A Complicated Relationship

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

After the attack in southern Israel carried out by Hamas last Oct. 7, Russia declined to condemn Hamas’s actions, expressing only “grave concerns.” Moscow also refused to list Hamas as a “terrorist” organisation.

A week later, in a speech to leaders of former Soviet states in Kyrgyzstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Hamas massacre was unprecedented, but in the same breath he accused Israel of a cruel response.

He went on to compare the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip to the Nazi siege of Leningrad, which led to a high number of civilian causalities, estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

It was only on Oct. 16 that Putin, in a phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed condolences to the families of the murdered Israelis, but without condemning Hamas.

Moscow’s goal is to cement its status as a friend of the Global South. Russia is seizing an opportunity to bolster its claim to be challenging what Putin calls “the ugly neocolonial system of international relations.” Hence the Kremlin’s half-hearted response to the attacks and continued willingness to engage Hamas, and more broadly its outreach to Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Most of these countries – including the vast majority of Muslim ones – have very strong pro-Palestinian policies, which dictate the position that Moscow takes in the Israel-Hamas war. As long as there is no resolution to the conflict between Russia and the Western pro-Ukraine bloc, Russia’s desire to score points in the Global South will continue.

The Muslim world, according to this worldview, is an important part of the multipolar architecture and is a pole that would be friendly toward Russia, while Israel belongs to the West led by the United States and is part of the pole that is hostile to Russia.

Israeli advocates of a policy of conciliation toward Russia, however, nonetheless argue that Israel must be cautious in its relationship with Moscow. The risks involved in adopting a tougher stance against Russia outweigh any possible advantages.

They explain that Russia’s ability to inflict harm – on the international and diplomatic stage, in the context of Iran, on the Syrian front, and in terms of personal security for Jews (and Israelis) in Russia – is so great that a policy of extreme prudence must be adopted.

This view was given some encouragement by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Speaking at a Doha Forum in Qatar Dec. 10, he said that Russia “strongly condemned the terrorist attack against Israel on October 7.” Doha is where much of Hamas’ top leadership resides.

“We have a relationship with that political branch,” Lavrov added, explaining that Russia differentiates between the organization’s armed and political wings. But Israel flatly rejects this differentiation.

Israel has been restrained in its criticism of Russia over the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and has resisted sending weaponry or critical equipment to help Ukrainian forces. “Israel has a complicated relationship with Russia. That’s not a secret and it’s not new,” said Eylon Levy, a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Israel and Russia have managed to avoid conflict even as Israel’s air force has routinely targeted Syrian sites, including the Damascus airport, where weapons shipments and other supplies for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia have been known to transit.

On Oct. 30, Israeli warplanes bombed a Syrian base in the southern Daraa Province. And days earlier, Israeli jets struck an ammunition depot at another Syrian base, where fighters and officers reported to be Iranian were working alongside Syrian troops.

“For many years, Israel had a mechanism of coordinating with the Russian military presence inside Syria as we attack targets inside that country. And it's important not to get our wires crossed,” Levy explained. And even now, this continues.

 

 

 

Did an Election Help Africa’s Largest Failed State?

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

A chaotic presidential election held Dec. 20-21 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has fueled unrest in the country, with five opposition candidates calling for protests, predictably followed by violence. With the usual massive delays and bureaucratic chaos, did it offer the country any hope?

After years of political instability and coups, it was the first election since the transfer of power between former President Joseph Kabila and the current head of state, Felix Tshisekedi, in 2019. The latter, who was seeking a second, five-year term, won – of course! He obtained 73 per cent of the vote, with his nearest challenger, Moise Katumbi, at 18 per cent. Voter turnout was a dismal 43 percent. It was, as it always is, neither free nor fair.

This matters since the DRC is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a land mass of more than 2.3 million square kilometers -- an area the size of Western Europe -- with an estimated population of more than 100 million people, encompassing about 400 disparate ethnic groups.

The country is rich in natural resources, with 70 per cent of the world’s reserves of coltan, a highly prized mineral used to make mobile phones, 30 per cent of the world’s diamonds, plus large quantities of cobalt, copper and bauxite.

But life remains hard for most people, due to conflict, corruption and many decades of poor governance dating back to the colonial era under Belgian rule.

The eastern Congo, where most of the mineral wealth lies, has been ravaged by conflict for three decades, involving some 120 insurrectionist groups. The powerful M23 rebels, supported by neighboring Rwanda, controls the territories of Masisi and Rutshuru in North Kivu.

It is impossible to know how many lives have been lost in the various conflicts in the country over the past three decades – it is estimated that about 5.4 million people may have died, mostly from hunger and disease. The wars also involved interference by so many neighbouring states that many have called it “Africa’s World War.”

Tshisekedi main challenger, Moise Katumbi, is a wealthy businessman and former governor of Katanga province. The leader of the Ensemble Pour le Changement (“Together for Change”) party, he maintains that the result has been tainted by “massive fraud.” But he won’t challenge the outcome “because the courts are not independent.”

Other opposition leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege and former oil executive Martin Fayulu, also protested.

Katumbi is a far more interesting politician than the incumbent, and hails from a part of the country that once tried to secede from the DRC. His Greek-Jewish father Nissim Soriano fled the Greek island of Rhodes, then under Italian fascist control, in 1938 for central Africa, and married Virginie Katumbi, a Congolese Lunda woman of royal birth, from the traditional pre-colonial Kazembe kingdom.

Katumbi suggested his prior success while governor of the country’s richest province, Katanga, would become “the pilot programme for Congo.” His record there between 2007 and 2015 saw the building of roads, increased access to drinking water, doubling the number of children in school, and enacting mining regulations.

He made the bulk of his fortune in mining. He founded the Mining Company of Katanga (MCK) in 1997, which in 2004 joined forces with Anvil, a Canadian firm, to become AMCK Mining. Anvil had been accused of backing a deadly Congolese army mission near one of its mines that resulted in at least 70 civilians being killed.

Katumbi left the DRC in 2016 after he was accused of hiring mercenaries by the government of President Tshisekedi’s predecessor, Joseph Kabila. He was sentenced to three years in prison in absentia and barred from returning to the country to take part in the 2018 election. However, he returned home in 2019 after the charges were dropped.

There’s irony in this, because his home base, Katanga, became a major hot spot after the DRC became a sovereign state in July 1960. Moise Tshombe, the leader of a secessionist movement, declared the southernmost province of the Congo to be an independent nation.

With its copper belt and lucrative mining operations, it was the wealthiest province of the Congo. Despite UN regulations forbidding countries from directly supporting the secessionists, Tshombe gained support from both foreign powers and local elites.

Ethnic animosities were also a major factor in the secession. The area was predominantly populated by the Lunda and Baluba ethnic groups, who had a sense of exclusion from the wider Congolese community. The secession lasted three years. Only after the fighting ended in 1963 was the region gradually reintegrated into the country.

From its origins in 1885 as the personal property of an avaricious European monarch, Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo has endured a history of mass violence, protracted wars, chronic misrule and endless plunder.

In their book The Future of Africa: A New Order in Sight? political scientists Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills suggest that “it is time to ask if provinces such as the Kivus and Katanga (which are themselves the size of other African countries) can ever be improved as long as they fall under a fictional Congolese state. The international community should say, plainly and simply, that the DRC is not a sovereign state.” Sad but true.

 

All Ideological and Political Roads Lead to Iran

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

It is overly simplistic to refer to “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Hamas belongs to the Islamist “resistance” camp, whose ideology began to leave its stamp on the Islamic world in general, and Palestinian society in particular, during the first half of the 20th century.

Hamas’ attack on Israel Oct. 7 was more than an opening salvo in a war between Israel and the organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Hamas is a self-declared member of the “Islamist resistance” camp, which reasserted one of its main principles with clarity, namely, the refusal to ever make peace with Israel. 

“Islamism” refers to a revolutionary interpretation of Islam whose roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century, as propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

Hamas, which is a member, notes its link to the Islamist camp in its 1988 Charter. According to this document, the war against Israel was launched nine years before the founding of the state in 1948: 

Hamas, it states, “is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Muslim Brotherhood.”

Things took a further turn in 1979, when Iran, though it practices Shia Islam, unlike the Brotherhood’s Sunni version, was captured by Islamist ideologues who are happy to play the global game of states when it’s convenient, but who exploit other states and their resources, in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza, in order to promote their revolutionary political designs.

Iran’s provision of support to Hamas has continued to grow over time, especially after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force from fellow Palestinians in 2007. Iran assists Hamas in various ways, mainly financially, but also in frequent meetings with the organization's external leadership – and it is an active partner in the rocket launches Hezbollah carries out against Israel from Lebanon.

The revolutionaries ruling Iran are plotting to transform their dreams into practical schemes of destruction of existing Middle Eastern regimes. All the while, the post-colonial left runs interference for the Islamists around the globe under the ambiguous banner of “resistance.”

Israelis blame Iran for Hamas’s impressive arsenal and the innovative methods of its fighters. They fear that Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will also attack Israel, using its exponentially larger rocket arsenal and far more skilled fighters to launch a much more devastating attack.

Today, as Israel seeks out Hamas fighters hiding in Gaza’s labyrinth underworld, Islamist forces remain in their positions. Hezbollah exploits Lebanon like Hamas exploits Gaza, nesting within civilian populations and aiming more than 150,000 missiles at Israel.

To the south, the Houthis use Yemen to disrupt shipping along the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and fire missiles at the Red Sea resort town of Eilat. On Israel’s east side, Hamas is deeply integrated into the West Bank.

Hamas embodies an ideology that will be hard to eliminate. The idea behind muqawama, or resistance, is that the way to defeat Israel is through persistent military force, a credo also embraced by Hezbollah and Iran.

Iranian military leaders view current Hamas operations in the Gaza Strip as the prelude to a long-term war to destroy Israel.  The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is the ideological custodian of Iran’s 1979 revolution. Its former commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, in an interview on Oct. 15, framed the attack as a “warmup” to prepare and train for future operations against Israel.

The IRGC’s current leader, Hossein Salami, on the same day described Hamas’ operation as the “first stage” of Israel’s “hasty collapse.” He had prior to Oct. 7 argued that Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian militias needed to conduct more ground operations and urban combat inside Israel that would destabilize and generate internal displacement leading to Israel’s collapse. Since Oct. 7, over 200,000 Israelis have fled areas near Gaza and Lebanon.

Iranian Defence and Armed Forces Logistics Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Gharaei Ashtiani said on Nov. 18 that Israel’s military and intelligence failures since Oct. 7 provide lessons for future action against it.

Ashtiani asserted that the “al-Aqsa Flood” attack has reduced Jewish migration to Israel by creating economic, political, and security crises. He also claimed that the war has driven anti-Israel sentiment throughout the world and undermined the credibility of the Israeli government.

Ashtiani previously served as deputy chief of the Armed Forces General Staff from 2019 to 2021 before becoming defence minister, which is often a stepping stone into increasingly influential positions in Iran. Numerous Iranian defence ministers have later served as personal advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The latter a day later said “the defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza is a fact.”

In airstrikes near Damascus Dec. 25, Israel reportedly killed IRGC Brigadier General Sayyed Razi Mousavi. Israel has decided to step up its struggle, not only against Iran’s proxies, but against Iran itself.

Iran until now has waged a multi-front proxy war without paying any price. Will Israel strike Iran openly on its territory? This is a complex decision, but it may cause Tehran to deal more with defence and less with offence. Either way, a wider war would be the result.