At the end of the second millennium of its Christian history, Europe has changed.
After a nearly half-century long grim battle, communism abandoned the place, and suddenly vanished like an ugly nightmare at sunrise.
And capitalism has returned.
In the beginning of January 2020, the UN General Assembly announced that, according to Article 19 of the UN Charter the Lebanon’s right to vote in the General Assembly was suspended for not having paid its financial contribution (to the organization) for the past two years - a total amount of 459,000 USD. The Lebanese foreign minister, Gebran Basil, president Michel Aoun’s son-in-law and leader of the political party Free Patriotic Movement established by the current head of state, rejected any responsibility of his Ministry’s on the matter, which led to a denigrating polemic with his colleague in the Ministry of Finance. The resolution of the international organization and the conflict between the two departing Lebanese ministers was but a tip of the iceberg which hid the state of chaos Lebanon and the Lebanese had been in for these past months. Lebanon was not the only country incapable of paying its contribution to the UN - less than half a million dollars. Lebanon, which in the eye
With the two front men of the Libyan civil war in the spotlight - Fayez Sarraj, the leader of the “Government of National Accord” recognised by the international community and headquartered in Tripoli, and the field marshal Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the so called “Libyan National Army” which controls the eastern part of the country - on the 19th of January 2020, and after long and difficult preparations, Berlin hosted the international peace conference on Libya.
A ticking clock and a shutting trap seem appropriate metaphors for the predicament of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his team hoping against hope for “peace” with Russia.
In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as Novorossiya; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Putin himself had launched a short-lived Novorossiya project in 2014, aiming at that time to create a Russian protectorate out of eight Ukrainian provinces, six of them along the Black Sea coast.
At a late hour in the night between the 2nd and the 3rd of January, close to Baghdad International Airport, on the road connecting the airport to the city, and following President Trump’s direct orders, an US drone hit the convoy transporting the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. He had been, ever 1999, the commander of the “Al-Quds Force” - a special unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (“Pasdaran”) responsible for foreign operations.
On the 12th of December 2019, the day when 45 million British were expected at the polls, The Guardian headlined: “polls open in most important general election in a generation”. For its part, the conservative publication The Spectator headlined, on 12th of December 2019: “the most important election in modern history”. According to The Financial Times the voters were facing “an impossible choice” in a crucial election that could carve the future of Great Britain for generations to come. The foreign press had a similar approach.
A decade passed since the first “spring season” of the Arab Middle East. This period was marked by hesitations, confrontations, by the so called “stolen revolutions” and, most of all, by its instability and lack of credibility. They are the reason why there have been rushed and timid attempts to social and economic reformation, institutional modernization and, most of all, to eradicate or diminish poverty and corruption.
During its modern history - marked mostly by the Sykes-Picot agreements in 1916, where Great Britain and France shared the vilayets and Ottoman provinces in the Middle East, then in 1947 by the famous “Partition Plan”, when the UN separated historical Palestine in two entities (Jewish and Palestinian Arabic) followed a year later, in May 1948, by the birth, in the Middle East, of the state of Israel - this troubled piece of the global political geography has known just a few, and short-lived moments of peace.
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