World roundup: April 24 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, China, Ukraine, and elsewhere
TODAY IN HISTORY
April 24, 1547: Habsburg/Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s army virtually annihilates a smaller force led by Protestant princes John Frederick I of Saxony and Philip I of Hesse at the Battle of Mühlberg in Saxony. The battle, and particularly the capture of John Frederick, marked the effective end of the 1546-1547 Schmalkaldic War and the first iteration of the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant German nobles. It did not, of course, mark the end of Protestantism. A second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 went worse for the Habsburgs and resulted in the Peace of Passau and, in 1555, the Peace of Augsburg and its famous principle of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, their religion”).
April 24, 1915: Ottoman authorities arrest a group of around 250 Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul in what has come to be known as “Red Sunday.” They were forcibly deported to other parts of the empire and most were ultimately killed. The incident is considered a kind of “decapitation strike” against the empire’s Armenian community and is regarded as the first major event of the Armenian Genocide. April 24 is commemorated as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day within Armenia and by diaspora Armenians, as well as in countries that have recognized the genocide.
April 24, 1916: Some 1200 Irish republicans, including members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, commemorate Easter Monday by seizing a number of key positions in Dublin and declaring the advent of an independent “Irish republic.” The “Easter Rising,” as it’s known, was suppressed within six days by UK security forces, but the atrocities they committed during and after that suppression fueled greater levels of anti-UK sentiment among the Irish population. The Rising is now regarded as one of the major milestones of the “Irish revolutionary period,” as that period’s first serious armed conflict.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is creating a “Climate Resilience Fund” that it says will be aimed at people displaced by the effects of climate change. The fund, which aims to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2025, will support refugee services as well as environmental mediation efforts in the countries those refugees are fleeing. It remains to be seen how the fund is going to operate in practice (assuming it gets the requisite funding), particularly in terms of defining who is or isn’t a climate refugee. The UN says that over 70 percent of new refugees in 2022 came from “highly climate-vulnerable countries,” which is one somewhat objective way to define the problem that might also be too broad for a relatively small fund to address.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Reuters, citing “a senior Israeli defense official,” reported on Wednesday that the Israeli military (IDF) is “poised” to begin its Rafah operation. This aligns with evidence gleaned from those satellite images I noted yesterday. The exact timetable is still unclear, probably by design, but the Reuters piece said that Israeli leaders will “in the coming two weeks” begin their evacuation effort, which could take a month. The part that seems uncertain is whether the IDF will begin its assault on Rafah at the same time as the evacuation or begin the evacuation first and then attack. Either way there are going to be a lot of civilians still in Rafah when the heaviest fighting commences. There are some 1.4 million people in and around that city and the entire Gaza Strip has been pulverized over close to seven months of IDF activity, so one month is certainly not enough time to effect an evacuation successfully. It is, however, enough time to pretend that you tried to effect an evacuation, which is all the Israeli government and the Biden administration really want.
In other news:
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