World roundup: February 4 2021
Stories from Yemen, Libya, Italy, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
February 3, 1509: The Battle of Diu
February 3, 1966: The unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 becomes the first man-made object to make a soft, recoverable landing on the moon. The craft then sent back a series of photographs of the lunar surface—obviously the first ever taken from that vantage—before losing contact on February 6.
February 4, 1789: In the inaugural Electoral College in US history, George Washington is elected the first President of the United States. Washington’s election was “unanimous” in the sense that he received the support of at least half of the electors in each of the ten states that participated, for a total of 69 out of 138 votes cast. John Adams finished second with 34 votes and thereby became vice president. New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island didn’t participate—the latter two because they still hadn’t ratified the Constitution, and New York because its legislature failed to choose its slate of electors in time.
February 4, 1861: Representatives of seven US states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—meet in Montgomery, Alabama, to drawn up a preliminary constitution for a new secessionist nation. Texas would soon join once the results of its February 1 referendum were tabulated. The “Montgomery Convention,” as the meeting is sometimes known, formed the basis of the future Confederate States of America.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for February 4:
105,398,991 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (25,882,649 active, +504,908 since yesterday)
2,292,656 reported fatalities (+14,286 since yesterday)
A new report from Freedom House finds that authoritarian governments are increasingly reaching beyond their borders in an effort to suppress dissent abroad:
The project compiled a catalogue of 608 direct, physical cases of transnational repression since 2014. In each incident, the origin country’s authorities physically reached an individual living abroad, whether through detention, assault, physical intimidation, unlawful deportation, rendition, or suspected assassination. The list includes 31 origin states conducting physical transnational repression in 79 host countries. This total is certainly only partial; hundreds of other physical cases that lacked sufficient documentation, especially detentions and unlawful deportations, are not included in Freedom House’s count. Nevertheless, even this conservative enumeration shows that what often appear to be isolated incidents—an assassination here, a kidnapping there—in fact represent a pernicious and pervasive threat to human freedom and security.
Moreover, physical transnational repression is only the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of each physical attack ripple out into a larger community. And beyond the physical cases compiled for this report are the much more widespread tactics of “everyday” transnational repression: digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy, such as the imprisonment of exiles’ families. For millions of people around the world, transnational repression has become not an exceptional tool, but a common and institutionalized practice used by dozens of regimes to control people outside their borders.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
2122 confirmed coronavirus cases (+0)
615 reported fatalities (+0)
In what is easily the biggest and potentially best news of the day, or the past many (many) days, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters ahead of a scheduled speech by Joe Biden that the administration will end US support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen. If this means a comprehensive US withdrawal from the conflict that’s truly fantastic news. I’m hedging a bit because the details are as yet unclear. I’ve seen accounts that say the administration will end US support for “offensive” Saudi operations in Yemen. That qualifier leaves the door uncomfortably cracked for the US to support “defensive” Saudi operations, in which case the question becomes who defines “offensive” and “defensive.” Sullivan talked of a “freeze” in US arms sales to the Saudis and the UAE, which sounds promising though again the details matter. In his speech at the State Department later in the day, Biden didn’t do much to dispel these concerns when he stressed that the US will still help the Saudis “defend” themselves and that the weapons hold will only apply to “relevant” weapons systems—without explaining what that means.
(I went into more detail about this story in a piece for Jacobin that should be published tomorrow morning. I’ve been brief here both because these newsletters are already long enough and because I don’t want to duplicate too much what I wrote in that piece.)
Biden is also reportedly naming Timothy Lenderking, currently a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Near East Bureau, as his new Yemen envoy. I don’t know anything about Lenderking but he’s apparently a career foreign service officer and that’s probably a plus when compared with the background of, say, the Trump administration’s former envoy for Venezuela and Iran. At the very least appointing a Yemen envoy signals some intent to pursue diplomacy rather than farming the whole issue out to the Saudi government as the previous administration did. But it remains to be seen how much pressure Biden is prepared to bring to bear on the Saudis to come to the negotiating table and bargain in good faith.
In full candor, and I think this has come through in the newsletter especially over the past few days, I’ve been skeptical about whether Biden would really take action here and increasingly concerned over the inaction during his first two weeks in office. I’m not exactly hopeful about Yemen yet but I am hopeful that my skepticism was misguided if that makes sense. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the US is only fixing its own grievous error in taking this step, and again those details could be very critical, but there’s real potential for something good to happen here. Not only could it mean a new day for Yemen but it may signal a real commitment on Biden’s part to follow through on his pledge to rethink the US-Saudi relationship, which obviously has much wider implications for the region and for US foreign policy.
In other Yemen news that seems less significant in light of the above, the leader of Yemen’s separatist Southern Transitional Council, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, has suggested to Russian media that an independent southern Yemen—his group’s goal—would be open to normalizing relations with Israel. This seems like a real Hail Mary for Zoubaidi, who is clearly making a play for US support but will almost certainly pay a price for it in terms of the STC’s standing in Yemen. Zoubaidi is a few weeks late—this gambit really might have worked on the Trump administration, but I doubt the Biden administration will be similarly moved.
TURKEY
2,508,988 confirmed cases (+7909)
26,467 reported fatalities (+113)
It’s taken me a while to come around to the idea that the ongoing protests at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University are worth some of our limited newsletter real estate but I think I’m finally convinced:
The demonstrations began earlier this month over, as the video notes, the appointment of one of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pals, Melih Bulu, as university rector. Traditionally, Boğaziçi’s rectors have been chosen from within the university—Bulu is the first outsider appointed to that post since 1980—so this decision was controversial by nature. Erdoğan’s difficulties in winning over younger Turks and Boğaziçi’s historically left-ish leanings as an institution certainly contributed to Bulu’s reception as well.
Erdoğan has taken to calling the demonstrators “terrorists” and “LGBT youth” (which I guess he views as a slur), which has only exacerbated the tension (and the “LGBT” bit, amplified by other officials in Erdoğan’s government, has garnered Turkey some international criticism to boot). Some 319 protesters, mostly students, have been arrested in Istanbul and in Ankara over the past few weeks.
IRAQ
624,222 confirmed cases (+1150)
13,091 reported fatalities (+12)
The Iraqi government appears to be backtracking on the planned closure of at least one of its internally displaced persons camps, a facility called Jadah 5 in the northern part of the country. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi is anxious to shut the camps down, despite having no really accommodations for the people still living in them, because it would be politically advantageous for him to define Iraq’s IDP problem out of existence. But Jadah 5 is something of a special case because it houses thousands of people who have either actual or perceived connections with the Islamic State, which means they’re either too dangerous to release or cannot return home for fear of retaliation by their neighbors.
LEBANON
312,269 confirmed cases (+3107)
3397 reported fatalities (+82)
A prominent Lebanese writer named Lokman Slim was found murdered in southern Lebanon on Thursday. Slim was a frequent critic of Hezbollah and the son of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared to revel in his death on social media (he’s reportedly deleted the offending post and denies it was about Slim), so it’s no surprise that a lot of media reporting on his murder is focusing on that angle. Officially Hezbollah has condemned the killing.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
675,618 confirmed cases (+6744) in Israel, 161,087 confirmed cases (+661) in Palestine
5001 reported fatalities (+53) in Israel, 1865 reported fatalities (+8) in Palestine
Israel’s Joint List, an electoral alliance of four predominantly Arab parties, has split, with one of its members opting to go it alone in what could be a major economic boost for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The United Arab List opted to quit the group because its leadership is amenable to the idea of backing Netanyahu and has apparently been won over by the PM’s campaign pitch to Arab Israelis despite how absurd that entire concept seems on its face. The party isn’t going to win but a small handful of Knesset seats at best in next month’s election, but given how fractured Israeli politics are right now its backing could wind up being critical to Netanyahu’s chances of remaining PM (and, incidentally, out of prison).
In general, right-wing Israeli leaders are, according to Israeli journalists Meron Rapoport and Ameer Fakhoury, “falling over each other to sweet talk Arab citizens” as part of their campaign efforts. All they seem to be asking in return is that those Arabs stop identifying with Palestine:
If current polls bear out, the next Knesset will be one of the most right-wing in history. The 80 MKs expected to serve in right-wing parties (including Sa’ar, Bennett, and Lieberman) will likely sign off on any measure designed to further entrench Israeli annexation and apartheid. Should formal annexation become a possibility again — which does not seem likely under a Biden administration — they will all vote in favor.
In other words, the Israeli right, and Jewish politics in general, is embracing Arabs while trying to erase Palestinians. Jewish Israel is tearing down the walls that have separated it from the Arab world — as evidenced by the thousands of Israelis scrambling to vacation in the United Arab Emirates — while fortifying the walls that keep Palestinians away. Arabs are good, Palestinians are bad.
QATAR
152,898 confirmed cases (+407)
249 reported fatalities (+0)
The International Court of Justice ruled Thursday that it cannot hear a case brought by Qatar over the 2017 blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. The Qataris were seeking damages from the UAE under the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which does seem like a bit of a stretch, and the court upheld the Emirati defense that the blockade was based on nationality, not race, and therefore not covered by the convention.
IRAN
1,445,326 confirmed cases (+7040)
58,256 reported fatalities (+67)
The US Department of Justice has filed a court motion to seize a Greek-owned tanker allegedly hauling some two million barrels of Iranian oil. The owners of the ship, the Achilleas, themselves contacted US authorities over concerns that their ship had been loaded with Iranian product, the sale of which is barred under US sanctions, through ship-to-ship transfer abetted by some fraudulent paperwork.
ASIA
KYRGYZSTAN
84,832 confirmed cases (+70)
1418 reported fatalities (+3)
Little is known about the new constitution Kyrgyz leaders are drawing up, but what is known suggests, according to Eurasianet’s Ayzirek Imanaliyeva, that Sadyr Japarov is looking to greatly enhance his presidential authority:
Kyrgyzstan under President Sadyr Japarov is promising not just a return to strongman rule, but also the aggressive promotion of hazy notions of traditional values and patriotism.
Activists are alarmed that much of this is happening with a minimum of public scrutiny and that basic freedoms are now at risk.
The new-look constitution is the main method by which this objective is being pursued. Voters elected in a January 10 referendum, held alongside the polls that sealed Japarov’s hold on power, to approve a return to super-presidentialism. That will end an uneasy 10-year experiment of a mixed presidential-parliamentary rule that only ever existed on paper.
Among other details, Kyrgyz presidents will allegedly be able to appoint judges, prosecutors, the head of the central bank, and half of the electoral commission, and the office of prime minister will be eliminated and replaced with a sort of hybrid PM/presidential chief of staff post. As if to amplify concerns about the return of largely authoritarian rule, Japarov’s predecessor, Sooronbai Jeenbekov, reportedly left the country this week and is likely now in exile (though there’s been no official confirmation of that).
TAIWAN
919 confirmed cases (+2)
9 reported fatalities (+1)
The Biden administration carried out its first “freedom of navigation” mission through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday. They grow up so fast these days. One day they’re taking the oath of office, the next they’re buzzing Russian airspace in the Baltic Sea, and so forth. Excuse me, I’m feeling a little emotional right now.
NORTH KOREA
No acknowledged cases
The North Korean government has apparently secured a supply of almost two million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine through the World Health Organization’s COVAX distribution program. This seems like an odd move for a country that supposedly hasn’t had a single COVID case but maybe it’s just out of an abundance of caution. Or something like that.
AFRICA
SUDAN
27,500 confirmed cases (+57)
1831 reported fatalities (+1)
Sudan’s interim presidential council, which is wielding executive authority until the country (potentially) holds a general election in 2023, added three new members on Thursday, all leaders of Sudanese rebel groups. They are: Alhadi Idris Yehia from the Sudan Liberation Movement, which is active in Darfur; Malik Agar from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, which is active in southern Sudan; and Al-Taher Abu Bakr Hagar from the Sudan Liberation Forces, a Darfuri rebel coalition. All are affiliated with the Sudan Revolutionary Front umbrella group and their appointments represent a step forward in implementing the peace deal the Sudanese government and SRF signed last year. The SRF should also gain a presence in the interim Sudanese cabinet as well as in the still non-existent interim legislature, though it will be hard to tell with respect to the latter because it’s, you know, non-existent.
LIBYA
122,013 confirmed cases (+770)
1919 reported fatalities (+5)
While Libyan political leaders try to cobble together an interim government to hopefully settle their country’s civil war, a recent report from the UN’s Panel of Experts on the Sudan finds that the UAE has begun dealing directly with Sudanese militias from Darfur that it’s engaged to support Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army,” long a UAE client. This kind of direct contact allows Emirati officials to sideline the increasingly out of favor Haftar and, more troublingly, may give them a means by which to spoil the peace process:
The UAE’s contact with the Sudanese armed groups in Libya, bypassing Haftar’s forces, is seen by some experts as a sign of the country’s appetite for a more hands-on role in the conflict and of growing mistrust of the renegade general.
“I think there’s an argument to be made that they distrust Haftar’s battlefield competence. Many outside backers have [distrusted it], including the Russians,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Haftar’s international backers have stuck by him so far out of concern that eastern Libya could descend further into chaos fueled by fracturing rebel groups in the absence of clear leadership. But in establishing closer direct ties with Sudanese groups in Libya, the UAE could be well positioned to shift its support to another leader, should one emerge.
Though Haftar has only been a reluctant participant in that peace process, if his LNA fragments then the entire diplomatic situation in Libya could go back to square one.
NIGERIA
136,030 confirmed cases (+1340)
1632 reported fatalities (+14)
Nigerian soldiers have reportedly seized “several camps” previously belonging to Islamic State West Africa Province in a region straddling the border of northeastern Nigeria’s Borneo and Yobe provinces. This region is apparently known as the “Timbuktu Triangle,” and before anyone asks I have no idea why. It’s long been a major ISWAP stronghold, but Nigerian authorities now say they’re fully in control of it. That would leave the Lake Chad area alone as ISWAP’s primary home region.
CAMEROON
30,313 confirmed cases (+0)
474 reported fatalities (+0)
According to Human Rights Watch, the Cameroonian army killed nine civilians last month during an operation in the country’s restive anglophone western regions. Cameroonian officials have rejected HRW’s claim and say the operation involved a clash with separatist fighters.
ETHIOPIA
140,157 confirmed cases (+749)
2126 reported fatalities (+4)
International pressure continues to mount on the Ethiopian government to allow international organizations to have broader access to the country’s war-torn Tigray region. On Thursday it was US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressing Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to do so. Of more concern and somewhat buried in that AP article, however, is a report that United Nations humanitarian affairs chief Mark Lowcock has told the UN Security Council that Ethiopian authorities do not control up to 40 percent of the Tigray region and in particular don’t have control over Eritrean military forces that entered Tigray to assist the Ethiopian war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Eritrean soldiers, whose presence in Tigray is still officially denied by both the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments, have been implicated in some of the Tigray conflict’s worst human rights abuses. The idea that they’re freelancing is deeply troubling because it suggests there’s no obvious way to get them to leave.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
3,917,918 confirmed cases (+16,714)
75,205 reported fatalities (+521)
He may be having some trouble with supporters of imprisoned critic Alexei Navalny and with a long struggling Russian economy, but polling suggests Vladimir Putin’s approval rating is staying relatively consistent. A new survey from the pollster Levada finds that 64 percent of Russians are OK with their president’s job performance, down only a single point from the same poll conducted in November. That said, the results may suggest some trouble ahead for the Russian leader, as his approval among young Russians is declining fairly substantially and almost half of Russians aged 18-24 think things are going in the wrong direction.
ITALY
2,597,446 confirmed cases (+13,659)
90,241 reported fatalities (+421)
Former European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi on Thursday began negotiations with Italy’s various political parties in an effort to cobble together enough support to make himself prime minister. At this point his chances of forming a government seem reasonably good, but his chances of actually being able to govern are considerably lower. An array of centrist parties from the center-left Democrats to the center-right Forza Italia seem amenable to a Draghi-led government. The far right League party, the second largest party in the Italian parliament has tentatively signaled some openness and even the Five Star Movement, the largest party in the Italian parliament, has begun to walk back from its earlier rejection of Draghi’s candidacy. The catch is that League leader Matteo Salvini has said his party will not back Draghi if Five Star does, but if all of the centrist parties support Draghi then he will probably need the backing of only one of the two larger parties.
As I say, though, whether Draghi will actually be able to govern with such an internally incoherent coalition supporting him is very much an open question. Political scientist Carlo Invernizzi Accetti suggests the outlook isn’t good for Draghi, nor for anybody else in Italian politics outside of the far right:
The only true beneficiary of the present crisis is the leader of the extreme right anti-establishment Lega, Matteo Salvini. For the time being, he has offered qualified support to Draghi’s nascent executive, thereby making himself essential to its future survival. However, Salvini has also signaled that he only takes this to be a temporary arrangement, intended to confront the most pressing aspects of the present crisis, and then give way to anticipated elections in 2022. All polls show that, if this were to happen, his party would do very well, given the sorry show put up by the other political forces in past weeks.
The most likely immediate scenario, therefore, is a weak and short-lived government, forced to remain within the narrow confines of what a vast array of parties can agree to. After that, a purely far-right coalition, with Salvini at the helm, and the ancillary support of Giorgia Meloni’s neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia and Silvio Berlusconi’s revitalized Forza Italia.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
27,273,890 confirmed cases (+121,627)
466,988 reported fatalities (+3523)
Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Beaucar Vlahos breaks down the non-Yemen portions of Biden’s big foreign policy speech:
In his first major foreign policy address President Biden has announced a return to a global leadership role — a broad declaration for repairing U.S. diplomacy and a reset to the pre-Trump international order.
What was not clear from his somewhat brief remarks today is exactly what that will look like in practice, as the 16 years prior to Trump were marked by U.S. wars and counterterrorism operations in several countries, with an accompanying refugee crisis, and plummeting regard for American influence across the board.
But in Biden’s telling, it was Trump’s destruction of democracy at home, and his eschewing of traditional allies which tarnished our reputation as a model for democracy abroad. Diplomacy is the only way to get it back, he said. “We need to be re-forming the habit of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the last few years of neglect and I would argue, abuse.”
“We have to earn back our leadership position.” But don’t worry, he stressed, “America is back.”
To be honest, America never really left. Trump just peeled some of the mask away for a little while. When Biden says “America is back,” chances are he means that mask is fully on again.