Iraq’s Election Could Have been Worse

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

The Iraq war was arguably America’s biggest foreign-policy blunder since the Vietnam War. Although the American withdrawal from Iraq hasn’t been quite as shambolic as its exit from Afghanistan, Washington’s influence there, almost two decades after George W. Bush’s invasion, is rapidly waning.

One sign of this? A parliamentary election held a few weeks ago was won by a man responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of U.S. soldiers -- yet he was still seen as the lesser evil.

Following the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, Washington’s troubles in Iraq were just beginning, and much of it was due to the dreaded Mahdi Army led by the Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

It was formed in June of that year with the objective of evicting American forces, and it rose to prominence in April 2004 when it spearheaded the first major armed confrontation against the U.S. forces from the Shi’ite community. Over the years, the Mahdi Army killed a large percentage of the 4,500 American soldiers who died in Iraq.

However, with the U.S. now virtually out of Iraq, al-Sadr has reinvented himself as a political figure. And although a fervent enemy of the U.S., he has shown himself more independent of Iran than most other Shi’ite politicians.

Al-Sadr is the son of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr, a Shi’ite dignitary who was politically active against Saddam Hussein, for which he paid with his life in 1999.

The Sadrist base is significant in Baghdad and the southern Shi’ite provinces because it represents a Shi’ite underclass that viewed Muhammad al-Sadr as a religious authority who cared for them and preached to them when no one else dared to.

This base continues to feel marginalised today, and Muqtada al-Sadr appeals to them as the heir to his father’s position.

On October 10 Iraqis voted in an early election to determine the makeup of the unicameral Council of Representatives, Iraq’s national legislature. It was held months before schedule to meet the demands of a mass protest movement that was calling for sweeping political reform.

With the votes counted, al-Sadr emerged as the head of the largest party in Iraq’s parliament. His Sadrist Movement obtained 72 of the 329 parliamentary seats -- a significant increase compared with the 2018 result, when it won 54 seats.

The Iran-backed Conquest Alliance (Fatah) bloc led by paramilitary leader Hadi Al Amiri, comprising an array of politicians and militia commanders closely linked to Iran, suffered a significant defeat.

They lost two-thirds of their parliamentary seats, securing only 14 seats, a dramatic loss from a 2018 high of 47. However, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, who has also been an Iranian ally in the past, won 35 seats.

Al-Sadr claims that the next government will be a Sadrist one and the prime minister a staunch Sadrist. He is most likely to nominate the politically independent current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, for a second term.  

But other partners will be needed to form a government and the risk of taking sole responsibility for government failures may mean that he accepts a coalition that reduces the Sadrist identity of the government. So, while he opposes both Tehran and Washington, his status as a kingmaker isn’t guaranteed, as Iran tries to unite all the Shi’ite parties.

Sadr will likely work with other parties, including Sunni Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi’s Progress Party (37 seats), the Kurdistan Democratic Party (33 seats), and some nominally independent members of parliament (37 in total), to ensure he retains the prerogative to appoint his prime minister of choice.

Tehran has historically been able to bend al-Sadr to its will when necessary and likely believes that a combination of Iranian pressure and his inherent anti-American tendencies will be sufficient to advance Iran’s core strategic objectives: ousting remaining U.S. forces from Iraq and maintaining a non-threatening, Shi’ite-led client state there.

Iranian rhetoric suggests that its leadership is unwilling to dramatically destabilize Iraq just over the election results. Tehran knows that the makeup of Iraqi governments has never been determined by electoral results alone and that its proxies will still have a say in the process.

 

Mozambique is Mired in Warfare and Corruption

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Portugal was both the first and last of the great colonial powers and by the 17th century controlled a vast empire stretching from Brazil in the west to Macau in the east. Not until 1974-75 did it finally relinquish its African colonies, which it considered, after 1951, overseas provinces.

Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique were not given up peacefully. Unlike the other colonial powers, Portugal’s overseas interests were considered not marginal but central to its economic existence.

Since the Portuguese state was itself a dictatorship, its people, accustomed to authoritarianism at home, were unmoved by authoritarian rule in the colonies.

So in all three, wars of national liberation were waged for years, mainly by left-wing forces. These groups received military support and training from China and the Soviet Union, and therefore had a Marxist or socialist orientation.

The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was formed in 1962 and under the leadership of Samora Machel eventually gained power, so the country was at first governed as a one-party state along rigid Marxist lines.

But by the late 1970s, events were proving how hollow had been the victory of FRELIMO. The socialist policies pursued by the Mozambican leaders were proving disastrous on the economic side and civil war against the regime was also becoming widespread.

An anti-Marxist guerrilla movement called the Nationalist Resistance Movement of Mozambique (RENAMO) began attacking FRELIMO forces and disrupting local services. After a 16-year brutal civil war that ended in 1992, after one million people had died, the two signed the Rome General Peace Accords. Despite sporadic fighting, it was reaffirmed in 2019.

However, the country now faces a new threat, this time from Islamist forces. Extreme poverty, systematic neglect of the population, and conflicts of interest between local, regional, and international powers have provided a breeding ground for radical groups.

What has emerged is a population that is both historically and presently disconnected from the state and state institutions, living in a nearly ungoverned space, lacking in development and infrastructure, resentful of state abandonment, and, unsurprisingly, susceptible to violent extremism.

The conflict has claimed over 3,000 lives and displaced almost another million since the start of the insurgency in 2017 in Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country. The conflict zone is majority Muslim.

In four years the insurgents took control of most of five districts in the northeastern province. Mozambique’s defence forces are widely regarded as corrupt, poorly trained, and ill-equipped.

The region has huge gas and coal reserves and is the site of a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project operated by French energy giant Total.

This past July, President Filipe Nyusi called for foreign help. Rwanda deployed a 1,000-person contingent at Mozambique’s request to support efforts to restore authority. Rwandan forces have now driven out Islamist militants in Cabo Delgado province.

The Rwandan army has also created a 50-kilometre safety zone for the Total gas project. It will retain control of the towns of Mocimboa da Praia and Palma.

“This approach was probably negotiated at the highest political level between Mozambique, France and Rwanda,” according to Elisio Macamo, an expert on African politics at the University of Basel. For France, moving the biggest gas project in Africa forward is vital, and Paris was even prepared to send troops to secure its interests in northern Mozambique.

Throughout 2021 Portugal has been a particularly vocal advocate of increased military assistance to its former colony, and in May 2021 the two countries signed a new military cooperation agreement extending through 2026.

Apart from all this, corruption has become a major concern in Mozambique. A small elite with strong business interests associated with the ruling party dominates the economy.

Between 2013 and 2014, three Mozambican stateowned companies, ProIndicus, Ematum and Mam, took out $2.08 billion in loans. They came from Credit Suisse and the Russian bank VTB, among others. These funds were meant to finance maritime surveillance, fishing, and shipyard projects.

But no projects materialized, and the operation is believed to have covered up extensive corruption for the benefit of people close to the government.

In late August, legal proceedings against 19 defendants began. Ndambi Guebuza, son of former President Armando Guebuza, and Gregorio Leao, former head of the security services, are charged with blackmail, embezzlement, and money laundering.

Manuel Chang, the former finance minister who signed off on the loans about eight years ago, has been in detention in South Africa since 2018. He is charged with accepting $7 million in bribes and awaits extradition.

This, in a country where half of the population of 30 million lives below the poverty line. Its socialist past is now just a memory. Defeating an insurgency militarily will not erase the centuries of socio-political causes driving the conflict.

 

 

Poland and the EU Face a Troubled Future

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

The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe was a major factor in the decision of the British people to leave the European Union a year later. Will a new refugee wave, among other issues, result in a Polish exit?

Poland has seen big increases in migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran trying to enter the country since the start of the summer. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government is organizing the passage of migrants from war-torn and impoverished countries into Poland and other EU neighbors.

This comes in retaliation for EU economic sanctions placed on Belarus after the EU accused the authoritarian leader of stealing last year’s election and ordering human rights violations and the hounding of political opponents.

“We used to catch migrants in droves here. Now, forget it, you will be catching them yourselves,” Lukashenko taunted the EU in July.

All migrants now need to do is fly to Belarus, drive for several hours to the border, and then simply cross on foot into one of the three neighbouring EU countries -- Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Belarus has helped build the infrastructure to accommodate these travelers, too. At the beginning of the year, there was only a single flight from Iraq to Minsk, the Belarusian capital. Now there are several flights a week from multiple Iraqi cities. Iraqi Airways says their flights from Iraq to Belarus are sold out through November.

Since August, 16,000 migrants have crossed into Poland. Polish border guards detained eight times as many people crossing the 400-kilometre border illegally as they did in the whole of 2020. The guards have been joined by nearly 6,000 Polish troops who will also be guarding the frontier.

Poland contends that Lukashenko, backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has launched a hybrid attack to destabilize the EU. “This phenomenon that we’ve been witnessing there recently is a kind of weaponization of migration,” remarked Marcin Przydacz, the deputy foreign minister of Poland.

“We have decided to build a permanent barrier along the Polish-Belarusian border. The experience of other countries affected by the migrant crisis shows that this is the only effective method,” remarked Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczynsk on Oct. 7, speaking at a meeting of the National Security and Defence Affairs Committee which focussed on the situation on the border.

But humanitarian groups are criticizing Poland for pushing some migrants back to Belarus rather than reviewing their asylum applications, in violation of EU law. A few have died as a result.

And the European Commission has spoken out against EU border walls. At an EU summit meeting held Oct. 21-22 in Brussels, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ruled out any barriers on the bloc’s external borders, telling leaders that “that there will be no funding of barbed wire and walls.” This did not sit well with Warsaw.

Poland is already at odds with the EU over a number of other issues, especially the escalating fight over whether EU legislation supersedes Polish domestic law. Von der Leyen has threatened Poland with sanctions, including a block on the dispersal of 51 billion dollars in pandemic recovery grants and loans because of Poland’s insistence that key parts of EU law are not compatible with the Polish constitution.

This claim by Warsaw, given credence by a ruling from the country’s own constitutional court, follows a series of European Court of Justice rulings demanding the repeal of measures in Poland that it said is undermining the independence of the country’s judiciary.

In a speech at the EU summit, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawieck accused the EU of “blackmail.”  A few days earlier, he contended they were trying to turn Poland into a “province.” He also accused the EU of putting a “gun to our head.”

The Polish position has been described by France’s European Affairs minister, Clément Beaune, as a “de facto” exit from the EU. It has been portrayed as a back door “Polexit” by commentators.

Brussels maintains that EU law is supreme yet that its member states are sovereign. Poland is making it clear this is nonsense. There has never been any consensus on EU law supremacy. Even the German Constitutional Court has always seen potential for conflict in it.