Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Are trade deal worker & eco protections actually enforced?

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Not if history is any indication according to a detailed new report from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office:

On Monday, Warren fired back, showing that Obama simply has not effectively enforced existing labor standards in prior trade pacts. According to the report, a host of abuses, from child labor to the outright murder of union organizers, have continued under Obama’s watch with minimal pushback from the administration.

“The United States does not enforce the labor protections in its trade agreements,” the report reads, citing analyses from the Government Accountability Office, the State Department and the Department of Labor.

 

Ancient Syrian city safe from ISIS for now

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Two days later, on May 20, 2015, the Army made a hasty retreat and the city fell to ISIS.

State and opposition media both confirm that the Syrian Army has pushed back and blocked an approaching ISIS offensive on the ancient city of Palmyra (pictured below).

The international community was very concerned that the city’s antiquities would be dynamited as ISIS has done in many other areas. The counter-offensive was likely undertaken more over strategic concerns about Palmyra’s position relative to other key regime-held cities than over concern for the heritage sites, however.

The regime and FSA, in western Syria, have both systematically shelled and destroyed at least five of six UNESCO world heritage sites in Syria when they became battlefields. Palmyra is one of the six sites and has been subject to looting and some moderate battle damage.

Palmyra, 2009 pre-war view from Qalaat Ibn Maan, Temple of Bel and colonnaded axis. (Photo Credit: Arian Zwegers via Wikimedia)

Palmyra, 2009 pre-war view from Qalaat Ibn Maan, Temple of Bel and colonnaded axis. (Photo Credit: Arian Zwegers via Wikimedia)

India’s Remit

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The following text is adapted from a quiz I produced for The Globalist Research Center.

Remittances are cash payments that foreign workers transfer to their families or others back in their country of origin.

India received a total of $70 billion in remittances in 2013 from its overseas workers, according to the World Bank. While this amount represents just 3.7% of the country’s GDP, India is the largest recipient country of remittances worldwide when measured by the total amount of transfers.

An estimated 14.2 million Indians were living or working abroad as of 2013 – a greater number than any other country’s emigrant population.

The world’s largest source-country for remittances is the United States, whose $123 billion in 2013 accounted for a fifth of the global total of $577 billion. Almost three-quarters of that — $418 billion — flowed to developing countries.

Remittances from the United States in 2013 exceeded those of the next four countries combined: Saudi Arabia ($42 billion), United Arab Emirates ($28 billion), United Kingdom ($24 billion) and Russia ($23 billion).

Altogether, developing economies received $418 billion in remittances in 2013. By comparison, the amount of official development assistance (or foreign aid) from the OECD countries to the developing world totaled just $134.8 billion in 2013. That’s equal to just a third of remittance flows to developing nations.

It has become easier than ever, with the ubiquity of mobile technologies in the developing world, to send remittances fast and cheaply, even to those without access to banking. Remittances will therefore continue to be a crucial anti-poverty and development tool across the world.

flag-of-india

The “Burkina Faso effect” is still unclear

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Six months later, we are still no closer to a definitive answer on the question: “Burkina Faso’s Printemps Noir: A Black Spring or a fizzle?”

In other words, has the surprise popular/military ouster of Burkina Faso’s authoritarian president over a term limits dispute had any ripple effects across the rest of sub-Saharan Africa’s countries with long-serving leaders — many of whom are also currently trying to change their constitutions to seek additional terms? Will people be inspired to challenge attempts to revise term limits and nip their potential future strongmen’s careers in the bud?

A partial map of the years that Sub-Saharan African strongmen took office, in relation to Blaise Compaoré's 1987 coup in Burkina Faso. (Map labels by Arsenal For Democracy.)

A partial map of the years that Sub-Saharan African strongmen took office, in relation to Blaise Compaoré’s 1987 coup in Burkina Faso. (Map labels by Arsenal For Democracy.)

In Burundi this week we got perhaps the clearest parallel so far as a major military coup attempt was made against the president after weeks of increasingly bloody protests over his planned third term. It’s currently still too early to tell what the outcome of that uprising will be, since the army was divided over the decision to intervene in the political sphere.

Fighting raged in the capital last night. Reuters:

“The coup attempt failed, loyal forces are still controlling all strategic points,” said Army Chief of Staff General Prime Niyongabo in a statement broadcast on state radio.

A Reuters witness reported a journalist at the state broadcaster had said there was still heavy gunfire being heard around the state television and radio station in the capital on Thursday morning. Another Reuters witness said loud blasts were heard in the capital.

 
The Guardian:

Witnesses said rival factions of the armed forces, divided between supporters of the coup attempt and the president’s loyalists, were exchanging heavy machine gun and rocket fire around the state television and radio complex, which is held by the president’s supporters.

According to a pro-coup military source, the RTNB complex was attacked in the early hours of the morning after Burundi’s armed forces chief used state radio to announce that the coup had failed.

A journalist inside the complex confirmed heavy fighting raged through the early hours of the morning and after dawn, with heavy weapons including cannons and rockets being used.

 
Regardless of the outcome in Burundi, however, there is a bigger picture also still unresolved. Even beyond the “super-dicator” types — those who have ruled for 30-40 years and show no signs of budging or don’t even bother with real elections — there are almost a dozen wannabe-strongmen who are similarly trying to change the rules to contest semi-competitive elections and plan to coast to re-election on popularity or intimidation and join the ranks of the super-dictators.

The trends on the latter front appear to be quite unclear, with some countries and organizations showing positive signs and others making the same unfortunate decisions as we have just seen the president of Burundi undertake. An op-ed in Al Jazeera English summarized the state of play in the various countries with similar situations:

The forced resignation of Burkinabe President Blaise Campaore in October last year, following similar protests in Ougadougou is a case in point.

Perhaps that influenced President Thomas Yayi to accept the Benin constitutional court’s refusal to amend the constitution for a third term, and he has publicly stated that he will not seek re-election next year.
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Meanwhile in the DRC there has already been strong opposition to President Joseph Kabila’s attempts to amend both the constitution and the electoral law, including from within his own party.
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In other parts of the continent, the signals are mixed. In stark contrast to Burundi and DRC, in neighbouring Rwanda, two million people have petitioned parliament to amend the constitution in order to allow Paul Kagame to extend his rule for a third seven-year term in 2017.
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Last month, Togo’s Faure Gnassingbe and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir were both re-elected as their countries’ leaders, despite high questionable track records and notwithstanding protests against Faure’s third-term bid and an opposition boycott of the poll in Sudan, where Bashir has been in power since 1989.
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However, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) looks set to change such apathy this week, when it will table a new clause that would prohibit presidents of member countries from ruling for more than two terms. It is also said to be considering adopting a new legal regime that will make all ECOWAS decisions immediately applicable and binding on member states.

 

Burundi: Major military coup attempt in progress

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Update May 15, 2015: The coup has failed.

A military coup attempt is in progress after weeks of demonstrations against the president’s unconstitutional re-election bid for a third term and against his violent security forces or youth paramilitaries. BBC Africa covered the blow-by-blow events of the day on its live feed.

President Pierre Nkurunziza was in Tanzania for a regional leaders meeting when General Godefroid Niyombare — a former intelligence chief fired in February for advising the president against seeking a third term — took to the airwaves to announce he was closing the airport and borders to keep the president from returning and would be taking power. Protesters began leaving the streets, after initial celebrations alongside the supportive troops, on the orders of pro-coup forces who began arriving in tanks and armored vehicles. Police fell back.

President Nkurunziza’s team said its loyal security forces remained in control of key government and broadcast functions as well as the presidential palace. They dubbed the coup attempt a failure:

“It is with regret that we have learned that a group of soldiers rebelled this morning and made a fake declaration about a coup. The Presidency of the Republic wants the public opinion both in Burundi and abroad to know that this coup attempt has been stopped and that the people who read that statement on private local radio are being sought by the defence and security forces so that they are brought to justice. The Presidency of the Republic is asking the people of Burundi as well as foreigners to keep calm. Everything is being done to maintain security across the national territory.”

 
However, I fear we might be looking at a South Sudan situation in Burundi. The coup attempt may only partially succeed but it will likely not completely fail either (given the large presence of participating tanks and troops already). The military is multi-ethnic and comprises multiple factions from the country’s civil war. Some of them will back the president, some will back the coup, and some will back neither. It will also likely be a more violent split than in Lesotho last summer. And it will certainly not be as clean a break as the Burkina Faso military coup last October, which also involved an unconstitutional re-election bid.

As another complication, Nkurunziza had indeed been elected democratically but was now attempting to violate the constitution and has been widely accused of deploying death squads against his political enemies. Thus the coup is (if successful) removing a democratic leader but one who had become about as undemocratic as possible over the course of his tenure.

Flag of Burundi

Flag of Burundi

Seymour Hersh kind of went around the bend

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Seymour Hersh’s “reporting” is getting more bananas by the year. It’s a real shame to watch a respected investigative journalist — who broke stories like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal — go into a a total tailspin in public. His Syria chemical attack claims in 2013/2014 were so thoroughly debunked that I just assumed he made up the (highly questionable) Bin Laden story / conspiracy theory as soon as it “broke.” Vox:

A decade ago, Hersh was one of the most respected investigative journalists on the planet, having broken major stories from the My Lai massacre in 1969 to the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. But more recently, his reports have become less and less credible. He’s claimed that much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei, that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training, and that the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a “false flag” staged by the government of Turkey. Those reports have had little proof and, rather than being borne out by subsequent investigations, have been either unsubstantiated or outright debunked. A close reading of Hersh’s bin Laden story suggests it is likely to suffer the same fate.

 
I hadn’t even heard about the speech in 2011 where he said racist things and tried to allege that the US military ranks were filled with members of Opus Dei (like from the Dan Brown books, not the real ones).

There’s a certain set of people who keep citing his reports even when it’s increasingly clear they’re ludicrous paranoia because they already believe the conspiracy theories he’s validating.

Based on personal experience when I was a little kid growing up with aging relatives with certain genetic predispositions, I assume we’re going to find out later that 78-year-old Hersh has been suffering from dementia. But my relatives losing their grip on reality weren’t hugely influential journalists with major platforms. His home publication (the New Yorker) has reportedly stopped printing his stories (because they can’t be supported/confirmed) and he’s responded with tantrums. This “story” about Bin Laden and the last big report were only published in London.

Complicating things is that he has genuinely reported on actual coverups before. So it’s likely that anything disproving his “research” or “sources” on stories now is just convincing him in his confusion that there’s an even more massive coverup or conspiracy afoot when really there isn’t in this case. Coverups typically only work when there are few people involved and the incident being covered is fairly small and low-profile. They fall apart very quickly for anything bigger because there are simply too many people willing to talk. His latest allegation involves a vast multi-national intergovernmental conspiracy involving one of these least-reliably secretive intelligence outfits in the world (Pakistan’s ISI), and Hersh has convinced himself based on very thin and indirect sourcing that everyone has managed to keep their mouths shut for four years.

I’m afraid people with less reputable journalistic platforms are taking advantage of Seymour Hersh’s increasingly obvious disconnect with reality to get clicks and attention.

Authority Figure

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Recep-Tayyip-ErdoganIn March, I noted that as part of Erdogan’s increasingly erratic and authoritarian behaviors, anti-“Insult” crackdowns on free speech are mounting in Turkey. Erdogan’s immoderate behavior of the last two years (since the Gezi Park riots) is complex and motivated by many factors — some reasonable, others less so. But as I’ve argued many times before, it fits a pattern of political practices that are fairly consistent with Turkish (and maybe even pre-Turkish Ottoman) political culture, and I do not believe his actions and statements are uniquely egregious or related to his political affiliation as an Islamist democrat.

I just ran across an interesting piece from Mustafa Akyol, April 10, 2014 (during the run-up to Erdogan’s successful presidential campaign last year), headlined “Turkey’s doctrine of pre-emptive authoritarianism” for Al-Monitor, which goes more into depth on the political culture angle and how (at least) some of this has been “performed” authoritarianism:

This doctrine, which has not been observed much in Turkey simply because it is taken as a fact of life, is based on a simple rule: In every political confrontation, the thing to do is to be as strong, defiant, stubborn and threatening as possible. Only then, the enemy will be crushed and victory will be secured. Otherwise, the enemy will begin to come after you, defeat you and will show no mercy. So, you should pre-emptively corner and weaken him as much as possible.

This doctrine does not believe in peaceful solutions that will come through negotiation, bargaining and consensus. Reasonable concessions, which could normally lead to such consensus-based solutions, are condemned as naivete, weakness and perhaps not outright treason.
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It is not a first step forward toward reconciliation. It is rather the first step back toward downfall. Once the malicious people on the other side see your concession, they will become only more invigorated and aggressive. So you should keep them at bay by never accepting any of their demands and showing them how tough you are.
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This is why while Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism puzzles the West, it makes him only more popular at home among his conservative base. In fact, most conservatives love Erdogan precisely for being so defiant. One could see this feeling on the huge posters of Erdogan that were put up all around Istanbul during the recent election campaign: They carried a resolute pose of the prime minister and two simple words: “iron will.”

To be sure, it is not just Erdogan’s supporters who love an iron will, but most of his opponents as well. For decades, Turkey’s secularists praised Ataturk’s authoritarian legacy and rallied behind the military, which insisted in oppressing the “reactionaries” and the “separatists,” or religious conservatives and Kurdish nationalists, with all means possible.

 
Obviously I’m not excusing any of this, because it’s consistently one of Turkey’s biggest political culture failings. And I don’t think historical context and behavior automatically exculpates Erdogan himself. But I think it’s important to see that there is a wider/longer context, so that it’s not blamed on his faith or political affiliation, which I think has been wrongly implicated by some commentators who have an agenda of tearing down democratic political Islam and the religion generally.