The EU pays to stem migration

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 26 March 2024

            On March 17 a delegation of EU leaders visited Cairo and announced that the EU Commission had decided to provide Egypt with finance totaling $8.1 billion (some 32 billion shekels) over the three years 2024 – 2027.  Amidst the flurry of self-congratulatory statements, neither side specified what one particular tranche of the package was for.

That Egypt needs the money, it goes without saying. The country has been in economic difficulties for years. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine made matters worse.  The country relied heavily on wheat imports from both Russia and Ukraine, and food prices increased by more than 70%.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has supported the Egyptian government over the past 8 years with loans, has demanded strict financial controls.  Government action taken to meet IMF conditions, such as the removal of bread and fuel subsidies, new value-added taxes, and an increase in metro fares, aroused public opposition. 

In August 2023 inflation in Egypt hit a record year-on-year high of just under 40%, while the Egyptian pound was losing value hand over fist.  Over 2023 the cost of a US dollar hovered around 30 Egyptian pounds. At the beginning of March 2024 it was 70 pounds. 

Then Egypt’s fortunes suddenly took a turn for the better.  Three recent announcements in quick succession have dissipated the financial gloom. 

Impressed with the steps Egypt has taken to tighten the economy, and after Cairo agreed to further financial reforms including a flexible exchange rate and raised interest rates, on March 6 the IMF agreed to a $5 billion increase in the current $3 billion loan agreement.

Then, on March 17 came the announcement from the EU of its $8.1 billion package, spread over three years. Finally, and apparently out of the blue, on March 17 the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced it would inject $35 billion into Egypt over two months.

There is no doubt that this $48 billion windfall will go a long way toward clearing the economy’s dollar shortage and eliminating any near-term risk of default.  

The financial bonus from the UAE is by way of investment in the development of Ras El-Hikma, a 170 million-square-meter peninsula, stretching over some 50 kilometers of white-sand beaches along Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline.  The project, managed by an Emirati organization, aims to transform Ras El-Hikma into a luxury tourist destination coupled with a financial center and a free zone.  

The EU financial package is less explicit in its objective.

European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen was joined by the leaders of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece and Italy to meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for the signing ceremony.  The deal, both sides agree, lifts the EU's relationship with Egypt to a "strategic partnership" aimed at boosting cooperation in renewable energy, trade, and security.  The financial package specifies five billion euros in loans, 1.8 billion euros in investment, and hundreds of millions for “bilateral projects”.  

In their official statements following the announcement, neither side mentioned the word “migrants”.  However one official attached to the EU Commission told Radio France Internationale that part of the tranche allocated to “bilateral projects” is specifically earmarked to stem irregular migrant flows to the EU bloc. In 2023 the EU's border agency Frontex recorded nearly 158,000 migrant arrivals in Europe via the dangerous Mediterranean sea route, an increase of 50% on the previous year.  Migration was referred to briefly by Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, who hailed the EU-Egypt accord as a chance to give “residents of Africa” a chance "not to emigrate" to Europe, while the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said: "We must prevent the opening of new migration routes and we will work very closely with Egypt to ensure that this will be achieved." 

In negotiating this agreement, the EU Commission doubtless had in mind the rising popularity of right-wing parties in several EU nations, and the growth across Europe of anti-immigrant rhetoric.  It must also be aware of its own failure to cope effectively with the flow of uncontrolled migration into Europe from Africa.

Statistics for 2023 from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) show migrants setting out into the Mediterranean from Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt – that is, the entire stretch of the north African coastline, with the sole exception of Morocco.  By far the most favoured destination was Italy, but many thousands landed also in Spain, Greece, Cyprus and even Malta – all EU countries.  The EU Commission’s concern is understandable.  

Egypt insists that migrant boats have not sailed from its coast in recent years, yet Egyptians still arrive by sea in Europe, mostly in Italy, via Libya or Tunisia.  Recently these numbers have increased.  There are thousands of Egyptians currently in Libya, waiting for transport to Italy, and Libya has taken to shipping them back to Egypt in their hundreds.   This Libya-Italy route remains open despite deals already concluded by the EU in northern Africa, notably with Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania, aimed at reducing the uncontrolled flow of migrants across the Mediterranean.  The new agreement with Egypt is intended to augment those deals and make them more effective.

 There is always another point of view. Some interests do not see the current situation as an emergency.  Human Rights groups strongly condemned the EU’s deals with authoritarian governments, among which they include Egypt.  Human Rights Watch (HRW) has criticized what it labels "the EU's cash-for-migration-control approach" which, it said, "strengthens authoritarian rulers while betraying human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and activists whose work involves great personal risk."

Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesperson for the IOM, makes a different point.  He has said the  2023 migrant numbers were a far cry from those recorded in 2015 when more than a million people reached European shores via the Mediterranean.

“There is no real emergency,” Di Giacomo is reported as saying. “They are very manageable figures, and more should be done to give people who arrive by sea access to a system of protection.”

Egypt however, its immediate financial crisis averted, is no doubt grateful that the EU sees things rather differently.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "EU deal with Egypt to stem migration is morally ambiguous", 25 March 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-793684

Published in Eurasia Review, 5 April 2024:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/05042024-the-eu-pays-to-stem-migration-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 7 April 2024:@

https://mpc-journal.org/the-eu-pays-to-stem-migration/

Egypt prepares for Gazan influx

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 19 March 2024

            On March 1 Sky News published the results of an in-depth investigation it had undertaken.  It asserted, quoting chapter and verse and with many supporting pictures, that an Egyptian company is charging Gazans $5,000 per person to escape to Egypt, and that it has no shortage of customers.

            This method of fleeing from Gaza through a specialist company is known as “coordination”.  It is a long established system by which Palestinians can pay for permission to leave the Gaza Strip and undertake the journey.  Before the war, a number of companies were charging just a few hundred dollars for the service – pay the fee, and a few days later your journey across the border into Egypt is laid on.

   Since the start of the war all official cross-border travel, with just a handful of carefully vetted exceptions such as foreign nationals and people with severe injuries, has ceased, but “coordination” is still being operated by just one company – the Egyptian firm Hala.  Sky News asserts that currently the majority of those receiving permission to leave Gaza do so through Hala.  Before the war Hala charged $350 per adult for their service.  The company is currently charging $5,000 per adult.  Sky News states it has verified this price by corroborating accounts from dozens of sources, including a Hala employee, as well as price lists posted online.

As an example, it took February 27.  On that day 246 Palestinians were registered to travel with Hala. That means the company could have made $1,083,900 in just one day. Sky News says that the volume of daily passengers has been consistent for weeks.

A Hala employee told Sky News that the best way to register and pay for travel with the company was to send a relative to their head office in Cairo.  It is situated at the headquarters of its parent company, the Organi Group, in Cairo's Nasr City district.

"The whole building is guarded with massive security," said one source who had visited the office. Multiple sources affirmed that there were often hundreds or even thousands of people queuing outside. Videos showing the queues have been verified by Sky News.

"People are quite desperate," one source said.  "They are fundraising, they're asking for money from their family members, doing whatever they can to raise very high sums of money in order to pay for their own freedom."

If indeed hundreds of Palestinians are making the crossing into Egypt every day, as the Sky News report maintains, where on earth are they to be accommodated?

The answer may lie in a report that appeared in the world’s media back in February, and has since dropped out of public view.  On February 16 many global news sites reported that Egypt was constructing a walled camp in the Sinai Peninsula to receive displaced Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip.  The story was carried in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and supported by the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, an Egyptian NGO, which released a report detailing and illustrating construction of the compound which it said was to receive Palestinian refugees "in the case of a mass exodus."

The WSJ said an eight square mile (21 square kilometer) "walled enclosure" that could accommodate more than 100,000 people was under construction on the Egyptian side of the border, part of "contingency plans" if ceasefire talks failed.

The Sinai Foundation said that two contractors had told it that construction firms had been tasked with building the gated area, "surrounded by seven-meter high walls". And indeed the international news agency AFP reviewed satellite pictures taken on February 15 of the area in northern Sinai, showing machinery building a wall along the Egypt-Gaza border.

One source is reported as saying: "The area will be readied with tents," while humanitarian assistance would be delivered inside.

The story, replete though it was with testimony and satellite videos, was flatly denied by North Sinai governor Mohamed Shousha.  The construction work, he asserted, was to assess the value of houses destroyed during the running battles of recent years between Egyptian forces and Muslim Brotherhood insurgents operating against the regime in the region.  The aim, he said, was to determine appropriate compensation for the owners.

In the early days of the war Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned Israel against any "forced displacement" of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert. If that happened, he said, it could jeopardize the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.  He told a press conference back in October that Palestinians fleeing from Gaza could be moved to Israel's Negev desert "till the militants are dealt with.”

In response Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant,

has said that Israel had "no intention of evacuating Palestinian civilians to Egypt…We respect and value our peace agreement with Egypt, which is a cornerstone of stability in the region.”

Sky News asked Egypt's foreign minister Sameh Shoukry whether the government condoned Hala charging $5,000 per adult for Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip.

"Absolutely not," said Shoukry. "We will take whatever measures we need to restrict it and eliminate it totally. There should be no advantage taken out of this situation for monetary gain."

But Amr Magdi, an Egypt expert at Human Rights Watch, reportedly described Shoukry's response as ringing hollow.  "It doesn't make any sense," he said. "No one can pass through the border without the knowledge of the Egyptian authorities."  In other words Hala, with its headquarters in Cairo, may be operating in Gaza with explicit or implicit official approval.

Egypt has categorically rejected any suggestion that Palestinians should be allowed to flee en masse into Sinai.  But the problem Egypt may face, and is reportedly preparing for, is not any forced evacuation of Gazans by Israel, but the voluntary flight of desperate people able to find, beg, borrow or steal, the exorbitant charges imposed by Hala to organize a “coordination” evacuation.. At the current rate of exodus, Egypt’s 100,000 capacity refugee facility would be filled in about 18 months.

            On the other hand should there be, for whatever reason, a more general breakout of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, Egypt is making sure that it is prepared.  

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online titled "Egypt preparing for Gazan influx and the rising price of leaving the Strip", 19 March 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion

Iran’s take on democracy

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 11 March 2024  

National elections were held in Iran on March 1.  The results were underwhelming. It took three days for the electoral authorities to count the votes and consider the results.  On March 4 Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told a news conference in Tehran that of Iran’s 61 million eligible voters, only some 25 million had deigned to participate.  The resultant turnout of 41% would be the lowest ever recorded in post-revolution Iran.

Even so, the BBC published comments from voters skeptical  of the official announcement.  One said: "It's not the real result."  Another woman declared  “People believe it's actually less than 41%."  When asked what she thought the true turnout had been, she said comments on Instagram suggested as low as 20%. "Some even say 15%," she added. 

          Some experts agreed.  “The real turnout is likely lower,” wrote Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, “although it is impossible to know at this stage.” The Stimson Center, while unconvinced, was even more circumspect. “Due to press and media censorship,” it commented, “as well as the absence of independent observers, it is challenging to verify the authenticity of these statistics.”

The poll was held to elect the 290 members of the national parliament, the Majles, and the 88 clerics who make up the Assembly of Experts, composed exclusively of male Islamic scholars.  Each member of the Assembly will sit for a term of eight years and, should the occasion arise, be tasked with selecting the country’s supreme leader. The occasion may indeed arise.  Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 85 years old, and rumors about his health have been circulating since 2022.

            The election results indicate that conservative politicians will dominate the next parliament, which is scarcely surprising given the tightly controlled procedures under which candidates are vetted as suitable to run in the elections.  This pre-election task is undertaken by the country’s constitutional watchdog, the powerful Guardian Council, half of whose members are directly selected by Khamenei.

   In fact, of the 15,200 people who registered to stand in the election, no fewer than 7,296 were disqualified, some of them well-known critics of the regime, many of them moderates and reformers.  Iranian women have demonstrated more than once to the regime that they are a force to be reckoned with, and the Guardian Council acknowledged reality by allowing 666 women to stand.

   The popular mood during the pre-election campaign was somber.  Powerful voices called on the nation to boycott the forthcoming poll.  One with particular appeal was that of the imprisoned Narges Mohammadi, who won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran.

 She denounced the elections as sham, following what she called the "ruthless and brutal suppression" of the 2022 protests triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly”.

.Mohammadi, a human rights activist, has been arrested 13 times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison.  Having already spent some 12 years in jail serving multiple sentences, in January Iran's Revolutionary Court sentenced her to an additional 15 months in prison, doubtless in retaliation for what occurred at the Nobel Peace Award ceremony in December.

          Her children traveled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel award on her behalf. In her speech, smuggled from prison and read out on her behalf, she denounced Iran's "tyrannical" government. Referring to the 2022 protests, Mohammadi said young Iranians had "transformed the streets and public spaces into a place of widespread civil resistance."

          Freedom of expression was a major issue during pre-election campaigning.  Iranians are  well aware of the growing numbers of journalists, artists and other activists being arrested.  The suppression of political dissent is also resented.  The most prominent figure in the Green Movement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was a presidential candidate in 2009, remains under permanent house arrest. 

For a variety of reasons in 2021 it suited Supreme Leader Khamenei to approve the election of Hassan Rouhani as president, despite the fact that many in Iran regard him as a moderate.  He has since fallen out of favor. Disqualified from running for the Assembly of Experts after 24 years of membership, Rouhani nonetheless cast his vote on election day.  Another former president, the reformist Mohammad Khatami was, according to the Reform Front coalition, among those who abstained from voting.

On his official website Khatami posted that Iran is “very far from free and competitive elections."

The head of Reform Front, Azar Mansouri, said she hoped the state would learn its lesson from the low turnout, and change the way it governed the nation.

The respected London-based think tank, Chatham House, maintains that these Iranian elections “should not be seen as a democratic exercise where people express their will at the ballot box.  As in many authoritarian countries, elections in Iran have long been used to legitimize the power and influence of the ruling elite.”  

The regime, it says, has failed to learn any lessons from the nationwide protests in 2022 following the Mahsa Amini affair, and the subsequent brutal government crackdown. Rather than attempting to build back popular legitimacy through inclusive elections, it concludes, the political establishment has prioritized a further consolidation of conservative power across both elected and unelected institutions.

 Confirming his reputation for turning the truth on its head, Supreme Leader Khamenei on March 5 hailed Iran’s elections as "great and epic", despite the boycott by a large majority of voters. “The Iranian nation did a jihad and fulfilled their social and civil duties,” he declared.

In response, reformist lawyer and former member of parliament Mahmoud Sadeghi tweeted: “Don’t the sixty percent who did not vote count as Iranians?”

          Writing from Tehran’s Evin prison, where he has spent more than eight years behind bars, dissident reformist politician Mostafa Tajzadeh, an outspoken critic of Khamenei, called the elections “engineered” and a “historic failure” of the system and of the Supreme Leader.

           Yet this perverse manipulation of the founding principle of Western democracy – free and fair elections – is how Iran’s regime maintains its unyielding grip on power.


Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Iran's take on democracy and the Irfanians that refused to play along", 11 May 2024:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-791226

The Houthis – holding the world to ransom

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 4 March 2024

             The Houthis – whose flag proclaims, among other things, “Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews” – operate from the chunk of west Yemen they have seized from Yemen’s internationally recognized government (IRG).  It is a well-populated area which contains the capital Sana’a and a great length of coastline bordering the Red Sea, including the vital port of Hodeidah.  For the past ten years the Houthis, intent on extending their grip to cover the whole country, have been locked in a civil war which, despite various well-intentioned peace brokering efforts, has so far resulted in a virtual stalemate. 

As a result, recently their standing among the hard-pressed Yemenis had been on the slide, and they had been competing for popular support against the IRG and the other main protagonist in the contest for supremacy in Yemen – the so-called Southern Transitional Council (STC).  Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, who founded the STC and is its president, has set his sights on establishing an independent state of South Yemen.

Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, and the subsequent massacre, provided the Houthis with a totally unexpected political advantage.

As the news of the attack broke, the Houthis – needing little prompting from their Iranian paymasters – virtually declared war on Israel in support.  It was no doubt at Iran’s behest that the Houthis went on to plan a series of assaults on Israel. Not all went according to plan. Three cruise missiles fired from Yemen on October 19 were intercepted by the US navy.  A drone attack launched on October 28 apparently went off-course and resulted in explosions inside Egypt.

Since then, claiming they are acting to force the international community to halt Israel’s offensive in Gaza, the Houthis have begun a campaign of missile and armed drone attacks on commercial ships transiting the Red Sea.  The maritime security coalition of more than 20 nations, Operation Prosperity Guardian, set up by the US in December has done nothing to deter them, nor has the deployment of EU and even Chinese maritime forces off the coast of Yemen.

In mid-January, following more than 20 Houthi attacks on commercial ships, the US and the UK led a 14-nation campaign to “degrade and deter” the Houthi attacks by striking Houthi missile and drone launch and storage facilities, extending this to associated targets such as radar and air defense installations. When this too proved ineffective, in late January they began attacking Houthi weaponry being prepared for launch against commercial shipping. By early February, US-led strikes had destroyed more than 100 missiles and launches, including anti-ship missiles, drones, radars, unmanned waterborne drones, and other equipment.

Whatever the effect of this on the Houthis’  total military capacity, there has been no appreciable reduction in their bellicose operations. They have, if anything, stepped up their aggressive activity.  On February 18 they conducted their first strike against the crew of a commercial ship, forcing them to abandon it.  Struck by a missile, the Belize-flagged, UK-registered vessel M/K Rubymar, slowly sank in the Red Sea on March 3.

The Houthi attacks, threatening freedom of navigation and global commerce, have led  many shipping lines to take the longer Europe-Far East route round South Africa, avoiding the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.  Rerouting traffic around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope can add anything from 12 to 20 days to the journey.

In the first half of February, according to the UN, the Suez Canal experienced a 42% drop in monthly transits and an 82% decrease in container tonnage compared to its peak in 2023. Meanwhile commercial vessels have been rerouting to the Cape of Good Hope for nearly two months, leading to a near doubling of vessel transits in the region and a 75% increase in trade volume. 

This failure of the world’s leading military powers to deter the Houthis still lacks a convincing explanation.  There is not even evidence that the Houthis have been resupplied by Iran, followed the degradation in their military hardware from Western action.  The US-led maritime coalition has intercepted numerous shipments from Iran, but whether additional deliveries to the Houthis are slipping through remains unknown.  The Houthis’ original stockpile of weaponry may have been far higher than originally estimated.

How should the West proceed?  One approach under consideration is to concentrate on reviving the peace talks between the warring parties in Yemen, pushing for a political settlement which would include an end to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Another is to escalate the attacks on the whole Houthi military machine and defeat them by overwhelming force.  How Iran might act in such a scenario is the great unknown.

The respected US think tank and research body, the Soufan Center, believes that as of the end of February, calls in Washington for a significant escalation directly against Houthi forces in Yemen have been gaining momentum. Prominent experts and some former US officials, it says, “are calling for US support for ground combat operations against the Houthis as the only means of forcing the movement to alter its policies.”

The argument runs that the US and its allies will have to threaten something more valuable to the Houthis than the prestige they derive from attacking commercial shipping. The only thing that reaches that threshold is Houthi control of Yemeni territory.  So consideration is being given to massively boosting the anti-Houthi forces engaged in the civil war.  It is appreciated that supporting a direct attack on Houthi-held territory would entail a great many risks.  Of greater significance is that it would add to the misery of the Yemeni population, already the victims of a massive humanitarian catastrophe.  

Yet despite the negative consequences, the Soufan Center believes that the perceived threat the Houthis now pose to US and Western vital interests virtually guarantees that calls for an alternative to the current approach will continue to gather strength.

There is a chink of hope.  When the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza comes to an end, as it must eventually do, the Houthis might seize the opportunity to withdraw from holding the world to ransom.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online title: "The Houthis are holding the world to ransom through the Red Sea attacks", 4 March 2024:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-790035

Published in Eurasia Review, 9 March 2024:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/09032024-the-houthis-are-holding-the-world-to-ransom-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 11 March 2024:

https://mpc-journal.org/the-houthis-are-holding-the-world-to-ransom/