World roundup: March 11 2021
Stories from Yemen, Myanmar, Russia, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
March 10, 241 BC: A Roman fleet under Gaius Lutatius Catulus and Quintus Valerius Falto defeats a Carthaginian fleet at the Battle of the Aegates, just off the west coast of Sicily. The Carthaginians outnumbered the Roman fleet, but their ships were encumbered with supplies bound for the Carthaginian army on Sicily, and their sailors were inexperienced at combat. The Roman victory upheld their blockade on Sicily, and rather than build a new fleet the Carthaginian Senate instead ordered its commander on the island, Hamilcar Barca (father of Hannibal) to negotiate a treaty with the Romans. The ensuing Treaty of Lutatius ended the First Punic War, forcing Carthage to abandon Sicily and pay a war indemnity to Rome. Hamilcar spent the rest of his life hating Rome and, suffice to say, passed that feeling on to his son.
March 10, 1861: The Toucouleur Empire of Omar Saidou Tall conquers the city of Ségou, bringing an end to the already reeling Bamana Empire and consolidating much of West Africa (modern Guinea, Mali, and Senegal) under Omar Tall’s control. Although it was riding high at this point, the Toucouleur Empire’s further expansion was stymied by the Fula Massina Empire to the north, and by the 1890s it was swept aside by French colonization.
March 10, 1916: The British high commissioner for Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, pens the tenth and final letter in his exchange with Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Over the course of those ten letters the two men established the conditions under which Hussein would lead an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Britain reneged on its promises to support the creation of a single “Arab Caliphate,” ceding Syria to France (though McMahon did caution that France had interests in Syria and that Britain couldn’t entirely dispose of them) and most of Palestine to Zionism (though it’s hard to determine exactly what Britain promised Hussein with respect to Palestine).
March 11, 1784: The British East India Company and Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India, negotiate the Treaty of Mangalore, bringing the Second Anglo-Mysore War to a close. The 1780-1784 conflict saw Tipu Sultan and his father/predecessor, Hyder Ali (who died in 1782) win several early victories against the East India Company before the EIC counterattacked and fought back to a stalemate. When the American Revolutionary War ended and Britain made peace with Tipu Sultan’s ally, France, in 1783, London sent word demanding that the EIC wrap things up and so it negotiated this treaty, which returned things to the status quo ante bellum. A third Anglo-Mysore War in 1790-1792 ended in a decisive EIC victory that crippled Mysore, and the fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1798-1799 finished the kingdom off for good.
March 11, 1917: British forces capture Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for March 11:
119,100,965 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (21,745,430 active, +476,825 since yesterday)
2,640,992 reported fatalities (+9618 since yesterday)
In today’s global news:
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told the UN Security Council on Thursday that his organization needs to raise $5.5 billion in order to avert “conflict-driven famines” affecting as many as 34 million people around the world. The problem is particularly acute in the Congo, the Sahel, South Sudan, and Yemen, where millions of people have tipped or are about to tip over the edge from “at risk of famine” to “famine.”
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
2667 confirmed coronavirus cases (+40)
667 reported fatalities (+6)
Related to the story above, a new CNN investigation looks into the causes of famine in Yemen:
Yemen has stepped up to the precipice of famine, and back again, many times over its six years of war. Now, famine conditions not seen in the country for two years have returned to pockets of the country.
An estimated 47,000 people are likely to be living with "catastrophic" levels of food insecurity -- or famine-like conditions -- according to an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's authority on food security. A further 16 million are living in either "crisis" or "emergency" food security conditions, the analysis shows. That's more than half of Yemen's population.
The rapidly deteriorating situation is the result mostly of funding cuts that have battered activities by agencies like the World Food Programme, which is struggling now to meet the most basic of needs for millions of Yemenis, particularly in the country's north.
But it has also been exacerbated by a mounting fuel crisis. Staff at the hospital in Abs, where baby Hassan lost his life, say they will have to shut in less than three weeks if they don't receive more funding and fuel to keep their generators going. It's the same story all over the north.
That fuel shortage has affected the medical facilities where starving Yemenis seek help, but more directly than that it’s stranded “hundreds” of trucks that could be used to distribute food aid were their gas tanks not empty. And that shortage is mostly the result of the Saudi naval blockade, which has been backstopped by the US Navy. Now, the WFP’s funding for northern Yemen has been cut in part because of Houthi interference with aid distribution, so there’s blame to go around. But the Saudis—and the United States—bear a large portion of it.
On the plus side, I guess, the US State Department claimed on Thursday that there’s been some “hopeful progress” toward a Yemeni ceasefire. US Yemen envoy Timothy Lenderking just wrapped up a Middle East tour during which, unsurprisingly, the issue of a ceasefire was prominently featured on the agenda. The department’s remarks were notable for the lack of any actual detail, so who knows if it actually reflects genuine progress or just some PR for Lenderking’s trip.
JORDAN
457,151 confirmed cases (+8300)
5169 reported fatalities (+63)
Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah had his planned visit to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on Wednesday canceled. According to Jordanian officials, the cause was some sort of dispute with Israeli authorities over the prince’s itinerary. They haven’t gone into details but are alleging that the Israeli action somehow violated Jordanian custodianship over the Aqsa site (by treaty, Israel recognizes a rather vaguely defined “role” for the Jordanian monarchy in administering the site). The visit was to have been Hussein’s first to the site and clearly intended to burnish his profile as Jordan’s heir apparent.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
814,250 confirmed cases (+2758) in Israel, 203,669 confirmed cases (+1291) in Palestine
5967 reported fatalities (+17) in Israel, 2211 reported fatalities (+18) in Palestine
The dispute over Hussein’s canceled visit widened on Thursday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to cancel what was supposed to be his first official visit to the United Arab Emirates. Israeli officials claim this was because the Jordanian government delayed granting his scheduled flight permission to cross Jordanian airspace. The Jordanians eventually did grant that permission but only after the Israelis had canceled the trip. Jordanian officials haven’t commented on any linkage between these two incidents, and I think it’s worth noting that Netanyahu’s wife was hospitalized with appendicitis on Thursday, but the official story at least is that he was prepared to fly to the UAE regardless of her ill health.
Hamas officials in Gaza are now claiming that a still-indeterminate explosion on Sunday that killed three Palestinian fishermen was caused by an Israeli drone that was floating off the Gaza coast. They’re suggesting it crashed during an Israeli attack on Gazan fishermen last month while still carrying part of its explosive payload. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights had previously claimed that the boat was struck by an artillery shell or rocket fired by Gazan militants during a “training” session. The Israeli military hasn’t commented.
ASIA
MYANMAR
142,114 confirmed cases (+41)
3201 reported fatalities (+1)
Another day of violence from Myanmar’s security forces left at least 12 anti-junta protesters dead across the country. At least eight people were killed in one protest in the town of Myaing when police apparently opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators. UN investigator Thomas Andrews told the body’s Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday that the junta and its security forces have now killed over 70 people. It’s unclear whether he was including Thursday’s casualties in that count. Meanwhile, the junta piled more charges on ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This time it’s accusing her of corruption over allegedly accepting some $600,000 in “personal payments” while in office. This is the most serious of the charges the junta has leveled at Suu Kyi since last month’s coup.
The junta on Thursday decided to take the Arakan Army, a Buddhist separatist group based primarily in Rakhine state, off of the government’s list of terrorist groups. The AA has been active since 2009 but really intensified its insurgency over the past couple of years. The junta says AA has ceased its attacks, though I suspect it’s taking the group off of the list to try to find some domestic support and maybe put on a kinder face for the international audience. Myanmar is awash in rebel groups, and while some have criticized the coup none of them had any great love for the civilian (well, semi-civilian) government that preceded it.
AFRICA
SUDAN
28,984 confirmed cases (+218)
1940 reported fatalities (+25)
Sudan’s interim government on Wednesday pardoned and released imprisoned Janjaweed militia leader Musa Hilal. During the height of the conflict in Darfur militias loyal to Hilal are believed to have committed some of the worst atrocities against the region’s non-Arab population. He was eventually imprisoned after a falling out with then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, but he remains a prominent figure in Darfur’s paramilitary milieu and his release is probably part of the interim government’s efforts to mend ties with Sudan’s array of militias.
TUNISIA
239,977 confirmed cases (+609)
8313 reported fatalities (+21)
Two Tunisian children were reportedly killed and a woman wounded in a landmine blast in western Tunisia’s Kasserine region on Thursday. That part of the country has long been a refuge for militants.
ALGERIA
114,851 confirmed cases (+170)
3028 reported fatalities (+2)
Algerian President Abelmadjid Tebboune has scheduled an early parliamentary election for June 12 as part of a wider effort to appease anti-government protesters in the recently revived Hirak movement. That vote will be held under a new electoral law that’s intended to respond to protester demands for greater choice of candidates and stronger anti-corruption measures. Nevertheless this election is unlikely to meaningfully satisfy the goals of the movement.
NIGERIA
159,933 confirmed cases (+287)
2001 reported fatalities (+8)
Three separate bandit raids in Nigeria over the past two days have left at least 31 people dead. On Tuesday, attackers struck a village in Niger state, killing at least one person. Then on Wednesday, one group of bandits attacked a village in Nasarawa state, killing at least 17, and another group attacked a village in Zamfara state, killing at least 13. There’s no indication that any of these attacks was connected with any of the others apart from a few basic details common to most of these sorts of incidents. All seem to have involved a substantial amount of looting in addition to the killing.
ETHIOPIA
171,210 confirmed cases (+1332)
2483 reported fatalities (+17)
The AP reports on an emerging new development in the Tigray region’s humanitarian crisis:
For months, one great unknown in the Tigray conflict has been the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in vast rural areas beyond the reach of outside aid. With the region largely cut off from the world since November, fears of violence and starvation have grown.
Now those people are starting to arrive, many by foot, in the community of Shire, aid workers who are there and who have visited say. The Associated Press obtained permission to use rare photos largely from the International Rescue Committee of the dire conditions facing these displaced people. Photos from the region have been hard to come by, with electricity cut for much of the conflict and ethnic Tigrayans telling the AP that being caught with photos endangered their lives.
Some 5,000 people had arrived between last Wednesday and Sunday, and humanitarian teams are being sent to find those said to be on the way, Oliver Behn, general director for Doctors Without Borders-Holland, told the AP.
“They are coming in very bad conditions … very exhausted, dehydrated, skinny,” Behn said after a visit. “It’s becoming a desperate situation very quickly.”
EUROPE
RUSSIA
4,360,823 confirmed cases (+9270)
90,734 reported fatalities (+459)
Georgetown University’s Anatol Leiven isn’t thrilled by reports that the United States is planning to carry out cyber attacks against Russia, and not only because those reports make a mockery of Washington’s insistence that it respects international rules regarding cyber activities:
More importantly, the planned action reflects two very serious errors in judgement, which left unchecked, could increase in scope under the new Biden administration. The first is a tendency, amplified by much of the U.S. media, to attribute blame to Russia for negative developments based on inadequate evidence, which the American public is hardly given a chance to view or assess. Furthermore, there is a proclivity to base U.S. policy on information that may be unclear, exaggerated, or simply untrue.
Concerning the SolarWinds hack, U.S. intelligence services can only say that the Russian state was “most probably” or “very probably” to blame for the hack. The New York Times has reported this as a certainty, but it is in fact extremely difficult to pin down for certain the national origins of such hacks, and even more difficult to determine if they were the work of state forces or independent actors. We may well reasonably assume that Russian intelligence services were responsible, but action of the kind that the Biden administration is contemplating should be based on something more than probability.
The second error, as I pointed out in Responsible Statecraft on January 13, and as has been argued since in a paper by Major Juliet Skingsley for Chatham House in London, and in Wired by Andy Greenberg, is the use of the phrase “cyberattack,” reflecting an extremely dangerous confusion between cyber espionage and cyber sabotage.
The SolarWinds hack was an act of espionage, which is something countries do to one another routinely. But because the terminology around such actions is immature, it gets termed an “attack,” no different from a hack that actually caused material damage to infrastructure or the like. The latter kind of hacking, the sabotage kind, could be considered a casus belli, and if the US carries out an act or acts of sabotage against Russia it won’t represent an appropriate response to SolarWinds, it will represent an inappropriate escalation.
This is neither here nor there, but it might be worthwhile to start drawing some clear distinctions between these two categories of hacking before they get further conflated. Just a thought.
BELARUS
298,960 confirmed cases (+837)
2070 reported fatalities (+7)
The Polish and Belarusian governments are engaged in a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats that escalated on Thursday when two Polish diplomats were booted out of Belarus. Minsk got the ball rolling earlier this week, expelling a Polish diplomat who had apparently participated in an event honoring Polish World War II resistance fighters whom the Belarusian government considers to be war criminals. The Polish government then responded in kind on Wednesday, leading to Thursday’s expulsions by Belarus. At this rate, within another week or so neither country will have any diplomats left in the other. The Polish-Belarusian relationship is already pretty frosty these days due to the Polish government’s support for protesters who have been calling for the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
UKRAINE
1,425,522 confirmed cases (+9084)
27,685 reported fatalities (+262)
The Ukrainian government announced that one of its soldiers was killed by small arms fire in a village outside the eastern separatist capital of Donetsk on Thursday. That makes nine Ukrainian soldiers killed along or near the front line in eastern Ukraine in a bit under a month. At this point there are no new peace talks scheduled, and while the Ukrainian government has publicly called for new talks the Russian government says it has yet to receive any formal proposal from Kyiv.
DENMARK
218,660 confirmed cases (+862)
2384 reported fatalities (+2)
The Danish government on Thursday became one of several European governments to suspend distribution of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine due to concerns over potentially serious side effects. The governments of Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Norway have all taken similar steps amid reports that some recipients of the AstraZeneca vaccine have subsequently developed blood clots. European Union regulators are insisting that the vaccine is safe to use and at this point any link between the vaccine and the clotting problem does not appear to have gotten past the theoretical/anecdotal stage.
AMERICAS
COLOMBIA
2,290,539 confirmed cases (+4579)
60,858 reported fatalities (+85)
At World Politics Review, the International Crisis Group’s Elizabeth Dickinson is not a fan of the Colombian government’s plan to resume the aerial spraying of coca crops:
However, there is little evidence to suggest that this strategy will work. In the years since the Colombian government signed the landmark 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the country’s largest guerrilla group, better known as the FARC—it has become increasingly clear that coca eradication is the wrong remedy for Colombia’s problems. As they have before, these policies may temporarily suppress coca cultivation levels, but they will do little to reduce the economic incentives of a crop that offers poor farmers a reliable price and guaranteed buyers.
They also backfire when it comes to improving rural security. The eradication operations are dangerous both for the military and for growers, as troops come into direct confrontation with civilian farmers as they pull up crops. Given no alternative from the state, eradication pushes rural communities to side with the traffickers in order to protect their livelihoods. Ministry of Defense figures show more than 1,800 clashes took place last year between cultivators and soldiers. Officials in Bogota argue their goal is to reclaim far-flung areas from the control of criminal groups, but the hostilities provoked by eradication may well make that harder to achieve.
UNITED STATES
29,925,902 confirmed cases (+62,773)
543,721 reported fatalities (+1531)
Finally, the Biden administration is at least rhetorically expressing support for the idea of scrapping the 2001 (post-9/11) and 2002 (pre-Iraq War) Authorizations to Use Military Force, which have provided the shaky legal underpinnings for the entire subsequent “War on Terror,” and replacing them with something that is more “narrow and specific” that is more responsive to the global environment of 2021 than of 2001. While the administration obviously wants to frame this as a noble act of sacrifice by a president who recognizes how far off the rails the “War on Terror” has gone, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt argues that there are some savvy political reasons for Biden to prefer a new AUMF:
Second, even as president, Biden has an interest in getting Congress to take greater ownership over the United States’ far-flung military activities. When presidents can treat prior authorizations as a blank check to justify whatever they want the military to do, members of Congress can sit back and criticize their decisions without having to take responsibility themselves. Doves can complain that presidents are misusing their authority and leading us into pointless quagmires, and hawks can express their outrage whenever a president fails to take some military action they favor. By contrast, when members of Congress actually have to vote for or against an authorization to use force, they can be held responsible for their decision—and sometimes with telling effects. The presidential hopes of former Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, took a fatal hit when he opposed the Gulf War (which ended in a military triumph), and Sen. Hillary Clinton’s decision to support the 2002 AUMF authorizing the invasion of Iraq played no small part in her defeat by Obama (who had opposed the war) in 2008. At the very least, such circumstances force legislators to pay attention to what their constituents want.
If Biden wants to make it harder for members of Congress to carp from the sidelines, asking them to negotiate and then vote for (or against) a new AUMF is a canny move. But that’s also why getting a new agreement won’t be easy; members of Congress will undoubtedly be reluctant to be put on the spot. Obama spoke openly of his desire to “refine and ultimately repeal” the original 2001 AUMF, and in 2015, the administration formally requested new authorization (distinct from the 2001 AUMF) for operations against the Islamic State. But Congress wasn’t interested in having to take a position and simply continued to fund counterterror operations under a law that was originally passed to deal with a different foe.
Walt goes on to say that a narrower AUMF could allow Biden not to take actions that he doesn’t want to take while blaming Congress for his inaction. I think that’s being overly charitable toward Biden, whose record is much more of the “Do Something” type and whose administration showed, in absurdly claiming that last month’s Syrian airstrikes were legal under Article 2 of the US Constitution, that it is plenty willing to twist existing law beyond any reasonable interpretation in defense of its actions.