Foreign Digest: Syria, Sudan and Hungary

Syria: Elections were held in Syria last week for the first time since the overthrow of the Baathist dictatorship of Bashar Assad. The vote — the first free elections in Syrian history — were for a popular assembly to draft laws and a new constitution. Electoral colleges were appointed in each participating province (except in the provinces inhabited primarily by Kurdish and Druse because of divisions with the provisional Syrian government). Popular elections were impossible because of the displacement of millions of Syrians from the Syrian Civil War and lost records. The war began in 2011 as a popular uprising against the Assad tyranny and claimed over half a million lives and displaced around a quarter of the population of 20 million, causing the largest refugee surge in Europe since the Second World War. The Assad family, of the minority Alawite Shi’ite sect, had ruled Syria since 1970. They were backed in the war by Iran, Hezbollah (the Lebanese terrorist organization) and Russia. Each religious and ethnic group, as well as women, were represented in the Electoral Colleges. The diversity was reflected in the election of women and minorities in the assembly for the religiously and ethnically diverse Arab State. Sudan: The International Criminal Court convicted a senior Janjaweed militia leader for crimes against humanity in Sudan in 2003 to 2004, including destruction, rapes, and killings. He had surrendered in Central African Republic in 2020. The war began in 2003 in the western Darfur Province as an insurgency by ethnic groups against the oppressive Arab-led Government. It killed 300,000 people. Sudan’s Islamist tyrant was overthrown in 2019 and detained, but has not been turned over to the ICC for trial. The new civil war since 2023 between the Janjaweed’s paramilitary successors and the Sudanese military has disrupted Sudan’s political transition and killed 40,000 people in the African State. Hungary: The European Parliament last week rejected Hungary’s request to revoke immunity to center-right Hungarian Member of the European Parliament Peter Magyar from charges based on political persecution, and a leftist Italian MEP who had been imprisoned in Hungary for 16 months until last year on “terrorism” accusations stemming from a protest. Magyar had served in the Hungarian Government, but broke away because of its corruption and now leads the conservative opposition party that is leading the polls in next April’s parliamentary elections against the authoritarian anti-migrant pro-Russian far-right ruling party of Viktor Orban. Orban, whom the EU describes as an “autocrat” and has withheld funds to Hungary for authoritarianism and corruption, is the darling of American Trumpists. Orban’s party left the center-right European People’s Party, a European parliamentary group, after violating its principles. The vote of the EPP were decisive. Hungary, a former Communist and Soviet satellite State in Eastern Euorope is an ally of the United States as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but has opposed aid to Ukraine to defend against Russian aggression.