The Week USA – August 31, 2019

Best columns: International NEWS 15

NEW ZEALAND

RUSSIA

New Zealanders have an unhealthy obsession with

greasy meat pies, said Matt Rilkoff. The national

dish of minced meat and gravy, encased in a round,

flaky pastry that fits in your hand, is scarfed at

breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every day, thousands

of commuters “perform the gymnastics of using

one hand to eat a paper-bagged pie while steer-

ing their car with the other.” Loving these pies is

“part of being a Kiwi.” But it’s a love that is kill-

ing us. The meat pie is “one of the most efficient

calorie-delivery vehicles that humankind has ever

invented.” A third of New Zealanders are “grossly

overweight.” Of course, we can’t blame the pies

alone. We also gobble fried fish and chips and wash

it down with our favorite soda, the fizzy lemon

L&P. On special occasions, we’ll do a lamb roast

with trimmings, which sounds relatively harmless

until you consider that we serve it all “slathered in

fat-based gravy.” We know we should be snack-

ing on carrots and kiwifruits instead, but they

just don’t fire our taste buds the way meat does.

So we’ll have to be forced to improve our diets—

potentially through a tax on sugary and fatty foods.

“The days of cheap pies are numbered.”

We can’t blame only climate change for the

wildfires raging across Siberia, said Alexey Po-

lovnikov. Since the beginning of this year, fires

have consumed some 32 million acres—an area

larger than Greece—including forests within the

Arctic Circle. Those blazes have only intensified in

the summer months. The federal government has

blamed illegal loggers for setting fires to cover up

their misdeeds, but that doesn’t explain why the

blazes were allowed to grow to such a massive

size. The answer, says Russian historian Darya

Mitina, lies in President Vladimir Putin’s “de-

bureaucratization” reforms, under which firefight-

ing was removed from the responsibility of the

federal Ministry of Emergencies and transferred to
the regions. The problem is that regions such as
Irkutsk, where many of the worst fires are raging,
don’t have the money or the infrastructure to fight
fires. They lack not only aircraft to drop water but
also trained firefighters on the ground. The situa-
tion has become “so catastrophic that even foreign
countries are drawing attention to it.” The smoke
wafted over to Alaska a few weeks ago, prompting
U.S. President Donald Trump to offer Putin fire-
fighting assistance in a terrible “blow to Russia’s
international image.” Putin has now called out the
army, but returning firefighting to the federal gov-
AP ernment is the only long-term solution.

Can’t stop

scarfing down

those pies

Matt Rilkoff

Stuff.co.nz

Why fires

in Siberia

are so huge

Alexey Polovnikov

Nakanune.ru

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

has taken a “decisive and bold” step in

Jammu and Kashmir, said R.K. Arora

and Vinay Kaura in the Economic

Times (India). Modi’s government

sent tens of thousands of troops to the

restive Him a layan state and preemp-

tively detained hundreds of Kashmiri

leaders before announcing last week

that it was revoking Article 370 of

the Indian constitution. That article

granted Jammu and Kash mir, India’s

only Muslim-majority state, significant

political autonomy and barred non-

Kashmiris from taking land or jobs

there. Jammu and Kashmir—home to about 12 million people,

some 70 percent of whom are Muslim, and 30 percent Hindu—will

now be downgraded to a union territory, effectively ruled directly

by New Delhi. And its mountainous region of Ladakh—which

has a population of 300,000, almost equally divided between Mus-

lims and Buddhists—will be carved out and turned into a union

territory. The new arrangement “makes strategic sense.” It fulfills

a campaign promise of Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, and it will

enable India to finally quash the Pakistan-backed Islamist separat-

ist insurgency that has been simmering in Kashmir for decades.

The Kashmir problem has its roots in the British colonial era, said

Salil Tripathi in India’s LiveMint.com. When Britain divided the

subcontinent in 1947 into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-

majority Pakistan, Pakistani militants tried to intimidate the inde-

pendent kingdom of Kashmir into joining their nation. Kashmir’s

maharaja asked India for military assistance, and India agreed,

but only after “Kashmir signed an

accession treaty.” Now Pakistan con-

trols about a third of the region, and

India the rest. The two countries have

since fought three wars over Kash-

mir, and Indian security forces have

committed numerous “grave human

rights abuses” against pro-separatist

Kashmiris, including mass rape and

extrajudicial executions. Hindus have

also been victims, said Deepti Misri

and Mona Bhan in AlJazeera.com

(Qatar). Islamist militants began a

bloody rampage in 1989 that drove

some 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus from

the state. Those exiles are now cheering a possible return home.

But non-Kashmiri Hindu nationalists are also celebrating, hopeful

that Modi will launch a settler project designed “to transform In-

dia’s only Muslim-majority state into a Hindu-majority one.”

This is a betrayal of democracy, said Navnita Chadha Behera in

The Hindu (India). Kashmiri Muslims have had their self-rule

stripped from them “on legally shaky ground.” Jammu and Kash-

mir is now an “open-air prison,” with a curfew and no phone or

internet access. The mosques were closed even on Eid al-Adha,

one of the holiest days in Islam. After the curfew is lifted, Kash-

miris will be subject to the whims of New Delhi, with “no space

for dissent.” Prepare for “another intifada,” said Muhammad

Amir Rana in Dawn (Pakistan). Kashmiris will resist, perhaps

violently, and because Pakistan is “morally and politically bound

to support the Kashmiris,” we will be drawn in. “Pakistan-India

tensions could at any time turn into conventional warfare.”

India: Exerting direct rule over Muslim Kashmir

Kashmiri Muslims protest the lockdown.