The Week - USA (2021-02-12)

Best columns: International NEWS 15

PAKISTAN

NIGERIA

Pakistan has provided yet more evidence of its

“tight embrace of terrorism,” said Yashwant Raj.

The country’s Supreme Court—which, let’s be

clear, is not independent of political influence—

just overturned the conviction of Ahmed Omar

Saeed Sheikh, mastermind of the 2002 murder

of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The

jihadist lured Pearl on the pretext of an interview

and handed him over to al Qaida. Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed, a key figure behind the 9/11 attacks,

then beheaded the Jewish-American on video.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is not the first ter-

rorist to receive lenient treatment from Pakistani

authorities. Hafiz Saeed, founder of the extremist

group Lashkar-e-Taiba and organizer of the bloody

2008 Mumbai attacks, was freed in 2017 even

though the U.S. had warned that his release would

cost Islamabad nearly $2 billion in security aid.

At this point, if the Pakistanis won’t lock up their

murderous jihadists, the U.S. will have to do it for

them. The Biden administration should force the

extradition of Sheikh, just as the U.S. extradited

Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán

when his own country wouldn’t or couldn’t keep

him behind bars. Pakistani authorities will “coddle

terrorists” as long as they can get away with it.

The Nigerian civil war ended more than 50 years

ago, said Olu Fasan, but this country’s “ethnic na-

tionalities still can’t live peaceably together.” Most

domestic conflicts conclude with a painstakingly

negotiated settlement that requires compromise

from both sides, such as the Good Friday Agree-

ment that ended decades of sectarian violence in

Northern Ireland. But Nigeria’s 1967–70 civil war

ended with the bloody defeat and surrender of the

ethnic Igbo territories in the coastal south, which

had briefly seceded as the Republic of Biafra. There

was no attempt “to reorganize Nigeria in order to

make it workable as a multiethnic country,” and to

this day our various peoples “eye one another with
utter incomprehension and distrust.” In the past
few years, thousands of mostly Christian Yoruba
villagers have been displaced by marauding gangs
of Muslim Fulani herders, yet the government has
been no neutral arbiter. Instead, we have “a Fulani
president” in Muhammadu Buhari who “blatantly
defends the rights of Fulani herdsmen to live in
Yoruba states but ignores the rights of the Yoruba
to defend themselves against the herders’ atroci-
ties.” Various groups are already speaking darkly of
a new civil war. Until Nigeria builds a multiethnic
Re government, we will never be united.
ute

rs

Failing

to punish

jihadists

Yashwant Raj

Hindustan Times (India)

No unity

without

compromise

Olu Fasan

Vanguard

The horror of what’s happening in

Manaus is “unimaginable,” said

Julián Fuks in UOL.com.br. The city

of 2.2 million people, the largest in

Amazonas state, made international

headlines last spring when it was struck

by a massive outbreak of the corona-

virus. Sick patients were turned away

from overwhelmed hospitals, and the

dead were piled up in mass graves.

Now the city is being crushed by an

even worse Covid wave. January was

Manaus’ deadliest month in living

memory, with more than 3,000 burials

taking place. Hospitals there have run out of beds and oxygen,

so patients are slowly asphyxiating in “the very place that is sup-

posed to save them.” There are reports that some doctors, to

spare dying patients the agony of suffocation, are hastening the

end with morphine. Because of the collapse of the health system,

even Covid-free patients—including pregnant women—are dying.

This catastrophe is “the result of our choices,” said Dagmara

Spautz in NSC Total. Scientists in Amazonas warned in October

that a second wave was brewing, but “the government ignored

them.” When Amazonas authorities in December grudgingly

closed stores selling nonessential goods amid a surge in cases,

crowds of people came out to protest. Manaus Mayor David

Almeida says those protests, as well as Christmas and New Year’s

parties, likely seeded the current explosion.

A new Brazilian variant of the coronavirus is also fueling the

carnage, said Ana Conceição in Valor Econômico. The first out-

break was so widespread that some

scientists had thought the city was

nearing herd immunity, with an esti-

mated 76 percent of Manaus residents

having antibodies to Covid. The new

mutation, though, seems to be more

contagious, possibly deadlier, and in

a worst-case scenario could “circum-

vent the immune protection caused

by previous infections.” But doctors

haven’t seen many cases of reinfec-

tion, and the herd immunity theory

may be flawed. Manaus has the only

intensive-care units in Amazonas,

and many of the patients now dying in its hospitals likely came in

from outlying rural areas that weren’t hit by the first wave.

Our nation has been in a state of denial, said Fernando Gabeira

in O Globo. President Jair Bolsonaro, who has consistently down-

played the virus, shut his ears to the dangers of the new variant,

and he has done nothing to stop its spread. Our media is just as

bad: The strain has received more ink “in foreign newspapers

than in ours.” Manaus “is proof that we no longer have a func-

tioning government,” said Demétrio Magnoli in Folha de São

Paulo. Bolsonaro is so unpopular—and allegedly so corrupt—that

there are “dozens of requests for his impeachment” pending in the

legislature. But his worst crime by far is his failure to protect this

nation. At least 225,000 Brazilians have died of the virus; only the

U.S. has a higher toll. Their death certificates say Covid-19, but

these people really died from the virus of “negligence, of inepti-

tude, of criminal indifference.” How many more will be buried

before the “ultraright and delusional” Bolsonaro is impeached?

Brazil: A new Covid strain and a surging death toll

Lining up to buy oxygen in Manaus