World roundup: July 22-23 2023
Stories from Yemen, Cambodia, Spain, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
July 22, 1456: The Siege of Belgrade ends
July 22, 1946: Members of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group that was one of the predecessors of the modern Likud party, bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and kill 91 people in the process. Their target was the headquarters of the British mandatory authority and the attack was meant as a response to the British arrest of hundreds of Zionist militants in Operation Agatha in late June. Most Zionist leaders condemned Irgun, which in turn blamed British authorities for not evacuating the hotel despite telephoned warnings about the bomb.
July 23, 1952: Egypt’s 23 July Revolution
INTERNATIONAL
In today’s global news:
Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
Yemeni authorities say they have two suspects in custody in connection with the murder of a World Food Program official in Taiz on Friday, along with ten other people alleged to have been involved somehow in the incident. There’s no indication as to who these people are or what motive they allegedly had, but Yemeni officials have referred to the killing as a “terrorist” act. If that’s not just empty rhetoric it could suggest a link to a group like al-Qaeda or Islamic State.
Elsewhere, the United Nations operation to salvage some 1.1 million barrels of oil from the decaying hull of the stranded tanker FSO Safer, located off of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, is apparently going to begin in earnest this week. Preparatory operations have been underway for about a month and everything is in place to get the oil into another tanker brought in for that purpose, and from there on to land. In the meantime, there is still a major risk of what would be a catastrophic oil spill should the Safer’s hull give way and/or the salvage operation experience a major error. The UN says it’s still trying to raise around $20 million to complete the operation, which I assume is related to salvaging the Safer itself and towing it to a scrapyard.
IRAQ
A former intelligence officer in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Parastin intelligence agency, Mohammed Mirza Sindi, died on Sunday when his car exploded in the city of Dohuk with him in it. Authorities are investigating the blast but it seems reasonable to speculate that an explosive device of some sort was involved. Parastin is linked to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s two dominant political entities. That may be relevant though at this point it’s too soon to know.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man on Saturday in what they claim was an attempted car ramming attack near the West Bank city of Nablus. According to Israeli officials two Palestinians tried to ram a group of soldiers, who opened fire on the vehicle. Palestinian sources, however, including the victims’ families, are rejecting the ramming story and say the Israeli soldiers simply opened fire on the car unprovoked.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had surgery to implant a pacemaker on Sunday, a few days after he was taken to the hospital with what Israeli officials described as “dizziness.” I am certainly not a doctor but I’m pretty sure they don’t go around implanting pacemakers in people for dizziness. But I digress. The procedure comes one day before the Israeli Knesset is set to hold a vote on a piece of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, one that would reduce the Israeli Supreme Court’s authority to overturn laws passed by the legislature. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Jerusalem to renew their opposition to the overhaul, many after having marched to the city from Tel Aviv and other parts of the country. Thousands of Israeli military reservists, including around 1100 air force reservists, are threatening not to report for duty if the overhaul is implemented. The Israeli military is heavily dependent on reservists in several areas, including its air force, so this threat is not one Netanyahu can take lightly.
IRAN
Four police officers in southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province were killed when their patrol came under attack on Sunday. As far as I know there hasn’t been any indication as to the identity of the attackers. Sistan and Baluchistan is plagued by violence from Baluch separatists, Sunni jihadists, and criminal smuggling gangs.
ASIA
THAILAND
Hundreds of people took to the streets of Bangkok on Sunday in anger over the fact that Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat, the ostensible winner of last month’s parliamentary election, has been barred from becoming prime minister. Thai law gives the country’s Senate, whose members are all military appointees, an effective veto over any PM candidate and Limjaroenrat proved unable to win enough senate backing for his candidacy to, and I’m sorry in advance for writing this, move forward. Again, I’m sorry. The eight party coalition Pita formed is now considering its options, one of which may be dumping Move Forward from the coalition and bringing on parties that are ideologically more attuned to the military. The protesters also expressed opposition to that idea.
CAMBODIA
Cambodia’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party claimed a “landslide” victory shortly after polls closed in Sunday’s election. Neither the outcome nor the rapidity of the claim is particularly surprising in that there was no organized opposition running in the election and CPP has won every Cambodian general election since 1998. There are anecdotal reports of a number of people spoiling their ballots, which is a crime under Cambodian law, but no comprehensive figures on that front are available.
The real drama may occur after the election, when Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen could step down after nearly 40 years as either PM or co-PM. His son, Cambodian army commander Hun Manet, is in line to succeed him. Hun Manet’s eventual succession seems a foregone conclusion, but there is some uncertainty as to timing. It’s possibly Hun Sen could step aside in the next couple of months as part of a broader generational transition of power in the cabinet but some analysts have suggested he could stick around as late as 2025 to oversee that transition.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The conflict between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces hit its 100th day on Sunday amid indications that both its civilian death toll and its geographic footprint are expanding. Sudan’s lawyers’ union reported on Saturday that at least 16 civilians had been killed in an exchanges of rocket fire between armed groups in the capital of South Darfur state, Nyala. The country’s doctors’ union, meanwhile, said that shelling in the capital of North Kordofan state, El-Obeid, had killed at least four civilians. There have also been reports of military airstrikes in Sudan’s Gezira state, which is located just south of Khartoum and is currently home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced from the capital region. RSF fighters have apparently begun seizing villages in Gezira, which had hitherto been spared any serious fighting, prompting the airstrikes. There is little to no diplomatic activity at present though both the military and RSF have now reportedly sent negotiating teams back to the Saudi city of Jeddah for a possible resumption of talks.
MALI
The Malian Constitutional Court on Friday confirmed the results of last month’s constitutional referendum, in which official results showed that 97 percent of the voters who turned out (around 40 percent) opted to support a new national charter that cedes greater authority to the country’s president. The new constitution was presumably designed with junta leader Assimi Goïta in mind. Amid Mali’s transition back to ostensibly civilian rule he’ll presumably be engineering his own transition to civilian head of state, in which case I’m sure he’ll appreciate the additional power.
NIGERIA
Violence between herding and farming communities in Nigeria’s Plateau state has reportedly displaced at least 80,000 people since May, in addition to the more than 300 people killed. The Nigerian military began a “special operation” in Plateau over the weekend, which seems unlikely to succeed given the military’s track record in resolving, or rather failing to resolve, violence in the many other troubled parts of Nigeria. Inter-communal violence of this sort has long been a problem in Plateau and across much of central Nigeria, but it has intensified in recent weeks as farmers and herders come into increasingly stiff competition with one another for access to dwindling resources like fertile land and clean water.
KENYA
There are growing concerns that a series of relatively minor al-Shabab attacks in northeastern Kenya portend something much bigger—a shift in the jihadist group’s geographic focus. This rise in the frequency of al-Shabab attacks in Kenya has coincided with a relatively successful campaign against the group in central Somalia, fueled by greater cooperation between the federal Somali government and local/tribal militias. Al-Shabab may be turning its attention to Kenya to retaliate for Kenyan participation in counter-terrorism operations in Somalia (this has fueled past al-Shabab attacks in Kenya), or it may view the Kenya-Somalia border region as a new soft target to exploit.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Another overnight Russian bombardment of Odesa killed at least one person (possibly two people) and left more than 20 injured. The attack also damaged a number of important architectural sites, including the Transfiguration Cathedral. That structure, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was built in the early 19th century, destroyed by the Soviet government in the 1930s, and rebuilt after Ukraine became independent in the 1990s. The Russian military denied striking the cathedral and suggested that an errant Ukrainian air defense missile was responsible.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian military launched a drone strike that hit a Russian “ammunition depot” in Crimea. There’s no report of any casualties but the explosion did force an evacuation of civilians living in the area. And the governor of Russia’s Belgorod oblast, Vyacheslav Gladkov, claimed via Telegram that the Ukrainians had attacked the Russian border village of Zhuravlevka using cluster munitions, which if true would be somewhat awkward given that the US recently supplied such weapons to Ukraine after its leaders pinky swore not to use them against civilians. There’s no confirmation an attack even took place, let alone that it involved cluster munitions.
DENMARK
Another group of European right-wingers burned a copy of the Quran on Friday, this time in Denmark, sparking new outrage across the Islamic world. Hundreds of protesters attempted to march on the Danish embassy in Baghdad on Saturday but do not appear to have made it into the city’s protected “Green Zone.” As with previous demonstrations against the Swedish embassy this incident was organized by Iraqi preacher Muqtada al-Sadr, whose retirement from politics seems to be officially over. The Iranian government, meanwhile, summoned the Danish ambassador in Tehran to lodge a complaint. Speaking of Sweden, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation announced on Sunday that it has suspended that country’s OIC envoy in response to recent protests in Stockholm in which copies of the Quran have been desecrated.
SPAIN
In a bit of a surprise given polling, the emerging right wing People’s Party-Vox coalition has apparently lost Sunday’s Spanish parliamentary election. The People’s Party has “won,” in the sense that preliminary results have it holding a slim lead over Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party, but the coalition combined looks like it will control 169 seats, or seven shy of a majority. The question now is, with his opposition having lost, has Sánchez actually won? With support from the leftist Sumar bloc and other, smaller parties he can probably equal or exceed the size of the PP-Vox bloc, but it remains to be seen whether he can get to 176 seats. Still, he appears to be in better shape than the right wingers, and that’s not how most polling suggested this vote would go.
AMERICAS
GUATEMALA
Hundreds of people marched in Guatemala City on Sunday in opposition to the Guatemalan government’s recent campaign to shut down presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo’s Seed Movement party. Guatemalan Attorney-General María Consuelo Porras is leading an effort to have the party disqualified over alleged fraud in its registration process, though electoral authorities have so far resisted her office’s demands to take action. Arévalo is set to face former First Lady Sandra Torres in next month’s presidential runoff and is viewed as having a strong chance of winning. Speculation is high that members of the very corrupt Guatemalan political establishment are targeting him because of his avowed anti-corruption mission.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Andrew Cockburn argues that fighting wars is not really a priority for the massive US military apparatus:
As originally designed, the Bradley tanks promptly burst into flame when hit with anything much more powerful than a BB pellet, incinerating anyone riding inside. The armor bureaucrats were well aware of this defect, but pausing development for a redesign might have hurt their budget, so they delayed and cheated on tests to keep the program on track. Prior to one test, they covertly substituted water-tanks for the ammunition that would otherwise explode.
Only when Jim Burton, a courageous air force lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon’s testing office, enlisted Congress to mandate a proper live fire test were the army’s malign subterfuges exposed and corrected. His principled stand cost him his career, but the Bradley was redesigned, rendering it less potentially lethal for passengers. Hence, forty years on, the survival of those lucky Ukrainians.
This largely forgotten episode serves as a vivid example of an essential truth about our military machine: it is not interested in war.
How else to understand the lack of concern for the lives of troops, or producing a functioning weapon system? As Burton observed in his instructive 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, the U.S. defense system is “a corrupt business — ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.”