World update: May 11-12 2019

Stories from the UAE, Iran, Hungary, and more

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MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Rebels on Sunday shelled Suqaylabiyah, a predominantly Christian town in Hama province, killing at least six people including five children. The day before, the Syrian army reportedly advanced far enough into the rebel-held enclave in northwestern Syria that its forces were battling a rebel group from the village of Midan Ghazal, in Idlib province. So far the government’s northwestern offensive, which began late last month, has captured nine villages in northern Hama province that were previously under rebel control, but it has only approached the border with Idlib.

The New York Times reports on allegations of the Assad government’s systematic program of arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of political prisoners:

As Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a ruthless war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons where thousands were tortured and killed.

Nearly 128,000 have never emerged, and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labeled the process “extermination.”

The Syrian government of course insists that these allegations are false, but rights groups have gotten ahold of what appear to be official government documents describing the torture program in some detail. While it’s highly unlikely that Assad or anyone in his employ will ever be subject to an international investigation over these allegations, they’re having a practical effect—fear of being tossed into a state prison is one reason why millions of Syrian refugees don’t feel safe returning home.

YEMEN

Though the Yemeni government is scoffing at reports that the Houthi rebels have begun withdrawing from Hudaydah and two other ports, the United Nations says the first day of the withdrawal on Saturday went “in accordance with established plans.” This is the biggest step yet toward fulling implementing the Hudaydah ceasefire agreement to which the government and rebels agreed last year. Now it’s up to the Yemeni government to withdraw its forces further from Hudaydah city, at which point the parties can move to the second phase of the withdrawal agreement, in which both sides are to withdraw from Hudaydah completely, to a distance of at least 18 kilometers. If that phase happens, it’s hoped the ensuing goodwill could lead to negotiations on winding down the rest of the Yemen conflict.

TURKEY

One of the opposition candidates who ran in Istanbul’s March 31 mayoral election, the Democratic Left Party’s Muammer Aydın, has announced he will not run in the June 23 revote. The hope is that his withdrawal will help Republican People’s Party candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu’s chances of winning. İmamoğlu won the original election, but Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Committee wiped out that result at the behest of the country’s ruling Justice and Development Party.

LEBANON

A group of Lebanese veterans is staging a sit-in at the offices of Lebanon’s central bank in response to a planned reduction in the country’s military budget, part of an overall austerity push to slash Lebanon’s debt. Some portion of that reduction is going to be achieved through cuts to military pensions and other veterans benefits.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Hey, great news: the Israelis have found a site on the Golan to build a new settlement named after Donald Trump. The new settlement, like most of Trump’s foreign policy, will be illegal under international law.

Meanwhile, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told reporters on Sunday that Iran might attack Israel in order to get back at the United States. Let’s unpack this. We’ve been through an entire week of hair-on-fire panic about some nebulous Iranian threat, mostly as part of a continuing effort to manufacture a justification for war. Since Iran has supported both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the past, any future rocket attack from Gaza could in theory be made out to be an Iranian provocation. The Israeli government, a strong proponent of a US-Iran war, has a powerful interest in making the next rocket attack the casus belli for that war. Unfortunately for the Israelis…

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

…the UAE is trying to beat them to the punch. Emirati authorities declared on Sunday that four commercial vessels have been targeted by “sabotage operations” near Fujairah. Officials from Fujairah denied earlier reports of explosions in the emirate’s harbor, but so far nobody has offered another explanation as to what this alleged sabotage actually was.

Totally coincidentally, I’m sure, the latest iteration of the “Iran is about to do various misdeeds” story involved potential attacks against commercial vessels. Consider how this has worked out. Last weekend John Bolton announces that the US is sending a carrier group and bombers to the Middle East in direct response to undefined Iranian threats. The carrier deployment, at least, was probably already in the works. When asked what the threats are, nobody in the US government can quite say. The Iranians are moving missiles around. They have proxies and that’s bad, I guess. The Israelis told us to be worried, and obviously the Israelis would have no reason to overhype or outright fabricate a potential Iranian threat. There’s no evidence Iran has been planning to do anything, but you can imagine that they might, can’t you? And it’s terrifying, isn’t it?

Also Iran has ships, so they might attack the US Navy or, maybe, commercial ships. BINGO! They might attack commercial ships! And look at what’s just happened in the UAE! Commercial ships allegedly “sabotaged” in waters very close to Iran! Emirati officials haven’t said Iran was responsible for…whatever this was. But what if they do? Obviously the Emiratis would have no reason to overhype or outright fabricate an Iranian misdeed!

Briefly in the middle there the Trump administration asked us to consider the possibility that Iran made some threats just to cause the US to overreact to those threats, or in other words to consider the possibility that the lack of an actual, concrete threat was itself the threat. But I imagine that sounded stupid even within the administration itself.

To sum up, on multiple fronts the administration spent the entire week inviting any Middle Eastern country that would like to see the US attack Iran to create its own Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to make that happen. Maybe something really did happen to these commercial ships and maybe Iran was even behind it. But given the events of the past week, there’s plenty of reason to question whatever story emerges here.

SAUDI ARABIA

Saudi authorities reportedly took down a “terrorist cell” in the kingdom’s eastern Qatif region on Saturday, killing eight people in the process. Qatif is predominantly Shiʿa, but the Saudis haven’t said whether they were Shiʿite activists/militants or some other variety of troublemaker.

IRAN

Bolton et al’s efforts to manufacture a war with Iran are being aided by a media that apparently didn’t learn anything from the Iraq War, as Ben Armbruster writes:

Media-savvy U.S. government officials, political operatives, and lawmakers and their staffs from all political parties and ideological persuasions have no doubt, throughout the history of our great country, duped a fair-minded but unwitting reporter into writing a juicy story in order to get a piece of information into the public bloodstream without their fingerprints on it.

This is, in large part, how the Bush administration sold the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the American people: Feeding knowingly bogus or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMD programs to reporters, who then published it as fact, without much in the way of critical scrutiny.

Despite the lessons we’ve learned from that debacle, it’s happening again with regard to the Trump administration’s march toward war with Iran.

Meanwhile, Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests ways that European leaders can potentially satisfy Iranian concerns and preserve the 2015 nuclear deal:

One realistic and concrete goal that Europe and Iran can prioritise is to operationalise their respective special purpose vehicle mechanisms for trade by the middle of summer. To help press this forward, Iran and the E3 should obtain greater expert advice from the private sector, including on how to ensure the Iranian mirror entity to INSTEX meets the minimal necessary anti-money laundering norms. If more EU countries become shareholders in INSTEX, and if a handful of transactions in the humanitarian sector take place through this instrument, then together these would constitute a clear sign of progress.

Talk of EU sanctions at this stage is premature and is more likely to provoke Tehran further. Instead, E3 leaders should consider efforts that could provide Iran with some economic relief, including allowing Iran to repatriate its own money sitting in European bank accounts, which have reportedly been blocked due to US pressure. The E3 should also double down on efforts to seek clarification from the US Treasury over safeguarding humanitarian banking channels with Iran.  

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

Seven Afghan children were killed on Saturday and two more injured when one of them stepped on a landmine in Ghazni province. Authorities are blaming the Taliban for the mine. Elsewhere, gunmen—presumably Taliban—assassinated the deputy intelligence director for Baghlan province on Sunday. And a former journalist and adviser to the Afghan parliament was murdered in Kabul. It’s less clear who was behind this attack since both the Taliban and ISIS are active in the city.

PAKISTAN

Separatists from the Baluchistan Liberation Army attacked a hotel in the port city of Gwadar on Saturday, killing four hotel employees and one Pakistani soldier. All the attackers (three or four, depending on the account) were eventually killed by Pakistani security forces.

The Pakistani government has reportedly agreed to a $6 billion bailout deal from the International Monetary Fund. The deal, which will last three years, is the 13th bailout Pakistan has taken from the IMF in the past 30 years, give or take. It will of course bring with it the IMF’s special blend of country-crushing austerity, but with slow economic growth, rising inflation, and low levels of foreign investment, the Pakistanis didn’t have a lot of options.

KASHMIR

ISIS, via its Amaq news agency, announced the formation of a new India branch—“Hind province”— on Friday. This came after Indian security forces in Kashmir reportedly killed a militant with links to the group. The declaration is probably more aspirational than factual, but even that suggests that the already tense situation in Kashmir is about to take on a new destabilizing element.

CHINA

Hong King’s legislature debated a controversial extradition bill on Saturday. It, uh, went really well:

The bill would weaken restrictions on extradition, which would invariably mean more people accused of crimes against the state being sent to the mainland to face punishment. Understandably, pro-Beijing and pro-autonomy legislators don’t see eye to eye on that idea.

Meanwhile, US-China trade talks have reportedly broken down over Chinese unwillingness to cut subsidies to its own high tech manufacturing companies. Trump administration negotiators have accused China of “reneging” on commitments its negotiators made to reducing those subsidies, but Beijing seems to be chafing at the idea of letting the US dictate its internal policies, particularly with respect to a policy that’s central to Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” plan to boost domestic high tech production.

NORTH KOREA

Amid a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO on Friday, Donald Trump said that he doesn’t consider North Korea’s recent weapons tests to be “a breach of trust.” He’s unconcerned because the tests only involved short-range missiles, which obviously highlights Trump’s deep concern for the safety of South Korea (not to mention all the US soldiers stationed there). To be fair, the South Korean government has also downplayed the significance of the tests in an effort to maintain some diplomatic momentum.

OCEANIA

AUSTRALIA

The latest Newspoll has Labor still leading Australia’s governing coalition head-to-head ahead of Saturday’s election, 51 percent to 49 percent. Labor party leader Bill Shorten, who continues to be a drag on the party’s polling, slightly improved his personal polling numbers this week—38 percent of Australians think he would make a better prime minister than incumbent Scott Morrison, up from 35 percent last week though still seven points behind Morrison in that head-to-head matchup.

Meanwhile, a group of indigenous Torres Strait Islanders is taking a complaint against the Australian government to the United Nations Human Rights Committee over climate change. They alleged that the government has failed to take steps to protect their islands from sea level rise and erosion. They’re demanding measures to protect their land as well as a government commitment to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the first human rights action that a group of Pacific island residents have taken against a major country over climate issues, but chances are it won’t be the last.

AFRICA

SUDAN

France 24 reports on the ongoing confrontation between protesters and Sudan’s ruling military junta:

BURKINA FASO

An estimated 20-30 gunmen attacked a Catholic church in the village of Dablo in north-central Burkina Faso on Sunday morning, killing at least six people including the priest and burning down the church along with several other buildings. Islamist extremism is on the rise in Burkina Faso and it would seem reasonable to conclude that the attackers were of that persuasion.

NIGERIA

ISIS-West Africa Province has claimed credit for an attack on the town of Gajiganna, in northeastern Nigeria, that killed at least 11 Nigerian soldiers. Other sources have confirmed that an attack did take place Friday evening, ending only after government reinforcements and air support intervened.

SOUTH AFRICA

In the wake of an election in which his African National Congress won with a mere 57 percent of the vote, its worst showing since the end of apartheid, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa promised on Sunday to purge the party of “bad and deviant tendencies.” Which is a strange thing to say, but it’s clear from his remarks that Ramaphosa is talking about tackling corruption within ANC ranks. Ramaphosa could still face an internal challenge to his leadership. On top of the relatively weak showing, there’s a faction of the ANC that remains hostile to him for his role in ousting former President Jacob Zuma in 2017, a faction that not coincidentally probably includes most of the people who would be major targets in any intra-party anti-corruption effort.

EUROPE

LITHUANIA

Preliminary results from Sunday’s Lithuanian presidential election suggest that the contest is headed for a May 26 runoff between Gitanas Nausėda, who took in a bit over 31 percent of the vote, and Ingrida Šimonytė, in second place with a bit over 27 percent. Incumbent Dalia Grybauskaitė was term limited. Having failed to qualify for the second round, Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis announced that he will resign as PM in July.

ALBANIA

Opposition leaders are calling for more protests against the Albanian government after a violent clashes between demonstrators and police in Tirana on Saturday. Some 50 people were arrested as protesters hurled weapons, including Molotov cocktails, at police who responded with water cannons and tear gas:

HUNGARY

Donald Trump is hosting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who looks like Donald Trump would if his entire body were made up of cartilage, at the White House on Monday.

You can’t unsee it now, can you?

The two men are expected to bond over the fact that their politics are, you know, virtually identical, and the Trump administration is touting the visit as a chance to do some Deals with Hungary to keep it from sliding completely over to Russia and/or China. But even among Congressional Republicans and within the administration, there is concern over Trump potentially legitimizing Orbán:

While Orbán’s restrictive immigration policies and skepticism about international institutions mirror Trump’s own rhetoric, the Hungarian leader has faced criticism from the European Union, the State Department and civil society groups, which argue that Orbán’s leadership has eroded democratic values. Orbán has been denounced for limiting press freedom, undermining judicial independence, targeting independent nongovernmental groups, encouraging racist and anti-Semitic conspiracies and cracking down on the Central European University, an institution founded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.

“We urge you to raise these issues in your meeting with the prime minister,” a bipartisan group of senators, including Senate Foreign Relations Chairman James Risch (R-Idaho), wrote in a letter sent last week to Trump. 

And concerns about Chinese and Russian influence in Hungary — a NATO ally and EU member — are also expected to hang over the get-together.

As a result, White House advisers are cautioning Trump against a full embrace of Orbán, despite the president’s own affinity for the leader.

FRANCE

France’s “Yellow Vest” protesters turned out on Saturday for the 26th straight week, but the movement appears on the verge of fizzling out as protests dwindled yet again. The demonstrations that once included hundreds of thousands of people nationwide are now down below 30,000. There were scattered reports of violence in a couple of cities, but the outbursts have mostly diminished along with the crowd sizes.

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Nobody could have seen this coming:

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido said on Saturday he has asked his envoy to the United States to meet with Pentagon officials to “cooperate” on a solution to the South American country’s political crisis.

Guaidó has now gone from “probably” accepting a hypothetical US offer to intervene militarily to sending an envoy to encourage the US to make the offer. Next comes the open request for military intervention and, well, we’ll see what happens then.

CUBA

The Cuban government has begun rationing food and other basic goods in an effort to respond to shortages. US sanctions against Cuba are part of the cause, but US sanctions against Venezuela, which have all but shut off its oil shipments to Cuba, as well as Venezuela’s general economic collapse may be even bigger factors.

UNITED STATES

Finally, I’d like to mention this Foreign Policy piece by Brahma Chellaney, a “professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin,” on how to reinvigorate the Forever War on Terror. Chellaney argues that it’s time to stop responding to extremism and start attacking it at the source. Much of this involves treating Saudi Arabia, whose support for extremist Islam is unparalleled, as part of the problem rather than an ally in finding a solution, and that’s all well and good, as is his suggestion to expend more effort targeting terrorist financiers. But Chellaney then slips into a perfect encapsulation of the frequently encountered argument that we could bring Muslims back from the brink of radicalization by just showing them that Islam is actually bad:

The focus of the global war on terrorism must shift to crushing this ideological movement. One way to do this is to deploy a sustained information campaign to discredit the ideology of radical Islam. For example, it would not be difficult to mock and run down the jihadi notion that a martyr in heaven will enjoy the company of 72 virgins. And the concept of jihad itself can be attacked as antithetical to the fundamental principles of contemporary civilization, while the Islamist drive to impose sharia, or Islamic law, should be exposed as an assault on science and modernity, as fostering gender inequality and discrimination against women and non-Muslims, and as legitimizing child rape through the marriage of young girls to adult men.

Yeah, that’s not going to work. A bunch of non-Muslims trying to explain Islam to actual Muslims, along with a bit about how some fundamental aspects of Islam actually aren’t compatible with “contemporary civilization,” isn’t going to get anybody on board. This would be true of pretty much any faith group or community in the world, and it’s even true if the person doing the Islamsplaining is a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, whatever that is. And the fact that supposed experts don’t get this is part of the problem.