#longyearben

By Andrew Higgins, NY Times, Sept. 27, 2014

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway--For anyone in the market for a majestic waterfront property with easy access to the North Pole, Ole Einar Gjerde has a deal. “We will throw in the polar bears for free,” said Mr. Gjerde, pitching the attractions of a huge tract of Arctic land two and half times bigger than Manhattan but considerably less noisy. It has a human population of zero.

But the sale of the property, across a frigid fjord from Longyearbyen, the capital of Norway’s northernmost territory, has kicked up a noisy storm fed by alarm over the Arctic ambitions of a Chinese real estate tycoon with deep pockets, a yen for ice and a murky past working for the Chinese Communist Party.

The tycoon, Huang Nubo, was rebuffed last year in an attempt to buy a tract of frozen wilderness in Iceland and has turned his attentions to Norway. This summer he reached a preliminary deal to buy a large waterfront plot for about $4 million near the northern city of Tromso and, according to Norway’s state-owned broadcaster, is also eyeing a much bigger and even more northerly property here on Spitsbergen, the main island in the Svalbard archipelago.

Mr. Huang’s company, Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, denied reports in the Norwegian news media that it wants to buy land here in the high Arctic, and said it is focusing instead on plans for a luxury resort complex in Lyngen, a mountainous area on the Norwegian mainland near Tromso. That project, though centered on land much farther south than Svalbard, still puts Mr. Huang’s company inside the Arctic Circle and has set off a heated debate about his intentions.

“No need to doubt that billionaire Huang Nubo is a straw man for the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s authorities,” warned a commentary in Nordlys, northern Norway’s largest newspaper.

Ola Giaever, the seller of the property near Tromso, said he had “100 percent confidence” that Mr. Huang was a straight-up businessman with no hidden agenda. “This is a business deal. Nothing else is going on,” Mr. Giaever said in a telephone interview.

Such assurances, however, have done little to calm a frenzy of speculation about China seeking a permanent foothold in the Arctic, a region of growing geopolitical and economic significance as global warming opens new and cheaper shipping routes from Asia and also expands the prospects for exploiting the Arctic’s abundant natural resources.

“For anyone interested in geopolitics, this is the region to follow in years to come,” said Willy Ostreng, the president of the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research. Mr. Huang, he added, “might be just another smiling businessman” genuinely interested in simply developing tourism, but “we are talking about perceptions here.”

“And the perception is that China wants a foothold in the Arctic.”

Hungry for energy, China has “openly declared its Arctic ambitions,” said Mr. Ostreng, noting that Beijing had invested in an icebreaker, the Snow Dragon; sent scientists to Svalbard to join teams of international researchers; and successfully lobbied to become an observer at the Arctic Council, a grouping of nations with Arctic land, including Norway, Russia and the United States. It has also tried, so far without success, to get permission to build a large radar antenna on Svalbard.

China has even declared itself a “near Arctic state,” a big stretch as even its northernmost region lies more than 1,000 miles from the Arctic Circle. But, Mr. Ostreng said, “When you are a big country, you can claim to be whatever you want, and people believe you.”

Mr. Huang first attracted attention and suspicion in 2012 when he tried to buy a desolate, 100-square-mile tract of land in northern Iceland, saying he wanted to build a golf course and a high-end hotel for Chinese tourists. The project fell apart after baffled Icelandic officials invoked laws restricting foreign ownership of land.

In the case of Svalbard, however, Norway is barred by the 1920 Svalbard Treaty from imposing any such restrictions. The treaty granted Norway “absolute sovereignty” over the Arctic Archipelago, but also committed it to grant “complete equality” in the purchase and development of Svalbard land to the nationals of all the countries that signed the original treaty, or, like China, joined it later.

When the treaty was signed as part of the Versailles negotiations after World War I, the main economic activities on Svalbard were coal mining and fur trapping. Global warming and new technologies, however, mean that Svalbard now sits in the middle of what, in coming decades, is expected to be an Arctic gold rush.

The Arctic region, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, holds around 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its natural gas, reserves that have been untouched because of the difficulty and high cost of their development.

Russia, which recently announced plans to invest $400 billion on extracting Arctic resources over the next 20 years, believes the region has even more promise, though these plans could be disrupted by Western sanctions imposed over Ukraine.

Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has said the Arctic holds over 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. He also indicated that Russia, despite its increasingly warm relations with China, was uneasy about Beijing’s push into the Arctic, warning that Russia faced “plenty of competition,” not only from nations with well-established Arctic claims like Canada, Norway and the United States, but also “countries which seem to be far from the Arctic,” including China and “even Singapore,” a tropical nation 4,500 miles from the Arctic. “The struggle for resources is getting tougher,” Mr. Sechin said.

The land now up for sale, owned by the descendants of a Norwegian shipper who acquired it in 1937, is the first property on Svalbard to go on the market since 1952, and is the only privately held territory left. All the rest is owned by the Norwegian state; a Norwegian state coal company, Store Norske; and a Russian state-owned coal company, the Arctic Coal Trust.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It is unique,” said Mr. Gjerde (pronounced gyer-DA), a friend of the family that owns the land and a board member of Austre Adventfjord AS, a company set up last year to manage the property. Henning Horn, a Norwegian industrialist and farmer who owns the property along with other descendants of the original purchaser, is the chairman. Mr. Horn declined, through his lawyer, to be interviewed.

When Norwegian news media first reported the planned sale in April and then named Mr. Huang as a possible buyer, the government immediately came under pressure in Parliament and in the news media to make sure the land did not fall into foreign hands.

Amid a rising clamor against any foreign sale, the government announced in May that it would work to ensure that the Svalbard property remained in Norwegian hands. “The government has decided to work for a solution involving a state takeover,” the trade minister, Monica Maeland, said in a statement. “It is entirely natural and right that the state is committed to taking over the property.”

Efforts to secure state control have yet to bear fruit.

Christin Kristoffersen, the mayor of Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s administrative center, said she supported a purchase by the Norwegian state to make sure the region’s fragile wilderness areas do not get swept up in a chaotic rush to exploit Arctic resources. “This is not an area for a new Klondike. We have to tread carefully,” the mayor said. “We should own this island. This is not anti-Chinese, but pro-Norwegian.”

Svalbard’s governor, Odd Olsen Ingero, also wants the state to step in, but stressed that even a private buyer would have to abide by strict zoning and environmental regulations. “Starting a hotel over there is unthinkable,” the governor said.

Representatives for the owners say the state is welcome to submit a bid but must follow market rules. “We are not in politics or geopolitics. We are in business. We will sell to the highest bidder,” said Arnstein Martin Skaare, a board member of the company managing the sale. “If Norway thinks this land is important for Norway, then it will buy it for a fair market price.”

By Andrew Higgins, NY Times, July 9, 2014

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway--As governor of Norway’s northernmost territory, Odd Olsen Ingero commands a police force with just six officers and a single detention cell for an area twice the size of New Jersey. Even that is overkill: Nobody has been locked up here in the capital of Svalbard since last summer. And that was for just two days.

It is not just that there are not many people--fewer than 3,000 are officially registered as residents--or that what are elsewhere run-of-the-mill crimes like car theft are an exotic and very risky business in a place where there are no roads out of town to escape on.

The key to Svalbard’s status as probably Europe’s closest thing to a crime-free society, according to the governor, is that unemployment is in effect illegal. “If you don’t have a job, you can’t live here,” Mr. Ingero said, noting that the jobless are swiftly deported. Retirees are sent away, too, unless they can prove they have sufficient means to support themselves.

Although governed by Norway, a country that prides itself on offering cradle-to-grave state support for its needy citizens, Svalbard, an archipelago of islands in the high Arctic, embraces a model that is closer to the vision of Ayn Rand than the Scandinavian norm of generous welfare protection.

Even Longyearbyen’s socialist mayor, Christin Kristoffersen, a member of the Labour Party, wants the town--named after an American industrialist, John Munro Longyear, who founded it in 1906--to stay off limits to all but the able-bodied and gainfully employed.

“This is a very special kind of place,” said the mayor, whose town has all the conveniences of a modern urban area, including an airport, high-speed Internet and even a high-end restaurant, but faces such a struggle to survive against the elements that it has no place for the jobless or infirm.

Homelessness, like unemployment, is banned. All residents must have a fixed address, a rule that ensures that nobody freezes to death in a place that is closer to the North Pole than to the Norwegian capital, Oslo, and where snowfall continues deep into summer.

The government does fund a school and a hospital, as well as the governor’s administration, and also subsidizes Svalbard’s biggest employer, a loss-making state-owned coal company. But it shuns the leftist, leveling consensus that according to conservative critics has made working almost a lifestyle choice in the rest of Norway. Taxes are much lower than elsewhere in the country.

“There is no welfare system in Svalbard,” Mr. Ingero said. “If you are unable to support yourself with work, you cannot stay here.”

The result, he added, “is a very quiet and law-abiding society.” He’s not advocating the Svalbard approach as a solution to crime elsewhere, but he does think it shows a clear link between unemployment and lawlessness. At the same time, it also debunks a view held by surging populist parties across Europe, including Norway, that immigration is largely to blame for rising crime.

Svalbard has no restrictions on foreigners who want to move here, except that they must have a job. Under a 1920 international treaty that granted Norway sovereignty, the territory is open to all nationals of the more than 40 nations that have now signed the pact. A population that used to be homogeneously white now includes Thais, Chinese and other foreigners. Nearly a third of all residents are foreigners, including hundreds of Ukrainians working in a mining concession owned by Russia.

“The demographics here are rather unique,” said Mr. Ingero, who spent most of his previous career fighting crime as a senior police official on the Norwegian mainland, and now presides over a place so placid that residents regularly leave their car and snowmobile keys in the ignition and often don’t bother locking their front doors.

Mark Sabbatini, an American who edits “the world’s northernmost alternative newspaper,” an English-language weekly called Icepeople, said he often leaves his computer untended in a coffee shop but never worries it might get stolen. “There is no crime,” he said.

That is not entirely true. According to official statistics, Svalbard was gripped last year by a dramatic crime wave, with reported cases that involved violence soaring by 800 percent. But that was due mostly to bar brawls that raised the number of violent cases investigated by police from just one in 2012 to nine in 2013.

The most serious incident last year involved a drunken Ukrainian miner arrested for a knifing in Barentsburg, a grim Russian-owned mining settlement down the coast. Moved to Longyearbyen, he spent a couple of days in the governor’s holding cell ahead of his trial on the Norwegian mainland.

In total, the police handle around 100 cases a year, most of which involve minor infractions like reckless driving on snowmobiles and shoplifting. There have been no serious crimes reported so far this year, although the authorities are worried about a spate of littering involving untidy scientists who, during research in the wilderness, failed to clean up their garbage.

Svalbard has been featured in a James Bond movie, “Die Another Day,” and in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, but is so bereft of real human villainy that polar bears have taken on the role as the main troublemakers.

Polar bears feature regularly on the front page in connection with attacks, along with melting glaciers and scientific research projects. At an inquest in London last week about a student at Eton who was mauled to death near Longyearbyen in 2011, survivors of the school trip told of a horrific nighttime attack by a starving bear.

Gun ownership is widespread, not because anyone worries about fending off a mugger or a knife-wielding coal miner, but because polar bears present a real danger. The police enforce a rule that anybody moving outside the city limits of Longyearbyen must carry a weapon and know how to use it. The British school group had a rifle, but the weapon, fitted with an elaborate safety system, failed to fire.

Another hot recent topic, aside from a fault in an undersea cable that left Svalbard without telephone and Internet service for a few hours, is the extortionate price of fresh food. Svalbardposten, for example, uncovered what it called the world’s most expensive milk.

While alcohol and cigarettes, free of many of the high taxes levied in the rest of Norway, are relatively cheap, a liter carton of milk in a local shop can cost the equivalent of nearly $7.

Mr. Sabbatini, the American editor, said he doesn’t worry much about bears and even less about thieves and muggers. “I used to be a crime reporter in Los Angeles,” he said. “I can’t say I enjoyed it.”