World roundup: March 2-3 2024
World roundup: March 2-3 2024
Stories from Pakistan, South Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere
This is the web version of Foreign Exchanges, but did you know you can get it delivered right to your inbox? Sign up today:
THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
March 2, 1962: The Burmese military, led by General Ne Win, overthrows the country’s civilian government in a coup. The military stepped in amid widespread public opposition to the government, which was accused of corruption and incompetence, and fears that the government’s weakness might cause the country to break apart. This kicked off a period of military or essentially military rule in Myanmar that ended…well, I’m sure it will end one of these days.
March 2, 2002: The US military begins Operation Anaconda in Paktia province, the first large-scale battle in the War in Afghanistan. The battle ended on March 18 with a decisive US/coalition victory. It’s best not to think about what happened after that.
March 3, 1878: The Treaty of San Stefano ends the 1877-1878 Ottoman-Russian War with a decisive Russian victory. The treaty was so lopsided, and in particular the amount of territory given to Bulgaria was so large, that Britain and France stepped in and forced it to be substantially revised at the Congress of Berlin held that summer.
March 3, 1918: The Bolshevik government of Russia signs the Treaty of Brest Litovsk with the Central Powers, marking Russia’s formal withdrawal from World War I. In addition to quitting the war, Russia ceded its claims on Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine in Eastern Europe, all of which were expected to come under German domination, and its territories in the Caucasus, which were expected to come under Ottoman domination. Naturally all of those plans were upset when the Central Powers lost the war.
INTERNATIONAL
The friendly friends of the OPEC+ group—some of them, anyway—agreed on Sunday to maintain the oil production cuts they instituted last year through at least June. The Gang has been restricting production collectively since late 2022 in an effort to keep prices up, but internal disagreements last year prevented further joint reductions so several countries made their own unilateral cutbacks instead. OPEC+ heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Russia are continuing their cuts, along with Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, and the UAE. Global oil prices are fluctuating around $80 per barrel depending on the index, which is not as high as the group’s major players—the Saudis in particular—would like.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Biden administration undertook the first of what I guess will be multiple airdrops of humanitarian aid into Gaza, delivering over 38,000 meals, on Saturday. That figure alone shows how ineffectual this effort is. Gaza is home to somewhere between 2.3 and 2.4 million people, all of whom are in some level of food insecurity due to the Israeli military blockade and the inadequacy of current relief operations. According to the United Nations around one-quarter of them—some 576,000 people—are “one step” away from famine. Even at 38,000 meals per airdrop there is no conceivable way to ameliorate those conditions like this. The United States is arming and supporting the Israeli military and has the leverage to force meaningful improvements in aid distribution. The Biden administration is refusing to use any of it.
The administration is now targeting the start of Ramadan, which is about one week away, for a ceasefire deal. But negotiations appeared to take a step back over the weekend. After reportedly agreeing in principle to the ceasefire framework that’s currently on the table, the Israeli government boycotted a new round of talks in Cairo on Sunday. It seems Israeli leader have requested a list of those hostages who are still alive in Gaza and Hamas is refusing to provide it. It’s unclear why Hamas has rejected this request but aside from creating a new immediate obstacle to this deal it raises troubling questions about just how many hostages actually are still alive, which could have serious ramifications for the possibility of any ceasefire deal.
On the US front, Vice President Kamala Harris issued the Biden administration’s most forceful ceasefire demand to date on Sunday. This has generated a bit of buzz but I’m not entirely sure why. For one thing it’s the VP, not the president, making this call and it’s just rhetorical, there’s still no US real weight behind it. For another thing, what she demanded was the temporary ceasefire to which the Israeli government has already agreed (see above), so she was able to focus blame on Hamas rather than on Israeli leaders. There wasn’t anything new or particularly interesting in her comments from what I can tell.
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least seven Hezbollah members in a pair of strikes on southern Lebanon between Friday night and Saturday morning. Both attacks took place near the Israeli border.
YEMEN
The Rubymar, the cargo ship that was badly damaged in a Houthi attack last month, has apparently sunk in the Red Sea. It’s been spilling oil since the attack but now its cargo, 22,000 metric tons of fertilizer, is also seeping into the water and the combined environmental and economic effects may be quite serious. Fertilizer spills have been linked with devastating algae blooms that can create ocean “dead zones,” and currents may keep that fertilizer trapped in the Red Sea for the foreseeable future, worsening its impact. The extent of the damage may depend on the degree to which the vessel remained intact as it sank, which will determine how quickly the fertilizer gets out into the water. The oil may, among other risks, interfere with desalination plants along Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast.
IRAN
Iranian state media has apparently been reporting unofficial results from Friday’s parliamentary election that put turnout somewhere in the neighborhood of 41 percent. That would be the lowest turnout for an election since Iran’s 1979 revolution—a bit below the 42.5 percent who voted in the last parliamentary contest in 2020—and Iranian authorities had to extend voting by two hours just to get to that level. Some combination of lingering anger over the Mahsa Amini protests, anger over Iran’s weak economy, and resignation at the fact that the outcome was essentially predetermined presumably fueled the apathy.
This is, you would think, something of an embarrassment for an Iranian government that appreciates the PR value of high turnout elections. Interestingly, those state media outlets have been arguing the opposite, saying that the 25 million or so people who did vote represent a rebuke to calls from reformist and moderate corners to boycott the vote. This seems like somewhat desperate spin, but what do I know?
ASIA
PAKISTAN
The Pakistani National Assembly elected former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to a second term in that job on Sunday. This result was expected, especially after the assembly elected Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz colleague, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, as its speaker on Friday. Sharif received 201 votes, comfortably above the 169 vote majority line and well ahead of the 92 votes received by Imran Khan’s PM candidate, Omar Ayub.
MALAYSIA
The Malaysian government said on Sunday that it may reopen the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared during a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014 and is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, well off course. Over the past decade, debris from the aircraft (and debris suspected of coming from the aircraft) has washed up around the Indian Ocean, but the main wreck has never been discovered. The US firm Ocean Infinity, which previously searched for the wreckage in 2018, has apparently pitched Malaysian officials on another operation. Discovering the wreckage could provide some clues as to what happened to the plane and would also offer some closure to the families of the people who died in the crash.
AFRICA
BURKINA FASO
A prosecutor in Burkina Faso’s North region revealed on Sunday that some 170 people were killed when three villages in that region were attacked on February 25. He’s apparently ordered an investigation into the attacks, which he did not attribute to a particular group. That same day also saw suspected jihadist attacks targeting a church in the Sahel region and a mosque in the East region as well as a number of other strikes that may have been coordinated on some level.
SOUTH SUDAN
South Sudan is supposed to hold a general election later this year that will ideally hasten the country’s political transition out of the instability that marked its civil war. However, a new report from the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan sounds a number of alarms about that prospective vote:
Patterns of violence, violations and entrenched impunity continue to blight the lives of an extremely vulnerable population, the report said, warning that the already dire humanitarian situation in the country will deteriorate further.
The elections, the first since independence from Sudan in 2011, should signify a milestone in efforts to secure a lasting peace since the end of the civil war which raged in South Sudan from 2013, killing some 400,000 people. A peace deal was agreed in 2018 but implementation has been sluggish and violence persists in parts of the country.
The report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva Friday said the elections face severe political and logistical challenges, and the post-election legal framework remains uncertain.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Security forces killed six “militants” in Russia’s Ingushetia region over the weekend, after gunmen allegedly opened fire on a police facility in the town of Karabulak. It’s unclear who the militants were, but Ingushetia—along with neighboring regions Chechnya and Dagestan—has dealt with Islamist violence in the past.
SERBIA
Serbian officials announced on Sunday that they’re redoing December’s municipal election in Belgrade, date TBD. The ruling Serbian Progressive Party officially won that vote but the Serbia Against Violence party, with the support of international observers, has alleged that there were major irregularities in the vote and insists it actually won. The SPS rejects those claims, though the decision to do the election over may indicate that there was something to them.
AMERICAS
HAITI
Gangs attacked Haiti’s National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince late Saturday, killing at least 12 people and freeing around 3700 of the facility’s 3800 prisoners. There was apparently another attack on a second detention facility but it’s unclear how many prisoners were freed, if any. Notorious gang leader Jimmy Chérizier has been the public face of a major push by criminal groups in the city over the past several days, apparently part of a joint effort aimed at ousting Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry. It’s unclear how successful they’ve been so far, though the prison attack was clearly a significant win for them.
UNITED STATES
Finally, the Project on Government Oversight reports on another dismal annual report for, you guessed it, the F-35:
The F-35 program officially began on October 26, 2001, when Lockheed Martin received the coveted development contract. That day was more than 22 years ago. The costs of the program through its anticipated lifespan have risen $1.7 trillion since then. What the American people have so far received for that enormous financial commitment is an aircraft program where less than a third of the jets are capable of performing their combat role according to multiple government sources. The Pentagon’s top testing office, the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E), recently released its office’s annual report, which showed that the F-35 program has a fleet-wide full mission capable rate of only 30%.
This year’s unclassified version of the report is rather thin. Many details about the F-35’s demonstrated performance in 2023 are presumably hidden in the classified version of the report submitted to Congress and the secretary of defense. The testing director did say that results from the testing process will be included in the F-35 program’s initial operational test and evaluation report, now expected to be released before the end of March 2024.
One single detail about the program’s abysmal availability rate in the unclassified version of the report says a lot about how poorly the F-35 performs. It doesn’t actually matter what kind of dazzling capabilities the F-35 may one day be able to perform: If the aircraft can’t be relied upon to perform when needed, then any potential capability is useless.