PROGRAMMING NOTE: Unfortunately a sudden commitment will prevent me from writing the newsletter tomorrow. I will be back to it on Friday for an unlocked double edition.
TODAY IN HISTORY
May 13, 1805: The Battle of Derna ends with US and allied mercenary forces in control of that eastern Libyan port city, having driven off a Tripolitanian relief army. Though a relatively small affair, Derna was the climactic battle of the First Barbary War (1801-1805). In its wake ,the Jefferson administration negotiated a peace deal with the governor of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, under which the US ransomed its prisoners for a relatively small sum and returned possession of Derna to Tripoli. The issue underpinning the war, North African pirate attacks on US vessels, remained essentially unsettled and the result was the Second Barbary War (1815), whose outcome was considerably more decisive. Despite the ransom payment the US government claimed victory in the war, and the still young nation was able to demonstrate an ability to carry out military action overseas.
May 13, 1846: The US Congress votes to declare war on Mexico, marking the formal start of the Mexican-American War although the fighting had actually begun several days earlier. The war ended officially in February 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which has to be one of the most lopsided treaties ever negotiated, in which Mexico acknowledged US sovereignty over the whole of Texas and ceded most of what is now the southwestern United States.
May 13, 1981: A Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Ağca opens fire on a vehicle carrying Pope John Paul II as it enters Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Square, seriously wounding the pontiff. The Pope famously forgave Ağca, who was pardoned by Italian authorities in 2000 and extradited to Turkey on another murder charge. Several theories abound as to why Ağca and his compatriots attempted to assassinate the Pope, including that it was a KGB operation, that it was a German intelligence operation that was supposed to look like a KGB operation, and that it was the result of a plot within the Vatican. Ağca himself made multiple contradictory and sometimes bizarre claims about the attack.
MIDDLE EAST
TURKEY
The Turkish government announced on Wednesday that it and its Armenian counterpart have reached an agreement to open bilateral commercial ties. Currently Turkish products bound for Armenia and Armenian products bound for Turkey have to go through an unnecessarily complicated “re-export” mechanism whereby they would be shipped to a third country (usually Georgia) and then “re-exported” to their destination. Al-Monitor reported a couple of months ago that they’d agreed to drop this fiction but Wednesday’s announcement makes it official. The third country aspect will remain because the Turkish-Armenian border is still closed, but goods passing through Georgia to get from one country to the other now no longer need to be treated as Georgian re-exports. This removes a layer of bureaucracy and is another step toward normalizing Turkish-Armenian relations.
