World roundup: April 9 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Togo, Bulgaria, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
April 9, 1241: A small Mongolian army under the command of Orda, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, defeats a Polish force under the command of Grand Duke Henry II at the Battle of Legnica.
April 9, 1865: Confederate General Robert E. Lee, along with his Army of Northern Virginia, surrenders to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Though there were still other Confederate armies in the field, Lee’s surrender is generally treated as the end of the US Civil War.
INTERNATIONAL
Humanity broke yet another record last month, which according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service was the hottest March ever with global average temperatures hitting 14.14 degrees Celsius. That’s a tenth of a degree higher than the previous record, set in 2016, and makes March the tenth “hottest month ever” in a row. The 12 month period from April 2023 through March also set a new heat record, one that will probably fall once this April’s average temperature is determined. The expected weakening of the current El Niño may put an end to this streak of record hot months, but suffice to say the effort to ameliorate climate change is not going in a positive direction.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The word on the ceasefire front was not good on Tuesday, with The Wall Street Journal among several other outlets reporting that Hamas and the Israeli government are nowhere close to an agreement. The talks appear to be organized around a proposal put on the table by the US government, although Hamas issued a statement on Tuesday that referred to “the Israeli position” and it’s unclear whether that means the current proposal or something else. Their statement indicated that said “Israeli position” was unacceptable but that they were preparing a response. The response will almost certainly be unacceptable to the Israelis, and round and round they’ll continue going. There are a couple of issues that seem to be intractable. One is the duration of the ceasefire. Hamas still wants the initial six-week ceasefire to lead into a full ceasefire, while the Israelis are still insistent that it be six weeks and no longer. The US proposal is apparently noncommittal on the subject.
The other problem seems to be the hostages. Specifically, the deal calls for the release of 40 living Israelis held captive in Gaza, and Hamas negotiators have acknowledged that there are now fewer than 40 hostages still alive who fall into the “humanitarian” category (women and elderly/infirm men). There’s been some suspicion that this was the case for a while now, going back at least a month to when negotiations broke down because Hamas refused to provide a list of the hostages it was planning to release. The Israelis are insisting on 40 living hostages but Hamas leaders have shown a reluctance to free male combatants. As the number of living hostages dwindles the chances of any sort of ceasefire evaporate, which is arguably the ideal scenario for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he gets to have his extended war without the pressure to free hostages who can no longer be freed.
CNN has conducted an investigation into the so-called “flour massacre,” the incident in late February in which over 110 Palestinian civilians were killed while attempting to access aid trucks in Gaza City. Shock of shocks, it seems the findings don’t support the Israeli military’s (IDF) version of events. Where Israeli officials insist their soldiers simply fired “warning shots” at an unruly crowd that then panicked en masse, video and witness evidence suggests they opened fire on the crowd directly, massacring the aid seekers.
TURKEY
The Turkish government announced on Tuesday that it is restricting exports to Israel across 54 categories, in retaliation for the Israeli government’s rejection of a planned Turkish aid airdrop in Gaza. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that Israeli officials would impose a ban on some Turkish imports (the details are unclear as yet) in response and suggested that he would lobby the US government and American companies to sanction and otherwise divest from Turkey.
SYRIA
Eight Syrian militia fighters with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in an apparent knife attack in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province on Tuesday. The incident took place near the town of Mayadin, where three other Syrian militia fighters were gunned down on Monday in what was presumably a related attack. It seems likely that Islamic State was involved though that’s uncertain. Elsewhere, the IDF struck “a weapons and ammunition depot” in southern Syria on Tuesday morning, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. This was after somebody inside Syria fired a barrage of rockets into the Israel-occupied Golan.
IRAN
Iranian media is reporting that six police officers were killed in another Jaish ul-Adl attack in southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province on Tuesday. The Baluch militant group carried out a flurry of attacks last week that killed at least 16 Iranian security personnel—six of the wounded having since died. The reason behind this recent uptick in activity is unclear.
ASIA
AZERBAIJAN
The UN’s COP29 event will be held in Azerbaijan this November, which is great because having a corrupt petrostate host the world’s largest annual climate change summit worked out so well last year. At Inkstick, Kate Watters and Jeffrey Dunn take a dim view of Baku’s environmental record to date:
Azerbaijan’s domestic fossil fuel companies are primarily state-owned. The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) is the key Azerbaijani company engaged in partnerships with international oil companies, whether in upstream or midstream projects. Thus, SOCAR holds shares in the biggest oil fields as well as in refineries and pipeline projects, cooperating with international oil majors. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev was vice president of SOCAR before assuming the presidency just before his father, who was president before him, died.
A former SOCAR official for 26 years, Mukhtar Babayev, has been selected as president-in-waiting for the COP talks. He is also the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan, but his appointment raises concerns about Azerbaijan’s commitment to combating climate change. Azerbaijan only signed the Global Methane Pledge on March 4 of this year; presumably in preparation to host COP. Azerbaijan’s climate commitments include signing on to the Paris Agreement and a revised Nationally Determined Contribution, which calls for a reduction in GHG emissions by 35% by 2030 and by 40% by 2050. According to the World Bank, Azerbaijan is not on track to hit these targets.
MYANMAR
Karen National Liberation Army and People’s Defense Force rebels are saying that “hundreds” of soldiers have surrendered to them in the town of Myawaddy, which the Myanmar military has reportedly abandoned. Hundreds more are believed to have crossed the nearby border into Thailand to escape the rebels. According to The Guardian, only a few dozen soldiers are still putting up a fight in the town, which is the largest commercial crossing on the Thai border.
Elsewhere, Myanmar’s military has reportedly begun training individuals pressed into service under a new (well, newly implemented) conscription law. It’s hard to know just what condition the military is in, but its repeated defeats at the hands of various rebel groups since October, combined with the rush to enlist a bunch of probably-reluctant new soldiers, suggests it is reeling to say the least.
AFRICA
SUDAN
A drone strike targeted military facilities in the eastern Sudanese city of El-Gadarif on Tuesday. There’s no indication regarding casualties or damage, but the strike suggests that the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group may have identified the city as its next target. The RSF has seized much of neighboring Gezira state to the west, including the capital Wad Madani, so a move against El-Gadarif state would not be surprising. It will be disruptive, though, as hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Sudanese civilians are currently in El-Gadarif and will likely be forced to flee again in the event of an RSF assault.
TOGO
The Togolese government on Tuesday set April 29 as the date for its forthcoming parliamentary election, potentially forestalling protests that are supposed to take place later this week. The election had been scheduled for April 20, but Togolese officials announced last week that they were postponing it, citing a need to “listen to and inform civilians” regarding a controversial constitutional reform the Togolese parliament passed late last month that shifts the country from a presidential system to a parliamentary system. Part of that shift involves stripping the presidency of much of its power and giving it instead to a head of government/prime minister.
The controversy arises from a general suspicion that this is incumbent President Faure Gnassingbé’s big plan to retain his powers without having to run for a fifth term in next year’s planned presidential election—an election that won’t even take place under the reform, since the new weaker president will be chosen by parliament rather than in a direct election. Gnassingbé could just slide into the powerful PM job and never skip a beat. Opposition groups say they intend to hold a three-day protest over the delayed election starting on Thursday, despite the fact that Togolese authorities have banned the demonstration. It remains to be seen whether the new scheduling will satisfy the would-be protesters.
EUROPE
BULGARIA
The Bulgarian parliament on Tuesday confirmed an interim government led by former speaker Dimitar Glavchev that will run the country through a snap parliamentary election on June 9. That vote, which will be Bulgaria’s sixth parliamentary vote since April 2021, became necessary when the unity coalition between the GERB and We Continue the Change parties broke down amid a planned transfer of power late last month. There is little reason to believe that the snap election will do anything to stabilize Bulgaria’s fractious political situation.
GERMANY
The German government defended itself before the International Court of Justice on Tuesday, in response to a Nicaraguan case accusing it of complicity in genocide in Gaza. While acknowledging that it has “provided support to Israel,” the German team insisted that the government’s safeguards around military aid are more than enough to satisfy the terms of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Nicaragua’s case seems like a long shot, though it is possible the ICJ will issue some sort of preliminary order that German officials take extra precautions with respect to Israeli arms transfers.
SWITZERLAND
The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday that the Swiss government’s inaction with respect to climate change is a human rights violation. The suit was brought by a Swiss group called Senior Women for Climate Protection that accused the government of “harming” its members “living conditions and health” by failing to reduce carbon emissions fast enough to meet its own climate pledges. There’s some hope that this ruling could become a precedent for similar legal action against other governments, though it should be pointed out that the court also tossed two other climate-related cases on Tuesday that would have strengthened the precedent.
IRELAND
Former health and higher education minister Simon Harris was elected Ireland’s new taoiseach (prime minister) on Tuesday, replacing the departed Leo Varadkar. At 37, he is now the youngest person ever to hold that post.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, amid a review of a recently published book covering the Biden administration’s foreign policy team, The Nation’s David Klion considers the gap between what that team pretends to be and what it really is:
Anyone who writes about current events knows how cruel the gap between final edits and publication can be. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, certainly does. On October 2, 2023, Foreign Affairs closed a print issue that included a 7,000-word article by Sullivan intended to offer a comprehensive overview of the global situation on Biden’s watch. In it, Sullivan boasted that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades” and that “we’ve de-escalated crises in Gaza.” Five days after those lines went to press, and 17 days before their publication, Hamas launched a sneak attack on southern Israel that resulted in some 1,200 Israeli casualties and the capture of more than 200 hostages. Over the ensuing months, Israel has retaliated with a merciless war on Gaza that has killed or injured tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and that has expanded into a wider regional struggle between the United States and Iran, incorporating military exchanges from Yemen to Syria to Iraq. Notwithstanding Sullivan’s unfortunately timed assessment, the Middle East under Biden is anything but quiet. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently put it, “We’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973.”
The Internationalists, the new book by the Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward, suffers from similarly awkward timing. An account of the first two years of Biden’s foreign-policy team, The Internationalists closes with a speech that Sullivan gave in April 2023, some 10 months before the book’s publication, meaning that it does not cover the October 7 Hamas attack or its ongoing, cataclysmic aftermath. Ward, as he explains in the book’s acknowledgments, set out “to write a story of a team that came in with immense confidence, lost it during the withdrawal of Afghanistan, and found their mojo again with the defense of Ukraine.” He delivers that exact arc, and also delivers on his expressed intention to produce “a helpful second draft of history for those seeking to go deeper,” but the book’s resilient-comeback narrative has already been undermined by global events.
This is in no sense Ward’s fault—unlike Sullivan, he bears no responsibility for the state of US policy in the Middle East or anywhere else—but it does cast the principal subjects of his book in a different light than he presumably wanted or expected. Written with what was clearly extensive access, The Internationalists reflects the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Biden’s foreign policy advisers. Team Biden members see themselves as a group of sober-minded yet idealistic professionals who took office intending to end wars and to repair America’s ailing body politic at home and its damaged reputation abroad in the wake of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, on their watch the United States has been drawn into a set of major new wars whose unintended consequences threaten to prematurely end the Biden presidency and transfer the reins of global power back to Trump. Like Ward, they had set out to tell an uplifting story about American global leadership, but at some point they lost the plot.
Bulgaria mentioned!!! 🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬