World update: April 28 2020

Stories from Lebanon, Russia, El Salvador, and more

Apr 29, 2020

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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

April 27, 1960: The Togolese Republic declares its independence from France. Commemorated annually as Independence Day in Togo.

April 27, 1961: The Republic of Sierra Leone gains its independence from the United Kingdom as the result of negotiations that had taken place the previous year. Commemorated annually as Independence Day in Sierra Leone.

April 27, 1978: The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, with the support of the Soviet Union, undertakes a coup against Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan that is known as the “Saur Revolution.” PDPA leader Nur Muhammad Taraki assumed the presidency after Khan’s execution on April 28, and mismanaged things so badly that his own party ousted and executed him in September 1979. That incident led directly to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and, with few and very brief exceptions, Afghanistan has been in a steady state of war ever since.

The militarized scene outside the presidential palace in Kabul on April 28, 1978, the day Khan was executed (Cleric77 via Wikimedia Commons)

April 28, 224: This is the date generally given for the Battle of Hormozdgan, which effectively ended Parthian rule over the Persian Empire and installed the Sasanian dynasty in its place. Then-Emperor Artabanus IV was responding to the rise of the Sasanids under Ardashir V, king of Pars. Ardashir’s smaller but better armed and better prepared force met the Parthians at Hormozdgan—the location of which remains unconfirmed but was probably near the Iranian town of Ram-Hormoz—and won a decisive victory, killing Artabanus in the process. Ardashir V of Pars soon became Ardashir I of Persia, and the Sasanians ruled the empire until the Arab invasion swept them aside in the 7th century.

April 28, 1192: The newly elected king of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, is assassinated in the city of Tyre.

COVID-19

Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for April 28:

3,136,508 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (+76,562 since yesterday)
1,965,386 active cases
221,437 reported fatalities (+6365 since yesterday)

In today’s pandemic-related news:

The International Rescue Committee called on Tuesday for increased humanitarian aid to “fragile countries” that are either mired in instability or are outright war zones. The IRC warned that if more isn’t done to help those countries contain the coronavirus, the world could eventually see upwards of one billion people infected and three million fatalities. Most countries that would meet the definition of “fragile” are currently acknowledging fairly low infection rates, but that’s likely a reflection of their lack of testing rather than of their actual numbers of cases.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock says that just $90 billion could provide desperately needed food aid, medical care, and income support to 700 million people at risk of destitution and worse amid the pandemic. While that sounds like a significant amount of money, it’s a little over one percent of the $8 trillion in stimulus that the leaders of the G20 countries are injecting into the global economy, most of which will find its way to people who need it far less than these 700 million do. The UN isn’t requesting this aid but Lowcock called on institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as well as large global lenders to make the funds available.
The head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, called on “major powers,” by which he mostly meant the United States, to suspend “blanket economic sanctions” against countries like Iran and Venezuela in order to help them deal with the pandemic. Egeland exempted “targeted sanctions against elites, or leaders or military sanctions, or sanctions on atomic energy or whatever” from his request, saying that more wide-ranging trade and economic sanctions are preventing international NGOs from working in target countries.
The UN Population Fund predicts that there will be an increase of at least 15 million domestic violence cases this year because of lockdown measures, and that “tens of millions of women will not be able to access modern contraceptives this year, and millions more girls will undergo female genital mutilation or be married off by 2030.” That 15 million figure is optimistic—the fund, along with researchers from Johns Hopkins, estimates that there will be that many additional domestic violence cases for every three months that major lockdown policies are in effect.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

43 confirmed coronavirus case (unchanged)
3 reported fatalities (unchanged)

The Turkish military says that at least 40 civilians were killed on Tuesday in a bombing in the town of Afrin. The explosive was apparently attached to an oil tanker, which may explain the high number of casualties. The Turks accused the Kurdish YPG militia of the bombing.

IRAQ

1928 confirmed cases (+81)
90 reported fatalities (+2)

A suicide bomber attacked Iraq’s Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Directorate office in Kirkuk on Tuesday, but apparently only killed himself while wounding three other people. The bomber was spotted before entering the office and detonated his vest outside. An accomplice reportedly fled the scene. Iraqi authorities seem convinced that this was an Islamic State attack though the group hasn’t claimed responsibility as yet.

LEBANON

717 confirmed cases (+7)
24 reported fatalities (unchanged)

The city of Tripoli has in many respects been the center of the Lebanese anti-government protest movement, so it’s not surprising that Tripoli has now seen the most violent uprising since protesters started returning to the streets earlier this month. Protesters in that city set fire to banks and threw stones at security forces armed with tear gas on Tuesday, after word spread that a protester shot the day before—presumably by those same security forces—died of his wounds.

The attacks on bank offices began over the weekend and have begun spreading to other Lebanese cities, fueled by the ongoing crash of the Lebanese pound. It’s now trading at around 4500 per dollar on the black market, but bank customers are being offered exchange rates of 2000/dollar at best, and most local banks have transferred their actual dollar holdings to the Lebanese Central Bank so it is impossible for customers to withdraw dollars even if their accounts are dollar denominated. Inflation has now sent food prices skyrocketing at a time when many people are still unable to work because of the pandemic. Needless to say it’s a combustible mix that is likely to deteriorate further.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

15,728 confirmed cases (+173) in Israel, 343 confirmed cases (+1) in Palestine
210 reported fatalities (+6) in Israel, 2 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Palestine

Surprising absolutely nobody, the Trump administration made it clear on Tuesday that it will legitimize whatever West Bank territory Israel’s incoming “unity” government decides to annex. The administration says it expects the annexation to happen in the context of negotiations with the Palestinians, but since those negotiations would be conducted on the basis of Donald Trump’s “heads the Israelis win, tails the Palestinians lose” facsimile of a “peace plan,” there’s virtually no way the Palestinians would agree to participate.

IRAN

92,584 confirmed cases (+1112)
5877 reported fatalities (+71)

The US has begun circulating a draft UN Security Council resolution imposing an indefinite arms embargo on Iran. The plan is to introduce the resolution next month, when Estonia holds the council presidency and will give it a favorable reception. It will nevertheless be vetoed by Russia and China. This could be the precursor to the Trump administration’s ridiculous scheme to invoke the sanctions “snapback” mechanism in the 2015 nuclear deal, a deal in which the United States is no longer a participant and therefore has no standing to invoke anything. But at this point it seems the administration is not planning to go that route, yet. An attempt to invoke “snapback” would certainly destroy whatever is left of the deal, which may be the point, but it might also splinter the Security Council. Russia and China might just refuse to go along with it, and even some US allies like France might balk as well.

At Responsible Statecraft, economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani delves into the contradictory and inaccurate messages being offered by the Bomb Bomb Iran brigade:

Iran’s request for a $5 billion emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is revealing serious desperation, and not only on the part the Iranian government. Desperation is also apparent in the responses from the Trump administration and the regime change lobby in Washington led by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) as they try to block the loan.
In a few short weeks, their message has gone from one extreme to another: from repeating that Iran’s economy is near collapse, to saying that the country is flush with money. But they cannot have it both ways. With the economy not showing any sign of imminent collapse and Iran’s leaders still defiant, the first message was clearly a misreading of the facts. The new message misleads with bad data.

ASIA

CHINA

82,858 confirmed cases (+22) on the mainland, 1038 confirmed cases (unchanged) in Hong Kong
4633 reported fatalities (unchanged) on the mainland, 4 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Hong Kong

Thankfully for all of us, Donald Trump resumed his daily pandemic bullshit extravaganza on Monday, and he made sure to once again blame China for his myriad failures. Trump explained that his administration is “doing very serious investigations” about China’s initial response to the coronavirus and suggested he might seek damages from the Chinese government. A recent editorial in Germany apparently suggested that the German government seek $165 billion in damages from Beijing, and that apparently gave Trump the idea to pursue what he termed “a lot more money” than that. Sounds like a foolproof plan.

NORTH KOREA

No acknowledged cases

There’s still no indication as to the condition of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, though speculation as to his whereabouts seems to have largely coalesced around the city of Wŏnsan. Even North Korean defectors say they can get no indication from their sources within North Korea as to why Kim has disappeared from the public view since April 11. Indeed, many seem unaware of his disappearance, let alone the commotion it’s caused internationally. There seems to be a growing sense within both the South Korean and US governments that the simplest explanation—Kim is holed up because he’s afraid of contracting the coronavirus—is in fact the correct one. This marks quite a turn from last week, when anonymous US sources were breathlessly feeding the narrative that Kim had undergone a botched heart procedure and was on death’s door. The entire heart procedure story may have been manufactured by the North Korean government, since admitting that Kim is hiding from the pandemic would be to admit that the pandemic has in fact penetrated North Korea. Which Pyongyang has been unwilling to admit.

Despite the questions about their boss’s condition, a delegation of North Korean officials is reportedly heading to Beijing this week for trade and economic discussions. Regardless of whether you believe Pyongyang’s unlikely story that it’s managed to avoid the pandemic entirely, the economic downturn caused by the pandemic has undoubtedly hit what was already a very shaky North Korean economy. The delegation may be looking for some basic humanitarian aid at this point.

AFRICA

LIBYA

61 confirmed cases (unchanged)
2 reported fatalities (unchanged)

Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” is accusing the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and its allied military forces of carrying out a drone strike on Tuesday that killed at least five civilians in western Libya. Pro-GNA militias rejected the claim, saying they attacked a convoy that was carrying weapons and ammunition for the LNA. Haftar’s forces insist the convoy was carrying food.

Meanwhile, Haftar’s decision to up and declare himself the new dictator of Libya (in so many words) has not been terribly well received among his foreign backers. The Russian government directly signaled its disapproval on Tuesday, while the French government, which pretends not to support Haftar, pretended not to be talking specifically about him when it criticized “unilateral decisions” that might interfere with a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Verbal disapproval means much less than actually withdrawing support, of course, and it remains to be seen whether either country will do that.

MOROCCO

4252 confirmed cases (+132)
165 reported fatalities (+3)

The Moroccan government on Tuesday angrily denied that it’s using the coronavirus as an excuse to crack down on political opposition, after the UN human rights office suggested it was. The facts, however, are on the UN’s side, and they put Morocco in good company with its fellow North African states:

Most governments, be they at the helm of democracies or autocracies, have severely curtailed civil liberties to prevent the virus from spreading, but North African governments have capitalized on the global acceptance of this step to enact even harsher restrictions on free speech and expression.
The extreme crackdown on Algerian antigovernment protesters for “undermining national unity,” the prosecution of more than 25,000 Moroccans (including several critics of the government) for violating the state of emergency, and the consolidation of the prime minister’s power in Tunisia are all forms of suppression and represent potential power grabs that, even if temporary, will likely have a lasting impact on the citizen-state relationship.
In this new environment, lack of transparency—especially regarding the outbreak itself and the governments’ responses—has become an even greater problem and further reduced the space for freedom of expression. According to journalists in the region, lockdowns have made it impossible for them and civil society activists to conduct on-the-ground research. Instead, they must rely on phone calls and secondhand information to verify claims of arrests. A rise in unreliable reporting has also made it extremely difficult for independent media, where they exist, to fact check or produce their own stories—and to thereby counter misleading or false information.

MOZAMBIQUE

76 confirmed cases (unchanged)
No reported fatalities

Mozambican security forces say they’ve killed 129 Islamist fighters in that country’s troubled Cabo Delgado province this month. Mozambique’s interior ministry portrayed those killings as retribution for an Islamist attack on the village of Xitaxi on April 7 that killed 52 people.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

93,558 confirmed cases (+6411)
867 reported fatalities (+73)

Most of Russia’s confirmed coronavirus cases have occurred in urban centers, with Moscow the hardest hit, but The New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa reports that the virus is also spreading in isolated industrial outposts in the Russian Arctic:

In mid- and late March, as the coronavirus was beginning to tear through Europe and the United States, Russia reported a curiously low rate of infection. I wrote an article on March 25th, when Russia had fewer than five hundred confirmed cases, asking whether, thanks to a mixture of luck and some early measures, Russia would be spared the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. A month later, the answer seems to be no.
Russia now has more than ninety thousand reported cases of the virus, with a curve that is still growing steadily upward; the pace of new infections is the second highest in the world, behind only the United States. (Russia’s growth rate has slowed some in recent days, settling at seven per cent per day.) Just more than half of those cases are in Moscow, a logical epicenter, given its extensive global connections and urban density. In the provinces, infection clusters have broken out in hospitals, nursing homes, and church congregations—a tragically similar pattern to those found throughout Europe. But one particularity of the virus in Russia has been its spread in remote settlements above the Arctic Circle, in places such as Belokamenka—forbidding outposts that exist to service the country’s lucrative oil-and-gas industry. Otherwise cut off from the rest of the world by geography and climate, they are connected to the rest of Russia and beyond through their ever-rotating workforces—which, in the time of a global pandemic, serve as a dangerously efficient vector for spreading the virus.

FRANCE

165,911 confirmed cases (+2638)
23,660 reported fatalities (+367)

Monday’s car attack on two police officers in a Paris suburb looks like it may not have been motivated by working class anger over the pandemic. The driver of the car, a 29 year old man who was arrested at the scene, was apparently carrying a letter pledging his loyalty to the Islamic State. French authorities say he was not on any agency’s watch list prior to Monday.

AMERICAS

BRAZIL

72,899 confirmed cases (+6398)
5063 reported fatalities (+520)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro added to his corruption spree on Tuesday by appointing family friend Alexandre Ramagem as the new head of the federal police force. In his resignation announcement last week, former Brazilian justice minister Sérgio Moro objected to Bolsonaro’s decision to fire former police chief Maurício Valeixo and strongly alleged that he did so in order to improperly influence corruption investigations involving three of his sons. Which is itself an act of corruption.

When Bolsonaro ran for president in 2018, his main pitch to people who weren’t on the far right political fringe was that he would fight corruption. It would appear he was lying about that. Consequently, the Brazilian Supreme Court has just green lit a new investigation into the Valeixo firing and whether Bolsonaro was indeed trying to influence those previous investigations involving his sons. That investigation could conceivably end with Bolsonaro’s impeachment, though it should be noted that polling shows a plurality of Brazilians don’t want it to come to that, even though 52 percent believe Moro’s account compared with only 20 percent who believe Bolsonaro’s. Around 50 percent don’t want Bolsonaro to resign either, but that number is on the decline partly due to unhappiness over the way Bolsonaro has handled the pandemic.

PERU

31,190 confirmed cases (+2491)
854 reported fatalities (+72)

At least nine prisoners have died as the result of a riot in the Miguel Castro Castro prison in Lima that began Monday afternoon. The uprising was caused by anger over sanitary and medical conditions in the facility as well as a demand for pardons to reduce the chances of a major coronavirus outbreak. The causes of their deaths have not been released but presumably the security forces that responded to the riot had something to do with it.

EL SALVADOR

345 confirmed cases (+22)
8 reported fatalities (unchanged)

A whopping 97 percent of Salvadorans approve of the job President Nayib Bukele is doing managing the pandemic. This, frankly, is troubling, because Bukele is slowly but surely establishing himself as a right-wing dictator in a country that’s had a problematic history with that sort of thing. In just one year in office, Bukele has already, among other things, deployed his military to occupy the Salvadoran Congress as a threat to opposition legislators, ignored a Supreme Court ruling striking down part of his hyper-criminalized pandemic lockdown plan, and…well, whatever this is:

Right groups condemned El Salvador’s president on Monday for releasing startling photos of hundreds of jailed gang members stripped to underwear and pressed together in formation, part of a punishment for an outbreak of violence.
The images published at the weekend on the Twitter account of President Nayib Bukele’s office stood in contrast to social-distancing measures around the world, including an obligatory home quarantine in El Salvador to stop the new coronavirus spreading.
They were followed by orders from Bukele to place members of gangs, including the notorious MS-13, in sealed, steel box-like cells and permission to use lethal force against gang members on the streets.

The appearance of toughness in the face of El Salvador’s unpopular criminal gangs is bound to gain popular support, but Bukele’s apparent disregard both for the Salvadoran constitution and basic human rights is pretty startling. There are growing calls for the Organization of American States to investigate Bukele’s human rights abuses, but as the OAS really only seems interested in undermining left-leaning governments I suspect Bukele can rest easy.

UNITED STATES

1,035,765 confirmed cases (+25,409)
59,266 reported fatalities (+2470)

Finally, Andrew Bacevich argues for a greater focus on self-reliance and sustainability as national security tenets in the aftermath (whenever that might be) of the pandemic:

Proponents of globalized neoliberalism don’t care where things get made or who makes them. All they care about is price: The lowest wins.
The unwritten motto of contemporary America life is the slogan you see painted on the Wal-Mart eighteen-wheelers crowding interstate highways: “Save Money. Live Better.” Unpacked, it means: Buying lots of cheap stuff holds the key to the good life.
This describes the delusion to which the People of Plenty fell prey during the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Abundance became synonymous with novelty, convenience, and instant availability. Quality and lasting value became afterthoughts. With just-in-time logistics all the rage so too did stockpiles.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, those chickens have come home to roost. Authorities at all levels of government discovered — whoops! — that the United States did not have on hand and no longer possessed the ability to make critically needed items, even simple things like nasal swabs and surgical gowns. For the People of Plenty, “Quick, call China, to see if they can help” became the embarrassed response of agencies whose preference for shortsighted thrift ended up exposing Americans to great danger.