World update: October 22 2019

Stories from Lebanon, India, Bolivia, and more

In lieu of something more depressing, please enjoy this photo of a double rainbow I took today

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

October 21, 1096: The “People’s Crusade” ends

October 21, 1600: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s army defeats the “Western Army” of Ishida Mitsunari at the Battle of Sekigahara. The victory left Ieyasu in virtually uncontested control of Japan and is generally marked as the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, even though Ieyasu wasn’t formally appointed as shōgun until 1603.

October 21, 1805: A British Royal Navy fleet under Horatio Nelson (who was killed in action) decisively defeats a combined Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, near Cape Trafalgar in southern Spain. Britain had established naval supremacy over France years earlier through engagements like the 1798 Battle of the Nile. Trafalgar confirmed that naval supremacy and was the last major naval engagement of those wars. Napoleon’s plans to build a great navy that would outnumber Britain’s were derailed by his eventual defeat on land years later.

October 22, 1633: Ming China’s navy defeats a Dutch East India Company fleet at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay, in the Taiwan Strait. The battle reestablished Chinese authority in the strait (though they subsequently negotiated very generous trade concessions with the Dutch) and was the largest naval engagement between Chinese and European fleets until the Opium Wars.

October 22, 1884: The International Meridian Conference, which was a real thing, designates the line of longitude running through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. Nowadays we use the IERS Reference Meridian, which still runs through Greenwich but is around 100 meters east of the Greenwich Meridian.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Tuesday to discuss the situation in northeastern Syria. They came away with a deal to jointly patrol the border area and ensure that Syrian Democratic Forces fighters withdraw south, out of Turkey’s way. In return the Turks agreed on a Russian demand to acknowledge Syria’s “territorial integrity.” The agreement presumably forestalls any possibility of a conflict between Turkish forces and the Syrian army, which is deploying in northeastern Syria after concluding an agreement to do so with the SDF. It also mandates the removal of the SDF from a much larger area than did the agreement Turkey reached with the US last week. That deal established a five day ceasefire to give the SDF time to withdraw, which expired on Tuesday. The SDF announced on Tuesday that it had withdrawn its forces as required under that deal, and later in the day the Turkish government appeared to accept that claim.

YEMEN

The Houthis say that a Saudi airstrike killed five civilians in Saada province on Monday. The Saudis had no comment. The Saudis have reduced the frequency of their Yemeni strikes of late in response to the Houthis’ decision to stop attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia, but clearly they’ve maintained the same keen targeting ability and commitment to avoid civilian casualties.

TURKEY

With the situation in northeastern Syria calming down and Lindsey Graham’s spine having once again deserted him, the US Senate plans to suspend its effort to levy new sanctions against Turkey.

IRAQ

At least six Iraqi police officers were killed on Tuesday when their patrol was attacked by Islamic State fighters in Saladin province. The commander of the Iraqi police force’s Fourth Division was among those killed.

A government commission has concluded that Iraqi security forces employed excessive force and killed 149 protesters during the round of demonstrations in Baghdad and across southern Iraq earlier this month. Over 70 percent of the deaths were due to gunshots to the head or chest, presumably courtesy of the still-unnamed snipers who were working with the security forces but whose involvement has been disavowed by the Iraqi government. With demonstrations possibly set to resume on Friday, it will be interesting to see how the Iraqi government approaches them and whether it takes steps to minimize civilian deaths.

LEBANON

Lebanon’s protests show few signs of abating despite the grand unveiling of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri’s wondrous economic reform package. The centerpiece of that package is an increase in taxes on Lebanese banks, which have been closed for days due to the public unrest and don’t seem to really have a handle on what that tax increase entails. The tax increase is intended to substantially reduce Lebanon’s deficit and hopefully unlock new foreign investment to bolster the economy. The Lebanese government has reportedly set Wednesday as the day things return to “normal,” which would mean business as usual at government offices, schools, private businesses, and elsewhere, so unless the protesters have a sudden change of heart things could get interesting as soon as tomorrow.

The most shocking and potentially impactful aspect of the demonstrations to date has been that they’ve been largely non-sectarian. Everybody seems fed up and they seem fed up at their own community leaders as well as everybody else’s. Alongside demands for a purge of Lebanon’s ruling elite, some protesters are also calling for an end to the sectarian quota system that defines the country’s political system and, as far as its opponents are concerned, has contributed to corruption by creating patronage networks within each of those communities—Maronite, Druze, Sunni, Shiʿa, and so forth. The sectarian system has been in place since the post-World War I French Mandate and was most recently redesigned in the 1988 Taif Accord, which helped settle the Lebanese Civil War. Taif envisioned phasing out that system over time but has instead just entrenched it. Getting rid of it could break those patronage networks and curtail corruption. It could also plunge Lebanon back into civil war.

I think it’s also worth noting that there are a couple of regional components to these protests. They share many things in common with recent protests in Algeria, Iraq, and Sudan, in the sense that protesters in all of those countries are fed up with elite failures and corruption and are demanding wholesale changes in their political structures. These protests, and the ones in Iraq, are also hitting two countries in which Iran has a fair amount of political influence. I’m not suggesting Iran is part of the cause, but the outcomes in both countries could impact Tehran’s regional plans.

SAUDI ARABIA

The Trump administration wants NATO to take a larger role in protecting Saudi Arabia from the various evils of the world, chiefly Iran. It’s unclear why the hapless Saudis need so many other countries to protect them despite having the third largest military budget in the world. It’s also unclear why NATO would want to follow Washington’s lead in further embroiling itself in the Persian Gulf. But the request is in keeping with Donald Trump’s insistence that the rest of the world should assume responsibility for fulfilling US foreign policy aims.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

Taliban fighters killed at least 15 Afghan police officers in an attack on a checkpoint in Kunduz province late Monday night.

INDIA

Journalist Soumya Shankar looks at voter suppression in the “world’s largest democracy”:

India is often celebrated for its status as the world’s largest democracy, but relatively little attention is given to the fact that many citizens are denied the chance to vote. The founders of Missing Voters, a smartphone app to track disenfranchised voters in India, estimated that nearly 120 million citizens were missing from voter lists in last May’s national election. More than half of those disenfranchised citizens were Muslims like Azam or lower-caste Dalits, minorities who would, put together, normally constitute less than a third of the country’s population. Women are also disproportionately affected: The political scientists Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala calculated in a book released this year that, on average, approximately 40,000 female voters are missing from the electoral rolls in every constituency in India, a number often higher than the winning margin in many lower house electoral contests.

India is often celebrated for its status as the world’s largest democracy, but relatively little attention is given to the fact that many citizens are denied the chance to vote.

While voting is a fundamental right promised to every citizen, not having the ability to vote is a predicament that especially impacts the lives and political prospects of minority communities. This is especially alarming at a time when attacks on those groups are increasing in frequency across the country.

BANGLADESH

The Bangladeshi government is close to implementing its plan to relocate as many as 100,000 Rohingya refugees to a floating island in the Bay of Bengal where they will be at considerable peril due to flooding. In an effort to entice refugees to relocate voluntarily, Bangladeshi officials have been building swanky new infrastructure on the island that far exceeds the squalid conditions in the mainland camps the Rohingya currently occupy. Of course, that infrastructure could all be washed away at some point, but maybe that will just keep things exciting.

CHINA

The Financial Times (which is paywalled) is apparently reporting that the Chinese government will replace Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam but is waiting—this may take a while—for the unrest in that region to subside a bit before it moves forward. Beijing probably doesn’t want to be seen as caving to protester demands in removing Lam. Whoever does replace her will serve out the rest of her term, which runs through 2022.

AFRICA

LIBYA

Rocket fire struck a home in Tripoli on Tuesday, killing two children. The Libyan government blamed the “Libyan National Army” of Khalifa Haftar, which has been conducting an offensive against the Libyan capital since April. The LNA claims it attacked military sites on Tuesday. Amnesty International issued a report earlier in the day criticizing the “utter disregard” that both combatants have shown for the laws of war and for protecting civilians.

BURKINA FASO

At least 19 people have been killed in a series of attacks in northern Burkina Faso since Friday evening. It’s unclear who was responsible, but al-Qaeda and IS affiliates are active in that region.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

New research finds that African conflicts that are often categorized as “civil wars”—including the Congo Wars of the late 1990s-early 2000s—are often anything but:

In a recent article in the Journal of Modern African Studies, some colleagues and I found that just 30 percent of African conflicts since 1960 were “internal” and the remainder a mixture of “internationalized internal” and “interstate”: fully 70 percent were actually internationalized in one way or another.

The new data doesn’t invalidate dominant stories about how African conflicts originate or escalate. But it adds a new layer of explanations. It reveals a story of pan-African cooperation to support anti-colonial insurgencies in southern Africa; of mutual destabilization in the Horn of Africa, as Ethiopia sought to cement its position as regional hegemon and undermined governments in Somalia and Sudan and they reciprocated; of Libya’s invasion of Chad and sponsorship of rebels across the Sahel and West Africa to try to establish Muammar al-Qaddafi as the big man of Africa; of rivalries between Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso fought out in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and of how the path towards Africa’s “great war” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was paved by interstate armed rivalries and proxy wars in the African Great Lakes, the Nile Valley, and Angola.

During the last 15 years, as the African Union and United Nations, along with regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States, have constructed a new peace and security order for Africa, these patterns of armed interstate rivalry have not gone away. Rather, power hierarchies have been legitimized, and peace operations have become part of dominant states’ repertoire of power projection.

MOZAMBIQUE

The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa says that Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi is heading for a landslide victory in the country’s October 15 election with over 70 percent of the vote. Which would be swell for him if the same institute weren’t also reporting serious electoral irregularities, like districts reporting more votes than they have voters. The opposition RENAMO party has already rejected the results of the election, which now threatens to exacerbate tensions between that party and the ruling FRELIMO party.

EUROPE

UNITED KINGDOM

Boris Johnson suffered still another setback on Tuesday when parliament refused to fast-track a vote on the legislation to implement his Brexit deal. Johnson wanted the whole process wrapped up within three days in an effort to meet the October 31 Brexit deadline. He’ll now have no choice but to either accept an extension of that deadline or pursue a no-deal Brexit, and to that end Johnson later announced that he would wait for the European Union to decide on an extension. It appears the EU will try to push the deadline back to January 31, but it may meet some objections from members like France, which says it’s amenable to a few extra days to allow parliament time to do its thing but would resist any extension beyond that. On the plus side for Johnson, the legislation did pass its second reading comfortably, indicating that it is likely to pass whenever it does have its final vote.

AMERICAS

CHILE

Protests are continuing in Chile despite efforts by the government and its security forces to tamp things down. And as often happens in these situations, those efforts to tamp things down are actually fueling greater public outrage:

By Tuesday morning, the official death toll stood at 15. The Chilean government claimed all the casualties were looters, but there were widespread allegations of brutality by the military, following the declaration by president, Sebastián Piñera, that his country was “at war”.

U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet – a former president of Chile – has called for independent investigations into the deaths in weekend protests, saying there had been “disturbing allegations” of excessive use of force by security forces.

“I was coming home and the military patrol stopped me,” said one bruised and bloodied man as he stumbled home in the early hours of Tuesday morning. “They put me in the truck and – ‘Bang! bang! bang!’ – they smashed me in the head with the butt of a gun. I begged them to stop but they kept on kicking me – and they took my friend away.”

BRAZIL

The turmoil within Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL) appears to be worsening. Just a day after the president’s son, Eduardo, ousted party member Delegado Waldir and replaced him as the PSL’s floor leader in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, party leaders moved to suspend Eduardo and 18 of his allies, while removing him and his brother, Flavio, as the party’s presidents in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The PSL’s Bolsonaro faction went to court and obtained an injunction preventing party leaders from following through on these plans, but clearly this fight isn’t over yet.

BOLIVIA

Neither, for that matter, is the fight over the outcome of Sunday’s Bolivian presidential election. Thousands of people gathered in La Paz on Tuesday to protest against what they believe is an effort to rig the vote count to give President Evo Morales a first round victory and avoid a runoff. The incumbent’s margin of victory with 84 percent of the vote counted Sunday evening was short of the ten points needed for a first round win, but Bolivian officials abruptly halted the count and when they resumed on Monday, Morales’s lead jumped to nine points with 95 percent of the vote counted. Which is not impossible, just curious under the circumstances. The Bolivian government has said it will abide by whatever the result is and has invited the Organization of American States—certainly no fan of the leftist Morales—to audit the vote count.

CANADA

Finally, while Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party held on to the Canadian government but lost its parliamentary majority on Monday, the leftist National Democratic Party underperformed its polling numbers. At Jacobin, Canadian writer Gerard Di Trolio argues that the outcome nonetheless vindicated NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and his leftist agenda:

The NDP’s decline should not be laid at the feet of Singh, though. When the election started, the polls were bleak. There was talk that the NDP would end up with less than twelve seats, which would have seen it lose official party status in the House of Commons. Singh ran a good campaign, and his performance in the debates helped to save the NDP from a wipeout. He will almost certainly stay on as leader, and deservedly so, given the circumstances and his strong campaign presence. And, frankly, there is no one who could realistically replace him.

The NDP ran on its most left-wing platform in years. Its climate plan and its calls to tax the rich were well received. There were limitations, of course, like the plan to make dental coverage means tested and limited to households making less than $70,000 a year, despite the fact that targeted social programs are easier to undo than universal ones.