World update: April 16 2020
Stories from Iran, Mali, Brazil, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
April 15, 1395: The Battle of the Terek River
April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson makes his Major League Baseball debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In doing so, he became the first African-American to play in the MLB, breaking the color barrier that had been entrenched in the league since the 1880s. Two years later he became the first African-American to win his league’s Most Valuable Player award for the 1949 season, and he was inducted in the the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
April 16, 1457 BCE: This is the date most commonly cited for the Battle of Megiddo, the earliest well-documented battle in human history. An Egyptian army under Pharaoh Thutmose III defeated a group of rebelling Canaanite kingdoms at Megiddo, a city that was the site of so many battles in the ancient world that it gave its name to the hypothetical apocalyptic “Battle of Armageddon.” They followed up by besieging the city, which fell seven months later. Thutmose’s victory restored Egyptian preeminence in the Levant and enabled the greatest territorial expansion in Ancient Egyptian history.
April 16, 1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. writes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he outlines his nonviolent approach to fighting racial injustice:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent." But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.
But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? — "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? — "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? — "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist? — "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? — "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? — "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? — "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
COVID-19
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for April 16:
2,181,308 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide (+95,022 since yesterday)
1,488,769 active cases
145,470 reported fatalities (+6996 since yesterday)
The Accountability Lab’s Blair Glencourse argues that part of an effective anti-pandemic strategy must be an effort to tackle corruption:
There are countless other stories around the world detailing how corruption has undermined the fight against the novel coronavirus. They include dodgy procurement contracts that were fast-tracked through the approval process under emergency measures in Slovenia, cops soliciting “coronavirus risk allowances” from citizens in Zimbabwe, and contractors overcharging for supplies in Colombia. In the U.S., senators have been accused of capitalizing on the crisis to make a killing in the stock market, while President Donald Trump has openly used political loyalty as the basis for distributing life-saving medical equipment to states. Trump has also brazenly tried to undermine the independent federal watchdog established by Congress to oversee the implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief law.
Deep-seated corruption within governments around the world has decimated their ability to deal with pandemics. Problems range from counterfeit drugs to price gouging to shady procurement processes. Even before this outbreak, Transparency International estimated that corruption in the health sector costs at least $500 billion a year and kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. One study found that in 2011, $98 billion was lost to fraud within Medicare and Medicaid alone in the U.S. During the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, I saw firsthand how citizens had to pay bribes to access health care, and how a lack of accountability in government expenditures to contain the disease led to thousands of deaths.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
1 confirmed case of COVID-19 (unchanged since yesterday)
no reported fatalities
United Nations Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths said Thursday that he’s expecting to conclude an agreement that includes a nationwide ceasefire and a resumption of peace talks “in the immediate future.” He’s been talking with the pro-government coalition and the Houthi rebels for two weeks now on a cessation of hostilities spurred by concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. The coalition has already declared a ceasefire but the Houthis have dismissed it as a political stunt.
IRAQ
1434 confirmed cases (+19)
80 reported fatalities (+1)
Turkish warplanes targeting Kurdistan Workers’ Party positions killed at least three civilians in two airstrikes in northern Iraq on Wednesday, according to the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw. The Turks attacked one site near the town of Makhmur and a PKK facility near the city of Rawanduz. The civilians were reportedly killed in the Makhmur strike. Turkish officials claim they killed four PKK fighters in the Rawanduz strike but haven’t acknowledged any civilian casualties.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
12,758 confirmed cases (+257) in Israel, 295 confirmed cases (+4) in Palestine
142 reported fatalities (+12) in Israel, 2 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Palestine
Benny Gantz has reportedly given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu until April 20 to sign on to a national unity government. If Netanyahu refuses, Gantz will push for a measure in the Knesset that would make anyone under indictment ineligible to serve as prime minister. Netanyahu is under indictment, so the threat is clear. Gantz might be able to eke out passage of such a bill by uniting anti-Netanyahu forces in the legislature, though there would certainly be additional legal challenges to it beyond that. Netanyahu and Gantz have been negotiating on a unity coalition for some time now, but failed to reach agreement before Gantz’s deadline to form a government passed on Wednesday. The Knesset now has 21 days to form a government under anybody before Israel will have to go to a fourth consecutive election. Netanyahu seems to be insisting on legal protections if/when he transfers the premiership to Gantz, as he would theoretically have to do in 18 months under their proposed power-sharing arrangement. Suspicion remains high that what he really wants is to scuttle the unity talks and force that fourth election.
In a real change of pace, Palestinians in the West Bank have now started working to make sure that the wall cordoning them off from Israel is structurally sound. They’re repairing small gaps and reporting larger ones to authorities, while criticizing Israel for allowing parts of the wall to decay. Yes, if you live long enough you get to see everything, but in the case it’s not that surprising. Palestinians have come to view the wall as an important tool in containing COVID-19, since when its in good repair it forces people who work on the Israeli side of the line to return through specific checkpoints where they can be evaluated for infection. Parts of the wall that are in disrepair allow Palestinians to cross into the West Bank unseen. Returning laborers are by far the biggest vector for COVID-19 in the West Bank.
IRAN
77,995 confirmed cases (+1606)
4869 reported fatalities (+92)
Tufts University’s Ben Denison takes issue with the latest Blob call an overt Iranian regime change effort:
In a new Foreign Affairs article this week, Eric Edelman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh argue that the United States should be using every tool of statecraft at its disposal to aid dissidents in Iran to overthrow the regime.
They bluntly state that, with Iran, the “only U.S. policy that makes sense is to seek regime change.” They contend that the Iranian regime is inherently revolutionary, and as such, American interests in the Middle East can only be secure once the regime is deposed.
To carry out regime change in Iran, the authors contend that covertly supporting dissident movements, engaging in public diplomacy campaigns, and continuing the use of sanctions and other tools of statecraft to put maximum pressure on the regime is necessary. In so doing, they contend that the U.S. can aid local dissidents and protestors to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran, and the U.S. can begin reaping the benefits of negotiating with a less revolutionary regime.
There are a host of issues with this argument that the U.S. has implicit interests in engaging in regime change in Iran. Chief among these problems is the belief that the regime change strategy proffered “will not be terribly costly.”
ASIA
INDIA
13,430 confirmed cases (+1060)
448 reported fatalities (+26)
Indian authorities have arrested the leader of the Muslim evangelical group Tablighi Jamaat, Muhammad Saad Khandalvi, and charged him with manslaughter. They say Khandalvi ignored two official warnings to end a pilgrimage event his group held last month in Delhi that has now been linked to over 1000 cases of COVID-19.
CHINA
82,367 confirmed cases (+26) on the mainland, 1018 confirmed cases (+1) in Hong Kong
3342 reported fatalities (unchanged) on the mainland, 4 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Hong Kong
Journalist Celine Sui reports that allegations of xenophobic racism against African nationals may be undermining China’s heavy investment in building soft power across the African continent:
Video evidence of these mistreatments has sparked international outrage. A dozen African countries have summoned their Chinese ambassadors to explain the “inhumane treatment being meted out.” A coalition of African ambassadors in Beijing delivered a letter to China’s foreign minister demanding an immediate end to all discrimination. Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, also expressed his “extreme concern.” Moses Kuria, a vocal member of the Kenyan Parliament, took a more aggressive stance, calling for the immediate removal of all Chinese nationals in Kenya.
Rhetoric in the African press was just as intense. The front page of the Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, led with the headline “Kenyans in China: Rescue Us From Hell.” Similar news stories were found in the Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Ugandan press. The hashtag #ChinaMustExplain quickly trended on Twitter, as users expressed their anger and frustration. However, many people on Chinese social media praised the forcible expulsions and mistreatments as responsible steps to “stemming the spread of virus by Africans.”
NORTH KOREA
No acknowledged cases
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un skipped ceremonies commemorating his grandfather Kim Il-sung’s birthday on Wednesday. This is notable because Kim Il-sung’s birthday is one of the most important holidays in North Korea, and Kim Jong-un never misses it. Since North Korean politics are incredibly opaque by design it’s impossible to know what this means, if it means anything at all. It could signal some sort of change behind the scenes in Pyongyang, or it could just be that Kim Jong-un didn’t feel like attending. If he didn’t feel like attending, of course, that raises questions about his health, particularly amid the COVID-19 outbreak that North Korea won’t acknowledge but that is almost certainly happening.
AFRICA
MALI
171 confirmed cases (+23)
13 reported fatalities (unchanged)
Friend of the newsletter Alex Thurston has a new piece at War on the Rocks arguing for the French government to get out of the way and let Malian leaders negotiate with that country’s al-Qaeda affiliate:
On March 8, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel region — Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (“The Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims” or JNIM) — released a communiqué accepting an offer by the Malian government to negotiate a peace. The jihadists set only one precondition for entering into negotiations: “Ending the racist, arrogant, French Crusader occupation.”
France is highly unlikely to pull out of Mali altogether, at least in the medium term, given successive French governments’ seeming determination to pursue a military victory there. But however bitter a pill it might be for Paris to swallow, French forces would be wise to pull back on counter-terrorism operations in Mali. Doing so would give the Mali-JNIM dialogue a chance to play out, give France and its partners time to reevaluate their regional counter-terrorism approach, and could help drive a wedge between various jihadist groups. In particular, France should publicly commit to suspending its hunt for top jihadist leaders who participate in dialogue.
France’s Sahelian military adventures have done nothing to improve the region’s security situation. Some Malian officials have expressed interest in negotiations with senior JNIM leaders, like the group’s boss Iyad ag Ghali, and from their past behavior there’s reason to think those leaders would be amenable to a peaceful settlement of their grievances. At the very least it doesn’t risk much to talk. And given that the Islamic State has become the region’s main jihadist threat, anything that might neutralize JNIM could allow a tighter focus on the more serious problem.
NIGERIA
442 confirmed cases (+35)
13 reported fatalities (+1)
With fears still high that a COVID-19 outbreak of any severity will quickly overwhelm most African nations’ underdeveloped health care systems, countries with already spotty human rights records appear to be taking lockdown enforcement too far. Nigerian authorities, for example, have killed 18 people in “eight documented incidents of extrajudicial killings” over the past two weeks related to COVID-19 containment measures, according to Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission. As you can see above, that’s considerably more Nigerians than have actually died because of the virus. The NHRC says that eight of the alleged extrajudicial killings have taken place in prisons.
KENYA
234 confirmed cases (+9)
11 reported fatalities (+1)
Kenyan security forces, meanwhile, have killed at least 12 people under similar circumstances over the past two weeks. Worse, there’s anecdotal evidence that fear of police brutality has caused additional deaths, as in the case of a pregnant woman who died of complications in labor because she wouldn’t leave home to go to the hospital and her midwife wouldn’t leave home to come to her. Kenyan police are known for their brutality under normal circumstances and the lockdown seems to have exacerbated things.
CAMEROON
996 confirmed cases (+148)
22 reported fatalities (+5)
Cameroonian President Paul Biya hasn’t been seen in public for 35 days, raising obvious questions as to whether the 87 year old is still the president of Cameroon or even, you know, alive. Somebody in Biya’s office tweeted on his behalf on Thursday, including a photo of him alongside the French ambassador. Was the photo taken on Thursday, or at any time in the past 35 days? Who knows? Cameroonian officials have played around with alleged photos of Biya in the past. Biya is fond of dropping out of sight for extended periods, but most other African heads of state have gone out of their way to maintain a public presence amid the pandemic lockdown, so his disappearance this time is all the more conspicuous.
Biya meeting with then-US Secretary of State John Kerry at the US-Africa Leaders Summit in 2014, when he was definitely alive (State Department photo)
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
267 confirmed cases (+13)
22 reported fatalities (+1)
Al Jazeera reports on the recent uptick in inter-communal violence in the DRC’s Ituri province:
EUROPE
UKRAINE
4161 confirmed cases (+397)
116 reported fatalities (+8)
The Ukrainian government and separatist forces in the Donbas region started a prisoner swap on Thursday that will see Kyiv get 19 people back in exchange for an unknown number of prisoners going the other way. This is the third such exchange under current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and is a product of his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So far though these prisoner swaps haven’t produced any momentum toward a settlement to Ukraine’s frozen civil war.
It appears that high winds have sparked new brushfires in the vicinity of Chernobyl’s nuclear plant. None appear to be particularly serious as yet. A large brushfire had caused concern about the release of radioactive particles from around the plant, but heavy rains put it out earlier this week.
KOSOVO
449 confirmed cases (+62)
11 reported fatalities (+3)
Pomona College’s Mieczyslaw Boduszynski and Arizona State’s Victor Peskin say the Trump administration is alienating the Kosovan people by trying to undermine Prime Minister Albin Kurti:
The Trump administration has sown political turmoil in Kosovo at exactly the moment when stable governance is needed to face the COVID-19 threat. The challenge of responding to the outbreak in Kosovo has been compounded by the fallout of a U.S.-backed no-confidence vote that toppled Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s government at the end of March, after less than two months in power.
The ongoing political battle pits Kurti, who remains the caretaker prime minister and favors new elections, against President Hashim Thaci and some of his parliamentary allies, who want to form a government of national unity that would sideline Kurti and his Vetevendosje (“self-determination”) party, which campaigned on an anti-corruption platform and has balked at Washington’s outsized influence in Kosovo’s affairs. Thaci long led the Democratic Party of Kosovo, which emerged from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—in which Thaci was a former top guerrilla—after the 1998-1999 war. Thus, a constitutional crisis has emerged over who has the right to govern the country. Angry residents on lockdown in the capital, Pristina, have taken to banging pots and pans to protest the machinations that brought down the Kurti government during the coronavirus crisis.
GERMANY
137,698 confirmed cases (+2945)
4052 reported fatalities (+248)
Angela Merkel’s management of the pandemic has boosted her CDU-CSU alliance to its best poll numbers since before Germany’s last federal election, in 2017. The bloc now has 38 percent support in the DeutschlandTrend poll, up from 35 percent two weeks ago. Germany won’t have a new election until sometime next year, at which time Merkel has pledged not to stand for chancellor again. Her party has yet to choose a new leader to replace Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was Merkel’s heir apparent but resigned in February due to cratering poll numbers and the party’s dismal showing in last year’s European parliamentary election.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
30,683 confirmed cases (+2073)
1947 reported fatalities (+190)
As has been expected for some time, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta. The move sparked immediate protests in Rio de Janeiro and may lead to additional unrest, for the simple fact that the Brazilian public regards Mandetta in a much better light these days than it does Bolsonaro. Mandetta has taken the COVID-19 pandemic seriously and has publicly chided his former boss for not taking it seriously. Bolsonaro has pushed consistently for minimizing containment in favor of keeping the economy open, and really his bizarre behavior has gone beyond that. In fact, it’s clear he’s directly undermined efforts to contain the virus, as The Intercept’s Andrew Fishman explains:
On March 24, Bolsonaro gave a nationally televised address attacking social distancing as “scorched earth” tactics; hyping chloroquine as a promising treatment; blaming the press for creating “hysteria”; and insisting that Brazil “should go back to normal.” The Intercept’s Bruno Sousa wrote about the impact that the address had on his working-class Rio de Janeiro neighborhood the following morning, describing scenes where some people began to go about their lives as normal following the remarks; many nonessential businesses even opened back up. “Everyone talked about coronavirus and the president’s speech. Until yesterday, few stores opened here,” Sousa wrote.
The day after his speech, Bolsonaro doubled down: “What they are doing in Brazil, a few governors and a few mayors, is a crime. They are breaking up with Brazil, they are destroying jobs. And those guys who say, ‘Oh, the economy is less important than life.'”
Small street protests by Bolsonaro supporters who oppose the quarantine have broken out in multiple cities and, in some cases, have been shut down by state police and the courts.
On the bright side, to replace Mandetta Bolsonaro has appointed an oncologist, Nelson Teich, who also seems to take the pandemic seriously. He’s apparently better at kissing Bolsonaro’s ass than Mandetta, so ideally he’ll be able to maintain containment measures while minimizing his boss’s increasingly frequent tantrums.
COLOMBIA
3233 confirmed cases (+128)
144 reported fatalities (+13)
Residents of poorer neighborhoods in southern Bogotá set up roadblocks on Thursday to protest the fact that they have not yet received promised government assistance to weather the economic storm caused by the pandemic. Both the Colombian government and city government have promised tens of millions of dollars in healthcare, food, and cash assistance, but there have been delays in getting the aid to the public.
UNITED STATES
677,570 confirmed cases (+29,567)
34,617 reported fatalities (+2174)
Finally, the Quincy Institute’s Jeanne Morefield looks at the price of American Empire when it comes time to deal with something like COVID-19:
In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more on “defense” than the next seven largest countries combined. Our nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget and over half of all discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the Pentagon’s inability to pass a fiscal audit.
Trump’s claim that Obama had “hollowed out” defense spending was not only grossly untrue, it masked the consistency of the security budget’s metastasizing growth since the Vietnam War, regardless of who sits in the White House. At $738 billion dollars, Trump’s security budget was passed in December with the overwhelming support of House Democrats.
And yet, from the perspective of public discourse in this country, our globe-spanning, resource-draining military and security apparatus exists in an entirely parallel universe to the one most Americans experience on a daily level. Occasionally, we wake up to the idea of this parallel universe but only when the United States is involved in visible military actions. The rest of the time, Americans leave thinking about international politics – and the deaths, for instance, of 2.5 million Iraqis since 2003 – to the legions of policy analysts and Pentagon employees who largely accept American military primacy as an “article of faith,” as Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham Patrick Porter has said.