Three West African Dictatorships Have One Common Theme

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
 
Three African countries with similar names sit on the Atlantic Ocean coast, and they have something in common beside their name. All three are corrupt and failing states.

Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea are former colonies of, respectively, France, Portugal and Spain.

In Guinea, President Alpha Condé held a referendum on March 22, postponed from March 1, that would pave the way for his third term bid. He claimed the changes would create a “modern constitution” that would respond “to the needs of the world today.”

The referendum, ostensibly supported by almost 92 per cent of voters, was marred by massive violence. Opponents attacked a polling station, vandalised voting equipment, and clashed with police in the capital, Conakry. But Condé enacted the new charter by decree on April 6.

Opposition parties also boycotted concurrent elections to the 114-member National Assembly. The boycotting group included the leading opposition party, the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UDF), and the Union of Republican Forces (UFR). With little opposition, Conde’s party won 79 of the seats.

Condé, who has been president since 2010, won re-election in 2015. Both the 2010 constitution and the new constitution limits presidential mandates to two terms. But the new constitution resets the clock, so Condé, who is 81, would be able to run for president again even though he is approaching the end of his second term, and remain in power for 12 more years.

Since last October, protests against the planned constitutional change led to at least 32 protestors killed. Five opposition and civil society leaders were sentenced to prison for organising the protests.

Condé and his son have been implicated in a number of corruption scandals. In 2016, it was alleged that the mining company Rio Tinto paid $10.5 million for rights in the Simandou iron ore mine.

In next-door Guinea-Bissau, the results of the Dec. 29 runoff presidential election were challenged, after the National Election Commission declared former Prime Minister Umaro Sissoco Embalo of the Movement of Democratic Change (Madem-G 15) the winner.

He beat former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).

Eambalo’s swearing-in ceremony took place in Bissau Feb. 27. He immediately fired prime minister and PAIGC veteran Aristides Gomes and swore in former presidential opponent Nuno Nabiam as his new prime minister.

Embalo promised a “zero-tolerance policy” towards international drug cartels which have used the country as a staging post in the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe.

The PAIGC, whose 47 deputies continue to control the 102-seat parliament, disputed the result. Instead, the legislature voted to install parliamentary leader Cipriano Cassama as president.

But Cassama resigned shortly thereafter, alleging death threats. Troops then occupied the Supreme Court and other government buildings and shut down state broadcasters.

Incumbent José Mario Vaz, who served as the country’s fifth president but ran third this time, was the first leader since 1994 to complete his term, in a country which has seen 20 coups or attempted coups since 1974.

Equatorial Guinea is probably the worst of the three. The world’s longest serving leader, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo marked his 40th year in power last August. He deposed his uncle in a bloody coup d’état in 1979.

The ruling Democratic Party (PDGE) has a virtual monopoly over political life. It holds all but one seat in the 170-member bicameral parliament.

Citizens are denied economic and social rights, including access to health care and education, despite the country’s vast oil revenues, which benefit the political elite.

Corruption and repression of civil and political rights continue unabated. Freedoms of association and assembly are severely curtailed, and the government imposes restrictive conditions on the operation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Local activists who work on human rights-related issues face intimidation, harassment, and reprisals. In May 2019, a court convicted 112 people for participating in a December 2017 coup attempt. Former Chief Justice Juan Carlos Ondo, now in hiding, was also accused of taking part.

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the president’s son, was convicted of money laundering and embezzlement of more than $100 million by a Paris court in 2017. His collection of luxury cars was seized.

Post-Soviet Russian State Seeks an Identity

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

The collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago left behind as a remnant a Russian-majority state, albeit one with many minorities.

And though it retained the lion’s share of the old USSR, nationalists have fought hard to retain what was left, including regions like Chechnya.

Under President Vladimir Putin, a Russian nationalist ideology has become a mainstay of his rule.

The coronavirus pandemic, however, has been disrupting his ambitious visions. Victory Day, marked on May 9, commemorates the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany and has long been a cornerstone of Russian patriotism.

Usually observed by world leaders hosted by Putin amid throngs of veterans, it may be canceled because of COVID-19.

An April 22 referendum to approve constitutional changes has already been postponed. The proposal, passed on March 24 by the lower house of Parliament just hours after it had been introduced, would allow Putin to serve for an additional two six-year terms when his current tenure expires in 2024. 

He could serve as head of state until 2036. If so, he will have held the nation’s highest office for 32 years, longer than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin but still short of Tsar Peter the Great, who reigned for 43 years.

Russian nationalists in 1991 faced a dilemma. As the core of the Soviet system, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – today’s Russian Federation -- lacked distinctly Russian counterparts to the political, economic, and cultural institutions that the non-Russian republics took for granted.

There had been no place for a Russian state in the ideology and, hence, no ideologically justifiable ways of promoting its interests as a state. As the presumption was that the entire Soviet space was Russian, the ideology could not offer much solace to Russian state-builders. It did, however, offer another source of legitimacy, the Russian nation.

Because the RSFSR lacked a comparable institutional and ideological status, Russian elites had no ideologically legitimized base to fall back on when the USSR imploded. Instead, the source of their legitimacy turned out to be the Russian nation itself.

Russian Communist elites also jumped on the republican bandwagon in the final years of perestroika, with Boris Yeltsin deliberately using the RSFSR as a power base for his struggle with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1991 Russia inherited the bulk of the Soviet state -- the central ministries, the army, and the secret police, and it possessed a sense of cultural superiority and historical destiny that underpinned both nationhood and empire.

Some nationalists went even further, insisting on regaining Russian-populated areas no longer within its boundaries. 

Today the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside Russia live in former Soviet states such as Ukraine (about 8 million), Kazakhstan (about 3.8 million), Belarus (about 785,000), Uzbekistan (about 650,000), Latvia (about 520,000), Kyrgyzstan (about 419,000) and Estonia (about 328,000).

North-eastern Estonia, the urban parts of Latvia, much of Belarus, eastern Ukraine and the Crimea, and northern Kazakhstan, all with substantial ethnic Russian populations, have been the repeated targets of Russian rhetoric.

Russian policymakers, including Putin, have developed elaborate schemes for protecting the rights of their “blood relatives” in the “near abroad.” This has become a central theme of Russian political discourse.

Not Everyone in Israel Took Virus Seriously

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

When it comes to calamities, Israelis have been there, done that. More than 25,000 have been killed over the decades in wars, missile strikes, and terrorist attacks in a nation of less than nine million people.

On March 19 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a national state of emergency. Israelis were told to remain in their homes and work from there unless it is absolutely necessary to leave. All Israelis were expected to wear masks or scarves if going outside.

Schools, churches, mosques and synagogues are shuttered. The courts are shut down. Visiting parks, beaches, pools, libraries and museums is prohibited, as are all social interactions. Only “essential” services would remain open, including supermarkets, pharmacies and most medical services. The army is aiding in enforcement.

Some people were shocked by the Ministry of Health’s decision on March 17 to initiate a digital surveillance program designed to track the movements of infected citizens or those suspected of being infected, via their cell phones.

When the cabinet order was challenged, the Supreme Court required legislative authorization and oversight.

The ministry launched a new app on March 22 called “The Shield” which allows people to identify whether they have come in contact with a known coronavirus carrier in the 14 days preceding the patient’s diagnosis of the disease.

While Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau, urged the public to abide by the government’s policies, one segment, comprising about 12 per cent of the population, has been more recalcitrant.

Many haredi (ultra-Orthodox) have high levels of poverty and live within large families in crowded neighbourhoods. Their access to the internet and social media is also limited for religious reasons. 

They consider themselves as a kind of “state within a state” and listen to their rabbis far more than to politicians. This has been a cause of friction and animosity between them and the rest of society.

Ultra-Orthodoxy’s highest living authority, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, at first overruled the government’s order that all educational institutions be shut and ordered all ultra-Orthodox schools and yeshivot to remain open.

Many in those communities were at first ignoring rules forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people, including for prayers, weddings, and funerals. Their religious yeshivas also stayed open.

Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, was at first reluctant to acknowledge the threat. He resisted the stringent limitations on public movement his ministry’s own senior officials sought to impose. 

Avigdor Liberman, chair of the Israel Our Home party, on April 6 rebuked the haredi leadership, accusing it of “endangering the health of the public.” 

Liberman, who has often clashed with the ultra-Orthodox over issues of religion and state, criticized lawmakers from the United Torah Judaism and Torah-Observant Sephardim (Shas) parties for calling for limits to the restrictions on ultra-Orthodox towns, so that the community wouldn’t be singled out.

Police dispersed hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem March 30, following efforts to convince the community to comply with social-distancing orders. Of Jerusalem’s cases, 75 per cent were concentrated there. 

The government on April 2 approved a full, military-enforced closure on the haredi city of Bnei Brak, which has the highest number of infections per capita -- almost 40 per cent of its 200,000 inhabitants. The same quarantine followed for other predominantly haredi cities. 

There was also a complete nationwide lockdown for the first and last two days of the Passover holiday, prohibiting all travel between cities.

Yossi Elituv, editor of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamishpaha, tweeted on April 5 that many Israelis were trying to “turn the ultra-Orthodox into scapegoats.”

Israeli society and the ultra-Orthodox community will need to engage each other in a new dialogue, rather than the current enmity.

All told, though, Israel moved quickly and its relatively low death rate provides room for wary optimism. 

It appears any exit strategy would be run in three phases, each of around two weeks, with office workers first returning to work, followed by stand-alone stores opening, and finally schools would resume.

Still, as Netanyahu remarked last month, “No one knows where this is going to go. I am navigating the Titanic and there are many icebergs before us.”

China Seeks to Recover Image After Virus Crisis

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, N.B.] Times & Transcript

 

Having bungled its reaction at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, China is now hoping to build political ties around the world and defuse criticism that it allowed the disease to spread early on.  

Geopolitically, China’s move to brand itself as Europe’s savior aims to improve its standing on a global stage.

 “Now we see Chinese officials and state media claiming that it bought the world time to prepare for this pandemic,” remarked Natasha Kassam, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

While there is nothing wrong with China helping European and other countries, it is also clear that Beijing “sees its aid as a propaganda tool,” remarked Noah Barkin, senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

In the last few weeks, China has donated coronavirus testing kits to Cambodia, sent planeloads of ventilators, masks and doctors to Belgium, Italy and France, pledged to help the Philippines, Spain and other countries, and deployed medics and aid to Iraq and Iran.

One of the containers sent to Brussels was draped with the slogan “Unity makes strength” in French, Flemish and Chinese.

On March 12, one day before the World Health Organization announced that Europe had become the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of nine Chinese medical aid professionals arrived in Rome in response to the country’s “cries for help.”

Beijing sent an Air China flight carrying 1,000 ventilators, two million masks, 100,000 respirators, 20,000 protective suits, and 50,000 test kits.

“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang declared, referring to the aid.

 “This is what we call solidarity,” Foreign Affairs Minister Luigi Di Maio said. He posted a video of the plane of supplies and medics from China, noting that Beijing was the first to send aid.

In a phone call with Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte on March 20, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that he hoped to establish a “health silk road” as part as part of China’s global One belt, One Road Initiative.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 16 pledged help for Spain. “As we are consolidating the achievements of battling the disease,” Yi told Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez, “we are also willing to provide necessary support based on the needs of other countries.”

A day later, an aircraft carrying medical aid from China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and billionaire Jack Ma’s foundation arrived at Spain’s Zaragoza Airport.

Xi told the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, in a March 18 telephone call that he supports the measures taken by the Spanish government to contain the epidemic and understands the grim situation faced by Spain. He added that “sunshine comes after the storm,” and hoped that the two countries would step up cooperation and exchanges after the outbreak.

The Czech Republic’s president, Milos Zeman, also gladly accepted Beijing’s support. “This is China fulfilling its role as a responsible major country and the Chinese people making kind and selfless contribution to the global response,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said March 31.

 “We’re grateful for China’s support,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted on March 18.

“China’s experience is very valuable and can help Europe avoid detours,” Jean-Pierre Armand, an oncologist based in Paris, told reporters after a video conference with his Chinese peers on March 19.

On April 3, Foreign Minister Wang Yi told EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell that China is more than willing to help the EU and its member states. Borrell responded that he appreciated China’s support. He added that China was pushing the message that, unlike the United States, “it is a responsible and reliable partner.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, complaining that the EU wouldn’t help his country, which is not a member, could not have been more explicit when declaring on March 16, “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.” He said he believes in his “brother and friend Xi Jinping.”

Beijing is now portraying itself as the world’s “Noah’s ark” and global saviour.

Who Will Save Alberta from Disaster?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Alberta seems to stagger from one disaster to another. 

First it confronted its inability, thanks to a coalition of environmentalists and some native groups, to build pipelines.

This was followed by a precipitous decline in oil prices thanks to a Russian-Saudi price war, and now, of course, we have the shutdown of entire sectors of the economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We now project Alberta’s economic contraction -- at minus 5.6 per cent -- to be the most severe the province has ever experienced in a single year and the largest in Canada,” concluded a forecast from RBC Economics released March 25. The collapse in oil prices has been a “massive blow.” Some are calling it an “apocalypse.”

Alberta’s unemployment rate was already higher than the national average. A TD Economics Forecast, which appeared two days later, suggests the unemployment rate would rise to 9.5 per cent this month. Alberta is potentially looking at a deficit this year of $15 billion or higher.

Many of its largest employers, including oilsands producers Suncor Energy Inc. and Athabasca Oil Corp., and WestJet Airlines, are being hit particularly hard by the decline in oil demand and tourism, laying off thousands of employees.

The province revealed March 28 it was cutting funds for some 26,000 educational assistants and substitute teachers.

University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz asserted that the oil-price shock alone is expected to take at least $45 billion out of the Alberta economy this year. “The impact is over $200 million per day,” he said. “The government could spend money on stimulus, but they’re not going to spend that much money.”

The province is reeling – and it has already been suffering economic hardship for more than five years, following a previous drop in oil prices. 

Nonetheless, TC Energy Corp. is proceeding with its long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline and oil prices may rebound if the Russians and Saudis cut production.

Premier Jason Kenney compared the current economic crisis the province is facing to the Great Depression. “We must begin to prepare ourselves for a time of adversity unlike any we have seen since the 1930s in this province,” he warned Albertans March 19.

Kenney announced a number of financial programs including six-month mortgage, credit-card and line-of-credit payment deferrals through the provincially owned bank, ATB Financial. As well, there will be $50 million in income supports for people self-isolating. Oil sands workers will be declared essential.

Mintz has been appointed Chair of a new Alberta Economic Recovery Council to provide insight and advice on how to protect jobs during the economic crisis.

The council will also focus on strategies for long term recovery, including efforts to accelerate diversification of the Alberta economy.

Albertans are angry at the lack of support from other parts of Canada despite Alberta’s huge $650-billion financial contribution in transfer payments over 60 years. They feel Ottawa would never allow central Canada to twist in the wind like this.

Kenney has been quite vocal in telling the rest of the country about Alberta alienation. He created a Fair Deal Panel last fall that was tasked with studying whether to withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan, form a provincial police force and establish a formal provincial constitution.

It included a question on separation, which NDP opposition leader Rachel Notley argued stoked the fires of a fringe movement.

Alberta is landlocked within Canada, a major concern if new oil and gas pipelines fail to gain approval. It was created as a creature of the federal government in 1905 and didn’t even control its natural resources until 25 years later. Many central Canadians have, psychologically, seen it as a semi-frontier region, to be exploited by the population in the east.

How’s this for a suggestion? The difference between what Albertans have paid in federal taxes and received back in transfer payments totals runs to hundreds of billions of dollars. Why not have Ottawa reimburse the province some of that money?

Canada is a country with vast geographic, ideological, and linguistic differences, and it takes skill to keep it united. National-unity rifts with Alberta were already an issue. If Alberta cannot get a fair deal from the rest of Canada, the separatist option is bound to grow.

Turkey's Ongoing Kurdish Question

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Anthropologist Deniz Duruiz, a specialist on the politics of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, spoke at the University of Prince Edward Island on March 13, the week before the university shut down.

Now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Duruiz earned her PhD in anthropology from New York’s Columbia University in 2019.

She studies seasonal agricultural labour practices in western Turkey, performed by over one million migrant workers from the Kurdish region of the country and by Syrian refugees. 

She is currently working on a book on Kurdish and Syrian migrant farm workers in Turkey. The book explores how a migrant labour practice categorized as “informal labour” is in fact heavily regulated by racialized class structures, family and kinship used as mechanisms of labour discipline and social control, regional economic isolation, and the normalization of securitization in the lives of the marginalized. 

She uses labour as an ethnographic lens to observe the multiplicity of practices through which migrants build, or re-build, their lives.

About 30 to 35 million Kurds today live across the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran; they constitute 18 per cent of Turkey’s population.

After World War I, the Kurdish people were left stateless. As a result, the new Turkish government systematically tried to eliminate Kurdish cultural influences from the nation. 

These efforts led to the renaming of Kurdish towns with Turkish names, as well as forcing the Kurds to take Turkish names. Kurds could not use their own language in public until 1991.

The label “terrorist” is relatively new in the history of racialization of Kurds. It marks the state’s response to no longer being able to deny the existence of the Kurds, as a result of the thirty-five-year-long armed resistance of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The unstable relationship between the Kurds and the Turkish government continued throughout the 20th century, intensifying in the 1990s. The PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured in 1999 in Nairobi and is currently in prison in Turkey.

Following a temporary 2015 ceasefire, Turkish military forces invaded multiple cities in Kurdistan, killing around 1,000 people, reducing buildings to rubble, and vandalizing homes, Duruiz remarked.

That tension further intensified in July 2016 after an attempted coup on the government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quashed.

“The dominant Turkish ethnicity is predicated upon the Kurd’s being a colonized and racialized other, whose potential for equal citizenship disturbs not only the status quo of the Turkish state order but the entire social order,” she explained.

The Syrian Civil War next door has also worsened relations. In October 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to withdraw from northern Syria, an area predominantly occupied by Kurdish forces, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from the Turkish military.

Turkey is now attempting to ‘”control the lifestyle in those areas,” in Erdogan’s words, and attacking Kurdish-controlled northern Syria.

The study of the Kurdish question is just beginning, Duruiz said. In the 1990s it was almost impossible to conduct ethnographic work in Kurdistan because researchers were jailed.

“I think we are the first generation of anthropologists who are educated in the United States, and who can translate this knowledge into an understandable, digestible form,” Duruiz told her listeners.