World update: June 18 2020

Stories from Turkey, India, Australia, and more

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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

June 17, 1462: The Night Attack at Târgovişte

June 17, 1631: Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal dies. The favorite of Emperor Shah Jahan’s (d. 1666) wives, her death inspired her husband to order the construction of a glorious mausoleum to commemorate her. The result, the Taj Mahal, sees upwards of eight million visitors each year according to its website.

June 18, 1815: The Battle of Waterloo. Spoiler warning for those who are listening to the excellent Age of Napoleon podcast, but this one doesn’t go too well for Napoleon.

June 18, 1940: Charles de Gaulle’s “Appeal of 18 April” and Winston Churchill’s “This was their finest hour” speech mark France’s World War II surrender and the birth of the French resistance movement.

June 18, 1953: Egypt’s toddler (he was about 18 months old) king, Fuad II, is ousted when Egypt is declared a republic. Fuad had already fled the country with his father, King Farouk, when the latter was ousted the year before in the 23 July Revolution.

INTERNATIONAL

Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for June 18:

• 8,570,384 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (3,605,341 active, +140,528 since yesterday)

• 455,575 reported fatalities (+5123 since yesterday)

At Foreign Policy, journalists Carl-Johan Karlsson and Katarina Zimmer argue that the transition to green energy, while necessary, is not without an international downside:

Renewable technologies create ethical issues at both ends of their life cycle. Sovacool was part of a team of researchers who recently visited the two ends of technology supply chains: artisanal cobalt mining sites in Congo, where miners extract the metal using rudimentary tools or their hands, and electronic waste scrapyards in Ghana, a global cemetery for electronics such as solar panels. The team’s findings reveal widespread child labor, the subjugation of ethnic minorities, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and gender inequality along the length of the supply chain.

Sovacool and his colleagues call this inequality the “decarbonization divide,” which may widen as the world ramps up renewable energy use. For example, solar energy could meet the global demand for low-carbon energy many times over. But the sheer size of solar panels, which often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic metals, makes them one the largest global contributors of electronic waste. By 2050, which is the rough expiration date of solar panels manufactured today, the technology is estimated to produce 78 million metric tons of waste—some 80 percent more than the total annual waste from all combined technologies today.

Much of the e-waste generated by the West is sent, sometimes illegally, to countries in Asia or Africa, where a small amount of it is mined for reusable materials and sold back to world markets. This economic opportunity often causes toxic pollution, fueling environmental and public health crises. Many workers at one of the largest e-waste processing sites in Ghana, Agbogbloshie, are children who help dismantle electronic goods, extract metals, and then burn the waste—producing smoke that envelops the surrounding communities. Studies have found high levels of lead in the blood of those living near the processing sites.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

• 187 confirmed coronavirus cases (+9)

• 6 reported fatalities (unchanged)

Germany and Belgium are circulating a resolution at the United Nations Security Council to reopen a closed humanitarian aid entry point from Iraq into northeastern Syria and leave open two active corridors from Turkey. Back in January, the council agreed to close the Iraqi crossing and keep the two Turkish crossings open for only six months, with Russia and China threatening to veto any measure that went further than that. This resolution would leave the Turkish crossings, now scheduled to close on July 10, open for 12 months and reopen the Iraqi crossing for six with the option to renew for another six. Russia and China will presumably renew their veto threat although neither has apparently done so yet.

YEMEN

• 909 confirmed cases (+7)

• 248 reported fatalities (+4)

The Saudi government is trying to broker another settlement between the Yemeni government and the separatist Southern Transitional Council, which declared self rule in Aden and across southern Yemen earlier this year. The proposal reportedly involves a ceasefire and the redeployment of STC forces followed by the creation of a new cabinet in which the current government and the STC would share power. The order of these steps appears to be the main sticking point, as the STC wants a new cabinet in place before it redeploys its forces.

TURKEY

• 184,031 confirmed cases (+1304)

• 4882 reported fatalities (+21)

Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters detonated a roadside bomb in southeastern Turkey’s Şırnak province on Thursday, killing four laborers when their truck hit the device. The bombing may have been a response to Turkey’s recent campaign against the PKK in northern Iraq (see below).

Meanwhile, NATO officials say they plan to investigate France’s accusation that several Turkish naval vessels interfered with a French ship several days ago as it tried to enforce the international arms embargo against Libya. The Turks have denied that they threatened the French ship and claim that it was maneuvering dangerously, according to Reuters.

We’ve entered what will probably be a weeks-long news cycle in which one wild story after another will be gleaned from John Bolton’s still-unreleased tell-all about his time as Donald Trump’s national security advisor, so you can look forward to that at least. One such story involves Trump apparently trying to intervene, at the behest of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a federal investigation of Turkey’s Halkbank on charges that it helped evade US sanctions against Iran. Congressional Democrats are calling on Bolton to expound on his claims, though it’s unclear where that could lead, and if Bolton were really interested in helping Congress investigate his former boss he already had an opportunity to do so. He did not.

IRAQ

• 25,717 confirmed cases (+1463)

• 856 reported fatalities (+83)

Somebody fired four rockets into Baghdad’s secure “Green Zone” on Thursday, though there were no casualties and it’s not clear they caused any damage either. As usual with these incidents there’s been no claim of responsibility.

The ongoing Turkish military operation against the PKK in northern Iraq is apparently going to be a long-term affair. An anonymous “senior Turkish official” told Reuters that there are plans to establish additional Turkish military bases in northern Iraq, on top of the ten or so already there. Supposedly this is being done with the knowledge of the Iraqi government, but so far Iraqi officials don’t seem terribly thrilled at Turkey’s violation of the border.

LEBANON

• 1495 confirmed cases (+6)

• 32 reported fatalities (unchanged)

Al Jazeera reports on fears that new US sanctions against Syria will have a spillover effect on the already crippled Lebanese economy:

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

• 27,532 confirmed cases (+658)

• 546 reported fatalities (+42)

A mortar attack on a school in Afghanistan’s Takhar province killed at least nine students on Thursday and wounded six more. This was probably the Taliban’s doing, as it is known to have a presence in that region, but it hasn’t claimed responsibility and likely won’t, given the nature of the target. Speaking of the Taliban, the US military says it’s reduced its troop presence in Afghanistan to 8600, in accordance with the US-Taliban agreement signed in February. The agreement requires a full US withdrawal by next May but there are obligations the Taliban is supposed to meet before that withdrawal takes place.

PAKISTAN

• 160,118 confirmed cases (+5358)

• 3093 reported fatalities (+118)

The Pakistani military says that Indian shelling in Kashmir on Wednesday killed at least four civilians on Pakistan’s side of the border.

INDIA

• 381,091 confirmed cases (+13,827)

• 12,604 reported fatalities (+342)

Meanwhile, there’s a bit more clarity about India’s other recent border clash, the one with China over Himalayan territory in the Ladakh region. The Chinese government has reportedly freed ten Indian soldiers its forces took prisoner during Monday’s border brawl in which more than 20 people were killed. New Delhi has not acknowledged that any of its forces were captured.

Questions remain about who provoked Monday’s incident, with Indian and Chinese officials each blaming the other side for starting the fight. But new satellite imagery apparently shows a lot of activity in the Galwan Valley leading up to Monday’s clash, which suggests the provocation was Beijing’s. The imagery reportedly shows Chinese personnel cutting a trail through the mountains and possibly damming a river. Indian officials have accused China of trying to build something on the Indian side of the border, and this new evidence would certainly correspond with that interpretation. The problem is that with the border as poorly delineated as it is, those Chinese personnel may not have actually been in Indian territory, or may not have realized that they were.

TAIWAN

• 446 confirmed cases (+1)

• 7 reported fatalities (unchanged)

For the fifth time in ten days Taiwanese authorities had to warn off Chinese fighter jets that buzzed Taiwan’s air defense zone on Thursday. Chinese aircraft periodically skirt Taiwan’s airspace as a demonstration that Beijing doesn’t actually recognize that there is such a thing as “Taiwanese airspace.” But five such incidents in ten days is excessive and it’s unclear what’s prompting this increased frequency. The Taiwanese government got in a shot of its own on Thursday when it announced that it will establish a new office to help people flee Hong Kong. Beijing is about to impose a new security law in Hong Kong and there are fears it could curtail Hong Kong’s freedoms and erode the “one state, two systems” concept. The Chinese government of course denies it plans to suppress Hong Kong’s freedoms and regards this proposed office as an insult—which, to be fair, is how it’s meant to be regarded.

CHINA

• 83,293 confirmed cases (+28) on the mainland, 1125 confirmed cases (+4) in Hong Kong

• 4634 reported fatalities (unchanged) on the mainland, 4 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Hong Kong

The Chinese government says that its top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, had a “constructive” meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Hawaii on Wednesday. The US government did not sound quite as pleased, with Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell saying Thursday that the Chinese delegation had not been “forthcoming,” without going into specifics. Among other things, the two men apparently talked about “the need for full transparency and information sharing” to combat the pandemic. Easier said than done:

China lashed out at the United States on Thursday after President Trump signed into law a bill that would allow him to impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mass incarceration of more than one million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang.

The rebuke came after China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, held an unusual meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Hawaii that underscored the depth of discord between the two countries. The Trump administration has intensified its criticism of China on a variety of fronts, especially its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

It also came after reporting on the Bolton book revealed that Trump initially backed China’s Uyghur crackdown, though whether that was because the Uyghurs are predominantly Muslim or because Trump was trying to suck up to Chinese President Xi Jinping is unclear. This detail is not especially important, although it does make these current denouncements of the Uyghur policy ring hollow.

Yang and Pompeo in Hawaii (State Department photo via Flickr)

There’s also a new front in the US-China rivalry, as the Trump administration is probably about to deny approval to a proposed undersea data cable project that would run from the United States to Hong Kong with stops in the Philippines and Taiwan. The US government’s “Team Telecom” committee is preparing to reject the cable on the grounds that Beijing is moving to tighten its control over Hong Kong and therefore the data connection would represent a threat to US national security.

OCEANIA

AUSTRALIA

• 7391 confirmed cases (+21)

• 102 reported fatalities (+unchanged)

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison claims that his country is under cyber-attack from Chin-er, I mean from an unspecified state actor:

The government is not saying which country it believes to be responsible, expect to say it is “a state-based actor, with very significant capabilities”. The prime minister declined to respond to a specific question about whether it was China, after months of tensions in its relationship with Australia.

“I’m here today to advise you that, based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organisations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor,” Morrison told reporters.

“This activity is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure.

“We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber actor because of the scale and nature of the targeting and the tradecraft used. The Australian government is aware of and alert to the threat of cyber-attacks.”

NEW ZEALAND

• 1507 confirmed cases (+1)

• 22 reported fatalities (unchanged)

Hey, remember when New Zealand declared itself coronavirus-free? Well, it’s not anymore. Three people who have flown to New Zealand in recent days have tested positive for the coronavirus, including two women who for some reason were allowed to skip out early on their mandatory post-arrival quarantine. That case has proven to be a sudden black eye for a New Zealand government that had been earning top marks for its handling of the crisis. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has now tasked the military with managing quarantine facilities to try to ensure nothing like that happens again.

AFRICA

MALI

• 1906 confirmed cases (+16)

• 107 reported fatalities (unchanged)

Alex Thurston has a new piece at his blog on some emerging details about the attack that killed (apparently) former al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leader Abdelmalek Droukdel earlier this month, including speculation on the roles that the Algerian and US governments may have played:

The American role may have gone beyond intelligence and surveillance, however. Le Figaro‘s Georges Malbrunot, in a Twitter thread starting here, cites an anonymous diplomat without giving his/her nationality. According to this source, the U.S. identified Droukdel’s voice and located him when Droukdel placed a phone call, and then turned that information over to the French. According to the same source, an American drone fired the first shots at Droukdel’s convoy, lighting the way for French helicopters that then destroyed the convoy. French commandos then collected DNA samples, which were matched (in Paris) with DNA samples from Droukdel’s family collected by the Algerian authorities. (It’s kind of wild to me that Droukdel would talk on the phone – one would have assumed he would know better.)

KENYA

• 4257 confirmed cases (+213)

• 117 reported fatality (+10)

Kenya outlasted Djibouti in a second round of voting to fill one of the African seats on the United Nations Security Council starting next year. It will join the four winners of Wednesday’s first round of voting—India, Ireland, Mexico, and Norway—as new members of the council.

BURUNDI

• 104 confirmed cases (unchanged)

• 1 reported fatality (unchanged)

The Burundian government on Thursday held the inauguration ceremony for new President Évariste Ndayishimiye. The process was sped up in the wake of former President Pierre Nkurunziza’s sudden death earlier this month and a subsequent ruling by Burundi’s constitutional court that Ndayishimiye should take office immediately.

EUROPE

BELARUS

• 56,657 confirmed cases (+625)

• 331 reported fatalities (+7)

Protests broke out in Minsk on Thursday after Belarusian authorities arrested the main challenger to Alexander Lukashenko in August’s presidential election, Viktor Babariko. Authorities raided the offices of Babariko’s former employer, Belgazprombank, last week, amid corruption allegations that I’m sure are not in any way politically motivated (it’s entirely possible that the allegations are accurate and also politically motivated). Notwithstanding his authoritarian control over Belarus and its politics, Lukashenko is under considerable pressure for having botched Minsk’s response to the coronavirus.

HUNGARY

• 4079 confirmed cases (+1)

• 568 reported fatalities (+1)

It looks like Viktor Orbán and the European Union are heading for another legal confrontation:

The European Court of Justice found that a 2017 law that required nongovernmental organizations that received foreign financing to identify themselves as such and to disclose their donors had “introduced discriminatory and unjustified restrictions.”

Far from offering citizens transparency, as the government claimed, the court found that “the measures which it lays down are such as to create a climate of distrust with regard to those associations and foundations.”

To comply with the decision, Hungary would have to repeal the law as written, according to legal experts. If it refuses to do so, it could face sanctions, including possible financial penalties.

The law targets NGOs funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations but has weakened Hungary’s NGO community more broadly. The Hungarian government is of course lambasting the decision, though the possibility that Budapest will actually face sanctions is probably remote since its allies on the European far right (the Polish government chief among them) will do what they can to prevent it.

CZECH REPUBLIC

• 10,280 confirmed cases (+118)

• 334 reported fatalities (+1)

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš says he might veto the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund, depending on how Brussels decides to divvy up that 750 billion euro pool of money. One scheme has the money being spread around according to each country’s pre-pandemic unemployment rate, which wouldn’t do the Czechs much good since the Czech Republic’s unemployment rate was quite low.

UNITED KINGDOM

• 300,469 confirmed cases (+1218)

• 42,288 reported fatalities (+135)

The EU and the UK aren’t agreeing on much these days, but they do agree on the need to impose a global tax on digital services, so much so that they may do it over US objections. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has organized negotiations among 140 countries on creating such a tax, but the United States has withdrawn from those talks because the tax threatens to eat into the bottom lines of US tech firms.

AMERICAS

BRAZIL

• 983,359 confirmed cases (+23,050)

• 47,869 reported fatalities (+1204)

Brazilian police have arrested Fabrício Queiroz on allegations he was involved in an effort to create phantom employees in the Rio de Janeiro assembly and collect their salaries. What’s interesting about this is that Queiroz used to work for Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and the phantom employee scheme dates to the time when Flávio was a member of the Rio assembly. Go figure. Flávio of course denies any involvement, but it cannot be denied that clouds of corruption just seem to follow the Bolsonaro men around wherever they go.

COLOMBIA

• 60,217 confirmed cases (+3171)

• 1950 reported fatalities (+86)

The US government announced Thursday that it’s put $10 million bounties on the heads of two former FARC rebels, Jesús Santrich (real name Seuxis Hernández) and Iván Márquez (real name Luciano Marín). Both are accused of involvement in drug trafficking and both have repudiated FARC’s 2016 peace deal with the Colombian government, after initially supporting it. Also on Thursday, the Colombian military freed two foreign nationals who were kidnapped by militant ex-FARC members back in March.

UNITED STATES

• 2,263,651 confirmed cases (+27,924)

• 120,688 reported fatalities (+747)

Donald Trump had his bid to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects people who were brought to the United States as children and do not have citizenship or residency papers, quashed by the Supreme Court on Thursday in a 5-4 vote. The majority opinion contended that the Trump administration had failed to explain why it wanted to end the program.

Finally, Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch reports on the way foreign diplomats are observing the decline of the United States:

Foreign leaders and diplomats broadly agree that Trump displayed what they view as gross incompetence in his response to the coronavirus, as well as to several weeks of political upheaval. But what has disheartened observers abroad is that even liberal states and cities, including New York, have proved woefully unprepared for a long-predicted pandemic, before eagerly taking up the truncheons to pummel peaceful protesters. Some of the most violent crackdowns on demonstrators protesting the killing of George Floyd have played out in blue states and cities, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York, under liberal political leaders.

From afar, the latest demonstration of American carnage appears to be yet another sign of a great power spiraling at high speed into a period of national and international decline.

“There has been a dramatic decline in American political and soft power under Trump,” said Andrew Gilmour, a British national who served as U.N. assistant secretary-general for human rights. “I come from a country that experienced decline, but it took decades. This is happening much faster. A Democratic victory may stanch it, but it cannot reverse the damage Trump has inflicted on American prestige.”