As Persian Gulf states fed with rising revenues from their distinct natural resource, oil, move into a spending spree over massive financial projects, there is growing demand that attention must be given to the underlying and potentially explosive issue of unemployment among the locals.
With a booming population in the region, an estimated 40 million job seekers are expected to enter the labor market within the next decade. This would require governments to be far more creative than ever before to absorb this growing influx.
Handouts and subsidies to nationals would no longer be able to fill the gap, and would tax the respective governments far more than effective employment programs.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum of the UAE recently stated in Jordan: “Our region needs at this moment 15 million job opportunities, and our Arab world will need in the next 20 years between 74 to 85 million job opportunities.“
Saudi Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi said that fighting unemployment in the Kingdom was a joint responsibility of the government and businesses and has urged businessmen to employ more Saudis.
Appearing before the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently, he said, “It is wrong to assume that it’s the sole responsibility of the Labor Ministry. The whole society with all its institutions must come together to tackle this national issue.“
According to the General Statistics Department, there are nearly 470,000 unemployed Saudi men and women, accounting for 12 percent of the total Saudi work force.
“The number of unemployed men is 292,905 or 9.1 percent of the total number of Saudi working men while the number of jobless women is 176,113 or 26.3 percent of the total number of working women,“ reported the study that was conducted last year.
Unemployment is a complex issue indeed. Economies in the region currently present a picture of robustness and vigor.
But beneath the surface there remains the concern that we will lose the battle if we fail to undertake serious efforts to develop long-range plans that would educate, train and put forth an effective work pool.
From my travels in the region, I have witnessed a few such programs. Oman appears to have the best approach right now in that the government partners itself with the individual citizen in the fulfillment of his or her professional ambition.
This comes through the required education and training before the individual is released into the market place. And it is proving effective, as thousands of young Omanis have embarked successfully on small business enterprises.
Bahrain has set up employment programs to train nationals, and offers financial incentives to companies to employ them.
Such an attempt has created a labor fund that invests the taxes of multinationals in training and helps finance small private companies.
In the UAE, businesses help by offering far more work experience and training to young graduates.
Making young people fit for work--a major problem in this region where there is so often a mismatch between the skills delivered by education and what employers seek--is the key to success.
A case in point is the Dubai Aluminum Company, which had organized pre-employment courses in a project that doubled employment of locals, including women.
Saudis are looking into options to tackle unemployment, one of which would be to make the recruitment of expatriates more costly to the private sector by raising fees and reducing quotas.
Such steps may be a stopgap measure for now. What are needed are effective institutions of learning and training that address the needs of the market.
A society with hundreds of thousands of unemployed graduates with very little marketable skills does not bode well for the health of any country.
While we pride ourselves on the statistics of graduating students, very little is said about the quality of the product.
In oil-dependent countries, government handouts to the nationals have stifled all initiative in them to strive for success the hard way. It had come too easy before, and some among the unemployed are averse to the idea of replacing the foreign pool of labor in less than glamorous jobs.
The young, the unemployed and the hopeless can often be lured by those people with intent to harm society.
Tariq A. Al-Maeena
ARABNEWS.COM

Leaders of the summit countries have been changing. Gerhard Schroeder, the German Social Democratic chancellor of Germany, was the first to go. His replacement, Angela Merkel, is a Christian Democrat but leading a coalition with the Social Democrats.
The next was Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi. His successor Shinzo Abe does not represent any radical change from the past.
President Jacques Chirac in France was replaced in May by Nicolas Sarkozy, who came from the same party as Chirac but has made it clear that he wants to shake up France.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is due to step aside for Finance Minister Gordon Brown later this month.
Expect a change of style, but policies will probably not change radically.
U.S. President George W. Bush has only about 18 months left in office. There will surely be major changes in U.S. policies under any successor.
President Vladimir Putin remains in Russia. He may try for a constitutional amendment allowing him to stay on for a third term. If not, he is likely to choose a successor in his own mold.
International policies are generally made in response to events, but strong personalities can make real differences.
For instance, if Sarkozy’s party comes out strongly in the forthcoming French parliamentary election, significant changes could be made in France.
All the leaders who are retiring or have been forced out have spent much time trying to establish their historical legacy.
But politicians should remember English author William Makepeace Thackeray’s reflection on the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Oh, Vanity of Vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are; How very weak the wise, How very small the very great are!“
Chirac, who is said to have millions of dollars stashed away in Japanese Bank accounts, may be indicted for corruption.
Bush will be remembered as the president who failed to bring democracy to the Middle East and increased the threat of terrorism by his inept policies.
Blair hopes he will not be implicated by the police inquiry into the “cash for honors“ allegations.
Despite his having declared there would be no sleaze in his government, there have been just as many cases as under the previous Conservative government.
Close relations between Bush and Blair did not lead to Bush’s engaging in serious efforts to find a solution to the problems of Israel and Palestine.
Nor did Blair get Bush to move more than marginally over climate change.
Budgetary stringency meant that British forces did not always have the proper equipment or manpower for the tasks that Blair expected them to perform.
Intelligence was edited to suit government policy and was in part false.
When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the invasion was justified on the grounds that regime change was essential for peace.
Al-Qaida, which had not been active in Iraq before the invasion, took advantage of the chaos caused by the invasion.
Life under Saddam Hussein was cruel and hard for most Shiites, but law and order in Iraq has largely broken down and 3 million Iraqis have fled the country.
Blair’s attempts to manipulate the media through his media guru, Alistair Campbell, and the way in which the government machine and the civil service were undermined will be remembered to Blair’s disadvantage.
Blair boasts of domestic achievements in education, health, and law and order issues, but there are widespread doubts about whether the government has extracted adequate value for the resources provided. Blair has made much of his efforts to deliver real improvements, but examples of wasted resources, failures to deliver and administrative blunders are publicized every day.
Public service morale has been damaged by ministerial carping and a plethora of new legislation combined with ever more targets. “Targetitis“ has often forced officials to concentrate so hard on hitting prescribed targets that other humdrum but essential aspects of their work have been neglected.
Ever since Blair announced that he would be retiring, it has seemed to many that there has been a leadership vacuum.
David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative opposition, has criticized Blair’s farewell tours as behavior like that of a retiring pop star.
The danger arising from the efforts of politicians to build up historical legacies is increasing public skepticism about politics and an inevitable decline in the prestige of democratic institutions.
JAPANTIMES.COM

On June 3, 2007 the eight Democratic candidates for the 2007 US Presidential race took the stage at a small college in New Hampshire.
Revved up for debate, the six Senators, one Congressman and one Governor stood before their podiums ready for a war of words, dominance in which would mean greater coverage in the US media and a successful presidential bid.
Predictably, the third place candidate in the polls Senator John Edwards took on a combative stance confronting the two front-runners Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton on what he described as a lack of leadership in the Democratic Party over the Iraq issue.
In the ensuing melee, nearly all the Democratic candidates sparred on the best way to extricate American troops from the increasingly troubling mess in Iraq.
For a Pakistani watching the debate, one question posed to the candidates, loomed above all others.
A professor of history seated in the audience asked how the candidates reconciled American security interests in Pakistan.
The particular question, representing perhaps the biggest hole in the current Bush Administration’s democracy promotion agenda would have seemed a great opportunity for the Democratic candidates to distinguish themselves ideologically from the ruling Bush Administration. However, the responses did far from that.
Senator Hilary Clinton, the initial candidate who fielded the question made it painfully clear exactly how aware she was of the situation in Pakistan, saying “it is clear that he [General Musharraf] has not moved towards democracy but has solidified his rule and become quite anti-democratic with his removal of the chief justice and many of the other moves that he’s taken.“
Having said this, however, she ended with the same self-serving pronouncement that characterises the Bush Administration’s stance: “At the same time, we depend upon him to try to control the tribal areas, out of which come the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who cross the border into Afghanistan.“
Foreign policy realists would defend this stance arguing that each nation, regardless of moral concerns must make such calculations; that when faced with decisions involving national security, lofty ideals must be discarded for realistic considerations of survival; power and dominance must inevitably govern what states do in situations where their national interests are at stake.
All this may be well and true, and indeed provides powerful war-mongering nations with convenient arguments for why the weak must be vanquished without remorse.
But the reprehensible aspect of the Democratic candidate’s readiness to bomb Pakistan for Bin Laden comes not from whether such an act could be justified (for they would surely come up with a way) but rather whether it should be? In the wake of a 70,000 body count in Iraq, is it really so ludicrous to suggest that perhaps considerations other than power and dominance be used to evaluate whether other countries should be bombed to achieve military objectives?
The disparity between the Democratic candidate’s denunciation of the Iraq war at the outset of the debate and their alacrity in jumping to bomb Pakistan for Bin Laden merely minutes later suggest an unwillingness to look at this very question. Is the war in Iraq wrong because it represents the pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation or simply because it is a losing battle where American is unlikely to obtain a glorious victory?
While all the Democratic candidates put in considerable effort in detailing exactly how the Bush Administration has botched the war in Iraq, their response to the Pakistan question indicates that their ire is based on the fact that America is losing the war rather than an ideological difference on errors of pre-emptive wars in general.
This inability to apply the lesson of Iraq, to other cases suggests the reality that even under a Democratic president, there may be future Iraq.
The chilling tableau that the Democratic presidential candidates presented in raising their hands was one that illustrated this very message: we would do it again, in another country, if we thought we could win.
Rafia Zakaria
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

Asia’s three major countries--China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK)--are responsible for taking the lead in cooperation and integration of East Asia.
The meeting of the foreign ministers of the three countries in Jeju in the ROK was an important first step.
With tension between China and Japan melting, talks of this kind should give a strategic turn to Asia’s future.
With economic globalization rapidly building, regional integration is increasingly important.
Greater East Asian cooperation is a precursor to Asian integration. East Asian countries have a solid economic foundation for cooperation.
At the trilateral talks, it was important for the three countries to compare notes on regional and international issues and, more concretely, define areas for cooperation.
When trilateral relations are on a healthy track, the cooperation and integration of East Asia or, on a larger scale, Asia, are possible. Today’s world presents opportunities for the region to develop a more coherent identity.
The East Asian countries urgently need to strengthen cooperation to sharpen the region’s overall competitive edge to benefit from globalization. Beijing and Tokyo’s reconciliation removes one of the obstacles to this cooperation.
Regional cooperation serves as the only way for East Asia to achieve peaceful development. The integration of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, sets an example. The strengthened relation between ASEAN and the Plus Three countries--China, Japan and the ROK--helps promote East Asia’s overall development.
The region needs to determine how to turn the neighborhood into a community. To shape the community, the region needs to better understand each country’s history and customs to increase mutual understanding.
CHINADAILY.COM

A detainee holds onto a fence as a US military guard walks past at Camp 5 of the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base.

For five years, the administration of President George W. Bush has sought to weave a cloak of legality to clothe the wrongs it has committed in the “war on terror“.
That threadbare veil was pierced yet again-- as it has been so often in the past--when two military judges at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba rebuked the administration for failing to follow the law.
Civilian courts, including the US Supreme Court, have long looked askance at the way the administration has warped and twisted national and international law to give it a free hand to combat terrorism.
Now military judges seem in no hurry either to play their part in this absurd charade of justice.
The rulings are, on the face of it, merely technical: according to a new law rammed through Congress (with bipartisan complicity) last year, the alternative justice system at Guantanamo Bay can only try “alien unlawful enemy combatants“.
But the administration failed to comply with that law when it brought two Guantanamo detainees before military tribunals.
Even though the administration all but wrote the relevant provisions of the law--and must have been familiar with what it required--the government did not classify the two men as “unlawful“ combatants, as the law demands. (The law does not cover “lawful“ combatants, such as uniformed government soldiers.)
It is unclear whether this blunder reflects stunning incompetence or arrogant disregard for the law, but either way it could prove very costly.
There can be no further military tribunals until the government either gets the law rewritten, gets a special appeals court (that has not yet been created) to reinterpret the law, or takes other cumbersome steps to recharge the suspects.
Either way, there will be more delays, and the path to spurious justice will again be blocked.
Taking the law back to Congress for revision could be risky for the administration: opponents of the court-stripping provisions of the law might seize this opportunity to try to rewrite that part too.
It is high time Mr Bush faced reality. For five years he has struggled to construct an alternative justice system for foreign terrorism suspects.
Yet in that time he has convicted no one--and dragged America’s reputation through the dirt.
Mr Bush should abandon this farce and bring the suspects before traditional courts martial.
That will doubtless be harder than trying them in kangaroo courts. But it is his only hope of salvaging even a shred of credibility.
FT.COM