Notes from the World

On 10 October, Mahmoud Abbas, the 90 year-old President of the Palestinian National Authority, announced that legislative elections due to be held next month would instead be postponed until September 2027, citing what he alleged were “obstacles posed by Israeli measures” and the security situation in the Palestinian territories for the decision. The announcement further delayed the ability of Palestinians to choose by the vote how and by whom they are governed, with the last such elections having taken place two decades ago. Before the announced postponement, I spoke to the Palestinian political scientist Dr Ibrahim Rabaia about the elections and the situation in Palestine as whole. What follows is our conversation. Dr Ibrahim Rabaia is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Birzeit University. He has served as Managing Editor of the journal Shu’un Falastin (Palestinian Affairs), a Senior Editor at the newspaper Al-Hayat, acting director of the Governance Sector at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and is the chairperson of the Palestinian Forum for Development and Communication. [Illustration: A painting by Heba Zagout, who was slain during Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023. Image via: https://www.instagram.com/zagoutheba/]

Human Rights Watch characterizes the Caribbean nation of Cuba thusly: "The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and deter public criticism. It routinely relies on long and short-term arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate critics, independent activists, artists, protesters, and others. Hundreds of government critics remain behind bars, including many who participated in the landmark July 2021 demonstrations. The US embargo continues to provide the Cuban government with an excuse for its problems, a pretext for its abuses, and a way to garner sympathy abroad with governments that might otherwise have been willing to condemn the country’s repressive practices more vocally." Ruled by a handful of families circulating in the orbit of the Communist party and Cuban military since 1959 - most notably the Castro family of Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro, who collectively led the country from 1959 until 2019 - since the advent of the second Trump administration, the island has been under punishing coercive economic measures that amount to a kind of collective punishment of the Cuban people as a whole. According to the group Prisoners Defenders, there are currently more than 1,300 political prisoners in Cuba, many of them dating back to the 2021 anti-government protests that rocked the island and, among them some of the island’s leading lights of music, art, literature and journalism, along with feminists, LGBTQ activists and hundreds of ordinary citizens. The rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, is currently serving nine years in prison for “contempt” and “public disorder,” but his real crime was to dare to stand up to the regime’s abuses and hypocrisy in his music, most notably as part of the collective behind the 2021 song “Patria y Vida.” Convicted of “public disorder,” “contempt” and “resistance,” the poet and activist María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez also remains in jail. The Youtuber Sulmira Martínez Pérez, better known as “Salem,” was thrown in jail for “contempt” and “crimes against the constitutional order” for calling for nonviolent protests against the government. Cuba’s totalitarian government nevertheless remains a cause du jour among some on the international left, as witnessed by a bit of luxury revolutionary tourism undertaken by a cadre of groups like Code Pink, Progressive International and the Democratic Socialists of America to the island earlier this year, where trip participants chartered a plane to Havana operated by World Atlantic Airlines, an entity previously best known for operating deportation flights for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, and stayed in luxury hotels while praising the regime and its sadism. What may appear at first as simply more examples of the Communist deluxe, as the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas once termed this phenomenon, may however, in fact, be less diffuse and more intentional than it first appears, consisting of overlapping individuals and organizations and an enormous amount of money, its provenance often hidden between layers of “charitable” anonymity. Susana Molinet is an independent researcher based in Spain who earlier this year co-authored an investigation for the Cuban exile news outlet El Toque which can be read here: https://red.eltoque.com/. Building upon previous work by the New York Times and Newlines Magazine, the report examines how and by whom a great deal of such Cuban solidarity activity is funded - looking particularly at the activities of the American businessman and social activist Neville Roy Singham and Code Pink co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodi Evans - and the activities of the media outlet Belly of the Beast.

“In 1974, Beirut ranked among the greatest metropolises of the Near East. With a population of only slightly more than a million, its demographic weight was modest by comparison with Cairo, even with Damascus; and as the capital of one of the smallest Arab states, it could scarcely claim to be a major international center of decision making or diplomacy, even if the welcome Beirut granted to the leadership of the Palestinian resistance placed it at the heart of a political dynamic that transcended regional boundaries. No matter. And yet since the early 1960s it had incontestably been one of the premier poles of cultural and economic attraction in the Arab world. Among all the cities of this world, it yielded perhaps only to Cairo - and even then, not in every domain. As a university seat and medical center, as the capital of Arab publishing and journalism, as a transit port and airline hub, and as a market and clearinghouse for every kind of commercial and banking transaction, from the most ordinary to the most dubious, Beirut fulfilled a great many functions that went beyond the frontiers of the Republic of Lebanon. In exchange for these services it was paid in the form of currency--every currency in the world. Though it was not a wealthy city, it gave every appearance of being one; and because money begets more money, it exhibited the same insouciance one finds in wealthy cities everywhere, serenely confident that its sources of revenue would never dry up.” Thus wrote the late Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir - who would be killed by car bomb in June 2005 - about Lebanon’s capital in the era that immediately preceded that nation’s 1975 to 1990 civil war. In the years since the official end of the civil war, Lebanon has nonetheless endured tumult and conflict as few other countries have. A Syrian occupation that lasted from 1976 until 2005. An Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982 until 2000. The 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri, who served as prime minister of Lebanon from 1992 to 1998 and again from 2000 to 2004, and whose death gave rise to the so-called Cedar Revolution that succeeded in forcing Syrian troops to withdraw from the country. A series of 2015–2016 protests about the sanitation crisis. Protests beginning in October 2019 against corrupt political elites and a devastating 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. Amid all of this were a pair of highly destructive wars between the Iran-backed political party and militia Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and again beginning in 2023 To decode some of the complexities of Lebanon’s past and present, we are joined on Notes From the World today by three guests: Ronnie Chatah, who hosts The Beirut Banyan podcast and is the founder of WalkBeirut, a walking tour through the streets of the Lebanese capital that teaches visitors learn about Lebanon’s cultural heritage and history; Stephanie Bechara, a reporter with L’Orient-Le Jour, a French-language daily newspaper in Lebanon; and Karim Safieddine, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Sociology where his areas of inquiry focus on understanding the ways in which social movements in late 20th and 21st century Lebanon and the historical and contemporary development of the “Lebanese Left.” Image: “Lebanon” by Eugene Kaspersky, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In August 2021, after two decades of military involvement, the people of Afghanistan were abandoned by the United States and its allies. The Taliban, the extremist Islamist movement supported by the Pakistani intelligence services that had once sheltered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the run-up to and following the September 11th attacks on the United States, swept back into power as the Afghans who had believed in the West’s promise of nation building were mostly left to fend for themselves as U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken implemented an ignominious flight from their responsibility to the country’s people that had been carved out by Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before Biden and Blinken took office. The images of the month of August from five years ago are hard to shake. U.S. military leaving Bagram Airfield by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the middle of the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander. Desperate Afghans huddled around the international airport in Kabul where a suicide bombing killed 169 of them along with 13 members of the United States military. A young footballer and a dentist falling from the sky to their deaths after desperately clinging to a US air force C-17 Globemaster transport plane after it took off. Since then, things have only grown more grave for the country’s more than 42 million inhabitants. The Taliban have proven themselves to be as brutal, ignorant and violently misogynistic as they ever were, barring women from secondary or higher education and severely restricting their employment and even presence in public life. The Taliban’s new Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses, instituted early this year, legalizes child marriage, denies women the right to divorce even if husband is permanently absent, and denies women legal autonomy and allows a guardian and judge to determine their fate. As the Taliban engage in sporadic armed clashes with their former sponsors from Pakistan, more than 3.7 million children face acute malnutrition. Amidst all this, the European Union and India have hosted Taliban diplomatic delegations despite the fact that last year, the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Taliban so-called “Supreme Leader” Haibatullah Akhundzada and “Chief Justice” Abdul Hakim Haqqani finding “reasonable grounds” they have committed crime against humanity against women and girls. To discuss the situation in Afghanistan today, we are joined again by Fereshta Abbasi, the Afghanistan Researcher for Human Rights Watch, who first spoke to our programme last year.

On the night of 14 August 1791, in the course of a complex invocation of the Vodou religion that had been created as a syncretic combination of Catholic and African beliefs by the enslaved population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, a towering black overseer from Jamaica named Boukman led a pledge in which those in bondage swore to rise up against their masters at Bwa Kayiman (The Woods of the Crocodile) on the northern plain of what would later become the nation of Haiti. A week later, thousands did and over the course of a nearly 13 year war of independence that followed, eventually succeeded in defeating the French military and abolishing slavery, the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Since then, Haiti has lived more than 220 years of nearly constant tumult, the most recent chapter of which began with the assassination of the nation’s president, Jovenel Moïse, five years ago as part of a sprawling international conspiracy that - despite the trials and convictions of some in the United States for their role in it - the world still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of. Since then, Haiti has been ruled by a series of ostensibly temporary interim regimes, the most recent of which has been led solely since this past January by Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. Much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas are controlled by a coalition of armed groups calling themselves Viv Ansanm (Live Together). The International Organization for Migration counts well over 1 million people as internally displaced due to both the violence of Viv Ansanm and its sporadic clashes with what pass for the forces of order, which include elements of the national police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the nation’s resurrected army, the Forces Armées d’Haïti (FADH), and, until last autumn, an ineffectual, United Nations-sanctioned Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) force. Last September, the United Nations authorized a Gang Suppression Force (GSF) to replace the MSS with a mandated personnel ceiling of 5,550 consisting of both military and police personnel. Like the MSS, however, the GSF has been glacially slow to get up and running. Despite all this, Haiti’s interim authorities and the country’s sprawling (and largely discredited) amalgam of political parties have announced that elections for president and parliament are to be held in the coming months, with the first round to be held on 13 December and the runoff on 21 February. To discuss where Haiti finds itself today and where it may be heading, we are joined on Notes From the World today by three longtime experts observers of the country: Louis-Henri Mars, who for many years served as the Executive Director of Lakou Lapè, a group whose mission was the promotion of a culture of non-violence and dialogue in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. Lorraine Mangones, the Executive Director of the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL), a Haitian foundation working throughout Haiti in the fields of education, development, arts and culture, and in support of local civil society organizations; and Louino Robillard, a social activist who was has been the driving force behind a number of organizations in Haiti and currently serves as the Program Director of Rasin Devlopman, which seeks to strengthen the capacity of community leaders and locally elected officials on the Haitian island of La Gonâve.