Macedonia
Macedonia’s parliament last week ratified the
name-change agreement with Greece.
There will be a referendum later this summer to approve the Slavic republic’s
name change from “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” to “The Republic
of North Macedonia” to avoid encouraging any separatism in neighboring Greece’s northern province
of Macedonia.
Nicaragua
Deadly attacks continue to be
committed by the paramilitary forces that support the Marxist authoritarian
Sandinista government
Ethiopia
and Eritrea
Ethiopia
and Eritrea have begun peace
talks after Ethiopia
accepted a border agreement it had signed in 2000, ending a twenty-year war
that cost tens of thousands of lives.
Iran
There have
been significant daily protests over the last several days against the
tyrannical Islamist Iranian regime, including against its war on behalf of the
Bashar Assad regime of Syria.
Turkey
Turkey
conducted presidential elections earlier this week—under a state of
emergency—that were neither free nor fair.
Despite these advantages, the Islamist authoritarian President barely managed
a majority of the vote, but will now assume greater powers. Through the state of emergency, which was
imposed after the attempted military coup in 2016, he has been able to increase
his consolidation of power in the presidency at the expense of the office of
prime minister and to make the Turkish state less secular, as tens of thousands
of Turks were fired or imprisoned. Turkey had been founded in 1918 after the defeat
of the Ottoman Empire after the First World
War as a modern, democratic, secular state.
The Turkish military had long been the safeguard of the state as such,
but now Turkey
is no longer a free country – the first such unfree member of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization in several decades. Turkey’s goal of joining the
European Union will not be realized, as it does not share any European
values.
Turkey,
like the Russian Federation
and Venezuela,
is an example of the global rise of authoritarianism, as all three elected
leaders who subverted representative government, imposed autocracy and denied
their
citizens liberty.
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