World update: July 16 2020
Stories from Iran, Azerbaijan, South Africa, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
July 15, 1099: The Siege of Jerusalem ends with the Crusaders capturing the city.
Godfrey of Bouillon being anointed the first Crusader king (though he didn’t take that title) of Jerusalem, from a manuscript of chronicler William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer (Wikimedia Commons)
July 15, 1799: An officer on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, discovers an artifact later dubbed “the Rosetta Stone.” The stone, containing three versions of the same decree—in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek—enabled scholars to finally translate hieroglyphs and was a landmark in the development of the field of Egyptology.
July 15, 1974: Greece’s military government engineers a coup in Cyprus in order to install a government favorable to union with Greece. The coup prompted Turkey to intervene to prevent Cyprus from joining Greece, partitioning the island and leaving it in a state of frozen conflict that continues to the present day.
July 16, 1212: The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa
July 16, 1945: The United States conducts the first successful detonation of an atomic weapon at Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, code named “Trinity.”
July 16, 1979: Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr cites health reasons in stepping down from his post. Bakr does seem to have been a relatively frail guy and he did die in 1982, but in reality his main health consideration was probably “my vice president is going to murder me if I don’t resign and get out of his way.” His resignation allowed that vice president, Saddam Hussein—who was already Iraq’s de facto ruler anyway—to make it official by replacing him as president. I’m sure it all worked out great.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for July 16:
13,937,797 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (5,073,158 active, +248,912 since yesterday)
591,962 reported fatalities (+5741 since yesterday)
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
477 confirmed coronavirus cases (+19)
22 reported fatalities (unchanged)
According to The New Arab, warplanes bombed the town of al-Bab in northern Syria late Wednesday, killing at least one civilian and injuring ten more. The strikes were likely carried out by Russia and may have been a retaliation for a bombing in Idlib province earlier in the week that targeted a joint Russian-Turkish security patrol. If so, that would explain why the Russians felt comfortable bombing al-Bab, which is currently under Turkish control.
The Trump administration on Thursday levied new sanctions on six entities allegedly involved in funding the Islamic State. Three organizations and one individual on the list are active in Syria and Turkey. One additional organization and its director are based in Afghanistan.
IRAQ
86,148 confirmed cases (+2281)
3522 reported fatalities (+90)
Like clockwork, the onset of summer has led to a rise in blackouts in electricity-deprived southern Iraq, and that in turn has led to protests in cities across the region. This cycle has repeated annually for the past nine years, though the protests have escalated in recent years and so has the intensity of the government response. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi will be under pressure from one end of the political spectrum to control these demonstrations, and from the other end to make sure the response does not turn violent.
One of the absurdities of southern Iraq’s lack of energy is that the region’s oil wells burn off a huge amount of natural gas in an old-fashioned process known as “flaring.” This wastes the gas, which could be captured and put to use, reducing Iraq’s need to import natural gas and mitigating these annual energy shortages. On top of that, it’s also making the people in southern Iraq sick:
The men of Nahran Omar, a village in the heart of southern Iraq’s oil country, filed into a Shiite shrine clutching envelopes with X-rays, medical reports and death certificates.
They had come to describe the misery they say is caused by the burning gas and chemicals spewing out of the oil wells in their village. Each one had a sick son or a dying wife, an ill brother or sister.
“Imagine that in the town you come from every family has someone who has cancer,” said Khalid Qassim Faleh, a local tribal leader. “This is the situation in Nahran Omar.”
The chemicals in the air — in Nahran Omar and other oil towns across southern Iraq — come from the smoky orange flames atop the oil wells, burning away the natural gas that bubbles up with the oil.
The problem is that gas reclamation technology costs money, and Iraq doesn’t have enough of it to build that technology at the kind of scale required. And as it turns out, being either at war or under crippling international sanctions for 40 years, give or take, can have deleterious effects on your national infrastructure. Who knew?
JORDAN
1206 confirmed cases (+5)
10 reported fatalities (unchanged)
Jordan’s Court of Cassation issued a ruling outlawing the country’s Muslim Brotherhood branch on Wednesday. The Jordanian government, which historically has been relatively tolerant of the Brotherhood despite its anti-monarchical ideology, declared in 2014 that the organization’s license to operate had not been renewed, and Jordanian authorities shuttered its offices in Amman and elsewhere in 2016. That sparked the court case that seemingly reached its end on Wednesday. The Brotherhood is planning to appeal, but ultimately it may decide to “shut down” while letting its political wing, the Islamic Action Front, spin off as an independent organization.
IRAN
267,061 confirmed cases (+2500)
13,608 reported fatalities (+198)
Iranian media reported that at least two people were killed in what it termed a “terrorist” incident in Iran’s Kurdistan province late Wednesday. It did not go into details about the alleged incident and didn’t specify which group was allegedly responsible, though given the location it could be the Islamic State or a Kurdish militant group.
After an outpouring of opposition via social media, Iranian authorities are reportedly “reviewing” plans to execute three people convicted for participating in last year’s anti-government protests. Speaking of protests, demonstrators in the southern Iranian city of Behbahan were met with tear gas from police on Thursday. Details are sparse but it appears this protest could represent a revival of those anti-government protests, motivated partly by Iran’s economic struggles and possibly by the backlash against those death sentences. There are unconfirmable reports of Iranian police preparing for demonstrations in cities across the country.
With protests maybe on the verge of restarting, the Arab Center’s Daniel Brumberg presciently notes that Iranian hardliners, who are currently doing very well for themselves politically, might wind up biting off more than they can chew:
In many respects, this power grab goes against the grain of the multidimensional control system that Iran’s leaders have astutely used to prevent any opposition from posing a major threat to the regime. That system was buttressed by a massive security apparatus headed up by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its offshoots. Iran’s rulers preferred to rely on myriad institutions including the parliament, president, and Office of the Supreme Leader in order to channel and arbitrate political and social conflicts. Recourse to massive repression was usually a last resort, one that was deployed when these institutions proved incapable of containing or deflecting dissent. Brute force like that used against demonstrators last year was not a sign of the regime’s success but rather of its weakness.
It was for this very reason that every bout of opposition at home—or security challenge abroad—has been followed by an expansion of the powers and clout of the IRGC. If the latter has exploited crises to its benefit, however, Iran never made the transition from an Islamic republic to a military-led regime similar to that ruling in Egypt, or the military-managed regimes that dominated Turkey and Pakistan for decades. A transition to a “securitized” regime would deprive the IRGC (and the supreme leader) of the political shield it gains from a system that has allowed some measure of real debate and controlled competition but has given the state-controlled parliament or press the means to undermine the regime itself.
The trap of securitization was amply illustrated in the lead-up to the 2009 Green Movement and in the ensuing expansion of the IRGC’s powers. President Hassan Rouhani’s election in 2013 seemed to herald a return to a more balanced—if unfair—system that included a parliament in which reformists sought to push for economic and social reforms. But Rouhani’s authority was undermined by the Trump Administration’s repudiation of the 2015 nuclear accord, growing economic woes partly spurred by the re-imposition of sanctions, a series of popular protests (the last of which the regime brutally repressed in December 2019), and the rapid spread of the coronavirus in spring 2020. This perfect storm of events provided a stage for re-expanding the IRGC’s reach into key politica institutions, including parliament. The danger extends far beyond that body because the IRGC has been enlarging various other institutions in ways that could be pushing Iran closer to full-fledged securitization.
ASIA
AZERBAIJAN
26,165 confirmed cases (+493)
334 reported fatalities (+8)
A brief respite in fighting along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border ended Thursday with new claims of shelling on both sides. At least 15 people have already been killed in fighting that began on Sunday, 11 of them on the Azerbaijani side. The fighting remains localized, but fears of escalation are certainly warranted. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev sacked his foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov, on Thursday after blasting him publicly the previous day for going MIA in the midst of a diplomatic crisis. Mammadyarov’s reputation was poor anyway and he makes a convenient scapegoat for Aliyev, though firing him is unlikely to alleviate the public pressure that’s mounting on the Azerbaijani leader. Meanwhile, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar vowed that Armenia would “definitely pay” for this round of violence on Thursday, in comments that I’m not sure anybody wanted to hear and that could easily complicate efforts to reach a diplomatic resolution.
KAZAKHSTAN
65,188 confirmed cases (+1674)
375 reported fatalities (unchanged)
When the Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan issued an abrupt warning about a mystery deadlier-than-COVID “pneumonia” that had broken out in the Central Asian state, the Kazakh government angrily denied it. To be sure, there’s no evidence to support the claim. But there has been a bizarre insistence by authorities in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan that tens of thousands of people are contracting pneumonia this year—and hundreds dying of it—who are not infected with COVID-19.
The idea that, at the height of a global pandemic whose main presentation is as pneumonia, tens of thousands of people are just happening to also contract different kinds of pneumonia at the same time, almost defies belief. It’s not entirely clear why Kazakh and Kyrgyz authorities would feel the need to manipulate their COVID-19 statistics in this way, especially not when they’re acknowledging the supposedly unrelated pneumonia cases. Defective tests could be to blame, or just general bad record-keeping. But one theory is that they’re trying to downplay an inability to get enough protective gear to medical personnel by downplaying the extent of their COVID-19 outbreaks.
INDIA
1,005,637 confirmed cases (+35,468)
25,609 reported fatalities (+680)
The Indian army said Thursday that both it and the Chinese army are continuing to withdraw forces from their Ladakh-Aksai Chin border region, where deadly clashes last month caused tensions that continue to linger. But it cautioned that further deescalation is going to depend in part on an ability for each side to verify what the other is doing. Part of the problem is that the Galwan Valley area, where the clash took place, is only one of a number of locations in that region where the border is under dispute and Indian and Chinese military forces are stationed relatively close to the “Line of Actual Control.” Tensions are going to persist unless both countries make a full regional withdrawal.
CHINA
83,612 confirmed cases (+1) on the mainland, 1656 confirmed cases (+67) in Hong Kong
4634 reported fatalities (unchanged) on the mainland, 10 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Hong Kong
The Trump administration is now considering a blanket visa ban on all members of the Chinese Communist Party and their families, possibly written so as to authorize the expulsion of any CCP members or their families who are already in the US. This would be a dramatic escalation, at least symbolically, and would certainly lead the Chinese government to retaliate in kind—although the contours of such retaliation aren’t immediately clear since there’s no obvious analogue to the CCP in the United States. There are also a raft of logistical issues with implementing a ban on the 92 million members of the CCP and their families, like even identifying party members for starters. The administration may scrap the idea altogether or it may impose something that is more tightly focused on senior CCP figures.
AFRICA
LIBYA
1652 confirmed cases (+63)
46 reported fatalities (+3)
Libya’s Government of National Accord and its rival, Khalifa Haftar and his “Libyan National Army,” have reportedly negotiated a small prisoner swap:
Again the scope of this exchange was very small, but if it builds confidence toward a larger prisoner swap, and that builds confidence toward other reconciliation measures, it could be the first step toward serious peace talks.
TUNISIA
1327 confirmed cases (+8)
50 reported fatalities (unchanged)
Tunisian Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh, who resigned on Wednesday ahead of a no confidence vote but remains in office on an interim basis, canned all six of his cabinet ministers from the Ennahda Party on Thursday. It was Ennahda’s announcement that it would support a no confidence motion that forced Fakhfakh’s resignation. Practically this is a meaningless step, but symbolically it’s a slap in the face of the Tunisian parliament’s largest party and may make it harder to form a new coalition to replace the one Fakhfakh led. Which would increase the chances of a new election.
ETHIOPIA
8475 confirmed cases (+294)
148 reported fatalities (+2)
Questions are still swirling about whether or not the Ethiopian government has started filling the reservoir of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, despite repeated denials from the Ethiopian government. Sudanese officials reported Thursday that they’ve detected lower water levels on the Blue Nile River that would be consistent with the reservoir’s filling, though that doesn’t prove that the Ethiopians have closed the reservoir’s outflow channels. There’s no question that water levels behind the dam are rising, but the Ethiopians say that’s because heavy recent rains have filled the reservoir faster than those outflow channels can drain it. The Egyptian government in particular is concerned that the dam is going to reduce water levels on the Nile River, which is an existential issue for Cairo. The Sudanese government is also concerned about water levels, but it also sees the GERD as a potential source of badly-needed and relatively cheap electricity.
GABON
6121 confirmed cases (unchanged)
46 reported fatalities (unchanged)
Gabonese President Ali Bongo appointed Rose Christiane Raponda as his new prime minister on Thursday. She is the first woman in Gabonese history to assume that post. Raponda had been serving as defense minister under previous PM Julien Nkoghe Bekale, who resigned earlier in the day. There was no explanation for Bekale’s resignation but it probably had something to do with the state of Gabon’s economy, which has been badly weakened by low oil prices and the pandemic-related global downturn. Raponda assumes the job at a time when concerns are high about Bongo’s recovery—or lack thereof—from the stroke he suffered while in Saudi Arabia in October 2018. Bongo didn’t return to the country for a couple of months, and even now on the rare occasions he’s seen publicly it’s clear he’s still frail.
SOUTH AFRICA
324,221 confirmed cases (+13,172)
4669 reported fatalities (+216)
I’ve been trying to steer clear of “man, have you checked out [insert country]’s COVID-19 outbreak lately?” stories in this newsletter, unless I feel like there’s something more to say than that, because things could get very monotonous very quickly otherwise. So with that out of the way, man, have you checked out South Africa’s COVID-19 outbreak lately? It’s not going well. There seems to be a growing sense that the country’s high level of inequality is partly to blame:
When the coronavirus arrived in South Africa, it was an illness of the affluent. The first recorded COVID-19 case, the country’s patient zero, was a 38-year-old businessman from a wealthy rural town who had been on a skiing holiday in northern Italy. He quickly recovered.
All of South Africa’s earliest cases were travellers returning from Europe. Tourists in Johannesburg were heckled with “corona, corona” chants from angry locals who saw them as the source. Even today, people speak scathingly of the “Italy 10” – the skiing group that was blamed for importing the virus.
But four months after those early tourist cases, the virus has become a devastating disease of inequality and poverty. It has ripped through South Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, killing thousands of people from the crowded streets and shacks where people cannot afford to distance.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
752,797 confirmed cases (+6428)
11,937 reported fatalities (+167)
UK officials say they’ve found evidence of Russian state-backed hackers targeting Canadian, UK, and US firms and organizations involved in researching a potential COVID-19 vaccine. The Russian government denied the allegation and is demanding proof from London. The UK authorities say no research has been “compromised” but couldn’t say whether any information had been stolen by the hackers.
At Foreign Policy, analyst Ankur Shah argues that any alleged links between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union project are purely for show:
For its part, Russia rarely turns down superficial opportunities to showcase its ties with China. President Vladimir Putin is a regular attendee at Beijing’s biennial Belt and Road Forum. At last year’s Valdai Discussion Club, Putin for the first time described ties with China as “alliance-like,” enjoying “an unprecedently high level of trust and cooperation.” He has primarily pushed for economic and political engagement with the Belt and Road Initiative by promoting its compatibility with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, an economic union in the post-Soviet space. In what was then considered a landmark agreement, in 2015 the countries agreed to integrate the two initiatives.
By 2019, China had yet to deem any of the union’s projects worthy of the “Belt and Road” label. But despite the public rhetoric harmonizing Xi and Putin’s premier foreign-policy projects, there is little tangible evidence to show that Russia is even an official partner country of the Belt and Road Initiative. Of 40 transportation projects proposed by the Eurasian Economic Union to China in 2017, every single one was rejected. By 2019, China had yet to deem any of the union’s projects worthy of the “Belt and Road” label. A senior Russian government official interviewed in July 2019 told Bobo Lo, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute, that the needle has barely shifted since the political declaration.
The Chinese government needs Russia to at least continue pretending to support Belt and Road, otherwise the prospects of its expansion in Central Asia will be considerably worsened. But the Chinese rejection of all of those EEU projects isn’t likely to win the BRI many fans in Moscow.
BELARUS
65,623 confirmed cases (+180)
485 reported fatalities (+5)
Two high-profile opposition candidates who were disqualified from running in next month’s presidential election by Belarusian authorities earlier this week, Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo, announced Thursday that they’re throwing their support behind the one candidate who was allowed to run, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Incumbent Alexander Lukashenko is probably going to rig the vote anyway, but his political stature has probably never been weaker in his 26 years as president, so if he wins a disputed election it’s likely to generate a fair amount of public outrage.
POLAND
39,054 confirmed cases (+333)
1605 reported fatalities (+11)
Supporters of defeated presidential candidate and Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski are challenging the results of Sunday’s runoff, officially won by incumbent Andrzej Duda, in court. They’re unlikely to win, but they can embarrass Duda and the ruling Law and Justice party with revelations about their efforts to, oh, let’s say “shape” the vote in Duda’s favor. There are a number of reports of irregularities, all of which naturally seemed to benefit Duda and some of which included votes by Poles living abroad, including in Germany and the UK.
NORTH MACEDONIA
8623 confirmed cases (+93)
401 reported fatalities (+8)
Wednesday’s North Macedonian parliamentary election produced, as expected, a narrow outcome and an inconclusive result. The governing Social Democrats, led by Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, barely squeezed past the right-wing opposition VMRO-DPMNE, 36.1 percent to 34.9 percent. The result would leave the Social Democrats with 46 seats, 15 shy of a majority, with VMRO-DPMNE at 44 seats. North Macedonia’s largest ethnic Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, looks like it won 15 seats. It could give Zaev the seats he needs for a majority, but since the DUI has insisted it will only enter a coalition if the PM is an ethnic Albanian, such an alliance would cost Zaev his job. VMRO-DPMNE does not appear to have a path to a coalition without DUI, and given its right-wing nationalism it seems unlikely to agree to an Albanian PM. The Social Democrats may have a path without DUI, but it would result in a razor thin majority coalition involving an unwieldy four parties.
SERBIA
19,717 confirmed cases (+383)
442 reported fatalities (+13)
A face-to-face meeting between Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovan Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti in Brussels on Thursday, intended as the first step toward ending their countries’ decades-long conflict, doesn’t seem to have gone very well. When it ended, Vučić accused Hoti of demanding too much, too soon, and of demonizing Serbia. Hoti, though, characterized the talks as positive, at least when it came to economic development. Negotiations are set to continue, so that’s something, but the underlying issue remains that Kosovo wants Serbia to recognize its independence and Serbia isn’t willing to do that.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
2,014,738 confirmed cases (+43,829)
76,822 reported fatalities (+1299)
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has banned the setting of agricultural and brush clearing fires for 120 days, during the height of Brazil’s annual dry season, in an effort to minimize the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro’s government has presided over a drastic increase in the loss of rainforest territory, mostly because Bolsonaro himself has encouraged it in the name of “development.” This decree amounts to attempting to slap a band-aid on a gaping bullet wound, and is unlikely to make much difference even if we assume it will be enforced.
GUYANA
315 confirmed cases (+2)
19 reported fatalities (+1)
The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions against several Guyanese officials while demanding that President David Granger leave office. A recount completed last month showed that the People’s Progressive Party, led by Irfaan Ali, won Guyana’s March 2 election, but Granger and his Partnership for National Unity coalition are contesting the outcome and want the whole election tossed out. Their challenge is working its way through the legal system. The administration is reportedly lobbying the UK government to join its effort to pressure Granger to step down.
UNITED STATES
3,695,025 confirmed cases (+73,388)
141,118 reported fatalities (+963)
Finally, contrary to popular opinion the United States does too care about human rights, even with Donald Trump running the country. Just not, you know, all of them:
Mike Pompeo has sought to redefine the US approach to human rights by giving preference to private property and religious freedom as the foremost “unalienable rights” laid down by America’s Founding Fathers.
Pompeo, launching a draft report by a Commission on Unalienable Rights he established a year ago, also claimed that a proliferation of human rights asserted by different US and international institutions had the effect of diluting those rights he viewed as the most important.
“Many are worth defending in light of our founding; others aren’t,” Pompeo said at a launch ceremony in Philadelphia. He did not specify which rights he thought were superfluous, but the state department during his tenure has been aggressive in opposing references to reproductive and gender rights in UN and other multilateral documents.
In the report launched on Thursday, the authors — a mix of academics and activists — said they could not agree on the application of human rights standards to issues like “abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment, to name a few”.
Look, all we’re saying is that we’re going to follow the same human rights precepts that were honored by our Founding Fathers. Many of whom owned slaves and/or participated in the extended genocide of indigenous peoples in North America. I don’t see the problem.