World update: June 19-20 2019
Stories from Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and more
THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
June 19, 1821: An Ottoman army defeats a group of fighters from the Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends), a Greek independence movement, in battle near the town of Drăgășani (in modern Romania). This was one of the earliest battles of the Greek War of Independence, so clearly the Greeks’ fortunes picked up afterward.
June 19, 1961: Kuwait gains its independence from Britain. However, Kuwaiti National Day is actually celebrated on February 25, the date of the coronation of its first ruler, Abdullah al-Salim al-Sabah, in 1950, partly because it’s a drag to celebrate national holidays in the middle of a hot Gulf summer.
June 20, 1631: Algerian pirates sack the Irish village of Baltimore. They carted off 107 captives, of whom only three ever made it back to Ireland.
June 20, 1789: Members of the French Third Estate take the Tennis Court Oath, in which they pledged not to dissolve under royal pressure. This was one of the first serious acts of defiance in the French Revolution and established the power of the National Assembly.
June 20, 1863: West Virginia is admitted to the Union as the 35th state.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
A Saudi desalinization plant in Jizan was struck by (apparently) a Houthi cruise missile on Wednesday. According to the Saudis the missile didn’t directly impact the facility but struck near it, without causing any damage or casualties. Earlier on Wednesday the Houthis claimed to have struck a “power station” in the province, but it would appear that report was only partially accurate. The Saudis reportedly bombed targets around the city of Hudaydah on Friday in response.
Meanwhile, as expected the World Food Program on Thursday began partially suspending its food distribution efforts in territory controlled by the Houthis. The WFP and the Yemeni rebels have failed to reach agreement on a biometric system that the WFP says it needs to distribute food to those who need it. The WFP has further accused the Houthis of diverting food aid for sale on the black market.
TURKEY
Imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan on Thursday advised the predominantly Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to abstain from this weekend’s Istanbul mayoral election do-over. Former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş has already endorsed opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu, who won the March 31 mayoral election only to have Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) pitch a fit and get the result overturned. So Öcalan’s statement is a big gift to AKP, which obviously would like to suppress as much of İmamoğlu’s vote as it can. It’s probably Öcalan’s end of the agreement under which the Turkish government has allowed him to start seeing visitors again.
IRAQ
A rocket exploded in an area of Basra containing the offices of several major foreign oil companies on Wednesday, wounding at least three Iraqi workers. It’s not clear who was responsible. The strike may be connected with escalating US-Iranian tensions in the region, in which case it may also be related to two similar attacks earlier in the week on Iraqi military bases housing US personnel. Just in case, perhaps, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi issued an order for Iraqi paramilitary groups to cease operations except under orders from the Iraqi government. Most of those groups still operate autonomously and may not abide by Abdul-Mahdi’s directives.
In central and northern Iraq, meanwhile, ISIS is continuing to target Iraqi croplands with firebombs. The Iraqi government claims that only 40,000 dunams (an Iraqi dunam is about a quarter of a hectare) have been torched, some of that accidentally, but local officials say it’s more like 145,000 dunams. That’s still not a huge number but it’s verging on worrisome, and the frequency of the crop fires shows no sign of letting up.
LEBANON
The presence of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has increasingly become a sore spot for Lebanese citizens and a tripwire in Lebanese politics, and to some degree that’s understandable—Lebanon is a small country whose resources are legitimately being stretched past the breaking point by that large an influx of long-term refugees. But recently Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil—who hopes one day to succeed his father in-law, Michel Aoun, as president—has started demagoguing the refugee issue in ways that are disturbingly reminiscent of far-right politicians in Europe. He’s organizing xenophobic rallies to demand the refugees go back to Syria—even though their ability to do so safely is questionable at best—and is even talking about the “genetic distinction” of Lebanese people that differentiates them from Syrians. That kind of talk always leads to good places, and in this case it’s contributing to a rise in violence directed at the refugee community.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh briefed reporters on Thursday on the terms of a ceasefire agreement he claims his organization negotiated with the Israeli government, with Egyptian assistance. His intent was to show that Israel hasn’t lived up to its promises, which include expanding Gaza’s offshore fishing zone and permitting the construction (perhaps with Qatari funds) of two industrial zones, a hospital, and new power lines. Haniyeh said that Hamas is committed to stopping the launch of incendiary balloons over the Gaza fence and to controlling protests in order to prevent an Israeli military response. The Israeli government has never acknowledged cutting a deal with Hamas and presumably never will, so needless to say it’s not going to corroborate what Haniyeh says.
SAUDI ARABIA
A United Nations report released Wednesday concluded that there is “credible evidence” implicating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last November. The report likewise points the finger at Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to the crown prince suspected of being the mastermind of the Khashoggi kidnapping/murder plot. The Saudis claim that Qahtani has been disciplined for his role in the incident but the UN report suggests that’s not been the case. Saudi officials have naturally rejected the report.
A British appeals court ruled on Thursday that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia break the law because the UK government hasn’t done enough to ensure that its weapons won’t be used to kill Yemeni civilians. The government says it will appeal the ruling but is also reevaluating its arms sales procedures. The Saudis argued in response that the ruling would benefit Iran, though presumably the kids on the next Yemeni school bus the Saudis were planning to strike might see some benefit as well. In the US, meanwhile, the Senate on Thursday will likely pass three resolutions blocking arms sales to the Saudis. Those measures are expected to also pass the House, but they’ll be vetoed by Donald Trump and the sales will proceed anyway. The system works, if you’re a defense contractor.
IRAN
We’re probably a little closer to a military confrontation with Iran, for pretty much the dumbest possible reason. Early Thursday the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a US surveillance drone that had allegedly crossed into Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf in Hormozgan province. This was an RQ-4A Global Hawk drone (some reports have identified it as the closely related MQ-4C Triton), which is only a surveillance craft and cannot be equipped with ordinance like the more famous Reaper drone.
The US military called the shoot down an “unprovoked attack” and appears to be treating this as though the Iranians shot down an actual human being and not a, you know, thing. It’s also claiming that the drone was in international airspace, and while there’s no particular reason to believe the Iranians when they say it had entered their airspace, there’s also no particular reason to believe the US when it says that it hadn’t. There’s not even much reason to expect that the US and Iran have the same definition of what constitutes Iranian airspace, really. The US is offering up the claim that the drone’s debris is in international waters as evidence that it wasn’t in Iranian airspace, but that’s pretty thin. The aircraft could have been moving in and out of Iranian airspace, the explosion could have sent that debris out of Iranian airspace, or the debris could have drifted after falling into the water.
The victim, or at least a cousin (Wikimedia Commons)
The airspace issue matters, because the Iranians either were or weren’t justified in shooting the drone down depending on where it was, but it may be unprovable either way. The details, of course, aren’t going to get in the way of the US government if it decides to take action. As it seems like it might. Even Donald Trump, who’d been sounding fairly relaxed on Iran of late (see below), jumped onto the pile on Thursday:
Are we heading toward a military confrontation? The early response has been mixed. That tweet by Trump was kind of ominous, as was the report that the White House is briefing senior congressional leaders on Iran. Trump later told reporters “you’ll find out” when they asked what the US response will be, which also sounds ominous even though what it probably means is that Trump himself doesn’t really know yet. He also suggested that the shoot down was a “mistake” made “by a general or somebody” acting “loose and stupid.” He also noted that it was a drone rather than a manned aircraft, an important distinction in terms of deciding on a response. So that’s encouraging. Ultimately though, it’s Donald Trump, who struggles to hold the same thought in his head from one moment to the next. I don’t think it’s productive to try to predict what he might do next.
The Saudis have naturally seized on the shoot down—they’ve accused Iran of creating a “very grave” situation in the region, and while the Saudis have little room to talk it might be a good idea from an anti-war perspective for the Iranians to sit the next few plays out and let things calm down. That said, the fact that it’s even conceivable that the United States could undertake a military strike—even a one-off strike (which inherently risks escalating into a full-on war)—in which human beings may be killed, over the Iranians shooting down an unmanned drone seems like madness. There’s no other word for it. It’s a drone. Nobody died, nobody even got injured. There’s no justification for risking human lives over it.
Were it not for the drone, US-Iran tensions might actually be easing. Trump had really started talking down the possibility of conflict, and the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that he’s even told his advisers to calm down:
President Donald Trump has privately pushed his representatives to walk back their tough talk on Iran—and reiterate that the administration is not aiming to go to war with Tehran.
Two senior officials and three other individuals with direct knowledge of the administration’s strategy in the region tell The Daily Beast that the president has asked officials to tone down their heated rhetoric on Iran, despite the attacks on tanker ships in the Gulf of Oman that Washington has blamed on Tehran. The president has previously said he is less hawkish on Iran than some of his advisers and this week, in a Time magazine interview, said the attacks on the tankers were “very minor.”
Trump has never seemed enthusiastic about the possibility of a war with Iran and now even his friends from the TV are apparently advising him to steer clear. No wonder he’s trying to rein in people like John Bolton.
Still, tensions are going to remain high with the fate of the 2015 nuclear deal now hanging in the balance. The Iranians are threatening to violate the deal’s restrictions on their low enriched uranium stockpile within days unless the remaining signatories to the deal find a way to protect their commercial activities from US sanctions. But if anybody had figured out a way to do that and had the will to implement it, they would’ve done so by now. On Wednesday, the Iranians stressed that they’re not giving European leaders any extension in the nuclear deadlines they’ve already set, which means they also plan to start enriching uranium to 20 percent soon, up from the 3.67 percent to which they’re currently permitted to enrich. That’s a provocative step and will undoubtedly shake up what is an already precarious situation.
ASIA
GEORGIA
Tens of thousands of Georgians protested outside the parliament building in Tbilisi on Thursday over a speech delivered by a Russian lawmaker named Sergei Gavrilov. The speech was set up as part of the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy, an organization that seeks to create some unity among Orthodox Christian leaders around the world, but clearly the bad blood lingering from the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia outweighed any feelings of religious solidarity.
NORTH KOREA
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Pyongyang on Thursday for his first ever visit to North Korea and the first by any Chinese leader since 2005. There doesn’t seem to be much of an agenda behind Xi’s two-day visit other than improving relations with North Korea generally and demonstrating solidarity before Xi (likely) meets with Donald Trump at the G-20 later this month. That said, 38 North’s Robert Carlin has an interesting theory that Xi is in town to help settle some turmoil within the North Korean government, between hardliners who want to remilitarize Pyongyang’s foreign policy and Kim Jong-un loyalists who support his diplomatic efforts:
The debate roiling the leadership in Pyongyang is in its fourth week and appears to have heated up. That the Chinese leader Xi Jinping should go to North Korea in the middle of this tense situation is extraordinary and suggests a level of concern that the situation in Pyongyang is close to getting out of hand. At the same time, the visit could also be a calculated effort by Kim Jong Un to pull in heavy artillery to defend his position.
Both sides of the debate have used the party daily Rodong Sinmun to advance their positions. Those who are on the attack (for convenience we’ll call them the “orthodox” forces) appear to have the upper hand in that regard, having published two very lengthy, high-level “special articles” on the front page of the paper over the past several weeks (May 20 and June 12). By contrast, those forces—for want of a better term, the “loyalists”—on the other side of the debate appear, so far, forced to defend their position indirectly, without forthrightly pushing back or laying out their case.
SOUTH KOREA
The South Korean government donated $4.5 million in food aid along with 50,000 metric tons of rice to North Korea on Wednesday, part of an effort to alleviate a severe food shortage there. Drought and sanctions have left some ten million North Koreans in dire straits, and the World Food Program estimates that it will take at least $275 million in aid or 300,000 metric tons of food to put those people on sound footing.
JAPAN
The Japanese government has rejected a South Korean proposal to set up a joint fund to compensate victims of the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. The fund would be intended to address recent South Korean court rulings ordering Japanese corporations to compensate people conscripted into the occupiers’ forced labor program. Japan has long insisted that the issue of forced labor was settled under the terms of a 1965 treaty under which Tokyo paid some reparations in the form of economic aid and loans.
AFRICA
BURKINA FASO
Jihadi fighters of some description attacked a village in northern Burkina Faso overnight Tuesday, killing at least 17 people. That region gets spillover from both Niger, where ISIS-Greater Sahara is active, and Mali, where the al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaʿat Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (Group to Support Islam and Muslims) is active.
NIGERIA
ISIS-West Africa attacked a military base in the town of Gajiram, in northeastern Nigeria, on Monday, killing at least 12 soldiers and possibly as many as 25.
MALAWI
Police used tear gas to break up major protests in several Malawian cities on Thursday. They’re angry over the results of last month’s presidential election, which saw incumbent Peter Mutharika win reelection. They’re alleging irregularities in the vote and calling for the country’s top elections official to resign.
EUROPE
CYPRUS
The Turkish government has sent out a second drilling vessel to explore for offshore natural gas in what could be considered Cypriot waters. The Turks insist that those waters are Turkey’s, or at the very least belong to Cyprus’s Turkish community, but the governments of both Cyprus and Greece have asked the European Union to consider sanctions or other penalties against Ankara for its actions.
RUSSIA
The EU is going to extend until at least January its sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. European leaders’ resolve to extend the sanctions probably stiffened when Dutch investigators issued their findings on the downing of Malaysian Air flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. They found evidence that Russia had supplied the missile that shot down the civilian aircraft and accused four men of perpetrating the attack, including a former colonel with Russia’s Federal Security Service named Igor Girkin, who was the “defense minister” for the breakaway “People’s Republic of Donetsk.”
In Russia, Vladimir Putin on Thursday held his annual call-in show where citizens are invited to pose their questions to him. It seems to have been a little rougher than usual, as even Putin himself had to acknowledge popular frustration with the weak economy, corruption, and the many other perks of life in Russia these days. Putin maneuvered around the evident dissatisfaction mostly by promising that things are about to turn a corner and blaming the people working for him for letting him down all the time.
UKRAINE
The Ukrainian Constitutional Court has ruled that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was within his legal rights to dissolve parliament and schedule an early election. So he’s got that going for him.
Weapons that the Israeli government has been selling to Ukraine may be winding up in the hands of neo-Nazis:
Is Israel knowingly selling weapons to neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine? A group of Israeli human rights activists filed a petition to the Tel Aviv District Court last June to demand the government halt weapons exports to the country, where armed groups have been engaged in fighting for the past five years.
In response, the state has asked that the court slap a gag order on legal proceedings surrounding the alleged sale of weapons and military knowledge to neo-Nazis fighting in Ukraine, and has requested the court tohold its hearing behind closed doors and present its arguments in an ex parte hearing.
The petition, submitted by attorney Eitay Mack on behalf of 42 activists, demands that the Tel Aviv District Court instruct the Defense Ministry official charged with overseeing security exports to rescind, either tentatively or permanently, the licenses granted for exporting weapons to Ukraine. The activists argue that these weapons serve forces that openly support a neo-Nazi ideology and cite evidence that the far-right Azov Battalion, whose members belong to Ukraine’s armed forces, are using these weapons.
UNITED KINGDOM
The race to succeed Theresa May as Conservative Party leader and therefore new British prime minister is down to two, after another three rounds of voting left Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt as the last men standing. Michael Gove slipped ahead of Hunt in the fourth round of voting but then fell back again in the fifth and final round, raising accusations that some of Johnson’s supporters schemed to oust him by strategically voting for Hunt. The vote will now be put to the 140,000 or so members of the Conservative Party, and Johnson is widely expected to win.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump has “chewed out” his national security team over their failure to engineer regime change in Venezuela:
A frustrated Trump believed that national security adviser John Bolton and his director for Latin American policy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, “got played” by both the opposition and key Maduro officials, two senior administration officials said. As the president “chewed out the staff” in a meeting shortly after the April 30 failure, in the words of one former Trump official involved in Venezuela policy, he mused that he might need to get on the phone himself to get something done.
Summer arrives this week with Maduro still in place, and little indication that he is imminently on his way out, or that the Trump administration has a coherent strategy to remove him. The president, officials said, is losing both patience and interest in Venezuela.
COLOMBIA
Two ex-FARC rebel fighters have been killed in Colombia this week and three over the past two weeks. The killings have prompted ex-FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño to call on the Colombian government to stop what he called the “systematic murder” of former FARC members. Some 160 former members of the group have been killed since FARC and the Colombian government cut a peace deal to end their 50+ year conflict in 2016. Most of them have been killed by criminal gangs and smaller rebel groups trying to fill the vacuum left when FARC ended its rebellion. According to Reuters, many of those groups have begun recruiting Venezuelan refugees into their ranks, especially along the Venezuelan border. The refugees, who generally have nothing and have crossed the border with no real economic prospects awaiting them, are desperate enough to make a living that they’re ideal recruitment targets.
HONDURAS
The Honduran government called out the military on Thursday to suppress protests and keep the country’s main roads open. A strike by truckers, now apparently settled, caused fuel shortages that led to widespread demonstrations and rioting, while some police units have opted to stay out of the fight as part of their own labor action. There is growing hostility toward President Juan Orlando Hernández, after he bucked the law to run for a second term last year (and then maybe rigged the election), and the opposition says he’s planning to privatize the national health care and education sectors, which isn’t exactly winning him a lot of new fans.
UNITED STATES
Finally, while John Bolton gets all the press as the Trump administration’s number one Iran warmonger, The Atlantic’s Kathy Gilsinan says that a recent and less prominent Trump appointee may be doing a fair share of the mongering himself:
It’s been a little over a month since the U.S. kicked off a military buildup in the region in response to what officials called credible and imminent threats from Iran. On May 5, National Security Adviser John Bolton announced in a statement that a carrier strike group was headed to the region, and it came with a warning: “Any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” Though it was Bolton’s name on the statement, there was also someone else behind it: the new head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, General Kenneth McKenzie.
It was McKenzie who requested the carrier strike group, and secured two rounds of additional troop deployments to the Middle East afterward. As he told some 6,000 personnel on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it steamed through the Arabian Gulf: “I am the reason you’re here.” Centcom also publicized intelligence, in the form of video and photos, tying Iran to attacks against six separate tankers near the Strait of Hormuz in the past several weeks.
Since May, Bolton has served as an occasional spokesman for the administration’s Iran policy and is actively helping drive it behind the scenes. But lost in the focus on Bolton’s views was McKenzie’s role in helping shape the current policy. At a time when administration officials insist that they seek not war but diplomacy, America’s Iran policy is being steered to a large extent by the military.
According to Gilsinan, McKenzie developed a real hatred toward Iran during his service in Iraq, when he and his forces were being regularly attacked by Iranian proxy militias. He and his animus are able to drive policy, which active duty generals aren’t supposed to do, in large part because the Trump administration doesn’t really have a secretary of defense. Acting secretary Patrick Shanahan was just that, an acting secretary, and he’s now resigned before he could face Senate confirmation to assume the post for real. Now there’s a new acting secretary, Mark Esper, and it appears that the generals are starting to run the Pentagon outright.