World roundup: May 25-26 2024
World roundup: May 25-26 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Tomorrow is the Memorial Day holiday in the US so there will be no newsletter. We’ll double up on Tuesday. I am also, with apologies, going to forego a voiceover tonight.
THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
May 25, 1521: The Diet of Worms, an assembly called by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in response to the growing “Protestant” reform movement led by Martin Luther, culminates with the Edict of Worms. In that proclamation, Charles declared Luther “a notorious heretic” and promised that “those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.” Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, then “kidnapped” Luther and stashed him in Wartburg Castle for his own safety. Luther remained at Wartburg until the following March, writing and translating the New Testament into German while his reform movement escalated into a schism and Protestantism began to separate from the Catholic Church.
May 25, 1981: Leaders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sign the Gulf Cooperation Council charter in Abu Dhabi, formally marking the birth of that organization.
May 26, 1908: A British drilling operation discovers a commercially-viable oil deposit at Masjed Soleyman, in Iran’s Khuzestan province. This was the first oil find in the Middle East and obviously began the region’s transformation into the stable, economically advantaged paradise it is today. The strike was made under the terms of the “D’Arcy Concession,” a 1901 agreement between British oil baron William Knox D’Arcy and Iranian ruler Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar that gave D’Arcy exclusive rights to explore for oil in Iran in exchange for a payment of 20,000 pounds and a mere 16 percent of any future profits. Let’s just say this led to some problems down the road and leave it at that.
May 26, 1918: The short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia declares independence from the considerably shorter-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, which in turn formed out of the collapse of the Russian Empire. Although Georgia fell to a Red Army invasion in early 1921 and became a Soviet republic, this not-quite-three year period of independence was formative in terms of the development of Georgian nationalism, and after the country regained its independence from the USSR the Georgian government established May 26 as Independence Day.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Biden administration has had no response to Friday’s International Court of Justice ruling ordering the Israeli military (IDF) to cease its operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, nor has it said anything about the IDF’s decision to ignore that ruling. The plan, according to The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, seems to be that both the US and UK governments will simply continue supporting the Israeli operation in spite of the ICJ’s order—there’s another rule that no longer applies in the “rules based order”—and pretending that the Rafah operation is somehow not violating the “red lines” that both governments drew weeks ago. UK officials continue to insist that the IDF hasn’t actually gone into Rafah—who are you going to believe, them or your lying eyes?—while US officials like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are shifting to a new talking point, which is that the IDF has made some unspecified adjustments to its operational plan that have magically addressed the Biden administration’s concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian situation. As The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung reports, even people within the administration can’t seem to swallow that one:
Even as it has continued to describe the Rafah offensive as “limited,” the administration has reflected rising worries. “We had two concerns about a Rafah operation,” said David Satterfield, who served the first six months of the war as the administration’s on-the-ground envoy for humanitarian concerns and remains a State Department adviser.
“The first was the consequences” of displacing up to 1.5 million people who had crowded in and around Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, most of them fleeing from fighting further north. Once Israel shifted the war there, “where would they go? How would they receive humanitarian support, shelter, water, food, medical support,” Satterfield said, speaking Friday at a conversation hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The second concern was that the act of a kinetic operation, limited or not” would see the mass evacuation of Gazans and “all of this would conflict with the logistical, physical ability to move assistance. Regrettably, all of those concerns, which we had outlined to the government of Israel at the highest levels of state, have come to pass.”
“Regrettable” is certainly one way to describe a situation in which people are now at risk of dying due to dehydration, I guess. Clearly that’s not how Joe Biden would describe it.
Elsewhere:
The IDF bombed a designated displaced persons zone in Rafah late Sunday, killing at least 35 people and wounding many more. The IDF says it struck a “Hamas compound” and killed the group’s “chief of staff for the West Bank” along with another senior official. It says it is investigating claims of civilian casualties.
Hamas fired rockets at Tel Aviv on Sunday for the first time since January. There were no reports of casualties or damage but the (small) barrage, coupled with the fact that the IDF has gone back to fighting in parts of Gaza it claimed to have cleared of militants months ago, reinforces just how little progress the Israeli operation seems to be making. Well, that’s not fair. It is making progress in at least one area: killing Palestinians.
Hamas claimed on Saturday that its fighters took at least one Israeli soldier captive in an “ambush” in northern Gaza’s Jabalia area. It released a video of someone it claimed was an Israeli prisoner but there’s no confirmation of this and the IDF is denying it.
IDF soldiers killed a Palestinian teenager on Sunday near the West Bank city of Hebron. He allegedly tried to attack them with a knife.
The Israeli “war cabinet” is supposedly meeting on Sunday to discuss ceasefire talks. CIA director William Burns, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and Mossad director David Barnea met in Paris on Friday and agreed to resume negotiations based on a proposal to which the Israelis had mostly agreed last month, only to back out when Hamas agreed to a somewhat revised version of it. Hamas officials seem less interested in reopening talks, though I suspect the Qataris can pressure them into participating at some level.
Some of the humanitarian aid that’s been stuck in Sinai for the past few weeks started entering Gaza via Israel’s Kerem Shalom checkpoint on Sunday. This is the apparent result of a phone call between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Joe Biden on Friday. It’s no substitute for the closed Rafah crossing—aid was passing through both checkpoints before the IDF entered Rafah and that still wasn’t enough—but it is at least some movement in a positive direction.
As for the glorious Joe Biden Memorial Pier, two US naval vessels involved in that project ran aground in Israel late Friday. The pier itself appears to have been unaffected and there were no reports of any injuries.
SYRIA
A car bomb killed one person in the diplomatic section of Damascus on Saturday morning. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights identified him as a Syrian army officer. There’s no indication as to responsibility. Later on Saturday, an apparent Israeli drone strike killed at least two people, both Hezbollah members, near the Lebanese border.
LEBANON
Multiple Israeli airstrikes killed at least eight people across southern Lebanon on Sunday. At least four of them appear to have had ties to Hezbollah.
SAUDI ARABIA
The Saudi government on Sunday appointed diplomat Faisal al-Mujfel as its new ambassador to Syria. That wouldn’t be a particularly big deal if it weren’t for the fact that the Saudis haven’t had an ambassador to Syria since they broke off diplomatic ties with Bashar al-Assad’s government back in 2012. Damascus is reintegrating itself into the Arab world and this is another step in that direction.
ASIA
ARMENIA
Another protest drew “tens of thousands” of people into the streets of Yerevan on Sunday over Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s decision to hand control of four border villages back to Azerbaijan. These latest demonstrations have been organized by Bagrat Galstanyan, the archbishop of Armenia’s Tavush province and an opponent of Pashinyan’s whose supporters seem to think Galstanyan should replace him as PM.
NORTH KOREA
North Korean officials have reportedly informed the Japanese government that they are aiming to conduct another space launch between May 27 and June 4. The South Korean military said on Friday that it had seen indications that the North Koreans were making preparations for a launch, presumably in an attempt to put another spy satellite into orbit.
OCEANIA
NEW CALEDONIA
New Caledonia’s La Tontouta International Airport will remain closed to commercial traffic through at least June 2, airport officials announced over the weekend. The facility was closed several days ago and had been scheduled to reopen on Thursday, as French police worked to clear roadblocks on the highway connecting it to the New Caledonian capital, Nouméa. That operation still doesn’t appear to have cleared the highway and unrest on the island remains high overall. On Monday morning (local time), French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he is lifting the state of emergency he imposed in New Caledonia effective 5 AM Tuesday (again, local time). Macron said this was intended to enable “concrete and serious negotiations” on ending the unrest, and his statement seemed to leave open the possibility of reimposing the emergency if necessary.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Local officials in the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher said on Friday that recent fighting there between the military and the Rapid Support Forces group has killed at least 47 people, 30 of them civilians. Doctors Without Borders has updated the death toll at the city’s only functioning medical facility, Southern Hospital, to at least 134 since the RSF surrounded El-Fasher earlier this month, with hundreds more wounded. That’s a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people who will be at grave risk if/when the RSF begins its full-blown assault on the city.
MALI
An apparent jihadist attack left more than 20 people dead in a village in central Mali’s Mopti region on Saturday. It’s not out of the question for Malian security forces to attack civilian communities that are accused of collaborating with jihadists so the local mayor’s description of “unidentified armed assailants” should be considered in that light.
BURKINA FASO
Burkina Faso’s ruling junta has given itself at least another five years in power. The Gang was supposed to be transitioning to elections in July under an agreement it made with the Economic Community of West African States bloc after it seized power in 2022, but the junta quit ECOWAS back in January and it’s been readily apparent for some time that said transition wasn’t really taking place. On Saturday, after a supposed “national dialogue” event, the junta announced the signing of a new transition charter and said that “the duration of the transition is fixed at 60 months from July 2, 2024.” The saying “I’ll believe it when I see it” seems applicable. The new charter explicitly gives junta leader Ibrahim Traoré the right to run for president if/when the transition ends, which he’ll presumably do in what I’m sure will be a very free and fair election.
NIGERIA
Armed gunmen believed (according to the BBC) to have been Boko Haram fighters reportedly attacked a village in Nigeria’s Niger state late Friday, killing at least ten people and abducting 160 or more. The village in question, Kuchi, is frequently targeted for attack and mass abductions (usually for ransom) but I’m not sure if Boko Haram has ever been implicated in any similar attacks in Niger state, which is well afield of the group’s typical stomping ground in Borno state.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Allied Democratic Forces insurgents are believed to have been responsible for attacks on several villages in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province on Friday and Saturday that left at least 10 people dead. Several people remain missing and authorities are still searching the area so the likelihood is that the death toll will increase.
SOUTH AFRICA
South African voters will head to the polls on Wednesday for a general election whose outcome may be the most uncertain in the country’s post-apartheid history. Polling has consistently suggested that the ruling African National Congress party will come out of the election as the largest party in parliament but that it will lose the sole majority it has held since 1994. Assuming that polling holds up, in that case the party will likely try to form a coalition government, but South Africa has something of a checkered history with coalition governments at lower levels and a national coalition may not last very long. Its cohesion will depend to some degree on how close the ANC can get to a majority on its own and therefore how many parties it needs to involve to get to a working majority.
COMOROS
Comoran President Azali Assoumani took the oath of office to kick off his fourth term on Sunday. Assoumani won reelection in January in a vote that did not appear to be entirely legitimate and that consequently kicked off a round of protests, some violent. None of the other candidates who ran in that election has congratulated Assoumani on his supposed victory.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
G7 finance ministers met in Italy over the weekend to discuss plans to use frozen Russian assets to support the Ukrainian government. European Union member states have agreed in principle on a plan that would divert the interest generated by those assets to Kyiv, but the US government has already authorized the full confiscation of the (substantially smaller amount of) Russian assets frozen in US institutions. As a compromise, the Biden administration is reportedly pushing the idea of taking out a loan against future interest income. That could potentially give Ukraine access to around $50 billion immediately, but EU members are balking over the complexity of such an arrangement and concerns that Russia might retaliate against European firms.
LITHUANIA
Lithuanian voters headed to the polls on Sunday for the second round of their presidential election and, as expected, they returned incumbent Gitanas Nausėda to office for a second term. Nausėda won the first round with just under 45 percent of the vote and seems to have consolidated most of the available vote in the runoff, as preliminary results give up somewhere around 76 percent of the vote and a very handy margin of victory over first round runner up and current Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė.
UKRAINE
The Russian military claimed the seizure of another village in Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast on Sunday. As far as I know there’s been no comment from Ukrainian officials.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times Kyiv is starting to make use of long-range US munitions, but it’s pushing for more:
In the past week, Kyiv’s forces launched three attacks using Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS. The air assaults — which hit an air-defense system and a missile ship in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine’s east and south — were reported by both sides, and their impact was confirmed by independent groups that analyze geolocated footage of the battlefield.
Ukraine hopes that the strikes, by hurting Moscow’s ability to conduct military operations, will ultimately help relieve troops struggling to contain Russian advances on the ground. But the United States and other Western allies have permitted only the firing of Western weapons into Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, not into Russia itself, for fear of escalating the war.
Ukrainian officials have complained that the policy allows Moscow to launch attacks from inside Russia without risk and handcuffs Ukraine’s ability to repel them. “They proceed calmly, understanding that our partners do not give us permission” to strike, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an interview with The New York Times this past week. “This is their huge advantage.”
Now, pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to reverse that policy in the face of Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield. The latest call came on Friday, with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, telling The Economist that denying “Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.”
The established pattern so far in this conflict suggests that the Biden administration will eventually give in to the pressure, and that this latest thing that Ukraine absolutely needs in order to win the war won’t actually have much effect on the course of the war.
AMERICAS
COLOMBIA
The Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group on Saturday signed the first of what are supposed to be six accords that are on the table as part of their ongoing peace process. This first agreement covers the participation of civil society, and particularly victims of the ELN-government conflict, in peace talks. It’s a positive development for a peace process that hasn’t been especially smooth. However, ELN earlier this month declared that it is returning to the practice of kidnapping for ransom and accused the Colombian government of reneging on promises to provide it with alternative funding. Colombian authorities denied making any such promise. The government has been insistent that ELN get out of the kidnapping business and this setback could threaten the talks moving forward.
MEXICO
The International Crisis Group argues that Mexico’s next president should rethink incumbent Andres Manuel López Obrador policy of leaning on the Mexican military for law enforcement:
What’s new? Mexicans elect a new president on 2 June after a campaign scarred by criminal violence. Official murder rates have fallen slightly under outgoing President Andres Manuel López Obrador, but his ambitions of pacifying the country have not been met and more troops are deployed to fight crime than ever before.
Why does it matter? Some areas suffer from fierce clashes despite military deployments while in other places commanders have forged an uneasy co-existence with crime groups. Feuds between criminal organisations show no sign of abating, fuelling violence, while evidence suggests that illegal outfits now have more social control, state allies and economic might.
What should be done? The new government should ratchet back the military’s role in law enforcement to tasks requiring armed force, within limits defined by the constitution. Severing criminal links to the state, strengthening coordination between security bodies and concentrating resources in the most violent areas will be crucial for effective civilian-led law enforcement.
HAITI
Finally, the “planning team” that Kenyan President William Ruto dispatched to Haiti in recent days has left the country without much clarity as to when Kenya’s expected police deployment might begin. The advance team was apparently responsible for delaying the initial deployment, which was supposed to have taken place on Thursday but has now been indefinitely postponed. The AP, citing a “senior Kenyan official,” is reporting that there are logistical issues underpinning the postponement. Facilities intended for the Kenyan police are still under construction and vehicles and other equipment needed for the intervention are still not in place.