Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - March 13, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A6 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COMA6 SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022NEWS I LOCAL / WORLD Russian moves in Mideast, Africa raise threat B EIRUT — Russian President Vladi-mir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine dominates world attention. But with less global scrutiny, Putin is also busy advancing Russia’s presence in the Middle East and Africa — an expansion that military and civilian leaders view as another, if less immediate, threat to security in the West. Putin’s strategy in the Mideast and Africa has been simple, and successful: He seeks out security alliances with autocrats, coup leaders, and others who have been spurned or neglected by the U.S. and Europe, either because of their bloody abuses or because of competing Western strategic interests. — In Syria, Russia’s defence minister last month showed off nuclear-capable bombers and hypersonic missiles over the Mediterranean, part of a security partnership that now has the Kremlin threatening to send Syrian fighters to Ukraine. — In Sudan, a leader of a junta that’s seized power in that East African coun- try has a new economic alliance with the Kremlin, reviving Russia’s dreams of a naval base on the Red Sea. — In Mali, the government is the latest of more than a dozen resource- rich African nations to forge security alliances with Kremlin-allied mercen- aries, according to U.S. officials. Especially in the last five or six years, “what you’ve seen is a Russia that is much more expeditionary and casting its military power further and wider afield,” retired U.S. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove told The Associated Press. “Russia is trying to show itself as a great power, as at the seat in world affairs, as driving international situa- tions,” said Breedlove, the top NATO commander from 2013 through 2016, and now a distinguished chair at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. But with Putin’s hands already full battling the fierce resistance from a much weaker Ukrainian military, ex- perts view his expansionist goals in the Middle East and Africa as a potential long-term threat, not a present danger to Europe or the NATO alliance. “It’s threatening NATO from below,” Kristina Kausch, a European security expert at the German Marshall Fund think-tank, said of the leverage Russia is gaining. “The Russians have felt en- circled by NATO — and now they want to encircle NATO,” she said. To achieve its strategic aims, Rus- sia provides conventional military or Kremlin-allied mercenaries to protect the regimes of often outcast leaders. In return, these leaders pay back Russia in several ways: cash or natural resour- ces, influence in their affairs, and sta- ging grounds for Russian fighters. These alliances help advance Putin’s ambitions of returning Russia’s influ- ence to its old Cold War boundaries. Russia’s new security partnerships also aid it diplomatically. When the UN General Assembly condemned Putin’s Ukraine invasion this month, Syria joined Russia in voting against, and many of the African governments that have signed security deals with Russian mercenaries abstained. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Russia would bring recruits from Syria to fight in Ukraine. The threat was seen primarily as an in- timidation tactic and U.S. officials say there’s been no sign of Syrian recruits in Ukraine. Some security experts say Russian mercenaries are using Mali as a staging ground for deployment to Ukraine, but U.S. officials have not con- firmed these reports. Regardless of how imminent the threat is, U.S. and European leaders are paying increasing attention to Putin’s moves in the Middle East and Africa — and Russia’s growing alliance with China — as it formulates plans to pro- tect the West from future aggression. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in mid-February that the West could no longer ignore the com- petition for influence across Africa, where China spends billions on infra- structure projects to secure mineral rights, and Russia provides security through Kremlin-allied mercenaries. “We see and realize that if we with- draw from this competition as liberal democracies, then others are going to fill these gaps,” Baerbock said as West- ern diplomats huddled on the Ukraine crisis, in the last days before Russia’s invasion. Perhaps the boldest example of Rus- sia flexing its global reach was when it sent defense minister Sergei Shoigu last month to Damascus to oversee Russia’s largest military drills in the Mediter- ranean since the Cold War, just as Rus- sia’s military made final preparations for its assault on Ukraine. The drills, involving 15 warships and about 30 aircraft, appeared choreo- graphed to showcase the Russian mil- itary’s capability to threaten the U.S. carrier strike group in the Mediterran- ean. Russia’s Hmeimeem air base on Syr- ia’s Mediterranean coast has served as its main outpost for launching attacks in Syria since September 2015. Russia’s attacks in Syria, which levelled ancient cities and sent millions of refugees to Europe, allowed President Bashar al- Assad’s brutal government to reclaim control over most of the country after a devastating civil war. “Hmeimeem base is now an inte- gral part of Russia’s defense strategy not just in the Middle East but all the world,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian journalist and senior diplomatic editor for Syrian affairs at the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. In Africa, too, Russia is open to work- ing with leaders known for anti-demo- cratic actions and abuses of human rights. On the eve of Russia’s invasion with Ukraine, Kremlin officials met in Mos- cow with an officer of a military junta that seized power in Sudan. Isolated by the West, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo warmly responded to Russia’s overture of a new economic- focused alliance. Upon returning home, Gen. Dagolo announced that Sudan would be open to allowing Russia to build its long hoped-for naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. It’s far from certain that Russia would be able to take advantage anytime soon. The Ukraine invasion is straining its military and financial resources and showing Russia’s military weaknesses, and international sanctions are crip- pling its economy. But longer-term, a Red Sea port could help give it a greater role in the Medi- terranean and Black Sea, increase Rus- sian access in the Suez Canal and other high-traffic shipping lanes, and allow Russia to project force in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Russia’s expanding alliances aren’t just about its conventional military. From 2015 to 2021, Russian mercen- ary security outfits increased their presence around the world seven-fold, with operations in 27 countries as of last year, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The most prominent is the Wagner Group, which the U.S. and EU consider to be a surrogate of the Russian military, but which the Kremlin denies even exists. From Libya to Madagascar, security contracts granted to Wagner Group and others give Russia access to mineral resources, staging grounds for deploy- ments and substantial footholds challen- ging Western nations’ influence there. In Mali, the U.S. and Europe ex- pressed alarm in December at reports that the Wagner Group had signed a US$10 million-a-month security con- tract with that government. Experts say Wagner took advantage of local un- happiness over the failures of a years- long French-led deployment in the sub- Saharan targeting extremist factions. Mali denied any such deployment, but some in Mali saw the arrival of Rus- sians as a slam to Mali’s colonial ruler France, which had struggled to pro- tect them against armed extremists. They hope for better results from any Russian fighters arriving in the sub- Saharan. — The Associated Press Saudi Arabia puts 81 to death in its largest mass execution DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from kill- ings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam’s holi- est site. It wasn’t clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world’s attention remained focused on Russia’s war on Ukraine — and as the U.S. hopes to lower record-high gasoline prices as energy prices spike worldwide. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson report- edly plans a trip to Saudi Arabia next week over oil prices as well. The number of death penalty cases being carried out in Saudi Arabia had dropped during the coronavirus pan- demic, though the kingdom continued to behead convicts under King Salman and his assertive son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The state-run Saudi Press Agency an- nounced Saturday’s executions, saying they included those “convicted of vari- ous crimes, including the murdering of innocent men, women and children.” The kingdom also said some of those executed were members of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and also back- ers of Yemen’s Houthi rebels. A Saudi- led coalition has been battling the Iran-backed Houthis since 2015 in neighbouring Yemen in an effort to re- store the internationally recognized government to power. Those executed included 73 Saudis, seven Yemenis and one Syrian. The re- port did not say where the executions took place. “The accused were provided with the right to an attorney and were guar- anteed their full rights under Saudi law during the judicial process, which found them guilty of committing mul- tiple heinous crimes that left a large number of civilians and law enforce- ment officers dead,” the Saudi Press Agency said. “The kingdom will continue to take a strict and unwavering stance against terrorism and extremist ideologies that threaten the stability of the en- tire world,” the report added. It did not say how the prisoners were executed, though death-row inmates typically are beheaded in Saudi Arabia. An announcement by Saudi state tele- vision described those executed as hav- ing “followed the footsteps of Satan” in carrying out their crimes. The executions drew immediate international criticism. “The world should know by now that when Mohammed bin Salman promises reform, bloodshed is bound to follow,” said Soraya Bauwens, the deputy direc- tor of Reprieve, a London-based advo- cacy group. Ali Adubusi, the director of the European Saudi Organisation for Hu- man Rights, alleged that some of those executed had been tortured and faced trials “carried out in secret.” “These executions are the opposite of justice,” he said. The kingdom’s last mass execution came in January 2016, when the king- dom executed 47 people, including a prominent opposition Shiite cleric who had rallied demonstrations in the king- dom. In 2019, the kingdom beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, most of them minority Shiites, in a mass execution across the country for alleged terrorism-related crimes. It also publicly nailed the sev- ered body and head of a convicted ex- tremist to a pole as a warning to others. Such crucifixions after execution, while rare, do occur in the kingdom. Activists, including Ali al-Ahmed of the U.S.-based Institute for Gulf Af- fairs, and the group Democracy for the Arab World Now said they believe that over three dozen of those executed Saturday also were Shiites. The Saudi statement, however, did not identify the faiths of those killed. Shiites, who live primarily in the king- dom’s oil-rich east, have long complained of being treated as second-class citizens. Executions of Shiites in the past have stirred regional unrest. Saudi Arabia meanwhile remains engaged in diplo- matic talks with its Shiite regional rival Iran to try to ease yearslong tensions. Sporadic protests erupted Saturday night in the island kingdom of Bahrain — which has a majority Shiite popula- tion but is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, a Saudi ally — over the mass execution. The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque remains a crucial moment in the his- tory of the oil-rich kingdom. A band of ultraconservative Saudi Sunni militants took the Grand Mosque, home to the cube-shaped Kaaba that Muslims pray toward five times a day, demanding the Al Saud royal family ab- dicate. A two-week siege that followed ended with an official death toll of 229 killed. The kingdom’s rulers soon fur- ther embraced Wahhabism, an ultra- conservative Islamic doctrine. Since taking power, Crown Prince Mohammed under his father has in- creasingly liberalized life in the king- dom, opening movie theaters, allowing women to drive and defanging the coun- try’s once-feared religious police. However, U.S. intelligence agencies be- lieve the crown prince also ordered the slaying and dismemberment of Wash- ington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, while overseeing airstrikes in Yemen that killed hundreds of civilians. In excerpts of an interview with The Atlantic magazine, the crown prince discussed the death penalty, saying a “high percentage” of executions had been halted through the payment of so-called “blood money” settlements to grieving families. “Well, about the death penalty, we got rid of all of it, except for one category, and this one is written in the Quran, and we cannot do anything about it, even if we wished to do something, because it is clear teaching in the Quran,” the prince said, according to a transcript later published by the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al-Arabiya. “If someone killed someone, another person, the family of that person has the right, after going to the court, to apply capital punishment, unless they forgive him. Or if someone threatens the life of many people, that means he has to be punished by the death penalty.” He added: “Regardless if I like it or not, I don’t have the power to change it.” — The Associated Press JON GAMBRELL ELLEN KNICKMEYER AND ZEINA KARAM RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY PRESS SERVICE VIA AP FILES Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (left) listens to Syrian President Bashar Assad during their talks last month in Damascus, Syria. CALLING FOR CLIMATE ACTION Demonstrators demand the federal gov- ernment create a plan for a rapid and just transition from reliance on fossil fuels at a rally organized by the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition in front of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Saturday. DANIEL CRUMP / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A_06_Mar-13-22_FP_01.indd 6 2022-03-12 10:52 PM ;