World roundup: July 20-21 2024
Stories from Yemen, Bangladesh, the United States, and elsewhere
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THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
July 20, 1402: The Battle of Ankara
July 20, 1969: The crew of Apollo 11 carries out the first manned landing on the moon. Very early the following morning, mission commander Neil Armstrong became the first human being (as far as we know, anyway; I don’t want to upset any Ancient Aliens fans) to walk on the lunar surface. Possibly you’ve heard about this before so I don’t think we need to go into much detail.
July 21, 1774: The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca
July 21, 1798: The Battle of the Pyramids
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Writing for POLITICO, two American trauma surgeons, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, describe (in, fair warning, graphic terms) what they encountered while volunteering in Gaza:
In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.
The carnage of course continued unabated over the weekend, with no indication that either Antony Blinken’s goal line ceasefire or the Israeli military’s (IDF) big transition to less intense operations are close at hand. To the former, another POLITICO report has the Israeli negotiating team simply skipping out on “late-stage” ceasefire talks a few days ago without giving a reason. Apparently the Biden administration is super frustrated over this, which I’m sure will manifest in US policy toward this whole situation.
Elsewhere:
The IDF is vaccinating its soldiers to protect them from the polio outbreak that it may have unleashed upon Gaza. It’s also claiming that it’s imported enough vaccine to protect Gaza’s entire population, though how or when any sort of vaccination campaign could be implemented is a total mystery.
At Drop Site News, Yaniv Cogan reports on a think tank plan circulating in the upper levels of the Israeli government that suggests the installation of a “moderate Muslim entity” to administer Gaza in the “day after” period. The plan would call for, among other things, the elimination of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in favor of an Israeli-controlled humanitarian operation, and for Israeli control over Gaza’s media and the content of its school textbooks. The plan’s authors make it clear that punishing Palestinian civilians is one of the keys to achieving the aim of fundamentally reshaping Gazan society. While this is not the plan for Gaza—there is no plan yet—Cogan’s reporting suggests it’s getting a very positive reception among senior Israeli decision makers.
The Biden administration has leaked to (who else) Axios’s Barak Ravid that the idea of sanctioning Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and/or National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was “discussed” at a White House National Security Council meeting on Wednesday. The administration is also frustrated, allegedly, that these two have been undermining US efforts to tamp down on Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. There’s no indication the idea got any further than the discussion phase, but Ben-Gvir is already demanding that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threaten to destroy the Palestinian Authority if Washington goes through with it. I’ve said this before but the PA’s role is managing the nitty gritty of the occupation on Israel’s behalf and doing away with it would run counter to the Israeli government’s interests. Ben-Gvir either doesn’t understand this or doesn’t care. Probably both.
YEMEN
The IDF attacked several targets in the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah on Saturday, killing at least six people, wounding over 80 others, and setting fire to a number of oil storage tanks. The airstrikes were, of course, retaliation for the Houthi drone that hit Tel Aviv on Friday, killing at least one person. The decision to target civilian infrastructure at the main seaport through which humanitarian aid enters northern Yemen is certainly congruous with IDF practice but it’s going to hurt Yemeni civilians a lot more than it hurts the Houthis—whose movement has now been legitimized by having battled both the US (plus the UK) and Israel. The IDF intercepted a Houthi missile bound for Eilat on Sunday but that’s likely just the first of many more attempted strikes to come.
ASIA
BANGLADESH
The Bangladeshi Supreme Court on Sunday drastically scaled back the civil service employment quotas that have fueled several days of deadly violence and protests. The court ordered that just 7 percent of civil service jobs be held in reserve. That breaks down to 5 percent for the descendants of veterans of Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war and 2 percent for other minority categories. Previously 30 percent of those jobs were reserved for veterans’ families alone. Student groups opposed to the previous quota system have faced attacks from police and pro-government counter-demonstrators for the better part of a week, and Bangladeshi authorities have cut telecommunications service, imposed a curfew, and given police “shoot on sight” clearance in an effort to suppress the protests. Over 100 people have been killed and that was before the “shoot on sight” order.
If the protests are still motivated strictly by opposition to the quotas then this ruling should end them. If, however, they’ve shifted to more of a general anti-government sentiment (possibly fueled by the brutality of police and pro-government mobs), then the unrest will likely continue. Only time will tell.
MYANMAR
The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army have agreed to extend their temporary ceasefire with the Myanmar military in Shan state through the end of this month. The two groups, part of the “Three Brotherhood” rebel coalition, had previously agreed to a July 14-18 pause in fighting, but an anonymous TNLA “leader” told AFP that the group was under “pressure” from the Chinese government—which is nervous about conflict so close to its border—to agree to the extension. The third member of the coalition, the Arakan Army, has not agreed to either ceasefire and presumably isn’t under the same pressure since it operates in Rakhine state, nowhere near the Chinese border.
PHILIPPINES
Philippine officials say they’ve reached an agreement with the Chinese government to allow Manila to resupply its makeshift naval base in the disputed Second Thomas Shoal without causing maritime confrontations like the ones that have been regularly happening there for the past several months. It’s unclear from the reporting exactly how this agreement is supposed to work—all the Philippine Foreign Ministry said is that “both sides continue to recognize the need to de-escalate the situation in the South China Sea and manage differences through dialogue and consultation.” That’s nice, but doesn’t seem terribly detailed.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese government, or what passes for one, exchanged ambassadors with Iran over the weekend for the first time in eight years. Khartoum cut ties with Tehran in 2016 in concert with Saudi Arabia, but with the Iranians and Saudis now on better terms the two governments agreed back in October to normalize relations. Iran has reportedly been supplying the Sudanese military with weapons to support its conflict against the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces group.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The Congolese government summoned Uganda’s chargé d’affaires in Kinshasa on Friday over a recent United Nations report alleging that Ugandan military and intelligence officials have been supporting the M23 militant group’s campaign in the eastern DRC. The official, Matata Twaha Magara, rejected the accusation and pointed toward the joint Congolese-Ugandan military operation against the Allied Democratic Forces group as proof of Uganda’s good intentions. It’s unclear whether the UN report alleges systemic Ugandan support for M23 or if that support is limited to a few independent actors.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
The Russian military is claiming that it captured two more Ukrainian villages over the weekend, one in Kharkiv oblast and the other in Luhansk oblast. Russian missile strikes also continued to target Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, particularly in Sumy oblast. With Russia slowly but inexorably continuing to gain territory and the US presidential election up in the air (more on that later), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is now suggesting that Moscow should attend his next planned “peace summit” in November. Zelensky has been holding these summits periodically for the past several months, without Russian participation, to drum up support for his peace plan, which among other things demands a Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory that just doesn’t seem realistic given the state of the conflict. It’s unclear whether Zelensky is genuinely broaching the idea of negotiations or just trying to demonstrate to a future Trump administration that he’s not an obstacle to peace.
SWEDEN
With European governments increasingly considering conscription as a way to bolster their militaries following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there seems to be particular interest in how Sweden’s conscription system operates:
Welcome to Tegeluddsvägen 29A, a nondescript office block on the edge of Stockholm and an emerging must-visit stop for European defense officials trying to figure out how to get more people into uniform.
This conscription testing center, along with two others in Gothenburg and Malmö, will screen 110,000 teenagers this year, call about a quarter of those for physical and mental exams and then draft the best-suited third to serve between nine and 15 months in the military — whether they want to or not.
It is a model designed to restaff a Swedish army hollowed out after the end of the Cold War. The country's leaders were forced into a U-turn after Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea a decade ago, showing that a threat was again rising in the east.
It is a system grabbing attention in major European capitals, including Berlin, London and Amsterdam, where officials are scrambling to find ways to beef up their own depleted forces.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, I assume you’ve heard by now that Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection. Much as I’d like to say his support for the massacre in Gaza is what cost him his job it’s clear that concerns over his age and infirmity were what did the trick. Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, but that’s a discussion for another time. For now we’ll close with the best postmortem I’ve seen so far, from Parapraxis’s Nausicaa Renner:
When Joe Biden received the Democratic nomination in 2020, his acceptance speech was suffused with a sense of the world as a grand battle between light and dark and his own predestiny within that scheme. The speech, like everything Biden, was simultaneously impossibly cliched and also spoke directly to his own traumatic history. “We can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful and more divided. A path of shadow and suspicion. Or we can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light,” Biden said. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
Four years later, Biden’s deftness with death feels sinister and sick rather than healing. At the same time that his sympathy for American deaths and his kindness toward veteran families seeps from his person, his insensitivity for the loss of the “other” is baffling in its brutality. The tens of thousands Israel has murdered in Gaza have been accompanied by Biden’s weak protest of on-background “increasing frustration” with Benjamin Netanyahu and his strong promise that the U.S. will defend Israel to the end.
As Biden’s cognition slipped, the splits in his mind between good and bad, self and other, grew more polarized. He believed he had a duty to run. Paradoxically, we were told we must vote for him and no other option was possible in order to preserve democracy. Some voters bought this; for others, Gaza turned the question of Trump vs. Biden into a morbid battle of atrocities. If we had Biden, then we would have genocide. If we had Trump, then we would have genocide and no abortion. Was this really the grand choice between democracy and fascism? Many did not wish to choose a side at all. Even Biden seemed to sneak out the side door. By announcing in a letter he would not seek reelection, he dodged the chaos caused by the lateness of his own decision.