Can New York Recover From Covid-19?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The predominant urban center in North America, New York City is the primary American locale for the arts, culture, finance, the media, and intellectual life. I first visited New York in 1958, many, many times thereafter, and last time in December 2018. Who could not love it?

Yet today, New York faces a looming existential crisis brought on by the coronavirus. The city is a shadow of its pre-pandemic normal. In the most populated, most dense, most diverse American metropolis, more than 23,000 have died.

In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenants at two of the largest malls in Manhattan, recently filed for bankruptcy and announced that they would close those locations.

From SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. There are virtually no tourists, a fraction of the usual army of office workers goes into work every day, many residents stay at home, worried for their health, and many of the wealthy have left the city for second homes.

New York City accounts for a very large share of the country’s transit ridership. Many people don’t own cars and use buses and subways – which are now seen as incubators for the virus. Crowded public transportation facilitates the spread of a highly contagious, airborne disease.

Though New York’s subway system has stepped up its disinfecting of trains and buses and has launched an app that tells riders on some lines how crowded rail cars are, many people remain reluctant to use them. 

The pandemic sparked an exodus of frantic wealthier residents fleeing the city for the suburbs or countryside, an estimated 420,000 of them since March, gutting upscale neighborhoods now facing up to 40 per cent vacancy rates.

Many are looking to buy houses in small towns along the Hudson River in upstate New York, or nearby Connecticut. Real estate agents say these are selling hours after they go on the market, with buyers sometimes paying full price in cash after seeing the houses only on video tours.

After all, suburban, exurban, and small-town residents don’t live in dense urban neighbourhoods. They get around in their private cars and have far more room inside their houses; as well, they have back yards. Today’s technologies make it increasingly easy for employees to work far from dense megacities.

New York City’s left-wing mayor and New York State’s governor, though both Democrats, are at odds over what to do to stem the tide.

Mayor Bill de Blasio took a shot at Gov. Andrew Cuomo Aug. 6 for trying to lure the wealthy back to New York with the promise of tax breaks. The mayor stated he would like to raise taxes on the rich if federal coronavirus aid doesn’t come through.

“If our federal government fails us and doesn’t provide a stimulus we should immediately return in Albany to the discussion of a tax on wealthy New Yorkers,” de Blasio said. “Wealthy New Yorkers can afford to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can make it through this crisis.”

Cuomo has been pleading with rich city dwellers who left the city for second to come back, and dismissed calls for boosting taxes on the rich to stave off a potential 20 per cent cut to major programs, like school funding.

“We do not make decisions based on the wealthy few,” de Blasio declared. “I was troubled to hear this concept that because wealthy people have a set of concerns about the city that we should accommodate them,” he added. “That’s not how it works around here anymore.”

It’s a very divided city. Today the top one per cent in New York take in over 40 per cent of the city’s income while much of the city’s population find themselves left behind. This is due in large part because of a precipitous fall in middle income jobs.

The pandemic will only exacerbate the problems of a great, yet troubled, metropolis.

 

Belarus Strongman Is Returned to Power -- For Now

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

Let’s hope no one was foolish enough to take the Aug. 9 presidential election in the former Soviet republic of Belarus seriously, because it was as fixed as an old-time wrestling match.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Aleksandr Lukashenko was re-elected president, for the sixth time, defeating four challengers.

Lukashenko garnered over 80 per cent support, with political novice Svetlana Tikhanovskaya far behind with undert 10 per cent. She refused to accept the results, while large protests erupted in some 20 cities and were met with police attacks.

 Lukashenko has ruled the country since it passed its current constitution in 1994. Term limits were abolished in 2004, and he is Europe’s longest-serving ruler.

This is the land where the old Soviet Union has somehow managed to survive ideologically. So it’s no surprise to learn that Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm manager, was the only deputy in the old Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic’s Supreme Soviet to vote against the 1991 dissolution of the USSR.

Lukashenko’s authoritarian style involves controlling the main media channels, harassing and jailing political opponents, and marginalising and incarcerating independent voices.

The powerful secret police, still called the KGB, closely monitors dissidents. There have been more than 100 cases of prosecution of journalists across the country since January.

Still, this time around Lukashenko faced the biggest opposition protests for a decade. There have been hundreds of arrests in a wave of demonstrations since May.

On July 30 tens of thousands rallied in the capital, Minsk, in support of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. She stepped in to challenge Lukashenko after her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger, was arrested and barred from running. Two other leading contenders, Valery Tsepkalo and Viktor Babaryko, were also prevented from contesting the election.

Tikhanovskaya joined forces with Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of Valery Tsepkalo, and Maria Kolesnikova, campaign manager for Babaryko. He had been charged for embezzlement and fraud. The three women became the main symbol of the opposition.

The Belarusian authorities’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been met by severe criticism. In terms of preventive measures, Belarus remains the least active of all the countries in the region in trying to control the spread of the virus, and Lukashenko has insisted that Belarus’s economy continue to operate as normal.

Belarus has had nearly 70,000 confirmed cases and some 600 deaths. The president recommended vodka and sauna visits as protective measures. At the end of July, though, he himself contracted COVID-19.

Fearing the sudden upsurge in opposition to his reign might even result in a possible loss, Lukashenko on July 29 used one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook: He claimed to have uncovered a foreign plot to “destabilise” the country.

He claimed that 33 mercenaries with the private Russian military group Wagner had been arrested outside the capital, Minsk. Russia denied the charges against them and it cooled relations between the two countries, though Belarus has been Moscow’s closest ally since the breakup of the USSR.

Belarus was never an independent state before 1991 and its Slavic population of almost ten million is ethnically very close to that of Russia. The Russian language is used by 70 per cent of the population, and more than four-fifths are members of the Russian Orthodox faith.

Since December 2018, Russia and Belarus had been pursuing negotiations on closer integration. They have held joint military exercises and the struggling Belarus economy relies on trade with its neighbour.

Belarus exports some 40 per cent of its goods to Russia. And Moscow is also Minsk’s largest creditor: Almost 38 per cent of its debt is with Moscow.

About one-quarter of Belarus’ GDP is driven by cheap Russian gas and oil. But Moscow early this year stopped its deliveries when the two countries failed to renegotiate oil prices. On March 5, Belarusian Foreign Minister Uladzimir Makei declared that further  talks would make no sense before an agreement was resolved. The deliveries were resumed in April.

The arrest of the mercenaries was also aimed at Tikhanovskaya, as investigators tried to link her husband to the detainees. She has fled to Lithuania. Meanwhile, some 6,700 people have been detained since protests erupted after the vote results.

 

Panicked Provinces Succumbed to Fear

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

Lord Acton warned that it is human nature for people given power over others to wield that power ever-more broadly.

This impulse has been particularly evident with restrictions that violate Canadians’ mobility rights as enshrined in section 6 (2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It states that every Canadian has the right to live and work in any province. No legislature can overrule it with Section 33, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause.

True, the government can attempt to justify its actions limiting a right by using Section 1 of the Charter, which stipulates that it remains subject “to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” But this has not been tested in court. Nor has the federal Emergencies Act been invoked.

Prince Edward Island was all but cut off from the rest of Canada for months on end – this was even reported in a Washington Post article of July 6. Other Maritime provinces also shut their borders, while in British Columbia officials were telling Albertans not to cross the provincial border to cottages they owned in that province.

Since mid-April, 375 individuals have been denied entry to PEI. A Montreal woman with a 91-year-old mother on the island has been unable to visit. A Manitoba man who managed to get in after his application was denied was sentenced for violating the Public Health Act.

There were internal travel restrictions in various provinces and territories. Security checkpoints were implemented in several regions in Quebec, including along the Ontario border.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government gave sweeping new powers to the police, authorizing officers to stop vehicles, detain people and take them to the border if they were not complying with public health measures.

How quickly xenophobia rears its ugly head. On PEI cars with out-of-province licence plates had profane notes left on their windshields. British Columbia Premier John Horgan suggested drivers of such vehicles should consider taking public transit or riding a bicycle if they’re feeling harassed. Some have been victims of sabotage.

These border bans have fuelled criticism from civil rights advocates. Canada “should know better than to allow provinces and territories to claim lands as their own, to the exclusion of others,” wrote Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), in the National Post May 21.

The border restrictions are not based on population density and the need for social distancing, he noted. Instead, they’re based on residency. “It’s not their border to patrol,” he insisted.

The CCLA in May sent letters to each of the provinces and territories contending that if a province or territory limits those rights, its reasons must be justified. 

“So far, what we’ve seen from these governments hasn’t convinced us that there is good evidence that these limits are reasonable,” Cara Zwibel, director of CCLA’s Fundamental Freedoms Program, told the CBC in May. A challenge of the Newfoundland and Labrador ban is now before its supreme court.

On July 3, the four east coast provinces did ease inter-provincial travel restrictions within the region, creating an “Atlantic bubble.” However, the rest of Canada remains shut off.

Long before this pandemic upended our lives, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in a series of lectures he delivered in 1976 titled “Society Must be Defended,” laid out the basis of a new concept of power in the modern world, which he called “biopower,” or power over life.

Foucault became convinced that human freedom was deeply imperiled by alliances of opinion-makers, experts, and politicians. Against them, liberal democracy, with its guarantees to certain basic liberties and to participation in a process of collective self-determination, appears powerless.

A politics centered on life, promising safety and well-being to a populace that must forgo its rights, can become a murderous totalitarianism, Foucault argued.

During the French Revolution, for instance, Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre’s regime, which inaugurated the infamous Reign of Terror, was named the Committee of Public Safety.

In the twentieth century, too, dictatorial regimes contended they were saving their people from enemies, often portrayed as carriers of disease. Of course COVID-19 is real, but we must nonetheless always be wary of losing our liberties.

 

Politics and the Pandemic in Pakistan

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pakistan has been struggling to develop an all‑encompassing identity since the founding of the state in 1947. The nation was created as a homeland for Muslims, a place where they would no longer be a minority community in the Hindu‑majority state of India.

Expectations were high that Pakistan would flourish and that its citizens would be unified by their sense of religious identity.

It hasn’t worked out that way. This vision of promise and unity soon encountered the realities of state building. Islamists and secularists disputed the centrality of Islam in the government. Pashtun and Baloch tribes resisted relinquishing their autonomy to the new centralized state.

And now the country deals with COVID-19. Pakistan has so far registered nearly 280,000 cases and over 5,900 deaths. The province of Sindh has seen the most cases, with some 119,000, while Punjab has suffered the most deaths, at more than 2,100.

Pakistan was slow in trying to control the spread of the virus. In late March, President Arif Alvi and provincial governors held a meeting with Sunni and Shia clerics to convince them to close mosques for congregational prayers across the country amid rapidly increasing COVID-19 cases in the country. The clerics, however, rejected the request.

Their refusal to shun collective prayers raised doubts about the country’s resolve to fight the pandemic.

Earlier in March, the federal government had allowed Shia pilgrims from Iran to return to the country through Baluchistan province. The pilgrims were not properly quarantined, which resulted in a spike of infections.

By the end of March, with cases surging, various provincial governments had imposed complete lockdowns, but these were lifted in stages in May, ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, though the disease is not under control. In July, the government imposed a “smart lockdown” in 30 cities in a in a bid to control the virus while minimising the economic impact.

Pakistan’s public health system was overstretched long before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The country has one doctor for every 963 people and one hospital bed for every 1,608 people. It faces a shortage of 200,000 doctors and 1.4 million nurses to cope with the crisis.

When Prime Minister Imran Khan took power in 2018, GDP growth was around 5.8 per cent; now it is 0.98 per cent and is likely to decline further.

One third of Pakistan’s population already lives below the poverty line while 66 per cent -- 145 million people -- require immediate relief. Khan launched the Ehsaas Emergency Cash financial relief program on April 1 to help the most vulnerable part of the population.

None of this makes national unity any easier. Especially difficult has been trying to integrate the people of the old Northwest Frontier Province, renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 2010, whose 36 million residents are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, and four fifths speak Pashto.

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has now seen than 33,000 cases of COVID-19, with almost 1,200 deaths. On March 29, Chief Minister Mahmood Khan approved a $255.68 million stimulus economic package to provide relief to almost three million families and the business community. The provincial government has doubled the testing capacity of Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the province.

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Assembly has 124 elected members: 99 regular seats, 22 seats reserved for women and three seats for Non-Muslims. In the 2018 provincial election, Pakistan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of Imran Khan, won a landslide victory, taking 63 seats of the 99 regular seats.

The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of religious groupings including the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl, won 10 seats; the Awami National Party nine, the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz six, and the centre-left Pakistan Peoples’ Party Parliamentarians, four. Independents took five seats.

To add to the province’s complexity, in May 2018 the seven tribal agencies and the six regions on the border with Afghanistan, formerly called the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), were merged into Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The first-ever democratic election there took place a year ago. Of the 16 seats up for election, independents won six seats. Pakistan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf won five, the far-right clerical Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl gained three, and the Jamat-e-Islami and Awami National Party won one seat each.

America Is Not Living Through the Sixties

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

Many writers are inclined to view the current unrest in the United States through the lens of “the Sixties.” That decade actually spanned 1963 to 1973, beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through to America’s ignominious exit from Vietnam.

It gave us the so-called counterculture -- hippies, communes, the increasing use of drugs, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the American umbrella organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

But these authors are wrong. This is a very different political moment.

The Sixties activists challenged the structures of the state, including bureaucracy, the military, big business, and university administrators. All those sectors in turn resisted the activists. Also, though the New Left opposed racism, that wasn’t the very core of its critiques.

Today, many of these same, now older, radicals are themselves part of the political establishment. They control the Democratic Party and much of academia, the courts, the media, and the cultural industries, including films, publishing and television. Many became tenured university professors and brought the revolution into the classroom, Corporations are no longer seen as evil, the military is no longer smeared.

Also different is the situation of today’s protestors. Though iconoclasm now reigns, and protestors topple statues and eliminate the names of streets, sports teams, buildings, and even towns, with wild abandon, this is met with little resistance, something unimaginable 50 years ago.

While the main protests are carried out under the Black Lives Matter banner, the Antifa (for anti-fascist) far-leftists are mostly white.

The extremists in SDS, who spawned white militant groups like the Weathermen that bombed buildings and killed cops, were hunted down and destroyed by the police and FBI. Yet today’s radical Antifa rioters, whose core belief includes the embrace of political violence, are, by comparison, treated with kid gloves; they know the police won’t intentionally kill them.

Particularly different is the African American experience then and now. Urban insurrections were met by National Guard troops firing real, not rubber, bullets. Hundreds were killed in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark. Groups like the Black Panthers were suppressed, their leaders jailed, murdered, or driven into exile.

Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, has the backing of virtually the entire Democratic Party, including members of Congress, state governors and big-city mayors. One mayor, Ted Wheeler of Portland, Oregon, himself joined a Black Lives Matter-Antifa protest in his volatile city July 23.

Multinational corporations are in support of its aims. Major league sports teams have “taken the knee,” and American media outlets like the Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post are in favour. And don’t forget Facebook, Google, YouTube and the rest of the Silicon Valley billionaires.

Indeed, anyone who questions the left’s program and tactics is branded a racist by most Americans and becomes a pariah, often losing their job. Such is the power of ideological hegemony.

So if all those sixties radicals are now part of what sociologist C. Wright Mills 60 years ago called the “power elite” in his seminal book by that name, who are the new protestors?

For the most part, the members of groups like Antifa have always been the pampered children of the white professional class.

But they are also angry, because in today's high-priced American cities, especially on the globalized coasts, it is increasingly difficult for college graduates to find a job that will allow for upward mobility.

The protestors realize that they have little hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class, such as gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home. They now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations.

They are not rebelling against their elders, as was the case on the New Left, but rather because they cannot attain what those sixties radicals, now in power, managed to acquire. And those guilt-ridden “boomers,” their grandparents, are reluctant to admonish them.

For these reasons, today’s revolution is not a second iteration of “The Sixties.” One thing, though, is certain: a society whose history and founders are hated by millions of its members will not survive.

Conflict Grows on Pakistan's Borders

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
 
A mountainous area, the restive Pakistani region on the border with Afghanistan formerly called the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) has long been seen as a launching pad into Afghanistan for Islamist insurgents.

Since the 1980s, Pashtuns, who form the majority population, have paid a heavy price for the conflicts tearing their region apart. First, the Cold War rivalry between the former Soviet Union and the United States turned their territory into a war zone, and after 2001 came the battle between the United States and its allies against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns cross the Durand Line, the 2,430-kilometre long boundary between the two countries established by the British during their colonial rule.

The Afghan government does not recognize the Durand Line as the official border, nor do ethnic Pashtuns who live on both sides of the border and share historical, cultural and family ties.

In May 2018, the districts in the FATA were merged into the northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, ending 150 years of draconian colonial-era governance. Now there is hope that bringing these areas into a new political process will promote stability.

However, the tribal region, home to six million people, has always been ruled by tribal law, with councils of tribal elders holding the real political power. Whether elected representatives can merge democratic governance with traditional social mores remains to be seen.

The Pashtun cultural code of Pashtunwali, with its various tenets and structures, especially the Jirga (Pashtun tribal council) and Lashkar (tribal militia), are where real power continues to reside. 

However, the rise of the secular Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) is presenting a challenge to Pashtun patriarchal values as well as traditional structures in the region. It was formed in 2016 by eight university students from South Waziristan.

The PTM has gained considerable strength in the past two years, drawing tens of thousands of people to its protest rallies. Its supporters are critical of the war on terror, which they say has ravaged Pashtun areas in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Estimates from academics, local authorities and activists put the number of civilians, militants and security forces killed at well over 50,000 since 2002.

Coverage of the movement is censored in Pakistan. Newspapers and TV outlets are not allowed to report on the rallies the movement holds or to air its demands.

On May 26, 2019, an armed confrontation in the North Waziristan region between Pakistani troops and PTM supporters left at least 13 people dead and 25 others wounded, including five soldiers. The protest was led by two PTM members, Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir from North and South Waziristan respectively, elected to Pakistan’s national parliament in the July 25, 2018 general election.

On May 1, Sardar Muhammed Arif Wazir, another PTM activist, was assassinated in a drive-by shooting in South Waziristan.

A cousin of Ali Wazir, he was targeted after his release from a Pakistani prison. He had been arrested on April 17 on charges of delivering an “anti-Pakistan speech” during a visit to Afghanistan.

Dawar claimed that “Arif Wazir was murdered by ‘good terrorists.’ Our struggle against their masters will continue.” The term refers to the pro-government armed groups known as “peace committees” supported by the government.

Major General Asif Ghafoor, a Pakistani military spokesperson, has accused the PTM leadership of working against the country. He alleged that the PTM is receiving money from Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies.

“We are not anti-Pakistan; we are only anti-terrorism,” responded PTM leader Manzoor Pashteen, who was arrested in January. “We are against oppression in all its forms, be it perpetrated by ‘good or bad Taliban’ or by the Pakistani military's intelligence agencies.”

He contends that the movement “is against the human rights violations of the Pashtuns.” He added that “none of our demands conflicts with the Pakistani constitution.”

Still, the idea of an independent Pashtun-majority homeland in the northwest worried Pakistan right from the beginning. The state believes ethnic cleavages threaten Pakistan’s unifying glue of an Islamic identity. 

Some experts contend Pakistani authorities favored Islamization of the region to rein in the “Pashtunistan” movement, led by liberal and secular politicians and activists, and now by the PTM.

Pandemic, Protest and Government Overreach

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

I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian but I worry that governments have used the opportunity of the coronavirus pandemic to grab too much power. And states rarely voluntarily give these up.

Income tax was originally brought in to cover extraordinary expenses during the First World War in Canada. By 1948 income tax was no longer considered temporary and was replaced with the Income Tax Act.

In an article published June 30 in the C2C Journal, Peter Shawn Taylor cautioned us against bureaucratic overreach.

Public health officials are hard-working and well-meaning, beyond a doubt. Still, writes Taylor, “we should be mindful that whatever accolades they deserve for their current performances are not turned into blank cheques for future innovations and interruptions of normal, daily life once the pandemic finally recedes.” 

These people are not infallible, nor should it be considered heresy to question them. Taylor reminds us that COVID-19 represents the first global quarantine of healthy populations in human history, and it was imposed in dozens of democracies almost entirely by decree, without political debate or formal legislation. 

In Canada, provinces shut themselves off as if they were sovereign jurisdictions. In the United States, though no one prevented Americans coming or going to other states, various personal freedoms were also infringed upon by governments. 

Typical were the remarks made in April by New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, who remarked that he “wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights” while implementing social-distancing measures and writing off any constitutional considerations. 

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom said that “science,” not “politics” – that is, voters and their representatives -- would dictate when the state would reopen.

Also that month, New York City’s Hasidic Orthodox Jews ended up at odds with Mayor Bill de Blasio. He personally joined in the dispersal of a crowd that had gathered at the funeral for a revered rabbi, and then tweeted that “my message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed.” His Parks Department shut public parks populated by Orthodox Jews.

When conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections.

But after months of warnings by health officials about gatherings and social distancing, describing those who chafed at the restrictions as selfish fools, it all went out the window in the mass anti-racism protests that involved tens of thousands of marchers that began in late May after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis.

Suddenly, many public health officials decided social justice mattered more than social distance. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, tweeted in early June.

 “The injustice that’s evident to everyone right now needs to be addressed,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, remarked, condoning the marches. 

More than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests. They urged Americans to adopt a “consciously anti-racist” stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Others were conflicted. “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” Dr. Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, stated. “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy.”

The overnight change in views was indeed disorienting. Why should anyone take public health experts seriously, if it turns out their political convictions, no matter how well-meaning, trump their supposed fealty to science?

Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio said on July 9 he is permitting Black Lives Matter protesters to continue marching through city streets while canceling all other events through September.  The mayor said the demonstrators' calls for social justice were too important to stop.

Anyhow, the rights of citizens in a liberal democracy are worthless if they can be suspended, or reintroduced, at a moment’s notice, depending on ideological convictions.

Putin Tightens His Grip

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
 

At the start of the Second World War, Winston Churchill famously said that Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But, he continued, “perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

And so it remains today. We don’t really know how severely the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Russia. We do know, however, that President Vladimir Putin has won a referendum allowing him to continue governing the country until 2036. 

Russia has become the country with the third-most cases in the world, after the United States and Brazil. According to official figures as of early in July, Russia had more than 715,000 confirmed cases and over 11,000 deaths. But it may be far worse.

When the Financial Times in mid-May reported that the actual death toll, estimated using excess deaths, could be 70 per cent higher than the official tally, a Russian official suggested their press credentials should be revoked. Others immediately spoke of “Russophobia.”

Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, asked Google to block a Russian-language story based on the article from its website.

There is reason to believe some regions of Russia are hiding a much higher number. The ethnic republic of Dagestan, for instance, provided figures more than 20 times higher than Moscow’s official figures for the region. Many COVID-19 deaths were described as “community-acquired pneumonia.”

Meanwhile Russia held a nationwide referendum June 25-July 1 on some 200 amendments to its 1993 constitution. Voters approved the measures by 78.5 per cent on a turnout of almost 68 per cent of the electorate. A far northern district, Nenetsia, was the only place where a majority opposed it.

Putin appealed to what he termed Russians’ core values as he sought to rally support. “We have a common historical code, moral foundations,” he declared at a Moscow rally on June 12. These included respect for parents and family and “love for our soil.”

The passage allows Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections. The 67-year-old Putin has governed the Russian Federation since 2000, longer than any other ruler in the country since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Other constitutional changes further strengthen the presidency and emphasize the priority of Russian law over international norms. The Constitutional Court can block the implementation of decisions of international organizations.

Another related change makes it easier for the president to replace prime ministers without having to dissolve the cabinet. Cabinet members will also answer directly to the president.

Furthermore, the president will have the power to fire justices from both the Constitutional and Supreme Courts.

The amendments adopted also mean the Constitution will mention marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and faith in God.

This will strengthen what Putin has referred to at times as “sovereign democracy,” the centrepiece of ideological legitimacy and political stability for his regime and his personal power as “national leader.”

The concept was introduced into Russian political discourse in 2006 by Vladislav Surkov, whom many considered Putin’s chief ideologist at the time.

Surkov defined it as the state in which authorities and decisions are controlled by the Russian nation. The implication was that Russia’s previous attempts at democracy were somehow compromised in the 1990s by foreign control under President Boris Yeltsin.

This “weak” Russia was “conquered” or “occupied” by the West through its “agents,” the Russian “liberals,” “reformists,” “Westernizers” and their foreign “consultants.” Under Putin, Russia has regained its great power status.

“Sovereign democracy” conveys two messages: first, that Russia’s regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted. Any attempt at denial is regarded as unfriendly and meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs.

Putin has demonstrated that politics and the media can be manipulated to guarantee governments a permanent monopoly of power while maintaining a veneer of electoral competition and normal constitutional practice.

He has provided a justification for rejecting established democratic principles by insisting that every country has the right determine its own path. It is really a mix of authoritarianism and assertive nationalism.

What else is new? This is a longstanding feature of Russian political culture, whether under tsars, Bolsheviks, or now, Vladimir Putin.

Tajikistan’s Complicated Foreign Relations

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Authoritarian regimes have endured throughout post-Soviet Central Asia. Perhaps the most fragile of these states, Tajikistan has managed to survive despite its horrific civil war in the 1990s. 

Since the end of the conflict, political stability and foreign aid have allowed the country's economy to grow under the dictatorship of President Emomali Rahmon, whose Social Democratic Party, as expected, won the recent parliamentary election. 

The Tajiks are a Sunni Muslim people whose language and culture, on the other hand, derive from Shia Persia. As such, two major Muslim rivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have vied for influence in the state.

Tajikistan is generally considered Iran’s closest partner in Central Asia due to their linguistic, cultural and historical ties. The Tajik language is a dialect of Farsi. Moreover, Iran was the first country to recognize Tajikistan’s independence and to open its embassy in Dushanbe. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once described the relationship between the two as “one spirit in two bodies.

Iran helped encourage cultural exchanges through conferences, media, and film festivals. Iranian television programs, magazines, and books became increasingly common in Tajikistan.

For a time, though, Riyadh seemed to have the upper hand. Saudi leaders stepped in to help Tajikistan financially in 2015 as the country’s relationship with Iran had soured over Iranian demands that Tajikistan pay off a $62 million debt to Tehran.

Tajikistan was also displeased that Iran invited Tajikistan’s Muhiddin Kabiri, the head of the Islamic Renaissance Party, a banned Tajik organization, to attend 29th Islamic Unity Conference in December 2015. Kabiri, in exile in Turkey, had been accused of allegedly masterminding an unsuccessful armed mutiny in Tajikistan.

Kabiri even met with the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which led to Tajikistan's government summoning the Iranian ambassador to register its strong protest.

Tajik authorities also closed down an Iranian trade and cultural center in Khujand, the country’s second largest city, and helped block Iran’s application to become a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, started in 2001 by China, Russia and most of the Central Asian nations.

In 2017, India and Pakistan were admitted as members, but Iran was pointedly shut out. Tajikistan accused Tehran of having sent assassins and saboteurs into the former Soviet republic and of involvement in the murder of Tajik social and political figures when the country was embroiled in its civil war.

As relations with Saudi Arabia improved, the kingdom pledged to pump money into infrastructure projects like the new Rogun hydroelectric power plant project on the Vakhsh River; a highway in eastern Tajikistan; and investments in education.

The Saudis also backed a crackdown on Sunni mosques and clerics in Tajikistan. Around 2,000 or so mosques have been liquidated across Tajikistan over the past three years.

The authorities arrested dozens of people accused of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that is banned in both Tajikistan and the kingdom, which pleased Saudi leaders.

But the pendulum is swinging back to Iran. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Tajikistan in June 2019 and helped resolve some of the differences between the two countries. In turn, a month later Tajikistan Foreign Minister Sirodjidin Muhriddin skipped the Organization for Islamic Cooperation summit in Saudi Arabia to visit Tehran.

After all, landlocked Tajikistan needs access to Iranian ports, including the one in Chabahar at the top of the Arabian Sea, which offers the cheapest and shortest transportation option to the outside world.

Turkey Remains a Powerful Mid-East Player

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Turkey has not fared too badly in combatting COVID-19, and so that hasn’t stopped President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from continuing his foreign policy adventures in the Middle East. 

As in dozens of other countries, Turkey has seen the virus spread throughout the nation. There were slightly more than 5,000 deaths by early July, though some doctors dispute that, claiming the real figure could be twice as high because Turkey only includes those who test positive.

Still, for a nation of 82 million people, Turkey has “clearly averted a much bigger disaster,” according to Dr. Jeremy Rossman, at the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent in England.

You’d think that would be good news. But Erdogan insists that any negative stories about the country’s handling of the crisis are the result of anti-Turkish bias.

During a coronavirus briefing on May 4. he accused the secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which governs Istanbul, of having a “fascist mindset” and supporting military coups. He went on to claim it conspires with “terrorists” and “evil powers.”

The CHP’s actions are guided by “a desire to usurp the country’s administration through a coup rather than coming to power through democratic means,” he charged, adding, “This is what the picture tells us when you sum up the statements of CHP leaders.”

Erdogan also warned against the “Armenian and Greek lobbies” that were, he claimed, plotting against Turkey. “We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country,” he said.

The government was initially caught off-guard by the intensity and speed of the pandemic, and by mid-March Turkey had experienced one of the steepest infection curves in the world.

In that month Turkey allowed 21,000 pilgrims to travel to Saudi Arabia, and many weren’t quarantined when they returned, spreading the virus to their hometowns.

Turkey suffered from protective equipment shortages in the beginning, and intensive care wards in some hospitals were nearly overrun. A survey by the Turkish Medical Association in March showed that 66 per cent of medical staff experienced shortages of masks, and 40 per cent had not received any training in dealing with infectious diseases.

Not only did the government refuse to acknowledge these problems, but when medical staff or the few remaining critical reporters were brave enough to speak out, they were harassed, fired, investigated or even taken into custody.

Erdogan knows that political adventures outside Turkish borders increases his popularity, especially when economic hardships during the pandemic could impact his approval at home. Hence his increasing involvement in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars.

Long an enemy of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, last October Erdogan sent Turkish forces into the northwestern province of Idlib, the last rebel-held province of Syria, to stem a Syrian government advance. More than 50 Turkish troops were killed by Syrian government fire there in late February. 

Turkey is also trying to prevent Syria’s Kurdish community, which formed the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in 2011 to defend Kurdish-inhabited areas, from establishing control over the border region, fearing this would encourage Kurdish separatism within Turkey itself. 

Further afield, Erdogan is now involved in Libya. Since 2014, it has been split between two rival factions and their governments, based in Tobruk in the east and Tripoli in the west. In April of last year, General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), with the support of Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), began a major push from his eastern base to take Tripoli, the country’s capital, from Fayez Serraj’s UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA).

However, Turkey signed a maritime and military deal with the GNA late last year, and since then Turkey’s technological and tactical backing for Serraj has seen Haftar’s advance stopped and even reversed in some strategic areas.

Part of that strategy involved installing new air defense systems, which allowed Turkish drones to start a major campaign of air strikes in January, crippling Haftar’s ability to resupply his forces. It was Turkey’s most forceful intervention in the oil-rich North African nation since the end of the Ottoman Empire over a century ago.

“The balance in Libya changed significantly as a result,” declared Turkey’s Defence Minister Hulusi Akar on May 20.