Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, February 11, 2023.
You’d hope that one of these days a leader somewhere would be held responsible – looking at you here, President Erdoğan – when corruption in their construction industry and the sustained use of shoddy building materials and practices results in all these building collapses and deaths, earthquake after earthquake after earthquake.
Who’s in charge here? Or is it that the people in charge are beneficiaries of the graft that kills so many?
In his new book, Martin Wolf calls Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s version of governance “demagogic autocracy,” and I think most people’s default expectation has always been that through one scheme or another, Mr. Erdoğan would end up winning his next election. But it’s coming up fast now, election day, and the demagogic autocrat has been wrong footed by the earthquake, so this election offers a slim chance for Turks to shake things up on May 14.
Two huge earthquakes (7.4 and 7.2) struck the industrialized northwest of Türkiye in 1999 causing more than ten thousand deaths. In the following parliamentary elections “the party in charge of the ministry responsible for earthquake relief, and parties that served longest and controlled more of the city administrations in the quake zone were blamed,” Ali T. Akarca and Aysit Tansel wrote in a 2008 paper.
They concluded that “each and every party” that ruled in the period preceding the quakes “was adversely affected by the earthquake damage, and that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), then just formed, “was the beneficiary of the votes lost by these parties.”
Those 2002 parliamentary elections were the first in which Erdoğan stood as AKP leader. You might fairly expect that formative experience would lead the AKP to govern noting that earthquakes posed potential electoral risk. On election day Turks will test that thesis.
Indeed, the new Erdoğan government levied an “earthquake tax,” raising an estimated $4.6 billion, but Tarek Fatah writes that Erdoğan “has never publicly explained how the money is spent.”
Is it possible to conclude that supporters of the AKP party may be among those with their hands out today? Erdoğan doesn’t seem to have taken on corruption in the construction industries. Note that he has already declared his version of “mistakes were made,” in his trip to the earthquake zone on Wednesday, quoted in the Japan Times:
Speaking to reporters, with the wail of ambulance sirens in the background, Erdogan said there had been problems with roads and airports.
Opposition figures, including Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the biggest opposition party CHP, the Republican People’s Party, were quick to criticize the President’s slow reaction, blaming “destruction of some 6,400 buildings in this notoriously earthquake-prone country on his government’s failure to enforce its own construction regulations.”
The Turkish President is prickly, even as authoritarians go. Desirous to be seen as defiant after standing down that 2016 coup attempt, here he has condemned criticism and complained. Today, “In a period like this, I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest," he said. Iron will, weak stomach.
Meanwhile, here’s an angle to be aware of online:
WHO forecast on Wednesday the final death count would be at least 20,000 and that number was passed by Friday. Let’s see if it’s too much to imagine the current Turkish leadership to be a further casualty.
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A little bit about an interesting figure in German politics: Robert Habeck is 53, a Member of the Bundestag, Vice Chancellor of Germany and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He was co-leader of the Greens until the 2021 presidential election with the current Foreign Secretary, Annalena Baerbock. Habeck and Baerbock were elected as co-leaders of the Greens in 2018 as ‘realos,’ or pragmatists, meant to get things done.
Habeck, with his wife, has written children’s books and six YA novels, although I haven’t been able to find any translations into English.
With his vegetarianism and PhD in literary aesthetics, he must have been the type of tree hugger the right loves to hate, one of that short-lived cadre of politicians who maintained that Covid changed everything.
Early in the crisis he argued that health care was more important than the profit motive (Imagine). He supported suspending patent protection to get the vaccine into arms faster, saying “Patents make sense, but if patent protection means that the pandemic cannot be fought efficiently, then that is nonsensical. It's time to change course.”
Trouble is, because of the war and Europe’s energy challenges, he was forced by virtue of his own leadership position to take uncharacteristic roles. While as a good pacifist he maintained sending arms to Kyiv was “morally ambivalent,” he acknowledged that “just letting all those people die ... would not make us more innocent.”
Because of the war, Habeck has had to address issues in a way Greens aren’t used to. He is the highest ranking Green in German government ever, and it’s safe to say he would never have dreamed his tenure would have gone anything like it has. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced Habeck into some decisions that would have been impossible to predict before the war, like burning coal and not retiring the use of nuclear-derived energy as early as planned.
With Russia’s invasion it became Habeck’s job to ensure Germany could survive the loss of Russian gas, and in emergency legislation the Scholz government acquired Germany’s first import terminals for liquefied natural gas. Habeck held talks on procuring LNG with leaders in the Persian Gulf. When Russia cut off Nord Stream 1 in June Habeck revived German coal plants. Germany would burn the dirtiest fossil fuel under the leadership of a Green minister. In October Habeck brokered a scheme to bulldoze Lützerath, a small village in western Germany, to make way for an opencast coal mine.
Fallout has been predictable. “We just have the feeling there’s no ecological backbone in this government,” the German representative of the protest movement founded by Greta Thunberg said. But he still has Green supporters. A local party leader in Hannover called him someone “who has the courage to take responsibility for his decisions.”
We’ll see how things turn out for the Green Energy Minister. Gas is expensive but it’s less expensive than last summer and Germany has avoided blackouts.
Rainer Dulger, president of a big business group called the German Employers’ Association, admired Habeck’s courage and, while trying to help, maybe twisted the rhetorical knife, saying admiringly that Habeck “set aside his core beliefs.” Ouch.
I subscribe to the New York Review of Books but if I didn’t, reading Fintan O’Toole, a regular writer there, would be a good reason to scheme to evade the paywall. Interesting guy, not full of himself as far as I can tell, polemicist on Brexit and Tory politics. When I heard him this week on a podcast, I learned that owing to emigration Ireland still has fewer citizens now than it did in 1840. Didn’t know that. Hard to imagine.
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Let’s have a brief look at an intriguing bit of Russia with about 90 miles of Baltic shoreline, separated from the motherland by more than three hundred miles. Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania, the Baltic Sea and Belarus. Kaliningrad was annexed from Germany at the end of World War Two, and the former capital of Prussia and its surrounds were then emptied of Germans by Josef Stalin.
The main town, Königsberg, was the Prussian capital, where its kings were crowned. Once a Hanseatic League trading town, it’s the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, who taught at university there. Stalin renamed it Kaliningrad, and Poles could be forgiven for taking that badly, as it was Kaliningrad’s namesake and Stalin henchman Mikhail Kalinin who authorized the massacre of around 22,000 Polish military officers and POWs in 1940 in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.
The maps. First the wide view:
Now closer:
I’ve always intended to visit Kaliningrad. It always kind of scared me, I thought it must be imposing and military and mean, isolated from the motherland, by itself up there. Once I asked a Lithuanian fellow who ran his own travel business (which consisted mostly of his minivan), and he said he’d take us, but he said it’s expensive, there are hassles aplenty and not much to see. I took his word and now regret it, given it’s unlikely that travel there will get easier anytime soon. But because it is so isolated, from Russia’s perspective just sort of stuck on the end of Belarus way out there, I wonder what will happen in the event of war.
Military planners take for granted that Kaliningrad would present a formidable challenge, stuck in its sullen swamp and armed to the teeth, its artillery aimed squarely at the Danish island of Bornholm and the mouth of the Baltic Sea, the Swedish island of Gotland and the Polish shipyards at Gdansk, like so:
That’s not holding up for me with time. As headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, no doubt Kaliningrad could cause mighty destruction. But in light of how the Red Army has done in Russia’s war on Ukraine, would it? Would Kaliningrad even be an asset for Russia?
By standing agreement, rail traffic between Russia and Kaliningrad moves across Lithuania over around 120 miles of track. This would obviously be a point of conflict in any fighting. Here is another: when the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania came under the NATO umbrella in 2004, a famous worry was the Suwalki Gap, here:
It’s probably NATO’s most tenuously held patch of land, between Poland and Lithuania, scarcely thirty miles across, where Russian forces staged from Kaliningrad and Belarus might be expected to cut off the Baltic states from the rest of NATO. (Note that the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO would dramatically rearrange military planning here.) Any assault on the Suwalki Gap, though, would require active and effective participation from Belarus.
The Belarusian army has never fought. Since the night in 1991 when, at a hunting lodge in the Belavezha forest outside Minsk, the USSR ceased to exist (see the Belavezha Accords) the Belarusian army has been used solely for crowd control, to crush domestic dissent. In light of the mighty Russian army’s performance in its war so far, who’ll take odds on Belarus mounting a sustained, competent campaign, anywhere?
And that’s important because Russian materiel can’t get to Kaliningrad over friendly territory without the help of Belarus. So while Putin may one day abandon Lukashenka, he can never abandon Belarus, for it would cut him off from Kaliningrad. As much as either might prefer it to be otherwise, Putin and Lukashenka are in this together.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is the exiled leader of the Belarusian opposition, working from Lithuania, who is widely believed to have defeated Lukashenka in the most recent Belarusian election. Her Belarusian Democratic Movement claims to be revivified by the war in Ukraine but I’ve let that in one ear and out the other mostly, as just fog-of-war tough guy talk.
A Ukrainian war victory would validate the striving against tyranny in the region, that’s Tsikhanouskaya’s dream for Belarus, but her government in exile is self-proclaimed and untested. It claims 200,000 people have signed on to its movement inside Belarus, and it’s true there was some sabotage of Belarusian rail lines used to move Russian troops early in the war. It’s hard to say whether the Belarusian Democratic Movement inside Belarus is motivated and strong enough to mobilize in the event of wider war.
Which matters to Kaliningrad. Should Kaliningrad ever be involved in combat it would presumably be blockaded by NATO at sea. If that were effectively accomplished the Russian Baltic Fleet would be stuck. The rail supply line through Lithuania would be cut and Belarus, the only direction from which help could arrive, would become a critical battleground.
For Kaliningrad, the effectiveness and enthusiasm with which Putin, who has Lukashenka’s geographic back, would assemble and maintain support to the exclave would be decisive. In a broader general war Putin will presumably be engaged in many places besides Kaliningrad. I’m thinking Kaliningrad could cause a great deal of destruction with its existing stocks of artillery, but once that arsenal is depleted it’s hard to see the exclave as an important long term asset for Russia.
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Midtown Atlanta, Georgia, is an urban space where a signal of manhood is how much noise you can cause. The most common ways to do this are using either Dodge Chargers or Challengers. Makes me wonder at the ethics of the Dodge car salesman, but some other time on that. For twenty years we had ourselves configured into a rural hillside facing away from traffic and it came as a vulgar reminder when we moved back to the city that a signal of manhood is how much noise you can make.
Speaking of Atlanta, it’s not campaign season so I’m reluctant to spend much time on domestic politics but here in Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who won reelection last year, said this week he’s setting up a Political Action Committee. He’ll likely run to replace incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in 2026, when Kemp’s term expires at the same time Ossoff runs for reelection.
Ossoff, a first term Dem in a purple state, would appear to be vulnerable. As a measure of how tough a fight every statewide election is for Dems here in Georgia, Georgia’s other Democratic Senator told the Washington Press Club this week, "There’s one man ... who prayed harder than anybody else for my victories: … Chuck Schumer. In fact, I think that Sen. Schumer would have prayed the rosary while facing Mecca if he thought it would turn out more voters in the Atlanta suburbs."
Governor Kemp is pro-business enough to promote forward looking stuff like bringing electric vehicle manufacturing to Georgia, but still good old boy enough to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend. THAT’S the kind of southern conservative who could be senator for thirty years.
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A corruption scandal in Vietnam? Or is it really just a good old fashioned Communist Party power struggle? News organizations can’t decide. The BBC calls it a “power shift.”
Radio Free Asia decides yep, it’s a corruption scandal.
And Asia News Network has decided it’s a ‘national leadership struggle.’
Whatever it is, the President is out.
In 2019, the year before Covid stopped everything, I spent a month in Saigon, and I want to compare for you Saigon 2019 to what I saw on my first visit in 1995. First, the Saigon skyline, 1995:
And here, 2019:
Great, vibrant place. If you have the opportunity to visit, do.
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Elyas Afewerki, the authoritarian Eritrean leader, went to Nairobi late in the week. He’s a stay at home kind of guy so that’s news in itself, but the downright spectacular news was that he joined William Ruto, the new Kenyan leader, in a press conference. The BBC reported on Africa Today that he took three questions. The third was whether he would hold an election, you know, someday, and he grew angry and ended the press conference. Sounds like business as usual in the Horn.
Elsewhere on the continent, that Congo stuff we talked about last week, it’s always going on, and I feel compelled not to ignore it since estimates of deaths more than ten years ago already ranged around six million, making that conflict the deadliest on earth since WWII.
In the last week or so the M23 rebels (mentioned in the February 4 newsletter) have seized the town of Kitshanga in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after days of fierce fighting, drawing condemnation from the UN. The DRC’s army withdrew, insisting “We are making every effort to dislodge this enemy.”
Rebel groups roam pretty freely the area essentially from Goma north along the Uganda border. They took control of a town of about 60,000 called Kitshanga last week after capturing several villages on the road between there and Goma, about 50 miles to the south. This lawlessness isn’t news, it’s been the prevalent condition for years and years, but smart folks need to know.
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Next week, February 14th is Saint Valentine’s Day except in India where it is Cow Hug Day.
The Animal Welfare Board says that cow hugging “will bring emotional richness” and “will increase our individual and collective happiness.”
Cows are holy in Hinduism, the Animal Welfare Board is a governmental body in India, and the Modi government is notably Hindu nationalist, so a declaration like this might be thought to confer an official imprimatur. Maybe, but governmental bodies in India are rather as common as rain in a monsoon.
Once we visited Gangtok, the main town in Sikkim, a far northeastern state, which necessitated a lengthy ride in from the airport at Bagdogra. When we hit the outskirts of Gangtok town, I thought I discerned a trend, so I made notes. Here is a list of just some of the government offices you’ll drive by getting to Gangtok:
Forest Secretariat, Forest, Environment and Wildlife Management
Office of the Principal Accountant General, Sikkim
Sikkim Central Water Commission Office of the Superintending Engineer
Sikkim Government Press
The National Cadet Corps
The Regional Centre on National Resources and Sustainable Development
Office of the Ombudsman for the Area Engineers
Sikkim State Commission for Women
Sikkim Commission for Backward classes
Government of India Geological Survey
East Police District Deorali Outpost
The Office of the Director, Sikkim Fire and Rescue Service
The Sikkim Legislative Assembly
SARAH, the Sikkim Anti-Rabies & Animal Health Program
The Reserve Bank of India, Director’s Bungalow
The Directorate of Sikkim State Lotteries
Sikkim Information Center
Sikkim Welfare Board
Geological Survey of India
The Sikkim Relief Rehabilitation Committee for Tibetan Refugees
The Department of Tourism and Civil Aviation (!, a tall, imposing building)
East District Police, Deorali and Tadong Outposts
Forest Secretariat
State Trading Corporation of Sikkim
Urban Development and Housing Department
Family Counseling Center
Housing Welfare Society
You gotta say, all those civil servants work in a physically striking place:
There are more photos like this in the India Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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PEOPLE SAYING SMART THINGS:
1. I was defaming Frederick Hayek yesterday in the Friday Weekend Reading post, but I really want to jump up and down and scream my frustration about Poland, how effectively it has responded to Russia’s war, how it has absorbed so many refugees with minimal complaint on the one hand, and on the other, how utterly maddening it is that the odious Law and Justice party (PiS) is in charge. Because President Andrzej Duda, for every one of PiS’s faults, and there are many, can put him on some rhetoric. Last fall he told Judy Woodruff why Russia won’t use nuclear weapons and he was so right I went back to find and write it down:
“Ukraine is a totally unprovoked agression. Number two, they have committed murders there, and they know that today they are threatened by criminal accountability. Therefore the Russian authorities and Vladimir Putin started to threaten. What can they threaten with? The only thing they can threaten with is nuclear weapons. If this Ukraine, which is defending itself, which has no nuclear weapons, if this Ukraine is attacked by nuclear weapons, even to the smallest degree, even if they were the so-called tactical nuclear weapons used, the most modern ones, the smallest ones, that would break the world taboo and Russia would find itself on the margins of any sensible political debate whatsoever. The whole world would turn its back on Russia, even those countries which today support Russia silently or openly.”
And you know, you just know he’s right.
2. Tom Nichols, quoted in the Daily Beast, said:
“Even if Putin dies or is removed, the moral stain of the Ukraine war and its many crimes is going to last for generations, and a post-Putin Russia will not get the same benefit of the doubt from the rest of the world the way it did after the Soviet collapse.”
PEOPLE SAYING SMART THINGS - NOT:
Vladimir Putin stars here. While he may have been delusional to think he could take Kyiv in a three days, he must have been feeling some insecurity about his decision to go to war in the first place, evidenced by his need to justify the invasion with that overlong seven thousand word imaginary history, ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.“ He sent all his troops off to war with it.
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That’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed it. Moldova, between Ukraine and Romania, has one of those frozen conflicts left over from the Soviet collapse, and yesterday the Prime Minister resigned, blaming “so many crises caused by Russian aggression.” I hope next week we can consider how Moldova might use Russia’s war on Ukraine to take its country back.
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Tuesday in the travel column, we’ll go to witness the spectacle of the annual migration of wildebeests crossing the Mara River. For now, I’ll leave you with this. It’s just about the greatest thing ever. Ladies and gentlemen, the Gunhild Carling Jazz Variete: