Best columns: International NEWS 15
RUSSIA
SOUTH AFRICA
Russia is “coming to Europe’s rescue,” said Andrei
Samokhin. When we became the first country in
the world to invent and approve a vaccine against
Covid-19 last August, Western experts doubted the
shot’s efficacy and safety. But in a peer-reviewed
study published last week in The Lancet, “one of
the most world’s authoritative medical journals,”
scientists confirmed that the Sputnik V vaccine is
91.6 percent effective at preventing symptomatic
Covid-19 cases and 100 percent effective against
severe cases. Suddenly, we’re seeing “a change in
Western attitudes toward the Russian vaccine.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has been(^) enthusiastic, saying the EU will soon review the ev-
idence and is likely to approve the shot. Hungary
didn’t wait for Brussels’ approval and is currently
injecting Sputnik into Hungarian arms, while the
Czechs—who have one of the highest Covid infec-
tion rates in the EU—are considering following
suit. Europeans should not have been so skeptical
of Russian science. After all, Russia has long been
“a leader in the production of vaccines and in the
ideology of their use,” from Catherine the Great
through the Soviet Union. The Lancet’s nod is “an
authoritative and serious recognition of Russian
achievements” that is long overdue.
Racketeering. Money laundering. Bribery of judges.
The extent of corruption under former President
Jacob Zuma is “profoundly disturbing,” said New
Frame.com in an editorial. The ongoing Commis-
sion of Inquiry into allegations of state capture, set
up to examine the collapse of oversight during the
president’s 2009–18 tenure, has revealed how Zuma
used the intelligence services to pay bribes, influence
the media, and centralize power around himself.
But given his background, and South Africa’s his-
tory, should we really be surprised? The African
National Congress has always had “a paranoid cur-
rent” that sees dissent “as illegitimate and a threat
to the nation.” As a revolutionary movement op-
posing apartheid, it saw real and imagined enemies
everywhere. In the 1980s, Zuma was a dominant
figure in the ANC’s intelligence and security wing,
iMbokodo, which “tortured and executed people
suspected—often wrongly—of betrayal.” After the
ANC became a political party, it still had a habit of
considering itself the nation and dissenters as trai-
tors. The commission is showing us how the ANC’s
authoritarianism accelerated under Zuma and the
conflation of the nation with the party became con-
flation of the nation with the man. We came peril-
AP ously close to falling into dictatorship.
Vindicated
in vaccine
development
Andrei Samokhin
Vzglyad.ru
How we nearly
lost our
democracy
Editorial
NewFrame.com
The people of Myanmar are standing up
against the generals, said Larry Jagan in
the Bangkok Post (Thailand). Since the
military toppled the country’s civilian-led
government on Feb. 1 and placed de facto
leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house
arrest, hundreds of thousands of people
have taken to the streets each night, bang-
ing on pots and pans in protest. During
the day, a “civil disobedience campaign
is growing.” First health-care workers
began demonstrating outside hospitals,
wearing red and “defiantly holding up
the three-finger salute of protest from the
film The Hunger Games,” and then the
strikes spread to government-run factories and businesses. Staff
of the General Administration Department—largely composed
of ex-soldiers who serve as “the eyes and ears of the military”
across the country—have resigned en masse. These civilians don’t
buy the military’s absurd and evidence-free claim that Suu Kyi’s
popular National League for Democracy party (NLD) rigged its
landslide election victory in November. Myanmar was under total
military rule for nearly 50 years until 2011, and the people won’t
stand for it again.
The coup is the culmination of a yearslong power struggle be-
tween Suu Kyi and the military’s top commander, said Mary
Callahan in the Australian Financial Review (Australia). Both
Suu Kyi, 75, and Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, 64, are economic and
social conservatives, and “both consider themselves the embodi-
ment of the nation.” Suu Kyi—daughter of the martyred founder
of modern Myanmar—spent 15 years under house arrest for her
pro-democracy campaigning. Released
in 2010, the Nobel laureate became
the country’s unofficial civilian leader
five years later, when her NLD party
won the country’s first free election in
more than two decades. Her power,
though, was limited. Under the 2008
constitution, the military kept control
of all state security bodies and got
a quarter of seats in the legislature.
Suu Kyi tried to appease the military
by endorsing its murderous offensive
against Rohingya Muslims. But when
the NLD triumphed overwhelmingly
in last year’s election, Min Aung
Hlaing felt he had to take action or see his power wither away.
He almost certainly had the support of Myanmar’s foreign backer,
said the Taipei Times (Taiwan) in an editorial. Beijing has ex-
tended billions of dollars in high-interest loans to the country as
part of “Chinese debt-trap diplomacy,” hoping to snap up assets
when those loans come due. The NLD was trying to extricate
Myanmar from this con, something China wouldn’t tolerate. The
generals had their own economic reasons for ousting Suu Kyi.
They run the country’s biggest firms, and the NLD, with its pro-
market agenda, threatens that control. But the military may have
bitten off more than it can chew, said Philipp Annawitt in Asia.
Nikkei.com (Japan). Myanmar’s people have had a decade of rela-
tive democracy, and they like it. The civil service, the police, and
the troops largely voted for the NLD. If Western governments can
convince the military’s rank and file that the generals are greedy
and unpatriotic, this could still end up as “a failed coup.”
Myanmar: Why the military seized power
Demanding democracy—and Suu Kyi’s release