World roundup: May 20 2021
World roundup: May 20 2021
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Nigeria, Brazil, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
May 19, 1919: The Turkish War of Independence begins.
May 20, 1498: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrives at the port of Calicut (modern Kozhikode), completing his expedition from Lisbon around the African coast to India. Da Gama, who was expecting to extract favorable trading concessions from the ruler of Calicut, found instead that his token gifts were too shabby to win him any goodwill and Muslim traders spread scandalous gossip about the Portuguese arrivals. He left with only a smattering of local trade goods, but needless to say the opening of the trade route had some very long-lasting repercussions.
May 20, 1927: Abdulaziz Al Saud, also known as Ibn Saud, concludes the Treaty of Jeddah with the United Kingdom. Under the terms of the treaty, the UK recognized both Ibn Saud’s independence and his sovereignty over the kingdoms of the Nejd and the Hejaz, which he merged into Saudi Arabia in 1932.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for May 20:
165,839,381 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (+651,684 since yesterday)
3,444,420 reported fatalities (+13,032 since yesterday)
For vaccine data the New York Times has created a tracker here
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
23,939 confirmed coronavirus cases (+55)
1720 reported fatalities (+6)
Having cooperated to ensure that Bashar al-Assad won Syria’s civil war, Washington Post correspondent Sarah Dadouch reports that Russia and Iran are increasingly competing for postwar lucre. They’re particularly at odds over energy and phosphate extraction contracts as well as construction work, with Russia generally coming out ahead. This makes sense for a variety of reasons, but particularly given that Russia’s capabilities in those areas most likely outstrip Iran’s. The Syrian-Russian alliance, which reaches well back into the Cold War, is probably also relevant. Dadouch suggests that Russian-branded development projects are probably easier to sell to Syria’s mostly-Sunni population than Iranian-branded projects, but my guess would be that’s not as significant a consideration.
YEMEN
6613 confirmed cases (+20)
1301 reported fatalities (+3)
The Biden administration on Thursday blacklisted two senior Yemeni rebel commanders involved in the ongoing operation to capture Maʾrib. The lucky duckies, whose dreams of seeing the World’s Largest Pez Dispenser in Connecticut (Google it) are dashed at least for the time being, are Muhammad Abd Al-Karim Al-Ghamali, apparently the overall commander of the Maʾrib offensive, and Yousuf al-Madani, one of the operation’s commanders in the field.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
839,263 confirmed cases (+42) in Israel, 304,532 confirmed cases (+0) in Palestine
6396 reported fatalities (+1) in Israel, 3448 reported fatalities (+0) in Palestine
UPDATE: In a developing story, both Hamas and the Israeli government have announced a ceasefire, though it’s a little unclear exactly when it’s supposed to go into effect. Hamas has said 2 AM local time Friday, but Israeli officials have yet to confirm that as far as I know. I’ll update this if circumstances warrant but I’m going to leave everything I’d already written in place below because I think most of it is still relevant.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly called a meeting of his security cabinet on Thursday, suggesting that a ceasefire in Gaza may be pending. That would align with comments from Hamas yesterday and from anonymous Israeli officials overnight suggesting that there could be at least a pause in the fighting within a couple of days, and with reports that Egyptian negotiators have been claiming that they have an “in principle” ceasefire agreement from both sides, pending agreement on some remaining details. Any ceasefire decision would have to be approved by the security cabinet, and the fact that Netanyahu hadn’t previously called such a meeting over the past week and a half was a pretty clear indication that he wasn’t yet planning to deescalate the Gaza campaign.
That campaign as at this writing killed 232 people in Gaza, 65 of them children, and wounded more than 1,900 while displacing over 52,000. It’s created a lot of scenes like this one, published earlier this week by +972 Magazine:
For the last 14 years, I have been running a hospital in the city of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. The first day of the war was the hardest day of my life as a doctor.
I’m talking about the first shelling by Israel on Gaza. It was a week ago, just a little after seven in the evening. The first ones killed.
Two children arrived in an ambulance, one of them was three years old, one was seven. They are brothers, and as soon as I saw them, it was clear to me that they were both dead. Their bodies crushed and burned.
Their father also arrived. He was seriously wounded but still conscious. He got upset and asked me, “What about them, what about my kids?” Then another ambulance arrived with a little girl, 10 years old. She too died. This is the older sister of the first two children. All from the al-Masri family.
(By the way, I would highly recommend making 972 a regular part of your news reading if you’re interested in Israel-Palestine. If you’re interested in more details about the Palestinian general strike on Tuesday, Juan Cole wrote a piece on it yesterday that may be worth your time. And American Prospect is out with a new piece on US military aid to Israel, which is not exactly breaking news but is nevertheless staggering to see compiled in one place. Particularly when you realize that said aid is intentionally obfuscated to make it impossible to enforce relevant human rights restrictions on its use.)
In Israel, 12 people have been killed by rocket fire out of Gaza and hundreds more wounded. The World Health Organization is calling for a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting and that’s probably how the Israelis will couch their ceasefire whenever it happens, as a temporary halt for aid with the option of extending it provided there’s no more rocket fire. Chances are there will be more rocket fire—the history of major Gaza conflicts shows that it usually takes a few temporary ceasefires before a permanent one takes hold. But with The Guardian’s Oliver Holmes reporting that both the Israeli government and Hamas are starting to claim victory and with Netanyahu’s political future looking much brighter than it looked two weeks ago, it would not be surprising if the situation really were approaching some kind of endgame.
Beyond that, it’s unclear how much, if any, resonance the events of the past few weeks will have for the Israel-Palestine conflict moving forward. The New York Times is reporting that the Biden administration wants to be heavily involved in the international effort to rebuild Gaza, perhaps dangling aid as a carrot to encourage Hamas to disarm, to reengage in negotiations with the Fatah party, or both. Certainly these events make it pretty clear that Biden won’t be able to ignore Israel-Palestine, as he’d seemingly hoped, but there’s nothing in Joe Biden’s substantial record to suggest he’s really prepared to do anything that might help finally end the conflict. Netanyahu got exactly what he wanted from this flareup so he has no incentive to change anything. The one aspect of these events that could have long-term repercussions is the display of Palestinian unity—not at the political level, but on the ground, and including Palestinians in Israel proper (call them “Arab Israelis” if you prefer)—and the increase in international support for the Palestinian cause that became apparent during the worst of the Israeli bombardment.
EGYPT
250,391 confirmed cases (+1153)
14,559 reported fatalities (+61)
One other potential outcome of the past couple of weeks could be Egypt’s reemergence as an important political power in the Arab world. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government led the way in terms of brokering this ceasefire which, though admittedly late and more a function of Israel’s satisfaction than any dealmaking prowess exhibited by Cairo, positions Sisi as a potential broker and could be his way into Joe Biden’s good graces.
IRAN
2,804,632 confirmed cases (+12,428)
77,994 reported fatalities (+229)
Laura Rozen reports that US negotiators are expressing considerable optimism following the conclusion of the fourth round of Iran nuclear deal talks in Vienna on Wednesday. There’s no agreement in place yet but it seems like one is increasingly likely to emerge from these talks, perhaps as soon as next week’s fifth round. If anything, the sense of optimism seems to be higher in Iran, where President Hassan Rouhani is positively raving about the progress that’s been made. This should be tempered by the fact that Rouhani has a political interest in hyping said progress, since it may be the only thing that could potentially interrupt a hardliner victory in next month’s presidential election. Of course, many of the people inside Iran who are discounting Rouhani’s optimism have a political incentive to downplay whatever progress has been made, since they’re invested in a hardliner victory.
As expected, AFP reports that Iranian officials are in negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency on delaying Tehran’s full withdrawal from the IAEA’s “Additional Protocol” inspections program. Back in February Iran set a deadline for its withdrawal that will expire tomorrow without some agreement to push it back. Any change in Iran’s relationship with the IAEA right now would likely derail the progress toward reviving the nuclear accord.
ASIA
ARMENIA
221,559 confirmed cases (+191)
4364 reported fatalities (+7)
The Armenian military says its forces fired “warnings shots” near the Azerbaijani border on Thursday because of an incursion by Azerbaijani soldiers. It’s unclear from the very sparse reporting on this story whether this is related to the apparent incursion by Azerbaijani forces into southern Armenia last week or a new incursion altogether.
Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister (interim PM at the moment) Nikol Pashinyan is claiming that he’s close to reaching an “agreement” with the Azerbaijani government that would address a number of outstanding issues between the two countries. For one thing it would include the withdrawal of those troops that entered Armenia last week, as well as the return of several Armenians currently being held by Azerbaijani authorities. It would also involve the handover of several border villages to Azerbaijan, a detail Pashinyan would presumably like to downplay, given that he’s facing an election in a month. Most significantly, the agreement would form a commission to demarcate an Armenia-Azerbaijan border that still hasn’t been formally established nearly 30 years after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Given the approach of the election, any deal with Azerbaijan is likely to meet heavy political opposition in Yerevan, particularly since, since Pashinyan is technically only a caretaker PM right now, he doesn’t really have a mandate to negotiate a major international agreement.
AFGHANISTAN
65,080 confirmed cases (+505)
2782 reported fatalities (+10)
At least 16 people have been killed in three separate recent incidents across Afghanistan. On Wednesday, a vehicle carrying a family of 12 in Helmand province struck a roadside bomb, killing nine people. Four more people were killed by another roadside bomb in Ghor province. In the third incident, gunmen stopped a bus in western Afghanistan, ordered three Hazara men off of the bus, and executed them. The bus attack has some hallmarks of an Islamic State incident, particularly in that it targeted Hazara, though IS tends to be more active in eastern Afghanistan. The two bombings may have been Taliban but there’s been no claim of responsibility.
In less terrible news, Reuters reports that tribal elders in the Alingar district of eastern Afghanistan’s Laghman province have managed to negotiate a month long ceasefire between the Taliban and the Afghan government, in part to allow farmers to harvest their crops and students to take exams. The arrangement took effect on Tuesday and so far appears to be holding. It’s probably futile to try to extrapolate from one Afghan district to a model that could help bring the war to an end as the United States is withdrawing, but who knows?
PHILIPPINES
1,165,155 confirmed cases (+6100)
19,641 reported fatalities (+135)
Foreign Policy is reporting that the Biden administration is close to an agreement on extending the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippine government. The VFA governs the US military deployment in the Philippines, by among other things placing US personnel there under US, rather than Philippine, law. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made a big show of scrapping the VFA last year but has continued to maintain it on short-term (six month) extensions. This may be another six month extension but the FP report suggests it could be longer than that. Duterte has softened a bit on the US in recent months, and with Philippine-Chinese relations at something of an ebb, a longer term VFA may not be out of the question.
CHINA
90,920 confirmed cases (+12) on the mainland, 11,829 confirmed cases (+1) in Hong Kong
4636 reported fatalities (+0) on the mainland, 210 reported fatalities (+0) in Hong Kong
For the second straight day, the Chinese government complained on Thursday about a maneuver involving the US naval destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur. Yesterday Beijing reacted angrily to the Curtis Wilbur’s transit of the Taiwan Strait the previous day. On Thursday, it alleged that the vessel entered Chinese territorial waters around the Paracel islands in the South China Sea and that Chinese naval vessels “expelled” it from the area. The United States doesn’t accept Chinese claims around the Paracels, so US officials rejected the notion that the Curtis Wilbur had entered Chinese waters and the claim that it was “expelled” from them.
AFRICA
NIGERIA
165,901 confirmed cases (+49)
2067 reported fatalities (+0)
The Nigerian government apparently believes that notorious Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau is either dead or at least seriously wounded following a battle in the Sambisa forest on Wednesday between a group of his fighters and a group of fighters from the breakaway Islamic State West Africa Province group. Captured, the story goes, Shekau attempted to kill himself (either with a gun or explosives) rather than pledge allegiance to ISWAP. Whether or not he succeeded seems to be the main question, though it’s probably important to note that this would be something like the sixth time Nigerian officials have determined that Shekau was dead or near death and as far as I can tell they haven’t been right yet.
Shekau’s condition is probably less important than the fact that ISWAP is now operating with apparent impunity in Sambisa. When those groups split in 2016, ISWAP positioned itself in the Lake Chad region while Shekau’s Boko Haram Classic group remained in Sambisa. If ISWAP is now in Sambisa as well that suggests that its ascendance over Shekau’s faction is all but complete.
CAMEROON
77,429 confirmed cases (+0)
1189 reported fatalities (+0)
At Foreign Policy, journalist Jess Craig reports on an emerging alliance between anglophone “Ambazonian” separatists in western Cameroon and Biafran separatists in southeastern Nigeria:
In early April, Cho Ayaba, the leader of the Ambazonia Governing Council, one of two major Anglophone separatist groups, and the well-known Biafran leader Nnamdi Kanu appeared in a press conference, livestreamed on social media, to announce a strategic and military alliance.
“We have assembled here today in front of our two peoples to declare our intentions to walk together to ensure collective survival from the brutal annexation that have occurred in our home nations,” Ayaba said. “The Ambazonia and Biafra Alliance is critical in an area where Nigeria and Cameroon have established two autocracies that have used violence as political tools to suppress our own peoples.”
The scope of the alliance will include joint operations and training bases, Capo Daniel, the deputy defense chief of the Ambazonia Defense Forces, the military wing of the Ambazonia Governing Council, told Foreign Policy. The groups will work to secure their shared border and ensure an open exchange of weapons and personnel, representatives of both the Ambazonia and IPOB movements said.
ETHIOPIA
268,035 confirmed cases (+438)
4048 reported fatalities (+10)
Ethiopian elections officials have set June 21 as the new date for the country’s upcoming parliamentary election. The vote had been scheduled for June 5, but authorities announced earlier this month that they were postponing it due to delays in preparation. Elsewhere, the Ethiopian government is reportedly planning to start generating electricity from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam during the region’s rainy season this summer. The GERD’s reservoir is expected to trap some 13.5 billion cubic meters of water between June and August, enough to start operating albeit not at full capacity. This news is sure to be received positively in Sudan and Egypt, which continue to seek an agreement about the GERD’s operations that would minimize its impact on water levels on the Blue Nile and Nile rivers.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
4,974,908 confirmed cases (+9232)
117,361 reported fatalities (+396)
This week’s Arctic Council summit in Iceland ended on Thursday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the group’s other members to resist what the US says is a Russian effort to militarize the Arctic region.
Moscow, which is assuming the council’s presidency for the next two years, has suggested that the body should take on a more overtly military role, something it stopped doing amid the fallout over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russian officials have also made moves to impose rules on commercial activity in the Arctic, which has raised some international eyebrows. Blinken expressed a US preference for the council to stick to issues related to the environment, indigenous Arctic peoples, and maritime safety.
UKRAINE
2,170,398 confirmed cases (+5165)
48,899 reported fatalities (+203)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Thursday that the Russian government’s program to give passports to residents of separatist-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine is a preliminary step toward annexation. Russian authorities have reportedly distributed over 500,000 passports in eastern Ukraine since 2019, and the program is still active. Frankly I think Zelensky is overreacting here. Just because the Russians issue some passports to a friendly population doesn’t mean there’s something grim lurking on the horizon. I mean, Moscow started issuing passports to people in breakaway parts of Georgia in the early 2000s, and…uh, never mind. I’m sure it’s all going to be fine.
SLOVENIA
250,811 confirmed cases (+358)
4345 reported fatalities (+7)
Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša is facing an impeachment motion in parliament over his pandemic response as well as allegations that he’s undermining Slovenia’s rule of law. This measure will probably fail, as a no-confidence motion did earlier this year, though as the leader of a decidedly minority government Janša probably can’t take any effort like this for granted.
HUNGARY
800,368 confirmed cases (+780)
29,380 reported fatalities (+51)
The Hungarian government has decided to veto the Post-Cotonou agreement, which had been negotiated back in December by representatives from the European Union and the Organization of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States. It’s intended to be a revision of the 2003 Cotonou agreement, which deals mostly with humanitarian and commercial relations between the two blocs, updating it to include new provisions around climate change and human rights. Included among those provisions are measures that would open up some pathways to legal immigration for non-white people, which is naturally why Viktor Orbán objects.
SPAIN
3,631,661 confirmed cases (+5733)
79,601 reported fatalities (+33)
The Spanish High Court ruled on Thursday against a request to arrest Western Saharan independence leader Brahim Ghali, who entered Spain last month to receive treatment for a COVID infection. Ghali is the president of the mostly-unrecognized “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic,” and as we’ve seen this week his arrival in Spain has triggered a fairly serious diplomatic dispute between the Spanish and Moroccan governments. His arrest has been sought by several human rights groups in connection with his activities as head of the Polisario Front militant group. The court ruled that he cannot be arrested without a preliminary hearing.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
15,898,558 confirmed cases (+83,367)
444,391 reported fatalities (+2527)
The Washington Post reports on the ongoing problem of police violence in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas:
In June 2020, the Brazilian supreme court ordered Rio de Janeiro police to drastically restrict police raids that had come to resemble engagements of war. Police, encouraged by right-wing politicians who had won elections by calling for harsher tactics against criminal gangs, had in recent years sent armored cars, snipers and bulletproof helicopters into the favelas — and killed an astonishing number of people. In a state with a population of 16 million, police fatally shot 1,814 people in 2019 alone, according to government statistics, 80 percent more than police killed that year in all of the United States.
Last year, as an even deadlier force bore down on Brazil — a virus that has killed more people here than in any country outside the United States — the court told Rio police they could storm into gang strongholds only under “absolutely exceptional” circumstances. During the pandemic, they were to adopt “exceptional safeguards” to avoid “putting more of the population at risk.”
But in a country where right-wing officials increasingly clash with judges — where nationalist President Jair Bolsonaro has fanned calls to disband the supreme court — the order has failed to rein in police. In the first three months of 2021, as Brazil tipped into the darkest days of its outbreak, the police killed 453 people — a record for that period — in an urban onslaught that culminated with this month’s carnage in Jacarezinho.
GREENLAND
34 confirmed cases (+0)
No reported fatalities
Some sad news to report: the United States is apparently no longer trying to buy Greenland. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as much during a visit to Nuuk on Thursday after the end of the Arctic Council summit. Donald Trump famously tried to buy Greenland in 2019 but was rebuffed by both the Danish and Greenlandic governments. Ah well, I suppose the dream lives on.
UNITED STATES
33,833,181 confirmed cases (+30,214)
602,616 reported fatalities (+659)
Finally, TomDispatch’s Andrew Bacevich offers a mixed review of Joe Biden’s foreign policy at his presidency’s 100-ish day mark:
On the foreign-policy front, the Biden team can already claim some modest, if tentative achievements. President Biden has indeed preserved the New Start nuclear agreement with Russia. Unlike his predecessor, he acknowledges that climate change is an urgent threat requiring concerted action. He has signaled his interest in salvaging the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Perhaps most notably, he has ordered the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, ending the longest war in American history. Implicit in that decision is the possibility of further reductions in the U.S. military footprint across the Greater Middle East and much of Africa, all undertaken pursuant to a misguided post-9/11 Global War on Terror.
That said, so far President Biden has left essentially untouched the core assumptions that justify the vast (and vastly well funded) national security apparatus created in the wake of World War II. Central to those assumptions is the conviction that global power projection, rather than national defense per se, defines the U.S. military establishment’s core mission. Washington’s insistence on asserting global primacy (typically expressed using euphemisms like “global leadership”) finds concrete expression in a determination to remain militarily dominant everywhere.