World roundup: June 17-18 2023
World roundup: June 17-18 2023
Stories from Yemen, China, Sudan, and elsewhere
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THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
June 17, 1462: The Night Attack at Târgovişte
June 18, 1815: Napoleon’s revived imperial dreams run smack into British (with allies) and Prussian armies at the Battle of Waterloo. Spoiler warning for those who are listening to the excellent Age of Napoleon podcast, but this one doesn’t go too well for Napoleon. The French cause was arguably lost when Napoleon defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny two days earlier, which despite the French victory ended with the intact Prussian army retreating in good order such that it was still available to reinforce the British army. At Waterloo, the British, under Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley, were able to hold on long enough for the Prussians to reach them and make a decisive attack that sent the French into retreat. Napoleon abdicated (well, re-abdicated) on June 22 and was forced once again into exile. This time he was sent not to nearby Elba but to distant (and considerably harder to escape) St. Helena, where he died on May 5, 1821.
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
A Yemen Airways flight carried over 270 mostly Hajj-bound Yemenis from Sanaa to the Saudi city of Jeddah on Saturday. This would be a fairly nondescript event were it not for the fact that it was the first direct flight from Sanaa to Saudi Arabia since 2016. The Saudis imposed an air and sea blockade on rebel-controlled northern Yemen in August of that year, but recent progress toward settling the Yemeni civil war has apparently convinced them to start allowing a limited number of flights again. Saturday’s was the first of five planned flights, all predominantly carrying Yemeni pilgrims ahead of the Hajj later this month.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that he plans to resume his judicial overhaul plan in the coming days, after talks with opposition leaders on the subject broke down. Massive public opposition forced Netanyahu to pause his legislative effort to weaken and politicize the Israeli judiciary back in March, but he’d left open the possibility of returning to it should he and the opposition fail to coalesce around an alternative plan. That public opposition does not appear to have dissipated in the interim, so Israel may be heading into some interesting political waters in the near future.
Netanyahu’s cabinet also approved the construction of thousands of new West Bank settlement units on Sunday, granting Finance Minister/settlements guru Bezalel Smotrich broad authority to build new settlements without going through established legal and political channels. The new system gives Smotrich ultimate authority and bypasses a number of stages at which legal objections could be lodged against new construction proposals. Smotrich has already overseen the reopening of the proscribed Homesh settlement for use as a yeshiva, which is probably the preamble to fully reopening and legalizing that community. All of this encroaching West Bank annexation will likely draw some rhetorical criticism from the Biden administration, though there will of course be no substantive blowback from Washington.
IRAN
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud visited Iran on Saturday in another sign of normalizing relations between the two Gulf rivals. It was the first time a senior Saudi official has traveled to Iran since the two countries cut ties with one another back in 2016. Faisal met with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and apparently stressed the kingdom’s desire for improved regional security, particularly maritime security, while also discussing various Business Deals. Iran reopened its diplomatic facilities in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, and while there’s no indication when the Saudis plan to reciprocate Al Jazeera says there have been “unconfirmed reports” of a Saudi diplomatic team working out of a hotel in Tehran until their embassy is finally reopened.
ASIA
INDIA
A heat wave gripping parts of northern and eastern India has contributed to the deaths of at least 96 people in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states over the past few days. The district of Ballia, in Uttar Pradesh, recorded a high temperature of 43 degrees Celsius (109 Fahrenheit) on Sunday, some five degrees higher than normal for this time of year. Most of the deaths have involved individuals over 60 years old and/or suffering from comorbidities, but they start with the high temperatures and given the onset of El Niño conditions this is a pattern that’s likely to repeat around the world this year and for some time to come.
CHINA
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in China over the weekend, and so far his interactions with senior Chinese officials are going about as well as could be expected. In other words, there haven’t been any major breakthroughs but the “New Cold War” belligerents are at least talking to one another. And they apparently plan to keep talking, as Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has reportedly accepted Blinken’s invitation to visit Washington sometime in the foreseeable future. There are more meetings on Blinken’s schedule for Monday but it remains to be seen whether he’ll get any face-time with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Either way, a meeting between Xi and US President Joe Biden is also under discussion.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces agreed over the weekend to another ceasefire, this one for 72 hours as of Sunday morning. The US and Saudi Arabia, who have been jointly mediating truce talks in Jeddah, announced the ceasefire on Saturday night, local time, after a day of heavy shelling and airstrikes in Khartoum saw at least 17 people killed in Khartoum and Omdurman. The ceasefire does appear to have taken hold as planned, which should allow for some delivery of humanitarian aid into the capital region, though whether it will last the entire 72 hours very much remains to be seen.
MALI
The Malian junta’s request that the United Nations withdraw its peacekeeping force (MINUSMA) from Mali forthwith has already met with some resistance from the German government. There are around 1000 German soldiers in Mali at present, attached to the MINUSMA peacekeeping force. The German Defense Ministry issued a statement on Sunday expressing an intention for “a structured exit” to take place by May 2024—not the immediate withdrawal Malian officials are demanding. Although MINUSMA has largely failed to stem the tide of jihadist violence in Mali, its forces have been garrisoning a number of major population centers in the northern part of the country and so there are concerns that a rapid withdrawal could leave those places ripe for militant attacks.
BURKINA FASO
Suspected jihadist militants attacked a village in western Burkina Faso’s Upper Basins region late Friday, killing around 12 people and wounding many more. There’s no indication as to responsibility as far as I can tell.
NIGERIA
Another 13 people were killed over the weekend in more inter-communal violence in central Nigeria’s Plateau state. Five herders were killed on Friday by suspected members of a local farming community. Eight members of that community were subsequently killed in what appears to have been a reprisal attack by herders. Population growth and dwindling resources have intensified farmer-herder competition across much of central Nigeria in recent years, and the situation in Plateau is threatening to spiral out of control with more than 120 dead over roughly the past month.
UGANDA
The Allied Democratic Forces militant group is believed to have been responsible for an attack on a secondary school in the Ugandan border town of Mpondwe late Friday that left at least 41 people dead, most of them students. The attackers are also said to have abducted six people before fleeing across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the ADF is based.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The African peace delegation that visited Ukraine on Friday undertook the second leg of its mission on Saturday, meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The mission’s chief organizer, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, told Putin that “this war has to be ended,” citing its “negative impact on the African continent and indeed, on many other countries around the world.” Putin, as politely as possible I’m sure, appears to have told Ramaphosa and company to get bent. Instead of listening to the delegates’ opening remarks, he opted instead to explain to them why, in his opinion, they were wrong, though in fairness he did also acclaim their “balanced approach” to peacemaking. Given that the delegation also didn’t make any headway in Kyiv the previous day I think it’s fair to conclude their mission was somewhat less successful than perhaps they’d hoped.
UKRAINE
According to a Russian-appointed official in Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast, Ukrainian forces recaptured another village in that province over the weekend. That apparently hasn’t been confirmed independently but assuming it’s correct it adds to the Ukrainians’ small advance since the start of their counteroffensive. Russian defensive works are impeding the Ukrainian advance but it sounds like Russian air superiority is proving to be the biggest hurdle for the Ukrainians. There are indications that the counteroffensive is slowing down as the Ukrainian military reassesses and tries to figure out how to counter this particular imbalance.
Elsewhere, The New York Times put together a piece on Friday laying out the case for Russia having intentionally destroyed the Nova Kakhovka Dam earlier this month. It boils down to seismic and satellite evidence that suggests an explosion from within the dam, most likely from inside a maintenance tunnel running through the structure. Since the dam was under Russian control, and since Russian engineers would have had specs for the facility dating back to the Soviet era, it all paints a fairly plausible picture. There’s no way to confirm it without inspecting the dam’s rubble (and even that might not be conclusive) and to some degree it doesn’t matter—it’s unlikely that any amount of evidence will change any minds and/or force a confession at this point.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, over at The Nation Spencer Ackerman eulogizes Daniel Ellsberg with an account of his formative encounter with the antiwar movement:
Seeing Vietnam up close—not just the human carnage, but also how the foreign policy apparatus absorbed and perpetuated it—broke Ellsberg’s faith in the morality of his enterprise. But it wasn’t until Ellsberg, by then ensconced at Rand, visited Haverford College in August 1969 that his ultimate direction in life was set. That was when Ellsberg attended a conference of the War Resisters’ International, which he described in his 2002 memoir Secrets as a shattering, life-changing experience.
Ellsberg’s account of the conference presents candidly an allergy he had, one shared by many subsequent participants in US foreign policy and national security circles, to the people he attended it alongside. He described his “misgivings about the dogmatic commitment to absolute pacifism I presumed they shared.” Ellsberg no longer supported the Vietnam War, but he hesitated to join ranks with people whose critiques of American foreign policy were more fundamental than his. “My knowledge of such people still came almost entirely from media accounts, overwhelmingly negative, in which they were presented as being, in varying degree, extremist, simplistic, pro-Communist or pro-NLF [National Liberation Front, or the Viet Cong], fanatic, anti-American, dogmatic,” he writes.
But then, at a demonstration outside a trial for draft resister Bob Eaton, he began to feel something else: the “exhilaration” of solidarity. “I had become free of the fear of being absurd, of looking foolish, for stepping out of line,” he recounts.