had served with in Brazil.  He made arrangements for me to travel to Rome, so that my wife and I were not turned out on the streets of Warsaw by the US government.  This was a bitter reminder of a night during the Vietnam War at Firebase Barbara on a mountaintop west of Quang Tri.  We received intelligence that an enemy unit was forming at the base of the mountain.  Because of Vietnamization, we had no American infantry support; we had air defense “dusters,” vehicles with twin 40 mm cannons to protect us.  Our battalion headquarters radioed and said that the dusters were notoriously lazy and had not resupplied with gasoline, which was difficult to get to the mountaintop.  Headquarters said we were not to give any of our gasoline to the dusters.  Under the circumstances this could have been a death sentence.  Of course we made sure the dusters had gas; they fired hundreds or thousands of rounds into the area where the enemy was massing and the attack never materialized.  I was not happy to have the government say that I was expendable in Poland, as it had in Vietnam.

Once I arrived in Rome, part of my nuclear non-proliferation portfolio was the US-North Korea nuclear agreement overseen by KEDO, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.  Under this agreement one of the US responsibilities was to supply North Korea with a certain amount of fuel oil to keep their electrical generators going until the nuclear reactors promised under the agreement came on line.  This cost the US about $2 million per year, as I recall.  However, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee refused to appropriate the money to pay for the fuel oil.  Thus, part of my job in Rome was to go hat in hand to the Italians (representing both Italy and the EU) asking them for money to pay for the fuel oil so that the US would not be in breach of the agreement.  Again, I was horrified at the immoral US position.  We had an agreement with the rouge state of North Korea, but we were about to be guilty of breaching it, rather than the North Koreans, unless the Europeans helped us out.  I don’t know how this issue was resolved; I left before it was, when Italy’s EU Presidency ended, and the battle for money was being fought in Washington as well as in Rome.  I do not think that we breached the agreement at that time because of financial constraints, but I was not happy that there was even a question that we might do so.