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Turkey: Deterrence failing, Ukraine crisis partly result of Syria inaction
By Mick Krever, CNN
The international community’s decision not to intervene in Syria is directly linked to the crisis in Ukraine, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Thursday.
“Psychologically and also strategically, let me say, there is a link between the inability of international community to stop this bloodshed in Syria on the situation in Ukraine.”
"The deterrence of international community has been deteriorating in last three years," he said.
“So you think,” Amanpour said, “the deterrence has been deteriorating because of Syria over the last three years.”
“Yeah, of course,” he responded.
Borno Governor: Deal with devil if it means getting back kidnapped girls
By Mick Krever, CNN
The governor of Nigeria’s Borno State, where nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday that the government should negotiate with Boko Haram – make a deal “with the devil” – if it means bringing the girls back.
“The issue of not negotiation, of not negotiating with the terrorists – it’s out of the question,” Kashim Shettima said. “If it means talking to the devil, it mean the devil can come down, we can get back our girls.”
Boko Haram, the group that kidnapped the girls, “are a bunch of raving lunatics,” Shettima said.
A month has passed since the girls were kidnapped, and the Nigerian government has been accused of not acting swiftly or efficiently enough to protect villages in the region threatened by Boko Haram.
Sharon Ikeazor, a member of Nigeria’s opposition, told Amanpour that “most of the girls in school had their cell phones” when they were kidnapped.
“They had contacted their parents,” she said. “So they knew when the attack was happening, and the villagers around had reported to the military.”
The government, she said, “could have saved those girls.”
Click below to watch Amanpour’s full conversation with Shettima and Ikeazor.
Opposition speaks on Nigeria's nightmare
CNN's Christiane Amanpour speaks with the governor of Borno State and a member of the opposition.
Turkish foreign minister: Erdogan 'is always with the people’
By Mick Krever, CNN
Amid criticism over Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s response to a devastating mine disaster, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview that the Erdogan is “always with the people.”
An official period of mourning is underway in Turkey after its recent mine disaster; nearly 300 miners were killed after a fire broke out on Tuesday.
“This is a very sad event – one of the most tragic accidents that happened during our republican era,” Davutoğlu told Amanpour in London. “All the things, all the efforts will be done to check what was wrong, if there was anything wrong during this disaster or before, how it happened.”
Prime Minister Erdogan visited the site of the disaster and was met with jeers, boos, and calls for his resignation; the heckles got so bad, he was forced to seek refuge in a nearby store.
In his much-criticized speech to the relatives of the dead and injured, the Prime Minister glossed over the issue of mine safety, saying there is ample precedent for mine disasters.
“I think this was the wrong perception,” Davutoğlu said of the criticism.
Assad challenger: Opposition or cover for regime?
By Mick Krever, CNN
The task: Challenge a dictator in the middle of a devastating civil war that has killed well over 100,000 people.
That’s what facing the two candidates running against Bashar al-Assad in Syria; the government announced elections due to take place on June 3.
“I hope Assad will go and I will take his position,” Hassan al-Nouri, one of the two approved candidates, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday. “This is why I'm running for this election.”
Maybe so, but pre-war elections in Syria have usually been nothing more than a simple referendum on Assad’s rule.
“Let me tell you, this is Syria,” he told Amanpour. “In Syria, we have a constitution [which requires] a new presidential election 60 days before the end of the current president's time.”
“And I do believe that this is our right; this is our freedom. We own our decisions. This is a national decision.”
UN: Homs deal could be replicated
The deal between the Syrian government and opposition to turn the long-contested city of Homs over to Assad forces has “the potential of actually be replicated elsewhere,” Yacoub El Hillo, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Syria, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday.
"Homs is an experiment that needs to be studied carefully, he said. “I think it’s always the case when Syrians are able to sit together, and agree to discuss the problem – and it’s a big one – there is always a possibility of reaching a solution.”
After a brutal three-year siege, residents of Homs are returning to utter devastation.
Homs was ground zero in the revolution, but the government won back the city last week, when it offered to bus the rebels out with the government looking on.
“At the end of the day there is no victor, no winner. This cost of this conflict is too high for anyone to claim victory, frankly speaking.”
But it is critical to stem the killing and return some normalcy to civilians, he said.
“I think there is a lot that can be drawn from the Homs experiment. And I do hope that the Syrians – because after all this is a Syrian-Syrian affair – they will choose to see if this can be applied elsewhere.”
Click above to watch Amanpour’s full interview with El Hillo.
Germany industry leader talks pressure on Russia
By Mick Krever, CNN
As tensions rise in eastern Ukraine, Germany may be the key to détente with Russia.
“We are the West's number one modernization partner for Russia,” Markus Kerber, director-general of the Federation of German Industries told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour succinctly on Tuesday.
Germany came in for some early criticism of the Ukraine crisis for being viewed as too soft on Russia, because of the massive trade and historic links between the two countries.
Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel were both behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell – she as a young scientist and Russian scholar; he as a KGB officer. They speak each other's languages fluently.
But if diplomacy doesn't work, then German industry is publicly stepping up to refute the notion that billions of dollars in trade trumps the international rule of law.
To fight climate change, New York goes Dutch
By Mick Krever, CNN
The Netherlands is a country that, in some sense, shouldn’t exist.
Thirty percent of the country is below sea level, and would sit under the ocean were it not for centuries of effort by the Dutch, battling the sea.
New York, ravaged by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, has taken note.
“I really have to stress this,” Henk Ovink, who is spearheading the effort to bring Dutch knowhow across the Atlantic, says: “Water is not a threat; it's an asset. Especially for the Dutch.”
The Netherlands’ lessons could not come any sooner. Two separate groups of American scientists are now warning that the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting, and nothing can be done to stop it. One section alone would increase sea levels four feet, NASA says.
And this after last week’s White House report, which said climate change is a clear and present danger – not some abstract problem for the future.
The Netherlands has water engrained in its culture, acquired over centuries. But can the country export its unique approach to New York – and the world – in the short time needed to living with rising sea levels?
“It's not easy,” Ovink told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “It's very hard. It is a change between your ears and eyes. It is a change of culture and therefore a change of the heart, which is always harder than an engineering change, or harder than an investment decision. You really have to change the way we go about water.”
World’s ‘poorest’ president: ‘I do not need much to live’
By Mick Krever and Claire Calzonetti, CNN
Jose Mujica is often referred to as the world’s “poorest” president.
“I'm not a poor president,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour through an interpreter on Monday. “Poor are the people who need a lot – Seneca said that. I am an austere president.”
He donates 97% of his salary, drives a 1987 Volkwagen Beetle – the original “peoples’ car” – and sells flowers with his wife at their home.
Mujica, a former Marxist guerrilla, lives in the same modest Montevideo house he always has, forgoing the presidential palace.
“I do not need much to live. I live in the same way I used to live when I wasn’t a president and in the same neighborhood, in my same house, and in the same way. And I am a republican” – small ‘r.’
“I live like the majority in my country lives. It was a majority who voted for me. And that's why I identify with them. Morally, I do not have the right to live like a minority in my country.”
“A lot of people like a lot of money. They shouldn't go into politics. That's my way of seeing it. I am not improvising. I don't do marketing. This is my philosophy.”
President Mujica met with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House Monday. What is it like for a former Marxist guerrilla to enter the White House, that most potent of Western’s symbols?
“I cannot deny reality,” he told Amanpour. “I don't know whether I like this planet or not, but I have to accept it.”
Ukraine foreign minister: Law enforcement must be decisive
By Mick Krever, CNN
Ukrainian law enforcement must be “more decisive” in fighting separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, that country’s foreign minster, Andrii Deshchytsia, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
Operations have recently been suspended, he said, but vowed they would continue, because “separatist groups did not stop.”
“They have been in the last few days taking more and more buildings, and terrorizing more civil population.”
“So I think that we, the Ukrainian government and the law enforcement forces have to be more decisive, and actually what people from the region are expecting from us.”
Pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine have decided to go ahead with a Sunday referendum on greater local powers, they said Thursday, defying a call by Russian President Vladimir Putin to postpone the vote.
Putin had urged the pro-Russia sympathizers to delay the referendum to give dialogue "the conditions it needs to have a chance."
“What he should do is to ask to stop the referendum,” Deshchytsia said.
Defector: Shadowy organization, not Kim Jong Un, controls North Korea
By Mick Krever, CNN
Who controls the Hermit Kingdom?
According to a North Korean defector – a former regime insider who was one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite poet-propagandists – it is not the 31-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un.
“When Kim Jong Il died and Kim Jong Un succeeded him, people saw the transfer of power from father to son,” Jang Jin-Sung told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in London. “What they did not see also was what happened to the apparatus of the totalitarian system that supported the rule of Kim Jong Il.”
That apparatus, Jang said, is the Organization and Guidance Department, or OGD – it was Kim Jong Il’s education as he rose through the ranks, and was full of his university friends.
It is an “old-boy’s network” made into a massive surveillance organization.
“Kim Jong Il had the OGD as his old boys' network,” Jang told Amanpour. “Kim Jong-un may have friends in his Swiss school, but he has no one inside North Korea.”
Jang is the author of a new book, "Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee – A Look Inside North Korea."
“After the execution of Jang Song Thaek [Kim Jong Un’s uncle], he has become an orphan – not just in terms of family connections, but in terms of politics.”
“He's a political orphan.”
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