132 - The New Year Brings Massive Challenges, Darkness, and Too Much Suffering

Happy New Year to all readers and subscribers. I hope your personal tidings are positive even if prospects for much of the world are bleak and foreboding.

“Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is absolutely terrifying.” Those are the words of Arundhati Roy, India’s acclaimed novelist and social activist. She was referring primarily to her country’s increasingly demeaning attacks on, and marginalization of, its 200 million Muslims -- a solid sixth of what will soon be the planet’s most populous nation. But her words also speak to the dangerous and destructive state of the rest of the world as a new, alas war-beset, year opens. How is it that the “new concert” of peace that dawned democratically after the end of the Cold War has now plunged so much of the globe into deep despair and its inhabitants into paroxysms of unparalleled death and destruction?

Ukraine

            The lights have gone out in Ukraine, and so have expectations of warmth and normality – all on account of Putin’s so-far largely unchecked determination to resurrect the imperial pretensions of Stalin-like cruelty and domination.  His attempt to conquer Ukraine has largely (but not conclusively) fizzled. After myriad committed crimes against humanity, Putin, his generals, and their troops stand accused of repeated atrocities and persistent aggression. Now those offenses are being compounded by Russia’s missile and drone assaults on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

            Ukraine heroically repairs and rewires its electrical installations.  But still the drones and missiles arrive, too many to be defended against even with NATO and U.S. -supplied anti-aircraft batteries.  Ukraine still lacks a full complement of defensive ordnance to guard its people.

In a New Year’s Eve address, President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated Ukraine’s resolve: As he declared at the onset of the invasion, “We are here. We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine.”   

But no matter how much new defensive equipment arrives, including an expected Patriot missile assembly, Ukraine still lacks the critical capability to halt Russia’s relentless air bombardment with the offensive armaments that could still such pummeling.  Ukraine has sent a few drones deep into Russian territory, some last night, but the West refuses so far to provide Ukraine with the kinds of materiel that could threaten the missile launching pads and the drone assembly sites.  Putin’s people therefore assemble nightly bombardments with impunity. And that impunity plunges Ukraine into darkness and deprives civilians of water and heat in the dead of a frigid winter.

Ukrainians, motivated energetically by Zelensky, are remaining brave and stoic – but for how long?  As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says, the war in Ukraine will eventually be concluded at the negotiating table. Hence Putin’s attempt to gain advantage by depriving Ukraine of light and heat, and Zelensky’s rallying his people to reclaim “the return of what has been stolen from us” and to galvanize advances – however limited – in the east and south. 

We cannot even begin to predict how the war will end; there is too much of Russia to be overcome and too much hardened resilience despite appalling humanitarian suffering for Ukraine to be conquered. Nor does Russia seem ready to remove Putin, nor China and India to push Putin toward sense and sensibility. The last best chance for peace will come, but when, and how?

Other Troubled Zones

            The New Year begins with mostly dispiriting news from other conflicted places, and with no respite from the retreat of good governance and democracy. In late 2022, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied completed his disassembling of the Arab Spring’s decade-long most promising democratic initiative by giving himself full authoritarian power.  Only 9 percent of the country’s potential voters cast ballots in a recent parliamentary election, demonstrating the unwillingness of a battered populace to participate in a rigged charade. If Saied had only brought worldly goods to the people, creeping dictatorship might be more tolerable -- as it was in the past. But Tunisia’s parlous economy has cratered.  During the past two years, Tunisia slumped backwards by about 10 percent. Inflation is wild. Goods and food are short.  It is not clear that Saied’s lamentable rule will be able to resist a second Arab Spring sometime in 2023.

            President Cyril Ramaphosa survived a campaign last month to oust him within South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), and he now seems likely successfully to win the country’s presidency again in 2024.  But the Farmgate scandal, so-called after the thousands of dollars sequestered in a sofa and then stolen from his game estate, has sullied his legitimacy and may make it almost impossible for him to right the many current problems of one of Africa’s key nations.

            Self-inflicted managerial wounds, plus corruption (not bombardment from without) has left South Africa and its 55 million people daily short of electrical power. Eskom, the state monopoly, was so gutted over recent decades that its antiquated plants and methods cannot deliver consistent supplies of power from its one atomic facility, its many coal-fired plants, new renewable installations, and hydropower from Mozambique.

Fixing the power shortage mess is Ramaphosa’s most defining and urgent task of governance.  But so is reducing crime and restoring the country’s ability to educate its young people and to offer good medical support for them and their parents. Much of any potential resurgence also depends on Ramaphosa winning a titanic struggle within the ANC against rampant corruption. Resisted by many influence peddlers within its upper ranks, Ramaphosa will not easily succeed.

South Africa underwhelms its potential and promise. It is now mostly up to Ramaphosa and what is left of the better angels of the ANC to revive the impetus to greatness that President Nelson Mandela originally inaugurated in the 1990s.

            At the opening of a new year, there is more to bemoan, even in our own country and in such respected places as the United Kingdom and Canada. I will write before long about more troubles (and some successes) in Brazil, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, India, Malawi, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, the two Sudans, Zimbabwe, the scourge of corruption, epidemics of political deceit, and more.  But at present let me at least note possible good news out of Ethiopia.

            Eritrean invading troops seem to be withdrawing from Tigray, where an African Union-brokered cease fire was negotiated late in the year.  Ethiopian official banking and other commercial ties between Tigray and the country’s center have been reestablished. The national airline is flying between Addis Ababa and Mekele, Tigray’s main city, and many Tigrayan troops are standing down. How Tigray and Tigrayans will be reintegrated into Ethiopia is not yet clear or certain.  But tentative progress is underway – a contribution to the peace of the world in 2023.

            Let us hope the seeming end of the invasion of Tigray augurs well for Ukraine, and for peaceful efforts elsewhere in the world in 2023. And let us hope that Arundhati Roy’s India, and its hatreds, are not an enduring pattern for the planet in 2023 and beyond.