Caribbean Economy Hit Hard by COVID

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

How are various Commonwealth Caribbean island jurisdictions coping with the coronavirus pandemic? Overall, the small states and territories have done relatively well in controlling the spread of COVID-19.

Measures were taken to restrict population mobility through shelter in place measures, curfews, and national or localised economic lockdowns. Ten countries imposed national or localised states of emergency to enforce public compliance with prohibitions against the frequenting of bars, beaches and other recreational places.

All countries temporarily banned religious gatherings and closed their borders for varying durations. They have since maintained public health-related border protocols.

This capacity for control has been facilitated by their isolated geographical location. The most severe impacts of the pandemic on them have been economic, as many of these polities are highly dependent on tourism and remittances through labour migration.

The pandemic has highlighted the limited agency of the island countries, buffeted as they are by developments occurring elsewhere. The result has been higher levels of indebtedness, unemployment and psychological stress, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations throughout the region.

COVID-19 has further weakened the fragile socio-economic fabric of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Economies have been stifled by lockdowns, and by a global decline in travel and tourism. Their export-oriented economies are heavily dependent on tourism, air and maritime transport, financial services, remittances and commodities, including fossil fuels.

For economies based on oil and gas exports, COVID-19 has dramatically decreased the demand for energy, due to reduced international and domestic travel. Trinidad and Tobago illustrate this trend. An increase in the country’s deficit spending has accompanied the decreased contributions of the energy sector to GDP.

The hard-hit Caribbean tourism sector accounts for 15.5 per cent of GDP and employs approximately 2.4 million people. For countries like Jamaica, recently emerged from International Monetary Fund restructuring programs, COVID-19 has dealt a crushing blow to economic recovery efforts. The US$73 million allocated to the COVID Allocation of Resources for Employees program proved to be insufficient early in the pandemic.

The pandemic revealed the inadequacies of existing social assistance programs in a crisis. It is estimated that existing social assistance programs cover just 11 per cent of the most vulnerable in Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Lucia; approximately 30 per cent in Trinidad and Tobago; 43 and 45 per cent in St. Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada respectively; and 76 per cent in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The pandemic has exposed the inadequacies of health care systems in the region. Governments have responded by increasing expenditure on health care in many countries. Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis, increased their health care budget by 0.5 per cent of their GDP and local manufacturing of medical equipment and supplies has been bolstered in countries like Trinidad and Tobago.

Given the widespread adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, traditional donors may be less willing and able to enter into development cooperation agreements and to offer assistance to developing countries. Leveraging support from multilateral development agencies is therefore likely to be crucial to the process of restructuring and rebuilding.

Some elements of international cooperation have remained, as with the World Health Organisation’s COVAX facility, enabling developed countries to assist developing countries in obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine.

Despite their limited size and resources, Commonwealth Caribbean states have sought to support business and individuals alike, stimulate economic activity and preserve livelihoods. This offers opportunities to deepen functional cooperation and build resilience.

Policy responses to cushion the impact on the most vulnerable have included measures to boost employment in labour-intensive sectors like construction. Many governments expanded existing programs to meet demands arising from the adverse pandemic effects.

Examples include Antigua’s COVID-19 Government Assistance Food Voucher. As well, St. Vincent and the Grenadines expanded social safety net programs, and St. Kitts and Nevis provided additional support for its poverty alleviation program.

Grenada expanded the government employment programs, while Barbados expanded unemployment benefits to self-employed workers, expanded National Assistance payments and coverage under the National Assistance program. The British Virgin Islands stimulus package included an unemployment fund, business grants, and funds for the National Health Insurance program.

The responses that have been implemented should in future push Commonwealth Caribbean governments to go beyond just facing the pandemic’s immediate impacts.

 

Houthis Make Gains in Yemen’s Civil War

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 announced an end to support for Saudi-led military offensive operations in Yemen. A day later, the State Department said it would lift the terrorist designation against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Both moves will be welcomed in Iran, their ally, and the tide has turned in favour of the rebels.

The Houthis, an armed movement representing Yemen’s Zaydis, a branch of Shia Islam, continue making gains in Yemen’s civil war, whereas the Saudi-led forces opposing them face discord within their coalition.

Saudi Arabia’s air force launched its first air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in March 2015. The campaign, Operation Decisive Storm, at the time seemed likely to be over within weeks.

The Saudis wanted Abdu Rabu Mansur Hadi restored as Yemen’s president following his overthrow in a Houthi-led rebellion the previous September. Hadi had been elected president in 2012 after protests lasting nearly a year against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Fearing their growing power, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates opened their air and ground war against the Houthis.

The UN Security Council in April 2015 retrospectively gave carte blanche to the coalition, which in addition to Saudi Arabia involved a dozen Arab and Muslim countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco, and the Gulf states, except Oman.

The resolution legally sanctioned coalition military action and control over movements in and out of Yemen, including the use of a blockade, which soon exacted an appalling human toll.

The Houthi movement, named after the family it is associated with, emerged from Yemen’s northern province Saada, bordering Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s. Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority makes up about one-third of the country’s population.

The Houthis had formed a broad tribal alliance in Yemen’s north in opposition to an expanding extremist Sunni Salafism in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which exported the ideology to Yemen. In response, Zaidi clerics began to militarise their followers against Riyadh and its allies. They were also motivated by what they saw as Saleh’s economic discrimination of the north.

A hybrid range of forces make up the Houthis, also referred to as Ansar Allah, with some 60 per cent of the former Yemeni army having allied with the group. Their influence has grown since first challenging Saleh in 2004. They fought six rounds of war from 2004-2010 against Saleh’s forces, until the 2011 Arab Spring uprising toppled him.

A September 2019 report by Renad Mansour and Peter Salisbury, “Between Order and Chaos,” estimated Houthi strength at 180,000-200,000 armed men with access to weapons systems ranging from tanks and technical vehicles to anti-tank guided missiles and long-range ballistic missiles. The group claims many of the advanced parts their arsenal were captured when they took control of Sanaa in 2014.

The Houthis have had support from Iran, a fellow Shia state. Saudi and Yemeni governments have accused Iran of smuggling arms, including ballistic missiles and drones, to the Houthis, enabling them to keep fighting. The Saudis have intercepted many arms shipments off the Yemeni coast over the past several years.

But Tehran’s influence is likely limited politically, especially since Iranians and Houthis adhere to different schools of Shiite Islam.

The Houthis control a third of Yemeni territory including the major population centres. They have even breached Saudi borders.

For the past year, they have steadily advanced in Marib province, roughly 160 kilometres northeast of Sanaa. Capturing it would give the Houthis control over lucrative oil and natural gas reserves.

During his election campaign, Biden expressed opposition to the war in Yemen and was highly critical of the Saudis’ stance. He has made ending the conflict in Yemen a priority since taking office.

Meanwhile, the war continues to drag on and has caused a humanitarian catastrophe affecting some 80 per cent of the population, with 250,00 dead and more than 3.6 million people internally displaced, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

More than two million Yemeni children under the age of five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, which may lead to the death of 400,000 of them, report the World Food Program, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.

China’s New Ideologues

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

We know that the days when China’s Communist rulers quoted Lenin, Marx and Mao are long gone. If anything, those former Communist saints are something of an embarrassment to today’s capitalist-mandarin coalition. After all, it governs what has become arguably the most successful state capitalist country on earth.

But who would have thought that many of them are gravitating towards a long-dead German philosopher who admired Adolf Hitler? On second thought, maybe it’s not that surprising. Remember, China has now been accused of genocide in dealing with its Uighur minority.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has markedly shifted the ideological center of gravity within the Communist Party. The limited tolerance China had toward dissent has all but dissipated, so a new group of scholars have started defending the party’s hardening policies. Only with a heavy hand, they believe, can a nation secure the stability required to protect prosperity.

China’s new statists have come to admire the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. He joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact, helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews and political opponents.

Why has a Nazi thinker garnered such a lively reception in China? Schmitt gives pro-Beijing scholars an opportunity to anchor the party’s legitimacy on nationalism and external enemies rather than the notion of class struggle.

Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.”

Xu Jilin, Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang are three of the most prominent Chinese political philosophers who have actively introduced Schmitt to China. Schmitt, they maintain, provides the Chinese with new theoretical resources with which to consider the issue of political legitimacy in China.

Their ideas have energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities. Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012.

The German jurist, he argued, distinguishes between state and constitutional norms. “When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.” This was Schmitt’s notorious doctrine known as the “state of exception.”

Chen’s argument is a straight-forward Schmittian defence of China’s decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong last June.  In a keynote address at the “2020 Constitution Day Seminar,” held there on Dec. 4, Chen argued that the state is a security system, necessary to guarantee the safety of the individual and the group.  The sovereign protects the state; this is the “law of national self-preservation.” 

Chen illustrated the importance of sovereignty, national security, constitutional rule, and the state of exception by citing U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s actions leading up to the Civil War, when he overrode legal niceties and Supreme Court objections to oppose the secession of the Southern states, only after which, Chen insists, did the United States truly “become a nation.”

Jiang Shigong, Chen’s colleague, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, used Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2010 volume, China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective, to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favour of the Communist Party.

Chen and Jiang are “the most concrete expression” thus far of China’s turn to Schmittian ideas, Ryan Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in a paper last year. They are the vanguard of the statist movement, which supplies the rationale for the authoritarian impulses of China’s leaders.

The perceived threat of invasion, or at a minimum suspicion of outsiders, continues to inform contemporary politics in China. Such anxiety lends credence to the anti-liberal theories of Carl Schmitt, for whom all politics came down to a distinction between friends and enemies.

 

America's Elite Are Too Close to China's Government

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

Many writers across the ideological spectrum have contended that the American people’s trust in government lessened in recent years as they realized that a rising political establishment had become culturally united in disdain for them, leaving them impoverished and disempowered.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory drew upon these feelings, but it created ferocious opposition because the ruling elites recognized he was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which they lived.

These were summed up in the word globalism, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of their own country.

The determination to feel superior to the people whom Hillary Clinton had called the “deplorables” was what bound together Wall Street movers and shakers, the media, officials of public service unions, all manner of administrators, race and ethnic activists, and so on. The so-called “Resistance” grew by further awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them.

Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite, in particular the way they benefited and grew incredibly wealthy by offloading American jobs to cheap-labour countries like China, gave them a collective as well as a powerful motive for solidarity.

Why did they deal with an authoritarian regime by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off offshore and thereby impoverishing working Americans? Because it made them rich.

Together, they saw that they represented a coming together of public and private sector interests that shared the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits. Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent became lucid under Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal contempt of the elite that loathed him.

Meanwhile, think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Center for American Progress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others became recipients of Chinese money.

Nearly every major American industry now has a stake in China, from Wall Street to hospitality. Example? A Marriott Hotel employee was fired in 2018 when Chinese officials objected to his “liking” a tweet about Tibet. They have all learned to play by the Chinese Communist Party’s rules.

On Trump’s final days in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims.”

Yet last year Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act being considered by Congress.

Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed that he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. But under Joe Biden, they no longer need worry. The new administration is loaded with lobbyists for the American tech industry, who are determined to get the U.S.-China relationship back on track.

Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain was formerly on the executive council of TechNet, the trade group that lobbies on behalf of Silicon Valley in Washington. Incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked at a Beltway firm called WestExec, which had lobbied on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden security aide Colin Kahl was with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, which oversees the university’s links to Peking University. The latter is run by a former Beijing spy chief, Qiu Shuiping.

Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security.

U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa.

“I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she maintained. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.”

Winning the 2020 election was the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced during the Trump years. For them, the point of having Biden elected was to protect themselves.

 

Alexei Navalny Continues to Defy Putin

By Henry Srebrnik. [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A nationwide referendum held last summer on amendments to Russia’s constitution allows President Vladimir Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.

His main political opponent is not some ordinary politician, but opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been gaining momentum despite efforts by the government to stop him – including, perhaps, even trying to murder him.

The 44-year-old anti-corruption activist has been waging the battle against Putin for more than a decade, as a lawyer and a blogger, through his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, during his run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and in his abortive 2018 run for president.

Navalny was prevented from becoming a candidate in the election because of an embezzlement conviction that he says was politically motivated. He has continued to take his battle to the streets, saying protests are justified to encourage political change.

Navalny doesn’t mince words. He calls Putin’s United Russia party full of “crooks and thieves” and accuses the president of “sucking the blood out of Russia” through a “feudal state” concentrating power in the Kremlin. But he is no western puppet – for instance, he has also said the Crimea, which was wrested from Ukraine by Putin in 2014, should remain part of Russia.

Navalny was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August in what has been described as an assassination attempt by the Russian state.

He was administered Novichok, a potent neurotoxin, and fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The pilot made an emergency landing and Navalny was flown to Berlin where he spent weeks in a coma.

He was airlifted to Germany and recovered. After flying home to Moscow from Berlin Jan. 17, he was arrested at passport control, ostensibly for violating the parole terms from a suspended sentence he received six years ago.

On Jan. 23, tens of thousands of people across Russia called for his release. Videos showed protesters scuffling with police officers who were swinging batons and kicking them. More than 4,000 people were detained in more than 100 cities.

More protests Jan. 30 saw police arrest more than 4,000 people across the country, including 1,167 in Moscow and 862 in St Petersburg. There were further arrests Feb. 2 when a Moscow court on Feb. 2 ordered Navalny to prison for two years and eight months on parole violation charge. In a message from jail, Navalny urged Russians to stage new rallies.

“I think it's only the beginning of problems for the regime,” argues Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. “It's not just the political opposition, but civil society that’s irritated by the cruelty.”

Navalny knows how to get under Putin’s skin. He has exposed the corruption of officials and tapped into growing discontent. In the days before the protests, his Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation describing a lavish secret palace built for Putin on the Black Sea that cost the equivalent of more than $1 billion.

Putin denied the charges; it was built by billionaire Arkady Rotenberg. But the video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, a record number for the platform in Russia.

“We will live normally only when we stop tolerating officials who steal and re-electing them,” contends Navalny. “And if they refuse to hold fair elections, then we’ll take to the streets and remove them from power in this way.”

The next likely flash point will come with parliamentary elections in autumn, when Navalny had plans to “decimate” the pro-Kremlin United Russia party at the polls. But now he’ll be in prison.

The Kremlin has long painted Navalny as an “agent” of the West bent on undermining Russia. A news anchor on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One suggested that the United States, with a Democratic president now in the White House, had in fact organized the protests.

Navalny had spent a student year in the U.S. as part of the Yale University World Fellows program in 2010.  “As they say, draw your own conclusions,” he told viewers. But perhaps Russians are drawing different conclusions.

 

Yemen’s Ruinous Civil War May Soon Take a Turn

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

U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 announced an end to support for Saudi-led military offensive operations in Yemen. A day later, the State Department said it would lift the terrorist designation against the Houthis in Yemen. Both moves will be welcomed in Tehran and the tide may turn in favour of the rebels.

The Houthis of north Yemen have been engaged in a long-standing and intermittent insurgency against the government of the country.

The conflict has its roots in the failure of a political transition supposed to bring stability to Yemen following an uprising that forced its authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, after 33 years of rule, to hand over power to his vice-president, Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi, in 2011.

As president, Hadi had to deal with a variety of problems, including a separatist movement in the south, the continuing loyalty of security personnel to Saleh, as well as corruption, unemployment and food insecurity.

The Houthi movement, known formally as Ansar Allah, which champions Yemen’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority and had already fought a series of rebellions against Saleh during the previous decade, took advantage of the new president’s weakness.

Disillusioned with the transition, many ordinary Yemenis, including Sunnis, supported the Houthis. The insurgency escalated sharply in 2014, when their movement seized the capital, Sanaa, and the surrounding areas.

This was facilitated by a newly forged alliance of convenience with former President Saleh -- whom they killed in 2017. The Houthis continue to hold Sanaa, and a large part of the country’s territory. 

Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents. 

Yemen abuts a strategic choke point of global importance, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea.  It is a vital route for oil and natural gas shipments passing from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and on to the Suez Canal.  Around nine per cent of total global petroleum products pass through the strait. 

The Saudis and their allies failed to reconquer the entirety of Yemen but they did protect the Bab el-Mandeb.  Similarly, the intervention prevented the main port of Yemen, al-Hudayda, from falling under the complete control of the Houthis. 

The result is that Yemen, like some other Arab countries, is now subject to de facto division and ongoing conflict. The Houthis control the capital and a large part of the populated center of the country. Hadi’s internationally recognized government controls much of the east and the strategically important south and western coastal areas. 

To further complicate matters, the separatist Southern Transitional Council, supported by the United Arab Emirates, controls the port of Aden and a section of the southern coast. Finally, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State group are active on the ground. 

The Houthis follow the Zaidiya branch of Shia Islam, whereas the Iranians are Twelver Shia. Nonetheless, the Houthis have had support from Iran.  Also, some 60 per cent of the former Yemeni army having allied with them.

Iran uses the territory in Yemen controlled by the Houthis for the launching of missiles on Saudi Arabia. For example, the Houthis claimed responsibility for the sophisticated attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019, but the weapons came from Iran. 

Yemen’s economy, already fragile prior to the conflict, has been gravely affected. The war has wrecked the country's roads, hospitals, water and electricity networks, as well as other infrastructure.

Hundreds of thousands of families no longer have a steady source of income, and many public servants have not received a regular salary in years. The country’s civil war has worsened the humanitarian crisis. 

All parties to the conflict have committed human rights violations. Almost a quarter of a million people have died in Yemen’s war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in December.

As well, 3.6 million people have been internally displaced and some 20 million are experiencing food insecurity. And public health experts warn that the COVID-19 pandemic may have further significant negative effects on Yemen’s vulnerable population.

 

Putin's Policies Aimed at Re-establishing Russian Conservatism

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

Russian politics has been characterised by increasing cultural and political conservatism since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. This “cultural turn” has seen the promotion of social, political and cultural conservative themes in official political discourse.

The notion that Russian traditional values should be the source of regime legitimacy and a guide to public policy was not particularly strongly developed by Putin during his first period as president between 2000 and 2008.

But it became more prominent in recent years, particularly as the country has grappled with ongoing economic problems, exacerbated by sanctions imposed by other countries since the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

Action against oligarchs and regional leaders, and Putin’s efforts to strengthen the capacity of the Russian state through the reassertion of its monopoly rights over violence, has enhanced his personal powers.

Putin has promoted the concept of “sovereign democracy,” a term first coined by the ideologue Vladislav Surkov in 2006, to argue that Russia’s democratic standards were not comparable to those proposed by Western conceptions of democracy.

Russia, he contends, is different to other places because of the character of its civilisation and the extent to which it has retained it. It is, for Putin, a “state-civilisation.” There is, he stated in 2013, a close alignment between Russia’s ability to exist as a state and as a civilisation; each depends on the other.

The character of this civilisation is essentially a religious one, namely Russian Orthodoxy. This identity needs to be protected so that the state can survive.

 “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” Putin declared in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2013. And this, he claimed, is antithetical to true democracy, “since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority.”

Putin is part of a long Russian tradition that predates the Soviet Union and goes back as far as the Orthodox Christian idea of Russia as the “third Rome,” first put forward in the early 16^th century.

Rome itself was the first, but it was succeeded by Constantinople after the Christian Church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths in the 11^th century. When the Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, Moscow inherited the mantle of Orthodoxy, as the third Rome, making Russia a “world-historical” country.

In the 19^th century, intellectuals who became known as Slavophiles began to oppose the westernization of tsarist Russia. They declared that Russia was unlike Europe and that its type of civilization was higher than the European.

They denounced the ongoing Europeanization of Russia as a fatal deviation from the genuine course of Russian history and wanted Russia to come back to the principles of the Orthodox Church and state -- in other words, to autocracy.

Their opponents, the westernizers, believed that Russia’s development depended on the adoption of western technology and liberal government. They were rationalistic rather than emotional and mystical. Some remained moderate liberals, while others became socialists and political radicals.

The Bolsheviks who took control of the Russian Empire after 1917 were adherents of western ideas; after all, they were followers of the German political theorist Karl Marx. The dissolution of the Soviet Union also temporarily led to westernization.

Russia tried to become part of the “common European home,” as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, put it. In a July 6, 1989 speech before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that the concept “rules out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of the use of force.” Westernizers sought reforms under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, but his decade in office was a shambles.

So the westernizers have, for now, lost the battle for Russia’s future. Putin’s “cultural turn” is in fact a “re-turn” to Slavophilism, and he has put these ideas into practice, especially since his 2018 presidential election victory. It accounts for the extreme measures taken against westernizers such as the activist Alexei Navalny.

A referendum held last summer on Russia’s constitution allows Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.

 

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.