Welcome back to another edition of My Take 5, your weekly wrap of top international stories. Rebels seize Damascus and oust long-time President Bashar al-Assad, South Korea experiences a suprise abortive martial law, deportation of Ukrainian children documented, India tries to reset ties with Bangladesh, and China-Taiwan tensions rise again. So let’s get to it.
Syrian spring?: In a dramatic turn of events, Syrian rebels ousted the country’s long-time leader Bashar al-Assad following a lightning offensive that saw them take Damascus within 10 days. Assad fled before the rebels could reach him and his Syrian army simply melted away. Assad has now been granted asylum by Russia. But the speed with which things unfolded have taken all geopolitical watchers by surprise. In hindsight it seems that Assad was left exposed after Russia was bogged down in Ukraine, Lebanese Hezbollah battered by its conflict with Israel, and Iran too stretched by its continuous support to its proxies fighting Tel Aviv over the last 14 months. Syrian rebels, most likely given the go-ahead by Turkey, saw an opportunity to oust the Assad regime and took it.
But Assad’s dramatic collapse leads to more questions. First, what comes next for Syria? There are multiple rebel groups that don’t always work together. The strongest of them that led the offensive against the Assad regime, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is Islamist in its orientation and originated from the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda. Plus, there are also the remnants of the Islamic State hanging around. Given Syria’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious composition – including the Kurds who seek their own autonomous territory – there is a real danger of Syria becoming Balkanised.
That said, Turkey is the clear winner here given that it has some influence over the rebels who have taken Damascus. Iran and Russia are the big losers since Assad was their key strategic ally. While Iran’s embassy in Damascus has been vandalised, Russia is already moving its military assets out of Syria. This in turn is bound to have an impact on eventual negotiations to end the Ukraine war – Moscow’s Syrian loss weakens its negotiating position. Also recall that Turkey supports Crimea’s return to Ukraine. Besides, none of this would have precipitated without Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon. Which begs the question: Is this the reason the US has been backing Netanyahu to strategically undermine Russia and Iran in West Asia? Moscow and Tehran have just received a huge body-blow.
South Korea’s abortive martial law: Taking the international community by surprise, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a shock martial law for his country that was mercifully reversed by the Korean National Assembly within hours. Dramatic scenes unfolded in Seoul with lawmakers, their aides and ordinary people rushing to the national legislature to overturn the martial law decree. They then delayed and thwarted Korean security forces from entering the National Assembly so that the vote to cancel President Yoon’s decision could go ahead. That vote was passed unanimously, including with support of President Yoon’s own ruling party legislators. Since the Korean constitution allows the National Assembly to cancel martial law decrees through majority vote, Yoon was left with no choice but to take back his misguided move. There are now calls for his impeachment, a vote on which he avoided last Saturday after ruling party legislators walked out.
But equally bizarre is what precipitated this situation. Yoon was reportedly livid that the opposition-controlled parliament was stonewalling his policy agenda and had railroaded a pared-down annual budget. He also accused the opposition of targeting a senior member of his administration with impeachment proceedings. Of course, none of this justifies martial law – the first to be declared in Republic of Korea in four decades. It rattled South Korean businesses, shook Seoul’s Western allies, and gave North Korea – perhaps even China – something to gloat over. Given the strategic powerplays building up in East Asia, with the region bracing for Trump’s return, the episode is certainly not a good one for regional democracies and their preparations to take on an assertive China-North Korea-Russia axis.
Deportation of Ukrainian children: On December 3, the Yale Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab released a report on ‘Russia’s Systematic Programme of Coerced Adoption and Fostering of Ukraine’s Children’. The report identifies 314 individual children from Ukraine who have been placed in Russia’s systematic programme of coerced adoption and fostering following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It also found that at least 67 of the 314 children have been naturalised as Russian citizens. This follows changes in Russian law that allows Russian guardians of the minors to apply for Russian citizenship for them. All but one of the children identified in the report were taken from occupied eastern Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Luhansk where a Russia-backed separatist movement had existed before the full-scale invasion. Most of the children were also taken from institutions meant for orphans or those without parental care.
In fact, the report says that Russia uses this pretext of the children being ‘abandoned’ to illegally transfer them to Russia and list them on adoption databases or place them directly with Russian citizens. Moreover, the report states that aircraft directly under the Russian President’s office were used in the illegal transfer of children. Plus, there are also strong indications that many of these children were not actually orphaned and may have living relatives in Ukraine and were placed with institutions because of their families’ dire economic circumstances.
The report assumes salience on two counts. First, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrant for Putin in March 2023 for the war crime of forced deportation of Ukrainian children. Second, the report’s authors believe that their findings are only the tip of the iceberg and that Russia has illegally deported and placed thousands of Ukrainian children in the Russian adoption and foster care system. According to Ukraine, at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported to Russia – about 1,000 have returned thanks to the efforts of a coalition of countries to bring back Ukrainian kids. This is a pressing humanitarian matter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, through an exclusive interview to The Times of India (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/there-cant-be-neutrality-between-aggressor-victim-it-only-means-youre-with-russia-zelenskyy/articleshow/114668253.cms) had appealed to India to help return Ukrainian children. New Delhi should step up and answer this humanitarian call, and help bring back Ukrainian children.
India’s foreign secy in Bangladesh: In the first high-level visit from India to Bangladesh after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri met with his Bangladeshi counterpart and Bangladesh’s chief adviser Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka. Misri is reported to have raised the issue of safety of minority communities in Bangladesh amid reports of attacks on houses, commercial properties and places of worship of the Hindu community there. But he also said that India was willing to work with Bangladesh’s government of the day in a positive and constructive manner, highlighting the multifaceted relationship between the two sides.
That said, there’s no denying that India finds itself in a bind over Bangladesh. Its concerns over the safety of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh are legitimate. But it must also realise that there were missteps on its part too. The perception that had developed in Bangladesh that India only backed the Hasina government and the Awami League was not without reason. New Delhi should have worked to counter this perception and broadbase its engagements when it had the chance. Second, the political rhetoric in India about illegal Bangladeshi migrants did not go down well in Bangladesh and contributed to feelings of ill-will towards New Delhi. Political issues in India have always had an impact in Bangladesh, but Indian politicians somehow seemed to have forgotten this. It is because of these mistakes that India finds itself in this position vis-à-vis Bangladesh today. New Delhi now has to rebuild the relationship from scratch. We need a friendly Bangladesh as much as Bangladesh needs a friendly India. With Pakistan looking to take advantage of the situation, New Delhi’s task will be that much harder.
China deploys navy around Taiwan: China has deployed its largest naval fleet – a total of 90 ships – in waters around Taiwan since its 1996 war games in the region. Further, China this time hasn’t clarified that it is carrying out military drills. The naval presence – accompanied by military aircraft sorties – is clearly aimed at putting pressure on Taiwan and its allies. Last week, Taiwan’s President William Lai had embarked on a tour of Pacific allies with stopovers in the US territories of Hawaii and Guam. This had apparently irked Beijing. China deploying its navy around Taiwan without any announcement seems to be a message to the US that it will do whatever it likes in these waters. In fact, Beijing is trying to project the move as its own internal matter, and therefore, sans the need to inform anyone. In other words, Beijing wants to say that Taiwan and the waters around it are internal Chinese territories.
But there may also be another reason. Given that Russia, Iran, China and North Korea appear to have formed a compact, recent developments in Syria, which constitute a blow for Moscow and Tehran, need to be compensated for. Hence, China may be projecting power in the east to cover for its partners’ losses in the west. This smells like World War III on slow burn.
