control of water

Greater Middle East

Middle East: ‘peak wheat’ fears amid deep drought

Facing long lines and bread shortages, Lebanon’s government has been forced to give private importers $15 million to bring more wheat into the country. But it’s a short-term fix for a government that is broke and waiting for the IMF to approve a bailout deal. And nations across the Middle East may be looking for similar solutions as they struggle with the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—both countries are key wheat producers, and exports are effectively cut off by the war. The food crisis is deepened by a decades-worst regional drought impacting Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and especially Iran. A new assessment on Iran from the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) documents water shortages, disappearing wetlands and emptying villages, making the impacts “impossible to ignore.” (Photo of IDP camp in Yemen: Moayed Al Shaibani/Oxfam)

Europe

Polish-Czech agreement on border coal mine

The government of Poland announced that it has agreed to pay compensation in a dispute over the Turów open-pit lignite mine that lies close to the border with the Czech Republic. In return, Prague has withdrawn its complaint at the Court of Justice of the European Union. The dispute concerns the complaints of local farmers on the Czech side of the border that their water sources are going dry due to the mine’s operations. The Turów Brown Coal Mine, owned by Poland’s parastatal power company PGE, must pump water from the pit into the Lusatian Neisse River, draining the local aquifer. The mine has been expanding closer to the border, further enflaming the fears of the Czech farmers. The deal was protested by Greenpeace for failing to provide sufficient guarantees for protection of the watershed. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Africa

Chad: protests over Ouaddai sultanate autonomy

At least 14 protesters were killed in Chad’s Ouaddai province, climaxing several days of mounting violence and unrest. Protests broke out in provincial capital Abéché after the central government suspended the powers of Ouaddai’s traditional sultan, Cherif Abdelhadi Mahdi. The appointed prefect of the province is to assume his traditional powers over the ethnic Ouaddai community. The traditional Ouaddai chieftain of the locality of Bani Halba has also had his powers dissolved by decree. The appointed replacements are apparently to be Arabs, exacerbating tensions between the Arab and ethnic Ouaddai communities. Local rights groups say several more were killed by security forces in the days of protest, and are demanding an investigation. The heretofore autonomous sultanate of Dar Ouaddai is a survival of the Wadai Empire, which ruled much of the region from the 15th century through the consolidation of French colonial rule in 1914. (Photo via Twitter)

Syria

Russian warplanes bomb Idlib water station

Russian warplanes are reported to have carried out an air-raid on the main water pumping station for the city Idlib, capital of the besieged province of that name in Syria’s north. Witnesses on the ground said Russian Sukhoi jets dropped bombs on the water plant as well as several towns outside the provincial capital. A UN humanitarian official acknowledged the air-raid without naming the perpetrators, tweeting: “The country is already facing a water crisis & continued destruction of civilian infrastructure will only cause more suffering of civilians.” An official in the opposition administration of the city said the plant is now out of operation, charging: “The Russians are focusing on infrastructure and economic assets. This is to add to the suffering of people.” (Image via Twitter)

Central America

Honduras transition in the New Cold War

Hondurans elected self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Xiomara Castro to be the country’s first woman president. The wife of Manuel Zelaya, the populist president who was removed in a coup in 2009, Castro pledges to revive his program—and take it much further, instating far-reaching reforms. Castro also announced that she will “open diplomatic and commercial relations with continental China,” which was widely taken as meaning a switch of diplomatic recognition. Honduras is currently one of only 14 countries that recognize Taipei rather than Beijing. It is tragic to see the Central American republics, in their struggle to break free of Washington’s orbit, acquiesce in Beijing’s design to incorporate Taiwan into its own orbit—or, more ambitiously, its national territory. (Map: Perry-Castañeda Library)

Africa

Water scarcity sparks clashes in Cameroon’s North

The UN Refugee Agency reports that “intercommunal clashes” in Cameroon’s Far North region have displaced thousands inside the country and forced more than 30,000 people to flee to neighboring Chad. At least 22 have been killed and 30 others injured. The fighting began in the border village of Ouloumsa following a dispute between herders, fishermen and farmers over dwindling water resources. Violence then spread to neighboring villages. Ten villages have been burned to the ground. The violence also reached Kousseri, Cameroon’s northern commercial hub, where the cattle market was destroyed and thousands forced to flee. (Photo: Aristophane Ngargoune/UNHCR)

Europe

‘Environmental uprising’ in Serbia —and Kosova

In what local media are calling an “environmental uprising,” protesters blocked roads and occupied public squares in Belgrade and other towns across Serbia to oppose plans for a lithium mine at Loznica, on the Drina River. Transnational Rio Tinto has been buying up land in the area, in anticipation of final approval of the project. But concerns over a toxic threat to local waters have sparked widespread outrage over the plan. Meanwhile, across the border in Kosova, environmentalists claimed a victory as the country’s high court suspended the permit for the proposed Brezovica hydro-power plant on the Lepenc River. Local Albanians and Serbs alike came together to oppose the project, which would flood agricultural lands while depriving water to downstream communities (Photo: Masina)

North America

Podcast: the dialectics of cannabis liberation II

In Episode 94 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg presents a special cannabis harvest season interview with Karla Avila in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle. A licensed producer of artisanal outdoor cannabis for the legal market through her homestead-based company Flowerdaze Farm, Avila is an advocate for small-scale “legacy” growers through her work with the Trinity County Agriculture Alliance. She is also a founding member of the statewide Origins Council, which is seeking to establish official “appellations” for cannabis, certifying a strain’s regional origin. Avila discusses the challenges now facing small legacy growers who are struggling to keep alive heirloom genetics and ecologically sound cultivation methods in a legal market increasingly dominated large-scale enterprises on an agribusiness model. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Syria

The Syria war’s unknown toll

For the first time since it stopped attempting to count Syria’s dead back in 2014, the UN has released a new casualty number. The UN Human Rights Office now says 350,209 people were killed in the war between March 2011 and March 2021—but cautions that because of the strict methodology used, this figure is “certainly an under-count of the actual number of killings.” And it doesn’t include those who died from causes that would likely have been more easily treatable were it not for the ongoing violence, such as hunger or COVID-19, which is now barrelling through northwest Syria, spreading quickly in displacement camps and overwhelming healthcare facilities. (Photo: Destruction of Aleppo, via 7ee6an)

Planet Watch

Record number of ecologists slain in 2020

A record number of environmental defenders were murdered last year, according to a report by advocacy group Global Witness. The report, “Last Line of Defense,” counts 227 activists killed around the world in 2020—the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year. Many of the murders were linked to resource exploitation—logging, mining, agribusiness, and hydroelectric dams. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the organization found on average of four activists have been killed each week. (Photo via Groundwork)

Africa

Sectarian massacre in Nigeria’s Plateau state

Nigerian authorities imposed a curfew in Jos, capital of north-central Plateau state, after at least 20 Muslim travelers passing through the city were massacred by a presumed Christian militia. The Muslims, mostly of the Fulani ethnicity, were in a convoy of vehicles, returning to their homes in Ondo and Ekiti states from a celebration in neighboring Bauchi state marking the start of Muharram, the Islamic new year. In Jos, the convoy was caught in a traffic jam, and the vehicles set upon by militiamen, the occupants slain with machetes, daggers and other weapons. The assailants were apparently Christians of the Irigwe ethnicity. Northern and central Nigeria have for years seen growing violence between Muslim semi-nomadic herders and Christian farmers over control of land and water. (Map: Perry-Castañeda Library)

Planet Watch

Podcast: climate change and the global struggle

In Episode 81 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock of the fast-mounting manifestations of devastating climate destabilization—from Oregon to Siberia, from Germany to Henan. In Angola, traditional pastoralists are joining the ranks of “climate refugees” as their communal lands are stricken by drought. In Iran’s restive and rapidly aridifying Ahwazi region, protests over access to water have turned deadly. These grim developments offer a foreboding of North America’s imminent future. Yet media commentators continue to equivocate, asking whether these events are “linked to” or “caused by” climate change—rather than recognizing that they are climate change. And the opportunity for a crash conversion from fossil fuels that was posed by last year’s pandemic-induced economic paralysis, when already depressed oil prices actually went negative, is now being squandered. Oil prices are again rising, with the return to pre-pandemic dystopian “normality.” Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo of Ahwazi protesters in Iran: Ahwazna)