The Baltic States Remain on Guard

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 1873 Alexander Fedorovich Rittikh, one of the Russian Empire’s most eminent cartographers, published two maps of the Baltic provinces depicting the ethnographic and religious composition of the region’s inhabitants.

The Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland and Kurland, which correspond to present day Estonia and Latvia, had been incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 18th century. They continued, however, to be regarded as a distinct region within the empire, characterised by a degree of autonomy in local governance, German speaking elites, Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasantry, and their majority Lutheran faith.

Estonia and Latvia, along with Lithuania, gained their independence when tsarist Russia fell apart after the First World War, but in 1940 Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin seized them. The Nazis conquered all three in 1941 but Moscow regained them in 1944, and they would remain Soviet republics until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

NATO TERRITORY

The Baltic states, given their cultural and political culture, found it easy to rejoin the west, and today they are members of the European Union and NATO. Now they are also front-line states bordering the Russian Federation, which is at war in Ukraine.

This, understandably, has made these small states very nervous. Last March, Latvian President Egils Levits urged NATO to replace its “tripwire” stance with an approach of “forward defence,” including stationing NATO troops in key locations to be able to beat off, or even counterattack, any infringement of state sovereignty on the Alliance’s eastern flank.

The president of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, suggested that implementing “selective no-fly zones” near very sensitive areas, such as nuclear power plants, could be “credible” yet also “not risk escalation.” Estonian President Alar Karis said that the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities “are falling on every city in Europe and that all of Europe is at war. We are fighting for Ukraine.”

When a missile landed in Poland last November, killing two people across the border with Ukraine, it was at first thought it came from the Russians. The Baltic states were quick to call on the collective defence of NATO. Lithuanian President Nauseda declared on Twitter: “Every inch of NATO territory must be defended!”

Others said the incident made the case for even greater military support for Ukraine. Latvia’s defence minister, Artis Pabriks, suggested NATO could provide more air defences for Poland and “part of the territory of Ukraine.” Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, said the West should give Ukraine more military, humanitarian, and financial support.

RUSSIA'S AMBITIONS

Is this just paranoia? Maybe not. Russian President Vladimir Putin sometimes sounds as if Russia plans further escalation. In a speech made last June, three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, he appeared to leave the door open for further Russian territorial expansion.

Paying tribute to Russian tsar Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg, Putin drew parallels between the tsar’s actions and modernday Russia’s ambitions. An autocratic modernizer admired by liberal and conservative Russians alike, he ruled for 43 years and gave his name to the new capital that he built on land he conquered from Sweden in the Great Northern War of 1700–1721.

“This,” Putin added, also “applies to Narva,” the Estonian border city largely populated by ethnic Russians, which was captured by Peter in that war.

That same month, a member of Russia’s State Duma submitted a bill to the country’s parliament to repeal the recognition by the USSR of Lithuania’s independence. Yevgeny Fyodorov, a member of Putin’s United Russia party, claimed that the decision by the State Council of the USSR to recognize the independence of the Republic of Lithuania in 1991 was “illegal.”

Fyodorov maintained that a referendum on secession from the USSR was not held in Lithuania before the recognition of its independence and a transitional period was not established to consider all “controversial issues.”

“We have a lot of claims against Lithuania, in particular, with regard to the rights of the Russian-speaking population,” remarked Vladimir Evseev, the head of the Caucasus Department of the Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose successor to the USSR.

“In addition, there is a scenario according to which we will have to enter its territory in order to provide a corridor to Kaliningrad,” the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea separated from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland.

In response, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis warned that Lithuania must respond accordingly and be ready to defend itself together with its partners. Such worries keep the leaders of the Baltic nations awake at night.

 

 

 

Liberals Caught Flatfooted when it Comes to anti-Semitism

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We know Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is as “politically correct” as they come.

But episodes in 2022 provide evidence that some “anti-racist” and pro-Palestinian initiatives can quickly turn into the appearance of anti-Semitism – with financial and political support from Trudeau’s own federal government.

Anti-racism strategy

Particularly notorious was the Laith Marouf affair. In 2021, an organization known as the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) received $133,000 from the federal government to build an “anti-racism strategy” for Canadian broadcasting.

Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen personally and publicly endorsed the grant to allow the CMAC to instruct federally regulated broadcasters in “diversity and inclusion.”

The grant was channelled to the Department of Canadian Heritage. The funds enabled the CMAC to hire a senior consultant named Laith Marouf, who promised to implement the project in a “successful and responsible” manner.

But in August 2022, it came to light that Marouf, a Syrian by birth, is given to anti-Semitic rants. A screenshot of his private Twitter account provided more than ample proof.

In one tweet, he wrote, “You know all those loud-mouthed bags of human faces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from ..."

In another tweet, he suggested that “Jewish White Supremacists” deserve “a bullet to the head.” Among other claims, Marouf also asserted that Zionism is a project of “white Jews who adopted Nazism.”

Even after Anthony Housefather, another Liberal MP, had alerted Hussen to Marouf’s ugly habits, it took a month for the minister to acknowledge the controversy, pledging to look into the matter. Ahmed Hussen finally denounced Marouf’s “unacceptable behaviour,” saying it “clearly goes against our government’s values.”

He condemned anti-Semitism and “any other form of hate” and asked the Department of Canadian Heritage, the other agency involved, to “look closely at the situation.” Pablo Rodriguez, the Heritage minister, then also came forward to denounce the comments that had been discovered. Marouf’s contract was eventually cancelled, with a promise for “guidelines” to govern funding applications. This, of course, only after Marouf had been exposed.

In fact it turned out the Marouf scandal was far worse than suspected. More than half a million dollars has been paid out by Justin Trudeau-led Canadian governments between 2016 and 2021 to the organization fronted by Marouf, in the name of “anti-racism.”

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The usual condemnations of anti-Semitism, apologies, and empty excuses were offered ...

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Holocaust denier

In late November came another scandal, as an all-party group of members of Parliament hosted Holocaust-denier and Arabic-language newspaper publisher Nazih Khatatba at a Parliament Hill reception staged by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group. This event included Trudeau’s Minister of Transportation Omar Alghabra and Liberal MP Salma Zahid, who heads the “friendship” group.

Khatatba’s newspaper al-Meshwar is notorious for having printed articles alleging that the Holocaust was a Jewish plot and has referred to it as the “Holohoax.” The newspaper has also published articles claiming that Jewish bankers financed the Nazi party, and praising terrorist attacks against Jews, including a bombing in Jerusalem in November that killed 16-year-old Canadian-Israeli Aryeh Schupak.

Montreal’s Mahmoud Khalil was also in attendance. He has posted videos of himself, overlaid with dramatic music, giving a speech at a “Glory to our Martyrs” rally in Montreal, as well as reciting a poem commemorating the late Ghassan Kanafani, a spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP.)

This news came just days after the Twitter account Documenting Antisemitism reported that Nabil Nassar, the head of the Fatah Movement in Canada, had also attended the reception on Parliament Hill. Nassar’s June 2020 appointment to lead the Canadian branch of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ party was widely noticed in Canada’s Jewish community.

Only days before his appointment, Nassar was mourning the death of Ramadan Shalah, a former leader of the terror-listed Palestinian Islamic Jihad group. He has praised militants such as Ali Hassan Salameh, who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics murder of 11 Israeli athletes. (Khatatba, on the other hand, has claimed the massacre was an operation undertaken by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency).

Nassar has also had kind words for Dalal al-Mughrabi, one of those involved in an action in 1978 that saw Palestinian militants hijack a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murder its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. Nassar called her the “epitome of the Palestinian woman” and “a symbol of resistance and pride.”

The usual condemnations of anti-Semitism, apologies, and empty excuses were offered when this came to light, among them from Zahid, who said that it was not possible to “research the background of every guest.” Nonsense. This was a parliamentary event and invitees are regularly vetted before invitations are sent.

Participant Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party, also an attendee, stated that “I take my marching orders from the permanent representative of Palestine to Canada.” Really?

 

West Africa is a Zone of Coups and Conflicts

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Leaders of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), agreed on Dec. 4, during a summit in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, to establish a regional peacekeeping force to help restore constitutional order in a region that has seen several coups over the last few years. Part of the reason may be to limit increasing Russian involvement in this part of Africa.

Last June ECOWAS had already begun deploying a stabilisation force to Guinea-Bissau after the country was thrown into turmoil when President Umaro Sissoco Embalo escaped a coup attempt in February. The Guinea-Bissau Stabilisation Support Mission comprised troops from Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso have been hit by military coups in the last two years and were suspended from the decision-making bodies of ECOWAS. As well, many countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and southwards to the Gulf of Guinea, also have seen a wave of jihadism, which they have had difficulties controlling.

The trend of coups that began in 2020 in the region once infamously known as “the coup belt” continued in 2022. In September, soldiers overthrew Burkina Faso’s military government. Captain Ibrahim Traore led a coup to become Burkina Faso’s new leader, deposing Paul Henri-Damiba, who had come to power eight months earlier through his own coup.

In Mali, where a coup was thwarted, the military government which came to power through an August 2020 coup blamed an unnamed Western nation, widely though to be France. There were also attempted coups in the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tomé and Principe.

Expansionist violence by armed groups linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda made Burkina Faso a centre of conflict in 2022, largely driven by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the fastest-growing violent group in the world.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a leading aggregator of conflict statistics, a total of 1,315 events of organised political violence were recorded in Burkina Faso in 2021.

The increased wave of violence led to at least 2,354 fatalities. “The level of militancy is not comparable to any of the neighbouring countries,” reported Heni Nsaibia, senior researcher at ACLED.

The political situation in Mali also was a cause of the escalation of violence in Burkina Faso. “Malian forces significantly reduced their operations because the military has focused on staying in power rather than countering militants,” according to Fahiraman Rodrigue Kone, senior Sahel researcher at the Institute for Security Studies based in Pretoria, South Africa. So what started as a rebellion in neighbouring Mali by marginalized Tuaregs a decade ago has now set the entire Sahel region ablaze.

Experts maintain Burkina Faso has also become the epicentre of the conflict because armed groups are seeking to control the country’s gold mines and regional economic trade routes connecting other landlocked Sahel countries to the West African coast.

Benin and Togo, on the Gulf of Guinea witnessed a number of attacks from armed groups, heightening the fears about violence spilling over from the Sahel into coastal West Africa.

Anti-French sentiments over the perceived ineffectiveness of French troops to curtail the activities of armed groups in Mali created a vacuum being filled by Russian mercenaries, who are more ruthless. The French troops have since left to set up in Niger as their new Sahel base.

In recent years, Russia has made crucial inroads into Africa, renewing Cold War-era relationships. In March, only 28 of Africa’s 54 countries voted at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the same slim majority that subsequently voted in October to condemn Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.

The Wagner Group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, began operating in Mali at the end of 2021. Their presence in Mali and Burkina Faso has been seen as proof of the West losing its near monopoly of influence in Africa.

Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo, who alleged that Burkina Faso is paying the Russian mercenaries with mining rights, has warned that violence could escalate. Reports also suggest that they have engaged in activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.

In the Central African Republic, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has welcomed the Russians as a more effective presence in keeping a fragile peace than the United Nations peacekeepers who have been stationed there since 2014.

A nation of chronic coups and rebellions, it had been grappling with conflict for years, but lurched into full-scale war in 2012, with fighting between the mostly Christian anti-Balaka militia and the mainly Muslim Séléka rebel coalition that has killed thousands.

When Touadéra was elected in 2016, he had effective control over only about 20 per cent of the country, so he turned to Russia in a bid to re-establish control over rebel-held areas. Now, though, the Wagner mercenaries have established control.

“Today, we have 5,000 Russians in the country,” Pascal Bida Koyagbele, the minister for strategic investment, said in an interview published in the New York Times Dec. 24. “Thanks to them we have retaken control of 97 per cent of our territory.”

But one Western ambassador called the Central African Republic’s status today as one of being a “vassal state” of the Kremlin.