World roundup: September 19-20 2020

Stories from Iran, Thailand, Venezuela, and more

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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

September 18, 1810: The Government Assembly of the Kingdom of Chile, or the “First Government Junta,” takes power in the colony by pledging allegiance to the deposed King Ferdinand VII of Spain and rejecting Napoleon’s imposition of his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne, thus kicking off the Chilean War of Independence. Though it was supposed to be temporary, the junta continued fighting after Ferdinand’s restoration and kept fighting until Chile became an independent nation in the 1820s. Commemorated as Chilean Independence Day.

September 18, 1947: The National Security Act creates the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Boy that sure worked out great for everybody.

September 19, 634: The Siege of Damascus ends

September 20, 1519: Ferdinand Magellan sets sail with a small fleet intending to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan wouldn’t survive the voyage, but one of his ships did, arriving in Spain in September 1522 under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano and becoming the first ship to successfully complete that journey.

September 20, 2001: George W. Bush, in an address to Congress, declares war on terror. And we all lived happily ever after.

INTERNATIONAL

Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for September 20:

• 31,223,650 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (7,441,347 active, +243,019 since yesterday)

• 964,762 reported fatalities (+3891 since yesterday)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

• 3800 confirmed coronavirus cases (+35)

• 172 reported fatalities (+2)

Local witnesses and Syrian rebel sources are claiming that Russian and Syrian forces undertook a major bombardment of parts of northwestern Syria on Sunday, the largest such attacks since the Russian and Turkish governments imposed a ceasefire there back in March. There have been reports of multiple Russian airstrikes in and around the city of Idlib and on a couple of towns west of that city, as well as reports of Syrian artillery strikes in southern Idlib province and drone strikes in western Hama province. It’s believed that Moscow has been trying to pressure the Turkish government to withdraw its forces from the region—according to Reuters the Turks have “more than ten thousand troops” stationed there—and there have been reports of occasional Syrian attacks against Turkish positions of late. There’s no word on any casualties as yet.

YEMEN

• 2026 confirmed cases (+0)

• 586 reported fatalities (+1)

The Houthis reportedly fired a “military projectile” on Saturday that wounded five civilians in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province. The Houthis have not claimed responsibility as yet as far as I know.

The Yemeni government is reportedly calling for an emergency United Nations Security Council session on the Houthi military offensive in Marib province, which like Idlib province in Syria has become a haven for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons. Yemeni authorities have accused the Houthis of carrying out a sustained campaign of missile strikes against the province’s civilian populace, and while they haven’t offered any details Marib has seen some heavy fighting for the past several weeks and the number of combatant deaths alone is believed to be in the hundreds. The notion that any civilian deaths are all the Houthis’ fault is fanciful, but nevertheless a UNSC meeting on the subject would probably be a good idea.

LEBANON

• 29,303 confirmed cases (+1006)

• 297 reported fatalities (+11)

Along with the unsubstantiated claim that Iran was plotting to assassinate US South African ambassador Lana Marks, a claim that’s now been debunked by South African authorities, the Trump administration has for the past few days been floating an equally unsubstantiated claim that Hezbollah has caches of weapons and ammonium nitrate explosives strewn all over Europe. The French government debunked this one on Friday, its foreign ministry saying that “there is nothing tangible to confirm such an allegation in France today.” It’s not a conclusive refutation, I guess, but then the Trump administration hasn’t really offered anything to refute.

KUWAIT

• 99,434 confirmed cases (+385)

• 584 reported fatalities (+3)

Donald Trump on Friday bestowed the US Legion of Merit award on Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Sabah is still receiving medial treatment at the Mayo Clinic, where he’s been since July over an unspecified ailment. Trump also claimed to reporters that Kuwait may normalize relations with Israel in the near future, though there’s been no indication of this from any Kuwaiti official as yet and this doesn’t seem like the sort of thing they’d do while their ruler is in the hospital. The Trump administration has asserted, without going into specifics, that no fewer than five countries are considering deals with Israel, three of which are in the greater Middle East region.

BAHRAIN

• 65,039 confirmed cases (+540)

• 221 reported fatalities (+0)

The Bahraini government says that its security forces thwarted an Iranian-backed terrorist plot earlier this year, to have been carried out by a group allegedly calling itself the “Qassem Soleimani Brigade.” They don’t seem to have gone into specifics, but the plot supposedly involved multiple attacks on government buildings and foreign targets, and potentially a number of assassinations. There’s good reason to be skeptical of these claims. The Bahraini government regularly asserts that it’s foiled nefarious Iranian-backed plots without providing any evidence, assertions that then get laundered through Bahraini and Saudi state media. In this case, despite vague initial reports that made it sound like this was a recent development, Bahraini authorities later produced a report that referred to incidents that took place years ago and eventually clarified that the alleged plot was “not new.”

Given that Bahrain just normalized relations with Israel and that the US government is currently trying to flood the media with unsubstantiated allegations (see below) about Iran and its regional allies, the timing of this story is, to say they least, suspect.

SAUDI ARABIA

• 329,754 confirmed cases (+483)

• 4485 reported fatalities (+27)

According to the Wall Street Journal, which I realize is paywalled, Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are at loggerheads over the issue of normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations. Presumably I don’t have to tell you which one is pushing for normalization. The interesting scoop here is that MBS apparently had advance warning of the Israel-UAE normalization agreement and elected not to give his dad a head’s up for fear that the king would try to stop it. Salman was reportedly furious when news of the deal broke, to such an extent that he dispatched the kingdom’s former US ambassador, Turki al-Faisal, to write an op-ed criticizing the UAE for demanding so little from Israel in return for normalization.

MBS views normal relations with Israel as of substantial importance in terms of implementing his Vision 2030 plan, including his plans to build a brand new hyper-modern city, Neom, in the kingdom’s northwest. Israeli companies (and Israeli investment capital) could play a major role in Neom’s development, if the political challenges can be surmounted. Which they most likely can, and probably soon given that Salman is 84 and MBS is next in line for the throne. A Saudi-Israel normalization deal would be a green light to the rest of the Arab world to follow suit. In a sense it would be a death-blow to the Palestinian cause, but the fact is no Arab government is willing to really support that cause anymore anyway, and increasingly it’s not even a salient political issue for Arab populations.

IRAN

• 422,140 confirmed cases (+3097)

• 24,301 reported fatalities (+183)

As expected, the Trump administration declared over the weekend that UN sanctions have once again been imposed on Iran, meaning for example that the arms embargo scheduled to expire next month has been extended indefinitely, as far as the US is concerned. The thing is, “as far as the US is concerned” is the key part of that sentence, because for the most part the rest of the world disagrees. The remaining participants in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have rejected the US argument that it’s still entitled to invoke that deal’s dispute resolution mechanism to re-impose the sanctions, despite having quit the deal in 2018. The UN Security Council has simply ignored the US invocation, since apart from the Dominican Republic all the other council members similarly reject the claim that the US is entitled to take this step. UN Secretary-General António Guterres says the UN cannot act on the US declaration because there’s too much “uncertainty” over the process.

Even Iran is trying to dunk on the US over this, with President Hassan Rouhani saying Sunday that Washington “is approaching a certain defeat in its sanctions move.” It’s of course one thing for everybody to chuckle and roll their eyes at this most recent rogue action by the Trump administration in abstract. But when the Trump administration imposes actual sanctions on actual companies and actual individuals on the basis of these supposedly “restored” UN restrictions—which it’s reportedly going to start doing as soon as Monday—then I suspect we’ll see the eye rolling and chuckling stop, quickly. Because the fact of the matter is that there’s no mechanism by which the rest of the world can stop the US from imposing those sanctions, and there’s every reason to believe they’ll be effective because the US has the power to ensure that they are.

Is the US behaving lawlessly here? I guess, sure, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the US exists above and apart from international law. The rules don’t apply when there’s nobody who can enforce them against you.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

• 39,044 confirmed cases (+125)

• 1441 reported fatalities (+4)

Two airstrikes carried out in apparent “double-tap” fashion by Afghan forces in Kunduz province on Saturday appear to have gone very wrong, though reports of exactly how wrong differ. The consensus seems to be that the strikes, carried out in response to Taliban attacks on Afghan military positions in the province, killed at least 30 Taliban fighters in a village called Sayed Ramazan. According to Afghan authorities, that’s all they killed. But local officials are saying that the second strike killed at least ten civilians who had rushed to the scene of the initial strike to extinguish the ensuing fire. That’s the low end claim, but there have been other reports of 11, 12, or 17 killed, and according to the AP local witnesses have put the civilian death toll at 24.

THAILAND

• 3506 confirmed cases (+6)

• 59 reported fatalities (+0)

Thousands of anti-government protesters hit the streets of Bangkok on Saturday to demand democratic reforms from their still mostly-military government:

For [activist] Parit [Chiwarak], the reasons for the growing dissent are obvious. Though Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, the palace retains wide-ranging powers and is deeply embedded in the economic and cultural fabric of the country. Amid yawning economic inequality and a disputed election that extended the term of the junta chief who took power in a 2014 coup, the present King Vajiralongkorn was crowned, having taken the throne after the death of his revered father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, in 2016.

“The wind changed when the reign shifted” between the two kings, Parit said. The election, he added, made clear to Thais that they could speak out against the anti-democratic shift in the country and be supported.

“Once the train leaves, you can’t stop it,” he said.

TAIWAN

• 507 confirmed cases (+1)

• 7 reported fatalities (+0)

The Taiwanese military scrambled fighter jets on Saturday for the second day in a row in response to Chinese military flights skirting the island’s airspace. None of the 19 Chinese aircraft involved entered Taiwanese airspace per se, but many crossed the midway point in the Taiwan Strait and others entered Taiwan’s “air defense identification zone” to its southwest. China makes these flights to demonstrate that it does not recognize “Taiwanese airspace” inasmuch as it considers Taiwan a Chinese province.

CHINA

• 85,279 confirmed cases (+10) on the mainland, 5033 confirmed cases (+23) in Hong Kong

• 4634 reported fatalities (+0) on the mainland, 103 reported fatalities (+0) in Hong Kong

Donald Trump on Saturday told reporters that he gives his “blessing” to a pending deal to sell the TikTok video editing app to a new entity owned partly by Oracle and potentially also by Walmart. Ownership of the app under this arrangement would pass from the Chinese firm ByteDance to a company called “TikTok Global,” 20 percent of which would belong to Oracle. Walmart’s participation is still up in the air. ByteDance may still own some part of the new entity—details are sparse and may still be in flux—but the company “will have a majority of US directors, a US chief executive and a security expert on the board.”

The Chinese government, meanwhile, has threatened to retaliate for Trump’s newly imposed restrictions on both TikTok and WeChat. That could mean sanctions against tech giants like Google and Apple, though Apple has so much of its supply chain in China that to hurt it Beijing would have to risk hurting its own economy. The TikTok restrictions would presumably be lifted if the sale goes through, but the more serious measures taken against WeChat seem likely to remain in place indefinitely.

OCEANIA

SOLOMON ISLANDS

• No confirmed cases

Two men, one Australian and the other British, working for the Norwegian People's Aid NGO were killed Sunday while trying to clear unexploded World War II ordinance in the Solomon Islands. They were reportedly surveying munitions when one of the devices exploded. Normally when we mention the problem of WWII munitions in this newsletter it’s to talk about an evacuation or other inconvenience that some unexploded bomb has caused, but this incident serves as a reminder that these things are not just inconvenient, and not just harmful to the environment for that matter, they’re also still very deadly.

AFRICA

LIBYA

• 27,949 confirmed cases (+715)

• 444 reported fatalities (+8)

The AP is reporting that Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj does not support “Libyan National Army” leader Khalifa Haftar’s agreement to end his blockade of most of Libya’s major oil facilities. The reason is that, under Haftar’s deal, his LNA (or, more to the point, Russian mercenaries working with the LNA) would still remain in physical control of those facilities, able to blockade them again pretty much at will. The agreement was apparently negotiated by Sarraj’s deputy prime minister, Ahmed Matiq, not by Sarraj himself, and Khalid Haftar, Khalifa’s son. Some of the militia leaders backing Sarraj’s Government of National Accord are already criticizing Matiq’s concessions publicly and calling on Sarraj to join them.

CHAD

• 1151 confirmed cases (+2)

• 81 reported fatalities (+0)

The Chadian army reportedly lost at least ten of its soldiers, with another seven wounded, in an attack Thursday on a Boko Haram base in the Lake Chad region. Chadian officials say they destroyed the base but there’s no indication as to the number, if any, of Boko Haram casualties.

ETHIOPIA

• 68,820 confirmed cases (+689)

• 1096 reported fatalities (+7)

Ethiopian authorities on Saturday charged Oromo activist Jawar Mohammed with “terrorism-related offenses, telecom fraud and other crimes” according to the AP. Jawar, one of 24 people so charged but easily the most prominent of them, is a popular figure within the Oromo community and at one time was a political ally of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. I think it’s safe to say they’re not getting along very well anymore. They were arrested in connection with protests back in July following the murder of Oromo singer/activist Hachalu Hundessa. At Foreign Policy, journalists Tom Gardner and Lule Estifanos look at the political impact of the Hachalu murder and several other prominent killings across Ethiopia, as well as the Ethiopian government’s lack of transparency in investigating them.

EUROPE

BELARUS

• 75,674 confirmed cases (+213)

• 780 reported fatalities (+4)

“Tens of thousands” of people protested in Minsk and elsewhere again on Sunday, demanding for the sixth week in a row that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko resign. Belarusian police reportedly arrested scores of people, as they did the previous day when some 2000 women marched through the Belarusian capital also calling for Lukashenko to go, but authorities have been arresting scores of people at each of these protests and those mass arrests have yet to end or even reduce the intensity of the demonstrations.

AMERICAS

PERU

• 762,865 confirmed cases (+0)

• 31,369 reported fatalities (+0)

As expected, Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra survived Friday’s impeachment vote, maybe by an even wider margin than anticipated.

You will have Vizcarra to kick around a while longer (Peruvian government via Wikimedia Commons)

Only 32 members of Peru’s 130 seat Congress voted to remove Vizcarra from office, well short of a simple majority let alone of the 87 vote super-majority needed to actually remove him. The result is unsurprising, given that polling indicates that 79 percent of Peruvians prefer to see Vizcarra see out the end of his term next year. He’s already promised not to run in April’s presidential election. Peruvian presidents are elected to one five year term with no possibility of immediate reelection, though technically Vizcarra is serving out the term of his predecessor, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and probably could make a legal case for running if he chose to do so.

VENEZUELA

• 66,656 confirmed cases (+707)

• 547 reported fatalities (+8)

World Politics Review’s Benjamin Wilhelm reports on the divisions emerging within Venezuela’s political opposition:

A coalition of parties aligned with opposition leader Juan Guaido plans to boycott legislative elections that are scheduled for December, on the grounds that they will be rigged. Henrique Capriles, another prominent opposition figure, heads a much smaller faction that recently announced it will participate in the vote if electoral conditions are improved. That move could play into the hands of Venezuela’s repressive president, Nicolas Maduro, who is hoping to win international recognition of the election even though it will be neither free nor fair.

Capriles may ultimately abandon his plan to field candidates, as it hinges on Maduro delaying the vote, which the president has said is “impossible.” But regardless of whether Capriles and Guaido remain divided, the Dec. 6 polls represent a moment of truth for Venezuela’s beleaguered opposition. Guaido is still recognized by more than 50 countries as Venezuela’s legitimate interim president, but his campaign to oust Maduro has faltered. With the election looming, his movement is at risk of fading into irrelevance.

Capriles is likely to back down, using Maduro’s unwillingness to meet his electoral demands as a justification for joining Guaidó’s boycott. But it seems pretty apparent that he’s tired of following Guaidó’s lead—which is understandable, given that the opposition has been following Guaidó’s lead for nearly two years at this point and has nothing to show for it.

UNITED STATES

• 7,004,768 confirmed cases (+33,344)

• 204,118 reported fatalities (+294)

Finally, BuzzFeed News has broken a major story detailing the overwhelming scale of global financial corruption:

A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.

Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.

These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) requires banks to file these “suspicious activity reports” (SARs), but most of them are memory-holed. The ones that do generate any response usually end in slap on the wrist fines that cost those banks less money than they stand to make by continuing to enable the suspicious activity. SARs can be used by law enforcement agencies in pulling together civil or criminal cases, but there appears to be no mechanism within Treasury for flagging repeated offenders and taking action against them. Presumably that’s by design, since to take action on these reports would mean going after some (all, really) of the largest financial institutions in the world, as well as their very wealthy and very well-connected executives.

The scope of this story is overwhelming, beyond previous corruption-related document dumps like the Panama Papers leak, and because of that I’m skeptical it will get the attention it deserves. I can’t possibly do the whole thing justice here so please go read the piece for yourself.