World update: January 16 2020

Stories from Afghanistan, New Zealand, Chile, and more

A combination of evening obligations and major internet issues here at FX Newsletter HQ is forcing me to cut today’s update off a little shorter and earlier than usual. If we get our internet problems remedied then things will be back to normal tomorrow. If not we may be down for a short while until these technical problems get sorted out. Thanks for your patience.

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

January 15, 1892: While working at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA, the inventor of basketball, James Naismith, publishes the rules of his new game. I know we don’t do much sports coverage here but basketball is kind of a big deal and I figured why not break things up for a change? So this is the first of two sports references in tonight’s update.

January 15, 1967: The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, in Super Bowl I. Believe it or not this tradition has continued and the National Football League plays one of these “Super Bowls” every year. Who knew, right? Needless to say this is our second and final sports reference for tonight.

January 16, 929: Abd al-Rahman III declares that his Emirate of Córdoba is now, in fact, the Caliphate of Córdoba. This move did nothing to materially change the conditions of Umayyad rule in Andalus, but it did elevate Abd al-Rahman’s international prestige to some degree. At the time Córdoba was facing the possibility of an attack by the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa, and the Umayyad ruler thought it would be better to meet them caliph to caliph.

January 16, 1547: Grand Duke Ivan IV of Moscow, also known as “Ivan the Terrible,” has himself crowned Tsar of Russia. He wasn’t the first to use the title “tsar,” as his grandfather Ivan III had done so at least informally, but like Abd al-Rahman III’s decision to make himself caliph this formal move raised Ivan’s international profile to par with Mongol khans and the Ottoman sultan, among others. The coronation is considered a milestone in Russia’s transition from principality to empire.

January 16, 1979: Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi flees Iran for Egypt at the height of the Iranian Revolution. Realizing that his position was untenable in the face of massive public opposition, the shah cut a deal with opposition leader Shahpour Bakhtiar of the National Front to establish a civilian transitional government and then skedaddled out of town. Unfortunately for Bakhtiar, whose intent was to end the revolution successfully and peacefully, the deal tainted him as an agent of the shah in the eyes of the Iranian public, and so his government had no legitimacy from the very start.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Heavy fighting between rebels and government-aligned forces in Syria’s Idlib province overnight killed at least 39 fighters according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Government forces resumed their advance toward the city of Maarrat al-Numan and captured two villages along the way. They’re now only a short distance outside the city. Idlib is technically still under a ceasefire that went into effect on Sunday, but for all practical purposes the fighting has now resumed in full. The United Nations estimates that some 350,000 people have been displaced in Idlib just since the beginning of December. That figure is only going to grow as the government offensive reaches the province’s major urban areas.

Elsewhere, at least three Turkish soldiers were killed Thursday in a car bombing in the northeast Syrian border town of Suluk. The Kurdish YPG militia was probably responsible.

YEMEN

In a step toward fully implementing their Saudi-negotiated truce, southern Yemeni separatists and government forces have begun withdrawing from the city of Zinjibar, which is the capital of Yemen’s Abyan province. At the same time they’ve reportedly been exchanging prisoners and beginning to organize mutual withdrawals from several other cities in southern Yemen. Earlier this month there were signs that the truce agreement might be collapsing, but these steps suggest it’s on track (or back on track, anyway).

IRAQ

The Turkish military killed four Yazidi militia fighters in Sinjar on Thursday in another round of airstrikes targeting the PKK in northern Iraq. There is an active Yazidi militia in Sinjar that has close ties with the PKK and the YPG in Syria because those groups aided in the defense of Yazidi areas of Iraq back in 2014 when the Islamic State swept through the area. It’s therefore become a target for Turkey. Additionally, four Iraqi soldiers were wounded in a bombing near the Saudi border that was likely perpetrated by IS.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is sending some mixed messages about a potential US military withdrawal from Iraq. One day he’s promising to implement parliament’s vote to expel US forces from the country, the next he’s talking about finding loopholes in the expulsion and taking it slow and hey anyway it’s going to be the next PM’s job to figure all this stuff out. One thing he has apparently been doing is talking to the Kurdistan Regional Government to make sure it doesn’t undermine whatever Baghdad ultimately winds up doing. Abdul-Mahdi met last week with several KRG officials including President Nechirvan Barzani to argue 1) that the KRG is obliged to follow Baghdad’s policy on this issue, and 2) that the KRG shouldn’t do anything that leaves Iraq in the middle of the US-Iran conflict. There’s been talk in the US of moving US forces to Iraqi Kurdistan if Baghdad really moves to expel them. This wouldn’t be strictly speaking legal, and probably wouldn’t get much support from the KRG—unless, that is, the soldiers also came with guarantees that the US would back another Kurdish independence move. That possibility is no doubt what has Abdul-Mahdi worried.

LEBANON

Protests in Beirut turned violent Wednesday night as police made greater-than-usual use of tear gas and batons to batter demonstrators who threw rocks at the cops in retaliation. Dozens of people were reportedly injured and/or arrested by the cops. The violence was an echo and an intensification of the police violence meted out to protesters the night before. Lebanese security forces have defended their actions, arguing that some 100 police officers have been injured by protesters over the two days since protests resumed. But of particular concern is what seems to be the deliberate targeting of journalists, some 15 of whom were attacked by police just last night.

Prime Minister-designate Hassan Diab has finally made some progress in assembling his cabinet, a development that could calm things down in Beirut (or, to be fair, make things much worse if the protesters don’t like the government that emerges). Current interim Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said on Thursday that Diab was “on the doorstep of forming a new government,” but you should probably allow for the possibility that he was overstating things a bit. Khalil might consider himself lucky that it will be the next finance minister, rumored to be economist Ghazi Wazni, who will have to figure out how broke Lebanon can pay off the $2.5 billion or so in Lebanese debt (Eurobonds) that is maturing in 2020.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

An Israeli NGO called Ir Amin has issued a new report finding that Israeli demolitions of homes in Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem shot up from 72 in 2018 to 104 last year. Israeli authorities say they only demolish homes that are built without permits, but the thing is those same Israeli authorities simply don’t issue permits for new construction in Palestinian neighborhoods. So people are forced to build illegally or go homeless (or leave East Jerusalem, which is what the Israelis would prefer).

EGYPT

The Egyptian government has reportedly released the five people its security forces detained Wednesday in a raid on the Cairo offices of Turkey’s Anadolu news agency. Two of them, Turkish nationals, will be deported back to Turkey, while the other three, all Egyptian, have been released on bail. It’s still not entirely clear why they were detained. Egyptian authorities have suggested that the offices were being used to disseminate “negative” information, whatever that means, and suggested that it had links to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s constant bogeyman.

QATAR

The Qatari government announced another significant labor reform on Thursday that should help dismantle its brutal expatriate worker system. It has lifted exit visa requirements for domestic workers, the largest category of migrant workers that was left out of previous exit visa changes. One of the ways Qataris have abused their migrant workers is in the requirement that those workers obtain an exit visa in order to leave the country. That required employer approval, so workers in situations where they were being mistreated, either in terms of their working conditions or (in the case of domestic workers especially) in more personal, brutal terms, were unable to escape their circumstances. Exit visa requirements remain in place for migrants serving in the Qatari military and for certain “key” employees as defined by the companies for whom they work. No more than five percent of a company’s workforce can be designated in such a way as to require an exit visa.

IRAN

Is it possible that there’s not much Iran news today? I’m not sure how to cope with such a development. Of note, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer did confirm Wednesday’s Washington Post report that Donald Trump threatened to levy tariffs against European imports unless France, Germany, and the United Kingdom invoked the 2015 Iran nuclear deal’s dispute mechanism. And there are apparently concerns that Iranian authorities are not being completely transparent with respect to the investigation into the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. The Iranians have already admitted shooting the aircraft down but they appear reluctant to share the plane’s black box amid speculation inside Iran that the US jammed Iranian radar and thereby contributed to the incident. The latter is isn’t entirely implausible given the circumstances but obviously would be hard to prove. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani also said Thursday that the country is enriching more uranium than it was prior to the negotiation of the 2015 nuclear deal, which is unsurprising given the steps Iran has taken to reduce compliance with the deal in response to the full US violation of its obligations.

The International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez believes that the decision to invoke the dispute mechanism may well have doomed the nuclear accord and done considerably damage to the Iranian-European relationship:

This could result in the return of U.N. sanctions on Iran within 65 days. While British, French, and German officials are at pains to claim that this is not a first step toward reimposition of U.N. sanctions, failure to resolve the dispute in the allotted time would make such an outcome increasingly inevitable. The United States seems keen to accelerate this outcome, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asserting on Wednesday that “we look forward to working with [those three countries] quickly and would expect that the U.N. sanctions will snap back into place.”

This would spell the demise of the nuclear deal. Indeed, Iran has warned that the so-called snapback of U.N. sanctions, which would recategorize Iran as a threat to international peace and security under the U.N. Charter’s Chapter XII, would constitute a red line, prompting it to withdraw from not just the nuclear deal but also the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—blinding inspections, reviving talk of U.S. or Israeli military strikes, and moving the baseline for future negotiations.

For Tehran, distrust of the U.S. government is a long-standing dictum. But the experience of negotiating a nuclear accord may also leave Iran with the impression that Europe, keen to hail the deal but doing little in practice to save it, is strategically feckless. The European focus on punishing Iran for its noncompliance, while only expressing regret over the original sin of the U.S. withdrawal from the deal, could have long-term adverse consequences for Iran’s relations with Europe.

For a group of European leaders who seem to view themselves as the mediating force keeping the US and Iran from going to war with one another, invoking what could be the death knell of the nuclear deal is likely only going to wreck any lingering European influence with the Iranian government.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

The AP is reporting that the Taliban has offered a ceasefire to the United States in order to facilitate peace talks. It’s only a temporary ceasefire, ten days at most, but it’s the first time the Taliban have even been willing to go that far and it could be the thing that reboots the negotiations. The US will probably push for more but haggling over the length of a ceasefire is a lot easier than haggling over whether or not there will be a ceasefire at all. There are also questions about whether the Taliban’s central leadership will be able to wrangle all of its factions into abiding by a ceasefire, and of course the big question still remains whether and under what conditions the Taliban will finally be willing to negotiate with the Afghan government.

INDIA

The Indian government on Thursday requested that China not call a United Nations Security Council meeting over Kashmir, insisting that Kashmir was an internal issue for India alone. Beijing has hinted that it might call for a session several times since the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy in August. China is involved both because of its alliance with Pakistan, which has an intense interest in Kashmir, and because it shares a somewhat ill-defined border with the region of Ladakh, which had been part of Jammu and Kashmir state but has since been administratively separated from the rest of the region.

MYANMAR

Chinese President Xi Jinping is heading to Myanmar on Friday to revive several Belt and Road Initiative projects that have begun to languish for a variety of reasons. Beijing exerts increasing influence over Myanmar because it is the only global power that has refused to criticize the Rohingya genocide and therefore is the only major actor making major new foreign investments in the country. These include billions in BRI projects that will, among other things, improve China’s access to the Indian Ocean.

OCEANIA

NEW ZEALAND

This is probably OK, right?

A million seabirds died in less than a year as a result of a giant “blob” of hot ocean water off the coast of New Zealand, according to new research.

A study released by the University of Washington found the birds, called the common murre, probably died of starvation between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016.

Most dead seabirds never wash ashore, so while 62,000 dead or dying murres were found along the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, researchers estimate the total number is closer to 1 million.

The murre population may never recover, particularly insofar as humanity remains firmly committed to doing nothing to address the thing that caused them all to die off. The temperature spike has also, among other things, caused harmful algae blooms and an increased death toll among other seabirds and marine mammals. Anyway, time to shovel some more coal on the fire.

The common murre (NOAA via Wikimedia Commons)

AFRICA

SUDAN

The Sudanese government has named itself a new director of its General Intelligence Service. General Jamal Abdul Majeed is replacing General Abu Bakr Dumblab, who resigned presumably in some hot water after several former members of the National Intelligence and Security Service (what the GIS used to be called) revolted over a dispute about their severance packages on Tuesday.

LIBYA

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas claims that, although he hasn’t actually signed a ceasefire agreement that was drawn up in Moscow earlier this week, Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar nevertheless has expressed a “commitment to observe” that ceasefire. This is a strange distinction but it’s motivated by Maas’s desire to smooth things over ahead of a German-organized conference on Libya that’s scheduled to begin on Sunday. Haftar will attend, as well as Libya’s Government of National Accord and several international participants. The conference comes as the Libyan war continues to expand to an even wider international scope, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan confirming Thursday that Ankara has begun sending troops to help the GNA and the Greek government threatening to veto any European Union initiative on Libya unless the GNA withdraws from its recent maritime border agreement with Turkey, which according to Greece (and several maps) violates the territorial waters of some Greek islands.

NIGERIA

One of northeast Nigeria’s several Islamist militant groups on Wednesday released five aid workers taken captive in two separate incidents last month. It was unclear at the time whether those aid workers were taken captive by Boko Haram or by the Islamic State’s West Africa affiliate, which used to be part of Boko Haram but broke away in 2016. And now that they’ve been released, it’s apparently still unclear which group was involved in their kidnapping.

LESOTHO

Lesotho’s prime minister, Thomas Thabane, announced his resignation on Thursday. He didn’t offer a reason, but a personal scandal is brewing around Thabane’s wife, Maesiah, and her involvement in the 2017 murder of Thabane’s ex-wife, Lipolelo. One assumes that affair was at least part of the reason for his decision to step down.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

To the surprise of nobody, the Russian parliament on Thursday approved Vladimir Putin’s new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, in a lopsided 383-0 vote with 41 abstentions. The hitherto little-known head of Russia’s tax service, Mishustin is apparently a Putin buddy who plays hockey with the Russian president, and also—like a lot of Putin’s buddies—enjoys a lifestyle that seems incongruous with the relatively modest salary of a public servant. In his introductory address to parliament he made some relatively uncontroversial promises to improve the business climate and focus on social programs for the Russian people.

ITALY

Italy’s Constitutional Court has rejected a proposal by League party boss Matteo Salvini to hold a referendum on changing Italian parliamentary elections from a mixed vote to a purely first-past-the-post system. Right now a portion of Italy’s parliamentary seats are elected in direct races and another portion in proportional voting by party. Salvini’s League is the most popular party in Italy and would benefit from a fully direct electoral system. The ruling Five Star Movement-Democratic Party coalition, meanwhile, is working on a bill to take Italy in the opposite direction, to a purely proportional vote, which would work to their benefit. Italy isn’t required to hold an election until 2023, but Five Star and the Democrats don’t really get along so their coalition is in constant risk of collapsing and forcing a snap vote.

AMERICAS

CHILE

Perhaps unsurprisingly, after almost three months of anti-austerity protests and a brutal police crackdown, Chileans are not terribly happy with the way things are going in their country. A new poll says that President Sebastián Piñera’s approval rating stands at a whopping six percent, which is exciting to me because it means there’s a chance I’m more popular in Chile than he is and I don’t even know anybody there. The survey finds that 81 percent of Brazilians are critical of the way the government has handled the protests and a plurality of 47 percent feel that Chile’s democracy is working “badly or very badly.” That kind of number could be the invitation to some sort of military coup, but if the Chilean armed forces are getting any ideas they might want to also note that public support for them is down to 24 percent and support for police is down to 17 percent.

BOLIVIA

Former Bolivian President Evo Morales has backed off of his calls for the formation of armed militias in his former country. Morales, in exile in Argentina, previously called for his supporters to form such armed groups, though he insists he meant it only as a self defense measure against violent attacks by Bolivian security forces. His statements outraged Bolivia’s current ruling junta and it’s possible that the Argentine government asked him to tone it down.

GUATEMALA

New Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei announced on Thursday that his government is cutting diplomatic ties with Venezuela, as he said he would do during his campaign. As a right winger, Giammattei’s move is unsurprising. He may also be trying to curry favor with the Trump administration ahead of revisiting the “Safe Third Country” migration deal that his predecessor, Jimmy Morales, negotiated with Washington. Speaking of migration, Giammattei’s hopes of a good relationship with the Trump administration are getting an early challenge in the form of a new migrant caravan of more than 2000 people that has crossed into Guatemala from Honduras. The administration will undoubtedly make note of the efforts that Giammattei makes—or doesn’t make—to interdict that caravan.

UNITED STATES

Finally, The US Senate approved the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on Thursday by an 89-10 margin, sending NAFTA 2.0 on to the White House where Donald Trump will presumably sign it. I mean, he negotiated it so you’d think he’d sign it, but I suppose you can’t take anything for granted these days. USMCA is probably an improvement over NAFTA, as House Democrats managed to get stronger labor and environmental protections inserted into this agreement, but of course we won’t really know how it works until it starts working.