This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, the Canada-India beef, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Haiti
The Dominican Republic has closed its border with Haiti (tbh surprised this took so long) over the construction of a Haitian canal that:
Officials in the Dominican Republic say the project will divert water from the Massacre River, which runs in both countries, and violate the 1929 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Arbitration.
Presumably the spillover of lawlessness was also a concern.
The details of a Kenyan led multinational intervention force for Haiti are finally being hammered out. Kenya will pledge 1000 troops; America will pledge $100 million to the operation, and has also now signed a defense agreement with Kenya to help them combat the Jihadi group Al Shabaab. This has taken a remarkably long time (it still hasn’t been finally approved by the UN) given that President Moïse was assassinated two years ago and the country has been in semi-anarchy since. It is definitely less than ideal to use a country whose soldiers don’t speak French and is currently dealing with charges of police brutality in the ICC, but it’s something I guess.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt held the second round of talks over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which would double Ethiopia’s electricity generation but Sudan and Egypt are both worried would imperil their water supply. Unfortunately the talks seemingly brought the countries no closer to an agreement. According to Ethiopian President Abiy, the dam is now fully ready to be brought into operation - hopefully they work something out soon! There is supposed to be one more round of talks, which so far all the parties are still willing to attend.
Fighting seems to have flared up again in the Amhara region, where the ethnic militia Fano has been in rebellion over Abiy’s attempt to integrate it into the national armed forces.
Poland
Poland will be holding elections on the 15th, along with a general referendum on migration on the same day. Don’t know much about it and would be interested to hear from others:
While in 2019 PiS won 43.6% of the vote, the party is now several percentage points below that level of success at 38% as of 9 September, according to the latest POLITICO poll. Trailing behind Pis is Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition party - Koalicja Obywatelska - with 30% of the vote and the far-right Confederation Freedom and Independence - Konfederacja Wolsność i Niepodległość - with 11% of the vote. The current polls suggest that PiS, which has been ruling Poland since 2015, might look for a coalition partner to form the next government as it fails to reach an overall majority, though it’s still unclear where it will find one.
Nagorno-Karabakh
Azerbaijan has fully reasserted control over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia has warned against harming Armenians, but the 2000 Russian peacekeepers who were put in place to end the 2020 conflict do not seem to have the capacity or interest in helping them (The Azeri President Aliyev apologized to Putin for killing some of them and it’s apparently chill). This is likely the culmination of the past three years - Russia didn’t do much to help Armenia in the 2020 conflict either, and since then Armenia withdrew from CSTO and have sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Recently the Armenian President said publicly that they cannot rely on Russia to defend them anymore and had begun conducting joint military drills with the US.
Iran has warned against “border changes,” which is interesting. Iran doesn’t want to derail the overland routes they've invested in to be built across Armenia, and has also historically been a weapons supplier for the country (in part because Azerbaijan receives weapons from Israel). But they have something of a delicate game to play when challenging Azerbaijan, due to their own ~16% Azeri minority on the border. Previous President Rouhani made it a major initiative to improve relations with Iranian Azeris (some of whom are very integrated and others of whom occasionally protest) by allowing Azeri to be taught in schools, recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijan territory, and staying out of the 2020 conflict. Still, however, Azerbaijan regularly accuses Iran of favoring Armenia and tensions have never really disappeared.
Meanwhile, a pretty big chunk of the population in Nagorno Karabakh seems to be reading the room and heading for Armenia now that the Lachlin corridor is open.
Some 28,000 people — about 23% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh — have fled to Armenia since Azerbaijan’s swift military operation to reclaim the region after three decades of separatist rule. The mass exodus caused huge traffic jams. The 100-kilometer (60-mile) drive took as long as 20 hours.
Edit: Reports are saying it's up to almost 75% of the population that have now fled.
Kosovo
Speaking of breakaway republics and peacekeeping operations, a group of Serbians opened fire on Albanian policemen, who then returned the favor. The shootout left at least four dead and has further inflamed an increasingly tense situation:
Kurti accused the Serbian government on Sunday of logistically supporting “the terrorist, criminal, professional unit” that fired on Kosovo Police officers. Vucic denied the allegations, saying the gunmen were local Kosovo Serbs “who no longer want to withstand Kurti’s terror.”
President Vučić has demanded the UN deploy a peacekeeping force to take over the nation’s security. There is already a pretty large UN contingent in Kosovo, so I guess mainly he’s asking for a change in their scope of operations. The two countries are supposedly in the process of normalizing relations but it sure doesn’t look too likely at the moment.
Bolivia
Do you remember the coup in Bolivia? Long time socialist President Evo Morales was forced out of office after big protests against voting irregularities. A wacky lady named Jeanine Áñez took power in the wake and started promptly committing massacres. Áñez held off elections as long as possible until they ultimately resulted in Morales’ Movement for Socialism party re-winning the Presidency under his protege Luis Arce.
A lot of people at the time claimed it was a coup; further analysis of the voting records seems to indicate maybe they weren’t actually irregular, and there were suspicions that the west wasn’t wild about Bolivia closely guarding its nationalized lithium ion deposits - suspicions notable lithium-ion fan Elon Musk didn’t help by responding, for some reason, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!” Ironically, Acre has just announced that he will open up Bolivia for lithium extraction from foreign companies.
Either way, things may be coming full circle with Morales returning to the palace after all - he just announced that he will be running in the 2025 election. Acre hasn’t actually formally announced that he himself will be running again, but it’s unlikely that he’ll step aside just because Morales wants him to - the two have experienced a rift over the past few years, with Morales accusing Acre of hounding him with bonus corruption charges. Acre’s justice department will certainly be challenging Morales’ candidacy, but probably deservedly so - he’s already exceeded the constitutional limits on the number of terms you can serve.
Egypt
And speaking of leaders exceeding term limits, Egypt has announced new elections this December. Current President Abel Fattah Al-Sisi will be running again following amending the constitution to abolish term limits and increase terms to six years up from four. He won his last two elections with nearly 100% of the vote and jailed the last guy who was a serious challenge to him, so most likely he will win this one as well and govern till at least 2030.
The economy overall has been trending downwards. To make up for a lack of financing Egypt has been trying to coax a deal out of the IMF, who wants them to devalue their currency. They’ve now devalued three times in the past year but really the IMF wants them to switch to a floating rate regime that would accurately reflect their currency’s value.
Adding to economic bad news, to many Egyptians’ surprise they have now become embroiled in America’s latest political scandal around Senator Robert Menendez taking Egyptian bribes. This has led to increasing calls to withhold more aid from Egypt, which couldn’t really come at a worse time.
Uganda
Uganda has been resuming its own role of staying real active in its neighbors’ affairs. Recently they conducted a series of airstrikes against the Islamic State in the DRC (killing approximately “a lot” of fighters). This is part of a multiple decades old conflict - the Allied Democratic Forces is a 90s era Islamist rebel group from Uganda that was eventually driven out into North Kivu and has been attacking Uganda from a distance ever since, allegedly with the support of previous president Joseph Kabila. Recently the AFD joined the broader ISIS umbrella of jihadis and the DRC and Uganda agreed in 2021 to jointly crack down upon them. Since the conflict resumed Uganda has claimed to have killed over 600 jihadis already and has asserted the movement is on its last legs.
President Mosevini also recently offered to help mediate unification talks with Somalia and Somaliland; Somaliland promptly told them to kick rocks.
Spain
The vote to see whether conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo could become Prime Minister was held Wednesday, and he failed to cross the threshold of 176 votes. This means socialist PM Pedro Sanchez most likely now gets his chance to form a government, but with the Catalan independence party making strict demands of amnesty Sanchez doesn’t honestly seem much closer to winning either. The most likely result right now seems like another election getting held.
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Notes -
Referendum is blatant dunking on opposition by the current ruling party. Relatively smart one dunking, but still primarily dunking and used primarily as a propaganda tool. Pity, I like how Switzerland is handling their referendums.
Questions are designed to highlight cases where general population matches well with PiS stated positions, and poorly with opposition.
Questions are:
For context, second question is dunking on PO which (sensibly) raised retirement age to slightly more sustainable levels. PiS (currently ruling) proceeded to roll it back among catastrophic demographic collapse.
Third and fourth forces parties on left to become antimigrant (PO is trying to do it) or to announce support for something widely disliked. PiS is scoring points for their expressed position.
Third one also reminds people about barrier that was built on border. Opposition politicians were protesting against it, predicting it will fail or will not be built and funds going to it will be stolen.
For maximum irony it turns out that PiS administration was selling visas in African countries on large scale via organised bribery scheme. And migration from Asia/Africa increased massively during their rule (though number quoted by opposition are also misleading). Though PO complaining that PiS lets in too many Muslims and brown people is amusing. Also, I was sceptical about dog whistling claims. But they seem to be clearly doing it. Oh no, they are not complaining about migrants. They complain about PiS hypocrisy that was against migrations but "they let so many of them, and have we mentioned that many of them are Muslim males?"
Opposition is an a bind:
For elections in general, available choice is incredibly disappointing. No party is acceptable to me, and with presence of at least one catastrophically bad it is better to vote on one of less terribly bad so I will need to select something. I plan to select one randomly, except .
Some of these questions seem quite vague in terms of what policies will result. I might disagree with the outcome of some of the referenda, but the Irish way of having a Citizens Assembly to formulate the question and then voting on some specific constitutional amendment to be added or repealed seems like a good way of avoiding the mess of "We won! What did we win?", with the sense of betrayal from the voters if you don't properly interpret their answer to an unclear question.
Definitely, that is a big problem with it.
The best part is how badly phrased is the last question: even if it would be binding and with 100% no, then accepting this plan outright would not violate this referendum question!
After all, if these migrants would be accepted, then they would no longer be illegal migrants. But "illegal" is there to troll opposition.
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