From our Daily Report:

Palestine
Tel Aviv protest

Israel protests score a win —for now

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he will delay his proposed reforms of the judicial system in the face of ongoing mass protests. Calling it a move to “avoid civil war,” Netanyahu declared in a televised address “a timeout for dialogue.” However, he added: “We insist on the need to bring about the necessary corrections in the legal system.” Opponents of the reform remain wary that the current respite is only temporary, a tactic to buy time while tensions cool. The protest campaign has also seen a wave of civil disobedience, with military reservists refusing to report for duty. Despite the general single-issue focus on the judicial reform, the demonstrations have included an “anti-apartheid bloc” calling for a secular state and decolonization of Palestinian lands. (Photo: Or Adar/The Umbrella Movement via Twitter)

Africa
DRC

DRC: accused war criminal becomes defense chief

Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi appointed former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba as defense minister and deputy prime minister in a cabinet reshuffle. Bemba, who served as vice president from 2003 to 2006, was convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2016 of crimes against humanity over atrocities allegedly committed by rebels under his command when they intervened in the conflict in the neighboring Central African Republic in 2002. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but the court overturned his sentence on appeal in 2018. However, five defendants were convicted on charges related to obstruction of justice in the Bemba case. (Photo: MONUSCO via Defense Post)

Europe

Water also at issue in France protests

Amid nationwide protests over the government’s pension reform in France, clashes between demonstrators and police are reported from the rural commune of Saite-Soline, in the western department of Deux-Sèvres. Thousands defied an official ban to mobilize against construction of new water storage “basins” for crop irrigation. In the ensuing fracas, security forces deployed helicopters and tear-gas, and several protesters were wounded, some seriously. Authorities said gendarmes were injured as well, and patrol cars set ablaze. Some protesters reportedly dug up and dismantled a section of pipe that had been laid to feed the reservoir, and marched with the severed segments held aloft. Interior Minister GĂ©rald Darmanin described the scene as “eco-terrorism.” The Bassines Non Merci group calls the “mega-basins” project a “water grab” by “agro-industry,” which will deplete the local aquifer amid ongoing drought conditions in the region. (Photo via Unicorn Riot)

Mexico
maiz

Podcast: Mexico and the struggle for the genetic commons

In Episode 166 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses how a little-noted US-Mexico dispute on trade and agricultural policy has serious implications for the survival of the human race. Washington is preparing to file a complaint under terms of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement over Mexico’s decree banning imports of GMO corn, slated to take effect in January 2024. Concerns about the (unproven) health effects of consuming GMO foods miss the real critique—which is ecological, social and political. GMO seeds are explicitly designed as part of an “input package” intended to get farmers hooked on pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers, and protect the “intellectual property” of private corporations. Agribusiness, which can afford the “input package,” comes to dominate the market. Eased by so-called “free trade” policies, agbiz forces the peasantry off the market and ultimately off the land—a process well advanced in Mexico since NAFTA took effect in 1994, and which is related to the explosion of the narco economy and mass migration. The pending decree holds the promise of regenerating sustainable agriculture based on native seed stock. It is also a critical test case, as countries such as Kenya have recently repealed similar policies in light of the global food crisis. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: Sin MaĂ­z No Hay PaĂ­s)

Europe
belarus cops

Belarus: tens of thousands arbitrarily detained

Tens of thousands of people—many of them peaceful protesters—have been arbitrarily detained in Belarus over the past two and a half years, according to UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif. The charge came as Al-Nashif presented a report outlining rights violations in Belarus to the UN Human Rights Council, focusing on events leading up to and following the contested 2020 Belarusian presidential election and the ensuing protests. The report presents evidence of the unlawful deaths of at least five people, 100 or more cases of sexual and gender-based violence, as well as widespread unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, attacks on independent media, and unfair sentences that the report calls “politically motivated.” (Photo Libcom.org)

Europe
moldova

Moldova drops ‘Moldovan’ language; Russia irked

The parliament of Moldova voted to remove references to the “Moldovan” language from the country’s constitution and enshrine Romanian as the official language for all legislation. Lawmakers asserted that “Moldovan” is actually indistinguishable from Romanian, and that the notion that it is a separate language is a product of Soviet propaganda. The vote was applauded by Romania, whose foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu stated that the Moldovan language is an “artificial construct.” But pro-Russian Moldovan lawmakers assailed the move—as did the Russian Foreign Ministry, which issued a statement snarkily suggesting that Aurescu is an “artificial construct.” Moscow claimed that Moldovan is a distinct and older form of Romanian, which is now “officially preserved only in Transnistria,” the breakaway region of Moldova hosting Russian troops. (Image: Nicolas Raymond via Flcikr)

Africa
Somaliland

Oil contracts at issue in Somaliland conflict?

Fighting continues in Somalia’s northern breakaway state of Somaliland, where three administrative regions—Sool, Sanaag, and Aynaba—have taken up arms in a bid to rejoin the internationally recognized Mogadishu government. Somaliland accuses the government of Ethiopia (which is officially attempting to broker a dialogue in the conflict) of intervening on the side of the re-integrationist rebels, headquartered in the town of Las Anod, Sool region. Somaliland has been effectively independent since 1991, and has seen a more stable and secular social order than the regions controlled by the Mogadishu government. But now Mogadishu is asserting its right to grant oil contracts to foreign companies within Somaliland’s territory. Local media note that the new conflict erupted just after Mogadishu announced the issuing of an exploration lease to Turkish Genel Energy in Somaliland—indeed, within Aynaba, one of the contested regions. The move was protested as “illegal” by the Somaliland government, based in the city of Hargeisa. (Map: Siirski via Ethiopia Insight)

Syria
ssnyc

Syria: reject ‘normalization’ of Assad regime

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad arrived in the United Arab Emirates for an official visit—another advance in the attempt to normalize his genocidal regime. The trip was accompanied by more pomp than Assad’s visit to the UAE last year, his first to an Arab state since the Syrian revolution began in March 2011. The UAE trip follows a visit to Oman last month. Days before the UAE visit, Assad was in Moscow for a meeting with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. In addition to voicing support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, Assad told Russia state media that he welcomes any expansion of Moscow’s military bases in Syria. Meanwhile, opposition activists held a demonstration in Idlib, within Syria’s diminished pocket of rebel control, marking the 12th anniversary of the revolution. Thousands gathered under the Free Syria flag in the city’s center, to proclaim that the revolution survives and to oppose normalization of the regime. (Photo: Syrian Revolution commemoration in Times Square, NYC. Via Syria Solidarity NYC)

Europe
Kremlin

Russia bans ‘false information’ about mercenaries

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law forbidding the spread of “false information” about “volunteer” forces fighting in service of Russia. The law is clearly meant to prevent public criticism of paramilitary groups and private military organizations, such as the Wagner Group, currently operating in Ukraine. Offenders may be sentenced to up to five years. The previous version of the criminal code already included prohibitions on the spread of “false information” regarding the Russian armed forces. The amendment’s language appears to be an acknowledgement by Moscow that the “private” forces fighting in Ukraine are acting under the direct orders of the Russian military. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Europe
Ukraine

Russia agrees to (shorter) grain deal extension

Russia agreed to extend the Black Sea grain deal with Ukraine, but for only 60 days rather than the 120 days of the original agreement. The UN-brokered deal enables safe shipment of grain from Ukraine’s blockaded ports to boost global supply and stabilize prices. The agreement rolled over in November, but Russia now argues that provisions for the easing of restrictions on its own agricultural and fertilizer exports have not been met. So far, 24 million tonnes of grain have been exported under the initiative. But the International Rescue Committee noted that only 10% has gone to countries most in need. It has called on the UN to broker a 12-month deal, pointing out that food price inflation is at 40% in countries most at risk of “humanitarian catastrophe”—double the rate of the rest of the world. (Map: PCL)

Greater Middle East
Yemen

Will Iran-Saudi deal end Yemen’s war?

As part of its China-brokered deal to re-establish diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Iran has reportedly agreed to stop arming Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Officially, Tehran denies arming the rebels, who are fighting forces aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognized government—including a Saudi- and UAE-led coalition. Many have portrayed the conflict in Yemen as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s actually far more complicated than that: the violence is rooted in real grievances, and political and military alliances are also at play at a much more local level. Powerful Yemeni actors—all vying for a stake in the country’s future—have been left out of official peace talks. (Map via University of Texas)

Greater Middle East
Daraya

Podcast: Libya and Syria, 12 years later

In Episode 165 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the simultaneous 12th anniversary of the start of both the NATO intervention in Libya and the Syrian revolution. The NATO intervention was at root a bid to to control the political trajectory of the Arab Revolution, and bring about a Thermidor in which Western-backed technocrats would be ascendant. The Syrian people seized back the initiative with their popular uprising against the Bashar Assad dictatorship. But, following the precedent set in Libya, the Great Powers have intervened, seeking to impose their own order—over the heads of the Syrian people. This time, however, the principal interventionist power has not been the West seeking to coopt the revolution, but Russia seeking to prop up the genocidal ancien rĂ©gime. Listen on SoundCloudor via Patreon. (Photo: Daraya, 2011 via Leila’s Blog)

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kharkiv

UKRAINE: DEBUNKING RUSSIA’S WAR PROPAGANDA

In a special analysis for CounterVortex, Bill Weinberg debunks Vladimir Putin’s “de-Nazification” propaganda for his invasion of Ukraine, a paramount example of the ultra-cynical phenomenon of paradoxical fascist pseudo-anti-fascism. The Ukrainian state that he demonizes as “Nazi” has been experiencing a democratic renewal since the Maidan Revolution, as Russia has descended into autocratic dictatorship. Putin’s stated justifications for the Ukraine war are either paranoid delusions or outright lies. His real objectives are to rebuild the Russian Empire, re-establish the Russian dictatorship, and exterminate Ukraine as a cultural and political entity. These are the open aims of Alexander Dugin, the intellectual mastermind of Putin’s revanchist imperial project, and the political heir of Ivan Ilyin, the 20th century theorist of “Russian Fascism.”

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Kosovo-Serbs

RUSSIA’S STRATEGY TO DESTABILIZE THE BALKANS: IT’S WORKING

Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is emboldening Russia’s ally Serbia to press its claims on Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008. As ethnic Serbs launch violent protests in Kosovo, Serbian officials are threatening to launch a campaign to “de-nazify” the Balkans. Meanwhile, leaders of the autonomous Bosnian Serb Republic have announced their intention to secede from Bosnia & Herzegovina. The wars in the states to emerge from the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were an early harbinger of the current conflagration in Ukraine. Now, in a grim historical cycle, the war in Ukraine could re-ignite the wars in the Balkans. Nicholas Velazquez, in an analysis for Geopolitical Monitor, sees an intentional Moscow design to destabilize the region.

Continue ReadingRUSSIA’S STRATEGY TO DESTABILIZE THE BALKANS: IT’S WORKING 
mariupol ruins

RUSSIAN GENOCIDE OF THE UKRAINIAN NATION

Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine has sparked a strong international reaction, with most states referring to the actions of the Russian army as war crimes. A number of parliaments and heads of state have recognized that yet another international crime—genocide—is being committed by the occupation’s troops. Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, was the first to pass a resolution in March, strongly condemning “acts of genocide…committed on the territory of sovereign Ukraine by the Russian Federation armed forces, together with its allies, at the behest of military commanders being under the direct authority of President Vladimir Putin.” Since then, especially after the infamous Bucha massacre, other parliaments have joined Poland in condemning Russia’s actions as genocide, including those of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Canada, Czechia and Ireland. However, the International Criminal Court investigation has been slow to examine charges of genocide, and any binding action by the UN against Russia is effectively blocked by its veto on the Security Council. The dilemma is explored by Ukrainian law student Nastya Moyseyenko in a commentary for Jurist.

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Crimea protest

CRIMEA: LEGACY OF THE DEPORTATION

May 18 is commemorated as a memorial day for the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people. On that day in 1944, Joseph Stalin began a mass deportation of the entire population of Crimean Tatars who survived the German occupation of the peninsula. Over 200,000 Tatars, baselessly accused of collaborating with the Nazis, were packed in railroad cattle-cars and sent to remote locations in Central Asia and Siberia. Over 46 percent of the Crimean Tatar people perished during the first two years of the exile due to harsh conditions. Only in 1989 did the USSR condemn the deportation, after which the indigenous people of Crimea started returning to their homeland. The deportation was recognized as a genocide by Ukraine in 2015, and later by Latvia, Lithuania and Canada. In a commentary for Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Olena Makarenko notes that today, thousands of Crimean Tatars have been forced once again to leave the Crimean Peninsula due to the Russian occupation of 2014; hundreds of those who stayed are persecuted.

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witches

APOLOGY TO THE ‘WITCHES’: WHY NOW?

Scotland and Catalonia have issued formal apologies for the burning of thousands of women as “witches” between the 15th and 18th centuries. An apology for a crime committed hundreds of years ago, with the victims and perpetrators alike both long dead, may seem like an empty exercise. However, the contemporary world still sees periodic frenzies of “witchcraft” hysteria, with women and the least powerful in society “tried” and lynched—especially in rural areas of Africa and Asia. Last year, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution sponsored by Cameroon calling for “Elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.” New York area neo-pagan practitioner and commentator Carole Linda Gonzalez argues that, in this light, the new apologies are all too relevant.

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Kryuchki

ENVIRONMENTAL WAR CRIMES IN UKRAINE

The International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, finding that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe war crimes have been committed. Media attention has, quite rightly, focused on the plight of individuals caught up in the carnage—many of whom have died in terrible circumstances. However, in the background, there is another victim of the invasion: the environment. Bombardment of oil depots, the release of radiation at the Chernobyl nuclear site, the forest fires engulfing the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve—these may constitute environmental war crimes under the Rome Statute. However, the criteria are rigorous, and the perpetrators ever standing trial seems contingent on a political upheaval in Russia. In a commentary for Jurist, international law scholar Elliot Winter of Newcastle University in the UK examines the odds for prosecution of such crimes in the Ukraine conflict.

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mariupol

ECHOES OF SYRIA, AS PUTIN BOMBS HOSPITALS IN UKRAINE

Many Syrians are experiencing heart-wrenching flashbacks as they watch the mounting devastation in Ukraine, the millions of refugees fleeing—and the targeting of hospitals by Russian bombs, as so recently and repeatedly happened in their own country. Physicians for Human Rights have documented hundreds of attacks on healthcare facilities in Syria over 11 years of war, and no perpetrator has been held accountable for these crimes. Just a month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the figure already stands at over 100. But with timely action by the UN and International Criminal Court, things can be different in Ukraine. In a commentary for The New Humanitarian, Dr Houssam al-Nahhas, a Syrian physician and a researcher at Physicians for Human Rights, urges: “Whether a hospital is bombed in Mariupol or Aleppo, in Sana’a or in Kunduz, those responsible must be held to account.”

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deportations

THE CRIMEAN CLAUSE OF THE UKRAINE QUESTION

The current Russian-Ukrainian war really started eight years ago with the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which fell with hardly a shot fired, and largely without notice in the world at large. The most important thing to understand about Crimea is that it is indigenous land, and that the Crimean Tatars are its people. The Crimean Tatars overwhelmingly favor Kyiv over Moscow, but a large majority of the peninsula’s population has been Russian since 1944. Stalin’s genocidal forced relocation of the Tatars that year was carried out under a pretext of “denazification.” Under the new Russian occupation, the Tatars have again become a terrorized minority,  their language and culture again threatened by policies of Russification and “denazification.” In an analysis for CounterVortex, Kyiv-born writer and activist Yevgeny Lerner sees a foreboding historical cycle at work.

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Taliban

AFGHANISTAN: GOING BACK TO ZERO

The international community and the United States spent billions of dollars on rebuilding the Afghan legal and judicial system and improving the rule of law and governance over the past two decades. However, after the Taliban takeover, any such progress quickly disappeared, and the foundations for the Afghan legal system that had been expensively rebuilt over the last 20 years are in state of collapse—approaching the state of lawlessness that existed prior to 2001. In a commentary for Jurist, Mahir Hazim argues that is the responsibility of the United Nations and countries engaging with the Taliban to make rescuing the legal system and ensuring rule of law a top priority when they negotiate with the regime.

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LFJL

LIBYA: INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT WORSENING PROSPECTS FOR PEACE

Eleven years ago, courageous women and men took to the streets of Libya with an unflinching desire for rights, justice, and democracy. They were met with an unprecedented international response, ostensibly to protect them. The UN Security Council quickly established a no-fly zone, while NATO launched airstrikes. On the anniversary of the start of the uprising against Qaddafi, the country’s future could not be more precarious. Amid delayed elections and fragmented governance, the UN-led political process for Libya is unravelling. The international community has dramatically failed to live up to its promises to Libya. In fact, as geopolitical interests take center stage, it is making things worse. Writing in The New Humanitarian, Elham Saudi and Cristina Orsini of Lawyers for Justice in Libya say the international community must urgently refocus on human rights and accountability.

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Ukraine anarchists

UKRAINE: KHARKOV ANARCHISTS SPEAK

Ukraine is in the world headlines now as a frontline of confrontation between Russia and the West. Putin is implicitly threatening to invade the country if his demands are not met for a guarantee that it will not be granted NATO membership. Amid the geopolitical chess-game, few recall that during the Russian Revolution and the preceding years, Ukraine had one of the most powerful anarchist movements that the world has seen. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, anarchist groups have started to re-emerge in Ukraine, intransigently rejecting the regimes in Kiev and Moscow, and the power blocs around NATO and Russia, alike. CounterVortex communicated via email with one such group, the newly formed Assembly, which mostly functions as a media collective, reporting on labor and social struggles in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkov.

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thantlang

MYANMAR: CRISES SPIRAL ONE YEAR AFTER COUP

Volatile new conflict zones, aerial bombardment, rising hunger, and hundreds of thousands uprooted: A year after the military coup, crises are spiralling across Myanmar. But aid blockades by the junta are cutting off assistance to stricken areas even as humanitarian needs reach record levels. Irwin Loy of The New Humanitarian takes stock of what is fast becoming a forgotten disaster, relegated to “tier-two” by the world media.

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