The Ever-Shifting Contours of Hungarian Politic

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In a tour de force published earlier this year, University of California at Berkeley Professor John Connelly surveys the past thousand years in his book From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe. It will be the standard text for years to come.

One of these peoples, the Magyars, or Hungarians, have played a major role in the region. By the late middle ages, the medieval Kingdom of Hungary was an important Christian state. That kingdom, however, was destroyed by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent wiped out much of Hungary’s nobility and clergy.

Defence against Ottoman expansion shifted to the Habsburg emperors of Austria, and by 1700 all of Hungary had come under their rule. In 1867 Hungary became an autonomous partner in the renamed Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the “Dual Monarchy” was defeated in the First World War and the empire dissolved.

The post-war collapse of the Habsburg and three other major empires led to the formation of new states throughout the region, each determined to establish boundaries that would provide it with the largest possible territory.

Some succeeded, others failed, and this was particularly true of the nations defeated in the war. For instance, the map known as the “Carte Rouge,” created by the Hungarian Count Pal Teleki in 1918, represented the density of different Hungarian regions’ by ethnic population.

Created as a scientific backing for Hungary’s position at the peace talks after the end of the conflict, it was of little help. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon saw defeated Hungary lose two-thirds of its pre-war territory and some 60 per cent of its population. It remains a sore point among Hungarians to this day.

Hungary, an ally of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, again ended up on the losing side, and became a Soviet Russian satellite state. Although the 1956 uprising failed, Communism in Hungary thereafter tended to be more tolerable than in other states behind the Iron Curtain.

The decades of the 1960s-70s saw economic reforms, known as the “New Economic Mechanism, popularly called “Goulash Communism.”

So by the time the Cold War ended, the country was virtually free of Marxist dogma. In 1989, there were few doubts about the bright democratic future of post-communist Hungary. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Instead, there has been a bitter repudiation of liberal democracy itself.

Some fifteen years ago, Hungary looked firmly like a success story, having made considerable progress on all sorts of metrics of democracy, rule of law, and institutional quality. Today, on measures such as Freedom House’s Freedom of the World Index, the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, and the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, Hungary has undergone a degree of “democratic backsliding” or “de-democratization.”

In the 1990s the judiciary was insulated from political pressures, following recommendations by international authorities. Hungary’s constitutional court was also hailed as one of the strongest in the world, pushing back assertively against government legislation, including striking down its fiscal consolidation package in 1995.

It also deployed the doctrine of an “invisible constitution,” filling the gaps in the text of the constitution by borrowing from international law and developing and applying its own abstract concepts, such as human dignity.

Yet far from entrenching the principles of judicial independence in Hungarian legal practice and political life, these early reforms led to a backlash and ultimately to the full-fledged politicization of the courts under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his FIDESZ party.

In elections held in 2010, Orban secured a constitutional majority and passed a new Fundamental Law with FIDESZ votes only. By doing so, he also ensured that the entire pre-2011 jurisprudence of Hungary’s constitutional court went out the window.

Since then, we have seen the forced retirements of large numbers of judges, compromising the judiciary’s integrity; crackdowns on independent media; and the branding of foreign-funded non-governmental organizations as “foreign agents.”

Orban has also hounded the western-oriented Central European University out of the country and forced the university to move to Vienna. However, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that Orban’s decision was not in line with European Union law.

Some analysts blame this as resentment against those forces, spearheaded by the United States and Western Europe, which sought to turn Hungary and other Eastern European nations into copies of the West, without much regard for local realities. It may be a bitter lesson in ideological “overreach.”

 

Donald Trump Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

On Oct. 9, we learned who won the Nobel Peace Prize. It wasn’t Donald Trump – though it should have been. Instead, it went to the UN World Food Programme, “for its efforts to combat hunger.”

 Many people or organizations have been chosen since it was established in 1901, including some whom history later demonstrated were unworthy of it. Some recent recipients were activists whose work had little to do with relations between states.

In other cases, obvious candidates were bypassed, often for ideological reasons. Donald Trump was one of the latter.

The prize is awarded, according to the selection committee, “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

In September, Trump was nominated by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament, who lauded Trump for his efforts toward resolving protracted conflicts worldwide.

“I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” stated Tybring-Gjedde, citing Trump’s role in the establishment of relations between Israel and the Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

He also praised Trump for “creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea.”

Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, the treaties between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, signed at the White House Sept.15. The documents represent a significant symbolic and substantive breakthrough in the relationships between Israel and the Arab world.

Included is a reference to the Arab and Jewish common heritage, as descendants of Abraham, and the need “to foster in the Middle East a reality in which Muslims, Jews, Christians and peoples of all faiths are committed to a spirt of coexistence, mutual understanding, and respect.”

As part of this deal, Israel agreed to suspend annexation of more Palestinian land in the West Bank. It enhances peaceful relations between Israel and moderate Arab states as well as a possible precursor to progress with the Palestinians.

Other countries, including Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, and Sudan, may eventually come on board. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, cautiously welcomed the agreement and Riyadh may eventually normalize relations with Israel. It also, of course, foils to some extent the ability of Iran to make mischief in the Persian Gulf.

Also, Israel and Lebanon have agreed to conduct negotiations on their mutual maritime border, with the U.S. as mediator.

The agreement was the most significant advance in Arab-Israeli relations since Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979 – for which Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were jointly honoured with the peace prize.

And in 1994 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat received it for signing the Oslo Accords – which didn’t bring peace.

There are other accomplishments. Donald Trump brought the leaders of Kosovo and Serbia, two bitter enemies, to the White House on Sept. 4 to sign an agreement for economic cooperation.

Serbia agreed to move its embassy to Jerusalem, while Kosovo will be recognizing Israel and also planning to locate its embassy there. “It took decades because you didn’t have anybody trying to get it done,” Trump told Serbian President Aleksander Vucic and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti.

The contrast with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, is telling. Obama gained the prize just a year after winning office, basically for aspirational speeches. The former secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, Geir Lundestad, admitted in 2015 that Obama failed to live up to expectations.

Last year’s recipient, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, was honoured for resolving the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea. Commendable, but not as important as what Trump has achieved.

And unlike previous presidents, Trump has not blundered into new military conflicts. Very few American troops have been killed on his watch.

So why didn’t Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because he is reviled by a chattering class which differs from him ideologically, and which doesn't want to see him re-elected.

In Hong Kong, Things go from Bad to Worse

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

Police in Hong Kong arrested at least 60 protesters for “unlawful assembly” on Oct. 1 They had gathered for a demonstration, timed to coincide with China’s National Day, to draw attention to Beijing’s increasing influence in the semi-autonomous territory.

On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. The former British colony, under Chinese rule since 1997, had seen Beijing tighten its grip over the past few years, but this, as pro-democracy protester Joshua Wong tweeted, “marks the end of Hong Kong that the world knew before.” 

It signaled President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s desire to seize more control in order to squash pro-democracy protests in the city. The scale and intensity of Hong Kong’s protest movement and growing calls for democracy, and even some calls for independence, caught China’s leaders off guard.

“There was this idea before about China being cautious and trying to cultivate its soft power around the world,” remarked Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political science professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. “Those times are gone with Xi Jinping.”

The law supersedes Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the “one country, two systems” that was supposed to remain in effect until 2047. It effectively puts an end to the territory’s autonomy.

The Hong Kong government is establishing a national security council headed by a chief executive as well as a new central government commission. It will become the highest executive body in Hong Kong and enable Beijing to supervise local authorities in executing the law.

In addition, the chief executive will also be able to select judges to handle national security cases, which experts warn could jeopardize the city's judicial independence.

The new law jeopardizes civil liberties and Hong Kong’s independent judicial system, which has allowed the financial hub to thrive over the decades economically. It is so broad that it effectively criminalises dissent and is meant to silence the protest movements that have grown in numbers and intensity since 2013.

The new national security law was met with defiance, as protesters took to the streets in defiance of the sweeping security legislation. It happened to coincide with an annual rally marking the anniversary of the colony’s takeover by China in 1997. In Beijing, Zhang Xiaoming, executive deputy director of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, described the new security law as a “birthday gift” to Hong Kong.

The protests in Hong Kong had intensified in June 2019 after Carrie Lam, chief executive of  the Hong Kong government, tried to enact an extradition law that would have allowed residents to be transferred to the mainland to face an often harsh judicial system.

China has denounced the protests as acts of terrorism and accused Western nations of fomenting the unrest.

On July 31, Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced that she was postponing the Sept. 6 legislative elections, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This postponement is entirely made based on public safety reasons, there were no political considerations,” she claimed. However, the opposition accused the government of using the pandemic as a pretext.

Opposition activists had hoped to obtain a majority in the Legislative Council. Pro-democracy candidates had made unprecedented gains in 2019 district council elections, winning 17 out of 18 councils.

By the time those elections happen in 2021, opposition candidates will have been excluded from the ballot.

Hong Kong’s economic stature was supposed to guarantee its liberties -- instead, it is now losing both. In 1997, it had an economy worth about a quarter of China’s. Today, that share has shrunk to less than three per cent.

 “I foresee that the international status of Hong Kong as a city will be gone very soon,” remarked Dennis Kwok, an opposition lawmaker. Financial institutions are eyeing Singapore as a safer haven.

But Hong Kong, a British creation with its own political culture, retains its separate identity, nurtured over almost two centuries. This has only strengthened during the past year, and that will perhaps be the most salient result of the protest movement.

Hong Kong’s seven million citizens have a long history of resisting imperialism, both British and Chinese, and they will continue that tradition into the future.

 

A Frozen Conflict Zone Heats up in the Caucasus

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

Will Armenia and Azerbaijan engage in full-scale war over Nagorno-Karabakh? It’s beginning to look that way, as this “frozen” conflict heats up.

The unresolved battle over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region of about 4,400 square kilometres with a population of roughly 150,000 ethnic Armenians, continues to be a problem for the South Caucasus region.

 Should the conflict re-ignite, it would spread catastrophe over a wide region, impacting not just Armenia and Azerbaijan, but Georgia, Russia, Turkey, and even Iran.

After all, Armenians, an ancient Christian nation, and Azeris, a Muslim people, have had little love lost between them in the area they share in the southern Caucasus.

Each has also had a powerful ally over the centuries, based on their respective faiths, with Russian Orthodox tsarist Russia coming to the aid of the Armenians, while the Ottoman Turks supported the Azeris. They speak a Turkic language, though, like Iranians, they practice Shia Islam, whereas the majority of Turks are Sunnis.

The leaders of Turkey and Azerbaijan often refer to themselves as “one nation and two states,” and Turkey’s 300-kilometre border with Armenia has been closed since 1993 as a gesture of support over Nagorno-Karabakh, causing severe economic problems for landlocked Armenia.

This too factors into the conflict, as there remains the memory among Armenians of the Ottoman Turkish genocide during World War I, in which at least one million Armenians were massacred.

In late September, a new round of fighting over the disputed mountainous region resumed. The fighting now appears to be spilling out of Nagorno-Karabakh, with Armenia and Azerbaijan trading accusations of direct fire on their borders.

Azerbaijan’s Defence Ministry said Armenian forces shelled the Dashkesan region in Azerbaijan, while Armenian officials said Azerbaijani forces opened fire in the Armenian town of Vardenis.

Azerbaijan is frustrated that after nearly three decades there has still been no progress towards settling the conflict, including the return of seven adjacent Azeri territories currently under Armenian control.

Turkey openly backs Azerbaijan and there are signs it is actively engaged in the fighting. It also appears a proxy force of Syrian fighters has been deployed from southern Turkey to Azerbaijan. Indeed, in a major escalation, Armenia claims Turkey shot down one of its fighter jets.

“Armenia should withdraw from the territories under its occupation instead of resorting to cheap propaganda tricks,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aide Fahrettin Altun stated.

But Russia, which has a mutual defence pact with Armenia and a military base there, has been more circumspect, calling for a ceasefire. It helped negotiate a ceasefire in 2016 after the so-called “April War,” in which some 200 soldiers and civilians were killed, and the two sides came close to all-out war.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told Russian media the atmosphere was not right for talks while military operations were ongoing. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, also speaking to Russian outlets, ruled out any talks given Armenia’s current stance.

 The Soviet Union created the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region within Azerbaijan in 1924, when over 94 per cent of the region's population was Armenian. As the Azerbaijani population grew, the Karabakh Armenians chafed under the discriminatory rule of what became the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.

The conflict dates in its modern form to 1988, when Armenian deputies to the National Council of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to unify that region with Armenia. Although Armenia did not formally respond, this act triggered an Azerbaijani massacre of more than 100 Armenians in the city of Sumgait, just north of Baku. A similar attack on Azerbaijanis occurred in the Armenian town of Spitak.

Large numbers of refugees left Armenia and Azerbaijan as pogroms began against the minority populations of the respective countries. Meanwhile, in a December 1991 referendum, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh approved the creation of an independent state.

The dispute over the status of the territory has been costly: during the initial fighting, as the Soviet Union collapsed, around 30,000 people died and more than a million were displaced on both sides.

After a ceasefire agreement was signed in 1994, a situation of “no war, no peace” has prevailed punctuated by periodic border clashes. By this time the Armenian side had gained de facto control over a territory comprising not just Nagorno-Karabakh itself but a large swathe of land outside the region as well, amounting to just under 14 per cent of the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan.

The Nagorno-Karabakh polity, which calls itself Republic of Artsakh, is really a de facto Armenian entity, but it is not recognised as a sovereign polity by any other internationally recognized country, including even Armenia.

Only three other entities, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Transnistria, themselves breakaway regions which seceded from Soviet successor countries, have granted it recognition. For every-day purposes it has become a province of Armenia. Indeed, Serzh Sargsyan, president of Armenia from 2008 to 2018, is himself from Nagorno-Karabakh.

The UN Security Council has said it confirmed its “full support” for the role of the co-chairs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, comprising France, Russia and the United States, who have mediated peace efforts. The council encouraged the parties to work closely with the co-chairs “for an urgent resumption of dialogue without preconditions.” But this is falling on deaf ears at the moment.

 

Nothing to Celebrate as Lebanon Turns 100

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the creation of Lebanon. Given the mess the country is in, there’s been little to celebrate.

On Aug. 4, a massive explosion tore apart a large part of Beirut’s port, killing over 190 people, wounding thousands more, and leaving some 250,000 homeless.

The blast came at a difficult time for Lebanon, which is mired in an unprecedented economic crisis. The currency has crashed, throwing more than half the country’s five million people into poverty. Unemployment stands at 25 per cent and now a third of the population is living below the poverty line.

The economic situation had already triggered large anti-government protests. So bad as things have been these past few years, they got even worse For many, this new disaster seemed like the last straw.

Prince Edward Island’s Lebanese community has been raising funds to help alleviate the suffering, but it can only do so much.

Why does tiny Lebanon even exist? The idea of a separate Lebanon, carved out of a larger vague region that was called Syria under the Ottoman Turks, came from France. It was designed to give Lebanon’s Christians, especially those who belonged to the Maronite Church, their own homeland.

In the second half of the 19th century, France increasingly positioned itself as a “protector” of Arab Christian groups, intervening to protect them during conflicts.

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, France and Great Britain established their rule over the Fertile Crescent under a system of Mandates, under the legal and diplomatic aegis of the League of Nations. These mandates, really colonies, included Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The Syrian and Lebanese mandates were held by France.

Incorporating the largely Sunni Muslim lands of the Bekaa Valley and adding further new territory along the coast to the north and in the Shia majority south, all outside of the Christian heartland around Mount Lebanon, the 1920 borders of this Greater Lebanon included a substantial percentage of Muslims who never reconciled themselves to the state.

Lebanon became independent in 1943 under a National Pact forged by Christian and Sunni Muslim elites from Beirut, with no input from the Shia. It was a complex political system that ensured Christian hegemony.

French financial, commercial and cultural interests would continue to be interwoven with the Maronite community in particular. More generally, access to political and economic power was organised around sectarian identities.

To this day, parts of the country’s elite speak French, and at many schools, French is spoken in class. A vast number of wealthy Lebanese own a second home in France.

This system remained relatively stable until the 1970s. But after a 16-year civil war and the intervention of foreign powers, including Iran, Israel and Syria, it fell apart and the Christians no longer dominate.

Indeed, the state-within-a-state known as Hezbollah, the Shi’ite militant party whose armed strength far exceeds that of the country’s own military, has a hammerlock on Lebanon’s politics.

Though Lebanon is effectively a failed state, there is still a soft spot for it in the heart of the country that gave it birth. Since the August disaster, French President Emmanuel Macron has visited twice. Arriving on Aug. 6, he was mobbed walking about in the Christian districts of Beirut.

Macron met with officials from the eight largest political groups. They were given a so-called “French Paper,” a draft program for a new government. He set deadlines for them to take action and told them he’d be back in December to check on progress.

Meanwhile, a petition circulated online calling for Lebanon to be placed “under French Mandate for the next ten years.” Attracting more than 61,000 signatures, it condemned Lebanon’s officials and its “failing system, corruption, terrorism and militia.” French rule, it asserted, would establish “a clean and durable governance.”

Lebanon is at “risk of disappearing” without crucial government reforms, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Aug. 27. “The international community will not sign a blank cheque” otherwise, he warned in a radio interview.

Back in Beirut on Sept. 1, Macron alluded to France’s long history of involvement in the country and again insisted that the Lebanese elite must meet popular demands for reform by revising the existing political structure – ironically, the one initially created by Paris a century ago.

To help Lebanon overcome its endemic malaise, Paris has taken a variety of steps: encouraging and promoting internal Lebanese dialogue through international and intra-Lebanese conferences, sending French leaders to the country on frequent visits, mobilizing international economic assistance, and attempting to strengthen the Lebanese army so it can become a national military force with sufficient strength to counter Hezbollah’s army.

Macron’s visits have raised further expectations that change will finally come to lift Lebanon out of its dire political and economic troubles, all of which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the catastrophic explosion at the port.

 

America No Longer Has a Critical Media

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost scholars of totalitarianism, explained that “a totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.” In today’s “woke” America, media elites determine what is and isn’t appropriate. The system suffers no dissent from within, its practitioners policing the boundaries of acceptable – that is, left-wing – opinion. Other views are deemed “controversial,” a euphemism warning readers that these are wrong.

The press that existed in America from the end of the 19th century until the turn of this one was designed to inform. But it is now more like Pravda in the old Soviet Union.

Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, contends that the American mainstream media “has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity” and are “partisan political actors who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose.”

Over the past four years, they have shared a single overriding preoccupation: consolidating an social consensus that justifies itself by the claim that Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat that makes every action by the White House a national emergency.

The media both demonstrates and justifies its role in opposing this extraordinary threat by hyping one supposed crisis of American democracy after another, be it the advent of fascism, Russian control over Trump, the danger from white nationalists, and so forth.

In an article published in the Columbia Journalism Review Sept. 8, Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University, observed that the quantity of coverage devoted by the print media to Donald Trump is without historical precedent.

The New York Times, for instance, has increasingly embraced advocacy journalism. Its new reporting eschews balance and objectivity in favour of a more revolutionary narrative.

In 2018, “Trump” was the fourth-most-used word in the New York Times. On average, Trump was directly mentioned two to three times in every article, writes writes al-Gharbi, and indirectly mentioned an additional once or twice. “Trump has ceased to be just a topic of news, he seems to be the prism through which we interpret and discuss everything.”

A new tool from Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab revealed that cable news has undergone a similar transformation. In other words, he concluded, “news media have basically been running with 2016 campaign-level attention on Trump for four years straight now.”

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, owns the Washington Post, which has always been a liberal newspaper. But, writes Michael Anton, a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, it was never “so shamelessly dishonest.”

Lee Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, concurs, noting that each day brings a new story “trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous.”

On the other hand, the disinterest evinced by this media complex toward the violence and destruction carried out over the past few months is a striking case of the collectivized decision-making process that now governs them. For details of the chaos one needs to read local newspapers.

That’s because the media establishment is increasingly driven by narrative constructions based on theories of identity and power. For these journalists, the “dangerous majoritarian mob lurking in the middle of the country plotting to oppress vulnerable minorities” must be countered, asserts Jacob Siegel, a senior writer at the Tablet magazine website.

The proper aim of politics, therefore, is to wield the power of elite institutions to enforce “correct” thinking. Hence dissenters are regularly vilified as racists and reactionaries.

These ritual denunciations help enforce cohesion among journalists and within the larger educated professional class. They provide an deterrent for anyone tempted to notice the gap that separates elite moral crusades from the priorities of ordinary Americans.

“I think over the past few years, there’s been a kind of new groupthink developed on a number of topics among institutional progressives and a lot of people who are involved have the same zealousness as the convert to a new religion,” according to Zaid Jilani, a journalist who considers himself left-wing but refuses to follow the “party line” on every issue.

Much American journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. What’s left is a media largely controlled by “woke” progressives.

 

Protests Continue in Divided Belarus

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

Massive protests that began in the wake of the Aug. 9 presidential election, in which the incumbent Alexander Lukashenko awarded himself an 80 per cent victory, have overtaken Belarus. It was a result that has been declared illegitimate by every serious political observer and has led to mass demonstrations.

Often referred to by many in the media as “Europe’s last dictator,” he was even heckled at a post-election rally that was supposed to be full of his core constituency, workers from the rural parts of the country.

The post-election demonstrations have not subsided and seem to be spontaneous. The pre-election protest leaders, including Lukashenko’s main opponent Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, are mostly in exile or in undisclosed locations, and so the crowds that gather in Independence Square in Minsk are entirely self-organized and autonomous.

About 100,000 people have rallied against him weekly in Minsk -- by far the biggest opposition protests of his rule. Women have been at the heart of the protests. Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights appeared with rainbow flags in the women’s march in Minsk on Sept. 5.

Police arrested more than 400 people as tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Minsk during the “March of Heroes” protest on Sept. 13. 

This has all come as a surprise. After all, Lukashenko centralised power, marginalised all opposition and “won” rigged elections on no less than four previous occasions.

Lukashenko was able to enjoy huge Russian subsidies of cheap oil and gas in return for his political loyalty. A “Union State” between the two nations has existed since 1999, which guarantees free movement and employment in both states. 

In early February Lukashenko visited Russia to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the further integration process within the treaty. So the events following the August election have caught Lukashenko off guard.

In the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution that removed Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, anti-Russian feeling was very evident. But in Belarus, a country ethnically and religiously close to Russia, anti-Russian rhetoric is absent.

There are no European flags, nor many slogans about Europe or the European Union, nor are there any demands to join NATO.

Instead, we see the colours of the Belarusian National Republic, flown by the short-lived pre-Soviet independent republic of 1918-1919 and again from 1991 to 1995, prior to Lukashenko’s total takeover. Lukashenko had restored a modified version of the Soviet flag as the nation’s banner. The demonstrations have been about ending the dictatorship, pure and simple.

Russia remains the country’s chief ally. They have held joint military exercises and the struggling Belarus economy relies on trade with its powerful neighbour. Russia also maintains two military facilities in Belarus, the Vileyka VLF Transmitter and Missile Attack Early Warning System site in Hantsavichy.

In recent years relations had cooled after Moscow moved to end subsidized oil and gas supplies. However, now that Lukashenko is in trouble, he has again turned to Russia. He met with Putin on Sept. 14 for their first encounter since the anti-government protests erupted in Belarus -- a sign that the two leaders have drawn closer amid the crisis after months of strain over bilateral ties.

“These events showed us that we need to stick closer to our older brother,” Lukashenko told Putin, referring to the protests. He noted that disagreements between Moscow and Minsk can involve any issue except security.

Putin announced in late August that a Russian military contingent is ready to intervene on behalf of Lukashenko “if necessary.” Russia could send them in if the protests got really out of control,” he remarked. Putin also granted a $1.5 billion loan to Belarus.  

Moscow’s backing has emboldened the Belarus president. Many foreign independent news outlets have been stripped of their accreditation and several local independent online media sites that have played a key role in reporting on the crisis have been blocked, while members of Russia’s state-owned media have been invited in.

The opposition is not backing down. Tikhanovskaya, living in Lithuania after being forced into exile, told Putin that any agreements made with Lukashenko will not have legal force. “I regret that you have decided on dialogue with a dictator and not with the people of Belarus.”

 

The Presidential Race in Pennsylvania

By Henry Srebrnik,  [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

American citizens residing outside the country vote by absentee ballot in the last location that they lived in before leaving the United States.

In our case, that’s the 13th Congressional District in south-central Pennsylvania, a largely rural area that includes portions of Adams and other counties.

With its 20 Electoral College votes, the Keystone State is a must-win for President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden. Pennsylvania is among a group of competitive battleground states where this fall’s results could decide the presidency.

Although it voted Democratic in the six presidential elections prior to 2016, that election saw Republican Trump win the state by a razor-thin 48.58 per cent to 47.85 per cent for Hillary Clinton. It was one of three “blue wall” states (Michigan and Wisconsin were the others) Trump won on his way to the White House.

Pennsylvania’s two U.S. senators are divided by party, with Democrat Bob Casey Jr. and Republican Pat Toomey, making it one of nine states to have a split United States Senate delegation. There is no Senate race in the state this year,

In the House of Representatives, the 18-member delegation is also evenly split, with nine members from each party. The 13^th Congressional District is represented by John Joyce, a Republican. He is being challenged by Tom Rowley, the Democrat. With its white majority of 87 per cent, Joyce faces little opposition in this solidly Republican district.

In Pennsylvania, the president is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in vote-rich Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but statewide, Biden’s lead over Trump has dropped by 1.4 points.

The former Vice President now holds a small 49 per cent to 46 per cent lead over Trump among likely Pennsylvania voters, according to a recent AARP-commissioned public opinion survey.

Trump has pivoted to a “law and order” message in the state amid protests over racial injustice. The Republicans believe efforts to paint Biden as weak on crime will help Trump win back suburban voters, and especially women, who supported him in 2016 but have since soured on him.

To that end, Trump and his team have been paying frequent visits to the state as they work to build enthusiasm. “Trump is just on the wavelength of rural America in a way that previous Republicans were not,” remarked David Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College and the author of “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”

However, Biden appeals more to rural voters than Clinton did. He was born into a working-class Irish Catholic family in Scranton.

This month also saw two major developments that are a source of worry for Trump. A story published by the Atlantic magazine – a fiercely pro-Democratic publication – claimed that a few years ago on a European trip Trump called U.S. soldiers injured or killed in war “losers,” and questioned the country’s reverence for them.

Trump angrily denied the article’s claims, calling it a “disgrace.” He holds the military “in the highest regard,” White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah said in response. “He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”

Then came the publication of veteran reporter Bob Woodward’s book “Rage.” An associate editor of the “Washington Post,” also a partisan newspaper supporting Biden in this election, Woodward interviewed Trump in January and asserts that the president knew the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic but downplayed its severity.

“I wanted to always play it down,” the president told him. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” With close to 200,000 deaths by mid-September, this seems damning in retrospect.

Will these revelations change Trump’s level of support? Perhaps, though probably many of his backers will ignore the new information or even be critical of its release so close to the election. We shall see.

As it stands now, the 13^th district of Pennsylvania will remain in Trump’s column, and Joyce will retain his seat, but the state itself remains Biden’s to lose.

Guyana is Mired in Ethnic Conflict

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

Guyana’s ethnic woes make it a difficult country to govern.

Guyana’s 780,000 people form what many social scientists have characterized as a plural society, a form of social organization found in some countries that were colonized by Western powers.

Africans were brought over as slaves to work the sugar plantations, later followed by Indians as indentured labour when slavery was abolished.

By transporting different peoples from various parts of the globe for economic reasons, the British created a segmented colonial society.

The two groups remained highly discrete racial, ethnic and cultural communities with minimal common values.

Even after the end of British colonial rule in 1966, this South American country remained one of deep cleavages, with no common religious, political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between the ethnic groups. They have no common normative or philosophical framework, and therefore no concept of moral obligation towards each other.

In effect, one group rules over another through political or even military force; and those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. This has been true since independence

Indo-Guyanese now account for 39.8 per cent of the population, followed by Afro-Guyanese at 29.2 per cent. Guyanese of mixed heritage make up 19.9 per cent while indigenous peoples are at 10.5 per cent. Afro-Guyanese are Christians, Indians mainly Hindu.

Plural societies, maintained M.G. Smith, a Jamaican social anthropologist who taught at Yale University, are “defined by dissensus and pregnant with conflict.” So politics becomes a zero-sum game.

Since independence Guyana has seen fierce political rivalry between the two main ethnically-based parties, one largely the vehicle for the Afro-Guyanese population, the other dominated by the descendants of South Asians from the Indian subcontinent.

The 2020 presidential proved no different. The election on March 2 pitted the 75-year-old incumbent David Granger, leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC), the party supported by the Black population, against 40-year-old Irfaan Ali of the South Asian-backed People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C). Granger had won the 2015 election against the PPP/C’s then incumbent, Donald Ramotar.

Granger declared victory days after the vote but the opposition alleged that the results had been inflated in Granger’s favour. Following allegations of vote tampering, a recount, and a lengthy legal battle, the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) finally declared Ali as the winner on Aug. 2 – a full five months after the balloting.

The GECOM also announced that Ali’s party had won a narrow majority of 33 of the 65 seats in parliament, with Granger’s PNC-led but unwieldy A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU-AFC) winning 31 seats. Another group claimed the remaining seat.

The election was one of the most significant since Guyanese independence because of one of the largest new discoveries of oil in the world off the coast of the country, which could put Guyana among the top 10 oil producers in the world.

Production by Exxon Mobil in the offshore oil fields, estimated to contain at least eight billion barrels, started last December.

Each side feared the opposing party would exclude it from the oil riches and use the proceeds to cement its political power for decades. After all, the new president will be the one to administer the windfall resulting from the find.

As if there were not enough internal conflicts in the country, Guyana is also at odds with its neighbours, dating back to quarrels between rival imperial powers. Much of Guyana is claimed by Venezuela in the west and Suriname in the east.

The Guyana-Venezuela border largely follows the Schomburgk Line, so called after the German-born British naturalist and explorer who sketched it in 1840.

The Venezuelan authorities, however, have long maintained that the Essequibo River, not the Schomburgk Line, is their natural eastern border. This is no small matter: the area in between the line and the river is 159,000 square kilometres, or 62 per cent of Guyana’s territory.

Not only is Guyana’s western neighbor claiming most of the country, the nation on the other side, Suriname, claims the so-called New River Triangle in the southern part of both countries’ common border.

Not surprisingly, the border dispute with Venezuela has revived after the discovery of the offshore oil reserves.

Rivalries Flare Between Greece and Turkey

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

Over recent weeks, tensions have been rising in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, prompted by what seems like a simple rivalry over energy resources.

Turkey has pursued an aggressive gas exploration effort, sending its seismic research vessel the Oruc Reis, heavily protected by warships of the Turkish Navy, into its waters. Turkey is also holding a military exercise off northwest Cyprus until Sept. 11.

Turkey and Greece have competing ambitions over gas reserves and they disagree profoundly over who has rights to key areas of the eastern Mediterranean. They have laid claim to overlapping areas, arguing they belong to their respective continental shelves.

Turkey has embraced a doctrine known as Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan in Turkish), which aims to secure control of maritime areas surrounding its coasts.

But this conflict goes further than that. In fact, it’s part of one of the oldest “clash of civilizations” in history, dating back to the 15^th century, when the powerful Ottoman Turks, a Sunni Muslim people who had arrived in Anatolia, defeated the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, the centre of eastern Christianity.

Greece and the Balkan kingdoms would become subjects of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Greece recovered its sovereignty in the 19^th century, though it didn’t regain all of its present-day territories until 1912.

A vicious war between the two countries following the First World War, with massive ethnic cleansing. Millions of Greeks fled mainland Turkey and Turks were expelled from Greek lands.

Meanwhile, the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, until 1960 a British colony, remained home to both groups. Upon receiving independence, Greek-Turkish enmity finally led to a Turkish invasion in 1974.

There, too, transfers of population followed, and the island is divided into a rump Greek-Cypriot state in the south, and a self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, guarded by Turkish troops, in the north.

Despite multiple diplomatic efforts over the decades, the Cyprus issue has proved as intractable as ever.

As well, since coming to power, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy. So the tensions over energy have added a new element to a very old dispute.

The current quarrel has to do with Turkish claims to maritime territories in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Ankara contends that the many Greek islands off Turkey’s Aegean coast should be entitled only to a much reduced Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a sea zone in which a sovereign state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources.

They nearly went to war in 1996 over uninhabited islands in the Aegean Sea. 

In late June, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu argued that it was unacceptable that the small island of Kastellorizo, which lies just off the Turkish mainland and is more than 500 kilometres from Athens, has a maritime jurisdiction area extending 370 kilometres in every direction.

Up until now, Greece and the Greek Cypriot government have refused to negotiate with Turkey on the maritime border issue. They insist that it has already been settled by international treaties.

So when the Oruc Reis left the port of Antalya on Aug. 10, as Ankara resumed searching for oil and gas near Kastellorizo, Greece accused Turkey of threatening peace in the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey claimed that it is well within its rights to explore areas claimed by Cyprus and Greece. Ankara believes it is being treated unfairly and resents what it perceives as its exclusion from talks on energy discoveries in the Mediterranean.

The Greek Cypriots, along with Greece, Egypt, Israel, Italy, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority on Jan. 16 established the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), creating a platform for natural gas cooperation.

The EMGF was a response to an accord signed between Turkey and Libya’s UN-recognized Government of National Accord last November, which Turkey says grants Ankara economic rights to a large part of the eastern Mediterranean, including areas Greece regards as its economic waters.

Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, warned Greece on Aug. 26 that Ankara is ready to do “whatever is necessary” to protect its legitimate interests in the region.

Even if this is resolved, Greeks and Turks will find something else to quarrel about. They always do.

 

The Pandemic Propels Populists to Power

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We know that nationalism, isolationism, xenophobia, and attacks on the liberal world order have been increasing for years. That trend will be accelerated by the pandemic.

Many governments have used the crisis to give themselves emergency powers, moving them still further away from democracy.

In late March, Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte rammed a bill through his country’s parliament that granted him vastly expanded emergency powers, ostensibly to fight the novel coronavirus.

The measure granting Duterte the new powers was approved by Philippine lawmakers using Zoom, the remote teleconferencing service, and put the country under a “state of national emergency.”

The bill authorized Duterte to reallocate the national budget as he saw fit and to personally direct hospitals. “Do not challenge the government,” he insisted in a televised address. “You will lose.”

However, Duterte failed to win approval to take over private companies and utilities, authority he had sought.

Also that month, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pushed even more expansive emergency legislation through his parliament, enabling him to suspend existing laws, decree new ones, and arrest individuals deemed to be peddling “falsehoods” about the pandemic or “obstructing” the government’s efforts to fight it.

“He is using this crisis to further increase his power,” remarked András Bíró-Nagy, the director of the Budapest-based Policy Solutions think tank. “The Hungarian prime minister enjoys the situation where he can act as a captain in a crisis. I don’t see him giving up these powers again easily.”

Although parliament did lift this authorization in mid-June, the fact that it was ever in force in the first place is worrying. Hungary’s case demonstrates that populism can degenerate into arbitrary rule, and it should make observers suspicious of the democratic loyalties of populists in power.

Duterte’s and Orban’s COVID-19 power grabs were especially brazen, but they were far from the only attempts by authoritarian leaders or parties to use the current health crisis as an excuse to curtail civil liberties or undermine the rule of law.

Authoritarian regimes in Bangladesh, Belarus, Cambodia, China, Egypt, El Salvador, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela, and Vietnam have all detained critics, health workers, journalists, and opposition members during the pandemic.

Democracies that have lately come under assault, meanwhile, such as Brazil, India, and Poland, have seen populist leaders or ruling parties seize on the crisis to remove checks on their power or weaken the opposition.

Hybrid regimes, whose electoral mechanisms combine democratic and autocratic elements, are at risk of receding into electoral autocracies.

“In states of emergency, there may be a need to temporarily derogate from certain rights and procedures but any such measures need to be temporary, proportionate and absolutely necessary from a public health perspective,” contends Lydia Gall, an Eastern Europe researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Democracy was faltering globally even before the pandemic, as populism gained strength after the 2008 crash, with more and more jobs insecure and poorly paid.

For each of the past 14 years, according to Freedom House, which released its Freedom in the World 2020 report in March, more countries experienced an erosion of political rights and civil liberties than strengthened political rights and civil liberties.

People in 64 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties in 2019, while those in just 37 countries experienced improvements. Democracy has declined in 25 of the 41 established democracies since 2006. This has reversed the pattern of the preceding 15 post-Cold War years.

“The unchecked brutality of autocratic regimes and the ethical decay of democratic powers are combining to make the world increasingly hostile to fresh demands for better governance,” said Sarah Repucci, Freedom House vice president for research.

Also, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization that supports democracy around the world, at least 70 countries and territories across the globe have postponed various elections and referenda due to COVID-19.

When societies reopen, continued large-scale unemployment and economic distress may well fuel more populism, whose advocates are ready to mobilize against an establishment that, they contend, has deprived people of their freedom and livelihoods at the same time.

 

Mozambique Targeted by Terrorists

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

When you think about Islamic State terrorism, Mozambique isn’t a country that comes to mind. After all, it is in southern Africa, far from the Middle East.

Still, its location on the Indian Ocean, and the influence of Muslim traders, led to conversions to Islam over the decades. Today, about one-fifth of the country’s 30 million people are Muslim, and they predominate in the northern provinces. The rest of the country is mainly Christian.

This has led to attempts by militants to seize control of these areas. The region is far from Mozambique’s main central city of Beira and the capital, Maputo, in the far south.

Attacks began in the northernmost province of Cabo Delgado in 2017 and have rapidly gathered pace this year with insurgents seizing key towns for brief periods and increasingly hitting military or strategic targets.

That came after the group, known as Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama, pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS) last year, calling themselves an affiliate of its Central Africa Province. IS subsequently began claiming the local group’s attacks.

At least twice they have been spotted flying the black and white Islamic State flag and they have publicly declared their intention to turn Mozambique into a “caliphate.” Many are from the Kimwani people, who have suffered economic and social marginalization.

In 2010 a huge gas field was discovered off the coast. Overnight Mozambique became home to the fourth largest gas reserves in the world -- and became a target of Islamic insurgents.

The government hopes to reap as much as $100 billion in revenue over the next quarter-century from the projects being developed by French, American, Italian and other energy firms -- more than six times the current annual gross domestic product. Mozambique is still struggling to emerge from a 16-year civil war that ended in 1992 and badly needs the income.

In late March, insurgents captured the strategic and heavily-defended port in the far northern Mozambique town of Mocimboa da Praia. Two days later, they seized another important town, Quissanga.

It was one of several attacks on the port, 60 kilometres south of the projects It is used for cargo deliveries to the developments.

Rebel groups have also occupied villages more than 100 kilometres from the coastal capital, Pemba, before leaving under Mozambican Defence and Security Forces fire.

On Aug. 12, Islamic State claimed via its media channels to have taken over two military bases in the vicinity of Mocimboa da Praia, resulting in the deaths of a number of Mozambique soldiers and the capture of weaponry ranging from machine guns to rocket-propelled grenades.

Insurgents sank one of the French-made HSI32 interceptor boats Mozambique bought from the Abu Dhabi-based shipbuilder group Privinvest in the latest attack on the port.

The UN, in coordination with the Mozambican government, in early June requested US$35 million for a Rapid Response Plan for Cabo Delgado. Tanzania has also said it will launch an offensive against the jihadists in forests along the border with Mozambique.

The Brazilian-born Catholic bishop of Pemba on July 21 stated that the Cabo Delgado armed attacks have caused a humanitarian crisis affecting more than 700,000 people, almost one-third of the province’s population.

“The world still has no idea what is happening, because of indifference, and because it seems that we have already become accustomed to wars,” Bishop Luíz Fernando Lisboa said.

More than 1,500 people have died and another 250,000 have been displaced since the violence began. Several sub-contractors on the gas projects have been killed while outside the perimeter of their sites.

But the upsurge in brutal violence in northern Mozambique, including the beheadings of women and children, has now sounded alarms in the region.

Observers say the evolution of the insurgency in Mozambique is remarkably similar to Boko Haram’s emergence in northern Nigeria, with a marginalised group exploiting local grievances, terrorising many communities, but also offering an alternative path for unemployed youths frustrated by a corrupt, neglectful and heavy-handed state.

Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi has called these “heinous crimes,” but the solution to the conflict lies in good governance, and an attempt to address deep-seated economic and social grievances, including a share of any future gas revenues for those living in the region.

 

We're Witnessing an American Tragedy

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

The Coronavirus pandemic has created a massive economic contraction around the world, and its effects have been particularly devastating in the United States, which has suffered by far the highest death total, now inching upwards towards 200,000 people.

COVID-19 saw 40 million Americans lose their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down. Many analysts predict that the U.S. unemployment rate will remain in double digits through the middle of 2021, which will surely doom President Donald Trump’s chances of re-election.

Thousands of enterprises will never re-open, eliminating millions of jobs – almost half of all Americans work for small companies, mainly in the low-wage service sector, and such businesses are more vulnerable to bankruptcy. Younger people entering the work force may not get a good job in the first place for years to come and their overall lifetime incomes may never catch up.

These economic dislocations fall disproportionately on those with lower incomes and savings. Temporary government programs to help those in dire straits will only mitigate the problem. The road to recovery will be long.

This crisis has illuminated the deficiencies of the American economy, its ruling elites, and its Social Darwinist political culture, which places value on individual freedom and getting ahead at all costs, at the expense of community and family.

This has led to an ever-widening chasm between Americans who are beyond rich and those who have little or nothing. In the 1950s, the salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Strong unions saw to that.

But during the 1980s politicians began to dismantle social protections, undermine labour rights and slash taxes on the rich.

Today, those at the top levels of corporations earn 400 times that of their salaried staff. One per cent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while those at the bottom have more debt than assets. They live on the edge of bankruptcy and if they lose their jobs, there is little of a safety net. They are on their own.

Entire segments of the economy, especially in manufacturing, have been outsourced overseas, and much of industrial America is a hollowed-out economic wasteland. In the 1960s, manufacturing made up 25 per cent of U.S. gross domestic product.  It is barely 11per cent today. More than five million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.

Uncontrolled immigration and the corporate hunger for ever-cheaper labour has frayed the social fabric. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

Fully 37 percent of African American families have zero or negative net worth. The median wealth of Black households is a tenth that of whites. And 41 percent of all Black-owned enterprises have closed since March. This is the backdrop to the rage that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis this past May.

America, like many a hegemonic power before it, also suffers from imperial overreach. Policing the international system does not come cheap. After World War Two, the U.S. became a military behemoth abroad. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in domestic infrastructure, including education and health care.

Deindustrialisation, deregulation, low-wage work, underemployment, and a dysfunctional health system have long been evident but, as in a war, they now point to the nation’s underlying weakness. The reliance on unfettered markets with minimal government intervention has proved inadequate to repair the damage.

Americans today find themselves members of a failing state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government. The bonds of community and trust have almost vanished, replaced by anger and resentment that has led to levels of political polarization not seen since the Civil War 160 years ago. This will remain the case long after Trump is a memory.

Yet, in the midst of a pandemic and what is clearly an economic depression, Americans are about to elect as their president a run-of-the-mill machine politician born just a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 

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.