TODAY IN HISTORY
September 12, 1683: In the first major engagement of the 1683-1699 Great Turkish War, an army led by Polish King Jan III Sobieski defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna and thereby breaks up the in-progress siege of that city. The Ottomans retreated in disarray, allowing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Habsburgs to take advantage and grab chunks of formerly Ottoman territory. By 1687 they’d been driven out of Hungary and were well on their way to the first major military defeat the empire had suffered in centuries.
September 12, 1974: A committee of Ethiopian military officers, called the “Derg,” overthrows Emperor Haile Selassie in a coup amid mass unrest caused in part by a serious famine. The Derg, which refashioned itself as the “Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia,” ruled the country until 1987, when it further transformed itself into the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Reuters has an inside account of another atrocity perpetrated against Syria’s Alawite community by the country’s security forces. Late last month Interior Ministry forces entered the Damascus suburb al-Somaria and began forcibly evicting some of its residents. Somaria is home to a number of families of soldiers who served in Bashar al-Assad’s military and apparently the ministry has decided that they’re living on land that Assad “illegally seized.” The ministry personnel rounded up several men living in the neighborhood and interrogated them about any past military service, torturing them in some instances. The illegal land seizure allegation may very well be true though that doesn’t justify forced eviction and certainly doesn’t justify torture. Syria’s transitional government will ideally figure out a way to redress those past injustices without creating new ones.
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