No offense to Vanuatu or Abkhazia, but there's a slightly more high-profile international-recognition dispute taking place right now, as Paul Richter reports:

Ali Aujali, the soft-spoken representative from the rebels' ruling body, the Transitional National Council, has spent three months in a forlorn effort to persuade the Obama administration to extend diplomatic recognition to his group, a move that would bolster its international standing and could provide access to $34 billion in frozen Libyan assets.

But the White House has shut the door on formal recognition, imperiling the interim council's ability to pay for its rebellion as well as Aujali's capacity to keep the lights on in his lonely mission.

The military stalemate in Libya has turned Aujali, who served as Kadafi's envoy in Washington before switching sides in February, into a Rodney Dangerfield of diplomats. He waters his front lawn, worries about storm damage to his roof, and takes walks with his grandchildren when he's not escorting visiting rebels to inconclusive meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

His hopes have been raised time and again, only to be dashed. When he asks American officials why the Obama administration won't recognize the opposition council even though the U.S. insists Kadafi step down and is supporting the NATO alliance that is bombing Kadafi's military, diplomacy kicks in.

"I am only told, 'It is a legal issue,' and no more," sighs Aujali, a compact man in his early 60s with a shaved head and a close-cropped goatee. "We are desperate."

Administration officials tell Richter that the council "may not control enough territory or population to qualify as sovereign," but more to the point, transfering recognition from an established government, no matter how despotic, to a rebel group goes against long-standing U.S. policy. I looked into this a bit for an Explainer piece following last year's uprising in Kyrgyzstan:

 When the United States was founded, it established diplomatic relations with various foreign governments in an ad hoc fashion, and even today there are few codified rules concerning recognition. Generally speaking, it is the policy of the U.S. government to recognize states, not governments, and to deal (or choose not to deal) with whoever happens to be in charge. This hasn't always been the case: Woodrow Wilson used nonrecognition, with some success, to delegitimize nondemocratic foreign leaders like Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, and for years, the United States recognized the anti-communist government in Taipei as the legitimate government of China. In recent decades, however, U.S. leaders have mostly tried to avoid getting involved in recognition battles in which they would be lobbied by competing factions seeking legitimacy.

Of course, this can become more complicated when there are multiple leaders or groups within a country claiming to be the legitimate government. The United States typically avoids taking the lead in recognition, waiting for the domestic politics to play out or for regional bodies like the Organization of American States to resolve the crisis before deciding whether to confer legitimacy on the new government. In the case of Honduras, for instance, the United States followed the lead of other Latin American countries in deeming Zelaya's ouster illegitimate.

Italy, France, Qatar, and Kuwait have recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of Libya, and some other countries have taken intermediate steps in that direction. Sen. John McCain has called for the Obama administration to add the U.S. to that list. But it's safe to say that we're still a long way off from an international, or even regional, consensus recognizing the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya, so the U.S. is unlikely to stick its neck out at this stage.

This issue may also come up in Yemen if the current leadership vacuum continues.

Lightning is seen amid a cloud of ash billowing from Puyehue volcano near Osorno in southern Chile, 870 km south of Santiago, on June 5, 2011. Puyehue volcano erupted for the first time in half a century on June 4, 2011, prompting evacuations for 3,500 people as it sent a cloud of ash that reached Argentina. The National Service of Geology and Mining said the explosion that sparked the eruption also produced a column of gas 10 kilometers (six miles) high, hours after warning of strong seismic activity in the area.

More info here.

Last week's item on the recognition of Abkhazian independence by the tiny pacific nation of Vanuatu may have been premature, the New York Times reports:

Ambassador Donald Kalpokas, Vanuatu’s permanent representative to the United Nations, said officials in Port-Vila, the capital, have not recognized Abkhazia, a Black Sea territory that has long sought to break away from Georgia.[…]

“I have asked my capital whether this is true and they denied it emphatically,” Mr. Kalpokas said in a telephone interview from New York. “We don’t know who is responsible for declaring that this is true. As far as we are concerned, we are dealing with Georgia, not Abkhazia.”

He added: “It is defamation for our country. This is disrespect.”

Abkhazia is sticking with their story:

Abkhazia’s foreign minister, Maxim Gundjia, said the recognition document had been shuttled between Abkhazia and Vanuatu via air freight and was signed by the prime ministers of Vanuatu and Abkhazia on May 23. He said negotiations with Vanuatu’s premier, Sato Kilman, had taken three months.
“He has the right to make this decision,” Mr. Gundjia said. “I would never publish such news if I didn’t have confirmation.” He added that “no one paid anyone anything.”

It seems unlikely that this is the sort of thing the Abkhazian government would just make up. Seems like either someone in Port-Vila got their signals crossed or someone made Vanuatu an offer it couldn't refuse over the weekend.

Game changer?

Vanuatu, a Pacific island nation that lies about 1,500 miles northeast of Sydney, Australia, has become the fifth country to recognize Abkhazia’s independence, agreeing to set up diplomatic relations with the self-declared republic, according to a May 27 statement on the Abkhazian Foreign Ministry’s website.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia, another separatist region of Georgia, declared independence after a five-day war between Russia and the former Soviet satellite state in August, 2008. Only Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru, another country in the South Pacific, recognize their independence. Georgia maintains Russia occupied the two regions after the conflict. 

One wouldn't want to understate the significance of the milestone in Abkhazia's quest for international legitimacy, but Vanuatu can be fickle when it comes to interntaional recognition questions. It briefly recognized Taiwan in 2004 only to switch back to recognizing Beijing only a month later. Apparently there was some drama at the time:

[Then Prime Minister Serge] Vohor was also accused... of physically assaulting China's new ambassador, Bao Shusheng, by punching him on the shoulder after he complained that the flag of Taiwan was still flying in a hotel.

In general, Vanuatans seems to be pretty open-minded to new states. They recognize Kosovo and Palestine as well. 

Hat tip: Miriam Elder 

There was not much about foreign policy in Mitt Romney's official announcement of his candidacy today. He suggested that the president has been "hesitant" about supporting the Middle East's revolutions and picked up on the "leading from behind" theme. (You have to wonder if whatever White House staffer suggested "leading from behind" to the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza realized they were scripting every GOP candidate's first ad.) He also mentioned that the president had "traveled around the world to apologize for America" and had a zinger about the proposed U.S. withdrawal date from Afghanistan: "The Taliban may not have watches, but they have calendars."

Oddly, the region that got the most play in the short section on foreign affairs was not the Middle East, Central Asia, or China, but Europe. To his credit, Romney has avoided throwing in his lot with members of his party who have openly questioned President Obama's citizenship or religion, but the former Massachusetts governor did repeatedly suggest that there's a certain Continental flavor to the president's leadership style.

He suggested that the president takes his cues and values not from the small towns of America, but from the "capitals of Europe." He said that Obama was proposing "European answers to American problems" and was treating Israel the way European countries do, with "suspicion and distrust."

At our recent Shadow Government event here at FP, the panelists suggested that a major challenge for the GOP field would be to make the case that Obama has made the country weaker and accepted the narrative of "American decline," without pandering to extremists who see him as not only un-American but anti-American.

Romney's solution seems to be the label of "European," which, for the American electorate, carries the twin connotations of timidity in foreign affairs and socialist economic policies. (Though the stereotype also feels a little dated given that Western Europe's major powers are, for the most part, currently ruled by conservative governments whose passion for austerity budgets is tempered only by their enthusiasm for bombing North Africa.)

The European attack may be a good way to play to the Republican base in the primary, but I wonder about it as a long-term strategy. American voters may feel threatened by terrorists from the Middle East, insurgents from Central Asia, illegal immigrants from Mexico, and workers from China. I'm not sure bureaucrats from Brussels pack the same rhetorical punch. We'll see.

I'm sure Angry Birds must be twice as awesome on the bigger screen, but this still seems extreme:

A teenager in Huaishan, Anhui Province has sold one of his kidneys to buy an iPad2 tablet computer, as reported by SZTV on June 1.

The 17-year-old man surnamed Zheng, a freshman in high school, got connected with a kidney-selling agent through the internet, who pledged to pay him 20,000 yuan ($3,084.45 ) for one of his kidneys.

On April 28 of this year, Zheng went to Chenzhou, Hunan Province to have his kidney removed under the supervision of three so-called middlemen, and received 22,000 yuan ($3,392.97). Then he returned home with a laptop and an iPhone.

Zheng's mother discovered her son's new electronic products and forced him to reveal how he came to afford them. Then she took Zheng to Chenzhou and reported the matter to local police. The three agents' telephones have not been answered since that time.

Be sure to check out Scott Carney's new piece on the rise of the "red market" and why "no society has had as insatiable an appetite for human flesh as the developed world of the 21st century."

Putting aside the fact that Zheng is underage, broke the law, and is (seemingly) a moron, the ethical questions surrounding the organ market are not so simple. What if Zheng were a consenting adult rather than a teenager and looking to start a small business or move his family into a nicer home rather than pick up the latest toys from Cupertino?

Carney writes that the fundamental question surrounding the human-organ supply chain is "at what point is one person entitled to use the flesh of another?" That's a good question, but so is whether a person should be denied an economic opportunity -- and perhaps save a life in the process -- because the idea of buying and selling human flesh makes us queasy? It's an uncomfortable subject, but an increasingly relevant one.