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Yves here. For those of us on the other side of the pond, the Labour wipeout seems hard to fathom. The Tories ran a shambolic Brexit and many businesses are taking it in the teeth as a result. But Labour seems to have acted as if it were due a win as a matter of right. The resurgence of Blairites in the form of Kier Starmer and the mean-spirited treatment of Corbyn and his followers (who did deny Theresa May what the Tories had expected to be a seismic win in the 2016 snap election) disgusted some once-loyal backers. And as UK-based readers discussed in comments to yesterday’s Links, the Tories played a ruthless ground game. For instance, from Terry Flynn:
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“You have not seen Mount Ararat how I saw it growing up. I promise, one day I will take you back home.”
Since childhood, my grandfather grew up listening to these words of his great-grandfather, Baghdasar, who fled to Armenia with his family during the 1915 genocide.
My grandfather recollects how Baghdasar would tell stories of their home in Bayazet, or Doğubeyazıt in modern Turkey, in the shadow of Mount Ararat, and promise his grandchildren that one day they would return to their home. In 1915, to save his family from the massacres, Baghdasar closed the doors of his house, crossed the Araks River, which flows along the borders of Armenia and Turkey, and ended up in the Armenian city of Gavar. According to my grandfather, when Baghdasar died, he still had the key to his old house in his pocket.
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Ten years ago, Kazakhstan’s western region of Mangystau was swept by a series of oil workers’ strikes. The mobilisation lasted for more than six months and, at its peak in summer 2011, several thousand workers were involved. The epicentre was Zhanaozen, a city of 150,000 built in the 1960s next to Uzen’, a now-ageing oilfield that was once the country’s largest.
Throughout 2011, labour relations worsened to the extent that the resulting slump in production started to show on company balance sheets. On 16 December, the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence, clashes erupted between the authorities and striking workers. At least 16 civilians died and hundreds were wounded by police fire. Three dozen workers, union leaders and protesters were sentenced for the violence, while the authorities barred any independent investigation of the events, which the former UK prime minister Tony Blair later helped spin internationally.
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Two months ago, with the war in Yemen entering its seventh year, the UN secretary general, in his appeal to funders at the annual pledging conference, reminded everyone that “More than 16 million people [in the country] are expected to go hungry this year. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions. The worst hunger is in areas affected by the conflict.”
Yemen today has a population of 30 million people, with three million currently displaced. They are either hosted by relatives or in camps and informal settlements where they are dependent on humanitarian supplies since there is no employment and they are far from their lands. Another million have returned home after various periods of displacement.