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The Week In News
Egypt and Greece Maritime Agreement
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi over the weekend approved a maritime treaty his country reached with Greece in August.
The Egyptian press reported that Sisi ratified the agreement on Saturday. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the treaty was signed “due to the desire of the two countries to contribute to the stability of the region, in good faith, in accordance with international law as well as their desire in enhancing mutual cooperation, neighborly relations and bonds of friendship.”
The treaty defines the waterways between Egypt and Greece and allows both countries to utilize all of their natural resources, including oil and natural gas. The EgyptGreece deal stipulates the “partial demarcation of the sea boundaries between the two countries, and that the remaining demarcation would be achieved through consultations.”
Both the Egyptian and Greek Parliament had already approved the deal in September.
The agreement between the two countries is seen as a response to an accord Turkey signed with Libya in 2019 granting Ankara drilling rights in the Mediterranean Sea. A rival of both Greece and Egypt, the agreement was viewed as an attempt by Turkey to muscle in on the Mediterranean’s natural resources.
Tensions peaked this past August after Turkey sent the Oruç Reis to drill in waters claimed by Greece, raising the prospect of war between Ankara and Athens. While Turkey eventually backed down, the move was seen as another instance of aggression towards its neighbors.
Both Egypt and Greece are partners in the newly-formed Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), which includes Israel, Italy, Greece, Jordan and Cyprus and was founded to block Turkey’s energy ambitions. The forum, established as a joint venture between Israel and Egypt in light of the discoveries of natural gas in the Mediterranean, became an official international body last week following the establishment of the Constitution.
Babi Yar Mystery
Solved
The two-day German “aktion” at Babi Yar, where the Germans and Ukrainians slaughtered 33,771 people decades ago, was one of the largest open-air massacres but its precise location had remained a mystery for nearly 80 years.
Recently, however, a former Scotland Yard investigator solved the 1941 mystery together with the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, creating a 3D simulation of the site where at least 70,000 others were killed during the months following the original massacre.
Speaking with the Times of Israel, investigator Martin Dean said, “I believe my work goes considerably beyond the previous understanding of historians that have worked on this topic.
“The Germans feared the Soviets would use any such evidence for propaganda purposes. Ironically some of what we know about the locations of the shootings comes from about a dozen former prisoners who burned the corpses but then managed to escape just before the Nazis planned to kill them.”
He added, “In the end, I conducted around nine months of careful
research and wrote more than 30 detailed reports, each analyzing a specific location or aspect of the mass shooting, trying to highlight any new information discovered or significant conclusions that we had reached.”
After Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, the Soviet Union committed itself to erasing the memory of the Nazi genocides, among other things by filling the ravine itself with brickpulp and other landfill materials.
“The whole area of the ravine was literally flattened and turned into a park that is unrecognizable compared to the wartime terrain,” said Dean, who has mapped the route taken by the Babi Yar victims during the Yom Kippur massacre. “I discovered that a key feature [of the massacre], the ‘sand quarry,’ which can be seen in some key wartime images, did not come into existence until the late 1930s, such that even people familiar with Kyiv were not aware of this feature and could not find it on maps.”
The sand quarry was where Jews were forced to leave their clothes and belongings before being brought to the ravine’s edge, where they were shot in groups of ten. According to Dean, the mass grave was 500 feet long, and corpses were stacked in layers.
Dean said that he took testimonies from German and Ukrainian perpetrators, as well as the handful of wounded Jews who managed to escape death, and put them together, along with photographs and maps.
“My methodology has been to combine ground photographs with aerial photography, maps, and especially witness testimony. In the postwar German legal investigations, there are hundreds of testimonies by men who acted as guards or even shooters at Babi Yar. I looked especially for any references to geographical features or descriptions of the process of how the shootings were organized,” he said.
“Fortunately, there were several photographs that had overlapping views, so we could piece together a panorama of the photos by finding distinctive vegetation or terrain features that overlapped. These were then also compared to aerial photographs and maps to visualize the entire topography. By enlarging ground and aerial photographs, it was possible to identify features not obvious to the naked eye.”
He also used evidence discarded by other investigators.
“In particular, there were two quite primitive sketch maps drawn by Germans, which do not look very useful at first sight,” said Dean. “However, together with the testimonies of these witnesses, the sketch maps strongly corroborate the overall picture I have built from comparing the various sources.”
UK Grapples with
Corona
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government should impose additional restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said on Monday.
Coronavirus cases have spiked in the UK since mid-August, reaching 617,688 cases and 42,875 deaths as of Monday. The rising infection rate has already led the government to im-
plement wide-ranging restrictions, including closing pubs after 10 p.m. and shuttering cafes and restaurants in Wales and Scotland.
Dowden noted that the risk to contracting the virus is greater in pubs, restaurants, and night clubs.
“The purpose of these measures is to get the virus under control,” Dowden told Sky. “The point of moving to this tiered system is so that in those most highly affected areas, we have got measures in place to control the virus.”
Adding that he hoped the pandemic would be under control by the December holidays, he acknowledged: “Of course, it is very challenging for people. The measures we are taking are having a bad impact on health, they are having a bad impact on the economy but ultimately it is better to do that than to allow the virus to get out of control.”
While Prime Minister Boris Johnson has attempted to reduce the spread of the disease while mitigating the damage to the already-battered economy in the UK, critics say that he isn’t going far enough. Britain already has the highest death rate in Europe from the pandemic and may mpose a second lockdown.
World Food Programme Wins Nobel
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger and its “contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-afflicted areas.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee presented the award on Friday, praising the organization for being “a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”
A United Nations entity, WFP was created in 1961 and today provides food to over 100 million people each year.
“This is a powerful reminder to the world that peace and zero hunger go hand-in-hand,” WFP tweeted, expressing its “deepest thanks” for the honor and praising its staff, who “put their lives on the line every day.”
Executive director David Beasley said, “It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually been speechless; I really can’t believe it.” He said the award was a “call to action” and urged people to “step up and step up now.”
“Where there’s starvation there’s conflict, destabilization and migration,” he said, adding that the world was now experiencing “all of those things coupled with Covid.”
He shared, “We’re looking for a vaccine for Covid; we have a vaccine for hunger – it’s called food, and we have the food. We need the money and the access to solve it,” he added.
Unrest in Nigeria
Leading Nigerian celebrities and activists organized mass protests on Friday in major cities to demand an end to police brutality in the African country.
The protests come after weeks of anger by the younger generation over claims of kidnapping, harassment, and extortion by the police’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Folarin Falana, a lawyer and singer who led the protest in Lagos Island, said that there have been “too many numerous incidents of harassment, extortion and police brutality” and that he himself has suffered harassment from the police.
“People have been posting online about it for years, but it has been the same sluggish attitude and response to it,” he said. “Nothing has changed, and people keep on being harassed. That’s why we have taken to the streets and we want the government to listen.”
He added, “I am marching for the ones that are not recognized. We are surprised by the numbers that came
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out, and we are prepared to march again.”
Videos shared on Twitter from protests in Lagos mainland showed police officers forcefully dispersing the protesters, dismantling their sleeping tents, turning off the street lights, and making verbal threats.
In response to the outcry, Nigeria’s police force banned SARS from “carrying out routine patrols and other conventional low-risk duties – stop and search duties, checkpoints, mounting of roadblocks, traffic checks, etc. – with immediate effect,” Nigeria police chief Mohammed Adamu said on Sunday in a statement.
“Voices and complaints on the issues of unprofessional conducts by some SARS operatives have been heard very loudly and clearly,” the statement read.
Protester Feyikemi Abudu explained, “There are many demands, but the main one is to scrap SARS, not to reform it but to completely end it. Another demand is compensation for victims of SARS brutality, both alive and dead. We also want a committee that will investigate and look into the present and past grievances around SARS brutality.”
Muyiwa Adejobi, a Lagos state spokesman, said that all complaints against its officers are carefully investigated and that appropriate sanctions are applied to offenders.
Golden Dawn is Criminal Group
A Greek court deemed the country’s neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn” party a criminal organization last week. The party’s leaders will now face heavy sentences.
After a five-year trial, Golden Dawn’s founder and leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, together with other senior party members, were found guilty of running a criminal organization. They face between 5-15 years in prison.
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None of the senior members were present in court when the decision was handed down.
During the trial, 15,000 protesters gathered outside the Athens courthouse, where 2,000 police were deployed, together with a drone and police helicopter.
Sixty-eight members of the Golden Dawn party have been on trial, but just 11 of them were present in the courtroom, while the rest were represented by their lawyers. The prosecutions were sparked by the September 2013 murder of Paylos Fyssas, a 34-year-old anti-fascist rapper. Fyssas was chased down by a mob of Golden Dawn thugs and stabbed to death in front a café in Keratsini, a suburb of Athens.
Giorgos Roupakias, the stabber, confessed to the murder and was given a life sentence on Wednesday. His attack on Fyssas, however, sparked charges that Golden Dawn members used beatings, intimidation, and murder as tactics with the knowledge of senior party members.
Amnesty International, which took part in and helped organize a network to record racist violence in Greece, praised the verdict.
“The accusations against the leaders and members of Golden Dawn, including the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, expose a fissure that exists not just within Greece but across Europe and beyond,” said Nils Muiznieks, Europe director at Amnesty. “The impact of this verdict, in what is an emblematic trial of an extreme far-right party with an aggressive anti-migrant and anti-human rights stance, will be felt far beyond Greece’s borders.”
Golden Dawn denies any direct link to the attacks perpetrated by its members, claiming the trial and charges brought against the party’s leadership as an “unprecedented conspiracy” aimed at curbing its rise in popularity.
N. Korea Hosts Mass Celebration
North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s party hosted a celebration featuring tens of thousands of dancers, gymnasts, and other performers on Sunday.
The Workers’ Party, which has ruled North Korea since its founding, celebrated its 75th anniversary. Photos of the event published by the party’s newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Monday showed Kim and top aides at a long banquet table surrounded by an enthusiastic audience.
According to state broadcaster KCNA, Kim was greeted by loud cheers as he made his entrance, and the national flag and Workers’ Party flags were hoisted to musical numbers. Kim and his entourage were not wearing masks in the photographs, but the crowds of spectators were. When addressing the crowd, Kim vowed to continue “strengthening” North Korea’s military for “self-defense and deterrence.”
On Saturday evening, North Korea staged an unprecedented nighttime military parade, showcasing the country’s new weapons. In the parade, Pyongyang rolled out its new “massive” ICBM missile that experts say is capable of hitting anywhere in the United States.
More than 6 feet longer than North Korea’s Hwasong-15, the missile appears to be the biggest ICBM in the world. According to South Korean media reports, the missile can carry multiple nuclear warheads at once and is intended to send a message to the U.S. prior to next month’s presidential election.
Nadal Wins French Open
