World update: January 30 2020

Stories from Jordan, Kenya, Belarus, and more

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

January 29, 1258: The army of Đại Việt under the Trần dynasty defeats the Mongols at the Battle of Đông Bộ Đầu. Their defeat was so severe that the Mongols were forced to withdraw from Đại Việt, marking the end of their first attempt at conquering modern Vietnam. The Mongols made two more attempts in the 1280s, both failed, before the Trần rulers decided to make themselves vassals of the Mongols in order to forestall further incursions.

January 29, 1980: The Rubik’s Cube debuts at a toy fair in London. With an estimated 400+ million sold in the 40 years since, it’s generally considered the most popular toy ever created.

January 30, 1959: After over four years, the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, Said bin Taimur, defeats a rebellion by the elected Imam of Oman, Ghalib Alhinai, that is known as the Jebel Akhdar War. The war ended the split between the coastal sultanate and the Imamate of Oman, which controlled the interior of Oman and had been nominally but not really practically subject to the sultan in Muscat. It also ensured that Said would control Oman’s oil reserves, most of which were in the Imamate’s territory. That in turn meant that Britain, as Said’s benevolent great power patron, would actually control said oil.

January 30, 1969: The Beatles give their last public concert, an unannounced affair on the rooftop of their Apple Corp (no, not that Apple) headquarters on Savile Row in London. The band played a 42 minute set before police shut them down. The band broke up that September.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Russian airstrikes on the town of Arihah reportedly killed at least ten people on Thursday. If these reports are accurate—and it should be noted that the Russian military has denied them—it could be a prelude to opening a new front in the Syrian offensive in Idlib. Arihah lies south of Idlib city, on a road that leads to the Syrian military’s most recent capture, Maarrat al-Numan. If the Syrians wanted to advance directly on Idlib they’d have to go through Arihah, and these strikes could be the start of a campaign to do just that. On the other hand, the Syrians have been steadily advancing north along the important M5 highway, and if they continue to do that then their next target would be the town of Saraqib.

The Syria live map shows a lot of strikes in and around Saraqib, which suggest it’s being softened up for a ground offensive. If the Syrians took both Arihah and Saraqib they could advance on Idlib, the last major population center in rebel control, from two directions at once. The thing is, it’s unclear whether the exhausted Syrian army is capable of attacking two targets at once. But it’s also unclear whether the remaining rebels in Idlib province have the capacity to defend those targets anymore.

YEMEN

The Houthis are trying to arrange a prisoner swap through a back channel of sorts. They’ve informed the Sudanese government that they would be willing to release Sudanese nationals they’ve captured in exchange for the release of Houthi prisoners by the pro-government coalition. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been using Sudanese levies on the ground to support their campaign against the Houthis, so the intent here is to get Khartoum to put pressure on them to agree to the exchange.

IRAQ

The Iraqi military announced on Thursday that its forces have resumed joint anti-Islamic State operations with the United States. Those operations were suspended after the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad earlier this month. The Pentagon announced their resumption two weeks ago but the Iraqis held off. They now saw they plan to work with US forces in “the time that remains for the international coalition before the new relationship is set up”—or in other words, before the Iraqi government makes good on plans to force the US military out of the country. There is evidence that the Islamic State has stabilized itself to some degree since the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, so it makes some sense that the Iraqis would resume these operations. The US government insists, of course, that it’s not going anywhere. It’s even asking Iraqi permission to bring Patriot anti-aircraft batteries into the country to defend against any future Iranian missile strikes.

JORDAN

Of all the Arab states, Jordan is the one that has been put in the tightest bind by this week’s unveiling of the Kushner Accords. Popular Arab sentiment is against the lopsided deal, especially among Palestinians, which means the Jordanian government is under pressure to oppose it. The plan also effectively forecloses on the possibility of a real Palestinian state, which means there’s no chance that any portion of Jordan’s very large Palestinian population might return to Palestine someday. But Amman gets substantial financial support from the United States and from the Gulf states, whose leaders have enthralled themselves to Donald Trump because of Iran. And that means the Jordanian government is under pressure not to oppose the Accords. It also cooperates with Israel on security issues as well as in the Jordanian king’s role as the guardian of Jerusalem’s holy sites, something that is vitally important to the Hashemite monarchy’s legitimacy. The kingdom will likely try to cut a middle path by opposing the deal but not being too vocal about its opposition.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to denounce the Kushner Accords before the United Nations Security Council sometime in the near future. I have no idea what this is supposed to accomplish and I doubt he does either. It will probably lead to a non-binding resolution in the UN General Assembly, which the US and Israel will ignore as usual. Meanwhile, the Israelis have stepped up their security presence in both the West Bank and Gaza as protests have increased in frequency and intensity in both territories. The Israelis carried out airstrikes on Gaza late Wednesday after somebody fired a rocket out of the area.

SAUDI ARABIA

Persian Gulf analyst Kristian Coates Ulrichsen looks at the changing security considerations of the Arab Gulf states after the events of the past several months:

Spiraling tensions in the Persian Gulf have placed unprecedented strain on a regional security structure little changed since the 1980s, and have caused longstanding U.S. partners in the Gulf states to reassess the pillars of their defense and security relationships. The fallout from the attacks on maritime and energy targets in 2019 and the escalation in U.S.-Iran tension over the new year has led Gulf partners to question the deterrence value of U.S. security guarantees they had for years taken largely for granted. The muscular self-belief of the Crown Princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi that drew the Saudis and Emiratis into a disastrous and unwinnable war in Yemen, approaching the start of its sixth year, has evaporated and been replaced by a sudden desire for dialogue and de-escalation with Iran. An unanticipated outcome of the gradual disengagement of U.S. interest, if not force, from the Gulf may, ironically, be a revival of diplomacy and a greater sense of realism and restraint in regional affairs moving forward.

IRAN

The Trump administration on Thursday levied sanctions against Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Ali Akbar Salehi. At the same time, it renewed a set of sanctions waivers for work that Russia, China, and European countries are doing to help Iran develop its civilian nuclear capabilities. These projects were specified under the 2015 nuclear deal and are intended to close off possible avenues through which Iran could weaponize its nuclear program if it chose to do so. It’s probably only a matter of time before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo convinces Trump to end those waivers, at which point the other parties to the deal will have another serious decision to make in terms of whether to continue their work or obey Washington’s orders.

The administration and the Swiss government also announced that a new humanitarian aid channel companies to sell food, medicine, and medical supplies to Iran, via a specially designated Swiss banking channel, has begun preliminary operations. Humanitarian goods are supposed to be exempt from sanctions, but broad sanctions against Iranian financial firms means that even though the goods are protected Iran has no way to pay for them. This channel is supposed to show the administration’s commitment to ensuring the Iranian people don’t suffer under sanctions, but what it’s actually done is to restrict all humanitarian trade to this single mechanism and then impose strict requirements on any transactions that go through that channel. It gives the US even more control over the flow of necessities into Iran than it had previously, and it’s unclear how many companies are actually going to be willing to use it.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to repeal the 2002 Iraq War authorization, under which the Trump administration justified the Soleimani assassination, and to bar the administration from taking military action against Iran without Congressional approval. These are symbolic measures that almost certainly won’t survive the Senate and would be vetoed in the unlikely event that they got to Donald Trump’s desk.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

Earlier this week Pakistani authorities arrested Manzoor Pashteen, the country’s leading Pashtun civil rights activist and the founder of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement. Pashteen has been charged with sedition and officials often obliquely link his PTM movement to the Pakistani Taliban, even though PTM is secular, nonviolent, and, as its name says, exists to protect Pakistan’s Pashtun minority from rights abuses, in particular by Pakistani security forces. His arrest has led to protests in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and has caused a diplomatic spat between the two countries because Afghan President Ashraf Ghani criticized the arrest via Twitter. The Pakistani government angrily suggested that Ghani mind his own business.

PHILIPPINES

Speaking of angry world leaders, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has instructed his cabinet members not to travel to the United States. That’s because the State Department has barred his former chief of police from entering the US, probably on account of the blood on his hands from implementing Duterte’s vigilante war on drug users. So if you had plans to spend time with any high ranking Duterte administration officials I’m afraid those plans will have to be put on hold. I know things look bleak now but I think together we can get through this.

CHINA

The World Health Organization has reversed course and decided to classify the Wuhan coronavirus as a global emergency after all. That’s understandable, considering that the virus has started spreading at a very rapid rate, with the total number of cases now topping the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak at over 8200. All but around 100 of those cases has been in China, though, meaning that the global spread of the contagion is still pretty minimal. And the death toll, which stands at 213 (all in China), remains far behind the roughly ten percent fatality rate exhibited by SARS. The WHO says it is not recommending any restrictions on travel to China, though many countries have already begun imposing some limits and several airlines have reduced their flights to China due to heavily diminished demand.

On the plus side, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross cheerily noted on the Fox Business Network this morning that the virus and all its related death and human suffering might bring some jobs back to the United States from China. There’s always a bright side, I guess. This sounds like the kind of thing that only a profoundly stupid sociopath might say, and in Wilbur’s case those qualities all fit. He’s also extremely old to boot, which explains why saying quiet things out loud on television is a pretty regular occurrence for him.

Archeologists have tried to estimate Wilbur’s age, but frankly there are limits to what carbon dating can tell us (White House photo)

OCEANIA

AUSTRALIA

Authorities have declared a state of emergency in Australia’s capital, Canberra, which is threatened by encroaching brush fires to its south. The mix of drought, extreme heat, and high winds continues to make it nearly impossible to contain these fires, which are the worst to threaten Canberra since a 2003 fire reached the suburbs and caused some $350 million worth of damage in addition to killing four people.

AFRICA

LIBYA

The United Nations announced Thursday that it’s closing a refugee center in Tripoli because the facility is at risk due to fighting between forces aligned with the Government of National Accord and the “Libyan National Army” of warlord Khalifa Haftar. UN Libya envoy Ghassan Salame told the UN Security Council that the ceasefire the two sides reached earlier this month now exists “only in name.” On the plus side, the resumption of full scale hostilities has given Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and French President Emmanuel Macron another reason to be catty to one another. Macron on Wednesday accused Erdoğan of breaking his pledge at this month’s Berlin peace conference not to intervene in Libya by arming and aiding the GNA. Which is true. Erdoğan, in response, said that Macron’s decision to offer tacit support to Haftar has greatly helped to exacerbate the conflict. Which is also true. They’re both bad, folks, is where I’m going with this.

TUNISIA

Tunisia’s largest political party may be coming apart at the seams. A wave of resignations has reportedly hit Ennahda, the Islamist party that “won”—albeit very indecisively—last year’s parliamentary election. What appears to be happening is that younger party members are growing frustrated with the party’s old guard and its refusal to move on, including and perhaps most especially 78 year old party co-founder and leader Rached Ghannouchi. That frustration probably stems from the fact that, while Ennahda did technically win last year’s election, Ghannouchi led the party to a 17 seat loss, and that’s after losing 20 seats in the previous election in 2014. It’s not a phenomenal track record. Add to that the fact that Ghannouchi’s pick to be prime minister, Habib Jemli, failed to put together a cabinet that could survive a parliamentary confidence vote, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that several party members are unhappy with their leadership.

ALGERIA

Algerian authorities have arrested a man who was apparently planning to attack this week’s anti-government protests in Algiers on Friday with a suicide bomb. That’s their story, at least. It’s unclear who he is or what his motivations might have been. Those protests are continuing despite the fact that Algeria held the December presidential election that the protesters were trying to prevent. They’ve lost a lot of steam, however, and there are growing calls even from within the movement to seek dialogue with Algeria’s ruling elite.

To some degree the elite has simply waited out the protesters, betting that by allowing the demonstrations to continue relatively unhindered (and certainly not with the violence that protesters have received in, say, Iraq) the movement would eventually peter out. It’s also the case that many of the ruling elite’s most prominent members have been cast aside (former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika), have been thrown under the bus (multiple former prime ministers and other senior officials have been arrested and tried for corruption), or have died (powerful army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah suddenly died late last month of a heart attack). But the opaque, rigged Algerian political system still exists, and in that sense the elite appear to have won, at least for now.

KENYA

Kenya is being hit hard by locusts, which have spread out in vast numbers across a region stretching from East Africa all the way to South Asia. In many ways their rise and growth has been the product of every negative trend affecting that area over the past several years:

The insects have in fact benefited from human conflicts, and some of their most fertile breeding grounds have been in war zones — in Yemen, Somalia, the Indian-Pakistan border — where fighting between people has complicated fighting against locusts. Their arrival is also partly manmade in another way, according to climate researchers. Locusts need heavy rain to breed in these numbers, and climate change has contributed to many of the downpours that came to the affected regions after years of drought.

“The larger story here is that this is the new normal,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The same ocean warming trends in the Indian Ocean that created the hot, dry conditions that fueled Australia’s bush fires are also bringing rainfall to East Africa, she added. “We’re all connected.”

EUROPE

BELARUS

As Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin continue to discuss integrating their two countries, the idea of a full on merger seems to get less and less popular among both of their populations:

“You asked me why I am against the integration? Just take a look at Russia. Corruption is everywhere. You cannot do anything without bribe or having good krysha.” Maria, who prefers to go by a pseudonym, used the Russian word that literally means “roof” but is broadly used in post-Soviet states to describe illicit protection or patronage. She was sitting with her friends in the cozy kitchen in a block of flats in the Belarusian city of Brest. The owner of the apartment, Yauhen Skrabutan, is a declared opponent of President Alexander Lukashenko, labeled “Europe’s last dictator,” and a supporter of the country’s pro-democracy movement.

Maria admitted that, unlike for Skrabutan, politics is not essential to her. She prefers to focus on the challenges of everyday life, like avoiding any food from Russia, especially meat and dairy products, because of their low quality. To her mind, anything that comes from Russia is worse than its Belarusian or EU counterpart. “The roads there are horribly devastated, the food is awful, dirty, and mess lies everywhere, and corruption is overwhelming. Russia is not the country where I want to live and raise my children in the future,” Maria concluded firmly.

This is not an isolated opinion, even in Belarus, which is commonly perceived as the most Soviet-nostalgic and pro-Russian public in Europe. (As Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, the director of Belsat TV, an independent channel broadcasting from Poland to Belarus, told me this fall, “Belarusians have been intensively Russified for the most of two decades of Lukashenko rule. For instance, there are only seven Belarusian-language schools, six of which are in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and only two of them are secondary schools.”) Yet according to survey data from the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, only 7.7 percent of respondents would support entry of their homeland into Russia—a prospect that seems increasingly on the table as Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold frequent meetings to discuss deeper integration.

On the other side of the border, a meager 17 percent of Russians would like to see a union with Belarus. Putin’s goal is probably to make Belarus a full dependency without attempting an outright annexation.

UNITED KINGDOM

A new YouGov poll finds that 51 percent of Scots support independence from the UK, the first time it’s found a majority backing independence since the Scottish referendum in 2015. The shift seems mostly due to Brexit—the survey found that around 20 percent of those who voted against independence in 2015 have now changed their minds because of the UK’s departure from the European Union. A plurality still believe that independence would hurt the Scottish economy however, which was one of the “no” side’s strongest arguments during the referendum campaign.

AMERICAS

NICARAGUA

A large mob of armed men stormed a commune belonging to the country’s indigenous Mayagna people on Thursday, killing six of them and carrying off ten others. The attackers were “settlers,” non-indigenous people who have moved into the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, the rainforest area where the commune is located. Their aim is to displace those indigenous communities, clear cut the forests in which they live, and turn the whole area into farmland and pasture.

UNITED STATES

Finally, hearty kudos are in order for the Trump administration, which is really doing ground-breaking work with respect to finding new ways to make itself repulsive:

The Trump administration is expected to loosen restrictions on the US military's ability to use landmines in the coming days, weapons that have been banned by more than 160 countries due to their history of killing and wounding civilians, multiple Defense Department officials tell CNN.

The move represents a major reversal from the approach of the Obama administration which in 2014 committed the US to largely adhering to the 1997 Ottawa Convention, the international agreement which banned the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines. The Obama policy committed to replacing landmines in the US stockpile after they expire and directed the destruction of stockpiles not required for the defense of South Korea.

In an exception to the Ottawa convention, the Obama policy allowed the US military to continue to use landmines on the Korean Peninsula where some 28,000 US troops are stationed across the de-militarized zone from North Korea's military of one million troops. That exception was criticized by some non-government organizations.

President Donald Trump is expected to rescind Obama's 2014 order in the coming days, delegating landmine policy to the secretary of defense, thereby bringing it in line with weapons policies other than nuclear weapons.

The Obama administration’s landmines policy was already unjustifiable. This is grotesque, as it threatens a return a time when landmines killed thousands of civilians around the world each year (some 130,000 between 1999 and 2018, according to activists). The new Pentagon policy will only permit the use of mines with a self-deactivation feature, meaning that they render themselves inert after some period of time. Theoretically. I wouldn’t go dancing in a field of those things even after they’ve supposedly deactivated themselves, just saying.

The policy change was requested by the Pentagon, of course, ostensibly because it believes that landmines could be crucial to winning a European war against Russia that likely go nuclear anyway. That’s just logic. And I’m sure that’s all they plan to do with them. You’re not going to see a bunch of landmines spewed over, say, southern Somalia in hopes that they take out a few al-Shabab fighters among the hundreds of other people they kill (whose deaths the Pentagon will ignore as it does most of its civilian casualties). Of course not.