World roundup: March 5 2024
World roundup: March 5 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Mali, Haiti, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
March 5, 363: The Roman Emperor Julian, later dubbed “Julian the Apostate” since he converted from Christianity to paganism and has the distinction of being the last non-Christian Roman ruler, leads his army east to invade the Sasanian (Persian) Empire. Later Roman invasions of Persia generally turned out to be mistakes, and although Julian showed some martial abilities he proved to be a poor strategist and so this campaign was no exception to that rule. After some initial successes, Julian gave up his plan to besiege Ctesiphon and instead he led his army on an aimless march through Mesopotamia, harassed the whole way by Persian forces. He died of wounds suffered in the Battle of Samarra in June. The army chose his successor, a general named Jovian who ordered a prompt retreat back to Roman territory and surrendered Mesopotamia to the Persians.
March 5, 1770: British soldiers, confronted by an angry mob in the city of Boston, open fire on the crowd, killing five people and wounding another six in an incident that became known as the “Boston Massacre.” Although it took place five years before the start of the American Revolution, popular imagination has closely linked the massacre to the war. Crispus Attucks, said to have been the first person killed when the shooting began, became immortalized as the first person killed in the Revolution.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Negotiations toward a Gaza ceasefire broke off on Tuesday without a deal, with both Hamas and the Israeli government seemingly more interested in blaming one another for the lack of progress than in actually reaching an accord. Despite public pronouncements from the various outside participants in these talks (the US, Qatar, Egypt) about signs of progress, the combatants seem to be disputing the same issues they’ve been disputing for weeks now—the length and nature of the ceasefire, the possible relocation of displaced civilians back to northern Gaza, etc.—which to my admittedly untrained eye suggests they haven’t made any progress at all. The rhetoric coming out of the Biden administration—most recently from Joe Biden himself—is also not terribly promising, in that it also seems more geared toward blaming Hamas for the failure to achieve a ceasefire than toward actually achieving a ceasefire.
In other news:
The US military made its second airdrop of humanitarian aid into Gaza on Tuesday. I haven’t seen any word on how many meals were involved this time around, but unless it was several orders of magnitude more than in the initial drop on Friday—which would be logistically impossible—it’s not going to change anything about the situation in the territory. There have been reports of multiple children dying of starvation over the past few days, which likely means the territory is no longer “on the verge of” famine and is in fact in a state of famine. Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir and I discussed the humanitarian situation for American Prestige earlier today for those interested in listening to that.
Mahmoud Mushtaha at +972 Magazine has collected the accounts of survivors of last week’s “flour massacre” in northern Gaza. It may surprise you to learn that those accounts do not correspond with the claims the Israeli military (IDF) has been making about that incident. OK, maybe that won’t surprise you. Where the IDF has insisted that its soldiers only fired “warning shots” to try to disperse a chaotic crowd, these survivors are quite clear that the soldiers fired directly on that crowd. Where Israeli officials say their soldiers opened fire in response to a stampede, the survivors indicate that the gunfire caused that stampede.
A United Nations expert report published on Monday finds “reasonable grounds to believe” that acts of sexual violence were committed against Israeli victims on October 7 and have been committed against hostages in Gaza since then. The report cites “credible circumstantial information” and specifies that it was not based on any victim interviews. The report is contributing to the recent debate over what really happened on October 7, fueled by serious questions surrounding The New York Times’ claim that Hamas “weaponized sexual violence” on that day. The UN report doesn’t go nearly as far as the NYT report did in its conclusions but it suffers from a similar lack of direct evidence. The Israeli government recalled its UN ambassador on Monday while insisting that, despite publishing the report, the UN is trying to “silence” claims regarding alleged October 7-related sexual violence.
The UN human rights office reported last month on what it said were credible allegations of violence, including sexual violence, against Palestinian women and girls by Israeli forces and while in Israeli custody. For some reason that doesn’t seem to have gotten as much attention as the October 7 claims.
LEBANON
An Israeli airstrike killed three civilians in the southern Lebanese village of Hula on Tuesday, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Hezbollah said it fired “dozens of rockets” into northern Israel in retaliation. At least 51 civilians have been killed by Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 7.
IRAN
The NGOs Iran Human Rights and Together Against the Death Penalty issued a joint report on Tuesday revealing that Iranian judicial authorities executed at least 834 people last year, the highest number of executions they’ve carried out in a single year since killing 972 people in 2015. The Iranian government clearly used the threat of execution as a tool to suppress the Mahsa Amini protests, though it also reported a higher than usual number of drug-related executions and that may indicate an increase in illicit smuggling from Afghanistan and/or Pakistan.
ASIA
NEPAL
At The Diplomat, the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Rishi Gupta offers some context to the recent political shift in Nepal:
The Left Alliance government is back in Nepal for the third time. The Maoist Center-led government broke ties with the Nepali Congress and has allied with its former arch-rival, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) or CPN-UML. The two other parties to join the coalition are the Madhdesh-based Janta Samajwadi Party and the debutant Swatantra Party, following an eight-point deal. It will be the third alliance government formed in Nepal since the National Assembly elections in November 2022.
With a history of short-term governments in Nepal’s 15 years of democratic progression, the current reconfiguration is no surprise, and it will be no surprise if the Maoists get back again with the Nepali Congress in months and years to come.
Power sharing, political discontent, ideological differences, underperformance, and pressure to restore Nepal to a Hindu state – a long list of reasons reportedly forced the Maoists to sever ties with the Nepali Congress. While the Nepali Congress expected the Maoist leader and current prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (also known by his nom de guerre, Prachanda) to leave the alliance, it did not expect an overnight turnaround.
The new governing coalition augurs a shift in Nepal’s foreign policy orientation away from India and toward China, given Beijing’s established affinity for Nepal’s communist parties. Though as Gupta notes, this new government may not be in place long enough for such a shift to take hold.
PHILIPPINES
The Philippine government summoned the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Manila on Tuesday to complain about what it called “aggressive actions” by the Chinese Coast Guard in disputed waters in the South China Sea. Chinese vessels in recent days have reportedly forced two collisions, damaging one vessel belonging to the Philippine Coast Guard, and injured four people aboard a Philippine supply boat with a water cannon. These incidents have taken place during another Philippine mission to resupply its makeshift base in the Second Thomas Shoal.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali al-Sadiq Ali told the Russian media outlet Sputnik on Tuesday that Sudan’s military government has agreed to “indirect negotiations” with the Rapid Support Forces “through the mediation of Libya and Turkey.” Apparently this is the product of discussions held at the recent Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey. Al-Sadiq Ali insisted that any new negotiations would have to build on, rather than supplant, the agreement that the military and RSF reached in Jeddah last year, which quickly broke down. It’s unclear whether the RSF is similarly inclined toward talks, particularly if they’re to be held on the basis of a deal reached before the paramilitary group had seized control of the Darfur region as well as several other parts of the country.
MALI
At Africa Is a Country, Mohamed Issouf Ag Mohamed and Mariana Bracks Fonseca look at what the Malian government and its affiliated mercenaries are doing to communities across northern Mali:
As the eyes of the world are focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the military that controls power in Mali is taking advantage of the situation in the Middle East to discreetly exterminate ethnic minorities, using the fight against terrorism as justification. In this context, against a backdrop of a major political crisis and growing international isolation of the military junta in power in Bamako, the Russian mercenary company Wagner arrived in Mali in December 2021 to “help” the military junta in its antiterrorism fight.
Since then, extreme danger has afflicted the Fula, Tamasheq (Tuareg), and Moura populations of northern Mali. In September 2023, the military junta decided to launch operations led by men from the Russian Wagner militia. The mercenary groups use Turkish drones from the company BAYRAK with high destructive potential, targeting those it treats as “terrorists,” including not only the representatives of the former armed fronts—who were their partners until the beginning of this attack, under the Algiers Peace Agreement signed in 2015—but also the Fula, Tamasheq, and Moura.
Military actions amounting to ethnic cleansing of minorities are underway, combined with discriminatory propaganda calling for violence against and persecution of all civilians who wear turbans or other clothing typical of nomadic populations. Violence does not spare the elderly, women, and children, who have their homes burned down and their land, livestock, and little wealth stolen.
NIGERIA
Islamic State West Africa Province fighters are believed to have been behind the kidnapping of at least 47 women in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Friday. All had apparently left their displaced persons camp near the Cameroonian border to collect wood.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
The European Commission on Tuesday introduced a new plan intended to bring the European Union’s military spending back to Europe rather than spending it abroad. According to the EC, since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine EU members have spent a collective €100 billion on military acquisitions, and nearly 80 percent of that was spent outside of Europe. Most, in fact, was spent in one country—the United States. The project calls for increased investment into European manufacturing capacity and could be viewed as part of a broader initiative to reduce Europe’s military dependency on the US.
RUSSIA
The International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued warrants for the arrest of two senior Russian military officers, Sergei Kobylash and Viktor Sokolov, over alleged war crimes related to attacks on civilian utility infrastructure in Ukraine. The effect is symbolic but it will likely prevent either man from traveling to any ICC member states anytime soon. One assumes those states would have fewer reservations about arresting one of them than they’ve had about arresting, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
UKRAINE
The Ukrainian military says it sank the Russian patrol boat Sergey Kotov in waters off the Crimean coast on Tuesday. Ukraine’s military intelligence unit apparently attacked the vessel with seaborne drones. The war is not going Ukraine’s way on land, but it has inflicted a number of losses on the Russian Navy at sea in recent weeks, having sunk a landing ship and a corvette in separate incidents in February. Its main weapons in this arena have been a couple of domestically produced surface drones, the MAGURA V and the Sea Baby.
SWEDEN
New Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok signed off on Sweden’s NATO accession on Tuesday, which leaves only some paperwork standing between Stockholm and full membership in the alliance. The Hungarian parliament voted to ratify Sweden’s accession last week. It’s conceivable that Sweden could be formally inducted into NATO by the end of this week.
AMERICAS
PERU
Peruvian Prime Minister Alberto Otárola resigned on Tuesday, following the leak of an audio recording that purportedly implicates him in corruption. Otárola insisted that the recording, which was made when he was out of government, had been “manipulated” to discredit him. The entire Peruvian cabinet must now resign by law, but President Dina Boluarte can retain as many ministers as she would like.
VENEZUELA
The Venezuelan government has set July 28 as the date for its upcoming presidential election. President Nicolás Maduro will presumably be running for reelection against…well, it’s unclear at this point, since Venezuelan authorities are still barring joint opposition nominee María Corina Machado from electoral politics. Opposition leaders had requested a date later in the year, in part to give them time to decide how to proceed if Machado cannot run.
MEXICO
A roadside bomb killed three farmers in Mexico’s Michoacán state on Tuesday. This is the second such incident in Michoacán in less than a week and appears to be linked to an increasingly violent battle between two cartels for primacy in that state.
HAITI
Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry turned up in Puerto Rico on Tuesday, after spending a couple of days in apparent limbo while the country he’s supposed to be running devolved into chaos. Henry was in Kenya on Friday to sign an agreement that he hopes will clear the way for an international intervention to deal with Haiti’s out of control gang violence. But he’s apparently taking his sweet time coming home, which may have something to do with the fact that gangs in Port-au-Prince have joined forces and launched a major offensive aimed at removing Henry from office. On Monday they launched an attack on Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the Haitian capital, which if successful would certainly make it more difficult for Henry to fly back to Haiti anytime soon.
It’s not entirely clear where Henry was for the past three days and he has yet to actually speak publicly on the situation in Haiti. Interestingly, his flight on Tuesday was headed to the Dominican Republic before it diverted to Puerto Rico, possibly because the Dominican government has now closed its airspace to Haitian flights and Henry may have been planning to return to Haiti from the DR.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Informed Comment’s Juan Cole offers his latest assessment of the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in Gaza:
The known deaths from starvation of Palestinian children in Gaza hospitals rose to 16 on Monday. This is a fraction of the actual such deaths, since Israel has put most of the Strip’s hospitals out of commission and many infants and children are dying of malnutrition at home. In February, Israel let only half as many food and aid trucks into Gaza as it had in January, with UN and other aid workers warning that mass starvation of 500,000 people is imminent if these policies continue.
The response of some in the Biden administration to do an end-run around President Joe Biden’s studied unconcern with these child deaths by joining in a Jordanian air drop effort ends up being more a public relations effort than an effective food provision strategy. On Sunday, the US air-dropped 38,000 meals for 2.2 million people, which is like putting a band aid on an amputated leg. Air drops are costly and inefficient and would be rendered unnecessary if Israel allowed in sufficient food aid and actually began governing this territory it military occupies instead of playing shooting fish in a barrel with it.
Although the Biden administration says it has pleaded with the fascist government of Binyamin Netanyahu to allow in more food trucks, the US doesn’t have to beg. The Israelis ran out of ammunition a long time ago, and can only continue to bomb and shell Gaza because Mr. Biden supplies them with the requisite rockets and shells on a daily basis. After the Israeli government promised to let in more flour under (mild) US pressure, fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that he personally intervened to sequester the flour and keep it from going into Gaza. Unless Biden cuts off the arms supplies, his PR pleadings that he wishes Netanyahu and his black shirts would behave more humanely are just bunk.