Day: January 22, 2024

The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, will take part in the international meeting on Syria in the Astana format (Russia, Iran, Türkiye), which will be held in the Kazakh capital on January 24-25, according to Report.

NPR News: 01-22-2024 1AM EST

President Ilham Aliyev outlines main reasons behind conditions for snap election to be held in February  AZERTAC News

By Huricihan Islamoglu 

The Israel-Hamas war is dangerous for many reasons, but most significantly because neither side has a sustainable political objective. Mired in narratives of messianic conquest of promised lands, and of rights of return to the historic homeland, neither Israel nor Hamas has a vision for the resolution of their conflict except the expulsion and/or annihilation of the other.

Making this collision of non-negotiable aspirations particularly threatening is the rather precarious position of leadership cadres on both sides who increasingly see the continuation of the war as a way to stay in power, given the almost unlimited access to weapons by both parties – the U.S. willing to re-supply the Israeli army and Hamas’ so-called “weapons industry” and suppliers holding out. Fighting, then, becomes an end in itself, a theatre for voicing aspirations, without groups in the respective communities having a stake in the fighting and a subsequent peace process.

Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, by its brutal attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, took the great risk of making worse the already unbearable conditions under which Palestinians lived in Gaza, an area which the Israeli blockade since 2006 had turned into an open prison. Israeli response unleashed a genocidal process in Gaza killing upward of 23,000 civilians, destroying infrastructure including hospitals, and water supplies, blocking food, and aid, and threatening famine and the spread of diseases.

Hamas, an Islamic anticolonial organization seeking an end to Israeli occupation of Palestine, was at a political impasse. The leverage it acquired following the second intifada (2000-05) or the Palestinian uprising, had led to a split in the government of occupied Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In the elections held in Gaza in 2006, Hamas won 44% of the votes and has held power since, while the West Bank was administered by the Palestinian Authority consisting of the former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israel also played a part in Hamas’ ascendancy to power, as it was seeking to temper the influence of the secular and Marxist PLO with Netanyahu even persuading Qatar to direct funds to Hamas.

Before Oct. 7, 2023, the support for Hamas in Gaza was declining. Could Hamas’ attack on Israel be a move to recover its former legitimacy in the eyes of Gazan Palestinians? Or was Hamas responding to an even more immediate threat of expulsion of the Gazan population under Israel’s far-right government?

No doubt, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extreme-right government saw in Hamas’ attack an opportunity to take direct action in Gaza. The stated objective of the military action in the Gaza Strip (40 km long and 6-12 km wide) was to annihilate Hamas.

Yet, at home, Netanyahu does not have the full backing, especially of Israeli elites and the opposition. The fact that Hamas could cross the border to attack Israel has shaken up the image of invincibility of the Israeli intelligence and army and of Netanyahu and his boast that he had Hamas under control. The economy will take a hit too: According to a survey[1] by the Start-Up Nation Policy Institute in Tel Aviv, a large proportion of the Israeli army of reservists (350,000) work in the tech industries and the economy will feel their absence if the war is prolonged.

Is a solution to this tragic condition of the two states, Israel and Palestine, possible? The political and economic compulsions have changed.

The Oslo Accords – often a wishful imagining of a step in the direction of a two-state solution to the Palestinian plight – was based on UNSC resolutions recommending the end of Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, recognizing them as self-governing entities under the Palestinian Authority. The political hope the Accords held out for a two-state solution took place in the context of an expanding global economy led by the U.S. and secured by American armies, with the promise of capital flows and investments to develop the Palestinian economy on its way to statehood. It was also an era of Western dominance, with U.S. allies like Israel and Türkiye, a NATO member in line for EU membership, firmly positioned in that alliance.

All this has changed dramatically since the 2000s as Israel, the poster child of the West, and Türkiye, the faithful ally of the West during the Cold War, are turning into significant regional actors in the highly fluid scene of world politics. In the present context of the Gaza war, the resistance of the Israeli administration to pressures from the Biden administration for a ceasefire in the face of mounting criticism in the U.S. of the genocidal process unleashed by Israeli bombings in Gaza as well as Israel’s success in having the U.S. veto a UNSC resolution for a ceasefire, suggest Israel is not an ally which the U.S. can dictate.

The Hamas attacks, therefore, may provide the Netanyahu administration with the opportunity to put an end to the Palestinian issue by dismissing the possibility of a Palestinian state, finalizing Jewish settlements in occupied territories, pushing the Palestinians out of Israel and into the Sinai from Gaza – or to any place which accepts them – and using the remainder as slave labour in a then “legitimately” enlarged Israel. If there is a world conjuncture which is supportive of such a “solution”, opposition in Israel will be marginal.

This will not be an overly cynical but a realistic assessment, if relations among the great powers were stable and if Western hegemony in Middle Eurasia were intact. Since this is not the case, multiple solutions including the two-state solution – as much a dead horse as it is – will be on the table, and both Hamas and Netanyahu will keep on fighting to be in the game. For Israel, the leverage it may have in the emerging power equations may require it to act more responsibly and to re-consider, for instance, its aspiration for the evacuation of Palestinians in relation to global concerns for immigration. For Hamas, the changing situation may mean that it reconsider its anti-colonialist, expulsionist position vis-à-vis Israel and choose between being in a position of a viable political party cooperating with other Palestinian groups in occupied territories to speak for Palestinians in the new power equation or condemn itself to annihilation through irrelevance in the new world.

Israel’s alliance with the West is increasingly one among its multilateral engagements. It is a high-technology partner for China in the context of its Belt and Road Initiative. Israel has normalized its relations with the Gulf states, and was in the process of forging an alliance with Saudi Arabia before the Gaza war as a bulwark against Iran, while securing markets for Israel’s high-tech war industries in this security-obsessed region. Israel also has economic relations with Egypt and Jordan as an exporter of gas to these countries – which may explain the rather subdued response of both Cairo and Amman to Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza.

Central Asia is within Israel’s reach too. Israel has a major economic presence in Azerbaijan. Alongside Kazakhstan and countries in West Africa, Azerbaijan provides Israel with oil. Israel has achieved independence through discoveries in the 2000s of offshore natural gas reserves in its Mediterranean coast. Presently two major oil fields, Leviathan and Tamar, provide the domestic market as also export markets in its immediate neighborhood, with a projected East Mediterranean pipeline connecting Israel’s reserves to southern Europe via Greece and Italy.

The status of the Gaza Marine[2] field 36 km off the Gaza coast of the Mediterranean, is yet to be settled with Israel expressing concern that it may turn into a source of revenue for Hamas and with some confusion regarding who owns it – Royal Dutch Shell which acquired it in 2016, or the Palestinian Authority. Recently, the Biden administration has been exploring the possibility for Gaza Marine to provide a revenue stream for a future Palestinian state in the context of the realization of the two-state solution after the war ends[3].

In this context, the two-state-solution, even when sanctioned by reformed institutions of the international order, does not go beyond yearnings for a bygone dream of a past international order, amidst a reality of warfare and conflict. Nor can it go beyond short-term calculations of gains to be made from reconstruction or economic development of Gaza and the West Bank (which Türkiye would like to develop).

It is very difficult to imagine a young Palestinian state sustaining itself in the highly competitive and combative environment of the present Middle Eurasia. The failure of the Oslo peace process which was to give the start for the two-state solution, did not simply show the lack of support of both Palestinians and Israelis to the process. It also revealed the issues involved in state-making in a region subjected to colonial violations – communities divided, differences sharpened and turned against each other, reaction taking over reason. This is a picture we have seen in Afghanistan, in post-U.S. invasion Iraq, post-partition India, and given us the failed states of Taliban, present divided Iraq, of Pakistan. In occupied West Bank and Gaza, Israel stroked a religious opposition – which crystallised into Hamas and Islamic Jihad – against the PLO, secular and Marxist, in the process dividing the Palestinian community.

Under present conditions, any attempt at making a Palestinian state could, at best result in the creation of an ‘autonomous’ administrative unit. It may be realistic to assume that any such formation, its extent, who administers, who is responsible for its security, and the nature of that security, will be subject to Israeli consent and approval. In fact, Israeli ministers’ proposal for an arrangement in the occupied territories after the present war, approximated the creation of an administrative unit in Gaza and with security provided and leadership approved by Israel. The optimistic interpretation was a government of technocrats possibly coordinating investments from countries, and agencies approved by Israel. But on what kind of development or economy these technocrats would design for Gaza, the ministers remain mute. Somewhat along the lines of development and technocrats, recently a group of Palestinian economists, claiming a new economic realism, suggested that economic development under occupation may be a possibility, retracting from the ‘no sovereignty, no development’ position of the Oslo Accords.[4]

The Biden administration, in a flight of fantasy and unable to stop the Israeli bombings of Gaza’s civilians, suggested that oil from the Gaza Marine field could be revenue stream for a Palestinian state. The administration’s statement did not say what kind of a state this would be, who would make the rules, or whether the creation of the Palestinian state would allow for the return of the existing 6 million in camps of the UN in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and in Egypt. Or whether more than one-third of the land in occupied territories appropriated by the Israeli military and settlements will be returned to Palestinians. Nor did the statement mention what the economy or society would be: a service economy providing tax shelter? A gambling hub (like Monaco and Macau)? A finance hub (like Dubai)? Or would it be an adjunct to the Israeli economy providing primarily cheap labour (including domestic) along the lines of the townships in South Africa?

Leaving aside the two-state plan, a possible long-term solution to the Palestinians may lie with a one-state solution – as utopian as it may sound in the midst of the present fighting and polarization. It will mean 5.3 million Palestinians and 9.1 million Israelis agreeing to live in a society where they both have equal rights – one person, one vote; to live under a non-Apartheid regime which does not discriminate one community against the other. South Africans did it and are still struggling with it, but it can be done.

For Israelis, the one-state solution will be possible when occupation is simply too costly. Beyond the heavy burden of security on Israel’s budget, there are the human costs – for reservists in the army taking time from their high-tech work which might have saved lives; for parents sending their children for military service in the West Bank knowing they will be damaged by the experience of their own violence as they had been when doing their military service; for citizens living under constant threat of war. In this, a lot depends on Israeli political elites but it also depends on transnational investors in Israel’s high-technology economy – will there be a point at which the ongoing war threatens their interests?

For Palestinians, it is already too costly to remain in their homes under the onerous conditions of the occupation. The energies of a young Palestinian population can be channeled to changing those conditions and to do it with the cooperation of Israelis, mending their fractured community. For both Palestinians and Israelis. forgetting the long years under an apartheid regime but making sure that no other community becomes victim to it, may sound utopian. But such may be the only option for peace.

• About the author: Huricihan Islamoğlu is Professor of Economic History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and former Visiting Fellow, Gateway House. 
• Source: This essay was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

References

[1] ‘Difficulties in Fundraising: Key People Called for Reserve Duty,’ Start-up Nation Policy Institute, December 2023, https://snpi.org/insight/difficulties-in-fundraising-key-people-called-for-reserve-duty/

[2] ‘Gaza Marine,’ CC Energy, https://www.ccenergyltd.com/operations/palestine/overview

[3] Ben Samuels, Amir Tibon, ‘U.S. to Push Israel on Allowing Gaza Offshore Gas Reserves to Revitalize Palestinian Economy,’ Haaretz, 20 November 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-20/ty-article/.premium/u-s-to-push-israel-to-allow-gaza-offshore-gas-reserves-to-revitalize-palestinian-economy/0000018b-ed90-ddc3-afdb-fdd1ff250000

[4] Raja Khalidi, ‘The Two-State, Two-Economy Solution,’ Project Syndicate, 22 November 2023, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/palestinian-economy-key-to-two-state-solution-by-raja-khalidi-2023-11

By Peter Fabricius

Africa’s 2024 election season – comprising 19 presidential and general polls – got off to an unpromising and alarming start this past week. After the re-election of President Azali Assoumani to an effective fifth term, violent protests against the result broke out in Moroni, the capital of Comoros.

The government responded by imposing a night-time curfew and deploying the army on the streets. The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights appealed for calm and for the authorities to show restraint in dealing with the protests.

‘Comoros is experiencing an insurrectionary situation,’ the five losing presidential candidates said in a joint statement. This was ‘fuelled by a spontaneous reaction of indignation’ among young people against Assoumani’s perceived rigging of his victory. The candidates called for nationwide protests on 19 January after prayers.

The riots were sparked when the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) announced on Tuesday that Assoumani had won 62.97% of votes in the first round, avoiding a run-off. The most astonishing statistic was that only 16.3% of registered voters turned out to elect a president. So Assoumani will assume a mandate to govern with just 33 209 of his people formally backing him.

With a voter turnout of 16.3%, Assoumani has a mandate to govern from just 33 209 people

The excuses offered included tropical cyclones and general voter apathy. But these did not explain why the turnout in the simultaneous vote for the three island governors had, on average, been over 50%.

At the very least, that suggests a massive vote of no confidence in Assoumani and the integrity of the presidential poll. At worst, it’s hard to avoid suspicion of vote destruction, especially because CENI had already estimated a turnout of over 60% on Sunday night, a diplomat told ISS Today.   

‘How can they maintain that out of 4 voters who turned up at the polls, only one put his ballot paper in the box, when the presidential and governors ballots were harmonised?’ the five losing candidates asked in their statement. Ibrahim Mzimba, former foreign minister and now a strategy head for the opposition, denounced the ‘inconsistency and contradiction of the figures announced.’

Some opposition parties had called for a boycott of the polls. And many Comorians, even if they didn’t formally endorse a stayaway, had nonetheless told Radio France International they didn’t believe in an electoral process that was a foregone conclusion.

The African Union’s (AU) election observation mission issued a typically non-committal interim report, saying the polls had been ‘peaceful and without major incidents.’ The International Organisation of the Francophonie noted in its interim report that voting had largely been ‘free, reliable and transparent.’ Both missions nevertheless suggested how the government, CENI and the parties could improve future elections and heal social and political divisions.

The five losing candidates ‘rejected in toto’ the AU assessment, saying ‘it denotes culpable complicity’ in the rigging.

Unlike the presidential poll, the turnout in the three island governors’ vote was on average over 50%

The opposition indicated its intention to refer the matter to the courts to ‘put an end to this masquerade which violates the sovereign choice of the Comorian people.’ But few cherished any hope that the Supreme Court would help, as it’s widely considered a servant of Assoumani’s interests.

Assoumani’s democratic credentials are doubtless being judged against a questionable political career. As army chief of state, he seized power in a military coup in 1999 before standing down under international and regional pressure in 2002 to run in controversial elections, which he won.

He stood down again in 2006 before returning to office after winning elections in 2016. He prolonged his tenure by holding a controversial referendum in 2018 to extend the presidency’s lifespan to two five-year terms. The poll also scrapped the effective system of rotating each presidential term among the nation’s three islands. This rotation had ended the separatist crises that had begun in 1999. 

Assoumani’s amendments ‘reset the clock’, allowing him to be re-elected in 2019 for another five years. After Sunday’s victory, he’s set to remain in office until 2029. That would total 20 years in office, spread over five terms.

‘Assoumani’s latest term has been marked by crackdowns on dissent and curtailments of press freedoms. Journalists work in an atmosphere of intimidation and fear of arrest, resulting in widespread self-censorship. Demonstrations are regularly banned. Opposition party members are threatened and detained by the police and army,’ says the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

The AU’s election observation mission issued a typically non-committal interim report

Liesl Louw-Vaudran, the International Crisis Group’s Senior Adviser on the AU, told ISS Today that if the AU wanted to prevent coups, it should do more to promote fair polls and sharpen its election monitoring.

She felt the AU election observation report should have covered important elements such as the huge discrepancy between the number of voters who participated in the presidential elections and those of governors, ‘which seems very problematic.’

The report should also have made more of other vital aspects it mentioned, Louw-Vaudran said. For example the dispute between the government and the opposition about granting the diaspora the right to vote, ‘which in this case would have made a big difference.’ And the clash around the dismissal of the Supreme Court head before the polls. ‘The court has the final say about the fairness of the elections.’

Louw-Vaudran also noted that, ‘Assoumani chaired the AU in 2023 when the organisation called on countries to respect democratic rule following the coups in Niger and Gabon. And yet he has now been elected for a third consecutive term, after already serving for several years. Even if the constitution permits him to run for a third term, as a good democrat, he should step aside and give others a chance to be presidential candidates.’

Such manipulations of the electoral and political process, and centralisation of power in a heterogenous country with three distinct island cultures, seem perilous. Comoros has already experienced 21 coup attempts since independence from France in 1975. And Africa is seeing an upsurge in coups, some precipitated precisely by leaders clinging to power by cynical ruses such as extensions of presidential term limits.

• About the author: Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria
• Source: This article was published by ISS

By Jon Miltimore

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down last week with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. During a 14-hour session, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was grilled by lawmakers on various subjects, including the origins of COVID-19, coerced vaccination, mask mandates, and the lost learning of students due to school closures.

Though the interview took place behind closed doors, parts of Fauci’s testimony were reported by media and lawmakers, offering various revelations — including the fact that Fauci said he was “not convinced” schoolchildren actually experienced learning loss during the pandemic.

An abundance of evidence contradicts Fauci’s belief, including research cited by Harvard Magazine showing “a significant decline” over the past three years in reading, math, and history, part of what the New York Times editorial board recently described as “the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.”

But put learning loss and Fauci’s denials aside for now. His admissions are damning enough.

Take “social distancing,” the idea that people had to be six feet apart from one another to be in public, a ritual virtually all of us participated in at one time or another to grab a bite to eat at our local restaurant. Fauci admitted to lawmakers that the policy was basically a charade, something that “sort of just appeared” and lacked scientific basis.

Or take the unintended consequences of the coercive vaccine policies Fauci advocated and governments initiated at the federal, state, and local levels. Fauci, who privately told officials that “it’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls*** and they get vaccinated,” conceded that the coercive vaccine policies he advocated likely increased vaccine hesitancy. (The evidence suggests he is probably right.)

And then, there was the hypothesis that COVID-19 emerged from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the government of the United States was funding risky gain-of-function research. Fauci initially laughed off the possibility that COVID-19 could have emerged from the lab, calling it “molecularly impossible.” (The U.S. government also collaborated with social media companies to censor users who speculated that COVID-19 could have emerged from the institute.)

Fauci now concedes that the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory, according to congressional lawmakers.

In summary, Fauci admitted he pushed COVID-19 protocols that lacked scientific rigor, advocated coercive vaccine policies to disrupt people’s lives that likely fueled vaccine hesitancy, and unjustly smeared millions of people as conspiracy theorists for hypothesizing on a COVID-19 origin story that the FBI now admits is likely true.

These admissions are damning, and hopefully, they mark the beginning of a much larger mea culpa from Fauci and his longtime superior, Dr. Francis Collins, the previous director of the National Institutes of Health.

In a little-noticed interview last summer, Collins also admitted “mistakes,” explaining that in public health, officials often take a very narrow view of the trade-offs of health policies.

“You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,” Collins said. “You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”

Collins is not wrong. This is one of the most basic lessons in economics: There are no solutions to complex problems, just trade-offs. That’s why sensible economists raised objections to the “if it saves just one life” mantra early in the pandemic.

“Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, trade-offs exist,” political scientist James Harrigan and economist Antony Davies wrote in April 2020. “And acknowledging trade-offs is an important part of constructing sound policy.”

Harrigan and Davies were hardly alone. Many economists and public health officials recognized this truth in 2020. But instead of listening or opening a dialogue to craft sensible solutions, Collins and Fauci plotted a “take down” of them. This is not how science operates. Nor is it how public policy should be conducted.

This brings me back to Fauci’s recent congressional testimony.

The fact that Fauci is finally beginning to fess up about the role his policies played in one of the worst disasters in modern history is welcome news. But a two-day closed hearing is not sufficient for something of this magnitude or the allegations facing Fauci, which include an alleged attempt to influence the CIA’s report on the origins of COVID-19.

Fortunately, a public hearing is expected to take place in the coming weeks or months. Let’s hope lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, are prepared to ask important questions.

• About the author: Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE.
• Source: This article was published by FEE and originally appeared in The Washington Examiner.

Following the instructions of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the return of former internally displaced persons to the restored city of Fuzuli continues, Azernews reports.