World roundup: August 13 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Russia, Honduras, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 13 (or thereabouts), 838: An Abbasid army sacks the Byzantine city of Amorium, killing tens of thousands of people and carrying off thousands more as slaves. This was arguably the worst defeat the empire had suffered to the Arabs since the great conquests of the 7th century and represents a low point in Byzantine history. However, the Byzantine empire’s fortunes soon began to improve under the “Macedonian” dynasty, for a variety of reasons, while the Abbasid caliphs lost effective control of their empire in the 860s and it began to fragment internally.
August 13, 1521: Spanish and allied forces under Hernán Cortés conquer Tenochtitlan and capture the Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc. It’s estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 people were killed during the two and a half month siege of the city. Cuauhtémoc remained in place as a puppet ruler, but the Aztec Empire was over and Cortés eventually executed him in 1525.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
As you may recall, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US issued a joint statement on Monday essentially demanding that Iran rescind its threat to retaliate for the Israeli assassination of former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran a couple of weeks ago. The Iranian government responded in the negative on Tuesday, noting that The Gang has “raised no objection” to Israel’s “international crimes” and stressing the Israeli government’s violation of Iranian “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Iranian officials argue that those Israeli actions give them the right to respond, and Western demands for their restraint are therefore illegitimate. However, “three senior Iranian officials” have apparently told Reuters that a retaliation could be prevented, or at least put on ice, if Israel and Hamas are able to iron out a ceasefire. The Iranian government has been hinting at this for some time now but that report is probably as close as it will get to saying so openly.
Assuming those officials are being truthful, this suggests that Iran’s retaliation won’t come until at least Thursday, which is when the US, Egypt, and Qatar are planning to hold a new round of ceasefire talks. It remains to be seen whether either of the principals will really participate, though. Hamas is still demanding that mediators revive a proposal that they advanced in early July, which was based on the proposal Joe Biden put forward in May. But the Israeli government rejected that proposal (after supposedly drafting it) due to “changes” in the version Hamas accepted, and according to The New York Times the Israeli government has been—and you might want to sit down for this, it’s a real bombshell—“less flexible in recent Gaza ceasefire talks.” In fact, according to “unpublished documents” the NYT says it’s seen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “added new conditions” in late July to a “set of principles” to which he’d already agreed before Biden rolled the proposal out.
In short, the chances of a ceasefire emerging in the next few days are pretty slim. At this point, even the prospect of negotiations taking place this week seems to be a long shot. Which means an Iranian attack may be forthcoming.
Elsewhere, the Biden administration on Tuesday announced that it’s approved another $20 billion in arms sales to Israel. These sales will take years to fulfill so they don’t have much bearing on the current situation in the Middle East, but it does feel like another admission that all of the administration’s talk of being “concerned” about Palestinian civilians and “frustrated” with Netanyahu is empty bullshit.
IRAN
At +972 Magazine, Lior Sternfeld argues that part of the Israeli rationale for the Haniyeh killing was to undermine relatively moderate new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian:
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, came to Tehran to attend Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Based on multiple reports, Israel hired local agents to plant explosives in the hospitality compound in which he was staying, used by the Revolutionary Guards to host high-ranking guests. Through Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran’s capital, Israel appears to have sought to drag the Islamic Republic into a regional war — one that Iran hoped to avoid — on the first day in office of the new, moderate president. The expectation is that Iran will have to respond, and more forcefully than its previous choreographed attack on Israel in April.
This continues a long and seemingly counterintuitive tradition of Israel preferring conservative, fervently anti-Israel presidents in Iran over reformists, whom it sees as detrimental to its strategic interests. After all, part of Israel’s support among American and European governments derives from the idea that it is a Western democratic outpost in a “dangerous neighborhood,” which can defeat bad actors in the Middle East before they reach Europe and the West.
According to this logic, Iran is the chief enemy: an anti-Western, antisemitic, theocratic dictatorship that poses a clear and immediate danger to the world. When Iran elects moderate leaders, it undermines this monolithic caricature — and Israel, which refuses to change its outlook toward its regional neighbors, sees a diplomatic threat.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Afghan and Pakistani security forces exchanged gunfire from their respective sides of the Torkham border checkpoint on Tuesday, killing at least three civilians on the Afghan side. There’s been no word as to casualties on the Pakistani side. The checkpoint, one of the most active along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is unsurprisingly now closed. There’s no indication as to who fired first—Afghan authorities are, as you’d expect, blaming the Pakistani personnel—nor is there any indication what caused the skirmish. Tensions between the two countries are high over the continued presence of Pakistani militant groups in Afghanistan, and this is not the first time their border guards have clashed.
BANGLADESH
Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made her first public statement on Tuesday since being chased out of office by protesters earlier this month. Suffice to say she did not sound like someone who’d been forced to flee the country just a few days ago. Hasina demanded “that those involved in these killings and vandalism” related to the protests “be properly investigated and the culprits be identified and punished accordingly.” It’s unclear whether that includes Bangladeshi security forces and her own supporters, who seem to have done their fair share of the killing at least. Hasina herself, along with other members of her government, is now under investigation for at least one of the killings and there are likely more criminal cases to come.
Meanwhile, concern for the safety of Bangladesh’s Hindu community remains high, amid reports of at least 200 attacks targeting Hindus since Hasina’s ouster. The motives behind these incidents can’t be fully ascertained but may be as much political as religious, given that Bangladeshi Hindus have tended to support Hasina and her Awami League party. Nevertheless the result is the same, and there is also a geopolitical angle here in that the Indian government has unsurprisingly taken notice of the potential for anti-Hindu violence.
PHILIPPINES
The Philippine government lodged a formal diplomatic protest on Tuesday over an incident last week in which Manila claims that two Chinese aircraft buzzed and then fired flares at a Philippine military transport plane. Nothing serious transpired, but the flares in particular were dangerous. The incident took place in airspace over the South China Sea that is claimed by both countries.
AFRICA
AFRICAN UNION
The AU’s Centers for Disease Control declared a “public health emergency of continental security” on Tuesday over the latest outbreak of mpox. The CDC has tracked 38,465 cases of the disease and 1456 deaths from it since this outbreak emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in January 2022, and the rate of new infections seems to be on the rise so far this year compared to the first seven months of 2023. Most of the cases have been in the DRC but the outbreak has spread to neighboring countries, hence Tuesday’s declaration. This appears to be a more severe strain of the mpox virus than the one that caused a global outbreak in 2022-2023.
SUDAN
The International Organization for Migration’s Middle East and North Africa director, Othman Belbeisi, said on Monday that Sudan’s displacement crisis is nearing “a catastrophic, cataclysmic breaking point.” The IOM now estimates that some 10.7 million Sudanese have been displaced since the country’s military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group went to war with one another last April. Displacement from that conflict has been exacerbated over the past few weeks by another displacement crisis caused by heavy rains and flooding. The war, of course, prevents aid organizations from helping those displaced by the flooding. The US and Saudi Arabia are planning to hold a new round of ceasefire talks in Geneva this week, but at present the Sudanese military is still refusing to attend.
SOMALIA
The latest round of talks between the Somali and Ethiopian governments ended in Ankara on Tuesday without an accord on their dispute over the status of the secessionist Somaliland region. However, the principals did agree to a third round of talks that will take place on September 17, presumably in Ankara again though that part isn’t clear. That’s roughly when this second round was supposed to have taken place before the Turkish government hastily organized another session in a flurry of diplomacy earlier this month.
There is a framework on the table, proposed by the Turks, that would satisfy Ethiopia’s demand for an outlet on the Red Sea in return for Ethiopian recognition of Somalia’s territorial integrity. But that would presumably quash Ethiopia’s deal with the Somaliland government, which leased seafront territory to Addis Ababa in return for recognition of Somaliland’s independence. The Somalis are reportedly demanding that Ethiopia disavow that deal up front, while the Ethiopians seem unwilling to do that until they’ve extracted as favorable a deal as possible from Somalia.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Tuesday that 74 settlements in Russia’s Kursk oblast “are under Ukrainian control.” That would reflect a considerable advance by Ukrainian forces over the past day or so, despite Russian claims that the Ukrainians’ progress has been more or less halted. That said, even Russian military officials are talking about thwarting Ukrainian attacks on villages that are, according to Reuters, “26 to 28 km (16 to 17 miles) from the border.” That would suggest the Ukrainians have indeed moved deeper into the province. It’s still unclear what the long-term plan for this operation is, though Zelensky hinted at one possibility when he noted the capture of Russian POWs who could be part of future prisoner exchanges. If there were some immediate prospect of peace talks on the horizon Ukraine’s possession of Russian territory could become a factor, but there is no such prospect and it’s unlikely the Ukrainians can hold on to what they’ve taken long enough for it to enter into any negotiation.
UKRAINE
If any part of the Ukrainian aim is to draw Russian forces off of the front line in Donetsk oblast to deal with the Kursk incursion it must be said that it’s not working. Russian forces are continuing to push toward the strategically significant town of Pokrovsk, with no indication that the recent activity on Russia’s side of the border is having any sort of effect.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued a statement on Tuesday arguing that “it is especially troubling that so many people are being detained, accused or charged either with incitement to hatred or under counterterrorism legislation” since Venezuela’s presidential election last month. Over 2200 people have been arrested amid the protests that followed incumbent Nicolás Maduro’s disputed victory, and the reason we know that is because Maduro has bragged about it. At least 25 people have been killed.
HONDURAS
Jacobin’s Klas Lundström explains how, in the eyes of the US government, Honduras’s former president went from ally to criminal:
In late June, US authorities sentenced Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández to forty-five years in prison, on a series of drug and weapons-conspiracy charges. US prosecutors deemed the lawyer and businessman-turned-politician the leader of a “narco-state” where drug traffickers escape prosecution thanks to bribes, repression, and official favors. Hernández has sworn his innocence — labeling the verdict both “wrong and unjust.”
Hernández, a long-term US ally, has clearly now fallen out of favor with Washington. Yet this is owed not to his political record of aiding death squads, blatant corruption, nepotism, or even involvement in drug trafficking — but rather to the fact that his chosen successor, National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, lost the 2021 presidential elections. With the Honduran oligarchy kicked out of the presidential palace, Hernández and his allies could no longer ensure carte-blanche protection for US interests.
UNITED STATES
Finally, FOREVER WARS’ Spencer Ackerman reports on another disturbing chapter in the glorious War on Terror:
ALMOST ALL OF THE 28 YEMENI MEN whom the sultanate of Oman agreed to resettle from Guantanamo Bay between 2015 and 2017 have been expelled from the country over the past few weeks, FOREVER WARS has learned.
Five sources familiar with the expulsion, including two Yemeni survivors of Guantanamo themselves, told FOREVER WARS that an eviction foreshadowed since at least the spring has sent nearly all the repatriated former detainees back to their native Yemen. The handful who remain in Oman are expected to face imminent deportation.
The Obama administration had prevailed upon Oman to accept the Yemenis. Both that administration and human-rights experts concluded that these men would likely face persecution in Yemen owing to both the stigma of Guantanamo and Yemen's ongoing U.S.-facilitated instability. That risk of so-called "refoulement" remains, according to some of the men who have been sent back to Yemen and their advocates.
The reasons behind the expulsion are unclear, even to the many of the at least 24 men expelled thus far. Several former Guantanamo detainees and their advocates have over the past ten years praised the hospitality the Omani sultanate extended to them. Some said that Omani officials told them that the U.S. had approved the expulsion.
Spencer goes on to write that the State Department now says it had no expectation that Oman would host these men indefinitely, which is reasonable enough though there’s some question as to what the original terms really were. But there’s a lot of distance between simply cutting them off from state support and deporting them into a war zone where they’re at serious risk of harm.
This is the last time I say it: The VO is very useful.