(LONDON) — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the U.S. and Britain would retain and enhance their special relationship once the U.K. leaves the European Union this week. He also said that American unhappiness with the British decision to allow the Chinese tech company Huawei to play a role in the country’s high-speed wireless network would not affect broader ties.
As President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial neared a close in Washington, Pompeo met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to re-register American concerns about Huawei. But he stressed that he expected they could be addressed as more details emerge on what limits will be placed on the company and with advances in communications technology.
Pompeo played down concerns that Huawei’s presence in Britain’s 5G network would severely disrupt intelligence sharing within the so-called “Five Eyes” partnership of English-speaking nations that includes the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“That relationship is deep. It is strong, it will remain,” Pompeo said at an event with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab before meeting Johnson. “I am confident that as we work together to figure out how to implement this decision that we’ll work to get this right.”
“We were trying to make the case, as we made the case with every country in the world, that we think putting Huawei technology anywhere in your system is very, very difficult to mitigate and therefore not worth the gamble,” he said.
“But as we move forward together to make sure that next generation of technology is right, is secure and operates a under a Western set of values and system, we’ll get to the right place,” Pompeo said.
A State Department spokesman said the talks with Johnson focused on “strengthening bilateral ties” and “the importance of maintaining the integrity of communications networks.”
The U.S. has been lobbying European allies to ban Huawei over concerns it could be compelled to help with electronic eavesdropping after Beijing enacted a 2017 national intelligence law. U.S. officials also worry that 5G networks would rely heavily on software, leaving them open to vulnerabilities, and have repeatedly warned they would have to reconsider intelligence sharing with allies that use Huawei. The company has denied the allegations.
On Tuesday, Britain decided to let Huawei have a limited role supplying new high-speed network equipment to wireless carriers, ignoring Washington’s warnings that it would sever intelligence sharing if the company wasn’t banned.
Britain’s decision was the first by a major U.S. ally in Europe, and follows intense lobbying from the Trump administration as the U.S. vies with China for technological dominance.
Huawei is not expected to greatly affect negotiations on a post-Brexit free trade deal that Britain is counting on after its divorce from the EU on Friday. Trump has pledged that the U.S. and Britain will negotiate a major free-trade deal as soon as Brexit is complete and officials have already begun discussions on the plan.
Pompeo said that the U.S. would put Britain “at the front of the line” in its trade relationships and that the Trump administration had great confidence in the British people as they move ahead outside of the EU framework. He said he expected U.S.-British trade ties to exponentially increase once Britain is freed from EU commercial restrictions.
Pompeo is in London on the first leg of a trip to Europe and Central Asia that will also take him to Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The centerpiece of the trip will be a two-day stop in Ukraine that begins later Thursday when Pompeo will become the most senior U.S. official to visit Kyiv and meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky since the impeachment process began last year.
Ukraine is at the center of the impeachment charges against Trump who is accused of obstructing Congress and abuse of office for withholding critical military aid to the country in exchange for an investigation into alleged corruption by the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival. Those allegations got a boost earlier this week when a manuscript of former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming book was revealed to echo the claim.
The Senate is expected to vote on hearing impeachment witnesses, including possibly Bolton, on Friday. Bolton maintains that Trump was in fact withholding the aid in exchange for a public pledge of a probe into Biden as witnesses testified before the House impeachment inquiry.
Ukraine has been delicate subject for Pompeo, who over the weekend lashed out at a National Public Radio reporter for asking questions about why he has not publicly defended the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post early after unsubstantiated allegations were made against her by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani.
Pompeo has twice postponed earlier planned trips to Ukraine, most recently in early January when developments with Iran forced him to cancel. In Kyiv, Pompeo said he plans to discuss the issue of corruption but demurred when asked if he would specifically raise the Bidens or the energy company Burisma for which Hunter Biden worked.
“I don’t want to talk about particular individuals. It’s not worth it,” he told reporters aboard his plane to London. “It’s a long list in Ukraine of corrupt individuals and a long history there. And President Zelenskiy has told us he’s committed to it. The actions he’s taken so far demonstrate that, and I look forward to having a conversation about that with him as well.”
(JOHANNESBURG) — The worst locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in 70 years needs some $76 million to help control and the money is “required by, actually, now,” the United Nations said Thursday.
So far just $15 million has been mobilized to help stop the outbreak that threatens to worsen an already poor hunger situation for millions of people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and elsewhere, Dominique Bourgeon, emergencies director with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, told a briefing in Rome.
“You can imagine that a country that has not seen such a thing in 70 years is not well prepared,” he said of Kenya, East Africa’s economic hub.
The outbreak, blamed in part on a changing climate, now threatens to spread to South Sudan and Uganda and new rains in the weeks to come will fuel fresh vegetation and a new wave of breeding. The outbreak might not be under control until June when drier weather arrives, authorities have said.
But by then the number of locusts, if left unchecked, could grow 500 times, experts have warned.
“If after April the money has come, it’s somehow useless,” FAO chief Qu Dongyu told the briefing. “So the timing, location, is crucial.”
Already the locusts, moving in swarms of hundreds of millions, have stripped some crops bare. An Ethiopian representative at the briefing told the FAO that some farmers in Africa’s second most populous nation have lost 90% of their production.
The locusts have been moving steadily toward Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, the country’s breadbasket, the U.N. says.
Authorities have said aerial pesticide spraying is the only effective control in the outbreak, but officials in Kenya and elsewhere have said more planes and more pesticide are needed.
A single swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer of farmland, an area the size of almost 250 football fields, regional authorities say. One especially large swarm in northeastern Kenya measured 60 kilometers long by 40 kilometers wide (37 miles long by 25 miles wide).
“We depend a lot on this season and we worry that the locusts will destroy our harvest and we end up remaining hungry through the rest of the year, waiting for October for the next cropping season,” one farmer in Kenya’s Kitui county, Esther Kithuka, has told the FAO.
Even before this outbreak, nearly 20 million people faced high levels of food insecurity across the East African region long challenged by periodic droughts and floods.
(TOKYO) — Tokyo prosecutors issued an arrest warrant Thursday for Nissan’s former chairman Carlos Ghosn, who skipped bail while awaiting trial in Japan and is now in Lebanon.
Japan has no extradition treaty with Lebanon, so he’s unlikely to be arrested. Lebanon has indicated it will not hand over Ghosn.
Tokyo prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for three Americans they said helped and planned his escape, Michael Taylor, George-Antoine Zayek and Peter Taylor.
Deputy Chief Prosecutor Takahiro Saito declined to say where the three men were thought to be staying. He said Michael Taylor and George Zayek are suspected of helping Ghosn flee by hiding him in cargo at a Japanese airport and getting him into a private jet to leave the country.
Saito would not say if Japan has asked U.S. authorities for help, though he said all options were being explored. Japan and the U.S. have an extradition treaty.
Michael Taylor is a former Green Beret and private security specialist. Peter Taylor appears to be his son. Security footage released earlier showed Zayek and Taylor transiting Istanbul Airport at the same time Ghosn allegedly passed through Turkey on his way to Beirut.
Prosecutors suspect Peter Taylor met several times with Ghosn in Tokyo, starting in July last year, to plot his escape. Saito said Ghosn was given a key to a hotel room in Osaka near the Kansai Airport that Ghosn left from.
Prosecutors say Ghosn broke the law by violating bail conditions that required him to stay in Japan, mostly at his Tokyo home.
“We want to stress that the act of fleeing was clearly wrong,” Saito told reporters. “We need to erase the misunderstanding.”
Separately, Saito said prosecutors on Wednesday forced open a lock to search the Tokyo office of Ghosn’s former defense lawyer Junichiro Hironaka for records of people Ghosn met with while out on bail, and other materials. Prosecutors are asking a judge for help in accessing contents of a computer Ghosn used at Hironaka’s office that the lawyer has refused to hand over, citing attorney-client privilege.
Ghosn has said he is innocent of allegations he under-reported his future income and committed a breach of trust by diverting Nissan money for his personal gain. He says the compensation was never decided on or received, and the Nissan payments were for legitimate business purposes.
Ghosn has lashed out at the Japanese judicial system, saying he fled because he could not expect a fair trial, was subjected to unfair conditions in detention and was barred from meeting his wife under his bail conditions.
He contends others at Nissan Motor Co., which he led for two decades, drove him out to prevent a fuller merger with its French alliance partner Renault.
Ghosn’s dramatic escape, while under the watch of surveillance cameras inside and outside his home is an embarrassment for Japanese authorities.
He is believed to have traveled by train to Osaka and then left via Kansai Airport, reportedly by hiding in a box for audio or musical equipment. Ghosn has not shared specifics of his escape.
The maximum penalty under Japanese law for illegally leaving the country is one year in prison or 300,000 yen ($2,750) in fines, or both. The maximum penalty for hiding a criminal or helping a criminal escape is three years in prison or 300,000 yen ($2,750) in fines.
In the battle over the next generation of telecommunications, China is winning. On Jan. 28, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided not to ban hardware made by the market-leading Chinese firm Huawei as the U.K. builds out its infrastructure for 5G wireless technology. The choice was a blow to the Trump Administration, which has waged a monthslong campaign to persuade allies to shun Huawei–and just lost its closest ally.
Sensitive Topic
Although Johnson needs a post-Brexit trade deal with the U.S., he also promised voters a revolution in Internet speed and coverage. His decision not to ban Huawei–despite warnings of the risk of spying by Beijing–reflects the importance states are placing on the competitive advantage in Internet infrastructure. Huawei is to be limited to a maximum 35% role in the periphery of the U.K.’s 5G network, away from “sensitive” sites like nuclear plants. But on Jan. 29, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo still urged Britain to reconsider its decision.
Risky Business
In Germany, the same trade-off between economic growth and security is clear, with an added current of fear over Chinese retaliation. (An estimated 900,000 German jobs depend on exports to China.) “I don’t think we can quickly build a 5G network in Germany without Huawei taking part,” German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Jan. 18. And while new E.U. guidelines allow members to exclude “high-risk” 5G providers, they stop short of recommending a ban on Huawei.
New Era
For the past century or more, the cutting edge of technology has been dominated by the U.S. and its allies. Now, thanks to years of research and design subsidized by the Chinese government, Huawei’s hardware is cheaper and faster than that of its rivals. That could have lasting effects across the board for U.S. diplomacy. And as China’s sway grows, the Washington-London link is unlikely to be the only “special relationship” to come under strain.
“We just stay home and don’t go out,” says Mr. Dong. The 33-year-old researcher, who provided only one name, has no other options. He, his wife and their 3-month-old daughter live in Wuhan, the epicenter of an unfolding global health crisis. They’re treating the forced time at home as a holiday, though he says, “this is different than any of them before.” Families like his huddle in their homes, fearful that if they venture out, they will get sick. Since the first cases of a previously unknown pneumonia-like illness emerged in December, Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, has frozen in place. Ten-lane thoroughfares lie empty after a ban on personal cars, and buses and subways sit silent. Lunar New Year 2020 was stripped of its traditional fireworks, boisterous gatherings around overflowing tables of food and drink, and happy reunions with family and friends.
As researchers and public-health officials scramble to learn as much as they can about the new virus–how easily it transmits among people, and how deadly it is–fears swamp this city of 11 million. The disease responsible is caused by a coronavirus that’s never infected people before. Conflicting advice about how infectious the virus might be are swirling through the Internet, along with misinformation about exactly where the virus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, came from. Hospitals in Wuhan are besieged by the sick, and only a handful of clinics are able to test for the disease.
Coronaviruses make up a family of viruses that live mainly in animals (bats are a favorite) but also includes strains that contribute to the common cold in people. Only recently have they become more threatening, causing two deadly global pandemics in the past two decades–severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002 and 2003, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012. Each new outbreak adds a fresh urgency to the question of whether public-health officials could be doing more to confront the threat from emerging infections in general, and coronaviruses in particular.
The numbers will have climbed by the time you read this, but as of Jan. 29, the new virus had claimed at least 133 lives and sickened more than 6,000 people across 18 countries, including at least five cases in the U.S. While the World Health Organization (WHO) has not declared a “public-health emergency of international concern”–which would entail more stringent monitoring and containment of infected people–China’s President Xi Jinping is treating it as a national emergency. He ordered an unprecedented quarantine of Wuhan, banning travel in and out of the city on Jan. 22; a few days later, he extended the quarantine to a dozen cities in Hubei province. Xi also took the unusual step of extending the official Lunar New Year holiday to discourage millions from traveling back to work and further seeding new infections around China.
Faster than the virus itself, fear has spread around the globe. In the U.S., designated airports quickly instituted screening programs to identify passengers on Wuhan-originating flights with signs of fever, cough or difficulty breathing, and to immediately direct them to hospital isolation wards. Numerous airlines canceled flights to and from China. Asian stock markets that weren’t closed for the Lunar New Year plummeted. In the U.S., Europe and Asia, shortages of surgical face masks were reported.
The emergence of a powerful new infectious virus for which there is (as yet) no vaccine should scare us, of course. But at the same time, humans are better equipped to fight these kinds of outbreaks than ever before. New technologies, specifically ones that make possible the sequencing of any living thing’s genetic blueprint, are finally giving us a meaningful advantage over microbes. We can map the genome of a virus, for example, which provides valuable clues about how it spreads and helps us figure out how our immune systems can best battle it. The finest scientific minds are doing just that with coronaviruses in the hope that epidemics do not have a chance to mushroom into pandemics.
The question now is how quickly we can transmit that knowledge to every corner of the world, especially to China, where in some places the flow of information is tightly controlled by a paranoid state. Researchers in London and Hong Kong have already warned that Beijing has dramatically underestimated the number of cases in Wuhan. “For any disease outbreak, the best strategy is transparency,” says Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the New York City–based Council on Foreign Relations. “Even taking into account the potential for panic, you need people to be prepared.” With a government as opaque as China’s, can we be sure that we are?
Coronaviruses are not rare. In fact, you might have one right now. Depending on the year, anywhere from 10% to 30% of the annual burden of colds can be blamed on one of four coronaviruses. That’s why, until the early 2000s, the scientific community treated coronaviruses primarily as nuisances and paid relatively little attention to them. “Twenty years ago, people weren’t thinking in terms of coronaviruses being potential causes of pandemics or respiratory disease,” says Dr. Ian Lipkin, director of the center for infection and immunity at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
That changed in 2002, when SARS first emerged from China. Of the 8,000 people ultimately confirmed to have the respiratory disease, up to 10% died, waking public-health experts to the dangers of a virus that had jumped from bats to cats and dogs, and then to people. In Wuhan, officials believe 2019-nCoV made such a leap inside the city’s Huanan market. Rows of blue stalls housed countless purveyors of exotic, wild animals for consumption. “I saw live hedgehogs, porcupines, that kind of thing,” says Alan Laine, 57, a physics teacher from the U.K. who has lived in Wuhan since 2002. “It wasn’t exactly hidden.” The market has been shuttered since Jan. 1, though officials in white hazmat suits continued to sift through evidence when TIME visited on Jan. 22.
Movement across species is what makes virus experts nervous. Because of their sloppy genetic copying, viruses mutate all the time. By chance, the new aberrations sometimes make a strain more adept at living in a new host–and in some cases, those changes make it more virulent as well.
In some respects, the outbreak in Wuhan might have been inevitable. Ralph Baric, professor of epidemiology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on the genetic sequences of coronaviruses, has worked with Chinese researchers since 2002 to better understand this family of microbes and how its members infect human cells to cause major respiratory symptoms.
From bats, Baric and his team extracted a series of coronaviruses that varied genetically from SARS by anywhere from 2% to 12%. Those differences hinted that some were primed to jump from bats to people, and cause serious disease. His findings should have rung alarm bells, he says. “We made strong predictions that these coronaviruses were poised for re-emergence in human populations.” In December, that prediction came true, when a mysterious pneumonia-like illness began spreading in the city of Wuhan.
It’s not a mystery how authorities should respond to a new infectious disease; by and large, it’s been the same for thousands of years. Since typhoid fever struck Athens in 430 B.C.–among the first recorded outbreaks–to the black plague in Europe during the 1300s, and the more contemporary 1918 influenza pandemic, isolation and quarantine have been the most effective ways to contain a highly contagious infectious agent and prevent it from decimating an entire population of people.
Yet in China, those lessons weren’t always followed, despite the recent legacy of SARS. Although scientists in China quickly identified the new coronavirus, public-health officials were slow to advise people about how best to protect themselves. It took President Xi nearly a month after the first cases emerged in Wuhan to finally address the health crisis publicly, and local health officials say that delay tied their hands. As Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang explained on CCTV on Jan. 27, “As a local official, I could only disclose information after being authorized [by the central government]. A lot of people don’t understand this.” Indeed, the wife of a doctor in a Wuhan hospital told TIME that her husband had been instructed not to discuss the coronavirus situation and the government’s response with anyone.
The top-down leadership structure of Xi’s government leaves local health departments with little authority to issue alerts or take any action, snarling public health and politics at the expense of human lives. Train conductors were reportedly initially told not to wear masks to avoid generating more panic among passengers, just days before the entire rail system was shut down. “People didn’t realize the severity of the situation,” says a graphic designer from Wuhan who provided only her last name, Tao. “They thought the virus was controllable and not contagious. The government did not publish the facts in time, and they failed to control the epidemic.”
The swing from downplaying the initial cases to the extreme policies now in place fueled outbursts on the social-media network Weibo: “The common people are suffering. We don’t really have democracy here, and we are deprived of the right of telling the truth,” wrote one Weibo user on Jan. 28. Another, on the same day, went further, seeing the outbreak as a harbinger of the future of the Chinese state. “The virus outbreak exposes the truth. It is a wake-up call: our country is not as strong as we expected, our system is not as superior as TV describes.”
Xi’s government has done at least one indisputably effective thing to help battle the virus. On Jan. 10, it posted online a scientific paper containing the genetic blueprint of 2019-nCoV. The prompt release of the sequence won Xi plaudits in the global health community, since it allowed teams around the world to begin breaking down the ingredients of the infection and figuring out how to fight it.
When SARS hit, the sequencing of the human genome was costly and cumbersome; in part because of that, in 2002, it took the Beijing government five months to release what it did in just a few days in 2020. Today, the technology is cheap and routine and is already speeding detection of new cases. When the first potential case of 2019-nCoV appeared in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was able to confirm the fingerprint of the new coronavirus overnight, from the patient’s sample sent to the agency. The CDC also plans to ship testing kits to health departments, both in the U.S. and abroad, to enable them to quickly confirm coronavirus infections and distinguish them from the current seasonal flu.
Diagnosing a disease is one thing, but treating it is another, and creating a vaccine or drug will take longer. To find out exactly which proteins the virus is using to wreak havoc requires making high-quality synthetic DNA from the viral genome, something only a few companies are able to do in a process that takes around 10 days. Then researchers need to make proteins from that DNA. Without those proteins from the viral genome, you can’t test which antibodies or drug compounds might counteract them. “The [genetic] code on a screen doesn’t get you things to work with on the bench,” says Karla Satchell, co-director of the center for structural genomics of infectious diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Scientists shouldn’t be relying on private companies in this way, says Andrew Mesecar, a coronavirus researcher and head of biochemistry at Purdue University, who researches coronaviruses. He is currently working on a solution: he and his team have studied the proteins, or enzymes, that different strains of coronavirus use to replicate in human cells, and developed 50 compounds that can inhibit their activity, essentially blocking the virus from causing infection. “My idea is to have an [IBM] Watson of drug discovery,” he says. “As soon as we get the sequence information for a new disease-causing virus, I can feed the computer the information, and it will say you should try these compounds off the shelf to start. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming, and I hope this is realized in my lifetime.”
Yet even if researchers identify a potential drug for 2019-nCoV, testing its safety and efficacy will take months. To speed that process up, scientists are tapping some new technologies. For example, stem cells can be coaxed to churn out high volumes of human lung cells in order to study how a virus like 2019-nCoV interacts with them. And three-dimensional cell cultures, which mimic in a lab dish the physical and molecular environment in the human body, could substitute for some early human safety studies, making for a more affordable and efficient way to test how safe a treatment might be.
Advances like these make some in the field hopeful that the public-health response could be better this time around. “Twitter and everything was lighting up on Friday night [Jan. 10] that the genetic sequence of the virus was posted,” says Mesecar. “We analyzed the first one that Saturday morning. Within 20 minutes of having the sequence, I knew it was very close to SARS. That’s when I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this could be as virulent as SARS.’ That tells you right away that you had better act like this is SARS.”
There is still a lot about the Wuhan coronavirus that researchers don’t know, however. It’s not clear how easily the virus spreads from person to person or how long its incubation period is, and there are reports from Chinese health officials that it can be spread by someone who is infected but doesn’t have any symptoms of the illness. The CDC and other health agencies are trying to confirm that right now. Both U.S. and Chinese scientists are also working on developing a vaccine for 2019-nCoV, relying on some of the genetic knowledge they gathered from SARS.
All the science in the world still might not be a match for human nature, however, as personal fears often take precedence over the public good–especially during an unfolding outbreak when health officials don’t have all the answers. When Jacob Wilson, who runs a media company in Wuhan, first felt his throat get scratchy on Jan. 21, he wasn’t concerned. The 33-year-old from Alexandria, La., hadn’t visited the seafood market that was being targeted as the source of the outbreak, and health authorities in Wuhan said the new mysterious pneumonia-like illness wasn’t passed between humans. Reassured, Wilson continued going to work. “But for the next three days I had a fever and dry cough, which turned into an upper-respiratory infection, sneezing, runny nose and then muscle soreness, weakness and sharp pains throughout my chest,” he says. Unsure whether he was infected with 2019-nCoV or the flu, he decided to wait it out rather than brave a potentially infectious line of people at the hospital for several hours. “It just seemed absolutely terrifying and unsafe,” he says.
Even if he had gone to the hospital, he might not have learned if he had 2019-nCoV; only four medical centers in the entire city had kits to test for the virus at the time. He turned instead to his mother, a nurse in the U.S., who prescribed antiviral and asthma medications that improved his symptoms after about a week.
He and the roughly 50 million people stuck in Hubei province are still facing a quarantine period that looks likely to drag into weeks and possibly months, as the numbers of infections and deaths creep higher. With workplaces shuttered, and no way to earn money, locals are counting their meals–and trying to remain positive. “This break is peace and quiet,” says Dong. “People may feel bored, but I enjoy this holiday.” Until science offers a better remedy, the people of Wuhan must cling to those simplest of defenses: hope and hiding
A new virus has emerged from central China, infecting thousands with severe respiratory illness and killing dozens. Health officials, doctors and researchers are scrambling to contain the outbreak
The gunshots began in the middle of the night late in 2018. Ali Bakara, a twenty-eight-year old mother of eight, was jolted awake. It was three o’clock in the morning in her village near Maiduguri, in northern Nigeria. “They kept shooting until nine o’clock,” she remembered. When it was finally safe to leave the house, Ali and her family saw smoldering homes, burned by militants.
Her home state of Borno had long suffered from Islamist violence at the hands of Boko Haram and its offshoots, including the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, or ISWAP, which split from Boko Haram a decade ago. The militant groups routinely massacre, torture and rape civilians as they seek to control areas of land and govern them as independent entities that hew to their extreme interpretations of Islam. More than30,000 peoplehave been killed in the decades-long insurgency. In mid-December, four kidnapped aid workers for the group Action Against Hunger were executed by ISWAP in the border city of Damasak.
Ali’s husband, Issa, a driver, decided that they should leave Maiduguri with their children. “The next night, we left silently, on foot.” They fled north like many before them, toward Niger, the country that borders Nigeria to the north. At the town of Damasak, they were able to climb aboard a pickup heading toward Niger, but one of their children fell from the vehicle and died. Now they have spent a year waiting in a refugee camp in Niger with little to do. “We’re just sitting here, hoping for some kind of way to make a living,” Ali told me. “We can never go home.”
I traveled to Niger in December with the United Nations’ Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Ursula Mueller, who was in the country to review U.N. humanitarian programs and build relationships with the Nigerien authorities. The country hosts almost half a million refugees, despite the fact it ranks last on the U.N.’s human development index, which ranks countries on per capita income, life expectancy and levels of education. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have traversed its deserts seeking a better life in Europe over the last decade—in just five months, from February to June, 2016,the International Organization for Migration recorded more than 168,000 migrantsheading north out of two of Niger’s Saharan transit towns.
Now Niger itself is reaching a crisis point. A series of Islamist insurgencies, linked to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, has boiled across the country for the past five years. In the last few months, jihadi assaults have intensified. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a non-profit that monitors violence globally, said that the number of attackshad doubledin the country in the last year.
In the last two months, Niger has suffered two of the worst assaults on its military forces in living memory. In December, while I was in the country, ISWAP assaulted a military base at In Atès, killing 71 Nigerien soldiers. On January 9, at least 89 soldiers were killed in an assault at Chinagodrar, in the country’s west, and France’s air force had to scramble to ward off the attackers. (ISWAPlater claimed responsibility.) In the aftermath, Niger’s president fired the head of the army. At a Jan. 13summit in France, Sahelian countries pledged to reinforce security cooperation, and French President Emmanuel Macron promised to send 220 more French troops to the region.
***
Giles ClarkeRough sand tracks snake off into the distance in southern Niger.
I met Bakara at a refugee settlement in the southeastern Diffa region of Niger. The Diffa region alone hosts 260,000 refugees and displaced persons. Mud-brick houses, homes fashioned of bundled wood and temporary shelters stretch into the distance. As we spoke, two boys flew a kite made from the scraps of a garbage bag, hovering like a black spirit in the bright blue sky. Women collected water from a well and carried it back to their homes atop their heads in metal basins painted with the slogan “Unity and Faith,” and then underneath, “Nigeria.”
Awaridi, as the refugee settlement is called, crouches on a vast, flat plain of dust. Here, some 9,000 refugees and displaced people have built temporary lives. Some have lived there as long as five years now, waiting for something to improve. Many of the camp’s 5,000 or so internally displaced have fled Niger’s worst flooding in a hundred years. As climate change intensifies, weather patterns in this part of the world swing between ever-widening extremes of drought and intense heat. Across the country, 19,000 homes have been destroyed and almost a quarter of a million people affected. Around Diffa, the flooding has filled undulations of dry shrubscape into surreal, glistening pools of water, boiling in the West African sun.
Awaridi is not an official refugee camp, and the residents say the conditions are difficult, despite help from U.N. agencies, which helped provide water and other services for the settlement, and international humanitarian organizations who have provided latrines and cash distributions. “We have nothing here, nothing,” said Souley Gueré, a herder who fled Boko Haram violence in Niger’s easterly province of Bosso, on the shores of Lake Chad. “When we want to eat, our wives go in the town and do small jobs, pounding millet or washing clothes, and then come back with food. We have no proper houses, no food, nothing at all.”
“For eight months there has been no food,” Aboucar Malam Madou, a flinty 59-year-old farmer, told me. He explained that he had fled the town of Abadam, which straddles Niger’s thinly policed border with Nigeria, when Islamists attacked it six years ago. “I saw them shooting soldiers and burning their cars.”
He left his 20 cattle and bounced from town to town until he arrived in Awaridi. He has now been in the camp since April. “If we have food and then places on which we can farm, then we will have solutions to all of those other problems.”
***
Giles ClarkeNigerien Army troops on patrol in southern Niger, close to the Nigerian border.
Niger sits at the center of the Sahel, the vast dry shore of scrubland that separates the plains and jungles of Central Africa from the dune seas of the Sahara Desert. In recent years, a tide of weapons and violence has swept through the region, exacerbated by extremist interpretations of Islam, unresolved rivalries between different communities and ethnic groups, and the dividends that the smuggling of sub-Saharan Africans north to Europe has brought to criminal and armed groups.
The assault at In-Atès, in northwestern Niger, happened shortly after I met Bakara at Awaridi. News soon filtered through that ISWAP had claimed the attack. The militants used a drone, hovering over the base, to target a mortar attack and hit a fuel tank during evening prayers. “ISWAP has been using commercial drones for observation for some time,” said Vincent Foucher, an expert on Boko Haram atthe French National Centre for Science Research, saying that it mirrored attacks in Northern Nigeria.The militants had surrounded the base, and in the confusion that followed, began massacring the soldiers. Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, cut short an official visit to Egypt, and a meeting involving France and other countries in the region was postponed.
An international security source in the capital, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told me the soldiers had been based in an “indefensible” position, with a low wall around the base providing little protection from the militants. “Thirteen local leaders have been killed this year; we know exactly what the rebels are trying to do,” the source said. “Firstly, they are making the whole area inhospitable by carrying out these attacks, and then they step in to provide essential services. They want people to say that the government is doing nothing for us, and that the jihadists are more effective.”
The violence is exacerbating the problems of poverty in a region that can ill afford it. In Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, some 2,000 schoolshave been closedsince 2017 due to the ongoing violence. Niger, despite consistently ranking as one of the world’s poorest countries, spends a large portion of its small budget—2.5 percent of GDP—on its military. “That leaves not that much for education, for agricultural activities, for the health sector,” Mueller said.
***
Despite the huge problems it faces, the country is often seen as the calm eye of the Sahelian storm. “The country has a stable government for the moment that has often been willing to partner with international actors on humanitarian projects,” the U.N.’s Mueller told me. She told me that aid to humanitarian causes in Niger is considered incredibly cost-effective: not only do such funds help to address current issues, they also serve to mitigate the effects of the continued effects of climate change and insecurity. She urged donor governments to do more before it was too late.
“If one neighbor after the next is going down, we can already anticipate what’s happening in this country,” she said. “And when you look across the Sahel, I think there’s a huge opportunity now to step up all kinds of assistance the international community can provide to the government and the people of Niger.” Mueller pointed out that it was not just humanitarian assistance that was needed, but development projects to bring hope and jobs to the young people of Niger.
To see the crises like the one that caused Bakara to flee from Nigeria and the assault on the military base at In-Atès as inextricably connected is perhaps reductive—they, are, after all, separated by 800 or so miles—but both illustrate the precarious situation in Niger. The country faces elections later this year, and in many ways feels as if it is at the edge of a precipice. The hotels in Niamey, the capital, buzz with foreign military personnel and intelligence officers trading glances over beers. The U.S. is building a $110 million drone base near Agadez, in the country’s north. In the east, the country is fighting a bitter war against Boko Haram on the shores of Lake Chad; in the south, the country is seeing large numbers of Nigerians fleeing north from heavily armed bandits who often follow them across the border; jihadi groups from Mali and Burkina Faso often spill into the country’s west; and the conflict in Libya continues to destabilize the north.
Climate change has exacerbated these conflicts, making farmland more and more scarce and adding to food insecurity as unpredictable climate events, like the recent flooding, become more common. In Niger, in 2018 alone, desertification claimed the equivalent of 150,000 football pitches.
In the Lake Chad region, to the East and Southeast of Diffa, the recent weather has affected local commerce, and added to the agricultural woes.“High levels of rainfall and wide temperature variability are undermining people’s lives and livelihoods,” a team of researchers wrote in “Shoring up Stability,” a recent report about Lake Chad by Adelphi, an independent think tank that focuses on climate, security and international affairs. The flooding in the last few months has squeezed militant groups who have increased raiding and kidnapping.“The lake is very high this year so it has destroyed a potential part of the crops that they had planted,” Foucher, the expert on Boko Haram, told me. He pointed out that local leaders have responded by increasing raiding and kidnapping for ransom. “These days ISWAP seems to have fewer vehicles, less fuel, fewer resources; this makes plain why some ISWAP groups engage in kidnappings and plunder.” The militants also seem to be worried about food shortages: the group recently lifted a price cap on maize and beans to incentivize production, and forbade export of the crops. “They have a food problem,” Foucher continued. “They know it and they are trying to modify their policies.”
Laouan Magagi, the Nigerien minister for humanitarian affairs and disaster management told me that the cross-border movement, paired with the drying out of the land and the recent flooding, were all contributing to the country’s woes. “It’s a paradox: flooding and then there have been a lot of zones where, practically, the pastures are bare,” Magagi said. “There are lots of regions where farmers have sown seeds many times and have harvested nothing.” Temperatures in the region are rising at one-and-a-half times the global average.
“It’s climate change. In Niger, even the peasant in the fields knows that this is global warming, because they live this day to day,” Magagi said. “The Sahel is not a polluter, absolutely not,” he insisted. According todata from the European Union’s emissions database, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad—the countries that are part of the G5 Sahel framework, which deals with issues affecting the region—produced a little more than 10 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2016. The United States produced around 5 billion metric tonnes of the gas in the same year. What’s more, a team of French researchers showed that some Sahelian pastoral practiceshave a negative carbon balance. “The polluting countries are not sufficiently engaged,” Magagi added, “the polluters should pay their fair share. If they pay sufficiently in our region, the people who work the land will be able to increase their resilience.”
***
Giles ClarkeDr. Kadri Suleiman with the mother of a malnourished child.
Demographics are also key to understanding the crisis affecting the Sahel. Almost half of Niger’s population is under the age of 15. The region’s population is young, but hungry and without opportunities. In the central Nigerien town of Maradi, the country’s old economic hub, I visited theIntegrated Nutritional Rehabilitation Centerat the town’s Regional Hospital. Niger’s population is exploding, and is set to double over the next 20 years. Women here have on average more than seven children,the highest fertility rate in the world. Raising those children is very difficult . “Because of climate change the price of food is now very expensive,” Kadri Suleiman, the head of the hospital, told me. “Malnutrition is a big problem here.”
In the ward, around two dozen women clustered on white-frame metal beds, nursing frail children with matchstick arms. Half the lights in the room had failed, lending it a spectral gloom. Baraka Samaila, a 35-year old tradeswoman wearing a beige-checked veil, told me how she had married at 13, and how each of her seven children had suffered from malnutrition. Her 2-year-old son Issoufa lay beside her, withered and moving as if in slow motion. Another woman, Marwa Sané, a 27-year old mother of two, said her child had begun vomiting and was suffering from malaria. She had to journey three hours in order to get to the clinic.
Suleiman told me that the conditions at the clinic had improved in the last five years, but the facility still saw a 5% death rate. The problems of malnutrition were often compounded by malaria and pneumonia. According toa report by USAIDfrom 2018, 1.8 million children in Niger suffer from malnutrition, and one in 10 children suffer from acute malnutrition, which leads to cognitive impairment and sometimes death. When I returned the next day, one of the children I had seen the evening before had died.
It is remarkable, with conditions like these, that Niger has not slipped into the outright chaos, conflict and lawlessness that many of its neighbors face face. “There’s something rather special in Niger,” Foucher told me. Since elections in 2011, the government has been much more respectful of democratic norms than many of the governments in the region, and the country’s leadership is not mired in the same allegations of corruption and excess of some of its neighbors. Niger’s ruling class is also more diverse than those of its neighbors; the ethnic and tribal resentments that have fueled Islamist advances in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso are less apparent. This diversity of backgrounds, and a tradition of dialoguing with local populations has led to a more collaborative approach to problem-solving on the Nigerien government’s behalf. “They have this capacity to negotiate conflict and work out compromises,” Foucher continued. “They know they are fragile, and they are being very careful and measured in their responses to things.”
One compromise the government has been able to make is offering amnesty to militants, among them many young people who joined the groups under threat of execution. I visited a center run by an U.N. agency that houses children who have renounced their ties with radical groups and prepares them for reintegration in society through psychosocial support.
Giles ClarkeA young girl who fled Boko Haram’s campaign of violence in northern Nigeria now lives in a UNHCR-supported refugee settlement in Tillaberi, west of Niamey, Niger.
The center admits young men and boys who joined the group as children, lodging them in a small house with a leafy courtyard. When I visited, the 19 teenagers there played table football, showed me how they had learned to sew and ate food in a common room furnished with a bookshelf laden with French comic books (Boule et Bill,Asterix). On the wall, a whiteboard listed their activities for the week (sewing, hip hop, theater). During a conversation with Mueller in the courtyard, a slender boy wearing a black T-shirt and blue trousers said that being at the center had given him the desire to work. (I was asked to withhold the names and information of the boys in the center for their security). “I have spent three months learning a trade and I hope I will be able to continue the work that I have learned here in the outside world,” he said.
Later, I spoke withYunusa (not his real name), who wore a white tank top and a whisper of a mustache on his top lip. He had just turned eighteen. “I grew up in Nigeria. About three years ago soldiers withdrew from my village and Boko Haram had taken it,” he told me “Some people fled. Boko Haram said that if you ran away, they would kill you. The members of the group said that the villagers had three days. If they didn’t come and join their group, they would kill them and cut their brains out. So at that time I decided to join the group with my friends, and we left with them.”
Over the next two years, Yunusa told me, he was tasked with ferrying food from villages to the group’s child fighters and women. “It was like normal life, but there were very strict rules,” he said. “Even if you wanted to do something, there were rules and it was forbidden to do many things.” In 2018, he decided to repent and leave the group, after he heard about the amnesty; he was taken to a center for Boko Haram returnees at Goudoumaria, a town near Diffa, and then on to the center in which we were sitting. Now he has learned to sew and wants to continue to work when he leaves the center. “I was lucky to have the chance to understand that Boko Haram is not a good thing,” he said. “I hope that all young people, my family, and others understand that Boko Haram is not a good thing, and I hope it’s known all over the world.”
Niarchos is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines and newspapers. He is currently working on a book about the global cobalt trade.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions on a Moscow-based private railway company that last month opened passenger service between Russia and Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
The sanctions target Grand Service Express, its CEO and seven people who were slapped with European Union sanctions earlier in the week for their role in organizing Russian local elections on Crimea in September. The EU and the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia after the annexation and refuse to recognize Moscow’s authority over the region.
The Treasury Department handed down the new sanctions two days before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is due in Kyiv to meet with the Ukrainian president and other officials. They may be intended to send a message of support from the Trump administration during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump over his dealings with Ukraine.
“Treasury’s action, taken in close coordination with our international allies and partners, reiterates our unwavering support for restoring free and fair democratic processes in Crimea,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
The sanctions may also serve to reduce the sting of Pompeo’s recent disparaging comment about Ukraine. Following an interview last week with NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly, she said he shouted obscenities at her for asking about Ukraine and asked whether she thought Americans really cared about the country.
The railway connection to Crimea was inaugurated in late December by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who rode a train across the 12-mile (19-kilometer) bridge. The project is intended to bolster links between Russia and Crimea by increasing the transport of cargo and encouraging the flow of tourists.
