World update: October 5-6 2019

Stories from North Korea, Tunisia, Portugal, and more

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

October 4, 1957: The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1, putting the first artificial satellite in orbit and terrifying a whole bunch of people in Washington DC.

See? Terrifying (Wikimedia Commons)

October 4, 1993: The two-day Battle of Mogadishu, later memorialized in the book/film Black Hawk Down, ends. The battle began with a calamitous US/UN mission to capture a couple of aides to self-declared Somali President Mohamed Farrah Aidid, which went south very quickly when Somali fighters shot down a US Black Hawk helicopter (they subsequently shot down a second). In the end 21 international soldiers were killed (19 of them US) and one captured, while at least 200 Somalis (civilian and militant combined) and likely hundreds more than that were also killed.

October 5, 610: Heraclius (d. 641) becomes Byzantine Emperor after executing his predecessor, Phocas. Heraclius took power in the midst of the 602-628 Byzantine-Persian War at a time when the Sasanian Persians were swarming across the Byzantine Empire, but a disastrous siege of Constantinople and Heraclius’s invasion of Persia turned the war around and it ended with a Byzantine victory. The subsequent Arab invasion of the Byzantine Empire didn’t go quite as well from the imperial perspective. Aside from ruling the empire through arguably its most auspicious period (not in a good way, mind you), Heraclius is the rare foreign ruler who gets both an indirect mention in the Quran and a prominent place in an early Islamic legend.

October 5, 1789: A group of women angry over high food prices and scarcity march from Paris to the royal residence at Versailles, attracting a crowd of supporters along the way. The Women’s March on Versailles, whose goals morphed from a demand for food to a broader call for the court to return to Paris. Louis XVI eventually conceded to do so, in the process giving the budding revolutionary movement considerable momentum.

October 6, 1973: The Yom Kippur War begins

October 6, 1981: Members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during “Military Day” parade celebrating the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. EIJ targeted Sadat over his diplomatic outreach to Israel after the war, culminating with the 1978 Camp David Accords.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said over the weekend that a Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria could begin “at any time.” Ankara has been frustrated with the lack of progress in talks with the US about setting up a safe zone in northeastern Syria to “secure” Turkey’s border and/or allow the Turks to ethnically cleanse the area of Kurds. In the absence of a deal they’ve been threatening to act unilaterally and there is some evidence of military buildup on the border to suggest that they’re serious. Erdoğan and Donald Trump reportedly discussed the safe zone in a phone call on Sunday and agreed to meet in Washington next month, so it seems unlikely that the Turks will take any irreversible steps before then.

YEMEN

Analyst James Spencer offers an important look at a very under-covered part of the Yemeni war, the tribal element:

In the Northern Highlands, Ansar Allah, led by the sharifal Huthi family, are Zaydi revivalists. The sharifal family seeks to redress discrimination against the former sharifal aristocracy under the post-1960s Republic, while the wider movement seeks to re-empower the North’s predominantly agrarian Zaydi community. Under the Republic the latter lost influence vis-à-vis the more mercantile Shafa’i Sunnis of the South and felt besieged after the Sa’udis started, in the 1990s, sponsoring propagation of Salafism.

Overlaid on this religious tension is a less overt push for rebalancing from Bakil, one of the two main Zaydi tribal confederations. Bakil, having been more Royalist during the 1960s civil war, feels that it has lost ground to the more Republican Hashid confederation.

The Arab Spring brought to the surface splits within the then ruling (predominantly Hashid) regime. President Ali Abdallah Salih tried to transition to a jumlukiyya (hereditary republic), breaking the pact which had brought him to power. The General People’s Congress (GPC) party — never an ideological formation — split along factional lines. Despite having fought six wars against Ali Abdallah Salih, the Huthis aligned with his faction of the GPC against Hadi, Ali Muhsin and the 10 brothers of the al-Ahmar family (the paramount shaikhs of Hashid), who are also leaders of al-Islah, the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. The al-Ahmars themselves had tried to capture Sana’a in 2011, but were fought to a standstill; they subsequently decamped, and fight alongside Hadi.

While the GPC-Sana’a faction is not wholly aligned with the Huthis, especially since the killing of Ali Abdallah Salih, they have lost kin to the Sa’udi airstrikes and so want revenge. Also, they see the Huthis as being the least bad option / best chance of rehabilitating themselves. The Sa’udi-led Coalition has sought to peel this faction away from the Huthis — so far to no avail.

IRAQ

The death toll in Baghdad and southern Iraq is now at least 104, after a weekend of more sporadic but still violent protests against government incompetence and corruption. Eight of the dead are members of Iraq’s security forces. Over 6100 people have been wounded, around 1000 of them security personnel. The Iraqi government’s decision to respond to demonstrations by mass murdering the demonstrators seems to be paying off in the sense that the weekend saw fewer and smaller protests than in previous days. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told his cabinet that his “only concern is for the casualties,” which I guess is true in the sense that his orders to his security services are most likely responsible for causing those casualties. Apart from a bunch of bullets, he and the rest of the Iraqi government continue to offer the protesters nothing other than vague rhetoric about addressing their concerns.

IRAN

Sina Toossi examines the conditions that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has laid out for diplomatic engagement with the United States:

In his September 17 speech, Khamenei for the first time signalled his openness to respectful diplomacy grounded in reasonable compromise, not Iranian surrender. He contended that the current US aim with negotiations was not “just solutions,” but “insulting demands.” He said the US could not pursue such negotiations with the Islamic Republic, which he dubbed the “republic of honor.”

Khamenei argued that if Iran negotiates with Trump while under “maximum pressure,” it would forever validate the pressure track as the path to getting major concessions from Iran. He proclaimed: “If the enemy is able to prove that maximum pressure is effective on Iran, Iran and the Iranian people will never know comfort. Because behind all of America’s arrogant policies will be this policy [of maximum pressure].” He added: “From then on, whatever they demand of the Islamic Republic in a bullying way… if we say no they will again start maximum pressure.”

Khamenei then outlined his conditions for fresh US-Iran negotiations, saying it required a US return to the JCPOA. He stated: “When America takes back its words and repents and returns to the nuclear agreement it violated, then with the group of countries that are part of the agreement and talk with Iran, America can also participate. But without this, no negotiations at any level will occur between US and Iranian officials whether in New York or anywhere else.”

As Toossi notes, in the context of Iranian politics Khamenei’s position is actually pretty moderate and is leaving room open for Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Javad Zarif to explore the possibility of diplomacy despite an Iranian political environment that is very hostile toward the idea of any engagement with the US.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

The International Crisis Group argues that it would behoove the Trump administration to return to the agreement that its envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, was negotiating with the Taliban:

It has been only a year since the U.S. has put pursuit of a deal at the centre of its Afghanistan policy. In that time, U.S. Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad appears to have come close to securing an agreement that won sufficient Taliban concessions to justify the concessions made in return — particularly against the backdrop of a U.S. political tide turning toward a troop pullout. The text is not public, but U.S. officials say the deal sets out a timeline and conditions for the drawdown of U.S. forces in return for Taliban pledges to cut ties with al-Qaeda, stop transnational terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan and, importantly, enter intra-Afghan talks. Because the Taliban has long rejected negotiating with the Afghan government, which it portrays as illegitimate, its pledge to do so surmounts a major obstacle to a peace process. The Taliban would not have made such a commitment had Washington not — after years of resistance — conceded to the group’s insistence on up-front direct talks with the U.S., resulting in agreement to withdraw forces.

It’s still not clear what in Khalilzad’s framework would have obligated the Taliban to follow through on any of those pledges, but the ICG is not wrong to suggest that the US needs to get back to talks and should start with what Khalilzad and the Taliban had already put on the table. To just go back to fighting the Afghan war indefinitely, as the US has been doing for the past 18 years, cannot be a real option.

KASHMIR

At least ten people were injured on Saturday in a grenade attack near a government office in the city of Anantnag. It’s unclear who was responsible but, as Al Jazeera reports, it’s not like there’s a shortage of unhappy people in Kashmir right now:

INDIA

At Current Affairs, journalist Jaya Sundaresh explains why the man who’s caused so much Kashmiri unhappiness, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become so popular with Indians at home and abroad:

For one, there are some real achievements under Modi’s belt. The Gates Foundation recently made the (albeit, controversial) decision to honor the prime minister for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or the Clean India Mission, which has dramatically increased the access Indians have to basic sanitation, long a source of shame for India. One hundred and ten million toilets have been constructed over a five year period, which will do much to reduce open defecation. (There are criticisms of Swacch Bharat—outside observers argue that open defecation hasn’t been reduced quite as much as the government claims.) 

For another, Modi is an expert at telling stories about himself. He has masterful control of his own narrative, and even unqualified failures like demonetization have been seen as positive by the Indian polity. Modi is very talented at spinning disasters which would sink any normal politician as successes. This is because Modi has convinced a large segment of the Indian public that he is on their side, no matter what. 

SRI LANKA

When Sri Lankans go to the polls next month to elect a new president, they’ll really be electing a new president. Incumbent Maithripala Sirisena has decided not to stand for reelection on November 16, skipping this weekend’s filing deadline. Sirisena’s public standing has been battered by his badly mishandled attempt to can Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe last year and by the failure of Sri Lankan security services to prevent the Easter Day terrorist bombings earlier this year despite having apparently received warnings from foreign intelligence services. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, brother of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, is regarded as the favorite but he’s currently being hounded by questions over his citizenship.

CHINA

The Hong Kong government’s decision to ban face masks has had a significant impact on the region’s ongoing protest movement, in that many more protesters now appear to be wearing face masks. Tens of thousands of masked demonstrators marched through central Hong Kong and the Kowloon district on Sunday, in a protest that was reportedly peaceful until police opted to deploy tear gas and non-lethal ammunition. As has become routine, the violence picked up as the day wore on and protesters began using molotov cocktails and other homemade weapons against the police.

NORTH KOREA

Working level talks between US and North Korean representatives in Sweden on Saturday went so well that it doesn’t look like there will be any more talks between the US and North Korea anytime soon. North Korean negotiators said that the talks “broke off” because US negotiators would not “give up their old viewpoint and attitude.” That’s in reference to US inflexibility about the order in which North Korean concessions and the lifting of US sanctions are supposed to happen. Pyongyang has been trying to get the US to agree to lift sanctions first, or at least to partially lift sanctions now in return for concessions that the North Koreans have already made, and then to agree to a stepped process whereby some sanctions are lifted for each round of North Korean moves. The North Koreans even referred to the talks as “sickening,” which is not an adjective you often see in relation to high-level international negotiations. It’s certainly evocative.

The North Korean response led hilariously to the US insisting that the talks had gone just fine and that the North Koreans were blowing things out of proportion. What makes that hilarious is that in any two party negotiation, if one of the two parties says that talks have broken down, talks have broken down. It’s objectively true!

I grant you that what the US is doing might work on a sitcom, but that’s about it.

OCEANIA

AUSTRALIA

The Australian government is refusing to comment on what appears to be a prisoner exchange with Iran. Two Australian bloggers who were arrested for flying a drone near an Iranian military installation earlier this year were released from custody and returned to Australia on Saturday. Meanwhile, an Iranian scientist who’s been in Australian custody for over a year has apparently also been released and is back in Iran. The Australians may be trying to secure the release of a third person, held by the Iranians since late last year, which would in part explain their reticence to talk about the situation.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has apparently decided to go Full Trump:

As Scott Morrison took to his feet in the imperial surrounds of Sydney town hall on Thursday night for a major foreign policy speech, he quietly observed he found himself governing at “an unusually delicate moment in time”.

His government had spent a frenzied week caught in the chaos and calumny of the Trump administration, with Morrison himself facing questions about exactly what he had offered his ally in the White House.

At the same time, he had been attempting to harden Australia’s position against a bellicose China without harming too greatly his country’s relationship with its most crucial trading partner.

While conceding his “delicate moment” in history, rather than tread cautiously, Morrison used the speech to take a barely veiled swipe at the United Nations and the international institutions that Australia has previously championed.

Morrison revealed – in this week of tumult both at home and abroad – that his natural political instincts on the global stage are far more closely aligned to Trump and his populist fellow travellers than they are to decades of Australian foreign policy commitment to multilateralism.

AFRICA

SUDAN

The Saudi government says it’s lobbying the Trump administration to remove Sudan from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, following a visit by Sudanese Transitional Council head Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to Riyadh. With a new government in place and the country’s finances a shambles, this wouldn’t be a terrible time for the United States to change course on this policy, though the administration says it wants to see how the new government performs on issues related to human rights and civil liberties before taking action.

TUNISIA

Tunisia’s parliamentary election on Sunday appears to have delivered an inconclusive result, which is pretty much par for the course for world elections this year. Exit polling puts the Islamist Ennahda party in first place but with only 17.5 percent of the vote, meaning it’s going to take several parties negotiating what’s likely to be a tenuous coalition before Tunisia will have a functioning government again. This represents sort of a comeback for Ennahda, which dropped to Tunisia’s second-largest party in the 2014 election, though any celebrating will have to be tempered by the fact that Ennahda’s 17.5 percent is over 10 percent worse than its performance in that previous vote. Presidential finalist Nabil Karoui’s Heart of Tunisia party looks to be in second place with 15.6 percent. Turnout appears to have been only around 40 percent, expressing widespread frustration with the perennially weak Tunisian economy. The internal collapse of previous ruling party Nidaa Tounes also seems to have shaken things up.

MALI

One United Nations peacekeeper and four other people were killed on Sunday after their vehicle ran over a mine in northern Mali. It’s unclear who was responsible, but al-Qaeda’s Jamaʿat Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is very active in that part of the country.

BURKINA FASO

“Around” 20 people were killed in northern Burkina Faso on Friday when “armed individuals” assaulted a gold mine in Soum province. At this point the perpetrators are unknown but JNIM affiliate Ansar ul Islam is active in the region as well as Islamic State’s “Greater Sahara” affiliate.

ETHIOPIA

Representatives from Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan gathered in Khartoum over the weekend for more negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and its expected impact on Nile River water levels. It apparently didn’t go very well, because the Egyptian government is now saying that the negotiations “have reached a deadlock as a result of the Ethiopian side’s inflexibility” and is calling for mediation. The Ethiopians say they proposed filling the dam’s reservoir—which is what will really affect the river—over a four to seven year period. Presumably that was unacceptable to Cairo though the Egyptians haven’t offered any details.

RWANDA

At least eight people were killed and another 18 wounded in an attack late Friday in Rwanda’s Musanze district, near its borders with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Rwandan government says the attack was carried out by “Hutu terrorists,” possibly meaning members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a Hutu militia that operates out of the eastern DRC. Rwandan security forces killed some 19 alleged attackers in a retaliatory strike over the weekend.

MAURITIUS

Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth has called a new election for November 7, dissolving parliament in the process. There’s no political scandal here—Mauritius held its last election in 2014 so it was due to hold another some time this year.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Journalist Neil Hauer suggests that Russian mercenary firm The Wagner Group’s recent forays into Africa are not indicative of its importance to Russian foreign policy, but rather of a desperate attempt to stay active as its Kremlin relationship—and therefore its business in places like Ukraine and Syria—has dwindled. Its downfall, he writes, can be traced to an incident in eastern Syria early last year:

Wagner’s confrontation with U.S. troops in Deir Ezzor in February 2018 marked the beginning of the end for the firm. On Feb. 7, 2018, roughly 600 Wagner contractors, armed with tanks and artillery, launched an assault on a position of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a largely Kurdish militia force that had worked closely with the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition, in northeast Syria. What they may not have known is that U.S. advisors were embedded with the unit and promptly called for air support. Wagner forces nevertheless maintained the assault for a full four hours, during which they were hammered by U.S. artillery, airstrikes, helicopters, and even an AC-130 gunship. When the dust cleared, an estimated 300 of the 600 Russians were dead or wounded, in the first direct battle between Washington’s and Moscow’s forces since the Vietnam War.

The most astonishing aspect of this incident was that it evidently occurred without being ordered by, or even fully known to, the Kremlin itself. Leaked telephone conversations revealed that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man referred to as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef” who is believed to lead Wagner, ordered the assault after conversing with several Syrian business colleagues. (Prigozhin also controls a company with oil and gas stakes in the region.) Prigozhin himself has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his role in Russia’s 2016 U.S. election interference several times, most recently on Sept. 30.

The disjointed response from official Moscow also suggests they were uninformed: It took a week for Kremlin officials to say that there “may be citizens of the Russian Federation” not linked to the Russian armed forces fighting in Syria, before later saying that five Russians may have been killed, a number that later grew to “several dozen.” Sources close to the Russian Ministry of Defense told the Russian investigative outlet the Bell they were “simply stunned” when they learned the attack had occurred and that a deeply embarrassed Prigozhin then had to grovel to Kremlin officials that such an error would not happen again.

UKRAINE

An estimated 15,000 people, many of them veterans, protested in Kyiv on Sunday against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to commit to holding a regional election in the country’s breakaway Donbas region. Zelenskiy agreed several days ago to accept the “Steinmeier Formula,” a plan for ending Ukraine’s civil war that requires an election in eastern Ukraine and the establishment of a special autonomous status for that part of the country. The Ukrainian president has cast his decision as the only way to break the stalemate in eastern Ukraine and hopefully bring the war to a close, and insists that the election will be held transparently and in concern to Ukrainian electoral law.

Impeachment Update: A second whistle blower has indeed come forward to accuse Donald Trump of threatening to withhold US aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government agreed to investigate potential 2020 presidential rival Joe Biden. But that’s OK, because Trump cleared everything up over the weekend when he said he didn’t want to call Zelenskiy back in July and threaten his aid, but soon-to-be former Energy Secretary Rick Perry made him do it. It’s all very simple and believable.

KOSOVO

Kosovo’s parliamentary election on Sunday seems to have returned [all together now] an inconclusive result. Vetëvendosje (“self-determination,” VV), a leftist opposition party, seems to have emerged in the lead according to preliminary results, but it’s only getting around 26 percent of the vote. A center-right opposition party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), is right behind at around 25 percent. VV and the LDK had talked about forming a coalition ahead of the election, but even combined they may need support from a third party to stabilize their majority. Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj’s list is struggling in fourth place with 11.5 percent, behind one of his ex-coalition partners, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, at 21 percent. Turnout was only around 44 percent.

FRANCE

French investigators now believe that the attacker who stabbed four people to death in the Paris police headquarters on Thursday was radicalized by Islamist messages online and are considering the attack to have been an act of terrorism. The attacker worked in the police offices and so the incident was initially treated as a case of workplace violence. The notion that somebody working in Paris police HQ had been radicalized but that this was not detected by French authorities has led to calls for the resignation of Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, but he says he’s not going anywhere.

PORTUGAL

Portugal’s parliamentary election on Sunday seems to have gone largely as expected. With around half of the vote counted, Prime Minister António Costa’s Socialist Party was sitting at 36.7 percent of the vote, enough for a convincing victory but not enough for a sole majority. Rather than try to fix something that doesn’t appear to be broken, Costa says he plans on continuing his current minority government/support arrangement with the Left Bloc and Portugal’s Communist Party. He also suggested forming an alliance with the People-Animals-Nature party. It remains to be seen whether those parties will also be interested in continuing that relationship, in which they provide parliamentary support to Costa but are not part of his government.

UNITED KINGDOM

French President Emmanuel Macron said over the weekend that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson needs to do some more work on his Brexit proposal and that he needs to make substantive progress by the end of the week to determine whether any Brexit deal is in the offing. Johnson’s supposed “take it or leave it” proposal, which he sent around to EU leaders at mid-week, would reimpose a customs border in Ireland, which is something the EU has said it will not accept. Of course they’re going to get a customs border anyway if the UK leaves without a deal, but at least at this point European leaders don’t want to look like they’re caving to Johnson’s tactics.

AMERICAS

ECUADOR

Indigenous groups still protesting President Lenín Moreno’s austerity-driven decision to end Ecaudor’s fuel subsidy program have blockaded highways and roads across the country and have been taking police officers hostage—some 50 of them so far. Though the loss of the subsidy hits Ecuadorean truckers hardest, which is why these protests began among the country’s transport unions, they’re also hitting impoverished communities hard in the form of higher food prices. Moreno has declared a two-month national state of emergency in response to the protests.

HAITI

Ongoing protests against Haitian President Jovenel Moïse are having the unintended effect of further immiserating impoverished Haitians living outside of Port-au-Prince:

The political turmoil is hitting cities and towns outside the capital of Port-au-Prince especially hard, forcing non-government organizations to suspend aid as barricades of large rocks and burning tires cut off the flow of goods between the city and the countryside. The crisis is deepening poverty in places such as Leogane, the epicenter of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.

“We are starving,” said 28-year-old Duvalesse, who has been unable to work. “I had to make $2 last one week.”

The United Nations said that before the protests even began, some 2.6 million people across Haiti were vulnerable to food shortages, adding that roadblocks have severely impacted some humanitarian programs. On Sept. 16, the World Food Programme was forced to suspend all food deliveries to schools as demonstrations started.

Meanwhile, cash transfers to some 37,000 people in need were postponed.

UNITED STATES

Finally, TomDispatch’s William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger aren’t optimistic that the Pentagon is going to spend its next $1.4 trillion any more wisely than it’s spent the trillions that have come before it:

For the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come.

With such enormous sums now locked in, Secretary of Defense (and former Raytheon lobbyist) Mark Esper is already going through a ritual that couldn’t be more familiar to Pentagon watchers. He’s pledged to “reform” the bureaucracy and the spending priorities of the Department of Defense to better address the latest proposed threats du jour, Russia and China. His main focus: paring back the Pentagon’s "Fourth Estate" — an alphabet soup of bureaucracies not under the control of any of the military services that sucks up about 20% of the $700 billion-plus annual budget.

Esper’s promises to streamline the spending machine should be taken with more than the usual grain of salt. Virtually every secretary of defense in living memory has made similar commitments, with little or nothing to show for them in terms of documented savings. Far from eliminating wasteful programs, efforts pursued by those past secretaries and by Congress under similar banners have been effective in only one obvious way: further reducing oversight and civilian control of the Pentagon rather than waste and inefficiency in it.