Israel Gains a Friend in the Caucasus

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

Israeli President Isaac Herzog met May 30 with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the capital, Baku, further strengthening Israel’s partnership with the Shi’ite Muslim country which borders Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Iran.

The trip comes amid growing strategic and defence ties between the two nations, epitomized by the inauguration of the new Azerbaijani embassy in Israel. Aliyev once compared his country’s relationship with Israel to an iceberg: “Nine-tenths of it is below the surface.” This is no longer the case.

Israel’s Health and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel also accompanied Herzog. The visit saw a bilateral agreement signed on cooperation in healthcare. Aliyev also announced that the sides were actively cooperating in the field of cyber security, without providing further details.

Israel and Azerbaijan opened diplomatic ties in April 1992, six months after the latter declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Israel was one of the first countries in the world to recognize Azerbaijan’s independence and has had an embassy in Baku since 1992.

But only last November did Azerbaijan announce that it would open an embassy in Israel, with Baku naming its former deputy minister of science and education, Mukhtar Mammadov, as the country’s first ambassador. “We do not consider opening an embassy now as an end goal, but the turning of a new page in our relations with Israel,” Mammadov stated.

“The sky is the limit,” for the two countries’ ties, remarked Azerbaijan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Fariz Rzayev upon landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport for a visit a month later.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov in Jerusalem March 29, as Baku prepared to open its embassy. “Azerbaijan is a strategic partner of Israel,” Cohen told him.

Baku’s historic decision comes against the background of the growing tension between Azerbaijan and Iran. These increasingly strained ties present an opportunity for Israel, especially in security. After all, Israel and Azerbaijan share the same goals. They both seek to diversify their foreign relations in a hostile neighborhood. And both consider Iran a foe and favor an assertive strategy against Tehran.

“Israel and Azerbaijan share the same perception of the Iranian threats,” said Cohen. “The Iranian ayatollah regime threatens both our regions, finances terrorism and destabilizes the entire Middle East.” (This rhetoric makes Iran nervous and prompted Tehran to complain of the “anti-Iranian orientation” of Azeri diplomacy.)

Azerbaijan’s location on Iran’s border makes it an enticing ally for Israel. Foreign reports have indicated that Baku likely allows Israel to use bases on its soil to launch reconnaissance flights over Iran and to send intelligence operatives into the country to disrupt its nuclear program. In case Israel does decide to carry out air strikes on Iranian reactors and plants, access to Azerbaijani bases would make that task far more feasible.

Another important factor that has allowed the two sides to publicly formalise their relationship has been the Abraham Accords, under which Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates established official ties with Israel in 2020.

“Azerbaijan always took into consideration the position of Arab states. So that’s why, for example, even though Israel opened its embassy in Azerbaijan in 1993, for us, it took a long time to reciprocate despite the fact that we had good bilateral relations,” explained Faris Shafiyev of the Centre of Analysis of International Relations, a think-tank close to the Baku government.

Another primary area of collaboration between Israel and Azerbaijan is in the energy sector. Azerbaijan, a major producer of oil and gas, provides between 30 to 50 percent of Israel’s oil and gas needs, transported mainly through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

Of course this realpolitik has led to Israel’s diminished friendship with Armenia, long hostile to Azerbaijan. Jerusalem supported Baku in the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, a six-week long conflict with Armenia which claimed the lives of more than 6,000 soldiers and resulted in Baku regaining control over disputed territories in the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh republic.

Israel ambassador to Azerbaijan, George Deek, visited the site of a deadly missile attack during the conflict. “Israel showed we were there with Azerbaijan at a time of need,” he said.

The gesture resonated with the country. “The people of Azerbaijan highly appreciate and will never forget the enduring and consistent support by Israel for Azerbaijan’s just position during the 44-day patriotic war,” Azerbaijan’s interparliamentary friendship group with Israel proclaimed.

Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, who was in Israel for the opening of the embassy, said that his country is “grateful to Israel for the support for Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity during almost thirty years of illegitimate occupation of Azerbaijan’s territories by Armenia.”

But Israel’s more tangible support has come from the weapons it is one of Azerbaijan’s leading arms suppliers. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel provided 69 per cent of Baku’s major arms imports from 2016-2020, accounting for 17 per cent of Jerusalem’s overall arms exports over that period. Azerbaijan imported a total of $37 million worth of arms in the years 2020-2022, during which weapons purchased from Israel totaled $22 million.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently confirmed that Israel Aerospace Industries will supply Azerbaijan with two satellites at a total cost of $120 million, probably a new version of the company’s Ofek spy satellite. So cooperation continues.

 

Is Nigeria a Democracy? It’s Complicated

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

Last February, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy and most populous nation, held the latest in a series of regularly scheduled, democratically contested presidential elections dating back to 1999.

Voters headed to the polls Feb. 25 to elect a new president. The 2023 presidential election was an open contest with no incumbent in the race, and the emergence of third-party candidates disrupted the traditional two-party contest and created opportunities for enhanced political debate.

The U.S. State Department congratulated the victor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and hailed a “competitive election” that “represents a new period for Nigerian politics and democracy.” Tinubu was inaugurated May 29.

But is that really the whole story? The 2023 election took place under a deteriorating security situation, as the country was grappling with incidents of violent extremism. From kidnappings for ransom in the northwest to a 13-year Islamist insurgency in the northeast, separatist violence in the southeast, and ethnic tensions mostly between herders and farmers in the north-central region, Nigeria is rife with instability.

Additionally, inflation has reached its highest point in nearly two decades, hitting double-digit figures; it currently stands at more than 22 per cent. The naira, Nigeria’s currency, has plunged to record lows. One in three Nigerians are unemployed. Meanwhile, corruption remains at endemic levels. As the economy suffers, hundreds of Nigerians have decided to leave the country in a punishing brain drain after finishing their studies.

Despite 18 political parties signing a Peace Accord last September, committing them to peace in the leadup to the polls, the campaigns were frequently marred by violence between party supporters and the use of hate speech and inflammatory language by party leaders. Election day violence and disruptions occurred in at least 18 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja.

Independent election observers had raised alarm bells about widespread voting irregularities. The election was widely criticized for targeted violence, lack of transparency, significant voter disenfranchisement, and outright vote manipulation and vote buying in some states. For example, a civil rights organisation, Yiaga Africa, said that the results from Imo and Rivers states were inconsistent with its projections for them.

In fact, not long before the election, Nigerian society had been thrown into turmoil by the decision of the outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, to withdraw the country’s old banknotes from circulation and replace them with newly designed bills.

Many interpreted this as an attempt to combat counterfeiting and rein in the scourge of vote-buying by rival campaigns, although this didn’t appear to have much effect.

Coming on top of demoralizing gasoline shortages -- this, in an OPEC member state -- and economic desperation among the poor, the sudden change of currency caused chaos and contributed to a low turnout in what was arguably one of the most important elections in the world. Although more than 93 million Nigerians were registered to vote, only about 25 million cast ballots -- at 26.7 per cent, it was the lowest participation rate in the country’s history.

A total of 18 candidates were on the ballot, with the main contest a battle between Tinubu from the ruling APC, Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and a surprise contender, the Labour Party’s Peter Obi.

Obi had left the PDP last year after having been Abubakar’s running mate in the 2019 election, which had been won by the incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari.

Buhari, a retired Nigerian army major general, had served as the country’s military head of state from 1983 to 1985, after taking power in a military coup d’état before reinventing himself as a civilian politician and winning the presidency in 2015.

A former governor of Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria, Obi galvanized social media during the race and would have become the first president of Igbo ethnicity since Nigeria returned to democracy. In a country riven by religious conflicts, Obi is a Christian, while both Tinubu, a Yoruba, and Abubakar, a Fulani, are Muslims.

The results of the election highlight how sharply divided Nigerians remain along religious and ethnic lines. Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, came in first with 36.6 per cent of the vote, followed by Abubakar, who had been governor of Adawama State in the country’s northeast, at close to 29 per cent, and Obi third, with 25.4 per cent. A fourth contender, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party, a Muslim Fulani former governor of Kano State in the north, took 6.23 per cent.

To be elected, a presidential candidate must receive a plurality of the overall votes and more than 25 per cent of the votes in at least 24 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. Tinubu satisfied these conditions. In fact, each of the top three candidates secured victory in 12 of the country’s 36 states. Obi scored a major upset by winning Tinubu’s home state. But Tinubu’s victory is being challenged in court by Abubakar and Obi.

In the southeast, Tinubu faces separatist agitation, a highly sensitive issue in Nigeria where around one million people died in the three-year Biafran civil war in the late 1960s between federal forces and Igbo secessionists. Not surprisingly, some in the southeast were disappointed that Peter Obi lost. Keeping this huge country together is no easy task.

American Liberalism Faces a Democratic Deficit

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

The eminent American political theorist Michael Walzer recently speculated about the future of liberalism in Dissent, the influential periodical he used to edit.

From democratic socialists to right-wing populists, it seems like everyone agrees that liberalism is in trouble. In his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Walzer argues that Americans can, and should, rescue the virtues of the liberal tradition from the crisis of liberalism.

“A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies,” he stated in an interview in the journal March 21.

For more than 250 years liberalism as a theory and as a political movement has been dedicated to the cause of social and political freedom and the pursuit of happiness as a material end.

From the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, liberalism was a proud, optimistic, and confident intellectual, political, and social project. But its limitations as a political system have become more apparent. That is why classical liberalism has come under fire from critics like political philosopher Patrick Deneen, who see within it seeds of the current loss of freedom.

The world that classical liberalism made is now being rejected by the forces of economic neoliberalism and progressive liberalism. While the incendiary domestic activism of the 1960s subsided, it did not expire. It moved forward in new directions, among them those of multiculturalism and identity politics.

The American left has been on what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called a “long march through the institutions,” gaining hegemony in much of government, law, academia, and the media. This cultural revolution has accomplished what the abortive revolution of the proletariat failed to do.

Classical liberal democracy in America developed safeguards to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Citizens limited the power of elected governments by entrenching the individual liberties of citizens, including the freedoms of opinion, religion, speech, press, association, and political participation.

They did so by codifying those limits and liberties in a constitution to which the government of the day can be held accountable by the independent courts to which citizens have redress.

But what of a tyranny of the minority? Until the democratic revolutions of the 18^th century, this, in one form or another, was the only form of rule, whether by kings, priests or aristocrats. Everyone assumed that liberal democracy had vanquished such forms of governance.

Yet today, all over the western world, many fear we are being ruled once again by an alliance of plutocrats and leftist radicals. Elites, corporate and cultural, right and left, seem to be joining together. A so-called “woke” capitalism is allied with an identity-obsessed cultural left.

We are living through the capture of institution after institution by economic, political and cultural elites which rarely have majority support. They are imposing their designs and preferences on the so-called “deplorables” and “bigots” over whom they rule. Using a myriad of mechanisms, they are pushing more and more kinds of power, decision-making, and policy-making beyond the reach of the vote.

“The failure of the left in most of Europe, and very much here, to address the growing inequality produced by contemporary capitalism is a very important explanation for the rise of a certain version of nationalist, right-wing populism,” asserts Walzer. “I think I understand the ordinary Americans and Europeans who have become angry at the reigning elites, falsely identified with a centre-left doctrine.”

Thus, what we call “populism” serves as a reaction to the democratic deficit that now confronts American political institutions. Majorities feel shut-out and coerced, by a global economy they experience as rigged against them; by laws and treaties that seem to originate in far-away bodies and which they do not feel they can influence; and by an ever-spreading identity politics they do not support, imposed on them by activist minorities.

The new concept of “diversity,” for instance, replaced the older view of affirmative action. Whereas affirmative action was an attempt to remedy past discrimination, diversity means equality of result for groups as an end in itself, irrespective of past discrimination.

Governments now divide ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups into essentially two categories: dominant and marginalized. Any laws that have a negative disparate impact on a marginalized group is ipso facto discriminatory. The goal is to fundamentally transform the United States.

Yes, populist democracy can be leveraged to impose the tyranny of the majority. But elite democracy, a hollowed out, bureaucratic, and “progressive” version of representative government, can be equally overbearing.

As Walzer defines it, liberalism “constrains majoritarian rule” but is also “a constraint on the ideologically correct minority” which claims the vanguard role in society. “There has to be room for competing groups and for disagreement.”

All educated Americans know of French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential two-volume work Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840 after his travels in the United States. It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand American democracy.

Democracy, he contended, is two things simultaneously: both a system of popular suffrage and a condition where privilege has been abolished and “equality of conditions” prevails. He thought one could not succeed without the other. This still holds.

 

Tinubu Faces Many Obstacles

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There are many challenges confronting Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was inaugurated as president of Nigeria on May 29. He won a tightly contested election that was not only acrimonious but exposed the ethnic and religious divisions that have lingered throughout the country, one split between a largely Muslim north and mainly Christian south, and also comprising hundreds of different ethnic groups.

A total of 18 candidates were on the ballot, with the main contest a battle between Tinubu from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and the Labour Party’s Peter Obi.

THREE-WAY SPLIT

Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, came in first with 36.6 per cent of the vote, followed by Abubakar, who had been governor of Adawama State in the country’s northeast, at close to 29 per cent, and with Obi third, with 25.4 per cent. A fourth contender, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party, a former governor of Kano State in the north, took 6.23 per cent.

Abubakar and Kwankwaso are Fulani Muslims from the north, and Tinubu a Yoruba Muslim from the southwest. Obi, an Igbo from the southeast and a former governor of Anambra State, was the only major Christian in the race. Had he won, he would have become the first president of Igbo ethnicity since Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999.

To win in the first round, a candidate had to gain the largest number of votes nationwide and at least 25 per cent of the votes in two-thirds of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. Tinubu satisfied these conditions. In fact, each of the top three candidates secured victory in 12 of the country’s 36 states. Obi scored a major upset by winning Tinubu’s home state.

Tinubu would most likely have lost the election had it been held last year, before the PDP split three ways, since Obi and Kwankwaso are former members. The combined total of their vote plus that of Abubakar was about 60 per cent.

MUSLIM TICKET

Tinubu took a risk in his own bid. Instead of choosing a running mate from one of the Christian minorities, he picked a northern Kanuri Muslim, Kashim Shettima, a former governor of Borno state, not wanting to alienate the huge Muslim voting bloc in the north. He did draw the ire of most Christians by having a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

The election was widely criticized for targeted violence, significant voter disenfranchisement, and outright vote manipulation and vote buying in some states. There was also various controversies. Before the vote Tinubu denied various allegations of links to narcotics and corruption.

International observer missions from the Washington-based International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, who deployed a joint international election observation mission to Nigeria, described the process as lacking transparency. So did a European Union team. Tinubu’s victory is being challenged in court by Abubakar and Obi.

Maybe that’s why, although more than 93 million Nigerians were registered to vote, only about 25 million cast ballots — at 26.7 per cent, it was the lowest participation rate in the country’s history.

BALLOONING DEBT

One in three Nigerians are unemployed and 96 million live below the poverty line of US$1.90 per day, while inflation stands at a record 22 per cent. As the economy suffers, hundreds of Nigerians have decided to leave the country in a punishing brain drain after finishing their studies. One of the new government’s most urgent tasks will be to tackle insecurity, which has resurfaced in full force since April.

The oil-rich nation also faces the challenge of swapping crude oil worth billions of dollars for gasoline, which it then needs to subsidize for its domestic market. This has contributed to ballooning debt. At his inaugural, Tinubu said the decades-long subsidy on petroleum products was being scrapped.

In the southeast, Tinubu faces separatist agitation, a highly sensitive issue in Nigeria where around one million people died in the three-year Biafran civil war in the late 1960s between federal forces and Igbo secessionists. Some in the southeast were disappointed that Igbo presidential candidate Peter Obi lost.

Can Tinubu overcome all this? It won’t be easy.