U.S.-India nuclear 'breakthrough' could be finalised within year

U.S.-India nuclear 'breakthrough' could be finalised within year
BY DOUGLAS BUSVINE AND DAVID BRUNNSTROM
NEW DELHI/WASHINGTON Tue Feb 3, 2015 3:27am EST

U.S. President Barack Obama and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) shake hands after giving opening statements during a at Hyderabad House in New Delhi January 25, 2015. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

(Reuters) - A "breakthrough understanding" to open India's nuclear power sector to U.S. firms reached during President Barack Obama's visit to New Delhi last month could be finalised this year, Indian officials say.

The Jan. 25 announcement by Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi followed six weeks of intensive talks, but few details were released beyond a framework based on India's acceptance of the principle that plant operators should bear primary liability in the event of a nuclear disaster.

Significant work remains on the fine print of a deal aimed at unlocking projects worth tens of billions of dollars that have been stuck the drawing board for years. India wants to nearly treble its installed nuclear capacity, which would make it the world's second biggest market after China.

U.S. officials say details of an insurance scheme to protect suppliers from crippling lawsuits need to be thrashed out and India still has to ratify a U.N. nuclear convention. Indian officials do not rule out completing the process this year.

"We are committed to moving ahead on all implementation issues at an early date," said Syed Akbaruddin, chief spokesman at India's Ministry of External Affairs. "There are no policy hurdles left."

General Electric and Westinghouse, a unit of Japan's Toshiba, were fully briefed on the meetings of a nuclear "contact group" that hammered out the nuclear compromise in London, say sources with direct knowledge of the talks.

Bringing them into the mix was crucial because the prospect of huge lawsuits, like those against Union Carbide [DOWUNB.UL] over the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, has until now kept U.S. and other foreign firms on the sidelines.

India and the United States signed a landmark agreement to cooperate on nuclear power back in 2008. Yet an expected bonanza never materialized because India later passed a law that would expose reactor makers to liability if there was an accident.

The liability issue has became a metaphor for the unrealized potential of the bilateral business relationship and a question mark against Modi's "Make in India" mantra.

"NOT INCOMPATIBLE"

As the days counted down to Obama's visit, Indian officials persuaded their U.S. counterparts that their law was "not incompatible" with international standards that place the burden of liability on the operator, said one senior U.S. official.

New Delhi also proposed setting up an insurance pool with a liability cap of 15 billion rupees ($244 million). The state-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India would pay premiums to cover its liability. Suppliers would take out separate insurance against their secondary liability - which could not exceed that of the operator - at a "fraction" of the cost.

India must still ratify the International Atomic Energy Agency's Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), which requires signatories to channel liability to the operator and offers access to relief funds.

"We would be looking at how quickly we can ratify the CSC - this is part of our assurance to the suppliers, along with the insurance pool," said an Indian member of the contact group, set up by Obama and Modi at a Washington summit last year.

The U.S. official said Washington expects the Indians to ratify with the IAEA in the near future, along with documentation "stating what their law intends" on the issue of liability, which should offer further reassurance to U.S. firms.

A QUESTION OF DETAIL

The U.S. industry would have preferred the issue to be settled by amending the liability law, something considered politically impossible for Modi to achieve at the moment.

"We want to see all the detail before we say: 'Yes, it works for us'," Westinghouse President and CEO Daniel Roderick, who joined Obama's delegation, told Reuters.

That note of caution, however, masks the extent to which negotiators engaged with the industry to address fears that it could end up on the hook in a disaster on the scale of the 2011 reactor blasts at Tepco's plant in Fukushima, Japan.

"For the first time, we had a comprehensive inventory of concerns," said the Indian negotiator.

Westinghouse has been granted land in Modi's home state of Gujarat to build six reactors, while GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is eyeing a similar project in Andhra Pradesh. The liability roadblock has prevented commercial talks from starting on the projects, with a combined capacity of 10,000 megawatts.

India has 21 nuclear reactors with an installed capacity of 21,300 MW. It plans to launch construction of 40,000 MW of capacity in the next decade.

(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani and Tommy Wilkes in New Delhi, Lewis Krauskopf in New York, Krista Hughes in Washington and Fredrik Dahl in Vienna; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

கொபானி: அமெரிக்க வான் தாக்குதலில் நரகமாக்கப்பட்ட நகரம்!

Kobani is Falling to ISIS in Syria. October 2014  

Kobani – free but in ruins!
January 2015

Emma Graham-Harrison Report on Kobani

Photographer David Gill and Bulent Kilic/AFP captures details from Kobani after  Isis left from the Syrian city

Kobani: destroyed and riddled with unexploded bombs, but its residents dare to dream of a new start

Kurdish forces triumphed over Isis in Kobani but the Syrian town is devastated. Emma Graham-Harrison was one of the first reporters on the scene

‘It was beautiful. Now it’s like a destroyed city’Kobani residents return after Isis retreat: Emma Graham-Harrison

Saturday 31 January 2015 20.09 GMT

The concrete eagle in what used to be Freedom Square still surveys Kobani imperiously. But around it almost nothing stands. Buildings have vanished during months of heavy shelling, replaced by snarls of steel and rubble, and the yawning craters left by US air strikes.

A child’s toy lies amid the ruins

One side street is blocked by the bodies of Isis fighters, rotting where they fell – a pile of bones marked only by a foul smell. On the muddy track that marks where another road led, a series of tattered sniper screens veils the destruction of the schools and homes where sharpshooters had sheltered.

A tray of biscuits lies dirty and unsold

Everywhere there are bullet and shell casings, the twisted metal of spent mortar rounds and, often, the alarming outline of an unexploded shell, bulbous nose to the ground and tail fins spiking into the air.

The Kurdish forces’ unexpected victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable in their rampage across the region.

Kurdish fighters have taken full control of the city and pushed Isis forces into the countryside, where the battle continues 

But the mountains of ruins, the shells and booby traps, the decaying corpses and shattered power and water systems means that while Kobani has been freed, it is no longer a town in anything but name. Salvation from Isis came at the price of Kobani itself.

“There are no words coming back to a destroyed city that was your home,” said Shamsa Shahinzada, an architect who fled Kobani days before Isis arrived and who was our guide to the shattered remains – still off-limits to most of its former inhabitants.

Everywhere the shutters are down

“This was the main square where people crowded every week to ask for freedom,” she said, eyes filling with tears as she surveyed what was left of Kobani’s centre. “This was our friend’s home, we used to stay there. Oh God. Beside there, there was a school – my high school.”

An unexploded bomb by an abandoned car

Over half the city was destroyed, officials say. Entire blocks are pancake flattened, as if an earthquake had struck. Even in quieter areas, no building seems to have escaped unscathed – those still standing are missing windows, doors, whole sections of walls, scorched black by fire or looted during the fighting.

An unexploded mortar shell

Some things that inexplicably survived only highlight the devastation around them: an unsold tray of snacks sat in one shop window like a perfectly preserved museum exhibit on a street littered with jagged metal, piles of rubble and the twisted bodies of cars used for suicide bombs.

Even on the streets that still look like streets, there is an eerie silence – broken only by the crackle of distant gunfire, the pop of a nearby shot from training grounds and the echoing blast of air strikes and attacks by Isis tanks – a constant reminder that while the militants have been kicked out of the city the frontline is still just a few kilometres away.

A Kurdish fighter on the phone near the Turkish border (Forget the AMBULANCE!- ENB)

“The battle is not over yet,” said Anwar Muslim, a former lawyer and head of Kobani's government who stayed in the town through the whole campaign and has already brought his wife and children back to camp amid the devastation. His joy at driving Isis out of his home is tempered by concern for the rest of the district; most of it is still under Isis control.

“As you can hear our villages are still fighting, and we will only have finished our work after we free all our countryside,” he told the Observer.

“We, here in Kobani, are on the frontline, fighting against terrorists on behalf of all the people of the world … you can see here the cost of asking for freedom.”

Burnt-out cars lie on an unusable road

The battles and the devastation inside Kobani mean that tens of thousands of civilians huddled in freezing refugee camps across the Turkish border, who celebrated victory last week in the hope of returning, may not be back in Syria for months.

Many no longer have homes to return to, and the town is far too dangerous and unsanitary to house them all. “We know people are waiting for us but we can’t bring them back here because there will be disease – because of the bodies – and because there is no kind of service,” Anwar Muslim said.

Musa, a 25-year-old Kurdish marksman, looks at the bodies of alleged IS militants in the village of Halimce, east of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

Turkish authorities are also noting down the names of any Syrians who cross, warning them that they cannot return. With Isis still just 10km away, and likely smarting at their defeat, that is a gamble that even those whose houses survived are reluctant to make.

Certainly Kurdish officials are not taking their victory for granted, at a time when there is still a steady flow of casualties into the field hospital from the nearby frontline.

Destroyed town of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

Soldiers keep a wary guard on all tall buildings and main junctions, huddled round improvised braziers for warmth in driving winter rain. Many are caught between elation at their victory and grief at its cost.

“We are so happy, as if we were flying through the sky. As if God had created us again,” said 35-year-old Mahir Hamid. “But we can’t celebrate because we had so many martyrs.”

Destroyed town of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

Isis lost more than 1,000 fighters, but hundreds of Kurds were also killed in the initially lopsided battle. It pitted hundreds of militants armed with heavy weapons plundered from Iraqi arsenals against the ageing Kalashnikovs and ancient Russian machine guns of the Kurds. At one point, officials warned that food stocks were dwindling dangerously low as well.

The victory was as epic as it was unexpected – to everyone except perhaps the Kurdish fighters themselves. Kobani had been all but written off by the outside world last autumn. The US came to its aid with air strikes in late September but officials in Washington warned the bombs were not enough to save it, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also forecast collapse.

Kurdish vows to hold on to their base were dismissed as poignantly, but tragically, naive. Isis was well-armed, and its fighters eager to die in battle. They poured resources and men into taking the town, and even took hostage John Cantlie there to make a propaganda video claiming that Isis was just “mopping up” the last Kurdish fighters.

Instead they were being slowly driven back by outnumbered, outgunned but disciplined forces whom the city’s leader compared to heroes of ancient Greece in their ingenuity and bravery.

Destroyed town of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

They even devised a homemade version of an armoured truck to face off against Isis tanks. Steel plates and half-pipes welded to a flatbed lorry created a safe area, gun turrets and a battering ram to attack. It looked more Mad Max than modern military, and still reversed with the warning beeps of the original humble lorry, but was part of their slow slog to victory.

“We bow down before these fighters, who were like the legions of ancient Sparta, holding off terrorism, fighting Daesh against the odds,” said the city president Anwar Muslim, using another name for Isis.

He has set up a committee of architects, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other experts to look at the massive task of clearing and then rebuilding Kobani, which will take years, perhaps decades. For now, they cannot even get heavy moving equipment across the Turkish border and fear a simple clearance of the ruins would be too risky.

Destroyed town of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

“We have unexploded mortars, rockets, bombs, and maybe some traps for explosion the terrorists left behind to surprise us, to kill our civilian people or fighters when they clear up or check the destruction of their houses,” said Idriss Nassan, deputy head of the government.

“There is no food, no medicine, no children’s milk. If our people come back now, there will be a humanitarian crisis on this victory ground.”

Rebuilding will inevitably be slow because even if the military campaign is entirely successful, it will stop at Kobani’s borders, so Isis will still surround its people on three sides.

The Turkish border is the only route with safe passage, so the government is lobbying for a humanitarian corridor, and the creation of new refugee camps inside Syria, where they can help with rebuilding.

They are hoping for help from the allies who sent military aid, and benefited indirectly from the blow dealt to Isis. The priority is funds for reconstruction, experts in bomb clearance to help dismantle the ruins, and pressure on Turkey to open up a humanitarian corridor into Syria.

The damage is so bad that some have questioned whether Kobani should be rebuilt on a new site, but Nassan said that would be emotionally devastating.

“Unfortunately the city is destroyed, but people have memories here and this is our land. We don’t want to move everything from here,” he told the Observer near the ruins of an institute where he once taught English, before Syria’s convulsions propelled him into another life.

Abandoned vehicles form part of a barricade

“We have to just clear it, but maybe keep some parts as a museum for foreign people to come here to see how Kobani resisted the terrorists.”

The city is still full of evidence of lives dramatically interrupted by the speed of Isis’s ferocious advance; tiny children’s clothes hanging to dry on a washing line months after their owners fled to Turkey, shelves stacked with food in areas where Kurdish discipline stopped looting.

The front wall of a nearby house was ripped off by an explosion, but a display cabinet in one of the rooms sat pristine – with television and a wedding photo in pride of place and untouched stacks of china tea cups and plates, as if the owner had just popped out. Some civilians are starting to filter back despite the risks. Most are fed up with terrible conditions across the border.

“I was in Turkey four months but, for me, it felt like four years. I am taking my family and coming back,” said Fatima, queueing in the dusk to pass through the Kurdish border gates with her five children. “If we have to die here that’s OK.”

Destroyed town of Kobani(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

Their house had gone, she has been warned, but they were fed up with sleeping on the floor of a shop in the Turkish border town. “I will find somewhere, even if I have to sleep in the street I will come back.”

There are perhaps 400 families in the western part of town, estimates Azad, a cook for the Kurdish YPG – People’s Protection U – fighters. His home survived undamaged apart from a hole torn in one wall to allow food deliveries without risking Isis snipers in the street.

He brought his family back a month ago, including 10-month-old son Fouad. With a well, a generator and rations distributed by the military, he says they are living well, even though Kobani is a virtual ghost town without shops, neighbours or any communal life.

Two ducks, rescued from an abandoned village, quack happily in their small yard and the soundtrack of battle no longer bothers even the baby.

“He is used to it now,” he says. “My wife was frightened at first but now it’s normal for her, too. We are upset about the destruction but happy we got Isis out. At least we have that.”

The only person leaving Kobani permanently was a Turkish member of Isis, returning to his family in a coffin after dying on the front line.

“We are telling the world those people came to kill our children, take our women. But if they ask for their bodies, we will give them,” said Kobani defence minister Ismet Sheikh Hasan as the coffin was carried through the steel border gate into Turkey.

It passed beside a crowd of fresh-faced recruits for the Kurdish forces, shuffling with nervous excitement. They clapped and sang until the door swung open, then raced into their battered home town with shouts of joy.


They had come from refugee camps to carry on the fight against Isis, and must have known that many of them would fall in battle, but just then, elated with victory, no one seemed to care.

(Kurdish people) flash the V for victory sign during a celebration rally near the Syrian border at Suruc, in Sanliurfa province, Turkey(Bulent Kilic/AFP)

குறிப்பு : நன்றி The Guardian, AFP, செய்திப் பட அமைப்பு ENB