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FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on stage during a campaign rally tonight in Richmond, Virginia, U.S. March 2, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Republicans regret Trump, Bosnia gets EU pathway, Pakistan swears in cabinet, Somalia’s pirates seize the moment
50 million:Donald Trump may have a chokehold on the Republican Party, but that doesn’t mean he has a grip on all Republicans. The group Republicans Voters Against Trump, which first appeared in 2020, has recently raised $50 million to produce a campaign of video testimonials by Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but say they just can’t do it again this year.
30: Almost 30 years since the end of the Yugoslav civil wars, Bosnia and Herzegovina will be invited to begin EU accession talks, despite still-simmering ethnic tensions between Bosniaks and Serbs in the country. The talks are no guarantee of joining, which can take many years, but the perception of growing Russian influence in the Balkans has heightened Brussels’ interest in getting membership talks on track. Of the six former Yugoslav republics, only Slovenia and Croatia are in the EU.
19: Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has a cabinet in place after its 19 members were sworn in earlier this week. They have their work cut out for them. Pakistan is mired in a severe economic crisis and must, almost immediately, negotiate a fresh $3 billion IMF loan package. Meanwhile, the streets are still hot with protesters supporting jailed opposition leader and former PM Imran Khan, whose alliance won the most votes in last month’s election but was shut out of government by Sharif’s coalition.
23: For the first time since December, Somali pirates successfully hijacked a vessel off the Horn of Africa, taking the 23 crew members of a Bangladeshi-flagged bulk carrier hostage. As Houthi attacks in the Red Sea draw much of the naval security attention in the region, the fearsome pirates of Somali are letting that Jolly Roger fly.Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik in 2018.
What We’re Watching: Trouble in Bosnia, China shifts Ukraine tone
Fears rise of new Bosnian conflict. As if one major conflict brewing on Europe’s doorstep wasn’t enough, rising nationalist rhetoric and threats over the possible breakup of Bosnia and Herzegovina are prompting fears of another. Bosnia’s Serb President Milorad Dodik wants to withdraw his Republic Srpska (RS) from key Bosnian institutions, most notably the armed forces, to establish Serb-only government bodies instead. Any such move would violate the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords and could spark another violent conflict in the Balkans. While Dodik — notably a Srebrenica genocide denier — has long threatened to secede, his talk of setting up a separate RS army is what’s causing real alarm. The US has threatened to use sanctions should the Bosnian Serbs secede and formally join Serbia. European foreign ministers met in Brussels on Monday to discuss the situation. While many European countries want to impose sanctions, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia — in addition to Russia — are expected to stand behind Dodik.
Other pressing issues to discuss in Munich
Much of the media attention on the Munich Security Conference will focus, understandably, on the Russia-Ukraine standoff. But other important security questions will be discussed. Here are three of the most important.
The Balkans. Bosnia now faces its most worrisome threat since the end of the Yugoslav civil war in 1995. To keep warring factions apart, the peace agreement ending that war created a special enclave within Bosnia for ethnic Serbs. The leader of that enclave, Milorad Dodik, has threatened secession over a new law banning the denial of the genocide that Serbs inflicted on Bosnian Muslims during that conflict. A breakup of Bosnia could trigger a new war.
The Caucasus. Ukraine is not the only former Soviet Republic weighing the costs of war. Armenia and Azerbaijan have long been locked in a struggle over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave inside Azerbaijan that’s populated mainly by ethnic Armenians. In 2020, the frozen conflict turned hot, with Turkey and Russia becoming directly involved when hostilities erupted. Following major gains for Azerbaijan, the guns have gone silent, but a ceasefire has not brought confidence that peace can be kept, and the status of prisoners is making its way through international courts.
The Sahel. In some West African countries, the inability of governments to respond effectively to jihadist emergencies has frustrated both military leaders and civilians caught in the crossfire. One result of this instability is a series of recent coups that have toppled governments across the region. France, the former colonial power, has long been a major player in the Sahel. As part of a plan called Operation Barkhane, French troops have tried to lead a regional effort to quell the insurgency, but lack of success has left West Africans angry at Paris and French voters unhappy. As a result, France has pulled back, leaving the EU to debate how to manage a problem that is destabilizing an entire region – with blowback for European security.Hard Numbers: No Aussie tech for China, young Bosnians want out, US fossil fuel auction, EU deforestation import ban
63: Australia will prevent Chinese companies from importing or investing in a group of 63 technologies that Canberra considers critical to its national interest. The off-limits areas include 5G, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and quantum computing.
47: Nearly half (47 percent) of young Bosnians want to leave the country, according to a new UNFPA poll. Bosnia is currently mired in its worst political crisis since the end of the bloody Yugoslav civil, as the country's ethnic Serb enclave threatens to secede.
2,700: The US government auctioned on Wednesday almost 2,700 square miles of oil and gas leases in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental groups have blasted the bidding of fossil fuels, which happened after Republican-led US states sued to lift an earlier Biden administration freeze on federal oil and gas sales.
6: The EU is looking to ban imports into its single market of six commodities — beef, cacao, coffee, soy, palm oil, and timber — if they are produced in areas at risk of deforestation. This could spell trouble for countries like Brazil, which exports a lot of beef to the bloc and has a big Amazon fire problem.
What We’re Watching: Erdogan picks 10 fights, Sudanese coup, Bosnia on the brink, Chilean right-winger surging, G-20 split on climate, Colombia nabs top narco
Turkey's Erdogan ups the ante with the West: Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared diplomats from 10 Western countries "persona non-grata" after the group — which includes the US, France, and Germany — called on Ankara to release Osman Kavala, a Parisian-born Turkish businessman who's been held in jail since 2017 but hasn't been charged with a crime. Erdogan says that Kavala was involved in an attempted coup against the government in 2016. This latest move is a sign of Turkey's authoritarian drift in recent years, which has seen Erdogan's government increasingly crack down on opposition members as well as journalists. It also reflects Turkey's increasingly fraught relations with the West: things got particularly bad between Washington and Ankara after Turkey purchased missile defense systems from the Russians in 2019. The Council of Europe (the continent's leading human rights organization) had previously warned that Ankara has until November to release Kavala or it would impose "infringements," though it's unclear what those would be.
Coup in Sudan: Sudanese soldiers have seized power in a coup, arresting the head of the transitional civilian-military government and declaring a state of emergency. In recent days, Khartoum has been rocked by rival protests from pro-democracy groups and supporters of the military wing of the government, which the latter wanted to dissolve entirely. What's more, a blockade set up by a pro-military tribal leader in eastern Sudan had interrupted the flow of goods and food to the capital — a recipe for disaster in a country already experiencing sky-high inflation and shortage of basic products. The possibility of a military takeover by troops loyal to former dictator Omar al-Bashir has haunted Sudan since Bashir — now pending trial for war crimes in The Hague — was ousted in 2019. The situation got even more tense as we got closer to the November deadline for the military to hand over control to the civilian wing in the supreme council, which has the final say on all national matters under a power-sharing agreement. That deal was supposed to pave the way for elections in 2022, but the coup has changed the equation.
Bosnia on the brink: Bosnia is facing its worst political crisis since the end of the bloody Yugoslav civil war in 1995, which pitted ethnic Bosnians against Serbs and Croats and left more than 100,000 dead. What's going on? Well, when that war ended, the peace agreement created a special enclave within Bosnia for ethnic Serbs — the better to keep warring ethnicities apart. This has always been a messy arrangement, but now the nationalistic leader of that enclave, Milorad Dodik, is threatening to secede altogether, amid a spat over new laws meant to ban denial of the genocide that Serbs carried out against Bosnian Muslims during the war. A breakup of Bosnia could quickly lead to serious violence, and both the EU and US staunchly opposed the move. But Dodik is undaunted. He says that Serb-only institutions will be in place as soon as November. Asked how he'd pull this off, Dodik — who recently oversaw provocative military drills that spooked Bosnia's other ethnic groups — responded: "as the Slovenes did it." That's a not-so-veiled reference to the breakup of former Yugoslavia, which led to years of bloodshed. Indeed, it's not a good omen, and raising fears of a return to the deadly violence of the 1990s.
Right-winger on a roll in Chile: José Antonio Kast, an ultra- conservative politician who pines for the days of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, has ridden a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to the top of the polls ahead of next month's presidential election. He's currently at 21 percent, one point ahead of leftist former student leader Gabriel Boric. Talk about political whiplash: it was just a few months ago that Chileans elected a broadly leftwing constituent assembly to rewrite the country's Pinochet-era constitution in the wake of mass protests about inequality. But Kast, an avowed free-marketeer and social conservative, has tapped into rising resentment against the vast numbers of migrants – in particular from Venezuela and Haiti – who have arrived in the country in recent years. Last month, for example, saw an outbreak of violence against Venezuelan refugees in the northern city of Iquique. Kast has called for digging ditches along the borders and wants a special police force to root out illegal migrants. In the last presidential election, Kast got less than 8 percent of the vote. This time he's making a race of it.
G-20 members split on climate ahead of COP26: Just before the COP26 climate summit kicks off in Glasgow on October 31, the leaders of the world's top 20 economies will meet in Rome to discuss climate change, soaring energy prices, and post-pandemic recovery. But the G-20 remains divided between Western countries – like the US and the EU – demanding firm commitments from all member countries on cutting carbon dioxide emissions, and top polluters like China, India, and Russia who say that demand is unreasonable given that many Western nations have benefited from fossil fuel use for decades. Of these three outspoken countries, only India's PM Narendra Modi will travel to Rome, which makes it unlikely that any meaningful progress will be made ahead of the landmark summit in the UK. Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden is in a tough spot: ahead of a trip to Europe this week, he was hoping to have secured billions of dollars in new climate funding from Congress, but his ambitious plans remain stuck due to divisions within his own party. More broadly, if no consensus is reached in Rome, it'll raise the stakes even more for Glasgow — and the planet can't wait any longer for politicians to make up their minds.
Colombia nabs top drug kingpin: Colombian security forces have arrested Dairo Antonio Usuga, the most-wanted drug kingpin in the country since Pablo Escobar. Usuga – known by his alias Otoniel – is head of the notorious Gulf Cartel, and will likely be extradited to face a slew of charges in the US, which had a $5 million bounty on his head. While some say Otoniel's capture is a big win for Colombia, others say that rather than striking a blow against narco-related violence, the strategy of taking down kingpins creates more power struggles within cartels, in turn leading to more violence and bloodshed. This was the case following the 1993 death of Escobar and the 2016 arrest of "El Chapo" Guzmán in Mexico. Still, if Otoniel spills the beans on his operations in exchange for a lighter sentence in America, that could provide critical intelligence for Colombian and US drug enforcement to better target other narcos at a time when large swaths of rural Colombia are now ruled by gangs, contributing to regional instability.An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Council of Europe was the EU's largest human rights organization. We apologize for then error.
What We're Watching: Bosnia's deepening political crisis
Bosnia on the brink: Bosnia is facing its worst political crisis since the end of the bloody Yugoslav civil war in 1995, which pitted ethnic Bosnians against Serbs and Croats and left more than 100,000 dead. What's going on? Well, when that war ended, the peace agreement created a special enclave within Bosnia for ethnic Serbs — the better to keep warring ethnicities apart. This has always been a messy arrangement, but now the nationalistic leader of that enclave, Milorad Dodik, is threatening to secede altogether, amid a spat over new laws meant to ban denial of the genocide that Serbs carried out against Bosnian Muslims during the war. A breakup of Bosnia could quickly lead to serious violence, and both the EU and US staunchly opposed the move. But Dodik is undaunted. He says that Serb-only institutions will be in place as soon as November. Asked how he'd pull this off, Dodik — who recently oversaw provocative military drills that spooked Bosnia's other ethnic groups — said "as the Slovenes did it." That's a not-so-veiled reference to the breakup of former Yugoslavia, which led to years of bloodshed. Indeed, it's not a good omen, and is raising fears of a return to the deadly violence of the 1990s.
Bosnian Serbs will boycott government over genocide denial law
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, shares his perspective from Europe:
What is going on in Bosnia with Bosnian Serbs boycotting all major institutions?Well, it's a reaction against a decision that was taken by the outgoing high representative during his very last days, after 12 years of having done very little in this respect, to have a law banning any denial of Srebrenica and other genocides. But this issue goes to very many other aspects of the Bosnian situation. So, it has created a political crisis that will be somewhat difficult to resolve.
Why is the Northern Ireland Protocol blocked?
It's not really blocked. It's just that the Boris Johnson government has suddenly changed its mind. It is the protocol for how to handle the difficult question of Northern Ireland, preserving the Good Friday Agreement in spite of Brexit, that was signed by and celebrated by Boris Johnson himself. And suddenly he's found out that there are some complicated aspects from the UK point of view in that agreement. That's always the case with compromises. And now he wants to amend it or change it and back out of it. And so far, Brussels is thinking, "eh, agreement-disagreement."