Mediterranean Nation is in a Mess

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Lebanon is in a mess.

But what else is new? There is no sense of national identity. The various religious communities — the Maronites, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis, and many others — claim their share of the politico-economic spoils.

From parliamentary seats down to administrative posts, the confessionalism that is the essence of the state requires their allocation by religious affiliation. In the meantime, public administration deteriorates, infrastructure rots, and inflation rockets.

STRING OF CRISES

The Lebanese people decided to challenge this status quo on Oct. 17, 2019, when people from all sects and regions took to the streets to say no to corruption, the political system, and for the first time, to the Shi’ite militia Hezbollah and its patron, Iran. But little changed.

The past few years have been dominated by a string of political and economic crises in Lebanon that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; the 2020 Beirut port blast which killed 216 people, injured 6,000 and shattered the homes of some 300,000 more; and a shortage of grains because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The World Bank reclassified Lebanon from an uppermiddle-income country to lower-middle-income last July. Many vital public institutions, including universities, service ministries and municipalities, are barely functioning. The financial crisis has led to an incredible 97 per cent loss of value in the Lebanese currency.

“A person that is earning 1,500,000 Lebanese pounds used to have an equivalent of $1,000 before the crisis, and now it is equivalent to less than $200,” according to Hussein Cheaito, a development economist at the Policy Initiative, a Beirut-based research centre. Those who have money in savings accounts are prohibited from withdrawing most of their funds from the banks. Stories abound of armed efforts to retrieve a depositor’s own savings.

IMPOSSIBLE REFORMS

Lebanon has seen prices soar for basic goods that has left three-fourths of the population in poverty. Some consumer items and especially many vital medical supplies are simply not available. October saw a cholera outbreak due to contaminated water, and those who can afford it drink bottled water — although it now costs eight times more than it did in 2019.

The World Bank has conditionally approved financial assistance of $3 billion upon the implementation of structural and financial reforms. But these reforms have been

impossible to implement in this political environment.

At the end of October, President Michel Aoun left office at the end of his six-year term without a successor, so the country has no head of state at the moment. It is currently ruled by a transitional government under caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, with limited power. (The country’s constitution requires the president, elected by parliament, to be a Maronite Christian. The prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim.)

Aoun warned that weeks of “constitutional chaos” lay ahead for the country, and he’s been proven right. Lawmakers have tried and failed to elect a new president. Aoun’s opponents have blamed him and his allies, the Iran-backed Shi’ite Hezbollah movement, for the impasse.

DIVIDED OPPOSITION

Hezbollah is now trying to promote Suleiman Frangieh, who is closely affiliated with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, as a candidate on its behalf, but the parliamentary camp that supports Hezbollah (the so-called March 8 Alliance), lacks the majority needed. They have only 60 members of parliament, but a two-thirds majority — 86 out of 128 MPs — are needed to choose a president in the first round of voting, followed by a 65-member simple majority in the second round.

But the opposition is highly divided. It includes two central blocs: the remnants of the March 14 Alliance, which opposes Hezbollah and the legacy of Aoun; and the so-called Change Bloc, which includes fragments of independent parties that are not affiliated with traditional camps.

The leading candidate so far has been Michel Moawad, son of former president René Moawad, who is affiliated with the bloc that opposes Hezbollah. But in the eleventh round of balloting held recently, Moawad received the support of only 34 members of parliament, all Hezbollah opponents. Another 37 MPs cast blank ballots and several others used their papers to make a protest.

In any event, Hezbollah can recruit a veto bloc of one-third of the MPs and it is doubtful whether the divided opposition will manage to reach a consensus and achieve the election of a candidate who will challenge that organization. Hezbollah’s goal today is to maintain their control by imposing their choice for the next president and their vision for the next government.

These disputes are likely to see the continued paralysis of the Lebanese political system for a long time. While no one seems ready to declare it a failed state, its government institutions are broken and non-functional.

 

 

Jacinda Ardern Leaves the New Zealand Stage

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

I’ve always considered the relationship between the two South Pacific settler states, Australia and New Zealand, as a “sun and planet” scenario, similar to that of the American-Canadian relationship.

In both cases the far smaller country, while culturally quite similar, lives in the shadow of the bigger, more aggressive one. Hence, it’s often ignored and, being jealous and annoyed but unable to do much about it, not being as “tough,” it takes on the role of the “upright, empathetic” and “virtuous” one.

This has been the case mainly since the 1960s. Prior to that, both Canada and New Zealand were less diffident and more forceful, because they were themselves part of another “sun” – the British Empire. But those days are long gone.

So perhaps it’s no coincidence that both countries have been governed of late by two virtue-signalling, ultra-“woke” prime ministers, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. But soon Trudeau will be the only one left, because Ardern has announced she is leaving office by Feb. 7, just shy of six years since she became Labour Party leader in New Zealand and before the expiration of her second term.

She, like Trudeau, has been a “star” as far as the international left is concerned. “New Zealand Gripped by ‘Jacindamania’ as New Labour Leader Soars in Polls,” a headline in the London-based Guardian announced, when she became prime minister in August 2017.

Gushed journalist Eleanor Ainge Roy, “Much has been made of Ardern’s youth and quick wit. She lives with a television presenter, enjoys single malts, music festivals and cheese and crackers for dinner when she’s rushed, according to her own revelations in the media about her life.”

In 2018, she became just the second world leader to give birth while holding office. When she brought her infant daughter to the floor of the UN General Assembly in New York that September, it made news around the world.

So Ardern had found herself the darling of the global left during a period when right-wing leaders emerged around the world. New Zealand’s youngest prime minister in 150 years, she reached celebrity status with the speed of a pop star. Her youth, pronounced feminism, and emphasis on a “politics of kindness” made her look to many like a welcome alternative to bombastic male leaders.

A New York Times article by Sushil Aaron published March 19, 2019, made that very clear.  “New Zealand’s prime minister is emerging as the progressive antithesis to right-wing strongmen” like President Donald Trump, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Narendra Modi of India, “whose careers thrive on illiberal, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric.” He might also have mentioned Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, known -- not very kindly -- as the “Trump of the tropics.”

Not everyone has been so favourable to Ardern. As Tom Slater, editor of the British online magazine Spiked, noted in “Good Riddance to Saint Jacinda,” published Jan. 19, “Ardern is in many ways an archetypal leader of our age, in which politicians draw just as much legitimacy, if not more, from the warm feeling they give international elites than what it is they actually do and achieve for their domestic population.”

CTV’s Don Martin also posted a less flattering picture of the outgoing leader on its news site Jan. 20: “On the far side of the planet a once-popular feminist prime minister, who battled violent Parliament-obstructing protests over pandemic policy, divided the population over its vaccination status, fought to green up resource industries and struggled with an economy inflating into recession, has called it quits just as an election year dawns with her polling numbers skidding downward.”

It was mainly the COVID-19 pandemic that brought about her downfall. She locked down New Zealand during the pandemic and then refused to lift lockdowns unless 90 per cent of the country complied with the vaccine rules.

Extended lockdowns and vaccine mandates hurt the economy, fueled conspiracy theories and spurred a backlash. In February of last year, inspired in part by the protests here and in the United States, demonstrators camped on the Parliament grounds in Wellington for more than three weeks, pitching tents and using parked cars to block traffic.

The police eventually forced them out, clashing violently with many of them, leading to more than 120 arrests. The attacks did not cease even as the worst of the pandemic receded, and many described her policies as “authoritarianism.”

Act New Zealand Party leader David Seymour said her government’s policies had resulted in New Zealand experiencing a level of despair not seen for years. This year, Ardern was forced to cancel an annual barbecue she hosts due to security fears.

New Zealanders are bearing the brunt of a deteriorating economy post-COVID, with inflation that has compounded the cost of living and concern about crime rates. In December she announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry would look into whether the government made the right decisions in battling COVID-19 and how it can better prepare for future pandemics. Its report is due next year.

While the prime minister said abuse or threats to her and her family had not been a decisive factor in her decision to resign, her supporters claim that constant vilification and personal attacks contributed, with some MPs saying the prime minister was “driven from office.”

 

 

Poland Asks Germany for $1.7 Trillion in War Reparations

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

Poland is now asking Germany for almost $1.7 trillion dollars in reparations for the loss of lives and damage to the country’s infrastructure during the years that Hitler’s Nazis occupied the country. Poland suffered more, in proportion to its size, population, and length of occupation, than any other nation during the Second World War.

Entire cities were virtually destroyed and some six million Polish citizens, more than half of them Jews, were murdered. Warsaw was razed to the ground following a 1944 uprising in which at least 200,000 civilians died. By war’s end, one fifth of the country’s total population had been killed. Most were civilian victims of war crimes and genocide.

Within occupied Poland, the Germans had built six notorious death camps, Chełmno, Sobibor, Bełzec, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazis also established hundreds of ghettos and slave labour camps throughout the country for their war effort. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.

The Poland Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has opened an exhibition in Warsaw titled “Economy of the Third Reich,” claiming that the sources of Germany’s current economic strength rest on infrastructure and technology that was developed through the exploitation of forced labour by well-known German companies in the concentration camps.

My parents were imprisoned in one, HASAG-Pelcery, located in their home city of Czestochowa. The rest of their respective families were murdered in either the Treblinka extermination camp or in the Czestochowa ghetto uprising.

Even after almost eight decades, this has not been forgotten. Last Sept. 1, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, presented a report looking into the financial damages caused by Germany’s invasion and occupation in the war.

A parliamentary committee found the losses amounted to 6.2 trillion zlotys (roughly $1.7 trillion Canadian) and added that Poland would officially demand reparations. The sum, which represents around one-third of Germany’s present-day GDP and around one-sixth of global GDP during the war itself.

Last Oct. 10, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau signed a diplomatic note describing Warsaw’s demands for reparations. His announcement came ahead of a visit to Poland by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Rau called for a “final” and “durable” settlement between Warsaw and Berlin on the issue of the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945. “Such a settlement would allow us to base Polish-German relations on justice and truth and close painful chapters of history.”

But Baerbock responded during a joint news conference that she had discussed the diplomatic note with Rau and reiterated the German government’s position that the matter was settled.

In 2004, Jochen Frowein, an expert on international law, concluded that no such demand by Poland had any chance of being upheld in a court of law. He pointed to the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, otherwise known as the Two Plus Four Agreement, signed in 1990, which paved the way for German reunification and also made clear that Germany would not be responsible to pay any further reparations stemming from World War II.

There is also a 1953 agreement, when Poland relinquished all claims to war reparations. However, today’s Polish government reminds Berlin that the country was at the time a Soviet satellite state and under pressure from the Soviet Union. Moscow wanted to free East Germany, another Soviet satellite, from any liabilities. The PiS argues that the agreement is invalid because Warsaw was not able to negotiate fair compensation.

Following Germany’s latest refusal to pay war reparations to Poland, Polish officials are calling on the United States and the UN for support. The government also aims to have its demands “clarified” to Germans.

“We do not accept Germany’s position. We reject it as completely unjustified and wrong. We will continue to act within Germany and on the international stage to urge the German population and the international community to change its position,” Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk declared.

He described Germany’s response as disrespectful to the Polish state and to Poles.” Germany does not pursue a friendly policy toward Poland,” he said on Jan. 3. “They want to create a sphere of influence here and treat Poland as a vassal state.” Mularczyk plans to visit Washington to find allies in the U.S. Congress.

A survey carried out by the Ipsos Institute at the beginning of January found that 75 per cent of the German population oppose Poland’s demands, while 66 per cent of the Polish population support reparations from Germany.

Criticizing Germany seems to be one of the Polish right wing’s main objectives in the lead-up to parliamentary elections in the fall. Poland’s largest opposition party Civic Platform (PO), led by former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who served as President of the European Council until 2019, is widely condemned as a “stooge” of Berlin and its “control” of the European Union, with which the PiS is also at odds.

But whoever wins the election will have to address the reparations issue. In a parliamentary decision that the opposition also supported, Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm, determined that Poland had never received compensation for its war losses and that it never waived its claims. This isn’t going away.