What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

They mean that in the eighteenth century, when the average surface temperature of the earth was 2.16° Fahrenheit less than it is today, four days in a row of torrential rain in arid Libya would have been 50 times less likely, and if it had happened it would have been only half as intense. Half as intense might have meant that the ageing, un-repaired dams near Derna would not have collapsed, washing away 20,000 people into the Mediterranean.

There is a reason that the average surface temperature of the earth is 2.16° F. (1.2° C.) higher than in the Holocene from roughly 10,000 years Before Present to about 150 years Before Present. It is called the Industrial Revolution.

Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm wrote about the twin revolutions of the early nineteenth century the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, that created the modern world. The French Revolution announced a set of political ideals around equality of rights that spun out across the world, helping inspire revolutions in Haiti, Ireland and Europe (1848). Hobsbawm, a progressive, did not dwell on its other legacy, of the Great Terror and political repression. Likewise, historians of his generation did not know yet (it wasn’t their fault) that the Industrial Revolution had an even darker dark side. It unleashed the biggest emissions of carbon dioxide in the shortest amount of time in world history.

The al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams, as the authors note, were built under Col. Moammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in the early 1970s, as part of his turn to big infrastructure projects of high modernism. Not only hadn’t they been properly maintained, their original specifications were intended to meet the climate of the Holocene, when a four-day deluge of water could be expected to occur only once in 300 to 600 years. That is, you can’t blame the engineers for not planning for something that unlikely.

But here’s the kicker. Virtually everything ever built was built for the specifications of the Holocene, the period of human history during which civilization grew up. It is all becoming outmoded and even dangerous. Those above-ground electrical wires on poles, e.g., are implicated in some of California’s wildfires. The hurtling of 20,000 surprised Libyans into the sea is not a fluke, it is a harbinger of our future if we go on burning coal, petroleum and fossil gas at the scale we are now doing.

The authors write, “This disaster also points to the challenge of needing to design and maintain infrastructure for not just the climate of the present or the past, but also the future. In Libya, this means taking into account the long-term decline in average rainfall, and at the same time, the increase in extreme rainfall like this heavy rainfall event; a challenging prospect, especially for a country plagued by crises.”

In the earth’s 4.5 billion-years-old history, there have been many times when a sudden increase in carbon dioxide has led to an increase in the surface temperature of the earth, as is detailed by Professor Michael E. Mann in his new book,
Our Fragile Moment. In these previous episodes, however, volcanic activity over millions of years gradually spewed more and more CO2 into the atmosphere, so that they very gradually heated up the earth. The fiendishly clever human race has figured out how to do over the space of 200 years what previous climate-altering phenomena took millions of years to do.

We can also halt the worst of the disaster by switching quickly to green energy. In fact, this is our Darwinian moment, which will reveal whether we are intelligent and “fit” enough to survive ourselves.

Greece had been hit by a cyclone, Ianos, three years ago, which was also very destructive but did only about a tenth of the damage that Daniel did this year. Cyclones are fed by warm seas, and the warmer they are the more intense they become. Warm seas release water vapor in the air above them, making cyclones more prone to dump walls of water when they make landfall and increasing the chance of major flooding. The seas have been heated up to a degree unprecedented in the modern period by the billions of tons of carbon dioxide human beings emit into the atmosphere annually.

Helena Smith writes in the Guardian that the crop crisis in Greece has shaken the public’s confidence in the center-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis for not having taken more flood control measures, which Storm Ianos had shown the need for fully three years previously.

She writes, “On Thursday the polling company Metron Analysis, releasing its first survey of public opinion after the floods, noted that 61% of respondents had a negative opinion of the government’s work, versus 57% in May. For the first time since Mitsotakis, who won a second four-year term in June, assumed power, analysts have begun to speak of the nation resembling a ‘failed state’.”

Likewise, in eastern Libya the warlord Haftar has ruled with more regard for his own position than for the welfare of the people of Libya. He has spent enormous sums on mercenaries, including on the dangerous Wagner fighters from Russia. But Haftar could not be bothered to reinforce the two rickety dams that regulated water flow in the Derna region, and people are blaming him in part for the disaster that washed away a fourth of the city, according to Samer al-Atrush at the Financial Times.

Libyans, in shock at the way Storm Daniel’s deluges caused two dams to collapse and to release mountains of water that washed away some 20,000 people in the city of Derna and neighboring areas, are calling for the resignation of Haftar and his cronies.

What Storm Daniel and its dire impact on Greece and Libya demonstrate is that the climate crisis that contributed to making Daniel such a powerful doomsday machine does not suffer fools gladly. Many in Libya’s east saw Haftar, the strong man backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, as a flawed warlord who nevertheless provided needed security and kept out the fundamentalist forces based in Tripoli.

Now they are having buyer’s remorse, and many are angry at the warlord for not doing a better job of upkeep.

In the Holocene era, with its relatively cold and relatively stable climate, maybe some imperfect leaders could get lucky and spend their years in office without incident.

Those days are over. In order to confront the challenges of climate change we need leaders who recognize that it is a real phenomenon and that societies need to be reorganized to remain resilient and to stave off its worst effects.

For Americans, the lesson is that we cannot afford four more years of the buffoon Trump, and never had been able to afford his first four years in office. He called climate change a hoax and actively attempted to promote coal, the dirtiest of the fossil feuls. He built no new infrastructure intended to make the US more resilient in the face of challenges from climate change. The Republican Party’s response to these challenges has been to deny them and to deny their cause. The Republican-dominated legisture in North Carolina tried to outlaw even mentions by state officials of the state’s eroding shore line lest property values fall and insurance rates rise. But ostrich-like policies cannot be mandated by legislation. State Farm has ceased accepting new insurance applications in Florida and California because these states are on the front lines of climate change.

As bad as negative climate effects will be, they will be much, much worse if we don’t cease emitting carbon dioxide and methane in such great amounts. And as for the global heating already baked in, it has immediate implications for how we build new infrastructure and how we begin making our residents, towns and cities more resilient.

People like Trump and Haftar are not up to the job, clearly. But they aren’t the ones who will suffer most; it will be their constituents, led like lambs to the slaughter.

UN humanitarians are working flat out on the ground in Libya, providing desperately needed aid to thousands of survivors of the flood disaster that has left thousands dead and thousands more unaccounted for.

( UN News ) – Disaster struck on Sunday when torrential rains from Storm Daniel led two dams close to the now devastated port city of Derna to burst, pushing entire neighbourhoods into the sea.

“The situation is quite terrible as you can imagine”, UN Children’s Fund UNICEF’s Libya Representative, Michele Servadei, told UN News.

What role did climate change play?

The deadly storm comes in an unprecedented year of climate disasters and record-breaking weather events, from devastating wildfires to excessive heatwaves.

Professor Petteri Taalas, the head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Wednesday said the tragedy in Libya highlights the devastating and cascading consequences of extreme weather on fragile States.

He stressed it shows the need for multi-hazard early warning systems which embrace all levels of government and society, in line with the UN’s drive to make them universal by 2027.

‘Drop in the ocean’

“As UNICEF, we have sent medical kits and medical supplies for 10,000 people. This was the first couple of days. We sent 1,100 hygiene kits, we sent clothing kits, but that is still a drop in the ocean.”

He said psychosocial support was urgently needed besides lifesaving supplies, “not only for the displaced but also for the ones that are in shelters”, or who remain stranded having lived through “that terrible night.”

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has already provided food assistance to more than 5,000 families displaced by the catastrophic floods.

“These devastating floods have struck in a country where a profound political crisis has already left so many in a desperate situation,” WFP Executive Director, Cindy McCain said.

Libya is particularly vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters as it has no unified government. The country has been split since 2014 between an interim, internationally recognized Government operating from the capital, Tripoli, and another in the east, with many armed groups also operating on its territory. 

📢⚠️ Flash appeal:

The situation in northeast #Libya in the wake of #StormDaniel is critical.

US$71.4 million is required to provide immediate life-saving aid to 250,000 people affected by the floods and respond to their most urgent and severe needs. 👉 https://t.co/13DNxj6jK0 pic.twitter.com/L1j4RClXpW

— UN Humanitarian (@UNOCHA) September 14, 2023

Appeal for $71 million

UN aid coordination office OCHA, on Thursday issued an urgent appeal to donors for $71.4 million to respond to the needs of around 250,000 people impacted by the floods in Libya over the next three months, saying death tolls could rise without more help.

OCHA estimates that more than 880,000 people, in five provinces, live in areas directly affected by the storm and flash floods.

“All hands are on deck to get as much help and support to people as we can. The UN is deploying a robust team to support and resource the international response, in coordination with first responders and Libya’s authorities”, the head of OCHA, and UN relief chief Martin Griffiths said.

Meanwhile, it is a race against time for emergency teams searching through piles of debris for survivors.

“The scale of the flood disaster is shocking, with entire neighborhoods having been wiped off the map and whole families, taken by surprise, swept away in the deluge of water,” Mr. Griffiths said.

“Alongside the tragic loss of life, thousands of families in Derna are now without food or shelter”, Ms. McCain noted. 

The World Food Program said its planned emergency operation will aim to provide monthly food assistance to 100,000 people in flood-affected areas for the next three months.

Via UN News

Featured image:

Storm Daniel swept through several areas in eastern Libya on Sunday, most notably Benghazi, Al-Bayda, and Al-Marj, as well as Sousse and Derna, leaving thousands dead and missing, most of them in Derna.

On Wednesday, the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health in the Libyan Government of National Unity, Saad Al-Din Abdel Wakil, confirmed that the number of deaths from the floods “exceeded 6,000”, and the missing were numbered in the thousands. “The death toll is a preliminary figure for all the areas affected by the floods, with the city of Derna recording the largest number.” He predicted that the death toll will rise.

According to Abdel Wakil, the work of government hospitals in the affected areas has been almost completely disrupted. Work is ongoing to have at least ten hospitals functioning and staffed as fully as possible, along with 20 local centres providing healthcare.

“The National Centre for Disease Control is evaluating the situation in Derna because of the human and animal corpses that are already decomposing,” he added.

The spokesman for the interior ministry in the government of eastern Libya, Tariq Al-Kharaz, said that burials have already taken place in Derna. “Almost 2,100 bodies have been buried in the city, of which 1,100 were unidentified.” At least 2,000 official reports of missing persons have been received by the authorities, added Al-Kharaz.

When asked about the nationalities of non-Libyans reported missing, he explained that “35 missing persons are Egyptians, and 151 Sudanese were buried in Derna.” It is known that at least 12 Palestinians are among the dead, with “scores more” still missing.

The head of the Libyan Presidential Council, Mohamed Al-Menfi, said in a televised speech on Tuesday evening that the disaster is greater than Libya can bear alone. “We call on friendly countries for urgent assistance.” He thanked the countries which have already provided aid, referring to Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and France.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Middle East Monitor

( Middle East Monitor ) – Sacrifice of scapegoats is one of the oldest customs and methods of governance. It is common to see the primary person responsible for any grave mistake or action that provokes popular discontent, trying to deflect responsibility from themselves by blaming their subordinates, regardless of the different ranks. The head of state often sacrifices their prime minister to pay for their actions; prime minister sacrifices one of their ministers; the minister sacrifices one of their ministry officials, and so on.  If we add to the above the usual tendency in patriarchal societies to treat women with hatred and contempt, even greater than what a man is treated in the same situation, we almost pity the dismissed Libyan Foreign Minister, Najla El-Mangoush, and feel sadness over what happened to her, especially since she was the first woman to hold her position. 

The truth must be told in this regard: the appointment of women to government positions in our region, which has increased slightly in recent years, is not at all related to civilisational progress or a shift in the consciousness of Arab rulers to embrace the principle of gender equality, nor has it, unfortunately, resulted from an increase in the strength of the regional women’s movement. Rather, it is merely a symbolic gesture that male rulers seek to suggest the modernity of their ideas and to gain some appreciation in the eyes of Western governments, especially the American government. This is because the women’s movement in the US, like the black movement and other social movements, succeeded in imposing standards of equality on its societies, even if the matter is still fragile and susceptible to relapse, as we see with the rise of the patriarchal and racist far right, spearheaded by Donald Trump.

For example, Tunisian President Kais Saied’s appointment of Najla Boudin as Prime Minister two years ago, shortly after his coup against the Constitution, was nothing more than an attempt by him to soften his reactionary challenge to democratic institutions by suggesting that the matter opened the way for progressive societal measures. Saied threw Najla Boudin in the garbage at the beginning of this month, implicitly blaming her for his economic and social failure. Likewise, Libyan Prime Minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh’s appointment of Najla El-Mangoush as his Foreign Minister was nothing more than a means to curry favour with the Western governments, beginning with the US government.

We do not doubt for a moment that the same logic of currying favour was what prompted Dbeibeh to make his Minister meet her Israeli counterpart in Rome, a meeting that was supposed to be kept a secret from everyone except the American government, which was involved with both parties in the process.

The US State Department strongly condemned the far-right Zionist government’s disclosure of the secret in a cheap attempt to divert attention from the state of disobedience it faces as a result of the cold civil war raging in Israeli society.

We also do not doubt for a moment that Dbeibeh was completely aware in advance of the meeting that was scheduled to take place, and that this meeting would not have taken place had it not been for his decision to hold it. As for the claim that what El Mangoush did was a “lone act”, it is a claim that is demeaning to the Libyan people and a disregard for them. Adding insult to injury, Dbeibeh visited the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority embassy in Tripoli and announced his dismissal of Najla El-Mangoush from there. He believes that a visit by the representatives of an authority cooperating with the Israeli government would be enough to convey him as sincere in his support of the cause of the Palestinian people.

However, the dismissed Minister is fortunate in that Dbeibeh is too weak to act like some of the Arab tyrants, as it seems that he ensured that she left the country safely (on a government plane, according to media reports, and perhaps also guaranteed her a comfortable stay in exile in exchange for her silence) instead of throwing her in prison. He did not inflict a harsher reality on her, as is often done by Arab rulers who want to keep their sins a secret.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabia on 30 November, 2023. 

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

The plane stopped in midair and plummeted down. Video showed the jet spiraling towards the ground, with one wing missing and smoke pouring from the fuselage shortly before erupting into a fireball. The crash left the charred and mangled remnants of 10 people found in the debris. The 62-year-old Prigozhin was identified by a missing part of his finger, an injury sustained while he served time in a penal colony. The identification was made certain via DNA testing.

Accompanying Prigozhin on the doomed flight were Wagner’s top commander Dmitry Utkin — the neo-Nazi sympathizer, who named the group “Wagner” after Hitler’s favorite composer. Besides crew members, the dead included Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov and four key lieutenants. Currently, it is not known why these high-ranking Wagner leaders, normally exceedingly careful about their security, were all on the same flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where Wagner is headquartered.

The death of Wagner’s central leadership decapitates the group and disrupts Wagner’s ability to reverse the effects of the Kremlin’s campaign to subsume the mercenary organization into Russia’s regular army. Prigozhin’s violent demise also raises questions, for Putin, about securing the valuable alliances Wagner secured in the Mideast and Africa as well as control of Prigozhin’s global financial empire.

Despite these challenges, it was surprising that Putin tolerated Prigozhin so long after he apparently painted a target on his own back by launching a rebellion with the stated aim of knocking out Moscow’s military leadership. Prigozhin called them “mentally ill scumbags,” who had led Russia to disaster in Ukraine. Wagner’s leader even questioned the basis of the war. The organization’s gunners brought down Russian helicopters and a military surveillance plane, reportedly killing 13. As the world watched, Prigozhin posed the most dramatic challenge to Putin’s rule in decades.

Within hours the revolt was defused: the Kremlin announced an end to the mutiny, whereby Wagner soldiers — many were criminals who fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine, the Mideast, and Africa — would escape punitive measures and Prigozhin would leave for Belarus without facing prosecution, his security guaranteed. Most, including President Biden, thought this was laughable, saying, “If I were he, I would be careful what I ate.” Prigozhin signed his own death warrant if he believed in the security “guarantee” or Putin’s equally absurd “word of honor.”

But, in the aftermath of the aborted insurrection, Prigozhin appeared unfazed. Putin met with him in Moscow. He soon appeared in St. Petersburg, at a forum for African leaders. Two weeks ago from somewhere in Africa, a video showed Prigozhin dressed in camouflage, holding an assault rifle, cheering the coup in Niger, and offering Wagner’s help.

“Prigozhin was scrambling to salvage his business empire from Kremlin control in the days before his death,” said a Business Insider story. Prigozhin found himself in a race with the Kremlin, which was at the same time trying to win over Wagner clients and have them deal directly with Russian officials instead of him.

Prigozhin’s continued posturing haunted Putin, who promoted himself as the omnipotent tsar. “Putin destroyed a whole propaganda narrative he himself had constructed,” an anonymous Russian official said. “It looked extremely humiliating. First, he got himself into a war he couldn’t win, and, when he inevitably encountered difficulties, he tried to find a cheap solution by allowing for the creation of an army of criminals — and then that army ended up turning against him.” Prigozhin cracked Putin’s shaky mystique.

Many Russians wondered how Prigozhin had been able to get away with such a brazen affront to Putin without consequence. Kremlin critic Bill Browder, a businessman with years of experience in Russia, said “Putin never forgives and never forgets. He looked like a humiliated weakling with Prigozhin running around without a care in the world after the mutiny. The dramatic assassination will cement Putin’s authority.”

Putin broke his silence about the plane crash last Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened. He described Mr. Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Putin revealed that his personal ties with Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he had personally asked Mr. Prigozhin to carry out tasks on his behalf. “He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results.”

Unlike the long list of people who have been shot, hanged, poisoned, and pushed out of windows because they criticized and undermined Putin, Prigozhin — until his mutiny — supported Putin, even helped create him. His arc of success was legendary: a crude and ambitious hustler like Putin, Prigozhin rose from convict to wiener salesman to warlord.

His ascension included a string of restaurants and a lucrative catering business that supplied food to Russian schools [until a 2019 dysentery scandal] as well as billion dollar, no-bid contracts to feed the Russian army and the Kremlin, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef.” Prigozhin later joked that “Putin’s butcher” would be more appropriate.

Wagner was born when the Russian state needed a deniable shadow force of mercenaries. On behalf of Putin’s agenda, Prigozhin built Wagner shortly after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. A year later, Wagner was secretly part of Russia’s military surge into Syria. Prigozhin’s paramilitary protected Syria’s oil fields and, as compensation, received a slice of Syria’s petrodollars.

As long as Putin controlled Prigozhin, Wagner was allowed to grow, reaching an estimated 50,000 fighters at its peak. Prigozhin’s personal fortune swelled too, elevating him to billionaire status: Wagner’s corporate soldiers plundered diamonds, gold, oil, and gas from countries in which they operated. Killing with impunity, Wagner fighters were accused of numerous war crimes. In one incident, Wagner men were captured on video beheading, dismembering, and incinerating a Syrian man.

Prigozhin also created the Internet Research Agency that became the notorious hub for bogus social media accounts, fake news, propaganda, and efforts to disrupt elections all over the world, including helping the con-man insurrectionist become U.S. president. Indicted in the Mueller investigation, Prigozhin basked in the accusations. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere,” he said in 2022. The FBI put Prigozhin on its most-wanted list to Prigozhin’s amusement.

In Ukraine, Wagner achieved the only Russian victory so far this year. Aiding a flailing Russian war operation starved for personnel, Prigozhin recruited convicts, who fought the long, horrible battle of Bakhmut. 20,000 poorly trained Russian soldiers died in that months-long siege, thanks to military tactics so wasteful of human life — sending suicidal wave after wave against Ukrainian defenses — that they were described as the “meat grinder.”

Becoming a global media figure, the shaven-headed Prigozhin — speaking in rough, often obscene language — projected a savage, even deranged image. Prigozhin may have believed his own hype when he decided to launch his rebellion. He tacitly endorsed a video showing the murder, with a sledgehammer, of a Wagner defector. “A dog’s death for a dog,” Prigozhin said in a statement at the time. Known as “zeroing out,” the Wagner punishment for desertion or retreat is death.

Accusations of war crimes follow Wagner wherever its fighters go. “In mid-April 2023, two alleged former prisoners and Wagner fighters detailed atrocities committed against civilians and combatants in Bakhmut.” These allegations included terrorism, political assassinations, and the use of rape as a weapon of war as well as the execution of 70 Wagner soldiers for disobeying orders.

In early 2023, the United Nations called for investigations into possible war crimes by government forces and Wagner Group units in Mali. In designating Wagner a “transnational criminal organization” in January, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Wagner-related businesses and accused Wagner personnel of engaging “in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Mali.”

Ignoring such accusations as well as his own war crimes, Putin viewed Prigozhin as a useful opportunist with a ruthless streak and sent his guns-for-hire private military company across the Middle East and Africa to bolster Russian interests often in vicious fashion. Wagner is vital to understanding the Kremlin’s emerging global strategy.

Blatant imperialists and Putin’s shadowy enforcers, Wagner backed shaky foreign governments in Syria, Libya, the Sudan, Mali, and the Central African Republic among others and nailed down mineral rights and other concessions, enriching Prigozhin in side deals. Corporate soldiers of corruption, “Wagner is nothing more than an organized crime group sanctioned by the Russian government,” wrote The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Wagner has perfected a blueprint for state capture in the Central African Republic (CAR), according to a report in The Sentry. Titled “Architects of Terror,” the paper details Wagner efforts to amass military power, secure access to precious minerals — gold and diamonds — and subdue the population with terror. As Richard Engel says in his NBC documentary Blood and Gold, “They are stealing money from the poorest people on earth.” Recent reports even question the agency of the CAR government, calling it a “zombie” host to Russian interests. Wagner’s role in Libya and Sudan has been equally sinister.

An elaborate Wagner scheme to plunder Sudan’s riches was reported by CNN: “Russia has colluded with Sudan’s beleaguered military leadership, enabling billions of dollars in gold to bypass the Sudanese state and to deprive the poverty-stricken country of hundreds of millions in state revenue.” Wagner actively supported Sudan’s 2021 military coup which overthrew a transitional civilian government, dealing a devastating blow to the Sudanese pro-democracy movement. Despite another coup that removed Wagner ally and Sudan president Omar al-Bashir, companies linked to Prigozhin maintain de-facto control of gold-mining interests there.

In Sudan’s neighbor Libya, Wagner has fought in the civil war, where it allied with the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Marshall Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting against the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The Wagner Group has provided security, training, artillery, snipers, and landmines to the LNA, as well as participating in combat operations. Its activates are closely tied to oil and gas resources affiliated with Prigozhin companies.

The Wagner boss established one of the world’s most mysterious and complicated corporate organizations across Africa, which included enterprises in media, logistics, mining, cinema, and catering in addition to his mercenary activities, according to an investigation by the Dossier Center. It remains unclear what is going to happen to the sprawling network now that its leader is dead.

After Prigozhin’s mutiny, the Kremlin moved to defuse his power and curtail his business empire. His contract for feeding the Russian army was canceled. Putin dissolved the Internet Research Agency, but did not shut down Wagner. Russian officials have indicated to Syria, Libya, and Sudan that they want Russian involvement to continue, suggesting that Wagner fighters could come under the Defense Ministry. The assassination of Wagner’s top leadership was likely the final step to eliminate Wagner as an independent organization, according to The Institute for the Study of War.

The Kremlin was pushing to dismantle Wagner’s presence in the Middle East and Africa, by forming new private military companies (PMCs) from existing Wagner personnel. Putin may have decided that Wagner personnel had reached a point where they were sufficiently more interested in payments and deployments with these new PMCs than their continued loyalty to Prigozhin and that he could safely kill Prigozhin without Wagner recriminations.  

Prigozhin never turned his nascent popularity into a coherent movement. Public mourning for him is subdued rather than a national outpouring of grief. The remaining Wagner commanders will grasp the lesson of Prigozhin’s murder — he shouldn’t have launched the rebellion or he shouldn’t have halted it. In any case, Wagner relinquished much of its vast arsenal of heavy weaponry to the defense ministry, and its fighters are now scattered across Belarus, Russia, the Mideast and Africa. In short, an immediate revolt, in Prigozhin’s memory, is unlikely.

Putin needed time to secure Kremlin control of Wagner’s complicated empire so Prigozhin survived for two months before his elimination. In Africa, for instance, Russia sought to reassure leaders who relied on Wagner for security that the firm will continue to operate under Putin’s control. As the Kremlin sought to untangle itself from the once-loyal warlord, it has also become clear that Prigozhin was the glue holding together a splintered kingdom and that it could all collapse.

“Wagner’s – and Moscow’s – clout in Africa may eclipse because of the rising influence of China and other core members of the now-expanding BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) bloc,” said Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch. “Russia’s sway in Africa will weaken irrespective of personalities at the helm of Wagner.”

Beyond wanting to control his far-flung financial realm, Putin’s spectacular public liquidation of Prigozhin is an attempt to reassert his dominance in retaliation for the humiliation that the Wagner Group’s armed rebellion caused him. He needed to exact ostentatious revenge against Prigozhin not only to prove that he is not a weak leader, but also to instill fear in Russian élite, and send a message to Russian oligarchs: No measure of effectiveness and accomplishment can shield an individual from repercussions when they breach Putin’s loyalty.

Though Putin may have frightened the élite into obedience, they all know, if they didn’t already, that his claims of a pardon or forgiveness can’t be trusted. “Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst. “This is a rather harsh precedent.”

The plane crash came on the same day that General Sergei Surovikin, known as “General Armageddon,” — a former top commander in Ukraine who was reportedly linked to Prigozhin — was dismissed from his post as commander of Russia’s air force. The Russian élite, whether in government, military, or business, can’t help but notice that it’s neither profitable nor safe to challenge Putin’s official hierarchy. Still, eliminating top generals and blowing up a dependable mercenary leader are not the actions of a confident, efficient, stable autocracy amidst an ongoing war.

The outcome of the Ukraine war will be crucial to Putin’s continued status. Thanks to Surovikin, Russian defenses have surpassed expectations against Ukraine’s counter-offensive. If this unfortunate trend continues and Ukraine’s summer campaign fails to reclaim significant Russian-occupied land, Putin’s authority will likely endure. However, if Russian defenses falter, especially near Crimea, Putin’s legitimacy could weaken even more than from the challenge of Prigozhin.

( Middle East Monitor ) – On 30 August 2008, Italy and Libya signed their Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, ending their awkward past of feuding and diplomatic tensions over Italy’s colonisation of Libya from 1911 to 1943. Libya was seeking compensation, recognition of suffering of its people and, above all, an apology. Rome, as is the case with all former colonial powers, tried for years to close the matter without offering anything. The treaty, a success for Libya, might have ended the political and diplomatic struggle over the colonial past, but it will not wipe it out from history and people’s memories.

The idea of invading Libya came during the colonial rush that saw major colonial powers like France, United Kingdom and others divide the dying Ottoman Empire possessions in North Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe itself. Libya was part of that empire, very close to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea and, above all, Libyans lacked effective means to fight back after the Ottoman military garrison left the country.

The rise to power of the Republican Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini in 1922, gave the occupation of Libya another nostalgic dimension as the fascists strongly believed in the deceptive idea that modern Italy was the rightful heir to the Roman Empire and, therefore, they were responsible for recovering the possessions of the bygone empire.  Another reason that made Libya more attractive to fascist Italy is the fact that Italy, united just 50 years earlier, became overcrowded and its farmers, particularly in the south, were eager to own land of which Libya has plenty. Mussolini used to call Libya the “fourth shore of Rome”.

Italians thought that the taking over of Libya would not be more than a few days’ sea trip and the entire country would be conquered. However, once the first amphibious forces tried to land on Tripoli shores in 1911, they were faced with stiff resistance from the locals, who rushed to defend their country with the little means they had.

As the invaders increased their numbers and widened their presence, the resistance shifted to new tactics, using the guerrilla tactics of hit-and-run. Outnumbered and out-gunned, the Libyans, mostly nomads and shepherds, figured out that direct confrontation with one of the most modern armies at the time was suicidal and destructive.

Instead of facing the Italian army directly, they waged rather small battles, mostly at night time. Benefitting from their detailed knowledge of the land and its geography, the Mujahidin, as they were called, managed to make life really difficult for the Italian army wherever it went. Facing a ghost enemy fighting on horseback, the Italian army started to use unheard of methods of war, scoring many firsts.

For instance, Italy was the first country to use air war and Libya became the first country to be bombed from the air. An Italian pilot named Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, in a letter to his father, described how he threw the first bomb at an Arab [Libyan] camp in November 1911, just a month into the invasion. The young pilot wrote “today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane”, before pointing out that it was “the first time that we [Italian army] will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.”

Pilot Gavotti, indeed, succeeded in throwing the first ever bomb from an aeroplane, ushering in the age of air war for the first time in the history of mankind.  He wrote “and after a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment” in Ain Zara, today a town, but at the time just an oasis south-east of Tripoli. Ain Zara became the first place on earth to be bombed from the air. The Italian pilot did not realise what he had just done and had no idea what his bomb had done to people, mostly civilians, below. He returned to base, overwhelmed by his success in hitting “the target” and went straight to report to General Caneva that he just registered his name in history as the first person to bomb a target from the air. Carlo Caneva was the first Italian commander to announce that “Tripoli will be Italian”, as his forces launched the first attacks on Libya. He led the earlier brutal stages of the invasion before being replaced later by another, crueler General Rodolfo Graziani in 1930.

In the same year, the Italian army scored another world first when Benito Mussolini authorised, for the first time, the use of sulphur mustard to subdue Libyans. Bombing formations of fighters and civilian villages suspected of supporting the Mujahidin from the air but, this time, using poisonous gas, besides explosives.

In the 1920s, Libyan resistance intensified, particularly in eastern Libya with the rise of Omar Al-Mukhtar, a septuagenarian who suffered old age and chronic back pain, who became the national leader of the Mujahidin against fascist Italian occupation.

This forced General Graziani to revert to using collective punishment against entire civilian communities by forcing them into concentration camps across Eastern Libya. At one point, there were some 16 different camps in the Sirte desert and further east in which thousands of civilians including women, children, the elderly and young men were forced to live with their animals in desert plots surrounded by barbed wire and guarded, around the clock, by armed soldiers.

Despite this brutality, Al-Mukhtar and his colleagues fought for 20 years, until he was captured on 11 September 1931, after suffering an injury in a village called Slonta, south of Al-Bayda town in Libya’s eastern Green Mountain region.

After a quick trial, he was sentenced to death by hanging on 16 September. Hundreds of civilians, including women and children were forced to watch as Al-Mukhtar was hanged in Suluq concentration camp, one of the most infamous, south-west of Benghazi. By staging such a gruesome show, the Italian authorities wanted to terrify Libyans who might think of following in his footsteps and fight them.

Modern Libya, before the NATO invasion of 2011, used to commemorate 16 of September as a national day of mourning to remember Al-Mukhtar and remind younger generations of what happened in Libya, decades before. New Libya, however, has forgotten the mourning day, while fascist concentrations camps are never really mentioned outside academic circles.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Trump is a would-be dictator, as his attempt to derail the 2020 election results and his whipping up of the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection demonstrates. That is, he wanted to do to the US Constitution what he did to Ms. Carroll.

Trump can be depended on to fund-raise on his conviction, and the scarily irrational MAGA base will ignore it.

Chris Licht’s right-leaning CNN has even thrown caution to the winds and offered to televise a Trump “town hall” in prime time. Licht came to CNN from entertainment television in part — having been a show-runner on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, and in entertainment TV it is thought unwise to alienate half your audience by taking partisan political stands. We saw Taylor Swift warned by her handlers about losing 50% of her concert attendees over opposing Sen. Marsha Blackburn. That’s how they think in show biz. It is why there are no union member characters on American television shows. (Ironically, Colbert himself rejects this warped logic and has had great success nevertheless.)

So Licht applied the same yardstick to CNN, and made the anchors stop calling Jan. 6 an insurrection and stopped them from referring to the phony conspiracy theory Trump put about that the 2020 election was rigged as “the big lie.”

And now he’s bringing Trump into America’s living rooms unfiltered. If the American Republic goes the way of the Roman, it will be enablers like Licht who are to blame.

In contrast, the US media never had anything good to say about other dictators who were serial sex abusers. Take Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. He was renowned for having a female personal guard. But guess what? Five of them alleged that he had raped them. Gaddafi, like Trump, was a monster.

Too bad his own people overthrew and killed him, or Chris Licht could give Gaddafi a live town hall on CNN, too.

Or there was Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose minions killed tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. He is admired in Trumpian circles — Trump consigliere Steve Bannon slavers over Il Duce as a role model. Mussolini, too, was a vicious rapist, according to Yale University Press author RJB Bosworth.

One of Mussolini’s letters is quoted in that book describing his assault on a young virgin: “I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine. She got up weeping and humiliated, and through her tears she insulted me.”

Creep.

Or there is the ex-dictator of Gambia in West Africa, Yahya Jammeh, who “handpicked” women for rape during his 22-year reign of terror. After it was over he tried to bribe them with gifts.

Rapist dictators are a dime a dozen. Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Hissene Habre of Chad.

Trump now formally joins their ranks, having at last been publicly found liable for just one of his many alleged assaults on women (some of them, again allegedly, having been minors). Ugh.

And many Americans would blithely put this ogre back in the highest office of the land.

US politicians are always going on about how things happen abroad that just wouldn’t be tolerated in a “civilized society.”

But it turns out, not so much. We, like the Chadians, Gambians, Libyans and Dominicans, have had a sexual predator-president who sought to be president for life.

Maybe that conceit of being a “civilized society” so different from others is unwarranted. Or maybe the phrase has a genuine content and we just don’t fit that bill.