1.    Russia Post War

I listened to a podcast with a US former Supreme Commander of NATO, I think that was his title. Remarkably, he said that the West was afraid that Ukraine would win the war. The complicating factor is a defeated Russia post war: the Russian army is failing but his war of intimidating Western leaders is succeeding. So, the problem might be that Russia will implode if they lose or Putin will be backed into using nuclear weapons. Hmmm.

Check out The Foreign Desk with Andrew Mueller.

2.    Migrant Deaths in the Mediterranean

Migrant boat with hundreds of missing migrants—with some estimates at 500 missing and presumed drowned—last week could be the worst ever in the Mediterranean. And that is saying something given all the tragedies and suffering of over the past ten plus years. With smuggling on the rise, and so many refugees on the run,  as the survivors from this tragedy attest (survivors were all “boys and men from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and the Palestinian territories”), what has to be done? One of the many, many issues that deserves our attention is that most of the missing are women and children.

3.    Sudan Peace Talks Adjourn

I am finding it more and more difficult to find words to talk about the War in Sudan, as once again the Janjaweed are committing ethnic cleaning in Darfur.

Yet peace talks are paused. Reuters reported that Molly Phee, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs told a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee said that the US adjourned the talks in Jeddah because: “because the format is not succeeding in the way that we want,” Both sides are still violating agreements and resumed fighting at the end of the last ceasefire.

US policy is to impose sanctions on companies fuelling the conflict. But with charges of genocide, what are we doing? More of this next week.

4.    Rwandan Genocidaire Seeking Asylum in South Africa

Fulgence Kayishema was in court in Rwanda accused of ordering the deaths of 2000 Tutsi seeking refuge in a church during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. He was charged in 2001 and has been in hiding in South Africa ever since. Kayishema is seeking asylum in South Africa. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, Felicien Kubuga, at 88 years of age, was ruled unfit to stand trial at The Hague. He has been accused of financing the genocide and using his radio station, Milles Collines, to foment hate.

I am reading a book by Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and African Regime Gone Bad (New York: Public Affairs, 2021) that describes the government of Paul Kagame, in power since his political/military movement based in Uganda came to power in Rwanda post genocide; he has been in power ever since. According to Wrong, he has been ordering the deaths of his political rivals among other deeply troubling state sponsored violence aimed at maintaining his and his government’s power.

I am working on writing a longer piece on post genocide governing. Any suggestions on what I should read? Or be thinking about?

When I was growing up (the 1970s), if I knew anything about surveillance, I certainly didn’t apply it to the state. It wasn’t a thing then (and if it was, it likely had to do with the man). I think that I started using the term around 9/11 when the Bush administration, via an empowered National Security Agency (NSA), and started listening in on “domestic” chatter (unimaginable to many who hadn’t read Orwell, I suppose).

When politics became a central word in my vocabulary, the world was still in the middle of the Cold War, with Nixon’s rapprochement with China and détente with the Soviet Union was the news. Another world, you say. Agreed. In some ways.

The news today, accompanied by videos of Israeli police’s disgraceful, disappointing, and despicable actions in entering the Al-Aqsa mosque, got me thinking about how Israel has taken the idea of the surveillance state to heights that would make Americans lose their shit. Well, non-right wing Americans, who these days seem intent on conflating this weird idea of “weaponizing the state”  with authoritarianism.  

The Israeli government and security forces use facial recognition, towers, walls, checkpoints, incarceration, beatings, bulldozing, and a host of other surveillance technologies (high and low) to try to control the “uncontrollable;” the Palestinians who are now a people split into two literal geographical camps in a country that they, too, have historically occupied and who have a claim to statehood. But Israelis will and are fighting to the death to prevent Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The surveillance state is but one tool.

Surely, when 9/11 happened, the surveillance state wasn’t what we wished for. Maybe after WWII this is the logical result of the mind boggling technological developments for war fighting and to counter terrorist attacks. But the post WWII-twentieth century was quite deceptive: most people who died in conflict died at the hands of their own state were due to low tech genocides (the Rwanda genocide and the Cambodian genocides), ethnic cleansing (Bosnia and Nagorno-Karabakh), or gang violence and structural poverty (Haiti).

But here we are now, a few decades into the 21st century and along with Israel’s surveillance state, we have death by drone (compliments of the Obama administration which brought its use to new heights) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s use of Iranian drones. Technology is now back in the driver’s seat as the preferred method for controlling citizens and people’s movements and for killing political opponents.

I will continue this conversation in upcoming posts. And I’m sure that historians of war, technology, and 9/11 will comment and set me straight if I am missing the mark. But in the meantime, I am going to read Tannenwald’s Nuclear Taboo.

To be continued.

On September 12, 2022, the Tigray forces from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, known as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), agreed to join the African Union’s (AU) peace process. The Ethiopian government, which has been fighting the TPLF since the latest round of hostilities started in November 2020, has long held that only the Ethiopian government can lead peace talks.

For the past 22+ months, the civil war has devastated the Tigray region and spilled over into surrounding regions, especially Afar and Amhara, and involved neighbouring country Eritrea. In March, the two sides agreed to a humanitarian truce and reopen humanitarian aid corridors. Medicine and food and other aid started to flow again along with restoring basic services such as electricity.

Few believe that either side (Tigray forces of Ethiopian government military) can win this conflict. But most agree that should hostilities start up fully again, women will suffer horribly.

In Tigray, when the truce was first announced in February, 13% of children under the age of five were malnourished as were 50% of pregnant or breastfeeding women. Women were also victims of sexual violence when Ethiopian soldiers used rape and other forms of violence as an instrument of war. Women who were raped were unable to access health facilities to receive treatment, emergency birth control, and other more general medical services.

But for other reasons women were and are particularly vulnerable.

As Sharmila Devi pointed out in an article in The Lancet (volume 399, p. 707, February 19, 2022), given the lack of medical supplies, one unintended consequence of the blockade and continuing hostilities, is the risk of maintaining Ethiopia’s low rate of HIV (the lowest in east Africa) because of, for example, expiring HIV kits.

But women will disproportionately suffer from a rise in HIV rates. Tigray regional authorities have reported that 5% of women who have been raped are now HIV positive. And women, who are responsible for caring for their children as single heads of households are exchanging sex for money to buy food and other basic needs.

Add to this difficulty in diagnosing and treating HIV in Tigray, and the many thousands of women who were displaced by the fighting, and the picture for women’s health is dire.

We will have to wait and see if the Ethiopian government agrees to peace talks, and if in the end both sides can agree. In the meantime, the G-7, AU member states, and the UN, need to keep the pressure on.

The Never Ending Failure of Never Again

In 2022, we know that a state could kill a group of its own people because they are different. We have many examples in the twentieth century of how a state’s leaders did just that: the Armenia genocide (estimate 1.5 million killed), the Holocaust (as many as 11 million killed), the Cambodia genocide (estimate 2 million killed), and the Rwanda genocide (estimate 1 million).

This blog is the first in a series that will be discussing genocides: the ones that are ongoing, like the Rohingya; the ones we know about, like Cambodia; the ones less known, like gulag in colonial Kenya; and why we just can’t get this figured out and protect innocents from state-sponsored murder.

Briefly, a word on the Rohingya. The failure to prevent genocide is why the Rohingya, the Muslim minority based largely in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, can be the victims of repeated mass violence at the hands of the Myanmar military. And why the Myanmar military can murder them with little fear of consequences. Mynamar is helped by at least two problems with the international system of states: (1) the Rohingya are stateless; and (2) the international community cannot force the Mynamar state to stop.

The Rohingya are stateless because in 1982, the Myanmar government denied them citizenship. Currently, an estimated 600,000 remain in Myanmar. They are also stateless even more Rohingya are refugees. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 980,000 Rohingya refugees are living in neighbouring countries, including 890,00 living in Bangladesh in one of the “most densley populated camps in the world.” The Myanmar military killed over 24,000 Rohingya in Rakhine state in 2018—the military started to remove them from their homes in 2017—so they fled to neighbouring countries. They are now among the largest, stateless groups in the world.

This past December, after another Myanmar military attack left 35 people dead in Kayah state, the EU and other states added another round of sanctions (I think this makes round four), including an arms embargo. But none of these actions are based in the Genocide Convention, which under Article I requires that every state that has signed the convention must act to prevent and punish genocide. For Myanmar, sanctions alone may be just like doing nothing.

In later blogs I will look at statelessness, sanctions, and a host of other issues in asking, What can be done?

Here’s the thing. I am finding it harder and harder to care about politics, at any level. I used to eat it up, no matter the issue, the point of view of ideology, or the policy debate. I was in, I had an opinion, and I wanted to know more. I no longer do.

So, over the upcoming months, I’m going to discuss my problem here. I don’t have any idea where I will be going with it, but I invite you to just go with it, with me.

This morning I want to consider the first of many possible reasons for feeling so disconnected: information overload. Let me borrow from Nate Silver’s signal and noise idea because it’s easy for me to think about information overload this way (see his website here https://fivethirtyeight.com/ if you to know more about his take on politics more generally). Silver suggests that I can’t get to the information that I need because I am so bombarded with random or not useful information (what I like to call stupid shit). Perhaps causing some of my frustration with politics.

Fair enough. But the thing is, I have limited my news to such a few sources that I can’t have overload, can I? Every day I glance at maybe three twitter accounts, some of the news wires, or news shows like Rachel Maddow (she covers women’s issues fairly regularly and I like her take on American politics) or CBC morning news (often more likely Radio Canada to work on my French). And usually, I check at least one foreign newspaper that I can still access online without a prescription.

If anything, given the volume of news that I could be reading each day, I shouldn’t be having a problem with information overload. But now that I’m thinking about it, I find most news platforms increasingly irritating because each one is overloaded with really uninteresting, useless content. I don’t know why CBC keeps trying to be all things to all people rather than journalists. I look at their website some mornings and all I can think is who cares?

I don’t think that I suffer from information overload. But I am frustrated with the few sources of information that I have. Moving on then.

January 3, 2020 just may become the most remarkable day of this brand-new decade. US drones assassinated Iran’s head of the Quds Force, Qassam Soleimani, and Iraq’s deputy head of the Hashd al-Shaabi, Mahdi al-Muhandi, and six others. American leaders announced that the attack was a defensive action against Soleimani, who planned to attack US forces.

Why now? Soleimani has made many visits to Iraq in recent months, in plain view of the Americans and anyone else who cared to know what the military leader was up to: fomenting chaos in the Middle East while expanding Iran’s influence and propping up anti-Western organizations from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the murderous al-Assad regime in Syria.

Many pundits will surely, and impetuously, speculate on the reasons. Impeachment. Distraction. Oil. Money. Power. Elections. US coverage will default along the rancor and unseemliness of the current state of the US political climate and culture. More sober analysis will await the foreign press or a few weeks after more details emerge and Iran’s response can be factored in.

Of course, given Trump’s intemperate policy statements—toward North Korea in the past, especially, and currently in taunting the Iranian government over Soleimani’s assassination—the feeling that the world is at a tipping point is hard to ignore.

However, US foreign policy since 9/11 has focused on preemption. Threaten the United States or Americans, expect a drone or special forces to attempt to take you out. This policy was drafted in the Bush ‘43 administration and has remained in play. The Obama administration and now the Trump administration continue to preemptively kill its enemies. It is unlikely to change any time soon.

Americans also have this idea that repeatedly killing leaders, of terrorist organizations or states they designate as sponsoring terrorism, will eventually lead to organizational failure. Until a few weeks ago, they pointed to the strategy’s success in ending ISIS (with the assassination of al-Baghdadi) and Iraqis protesting, among other things, opposition to Iranian influence in their country’s politics. While the response was expected, the outcome might not be.

But what Iran will do, and consequently how the response to US aggression will reverberate in the region, are two huge unknowns. Since Iran is known for its patience it could be some time before we see a response. So far, Iran has already named Soleimani’s replacement, Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani, called Soleimani a martyr, and promised to revenge for his killing; Nassrallah, Hezzbolah’s leader, has vowed to continue the fight; and Iraqis continue to protest.

Given the state of unrest in the region caused from ongoing conflicts (the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the plight of Palestinians as Israel continues its illegal land grabs, the Saudi show trial for the Khashoggi killing) this latest flash could turn into a long, slow burn that spreads well beyond the region’s boundaries.

And the chances that Iran will be interested in forgoing the development of its own nuclear weapons program are now pretty slim. With four declared nuclear powers (India, Pakistan, China, Russia) and one undeclared (Israel) in the region, and an increased US presence in Iraq, American forces in Afghanistan, and US ties to the Saudis and Israelis, it is not hard to imagine that President Rouhani’s first thought was to beef up uranium enrichment.

The Balkans requires more news attention, given the political enmity among states in the region, and the negative affects to the region of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Europe, and more broadly, Russia and the NATO countries. Russia is most assertive in prosecuting its anti-Western policies in the Balkans, where it regularly intervenes often on the side of the Serbs.

Russia’s recent decision to sell fighter jets and other military equipment to Serbia should give pause to region watchers, in light of: first,  the history of conflict between Serbia and Kosovo, since Serbia continues to refuse to recognize Kosovo’s independence, and Serbia’s continuing agitation for northern Kosovo (which incudes Serbs living close to the Serbian city of Mitrovia) to leave Kosovo and become part of the Serbian state; and second, the poor relations between Croatia, which is currently witnessing the rise of a growing and increasingly popular fascist political movement, and Serbia, largely caused by different perceptions of  war memories that date back to World War II. Russian meddling could exacerbate tensions.

Additionally, since 2010, the region’s political transparency scores, which are a measure of the degree of corruption, three Baltic countries – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo – are the most corrupt in Europe. And, Bosnia and Kosovo produce, per capita, more Jihadist volunteers than any other European country. Given Russia’s goal of destabilizing democracies, NATO and European leaders’ focus on countering Russian moves, has facilitated Russia’s long-term goal: more autocratic leaders are emerging in the Balkans.

While some policy-makers might think countering Russia in other areas, like Ukraine, is more worthy of attention, but given the history in this region (which includes ethnic cleansing), it might be better to err on the side of caution.

North Korea announced recently that it expects to test an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) this year – a missile with a nuclear warhead that can reach Europe and the United States. What was lost in the discussion, however, is how much pain the continued expansion of North Korea’s nuclear weapon capabilities will cost the average North Korean. If the past is truly a predictor of the future, we can expect to see an increase in the death of North Koreans from starvation and other effects of severe malnutrition; we could even see another famine like the country experienced throughout the 1990s, and near-famine in the late 2000s when food shortages were common.

Why?

Many North Korea watchers attribute the recent famines to self-serving political choices, the food shortages in the last decade to drought and mismanagement,  the United Nation’s efforts to supply food as a failure because it has yet to decrease the horrific stat that one in four North Korean children is malnourished, and argue that the economic, social, and political conditions that continue the food problems in North Korea will only be exacerbated by a concentration of political will and resources into nuclear weapons development.

Therefore, we can expect to see what we’ve seen in the past:  For the estimated 6 to 24 million North Koreans who are currently malnourished, it could lead to death.