Myanmar Coup Imperils its Quasi-Democracy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The military in Myanmar overthrew the government of Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1. They claimed they mounted the coup d'état because her political party committed massive fraud in last year's election. She has been detained and a one-year state of emergency declared.

UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Tom Andrews has called for sanctions and an arms embargo.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) won more than 80 per cent of the vote last Nov. 8, remaining hugely popular among the majority Buddhist electorate even in the face of allegations of genocide against the country’s Rohingya Muslims. It captured 396 out of 476 seats in the combined lower and upper houses of Parliament.

The Myanmar constitution forbade Suu Kyi from becoming president because she has children who are foreign nationals. Though her official title is state counsellor, Suu Kyi, now 75, has been the country’s de facto leader.

For the past five years, her once-banned party led the country after being elected in November 2015. The NLD was about to begin its second term in office.

But behind the scenes, the military has kept a relatively tight grip on Myanmar thanks to a 2008 constitution drawn up during the junta’s rule which guarantees it a quarter of all seats in parliament and control of the country’s most powerful ministries, including home affairs, defence and border affairs.

Could the NLD, with its majority, have amended the constitution? Unlikely, as that requires the support of 75 per cent of parliament, an almost impossible task when the military controls at least one quarter of the seats.

Following November’s election, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) opposition immediately began making accusations of fraud after the vote. The allegation has now been repeated by the military, and General Min Aung Hlaing has taken control of the country.

Aung San Suu Kyi has herself had a checkered career. The daughter of the country’s founding leader, in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and hailed as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

The army had placed her under house arrest in 1989. Altogether, she was held captive for a total of 15 years over a 21-year period, until finally released in November 2010.

The military government had held national elections in May 1990, which Suu Kyi's NLD won, but the junta refused to hand over control. However, a slow transition to civilian control began, culminating in the 2015 election and her assumption of power.

But her image has suffered internationally due to her response to the crisis that befell Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

In 2017 hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh due to an army crackdown sparked by deadly attacks on police stations in Rakhine state.

Following independence from British rule in 1948, the Bamar majority in Myanmar built a nationalism that was based on the Burmese language and Buddhism, combined with an authoritarian state apparatus. Since 1962, it has been ruled most of the time by the military and has little experience with democracy.

Myanmar now faces a lawsuit accusing it of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), while the International Criminal Court is investigating the country for crimes against humanity.

Suu Kyi’s international supporters accused her of doing nothing to stop rape, murder and possible genocide by refusing to condemn the military or acknowledge accounts of atrocities.

Her defence of the army’s actions at the ICJ hearing in the Hague in December 2019 tarnished her reputation. In a 17-0 decision, the ICJ on Jan. 21 of this year rejected Myanmar’s argument that the deaths of the Rohingya were part of an “armed military conflict.”

The military removal of a regime is, by definition, non-democratic and speaks to something very wrong in the political life of a country. Most of us instinctively recoil from the idea.

But are all coups by definition bad? Actually, some have occurred, oftentimes as a last resort, against despots, tyrants and kleptocrats engaging in human rights violations or ethnic cleansing.

However, the new military regime in Myanmar will be no improvement over Suu Kyi’s and therefore has no redeeming features. 

 

Kazakhstan's Economy is Finally Rebounding

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

At 2.7 million square kilometres in area, Kazakhstan, one of the former central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, is the ninth-largest country in the world. It encompasses an area roughly as big as Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria combined.

Until two years ago, everyone in Kazakhstan born after 1990 had known only one leader for their entire life -- Nursultan Nazarbayev. He had been largely unchallenged as leader of the nation since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.

Many regarded him as a president for life, a common practice for authoritarian states in central Asia. After independence, he was returned to office against largely token opponents in 1999, 2005, 2011 and 2015. He enjoyed great popularity, although it was never possible to independently measure it because these were not free and fair elections.

But in a move that caught Kazakhs by surprise, he resigned in March 2019, and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, regarded as a hand-picked successor, became the new president, after snap elections were announced to complete the process.

In the weeks leading up to the June vote, police raided the homes of opposition figures and courts sentenced anti-government protesters to short prison stays.

Tokayev’s first decision as president was to rename the then capital, Astana, as Nur-Sultan, in honour of the departing Kazakh president.

Because Kazakhstan’s economy was closely linked to Russia’s in the centrally planned system of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the union in 1991 and the removal of Soviet economic infrastructure caused a severe economic downturn in the years that followed.

By 1995, GDP in Kazakhstan had fallen by 36 per cent. Unemployment rose and the proportion of people living below the poverty line grew from 25 per cent in 1992 to 43.4 per cent in 1999.

During the Soviet period, collectivised farms overtook nomadic shepherding in the steppes, though they were not as successful as the Soviets had hoped.

Unprofitable farms relied on money from the Soviet regime to survive. When the funds dried up, many people were forced to look elsewhere for work, and hundreds of thousands of people vacated the grasslands.

Since then, many farms have morphed back into grassy patches, dozens of ruined buildings lie crumbling, and equipment such as water pumps, formerly used by farmers to source water for their livestock, stand unused.

Livestock in the region plummeted. Data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reveals that the number of sheep on the Kazakh steppe fell from 33 million in 1992 to 8.7 million in 1999. Cattle numbers dropped from 9.5 million to 4 million.

The new country engaged in widespread privatization, although many profitable enterprises went to members of the government-connected elite.

But new oil extraction operations after 2002 restored the GDP share of industry to about 30 per cent, and overall economic indicators rose substantially. Development of petroleum, natural gas, and mineral extractions has attracted most of the over $40 billion in foreign investment in Kazakhstan since 1993 and now accounts for some 57 per cent of the nation’s industrial output.

The country’s population, having declined by nearly 1.5 million post-1991, is now growing again, and stands at 18.7 million – of which almost 20 per cent are ethnic Russians. So too has its economic output -- per capita income now stands at $9,686.

Atyrau, the oil capital of Kazakhstan, is situated on the Caspian Sea near the new Tengiz oil field, and already provides nearly a quarter of Kazakhstan’s national revenue.

Until the arrival of the Russians in the eighteenth century, the history of Kazakhstan was determined by the movements, conflicts, and alliances of Turkic and Mongol peoples. The Kazakhs’ nomadic society suffered increasingly frequent incursions by the Russian Empire, ultimately being included in the Soviet Union that followed it.

After the Bolshevik takeover of the tsarist state, at first the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the larger Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

It became the separate Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. The second-largest republic in the USSR, its capital was Alma-Ata, today known as Almaty.

Over time, as in many Soviet entities, dissatisfaction with authorities grew, reaching a peak during the 1980s, with political turmoil and rioting. In the end, Kazakhstan became the last republic to secede from the Soviet Union, on Dec.16, 1991, and was soon recognised as an independent state. Today, it seems to be an economically secure country.

 

The Arab Spring's Promise Has Failed Most Tunisians

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Tunisia has been seen as the country that benefited more than any other from the Arab Spring that swept the Middle East starting in 2011. Unlike Libya, Syria, and Yemen, it did not descend into civil war, nor did it oscillate between rule by the military or the Muslim Brotherhood, as was the case in Egypt.

After decades of contempt, brutality and arbitrary treatment from the police, along with corrupt government and the conspicuous enrichment of families close to Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s kleptocratic ruler, the small towns of Tunisia’s rural interior and then the coastal cities, including the suburbs of Tunis, rose up to demand social justice and reclaim their dignity.

The catalyst for mass demonstrations was the death of a 26-year-old street vendor, who set himself on fire in December 2010 in protest at the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal official in the poor town of town of Sidi Bouzid. Mohammed Bouazizi sold fruit and vegetables illegally because he could not find a job.

Anger and violence intensified following his death Jan. 4, 2011, and within 10 days Ben Ali was forced to resign and flee the country, after 23 years in power. He died two years ago in exile in Saudi Arabia. His ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally was banned and its resources confiscated.

At first, it seemed as if democracy had triumphed. Politicians went on to write a progressive constitution in 2014 and to build an inclusive political system that gave space to both Islamists and their former adversaries from Ben Ali’s ousted regime.

In fact, the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, a coalition of civil society organizations, for “its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia.”

It hasn’t turned out that way. Ben Ali’s successors have betrayed the revolution’s promise of dignity. Ten years on, the revolution has lost some of its momentum. The poverty is even more shocking, corruption still plagues daily life, and the political class is discredited.

Thanks to deadlock in its post-revolutionary parliamentary system, Tunisia has seen new governments at a rate of one per year, and three in just the last 12 months.

Despite expectations that the revolution would replace the elites in power, members of the former regime have resurfaced. The police were among the first vestiges of the old regime to return to the post-revolutionary landscape. Political parties are dominated by wealthy businessmen.

As faith in politics has dwindled, so has voter turnout. Over the course of Tunisia’s seven free elections, participation has fallen from a high of 68 per cent in the 2014 parliamentary elections to 42 per cent in 2019.

Tunisians have been expressing their anger publicly for many months now, but since November, just before the 10th anniversary of the revolution that brought down Ben Ali, that anger has grown louder. Hundreds of young people have been detained during ongoing nights of unrest since January 14.

Protestors have demonstrated and blocked roads, demanding jobs, local development, and meetings with representatives of the government to present their grievances and proposals.

Wrangles over wages have led to strikes and protests in vital sectors, including health, transport, and natural resources.

The victories won a decade ago are now under threat. A Truth and Dignity Commission, formally launched in June 2014 to investigate gross human rights violations, was undermined when a law was passed by parliament in September 2017 that undermined its work by offering an amnesty to public officials accused of corruption.

There have been demonstrations in many cities by people hard hit by the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It continues to suffocate efforts toward reforms and investments, particularly in the southern half of the country, where levels of unemployment hover around 60 per cent.

Opportunities for most people have become so scant, especially in Tunisia’s impoverished interior, that at least 13,000 Tunisian migrants crossed to Italy by boat just in 2020.

Tunisians remain trapped by the same forces their protests sought to dispel a decade ago. Deposing a dictator is by itself not enough to create a new political culture and a viable economy.

 

African Nations Face a Daunting Decade Ahead

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

As we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, what are the prospects for Africa? Its nations face some daunting problems.

First, there remains the continuing problem of flawed elections.

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara won a controversial third term Oct. 31. Since opposition groups boycotted the election, only 54 per cent of the electorate cast a ballot.

They maintain Ouattara violated the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms. Main opposition candidates Pascal Affi N’Guessan and Henri Konan Bédié announced a rival “transitional government” in protest.

In Guinea, Alpha Condé won a third term as president on Oct. 18. In March the 82-year-old Condé, who has ruled for almost a decade, pushed through a new constitution that allowed him to run for two more six-year terms.

Dozens of people were killed during protests and Condé’s rival, Cellou Dalein Diallo, was trapped inside his home for over a week.

There were two contests in extremely poor states on Dec. 27. The Central African Republic saw the re-election of President Faustin Archange Touadera. His main challenger, Anicet Georges Dologuélé, was a former prime minister supported by former President François Bozizé.

Bozizé’s own candidacy was rejected by the country’s constitutional court after he was accused of planning a coup.

The opposition insisted the elections were an “electoral farce,” with widespread ballot stuffing, and a third of voters unable to cast ballots because of violence. Fighting has continued nationwide.

In Niger, former Interior Minister Mohamed Bazoum led in first-round balloting to succeed outgoing President Mahamadou Issoufou, his close ally. Bazoum was far ahead of former president Mahamane Ousmane, who was backed by Bazoum’s main opponent, Hama Amadou. But Bazoum fell short of the 50 per cent mark needed to win outright. A run-off will be held Feb. 20.

Amadou, who came second in 2016, was declared “ineligible” to run by the constitutional court on Nov. 13 because of a one-year prison sentence related to a baby-trafficking investigation.

An election in Uganda Jan. 14 saw President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986 and winner of five previous elections, returned to office. The home of opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi (popularly known as Bobi Wine) was surrounded by security forces and internet access was cut off. There were also unprecedented levels of violence and murder, and Wine rejected the results as fraudulent.

Africa also faces ongoing terrorism. In Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to create mayhem and the authorities seem unable to stop it. For a decade, the group has killed tens of thousands of civilians in their stronghold in northeast Nigeria.

The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara has been conducting attacks in the border regions of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. In Niger, gunmen killed more than100 people in a terror attack Jan. 2 near the border with Mali. Several armed groups took over the town of Bangassou in the Central African Republic Jan. 3.

This cycle of violence has also played out in Somalia and, in a recent troubling addition, northern Mozambique.

Corruption is another major hindrance; the continent loses about $100 billion each year due to this. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). On the most recent CPI, the African average score was 32, with corruption especially prevalent in the public sector.

 Under Julius Maada Bio’s presidency, Sierra Leone’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has actively tackled this practice. 

Government ministers and members of parliament are required to declare their assets and liabilities within three months of assuming office. Sierra Leone’s former president, Ernest Bai Koroma, is himself facing a corruption trial. In October, he and 120 officials who served in his 2007–2018 administration were barred from leaving the country.

South Africa’s recent corruption scandals have centred around COVID-19 funds and pushed the country towards new anti-corruption measures. Allegations of widespread mismanagement has undermined confidence in a government that had initially received international acclaim for its response to the pandemic.

It has become a source of embarrassment for President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected on a platform of stamping out corruption. He called those accused “a pack of hyenas circling wounded prey,” and announced a new law enforcement unit to investigate the allegations.

 

Biden Administration Faces Unprecedented Challenges

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Perhaps no president other than Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt comes into office facing greater problems than does Joe Biden, who becomes the 46^th president of the United States today. But few have had more experience in federal politics.

This alone makes the contrast between him and outgoing president Donald Trump, who never held any elected office until 2016, all the more stark. Biden served as a U.S. Senator from Delaware for six terms from 1973 to 2009 and was vice-president under Barack Obama.

The new president faces a somber domestic political situation. The election results were razor thin. The country is fiercely divided, geographically, culturally, and politically. A mob stormed the U.S. capital Jan. 6, creating mayhem to make their point.

Biden, at 78 years of age, is by far the oldest man to move into the White House. Not surprisingly, then, health care remains a top priority for him, and he supports adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, a centrepiece of Obama’s presidency.

First and foremost, though, Biden must deal with the worst public health crisis in 100 years. He must quickly scale up the manufacture and administration of hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines, in the most complex logistical operation in generations.

Millions of Americans are now unemployed and tens of thousands of businesses have been destroyed. There will have to be a massive stimulus plan, on the scale of Roosevelt’s New Deal, to bring the economy back from the abyss.

Biden has announced plans for a “American Rescue Plan” that will include a new benefit for children in poor and middle-class households, plus $2,000 in stimulus payments, unemployment benefits and other assistance for the ailing economy.

He has also promised that he will push to raise taxes on the richest households and partially reverse tax cuts granted to companies during the Trump administration.

Biden’s ambitious plans on climate change may face hostile Republican lawmakers in Congress. To do an end-run around them, he may seek to use sweeping executive power, but this invites pushback, perhaps even by the Supreme Court.

Though the Democrats will now control both houses of Congress, Biden will face pressure from his party’s own progressive wing. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both opposed him in the party’s primaries, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others in the House of Representatives, have their own domestic agendas.

They will try to push him hard on various radical measures they support, such as the Green New Deal, debt forgiveness for college graduates, and “Medicare for all,” the single-payer measure they advocate.

On the foreign policy front, Biden has picked Antony Blinken, his closest foreign policy adviser, for secretary of state, a job which will entail dealing with China, Iran and Russia, all countries with which Washington has perennial problems.

Blinken will have as his new deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, a lead negotiator during the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement talks. Renewing the agreement, which was abrogated by Trump, is something Biden hopes to revisit. But it may not be possible to reconstitute the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in its original form.

Biden is choosing Victoria Nuland as under secretary of state for political affairs. A fierce critic of Russia, she is sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.

Washington also needs to confront China on its human rights violations and aggressive behaviour in Asia. As well, Biden will have to tell Central American states to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty that is driving people to leave their homes there.

What about the Middle East? In an interview last year, Biden called Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan an “autocrat” and has described Saudi Arabia as with a government that has “very little social redeeming value.”  

There is one problem that the Biden administration will lose less sleep over: after the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Bahrain, and the Moroccan-Israeli peace deal, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become less critical.

But symbolic gestures to reassure the Palestinians that they have not been forgotten are in the pipeline, such as reopening U.S. consulates in East Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington.

 

Morocco and Israel Normalize Ties -- at the Expense of Western Sahara

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Last month the North African kingdom of Morocco became the fourth Arab country to normalize ties with Israel, following the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

The move is the culmination of a successful year of upgrading Israel’s relations with Arab and Muslim countries, beginning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Chad and meeting Sudan’s leader in Uganda, followed by the Abraham Accords, as well as the warming relations and cooperation with Saudi Arabia.

 Early in 2020, Israel proposed to the White House that normalization of relations with Morocco would come in conjunction with American recognition of Western Sahara as part of the kingdom.

Morocco has always had fewer hostile views of Israel than other Arab states, something emphasized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the Dec. 10 agreement.

“Everyone knows the warm ties of the kings of Morocco and the Moroccan people to the Jewish community there,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to Israel from Morocco and they form a living bridge between the people of Morocco and Israel. This solid base is the foundation on which we build this peace.”

Morocco already had semi-normal relations with Israel. The late King Hassan II tried to be a behind-the-scenes catalyst in the Arab-Israeli peace process. In July 1986, he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in an effort to stimulate progress.

Two months later, Hassan met with a delegation of Jews of Moroccan origin. In 1993, after signing the Oslo Accords with the PLO, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid a formal visit to Morocco. 

This latest deal was brokered by Donald Trump. Following the announcement, Trump spoke with King Mohammed VI of Morocco, who agreed “to expand economic and cultural cooperation to advance regional stability.”

The king, Morocco’s “Commander of the Faithful,” has pushed for a tolerant Islam that ensures freedom of worship for Jews and foreign Christians. One of his predecessors, Mohammed V, resisted the anti-Semitic laws promulgated during the Second World War, when the country was a French protectorate and, for a time, under the rule of the fascist collaborationist Vichy regime.

Fouad Chafiqi, director of the Education Ministry’s academic programs department, announced that Jewish history and culture in Morocco will soon be part of the school curriculum. The decision “has the impact of a tsunami,” remarked Serge Berdugo, secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco.

Education Minister Said Amzazi and the heads of two Moroccan associations also signed a partnership agreement “for the promotion of values of tolerance, diversity and coexistence in schools and universities.” At the end of December, a Moroccan delegation arrived in Israel to prepare to open a liaison office.

The presence of Jews in Morocco stretches back more than 2,000 years. Before the founding of Israel in 1948, estimates put their number as high as about 275,000, some 10 per cent of the population. It was the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world. Jewish Moroccans have held cabinet-level positions and advisory roles to multiple monarchs.

Today, after vast waves of departures over the years, only about 2,000 Jews remain in Casablanca and about 500 elsewhere in Morocco.

Most cities have a mellah, an old Jewish quarter, along with Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. The last Moroccan Jewish day school, Neve Shalom, is in Casablanca, the economic and business centre of the kingdom.

For years thousands of Jews of Moroccan origin, including from Israel, have been visiting the land of their ancestors, to celebrate religious holidays or make pilgrimages.

The Museum of Moroccan Judaism in suburban Casablanca, was opened in 1997., Last January, King Mohammed VI inaugurated the House of Memory, which celebrates the coexistence of Jews and Muslims in the port city of Essaouira.

The losers in this deal were the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony. Morocco annexed it in 1975, but it is claimed by the Sahrawi Democratic Arab Republic. It hosts the Polisario Front, the separatist group fighting for independence, which controls about one-fifth of the desert territory. Washington is opening a consulate in the Western Saharan city of Dakhla as well as providing $4 billion in economic and military aid to Morocco.

 

Russia’s Return to Africa

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In October 2019 around 40 African heads of state attended the first Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum, held on the initiative of President Vladimir Putin at the former Olympic village in Sochi.

The summit’s final declaration set out ambitious objectives — Russia aimed to double trade with Africa within five years — and called for a second summit to be held in 2022, probably at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, seat of the African Union.

This confirmed Russia’s return to Africa, and its renewed interest in the continent as part of an overall foreign policy strategy.

“The development and strengthening of mutually beneficial ties with African countries and their integration associations is one of Russia’s foreign policy priorities,” Putin said.

Soviet influence in Africa for many years followed the progress of decolonisation and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It became a foreign policy issue for the Kremlin in the 1950s, as the Belgian, British, French, and Portuguese empires began to collapse.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union gave massive economic and military support to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and took an interest in other national liberation movements.

From 1956 the Soviet Union forged close links with the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria fighting the French. The Soviet special forces centre at Perevalnoe, in Crimea, trained anti-apartheid fighters from Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo).

The Soviet Union also deployed soft power, establishing the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University (now the People’s Friendship University of Russia), named after the Congolese independence leader. It was created in 1960 to provide higher education to Third World students. It became an integral part of the Soviet cultural offensive in nonaligned countries.

But Moscow’s interest in Africa was diminished following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the course of the next two decades, post-Soviet Russia showed little interest in the continent and only in the late 2010s did the Kremlin once again begin to play a greater geopolitical role; sub-Saharan Africa re-emerged in Russian political discourse as trade and diplomatic traffic increased.

Moscow revived its associations with Africans who had studied in the Soviet Union and launched initiatives to lure more students to Russia. It rekindled relations with Soviet-era clients like Mozambique and Angola and forged new ties with other countries.

Under Putin’s leadership, the country has once again become a major force on the continent. The Kremlin aspires to pull African states into the network of geopolitical alliances that it has built to cast itself as a revitalized great power, international mediator, and effective counter-terrorism partner.

Part of Russia’s current engagement with Africa is military. The Russian army and Russian private military contractors linked to the Kremlin have expanded their global military footprint in Africa, seeking basing rights in a half dozen countries and inking military cooperation agreements with 28 African governments, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

The Wagner Group – a military enterprise connected to the Russian state –expanded its actions south of the Sahara. U.S. officials estimate that around 400 Russian mercenaries are operating in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Moscow recently delivered military equipment to support counterinsurgency operations in northern Mozambique. Russia is also now the largest arms exporter to Africa, accounting for 39 per cent of arms transfers to the region in 2013-2017.

Russia also sees an opportunity to boost trade with Africa and mitigate the negative economic consequences of its deteriorating relationship with the West after sanctions were imposed on Moscow in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea.

Moscow tripled its trade with Africa from $6.6 billion in 2010 to $18.9 billion in 2018. Russia also broadened its economic strengths beyond arms sales, adding investment in oil, gas, and enhancing nuclear power across the continent, while also importing diamonds from the CAR, bauxite from Guinea, and platinum from Zimbabwe.

Times have changed since the Soviet Union’s efforts to counter Western imperialism in Africa through Marxist ideology. Russia’s foreign policy today has no such ideological ambitions, yet its narrative continues to stress opposition to Western interference in the domestic politics of African states, be it through the promotion of democracy and human rights or military interventions.

Many African leaders have therefore welcomed Russia’s renewed interest, because it aligns with several African political, security, and economic objectives. Russia’s overtures in Africa also enable African governments to play the United States and Russia off each other: If Washington presses too hard on democracy and human rights, African nations can threaten to move closer to Moscow.

 

Cuba's Once-Glorious Revolution Has Faded Away

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Until the coronavirus struck, Canadians seeking a cheap winter holiday looked at Cuba as a vacation spot. A million of us visit every winter. But the days when the island inspired Canadian left wingers are long gone.

Cuba, the first Communist nation in the western hemisphere, was considered a model throughout Latin America and as far afield as Africa and Asia – though it was probably admired more as a beachhead of anti-imperialism and defiance of the United States than for its Communism.

As a Soviet ally, so dangerous did it seem to Washington that the world narrowly averted a nuclear war in October 1962.

I wrote an MA thesis on the Cuban revolution at McGill University and visited the island in 1975. Those were the days when college students would hang posters of Che Guevara on their dorm walls. He was an icon in the true sense of the word.

Back then, you couldn’t fly to the island directly from Canada (not to mention the United States). I took a Russian-made airplane to Havana from Jamaica.

Though Fidel Castro and his 26^th of July Movement came to power on New Year’s Day 1959, the Cuban Communist Party was holding its first formal party Congress that year, and the country was full of Russians and east Europeans. Tourism was non-existent.

How things have changed, especially with the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, which left Cuba in dire economic straits.

Cuba struggled desperately during the so-called “Special Period in Time of Peace.” Factories shut down and supply shortages became part of everyday life. The economy shrank by half between 1989 and 1992. In August 1994, angry mobs shouted “Freedom” and “Down with Fidel.” Some 33,000 Cubans fled for Florida in homemade rafts.

Castro’s death in 2016 had little effect on the functioning of a state that had been run by his brother Raúl since 2008. In October 2019, Raúl passed the presidency on to Miguel Díaz‑Canel, a 60-year-old bureaucrat who was born after the Cuban revolution. However, Castro still heads the Communist Party.

Under the Economic Modernization Plan of 2010, the state opened opportunities for small private business, such as family-run restaurants and home hotels. Farmers were given more autonomy and price incentives to produce more food.

However, the government still controls the lion’s share of the economy. Díaz-Canel is widely expected to represent continuity, and few Cubans have seen any dramatic shifts. The island still bears the stamp of half a century of “Fidelismo.”

Health and education remain free in Cuba. The country has the most doctors per capita of any country in the Americas, and life expectancy is 79.

Human rights groups say that the government continues to punish dissent and public criticism. Censorship affects literature, the arts, and the media. However, the number of long-term political prisoners in Cuba dropped significantly under Raúl Castro.

In today’s Cuba, 62 special stores offer a wealth of goods for sale – but only in a currency other than the Cuban peso. The move has seen an economic divide between people across the island. On one side, there are those people who receive their salaries in Cuban pesos, on the other, there are those who have relatives abroad and are able to get money, mainly U.S. dollars, transferred to them.

COVID-19 has made things far worse. Though the country has managed to contain the coronavirus quite well, tourist travel to Cuba has plummeted and the island lost an important source of hard currency, plunging it into one of the worst food shortages in nearly 25 years.

That left the Cuban government with far fewer sources of revenue to buy the products it sells in state-run stores, leading to shortages of basic goods throughout the island.

Despite resuming diplomatic relations in 2015 under President Barack Obama, Cuba and the U.S. still find themselves on poor terms. Under Donald Trump, the American economic embargo was tighter than ever.

But the prospect of a détente between Washington and Havana under Joe Biden may ease Cuba’s economic troubles. He plans to bring the U.S. closer to normalized relations with Cuba, reversing many of the sanctions and regulations imposed during the Trump administration

 

America's Economic Divide Isn't Going Away

By Henry Srebrnik. [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

J.D. Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, now adapted into a Netflix film, is a poignant account of the destructive combination of de-industrialization, joblessness, addiction and family breakdown among America’s white working class. The book in effect foretold the election of Donald Trump that same year.

When the real estate bubble burst late in President George W. Bush’s tenure, America’s financial system nearly collapsed. Individuals and then the institutions that funded them defaulted on their loans and the entire economy went into a deep dive.

Vance’s book was published eight years after the 2008 crash. But people had already realized that the Great Recession, as it came to be called, had left a lasting imprint.

Already in 2012, opinion columnist Harold Meyerson, in an April  commentary in the Washington Post, “A Very Exclusive Recovery,” was aware that the so-called recovery was “different from all other recoveries.”

Almost three years after economic growth had resumed, he wrote, the real value of Americans’ paychecks was “stubbornly still shrinking” and “real average hourly earnings continue to decline.”

Why? Because most of the jobs being created were in low-wage sectors. Even manufacturing job wages were falling. At a new high-tech locomotive plant in Muncie, Indiana, workers were being paid $24,000 a year to assemble some of the most sophisticated machinery being built.

“That’s not the kind of money you can send your kid to college on, or use to shop for much more than your daily bread,” he observed.

Where was the money going? To profits and dividends, so that income growth went to the wealthiest 10 per cent of households. How had this come about?

Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, workers expected to have their jobs for as long as they chose. But in the late 1970s, plants began to shut down and jobs were gone forever.

American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. And with the rate of private-sector unionization down to 6.9 per cent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay.

Even before the 2020 pandemic had hit and destroyed tens of thousands more jobs and small businesses, urban demographer Joel Kotkin, in the winter 2019 issue of the journal American Affairs, called this “America’s Drift toward Feudalism.” Income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, he asserts, “creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy.”

The richest four hundred Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 185 million of their fellow citizens com­bined. While the top one per cent in America captured just 4.9 per cent of total U.S. income growth from 1945 to 1973, in the following two decades the country’s richest classes “gobbled up the majority of U.S. income growth.”

The income gap between the top one per cent of the population and the remaining 99 per cent is now at an all-time high.

Where is much of this wealth concentrated? In a few mega-technology firms -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix – which have achieved a combined net worth equal to more than the next 282 firms combined.

Silicon Valley is increasingly divided between an entrenched ultra-wealthy class and its dependent poor, work­ing largely in the service industries the moguls require. Many rely on public or private assistance.

This new feudal order’s ideologues – academics, teachers, public intellectuals, consultants, lawyers, and gov­ernment workers – have mostly attended elite universities, and their shared belief in meritocratic superiority binds them to the political order dominated by the oligarchy and helps legitimate its rule.

On the other hand, contends Kotkin, the fading prospects for the new generation outside this sector are all too obvious. “Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they en­tered an ascendant middle class.”

But today’s millennials are be­coming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. Three-quarters of American adults today will not grow up to be better off than their parents.

They will face a future without home ownership or secure employment. A recent Pew Research Centre analysis found that 52 per cent of young adults today resided with one or both of their parents.

This is not a recipe for a healthy democratic republic. There may be more Trumps in America’s future.

 

Can America’s Divisions be Healed?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This past semester, in a course on American political culture, one of the books we used was Richard Kreitner’s Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union.

A writer for the left liberal Nation magazine, Kreitner’s thesis is that, virtually from its foundation, the United States has had one or more regions, or groups of people, so angry with the post-1789 political order that they would rather leave the Union. The horrific Civil War of 1861-1865, fought over the issue of African American slavery, is only the best-known of such attempts.

Kreitner’s incisive analysis delves into how secession, division and other forces that separate Americans have played into the nation’s history, from revolutionary days until now.

Have we, in the Donald Trump era, entered another such age? President Trump’s victory in the 2016 election left liberals aghast; they refused to accept it and called themselves a “resistance.” This time around, a majority of Republicans, including members of Congress, believe Joe Biden stole the election through “ballot-harvesting” mail in votes. In effect, the equivalent of stuffing ballot boxes.

Biden has said the country’s democracy was “pushed, tested and threatened” and “proved to be resilient, true and strong.” Does he really believe that?

Consent-based political systems require shared, fundamental “ends.” In his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy, economist Anthony Downs wrote: “A two-party democracy cannot provide stable and effective government unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens.” The “means” may sustain dispute, but foundational assumptions must be shared.

Not anymore in today’s America, it seems. The strife is economic, cultural and political. Not only do the two political parties adhere to different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.

A Sept. 19, 2019 Brookings Institution study by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, “America has Two Economies -- and They are Diverging Fast,” notes that the people in each of these do completely different jobs, in different industries, in different places, for different pay.

The gulf in living standards between prosperous areas in California or on the East Coast and much poorer sections in the country is immense and reflects this abyss.

The ramifications are concerning. For example, the donors to American politicians in all 50 states are concentrated in a few ZIP postal codes. Of those that delivered the most campaign funding for the Democrats in 2020, four of the top five were in New York City, followed by Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Other top Democratic ZIPs this year were Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in greater Boston.

New York City was also over-represented among donors to the Republican Party, whose donor base is more geographically diverse, with a lot of money coming from Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Palm Beach, Florida.

The influence of money has polarized politics and has led to a major shift in the American public’s political values over the past two decades.

The share of Americans with ideologically consistent values has increased over this time and these political values also have become more strongly associated with partisanship.

Partisan identities have become much more closely aligned with other social identities. Partisan divides now overlay religious divides, cultural divides, geographic divides and racial divides. Americans feel like two peoples because they have become two peoples.

Politics has devolved into a contest between two sides where there is no bargaining, because there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalties. In 1960, five per cent of Republicans and four per cent of Democrats did not want their children to marry across party lines. Today, a majority of both hold this view.

Observes James Hankins, a professor of history at Harvard University, in his article “Hyperpartisanship: A Barbarous Term for a Barbarous Age,” published in the winter 2020 Claremont Review of Books, “Partisanship is normal; hyperpartisanship is not.”

Hyperpartisans live in bubbles, writes Hankins, cut off from rival claimants to public authority by mutual incomprehension and mutual revulsion. They are dogmatic, intolerant, unable to sympathize with alien points of view.

“Opponents are demonized, their reputations destroyed by all means possible. Democratic deliberation becomes impossible and political deal-making -- the normal business of interest-group politics in pluralist societies -- is despised as an intolerable violation of principle. Politics turns into a battle between non-negotiable demands. Compromise is impossible; the enemy must be crushed.” That way lies disaster.

When both of those sides are convinced that the other does not respect them, and does not think them equal or worthy, is reconciliation possible?

A chasm has opened up. Unfortunately, the usual way that polities exit from periods of hyperpartisanship is via war, revolution, or tyranny, Hankins cautions. Not a very comforting thought, is it.

 

Few Global Bright Spots in a Year to Forget

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The year of the pandemic has been the year from hell. In 2020, we faced a global medical disaster not seen in more than a century.

COVID-19 has overshadowed every other story, and its consequences will be felt next year and for many years to come. Lockdowns, social restrictions, fatalities, and a global economic downturn resulted. It’s by far the biggest event of 2020.

What else will the year be remembered for? Most notably, the continued rise of China as a world power; the defeat of Donald Trump in the November presidential election in the United States; and the prospects for peace between Israel and many of the Arab countries in the Middle East.

We all know the grim statistics around the coronavirus. More than 1.7 million deaths worldwide, including at least 320,000 in the United States and more than 14,000 in Canada. When the various vaccines will finally wind it down, the celebrations will equal those like the V-E and V-J days that ended the Second World War.

While the European Union has faced unprecedented fractures due to the pandemic, with Hungary and Poland, in particular, showing increasing irritation with the bureaucrats in Brussels, China has gone from strength to strength. It has already outlasted Donald Trump’s attempt to slow its path to becoming the hegemonic power in East Asia – and perhaps farther afield.

The coronavirus early in the year posed a domestic crisis for President Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, as well as a setback to his ambitions to project China’s power on the global stage. But Xi has managed to overcome this setback and place his country in a strong position heading into 2021.

China’s success in containing COVID has allowed Beijing to focus on longer term economic and development goals, as outlined in the 14th Five Year Plan. Since 1953, these have been the guiding documents signaling the policy direction for the country’s future economic and social development.

While observers will have to wait until March for the release of the full plan, the Communist Party leadership has indicated that it aims for China becoming a “moderately developed” economy by 2035 with a per capita GDP of about US$30,000, nearly three times the 2020 level.

China will continue the transition from producing cheap low-tech goods to be the high-end and specialized producer of goods and it will encourage the transition to “tech self-sufficiency.”

In foreign policy, Beijing will continue to aggressively build its air, land and naval forces, and project power in the East and South China Seas, testing American, Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean reactions. It has become more strident in its insistence that Taiwan is an indissoluble part of the Chinese nation and must return to the motherland.

Great power rivalry is at the core of China’s relationship with Washington. Divergences between their political structures are bringing irreconcilable differences to the fore. The rivalry has become a clash of values.

The United States sees China as a repressive regime that will use its economic clout to punish its foes and limit criticism from overseas, while China sees the United States as a hegemony that wants to stunt the growth of, and sow division within, its rival. This is a narrative that Xi has used to enhance the Communist Party’s legitimacy and his own consolidation of power.

China has also recently clashed with India along their contested Himalayan border, the latest skirmish in a conflict that has simmered since May. Tensions have continued to rise, with both sides reinforcing their troops in the area.

China is increasingly willing to leverage its growing economic and military power to advance its national interests in Asia, especially over disputed territory. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels growing pressure from populists to push back, despite the potential short-term economic consequences.

In the U.S., we near the end of the Donald Trump saga, with the outgoing president metaphorically being dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming that the election was “stolen” by the Democrats. This type of behaviour is a sign of the deep polarization that has become endemic in the United States.

Along with the nationwide protests led by Black Lives Matter that followed the death of George Floyd last May, the pandemic destroyed Donald Trump’s presidency. But he was already under constant and fierce attack.

But this was nothing new, really. The last four presidents have, for one reason or another, been considered illegitimate by wide sectors of the country.

George W. Bush was handed victory over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in 2000, and it’s possible that the latter might have otherwise prevailed. Barack Obama faced the “birther” claims that he was ineligible to assume the office because he had been born outside the country. Donald Trump was faced from Day One by a “Resistance” that insisted he was placed in office by Vladimir Putin (who, by the way, remains firmly in control of Russia).

And now, large numbers of Republican legislators and voters are convinced the Democrats engaged in fraud through the use of mail-in ballots to overcome what were substantial leads by Trump on election night in a number of states that he narrowly lost. Absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. So it’s now Joe Biden’s turn to face this challenge. Is the United States becoming virtually ungovernable?

Meanwhile, is peace – or at least normalization – breaking out in the Middle East? The new ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have marked the beginning of a new regional order. Oman may be next.

While cooperation on security and economic matters between Israel and many Arab states had been growing for years, this year saw economic, security, and pragmatism trump ideological considerations. They will now maneuver more openly and effectively in response to perceived shared regional threats from Iran and Turkey.

Joe Biden’s promise to take a harder stance on Saudi Arabia on its human rights record and its war in Yemen may move Riyadh, which fears Iran above all else, closer to Israel as well.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who dreams of the past glories of the Ottoman Empire, has of late issued numerous threats against not just Israel, but also Greece and the Greek-run part of Cyprus, and Ankara is now militarily involved in the anarchy that has enveloped Libya.

Iran remains the wild card in the region. In 2020 it continued to send weapons to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Houthis in Yemen. Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, cancelled by Trump in 2018, did nothing but embolden Tehran.

With Trump gone, will the Tehran regime expect to see the Biden administration return to diplomacy in order to thwart its regional ambitions and desire to wipe Israel off the map?

Latin America has been hard hit by the pandemic, with staggering death tolls in Brazil and Mexico. But Brazil’s populist president Jair Bolsonaro seems to have weathered the storm. As for the two Marxist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, both are in a bad state.

Over the past three years post-Castro Cuba has been hit hard by the U.S. embargo of Venezuela, which undercuts Caracas’ ability to provide external support. As for Venezuela itself, political discontent under President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013, has been fuelled by hyperinflation, power cuts, and shortages of food and medicine. More than five million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years.

Venezuela held parliamentary elections on Dec. 6, but they were boycotted as fraudulent and illegal by the opposition led by Juan Guaido, the speaker of the outgoing National Assembly. Things will only get worse in 2021.

 

Is Ghana Still a Democracy?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The West African nation of Ghana held presidential and legislative elections on Dec. 7, with incumbent President Nana Akufo-Addo from the center-right New Patriotic Party (NPP) again besting opponent John Dramani Mahama of the center-left National Democratic Congress (NDC) with a slim majority of 51.59 per cent of the vote against Mahama’s 47.36, thus avoiding a second round.

The two also went head-to head in 2016, when Akufo-Addo defeated Mahama, who had himself four years earlier won the presidency against then challenger Akufo-Addo. In 2008, running on the NPP banner, Akufo-Addo lost to the NDC’s John Atta Mills, who died in office.

This will be Akufo-Addo’s final term in accordance with the Ghanaian constitution. Mahama’s defeat in the 2016 presidential race had marked the first time since the reintroduction of democratic rule that an incumbent president had stood for re-election and lost.

Both men hail from long-established political families. Akufo-Addo’s father, Edward, was one of the so-called “Big Six” who led Ghana to independence in 1957. John Mahama’s father, Emmanuel Adama, was one of the first ministers of state for the northern region under Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

Akufo-Addo’s NPP and Mahama’s NDC each won 137 seats. One constituency was won by an independent candidate.

Youth unemployment, security concerns and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy were among the top issues Ghanaians were considering when voting. The NPP administration had introduced free senior high school, which the party campaigned heavily on.  

This was the first time that an election was held without the presence of former president Jerry Rawlings, who died Nov. 12. Rawlings, a military officer, came to power in a coup d'état in 1979 and headed a military junta until 1992.

Although the election was peaceful, the post-campaign period was contentious. There had already been clashes between NPP and NDC supporters, with some killed, as well as attacks on Electoral Commission officials.

Moreover, civil society representatives raised concerns about what they claimed were alarming levels of ethnocentric hate speech used by politicians and alleged abuse of state resources.

Ethnolinguistic affiliations play a role in Ghana, opposing the poorer North to the wealthier Ashanti region. Politicking and political communication in Ghana during elections rely heavily on ethnic influence, with the NDC representing the Ewe in the poorer Northern Volta region, and the NPP representing the Akans in the Ashanti region.

Ethnic polarisation has aligned with political polarisation to the extent that most people who belong to a certain ethnic group become members of a particular political organization or party aligned with it.

The NDC has rejected the results and said they planned to appeal. Mahama warned his opponent not to “steal” the election, accusing the sitting president of using the military to intimidate voters, and saying the verification process hadn’t been followed, making the vote “illegal.” He also claimed his party really won 140 parliamentary seats.

John Boadu, general secretary of the NPP warned about the implications of accusations coming from the NDC. “Creating insinuations creates a lack of credibility on our whole election process.”

This is a disturbing turn of events because Ghana has held competitive multiparty elections and undergone peaceful transfers of power between the two main political parties since 1996, following the resumption of democracy, with the NPP victorious four times, the NDC three.

Ghana is one of only four sub-Saharan African countries ranked “free” in 2020 on the Freedom of the World index that measures political rights and civil liberties. One reason? Ghana has a strong and independent media and consistently ranks in the top three countries in Africa for freedom of speech and press freedom.

As Joseph Yaw Asomah, a sociologist at St. Thomas University in Fredericton asserts, Ghanaian private media address political corruption through investigative reporting, agenda-setting, providing a forum for anti-corruption discussions, and acting as a pressure group for institutional and legal reforms as well as political accountability.

But the improper exploitation and deployment of ethnic sentiments for party support can pose a danger to democratic development. Ahead of the election, Mahama and Akufo-Addo had signed a peace pact committing to non-violence regardless of the outcome of the vote. We’ll see if this holds.

 

China's Reach is Extending to the Caribbean

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Jamaica has emerged as an anchor of Chinese activity in the Caribbean. It has received more Chinese government loans than any other Caribbean island nation, according to the Inter-American Dialogue, which closely tracks Chinese government financing in the region.

Over the past 15 years, Beijing has lent Jamaica some $2.1 billion for building roads, bridges, a convention centre and housing, according to the group. Grants have financed a children’s hospital, schools and an office building for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among other projects, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica.

And direct investments from Chinese firms in Jamaica poured more than $3 billion into projects like bauxite mining and sugar production.

China’s efforts in Jamaica are part of its global strategy to forge deep economic ties and strong diplomatic relationships around the world, in part through the building of major infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, the  global strategy adopted by Beijing in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organizations.

Jamaica, near the geographic centre of the Caribbean region, became a partner in the initiative in April 2019, in order to develop Special Economic Zones and ports so that its global logistics hub would become an essential component of the project.

Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing in November of 2019, to discuss further economic cooperation. Also addressed were renewable energy, border security, agriculture, health care, and higher education.

While the Jamaican government announced that it would stop negotiating new loans from China, it would continue to cooperate with the Chinese on major infrastructure projects through joint public-private partnerships.

Jamaican officials maintain that outstanding Chinese loans are not putting an extraordinary burden on the country. They amount to about four per cent of Jamaica’s total loan portfolio.

In turn, the United States has stepped up warnings about the risks of doing business with Beijing, underscoring what it says are potential hazards ranging from shoddy construction to predatory loans and espionage.

The current American ambassador to Jamaica, Donald Tapia, cautioned against installing fifth-generation mobile networks made by Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese firms. Tapia called China “a dragon with two heads.”

He scolded China for its geopolitical game of chess, centred, he said, on extracting natural resources with ulterior motives. When they go into a country, he warned. they go after two things -- the minerals and the ports. “I could tell you horror stories of countries where they have taken over the ports because those countries could not pay for their investment.”

During a visit to Jamaica Jan. 22, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Prime Minister Holness and told him it was “tempting to accept easy money from places like China.”

The Chinese Embassy in Kingston, responding to Pompeo’s remarks, said it had deepened its involvement with Caribbean states “on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”

“It seems that some U.S. politicians cannot go anywhere without attacking China, tarnishing China’s reputation, starting fires and fanning the flames and sowing discords,” the Chinese Embassy declared. “They can go on talking the talk if they so wish, but we will continue walking the walk. The world will tell plainly who is stirring up trouble and who is trying to make a difference.

“Latin America and the Caribbean countries, as independent sovereign countries, have every right to determine their own foreign relations including choosing their trade and investment partners. Others are in no position to impose interference or coercion out of ulterior motives.”

The pandemic has allowed China to strengthen the relationship further by donating or selling personal protective equipment, in what has come to be called “mask diplomacy.” The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, pledged in July that China would extend $1 billion in loans for vaccines to Latin American and Caribbean countries.

A crucial motivation for China’s Caribbean strategy also involves winning over the four remaining nations that officially recognize Taiwan instead of China as the country’s legitimate government, though this does not affect its policy towards Jamaica. Kingston established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1972 and is one of nine in the region that recognize the People’s Republic.

 

Jamaica’s Brutal Colonial Legacy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Caribbean island of Jamaica has a population of less than three million, yet this small country has a global importance greater than many that are far bigger. This is the focus of The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson’s recently published book.

Himself Jamaican, Patterson contends that the extremely brutal history of the island’s slave system explains much of modern Jamaica’s dysfunction, including a high incidence of violence: last year 1,332 people were murdered, a per capita rate three times higher than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In January 2018, due to rampant violence and murders, the government of Jamaica declared States of Emergency and Zones of Special Operations for several parishes.

Numerous historians have documented that more abducted Africans were brought to Jamaica over the course of the slave trade than were imported to the entire continent of North and Central America and the enslaved were worked to death. Poverty remained the lot of most of its population after slavery was abolished and even after independence in 1962.

On paper, the country created a Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, with the consolidation of the country’s two main political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP), both founded in the early 1940s. The 63 members of the House of Representatives are elected in single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post voting.

On Sept. 3, the centre-right JLP won 49 of 63 seats in a general election. Prime Minister Andrew Holness had called for the early vote in what analysts saw as a bid to capitalise on people’s satisfaction with his economic agenda and early response to the COVID-19 virus.

The result was one of the larges margins of victory in decades, with the JLP gaining 17 new seats, but also one of the lowest voter turnouts at 37 per cent. The left-of-centre PLP, under Peter Phillips, remained in opposition, with 14. The two parties have monopolized power since independence.

In 2011 Holness lost an election to the PNP’s Portia Simpson Miller, the country’s first female head of government. Four years later, the tables were turned, and Holness beat Miller.

All of this hid another reality: by the time it was granted independence, Jamaica had established a pattern of political clientism which permeated partisan politics. The fact that jobs, houses, and other rewards were distributed and controlled by the victors of an election added to the stakes of party affiliation.

For politicians, the dispensation of patronage proved a powerful means of securing electoral support, and thus violence erupted around it. After all, for members of the various constituencies, ensuring that their candidate won was tied very directly to the material conditions of their lives. As one commentator put it, “when your party is in you eat; when the other man’s party is in you starve.” Under these circumstances, violence began to supplement the electoral process.

It led ultimately to the two parties losing control of their respective gangsters, who ran their own protectionist shadow governments within the poor and violent slum areas around Kingston and Spanish Town, commonly referred to as “garrison communities.”

By the 1970s, near civil war between gangs acting as proxies for the political parties left hundreds dead from gun battles. I travelled around Jamaica on public buses in 1975-1976 and it was indeed fraught with danger, especially in and around Kingston.

This was the period when government was controlled by the PLP under Prime Minister Michael Manley, whose brand of democratic socialism “scared the professional and capitalist classes,” writes Paterson (who served as a special advisor to Manley from 1972 to 1979).

Patronage, however, is not the only way that “the democratic process both enables and is enabled by violence,” he asserts. While we tend to think the ballot replaces the bullet, Patterson maintains that in Jamaica the bullet followed the ballot. Democratization coincided with extreme levels of violence.

The forms of mobilization that large-scale democracies require tend to calcify political identities and exacerbate conflict, he concludes, and he demonstrates how parties and elections inspire a solidarity and loyalty that ultimately entrench divisions and violence within a society. He calls this the “tribalism” of democracy. It’s a problem in all too many countries.

 

Trump's Surprising Success Among Minorities

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

As we know, President Donald Trump’s four years in office saw charges of racism and nativist xenophobia constantly levelled against him. So, in the 2020 election, how did he fare with the groups who were the main targets of his alleged wrath? Surprisingly, better than we might have expected.  

For the second straight presidential election, the polling industry missed the mark, though it was not as blatant as in 2016, when polls were certain that Donald Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton.

This has now happened twice in a presidential row. Perhaps once is a fluke, but twice shows inherent problems. My guess is that far less attention will be paid to polls in the future.

While Joe Biden won the White House this year, it didn’t signal the blue tidal wave that Democrats expected. Rather, Trump’s supporters kept pace.

As we search for reasons why polling seems to capture Democratic vote share but not Republican, a narrative is emerging: Minority groups included “shy” Trump voters the pollsters missed, and probably some respondents refused to answer honestly.

The less than impressive Biden victory supports the theory that there was a shift among minority voters, who moved slightly towards Trump, cutting into Biden’s margins. Biden underperformed compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers among voters of colour and other minorities who usually tilt Democratic. They still voted for the party, but by smaller margins than four years ago.

The AP VoteCast, a survey of the U.S. electorate conducted over several days before Nov. 3, and continuing until the polls closed, included interviews with more than 110,000 people across the U.S.

The survey was conducted online and via telephone. The margin of error was 0.6 percentage points for voters and 0.9 percentage points for non-voters, 19 times out of 20.

AP VoteCast found that African Americans remained overwhelmingly Democratic, with only eight per cent supporting the GOP. Even here, though, the vote for Trump increased by about two per cent.

The numbers were more mixed for other groups that Democrats assumed were in their corner because of ethnic or religious identity.

Some 28 per cent of Asians voted for Trump, up five per cent, and, perhaps most surprising, so did a full 35 per cent of Hispanic and Muslim voters. Trump also received 30 per cent of the Jewish vote, up six percent from 2016, despite being accused of anti-Semitism throughout his four years in office. 

Trump’s performance among Latinos, up three per cent nationally, alarmed the Democrats. He won 47 per cent of the Hispanic vote (as well as 41 per cent of the Jewish vote) in Florida, and it helped him keep the Sunshine State. He also gained Latino support in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas and held the Lone Star State as well.

Trump was also accused by those on the left of the spectrum of being anti-Muslim, if not indeed an Islamophobe. But Trump’s support grew by approximately four percentage points among this growing sector of the American population.

This trend has been causing consternation and disbelief within progressive circles who mechanically assume members of marginalized groups view themselves primarily or wholly in terms of their ascriptive identities.

What else may have motivated such voters this year? Many Blacks and Latinos are devout Christians and “pro-life,” hence supported Republicans. And some African Americans were pleased with the low unemployment numbers and Trump’s desire to reduce the injustices of mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects them.

Many small business owners from minorities liked Trump’s economic policies. For example,Vietnamese Americans, many of them entrepreneurs, actually favoured Trump outright. Among Jewish voters, Trump’s perceived pro-Israel positions were a major factor.

People are not automatons or robots. They have agency and free will. Is it not possible those who didn’t follow the left-wing dogma that they should be unthinking Democrats are assimilating more fully into an American culture in which they feel freer to define themselves?

In fact, Biden might have white men, more than any other group, to thank for entering the White House. In 2016, Trump won white men by a margin of 31 percentage points over Clinton. This time? Just 23 percentage points over Biden.