World roundup: February 27-28 2024
World roundup: February 27-28 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
February 27, 1844: A group of leading Dominicans called La Trinitaria declares independence from Haiti. Thus began the 12 year Dominican War of Independence, after which the Dominican Republic was established as an independent nation. Commemorated today as Independence Day in the Dominican Republic.
February 27, 1933: The Reichstag building in Berlin is set on fire one month after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor. Hitler and the Nazis pinned the arson on a communist named Marinus van der Lübbe, either alone or in collaboration with other communists. As far as I know, most historians nowadays believe that van der Lübbe set the fire alone, and that the Nazis manufactured the collaborator scenario to justify an already planned crackdown on communists that allowed them to tighten their grip on power.
February 28, 202 BCE: Former rebel leader Liu Bang is crowned Emperor Gaozu, ending the Chu-Han war and marking the start of the Han Dynasty. The Han ruled China until 220 CE, except for a brief interlude during the years 9-23 CE.
February 28, 1991: US President George H. W. Bush declares that Iraqi forces have withdrawn from Kuwait and announces a ceasefire. Bush’s announcement marked the end of the Gulf War but was only the start of the US obsession with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Joe Biden’s sunny optimism aside, both Hamas and the Israeli government as well as the mediating Qatari government suggested on Tuesday that the parties are not close to agreement on a ceasefire deal. Now, in my admittedly limited experience, any major negotiation like this has a moment before the parties reach a deal where everybody involved throws up their hands and says talks are on the verge of derailing. It’s gamesmanship. So I don’t think you can immediately dismiss Biden’s claim that a ceasefire could be in place by next week. On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that Biden made that claim one day before a Michigan primary in which he was hoping not to be embarrassed by the protest vote over Gaza, and because of that he and his administration have had every incentive to overstate whatever progress has been made. So I also don’t think you can believe anything they’re saying. The bottom line is that if, as Al Jazeera reports, Hamas is still insisting on an indefinite ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, a deal is unlikely.
Elsewhere:
In Gaza, the official death toll is close to 30,000 and may surpass it by the time you read this. The actual death toll is likely higher, and may include an unknown number of people who have by now starved to death amid Gaza’s increasingly dire humanitarian situation. The United Nations estimates that at least one-quarter of the territory’s population, or some 576,000 people, is now “one step away from famine,” particularly among those trapped in northern Gaza. One-sixth of Gazan children under the age of two are believed to be suffering from “acute malnutrition” and children are among those dying of starvation. Only a ceasefire that requires the Israeli government to stop blocking aid shipments can ameliorate this catastrophe.
According to Reuters, Hezbollah is prepared to stop shooting at Israel in the event of a Gaza ceasefire. I’m not sure this qualifies as a big scoop, given that Hezbollah already stopped shooting at Israel during the previous Gaza ceasefire, but it probably is worth mentioning.
Israeli forces killed at least three Palestinians during a raid in a refugee camp near the West Bank town of Tubas on Tuesday. Israeli officials are claiming that one of the three was a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad figure and the other two were also militants. According to camp officials only one of the three could be characterized as a “militant.” Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 403 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7.
At Axios, Barak Ravid’s US and Israeli sources have told him that the Biden administration has asked the Israeli government to sign a letter by the middle of next month giving “assurances” that the IDF “will abide by international law while using US weapons and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.” That should fix everything. The request is in keeping with the national security memorandum the administration issued earlier this month obliging recipients of US arms to adhere to US standards on international law and humanitarian considerations. It’s supposed to convince voters that the administration is Doing Something about the massacre in Gaza, hoping they’ll overlook the fact that the administration could have Done Something about that at any time over the past four and a half months and has steadfastly refused. I assume the Israelis will sign the letter, ignore it, and never hear about it again.
SYRIA
The Syrian government and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights are saying that the Israeli military carried out a new round of attacks near Damascus on Wednesday. At time of writing there was no word on casualties. Meanwhile, a Turkish drone strike on Wednesday killed at least three Syriac Security Office (Sutoro) personnel and one civilian (according to the SOHR) near the town of Malikiyah in northeastern Syria’s Hasakah province. Sutoro, a Christian paramilitary group, is affiliated with the Syrian Democratic Forces group, which the Turkish government regards as a hostile force. The Turkish state media outlet Anadolu Agency has also reported that Turkish forces killed a Kurdish YPJ militia fighter in Qamishli on Tuesday. Allegedly she had been involved in attacks against Turkish forces in Syria and against targets on the Turkish side of the border.
“Pro-government forces” killed one protester and wounded another in the southern Syrian city of Suwayda on Wednesday. Suwayda has been seeing off-and-on demonstrations for several months over economic conditions and particularly cuts to government fuel subsidies. This is the first time a protester has been killed since these demonstrations began back in August.
IRAN
The Biden administration on Tuesday blacklisted Mohammad Reza Fallahzadeh, the deputy commander of Iran’s Quds Force unit, as well as a Houthi militia commander and the owners of a vessel allegedly used to sell Iranian goods in violation of US sanctions. The UK government also added five entries to its Iran blacklist and one to its Houthi blacklist.
On Friday, Iranian voters will go to the polls to elect a new parliament and a new Assembly of Experts. Or at least some of them will, maybe. Neither of these bodies has a huge amount of power, though the Assembly of Experts is in theory the body that will appoint Iran’s next supreme leader (key stakeholders will almost certainly arrange that appointment before it gets to the assembly). More to the point, like all Iranian elections these races are predetermined by a political infrastructure that winnows out any ideologically unacceptable candidates ahead of time. So the outcome is not all that interesting. However, Iranian leaders have long used turnout as a proxy for public support, and high turnout elections give them some data with which to counter Western criticisms of Iran’s political system. So it comes as no surprise that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a speech to newly registered voters on Wednesday calling on people to get out there and vote. The noncompetitive nature of the contest probably isn’t going to inspire a lot of enthusiasm, but we’ll see.
ASIA
ARMENIA
Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman reports that the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments may be making progess toward a very stepped-down accord in which they would mutually recognize one another diplomatically but without resolving any of the issues causing tension in their relationship. The simple reason for this is that talks on resolving those issues—like delineating the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, or managing Azerbaijan’s demand for a corridor to its Nakhchivan exclave—have gone nowhere, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan views a vague diplomatic accord as a way to at least put off a war he seems increasingly to think is imminent. The two countries’ foreign ministers were supposed to meet in Berlin on Wednesday but I haven’t seen any indication as to how it went.
PAKISTAN
A police raid on a Pakistani Taliban (TTP) facility in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Tuesday sparked a shootout that left one police superintendent and two TTP fighters dead.
NORTH KOREA
South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik claimed on Tuesday that the North Korean government has sent Russia some 6700 containers of ammunition since September, a haul that could contain upwards of 3 million 152mm artillery shells though presumably it includes an array of munitions and not just one single type. North Korean munitions factories are apparently working at maximum capacity—given limitations on electricity, tools, materials, etc.—to churn out weapons for the Russian military’s use in Ukraine. In return, Moscow has been sending North Korea parts and materials, but mostly Shin said it has been sending…food.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that the Western program of trying to strangle the North Korean economy and thus starve the North Korean people over the past 18 years has been a failure, but imagine if the US had made a point of ensuring that North Korea was able to import ample food for its population. Seems there’s at least some chance that would have stopped Pyongyang from providing material support to the Russian military in what surely is a blow to US interests, doesn’t it? And even if it wouldn’t have done that, what’s the downside? That a bunch of North Koreans might have eaten better? Heaven forfend!
OCEANIA
TUVALU
New Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feleti Teo and his cabinet officially took office on Wednesday promising to maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The question of possibly shifting relations to Beijing loomed behind Tuvalu’s parliamentary election last month and Teo’s position was hitherto unknown. Tuvalu is one of 12 countries that still recognize Taiwan. The new government’s “Statement of Priorities” also indicates an intention to renegotiate a climate change treaty Tuvalu negotiated with Australia last year that would allow Tuvaluans to move to Australia to escape rising sea levels but that also gives the Australian government the power to veto future Tuvaluan security agreements with other countries (including, of course, China). That treaty hasn’t been ratified yet and it raised hackles in Tuvalu when it was announced over its implications for the country’s sovereignty.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Foreign Affairs’ John Prendergast looks at the outside players fueling conflict in Sudan:
It may be tempting to think of this tragedy as another episode in a multidecade conflict. The main combatants—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that the SAF organized out of the militias known as the Janjaweed—also helped drive the war in Darfur 20 years ago. That war prompted the twenty-first century’s first genocide, and genocidal violence has now returned to the Darfur region. In 2023, after the RSF turned on its former army benefactors and began taking over large swaths of Sudan, the United States partnered with Saudi Arabia to try to secure a cease-fire.
But these U.S. efforts failed, in part because the Sudanese civil war is not merely a reprise of old tensions. New players have joined the fray—international actors whose contributions to the violence both complicate the conflict and provide fresh opportunities to resolve it. Middle Eastern countries see especially tempting opportunities to exploit Sudan’s natural resources, access its ports along the Red Sea, use it as a base to combat the Houthis in Yemen, quash pro-democracy efforts, and strengthen the hand of Islamist or anti-Islamist groups. The illicit exporting of gold has become a particularly major source of funding for the war: Egypt is now buying gold originating from areas controlled by Sudan’s army. The United Arab Emirates has become a destination point for gold mined from RSF-controlled areas, and the country is allegedly delivering weapons to the RSF. Russia’s Wagner paramilitary company also facilitates large-scale purchases of RSF-controlled gold and provides the RSF with military aid such as surface-to-air missiles.
SENEGAL
Senegalese President Macky Sall’s “national dialogue” has settled on June 2 as the new date for the country’s postponed presidential election. It seems The Gang decided that it would be impossible to arrange a legitimate vote by April 2, Sall’s ostensible last day in office. Which means that under this plan Senegal would need to find an interim head of state for that two-month gap and-well, go figure, at least one of the participants in the dialogue has suggested extending Sall’s term. Sall himself would never dream of such a thing and has insisted he intends to leave office as scheduled. But, you know, twist his arm and maybe he’ll grudgingly agree to help Senegal out of this jam—a jam that he created, but enough about that. And who knows, maybe June won’t work out so well either. These things can be hard to predict.
GUINEA
Guinean unions suspended their general strike on Wednesday after the country’s military junta released an imprisoned union leader who’d previously been arrested for protesting against censorship. Securing his release was apparently one of the main goals of the strike, but union grievances around high food prices, low civil service wages, and the aforementioned censorship remain extant and could prompt a revival of the strike at some point. On Tuesday the junta named a veteran opposition politician named Mamadou Oury Bah as Guinea’s new prime minister, replacing the PM it sacked last week. Bah Oury, as he’s popularly known, had called on the unions to stand down and will now be tasked with managing those economic grievances as well as a potential transition back to some semblance of civilian rule.
NIGERIA
Nigerian unions began their own nationwide strike on Tuesday over rising prices. President Bola Tinubu has pursued a type of economic shock therapy that has resulted in the devaluation of the naira and the elimination of the government’s fuel subsidy program. Last fall his government responded to similar labor unrest by promising to implement wage increases and emergency stipends for particularly vulnerable families. It has apparently not followed through on those promises.
CHAD
Chad’s ruling junta is blaming an opposition group called the “Socialist Party Without Borders” (PSF) of attacking the offices of Chad’s National State Security Agency (ANSE) in N’Djamena on Tuesday in an incident that left “several” people dead. PSF is singing a much different tune, however, claiming that ANSE personnel arrested and then summarily executed one of the party’s members and then opened fire on a group of other party members when they approached the facility.
Prior to the ANSE incident the junta had announced that it’s planning to hold the country’s next presidential election, one of the key milestones on Chad’s transition back to its own semblance of civilian rule, in May with a runoff (if necessary) the following month. Junta leader Mahamat Déby intends to run in that election and will presumably “win.” Among the candidates he’ll be facing is PSF leader Yaya Dillo.
MOZAMBIQUE
A new wave of jihadist violence in northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province has reportedly displaced more than 67,000 people over the past several weeks, more than two-thirds of them women and children according to UNICEF. The reason for the abrupt uptick in attacks is unclear but according to one analyst interviewed by Reuters jihadists have carried out in just the first two months of the year over half as many attacks as they carried out in the whole of 2023. Cabo Delgado has been facing a jihadist insurgency since 2017 involving a group that is believed to be linked to Islamic State via its Central Africa affiliate.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
This week’s G7 finance ministers meeting in Brazil reportedly failed to reach consensus on perhaps its most significant discussion, the question of whether frozen Russian assets can legally be put toward supporting Ukrainian rearmament and/or recovery. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pitched the idea of at least a partial Russian asset seizure to a skeptical audience. As enthusiasm for spending Western money on Ukraine wanes there is a growing appetite for spending Russian money instead. But there also seem to be some deep-seated concerns about opening what could be a very big can of worms—chief among them the fear that seizing Russian assets in this way will prompt other…oh, let’s say “unsavory” actors around the world to get their own assets out of Western institutions where they could similarly wind up being seized. A possible compromise could be to devote any revenues generated by those assets to Ukraine while leaving the principal alone.
LATVIA
The Latvian government announced on Tuesday that it’s extending a ban on Russian tourists entering the country until at least March 4, 2025. It imposed that ban alongside Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland in September 2022 over alleged security threats. Russians with valid residency permits or humanitarian needs will still be allowed entry.
UKRAINE
According to CBS News, Russian attacks on the Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar have picked up recently, which may indicate that it’s become a new target for Russian forces now that they’ve secured control of Avdiivka. Chasiv Yar is located around 80 kilometers or so north of Avdiivka and is less than 20 kilometers west of Bakhmut, but more to the point it sits between the current Russian position and the city of Kramatorsk, which Moscow would definitely like to take.
You may recall that French President Emmanuel Macron mused on Monday that sending Western military forces to Ukraine can’t “be ruled out.” It probably will not surprise you to learn that Western leaders have spent the past two days frantically walking away from that comment. Leaders from Czechia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US, as well as NATO collectively, have all disavowed any plans to send troops to Ukraine and even French officials have specified that Macron wasn’t talking about sending combat forces. Macron was apparently hoping to create some uncertainty for Moscow but instead he created a panic among his own allies.
Of course, the discourse around Macron’s comment elides the fact that there are Western forces in Ukraine. We learned last year that the US has special forces in Ukraine, or at least did at the time, though US officials insisted that they were nowhere near combat and were simply detailed to the US embassy. And The New York Times reported over the weekend about the extent of US intelligence cooperation with the Ukrainian military, which isn’t boots on the ground exactly but does seemingly blur the distinction between “combatant” and “non-combatant” even more than all the arms shipments.
DENMARK
The Danish government has closed its investigation into the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea back in September 2022. Apparently it’s concluded that the pipes were definitely sabotaged but that there isn’t enough evidence to support a prosecution. A cynical person might suggest that what this really means is that they couldn’t pin the sabotage on Russia so they decided to drop the matter, but as I’m not a cynical person I won’t do that. The Swedish government earlier this month closed its own investigation on jurisdictional grounds, leaving the German government as the only body still investigating the attack. German media has suggested that a group connected with Ukraine was responsible.
AMERICAS
MEXICO
The campaign ahead of Mexico’s June 2 election doesn’t kick off officially until Friday, but on Tuesday two candidates for mayor of the town of Maravatío were murdered in a matter of hours. Unsurprisingly, criminal gangs are believed to have been behind the killings, but regardless of who was responsible the killings are further raising fears that this could be an extraordinarily violent campaign season.
UNITED STATES
Finally, TomDispatch’s William Hartung takes aim at the shoddy economic thinking that gets trotted out to defend sky-high military budgets:
The official story about military spending and the economy starts like this: the massive buildup for World War II got America out of the Great Depression, sparked the development of key civilian technologies (from computers to the internet), and created a steady flow of well-paying manufacturing jobs that were part of the backbone of America’s industrial economy.
There is indeed a grain of truth in each of those assertions, but they all ignore one key fact: the opportunity costs of throwing endless trillions of dollars at the military means far less is invested in other crucial American needs, ranging from housing and education to public health and environmental protection. Yes, military spending did indeed help America recover from the Great Depression but not because it was military spending. It helped because it was spending, period. Any kind of spending at the levels devoted to fighting World War II would have revived the economy. While in that era, such military spending was certainly a necessity, today similar spending is more a question of (corporate) politics and priorities than of economics.
In these years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.
Perhaps most shockingly, the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, even as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports that it now accounts for 40% of the world’s — yes, the whole world’s! — military spending. That’s four times more than its closest rival, China. In fact, it’s more than the next 15 countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies. It’s long past time for a reckoning about what kinds of investments truly make Americans safe and economically secure — a bloated military budget or those aimed at meeting people’s basic needs.