World update: January 21 2020
Stories from Iran, North Korea, Ethiopia, and more
THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
January 21, 763: The Battle of Bakhamra
January 21, 1793: Having been found guilty of treason by the National Convention, French King Louis XVI is executed by guilotine. His death marked the definitive end of the French monarchy, at least until Napoleon and then the Bourbon Restoration brought it back. It also shocked even some supporters of the French Revolution, a fact that some historians have argued contributed to the decision to restore the Bourbon Dynasty after the Napoleonic interlude.
A 1793 copper engraving of the big event by German merchant Georg Heinrich Sieveking (Wikimedia Commons)
January 21, 1968: The North Vietnamese siege of the Khe Sanh Combat Base begins. A US relief army was able to break the siege in April but American leaders decided that the cost of continuing to defend the facility wasn’t worth it so they had the base dismantled and withdrew US forces from the area in July. So ultimately both sides claimed victory. The Tet Offensive began a few days after the Khe Sanh siege and it remains an unanswered question whether the offensive was supposed to divert attention from the siege or the siege was supposed to divert attention from the offensive. The third and perhaps more likely option is that neither operation was a diversion, or put another way that both were diversions, and that the North Vietnamese undertook both in order to keep their options open.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
According to Reuters and its local sources, at least 40 civilians were killed in Russian airstrikes on northwestern Syria on Tuesday. The strikes appear to have been split between southeastern Idlib province, where the Syrian military has been slowly advancing toward the city of Maarrat al-Numan, and western Aleppo province, where the intended targets could have been rebel artillery positions though I’m just speculating there. As is typically the case in Syria, it’s next to impossible to verify these casualty figures and to determine whether all the casualties were in fact civilian.
YEMEN
After a Houthi missile strike killed well over 100 Yemeni soldiers in Marib province on Saturday, Saudi Arabia retaliated on Tuesday with airstrikes against Houthi targets in Nehm, just northeast of Sanaa, as well as in west Marib. At least 35 people were killed in the Nehm attacks and “several,” mostly Houthi fighters, were reportedly killed in Marib. The Yemeni military says it made advances on the ground under cover of those airstrikes but didn’t offer specifics.
IRAQ
Iraqi security forces killed at least two more protesters on Tuesday as anti-government demonstrations continue to rage in Baghdad and across southern and central Iraq. One protester was killed by a tear gas canister in Baghdad while the other was among dozens of people apparently shot by Iraqi forces in the city of Baqubah, the capital of central Iraq’s Diyala province. It’s expected that Iraqi President Barham Salih will pick a new prime minister-designate sometime this week to replace current PM Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who resigned in the face of the protests in November but appeared to be angling to maybe keep his job during the Qassem Soleimani fallout before the protests resumed in earnest last week. Salih apparently could make his announcement within a matter of hours but it’s obviously far from clear that this would do anything to appease the demonstrators.
Al-Monitor’s Mustafa Saadoun reports that both political firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr and Badr Organization and Fatah Alliance party leader Hadi al-Ameri are angling to take over Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units. There’s a leadership vacuum at the top of the PMU because the deputy chair of the council overseeing those groups, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed in the same US drone strike that killed Soleimani. Muhandis was technically the deputy leader of the PMU but was in practice the dominant figure in the organization. His death could cause the PMU movement, which is comprised of multiple militias that don’t always agree with one another, to splinter, especially if there’s a divisive struggle to replace him. The death of Soleimani, who was well respected by the various PMU factions, further increases the chances of some kind of internal fracture.
LEBANON
While Iraq may be about to get a new government, Lebanon already has one. Prime Minister-designate Hassan Diab and President Michel Aoun announced Tuesday evening that Diab has formed a new cabinet. Amid calls from protesters for a “non-political” or “technocratic” government, this cabinet on first glance manages to be both more and less partisan than previous governments. Diab has filled some important positions with people who are less political than their predecessors. His new foreign minister, for example, is a career diplomat named Nassif Hitti, who is easily less political than previous foreign minister Gebran Bassil.
But this government also draws its support mostly (or maybe exclusively) from parties in the March 8 Alliance, in contrast with previous “national unity” approaches. Even some of its technocrats, like new finance minister Ghazi Wazni, have links to powerful March 8 interests (in Wazni’s case, parliament speaker Nabih Berri). It’s unclear how protesters will receive it. What is clear is that because Hezbollah has helped organize this new cabinet, it will—rightly or wrongly—be viewed with at best suspicion and probably more like contempt by most Western governments. For a country that needs foreign support to get its finances in shape that’s not an ideal situation.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Palestinians who tried to leave Gaza on Tuesday and then allegedly chucked some sort of explosive at the soldiers when they were stopped. There seems to be some question about that last detail. Regardless, since Gaza functions as an open air prison anyone attempting to leave could potentially be shot by Israeli security forces.
IRAN
The Iranian government admitted on Tuesday that its air defenses hit Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on January 8 with not one, but two anti-aircraft missiles. I’m not sure that’s qualitatively worse than firing one missile since the end result is the same, but it might be relevant if, say, the first projectile missed the target. Determining something like may be part of the investigation into the incident, and that’s still the subject of some intense international wrangling. Canadian officials, involved because of the number of Canadians killed in the downing, are still calling for the aircraft’s black boxes to be sent to France for study, while the Ukrainian government wants them sent to, well, Ukraine. The Iranians haven’t ruled out eventually sending them abroad but are insisting they get first crack at them and are asking the US and French governments to send them the equipment needed to download the information from the flight recorders. This is of course raising suspicions about an Iranian coverup, though it seems to me they’ve already admitted to the most damning part of the story and their insistence on conducting the investigation themselves may just be a national pride issue.
Elsewhere, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Monday that Tehran will withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty if European leaders send their dispute over the 2015 nuclear deal to the United Nations Security Council, as would happen in the final stage of the deal’s dispute resolution process. This has been getting a fair amount of attention today, though I have no idea why since the Iranians have made this threat before and it’s quite possible they’re bluffing. Quitting the NPT would all but invite a military confrontation that Iran doesn’t want.
Also getting a lot of unwarranted attention is the $3 million bounty that an Iranian legislator, Ahmad Hamzeh, put on Donald Trump on Tuesday. Hamzeh also said that Iran would be “protected” from US threats if it had nuclear weapons, which I think is unquestionably true though not an especially helpful thing to say. The Trump administration is shouting about how damning Hamzeh’s comments are to the Iranian government, which is silly. Imagine if a foreign government attributed all the hot garbage that spews from the mouths of Steve King or Louie Gohmert to the entire US government. It would be absurd, and yet both of those guys hold more actual power in the US political system than this Hamzeh dude does in Iran. That said, I imagine that Iranians who are struggling under government-mandated (and sanctions-induced) austerity might be interested to know that one of their elected officials apparently has $3 million lying around.
And yes, there are a whole lot of Iranians struggling to meet their basic needs under US sanctions, as Iranian journalist Ahmad Jalapour reminds us:
Iran seems to be constantly in the news. First, it was bloody protests last November against a hike in petroleum prices. Next, it was the assassination of a hugely popular warlord, whose killing was mourned by 1.5 million Iranians, with crowds so enormous that 56 were trampled to death in a stampede at his funeral. Then, it was the possibility of a hot war between the United States and Iran in one of the most sensitive regions in the world. Yet another day, a civilian plane was shot down by the country’s own air defense system. If you follow events more closely, you may have heard of a couple of major floods, a train derailment, and two buses crashing and killing most of their passengers. Finally, there was an earthquake not long ago. All this in a just a little over two months.
There is, however, another story, the story of ordinary people’s lives caught in the maelstrom; of tens of millions of people seeing their savings evaporating overnight or having their business go belly up or seeing their dreams dashed. The reality of life here under the devastating impact of the US “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign is the one big story from Iran that’s mostly missing in the headlines.
If you haven’t heard about this, you are not alone. Nobody, certainly not the main protagonists, seems the least bit interested in talking about the devastation of human life in Iran today. It is as if a conspiracy of silence has been cast over the whole issue.
ASIA
PHILIPPINES
Indonesian officials say that Abu Sayyaf militants from the southern Philippines captured five Indonesian citizens last week after their fishing boat drifted from Malaysian into Philippine waters. The Islamic State-aligned Abu Sayyaf frequently engages in kidnapping for ransom, and while it generally frees its hostages there have been cases in which hostages have been killed.
CHINA
The “Wuhan coronavirus” (that’s apparently the best anybody can do for a name at this point) claimed its sixth life on Tuesday as the total number of cases rose past 300 (UPDATE: as of Wednesday morning those figures are now nine dead amid at least 440 cases of infection) and the virus spread to a sixth country—the United States. Authorities in Washington state identified the infection in a traveler entering the country from China. With the Chinese Lunar New Year approaching this weekend, and the extra travel that usually accompanies that holiday, there are fears that the disease could spread widely over the next several days. While this outbreak is nowhere near the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak in terms of intensity or lethality, concern of a repeat is growing.
NORTH KOREA
As the United States missed North Korea’s year-end deadline to make progress in denuclearization talks, the North Korean government says it no longer feels bound by its previous promises when it comes to things like nuclear or advanced missile testing. Pyongyang wants the Trump administration to move away from its “everything for everything” position with respect to sanctions relief and to ease sanctions in proportion to North Korean concessions. But the administration has stuck to a framework whereby North Korea gets nothing unless/until it completely denuclearizes, which it’s almost certainly not going to do.
OCEANIA
AUSTRALIA
From the irony file, Australia’s climate change-enhanced brush fires have now gotten so severe that they’re interfering with coal mining operations. No, really. Australian mining giant BHP says its output in New South Wales is down 11 percent because of poor air quality and the impact the fires have had on workers. Australia, just to be clear, is the world’s biggest coal exporter. Go figure.
AFRICA
ALGERIA
Now that it has a government—however unpopular it may be—Algeria’s main priority in foreign affairs is asserting itself with respect to the conflict in Libya. Algiers is mostly interested in seeing all foreign forces out of Libya, though it likely harbors a slight preference for the Russian-backed “Libyan National Army” over the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord:
Yahia Zoubir, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Center in Doha, Qatar, said Algiers does not have an overt "preference either for Russia or Turkey. It sees foreign presence in general as aggravating the chaos in Libya.” He added, “Algiers does not appreciate the support of France, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Russia to Hifter either. What Algiers seeks is to have a role in bringing about a solution. For domestic reasons, the authorities wish to show that unlike what had happened under [former Algerian president Abdelaziz] Bouteflika, Algeria now is an actor to reckon with.”
Zoubir also told Al-Monitor that if it came down to a choice between one or the other, Algerian officials might favor Russia as “Turkey is a NATO member whose policies Algerians detest. They view negatively Turkey’s relations and military cooperation with Israel. There is consensus between the authorities and the population, including the hirak (the Algerian anti-government protest movement), on this point." Zoubir said authorities also worry about the influence Turkey could have on Tunisia, which depends on Algeria and has been staying neutral, and in the Sahel. He said officials are even more worried about a potential military confrontation between Turkey on the one hand and Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on the other, and that "a generalized war in Libya could have a spillover effect in the entire Maghreb-Sahel region with which Algeria shares borders.”
Algeria’s secularist government also has problems with Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood. On top of its issues with Turkey, Algeria also enjoys a strong relationship with Russia that goes back to the 1960s, when the Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognize Algerian independence, and it remains a major Russian arms client.
BURKINA FASO
Militants attacked a village in northern Burkina Faso’s Sanmatenga province on Monday, killing at least 36 people. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Both the al-Qaeda linked Ansar ul Islam and the Islamic State’s West African affiliate (formerly its Greater Sahara affiliate and recently rebranded) are active in the area.
ETHIOPIA
According to Egyptian journalist Ayah Aman, that big breakthrough that Ethiopia and Egypt supposedly reached last week over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam involved a lot more smoke than fire:
Foreign and water ministers for Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan met last week in Washington in the presence of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and World Bank President David Malpass. When the three-day meeting ended Jan. 15, participants decided to include six points in a potential comprehensive agreement on the rules for filling and operating the dam.
But no agreement was reached on any of the contentious issues that have foiled the technical negotiation rounds during the past two months. Overall, disagreements over the $4 billion dam have been ongoing for nine years.
In other words, the parties (and Sudan, which has also been involved in the talks) still can’t agree on details around water flows on the Nile (what constitutes a normal flow versus a low flow), the process for filling the GERD’s reservoir so as to minimize impact on that water flow, and what to do if there’s a drought while the reservoir is being filled. Or in other other words, they still don’t agree on any of the key issues that have been holding up a deal all this time. Representatives from all three countries are due to return to Washington to sign a final agreement later this month, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that “final agreement” is going to be anything more than an empty photo op for the Trump administration.
UGANDA
The Ugandan government says that over 60,000 people have fled across the border from the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past year to flee inter-communal violence. Fighting between the Hema and Lendu communities in the DRC’s Ituri province started during the Second Congo War in 1999 and has continued to the present day, albeit at a lower level than during that conflict. It’s picked back up since December 2017, when the UN began reducing its peacekeeping presence in the province. Uganda is already home to hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese refugees and the additional migration is taxing the country’s capacity to accommodate them. The perpetually underfunded UN apparently hasn’t been much help.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Vladimir Putin unveiled his new cabinet on Tuesday, and really it’s not much different than the old one. Yes, Mikhail Mishustin has replaced Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, and he’s appointed a few younger deputy PMs, but the key ministers—Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu, and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov—are all staying in their jobs.
BELARUS
Belarusian oil firm Belneftekhim has begun importing oil from Norway due to a breakdown in relations with Russia. Moscow has only been exporting a limited amount of oil to Belarus since the beginning of the month because the two countries couldn’t reach agreement on a price for 2020. The Russian government is trying to use its oil and gas exports as leverage to force Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to accept greater economic integration between the two countries. But Lukashenko is wary of giving up autonomy and he’s looking for other suppliers even if it means spending more on energy imports.
SWITZERLAND
The World Economic Forum is holding its annual wankfest in Davos this week, and apparently Donald Trump received a warm welcome despite making his plenary address a climate-denying celebration of his own magnificence. While I have a strong aversion to writing about anything to do with this yearly abomination, I do think Ryan Cooper has the right take on the whole thing:
Everyone's favorite rally of neoliberal oligarchs is taking place this week in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum, "known for preaching the gospel of touchy-feely stakeholder capitalism against a backdrop of $43 hot dogs, $10,000 hotel rooms, and several hundred trips by private plane," as Lionel Laurent writes at Bloomberg, is struggling to maintain its #brand while global politics descends into fascism and the climate crisis gathers strength.
The Davos conference demonstrates only one thing: If the billionaire stranglehold over global politics is not broken, we are all going to fry in a future climate hell.
For one thing, President Trump is getting a distinctly more friendly reception this time than at previous Davos conferences. Sure, the man may be a boorish, corrupt accused rapist who was just impeached for trying to rig the 2020 election, but taxes are low, the markets are booming, and Wall Street is largely free from burdensome regulators. Oligarchs can accommodate themselves to just about anything that doesn't directly threaten their pocketbooks.
FRANCE
Hard line French unions have moved from strikes to civil disobedience in their efforts to stop President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to “reform” their pensions. Energy workers on Tuesday cut power to the Rungis market, Paris’s largest wholesale food outlet. They’ve also begun blockading ports and other public facilities as well as harassing more moderate unions that seem amenable to compromising with Macron. The pension movement is beginning to resemble the “Yellow Vest” protests in that it’s losing popular support, particularly since Macron’s government offered to relax some of its planned changes, and seems to be turning to more drastic action to remain relevant.
AMERICAS
CHILE
The US State Department has apparently concluded that somehow Russian bot networks were responsible for uprisings late last year against the right-wing government in Chile and the right-wing coup in Bolivia:
Watching political unrest explode across South America this fall, officials at the State Department noticed an eerily similar pattern in anti-government protests that otherwise had little in common.
In Chile, nearly 10 percent of all tweets supporting protests in late October originated with Twitter accounts that had a high certainty of being linked to Russia.
In Bolivia, immediately after President Evo Morales resigned on Nov. 10, the number of tweets associated with those type of accounts spiked to more than 1,000 a day, up from fewer than five.
There is an eerily similar pattern at work here but I don’t think it’s what the State Department wants you to think it is. We’ve reached a point now where the very real problem of online disinformation has become such a potent talking point that anything that doesn’t hew to US propaganda is going to be portrayed as Russian fake news. Protests against the Chilean government’s austerity agenda? Russian fake news. Protests against the right-wing coup that ousted Evo Morales? Russian fake news. Climate protests? Russian fake news. It couldn’t possibly be that right-wing governments are unpopular, or that Morales still had supporters, or that there are any serious problems in the world about which people might get angry. No, it’s all Russian fake news. They’ll be able to keep this con going right up until the effects of climate change become so severe that there’s no more ability to deny it, at which point our elites will slide seamlessly into ecofascism.
BOLIVIA
Of course, I misspoke in that paragraph above because what happened in Bolivia wasn’t a coup and wasn’t a right-wing power grab and was only done to preserve Bolivian democ-
Ah, well then. Nevertheless.
BRAZIL
Speaking of fascism, Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecutors have now charged journalist Glenn Greenwald with having “helped, encouraged, and guided” hackers who uncovered the text messages behind The Intercept’s damning Operation Car Wash exposé. Brazilian police had already seemingly cleared Greenwald of any wrongdoing in connection with the case in December, but that’s irrelevant when what we’re talking about is a political prosecution by a rogue government for which things like “freedom of the press” are obstacles to eliminate rather than important values to protect.
COLOMBIA
Several demonstrations were held in Bogotá on Tuesday, in a resumption of the country’s November-December anti-austerity protests after a lengthy holiday break. There were reports of scattered clashes between protesters and police but on the whole things seem to have gone peaceably.
VENEZUELA
The Trump administration slapped new sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA on Tuesday, blacklisting 15 of the company’s aircraft. In announcing the sanctions the State Department claimed that those planes had been “involved in the harassment of US military flights in Caribbean airspace.”
Inside Venezuela, meanwhile, police raided the offices of opposition leader and would-be president Juan Guaidó, apparently taking advantage of Guaidó’s absence due to his European tour. It’s unclear what the cops took, or left behind. The raid came as crowds of people supporting President Nicolás Maduro continued for a third straight week to prevent opposition legislators from entering the National Assembly building in Caracas. Those legislators say they’ll attempt another entry next week.
MEXICO
The Mexican government says its security forces have “largely” stopped a Honduran migrant caravan from crossing the Guatemalan border. Some 1000 of the estimated 4000 migrants in the caravan managed to get into Mexico but hundreds of them have apparently already been detained and some of those have already been sent back to Honduras. Mexico has been under pressure from the Trump administration to interdict these migrant caravans before they get to the US border.
UNITED STATES
The Trump administration added seven more countries to its travel ban on Tuesday. In addition to citizens from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, citizens from Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania will now also be barred from entering the United States. These may not be blanket bans but details haven’t been made available as yet. All have apparently failed to meet the administration’s requirements with respect to screening and/or counter-terrorism programs. On Monday, meanwhile, Customs and Border Patrol deported an Iranian student with a valid visa despite a federal court order halting the deportation for 48 hours. The CBP chalked its lawlessness up to the fact that the student had already boarded his flight when the court ruling came down, though it’s unclear whether the flight had actually taken off and there’s no particular reason to give the CBP the benefit of the doubt.
Finally, at TomDispatch, analysts Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel look at the legacy of the US detention-and-torture facility at Guantánamo Bay:
In January 2002, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility in Cuba opened its gates for the first 20 detainees of the war on terror. Within 100 days, 300 of them would arrive, often hooded and in those infamous orange jumpsuits, and that would just be the beginning. At its height, the population would rise to nearly 800 prisoners from 59 countries. Eighteen years later, it still holds 40 prisoners, most of whom will undoubtedly remain there without charges or trial for the rest of their lives. (That’s likely true even of the five who have been cleared for release for more than a decade.) In 2013, journalist Carol Rosenberg astutely labeled them “forever prisoners.” And those detainees are hardly the only enduring legacy of Guantánamo Bay. Thanks to that prison camp, we as a country have come to understand aspects of both the law and policy in new ways that might prove to be “forever changes.”
Here are eight ways in which the toxic policies of that offshore facility have contaminated American institutions, as well as our laws and customs, in the years since 2002.