Turkish government detains prominent journalists

Barış Demir

On Thursday, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office summoned well-known journalists including Soner Yalçın, Şaban Sevinç, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Ruşen Çakır, Yavuz Oğhan, and Batuhan Çolak for questioning.

They were charged with “publicly disseminating false information” and “aiding a criminal organization.” The journalists questioned were then released with a ban on leaving the country, while some had their phones confiscated.

The Chief Prosecutor’s Office announced that the operation targeting journalists was carried out as part of an investigation into the “Imamoğlu Criminal Organization.” Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB) and presidential candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has been in prison since March on charges of corruption. Additionally, a separate arrest warrant was issued against İmamoğlu at the end of October on espionage charges.

Stepped-up political arrests, operations targeting journalists, and attacks on press freedom are the steps taken by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to use the judiciary to build an authoritarian regime.

Attorney Hüseyin Ersöz said, “Journalist Yavuz Oğhan was taken from his home by the police at 6:45 a.m. in a manner that we could call ‘de facto detention.’ This is not called ‘detention’ [officially] but has been frequently seen in recent times. No search was conducted at Yavuz Oğhan’s home. He was informed that he would be taken to the Istanbul Police Headquarters for questioning. When we requested to meet with him, we were told that ‘the operation was ongoing and we could meet with him an hour later.’”

The Turkish Journalists’ Trade Union stated, “Journalists do their job, they inform the public. Fabricated detention orders are a policy of discrediting. We do not accept this! Journalism is not a crime.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Turkey Representative Erol Önderoğlu stated, “The endless operations targeting critical journalism and attempts to discredit those who make their living from journalism are unacceptable injustices. Unless the judiciary is freed from this political shadow, journalists and justice will continue to suffer severe harm.”

The early morning raids and detentions of journalists are designed to intimidate the press and opposition. As demonstrated by the recent “political espionage investigation” against İmamoğlu, routine election campaigning and related journalistic activities are being portrayed as criminal acts.

The World Socialist Web Site condemns the intimidation campaigns against journalists. Their prosecution for news reports and articles demonstrates that press freedom is under serious threat and this must be opposed on principle.

In the same “espionage investigation”, journalist Merdan Yanardağ was also arrested and a trustee was appointed to TELE1, the television channel where he served as chief editor. TELE1 was one of the few opposition channels broadcasting nationwide, and both Yanardağ and the channel had long been under pressure from the government.

The Erdoğan government claims to uphold the independence of the judiciary while using it to suppress political and media institutions. On the other hand, when a decision goes against it, it tramples on the law by disregarding the constitution.

As the latest example of this, on Thursday, Istanbul’s 13th High Criminal Court announced that it did not recognize the Constitutional Court’s (AYM) ruling on Tayfun Kahraman’s rights violation and release. Kahraman was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2022 for “aiding an attempt to overthrow the government of the Republic of Turkey.”

The 2013 Gezi Park protests, the subject of the case, began in opposition to plans to redevelop the park in Taksim Square into a shopping mall. The protests became the focal point of broader discontent with the authoritarian policies of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and increasing social inequality. In May-June 2013, millions of people participated in demonstrations in almost all of Turkey’s 81 cities. Kahraman was president of the Istanbul branch of the Chamber of City Planners during the protests.

In its reasoned decision published in the Official Gazette last month, the Constitutional Court indicated that Kahraman could not be held directly responsible for the incidents unless a causal link could be established between the violent incidents that occurred during the protests, in which millions of people participated, and Kahraman’s actions. The Court had previously issued a decision regarding Kahraman to suspend his execution, release him, and hold a retrial.

The Turkish Bar Association called for the removal of judges who do not comply with Constitutional Court rulings, while CHP Chairman Özgür Özel said, “Today, Turkey is crossing a threshold in the process of de-constitutionalization, de-regulation, and de-institutionalization.”

Özel implied government interference in the judiciary, adding, “They are waiting for instructions from somewhere; they are not writing opinions.”

The government’s vendetta against the political prisoners of the Gezi Park case, which disregards the Constitution as in other political cases, and its operations to intimidate the press, represent efforts to suppress growing social discontent.

There is growing opposition worldwide to war, genocide, dictatorship, and social inequality. In Africa and Asia, Gen Z protests against inequality and attacks on democratic rights are shaking governments. Since October 2023, millions of workers and young people from the United States to Europe and Australia have staged protests and strikes against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their governments’ complicity in the genocide. In the US, approximately 7 million people joined the “No Kings” protests on October 18 against Donald Trump’s attempt to establish a fascist dictatorship.

IMF calls for radical reform of the European welfare state

Peter Schwarz

The enormous costs of rearmament, the consequences of the international trade war and the profit demands of banks and companies are incompatible with the welfare state, as it emerged in Europe after the Second World War. Pensions, healthcare and many other government services can no longer be financed in their current form. Rigorous austerity measures and further deregulation of the economy are inevitable.

These are the main conclusions of the International Monetary Fund’s report on the economic situation in Europe, which the IMF’s European director, Alfred Kammer, presented to a gathering of bankers in Brussels November 4. The report, titled “How can Europe Pay for Things it Cannot Afford?” paints a dramatic picture of the financial and economic situation.

Protest against cuts to Berlin universities, hospitals and cultural sector, Monday, July 14

“Europe is facing daunting fiscal pressures from new policy priorities (for example, defense, energy security), the escalating costs of population aging (pensions and health care) and a rising interest bill on already high debt,” the report’s introduction states. “Without prompt policy action, public debt levels could more than double for the average European country in the next 15 years. This could drive up interest rates, slow down already sluggish economic growth, and undermine market confidence.”

As countermeasures, the report calls for structural reforms and budget cuts. However, this is not enough for highly indebted countries, “leaving no option other than a deeper rethink of the scope of public services and the social contract to fill the gap.” Delaying action would further deteriorate the fiscal position “and make the task for policymakers even more challenging.”

“We are all familiar with the difficult fiscal landscape in the region,” said Kammer when presenting the report. In fact, however, the situation was even worse. Additional spending on defence, energy security, higher pensions and healthcare costs would amount to 4.5–5.5 percent of GDP by 2040, rising debt and interest rates would lead to an increase in the interest burden and mediocre growth prospects would weigh on tax revenues and increase debt pressure.

Therefore, it was “abundantly clear that doing nothing is not an option!” If current policies were maintained, the debt ratio of European countries would rise sharply over the next 15 years, reaching an average of 130 percent—40 percentage points above sustainable levels and 70 percentage points more than the European fiscal framework allows. EU countries would then have to save 3.5 to 5 per cent of GDP in order to consolidate their public finances. This “is an almost impossible feat and would require deep cuts into the European model and social contract.”

Editorials in the media leave no doubt as to what this means. “It is high time that governments cut back on sprawling social welfare systems. Not with nail scissors, but with a scythe,” writes T-Online. Politicians need the “courage to impose tough cuts on citizens—including their voter base.”

And further:

Anyone who sees how difficult it is for the SPD to cut even a few million from the welfare state fat, or how irresponsibly France’s left-wing parties prevent any cuts to the luxurious pension system, may doubt that Europe is capable of saving itself from this mess. But there is no alternative; that is the bitter but true message from the IMF.

Workers should take this threat seriously. There is indeed no alternative as long as capitalist private property remains untouched and profit interests take precedence over social needs. Anyone who promises—like the Left Party in Germany or Mélenchon’s LFI in France—that all one has to do is vote for them and they will then stop and reverse social cuts without touching capitalist rule is a fraudster.

The attack on the social gains that European workers won in fierce class struggles after the Second World War began more than 40 years ago. And reformist and supposedly left-wing parties have regularly capitulated to the dictates of the financial markets.

This began with François Mitterrand, who was elected French president in 1981 on a promise of social reform and, after less than two years, switched to a brutal austerity program. When the Social Democrats returned to power in most European countries after two decades of conservative rule, it was British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who led the most comprehensive attack on working conditions and social benefits to date. And in July 2015, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of the pseudo-left Syriza party capitulated to the austerity dictates of the IMF, ECB and EU, which the people had rejected in a referendum just a week earlier.

As a result of these policies, a filthy rich oligarchy has emerged, owning billions, while the majority of the population finds it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The oligarchy defends its wealth by any means necessary. In the struggle for markets, raw materials and profits, trade wars and military force have replaced “free competition,” while internally, resistance to war and social cuts is suppressed with dictatorial measures.

This is most evident in the United States, where Donald Trump is establishing a presidential dictatorship and sending troops into the cities. But Europe is following the same path, as the IMF report makes clear. The “deep cuts into the social contract” it declares inevitable can only be enforced through authoritarian measures.

After collapse of the MAS, right-wing president takes power in Bolivia

Bill Van Auken

Rodrigo Paz Pereira is set to become Bolivia’s next president this Saturday, November 8, after winning an October 19 runoff election. His inauguration ends two decades of rule by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).

In the second round contest, Paz Pereira, the Christian Democratic candidate, won 54.96 percent of the vote compared to 45.04 percent for his opponent and fellow right-winger Jorge Tuto Quiroga of the Free Alliance. The MAS candidate, Eduardo del Castillo, received a humiliating 3.2 percent in the first round, while the party won just a single seat in the legislature.

The vote represented a crushing defeat for the MAS, long regarded in pseudo-left circles as a flagship of the Pink Tide and “21st century socialism,” the slogan first advanced by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and then embraced by MAS leader Evo Morales.

The slogan and the party’s name notwithstanding, the MAS never implemented genuine socialist policies, instead paving the way for the return to power by the right by maintaining intact the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus and protecting the core profit interests of both Bolivia’s ruling oligarchy and foreign capital at the expense of the working class and oppressed masses.

Paz Pereira won the election largely by appealing to layers that previously voted for the MAS as the “lesser of two evils.” He campaigned on the basis of demagogic phrases about “capitalism for all” and promises to support small businesses and the large informal sector. He claimed he would not pursue a structural adjustment agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), like his rival Quiroga, and that he would maintain minimal social assistance programs, including cash transfers to the poorest sections of what remains the second-poorest country in South America.

These election promises will likely be shelved in short order. The week before his inauguration, Paz Pereira and his advisers flew to Washington for talks with the Trump administration and the major international financial institutions.

Among the first acts of the new administration will be to restore diplomatic relations with the US. The MAS government of Morales broke off ties in 2008, expelling the US ambassador along with the Drug Enforcement Administration and USAID, accusing them of fomenting a coup against his administration.

The US State Department was among the first to congratulate Paz Pereira on his victory. Washington declared itself “ready to be a partner with Bolivia,” clearly counting on the election furthering its neo-colonial agenda in Latin America. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the election results “a transformative opportunity for both nations.”

The transformation that Washington seeks is to tie Bolivia to the war wagon of US imperialism as it prepares to attack Venezuela, while using loans and debt to impose a neo-liberal economic agenda, and break the country from its close economic and diplomatic ties with China and Russia.

In particular, the Trump administration has its sights set on Bolivia’s lithium resources, the largest deposit on the planet, crucial for electric vehicle batteries, which are also sought by China.

Paz Pereira has called for a break with “ideologies,” understood by many to mean a campaign of privatizations and “structural adjustment” that will drive up unemployment and transfer wealth from the bottom to the top of society.

The character of the incoming government has been foreshadowed by the release days before the inauguration of Jeanine Áñez, who took power as an unelected president, overseeing a campaign of violent repression, following a US-backed coup that overthrew Evo Morales in 2019.

Incoming Vice President Edmand Lara called for the Supreme Court’s annulling of Áñez’s 10-year prison sentence to be followed by a universal amnesty for military and police officials dismissed or facing charges for participating in the coup and the ensuing repression, declaring that they were only “doing their duty.”

The scion of Bolivia’s most prominent political dynasty, Paz Pereira improbably campaigned as an “outsider,” leaning heavily on the right-wing populism of his vice-presidential running mate Lara, an evangelical former police captain.

In reality, Paz Pereira is, by virtue of his background and experience, a highly conscious representative of the Bolivian bourgeoisie, whose great uncle and father were both presidents of Bolivia. His great uncle, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, first assumed the presidency in 1952 on the back of a revolution led by armed tin miners. Having integrated the main union federation, the COB, into his government, Paz Estenssoro set about reconstructing the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus.

His success was owed ultimately to the absence of a revolutionary leadership in the working class. This in turn was the result of the Pabloite revisionist perspective that prevailed within the Bolivian Trotskyist organization, the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party), which adapted itself to Paz Estenssoro’s petty-bourgeois nationalist MNR (Revolutionary National Movement).

This perspective relegated the role of the POR to attempting to push the MNR government to the left, rather than that of exposing before the working class the organic incapacity of this bourgeois government to complete the democratic revolution and wage a consistent struggle against imperialism, and fighting for a program of revolutionary class struggle for socialism.

This tragedy of the Bolivian working class was repeated in 1971 leading to a bloody coup d’état led by then-Col. Hugo Banzer, supported by Paz Estenssoro’s MNR. His great nephew, Paz Pereira, served in Banzer’s government after the ex-dictator managed to return to power via the ballot box in 1997.

With a far-right pro-imperialist government set to return to power, the MAS on Thursday announced that it had expelled President Luis Arce, Morales’ former finance minister, who was swept into power in 2020 on a wave of popular anger against Áñez’s coup regime. In a transparent attempt to distance itself from the debacle that it created, the MAS accused Arce of failing to take the party’s advice on dealing with Bolivia’s protracted economic crisis and floated allegations of misappropriated party funds.

But the disintegration of the MAS and its repudiation by Bolivia’s working class and oppressed masses are the the product not merely of any individual mistakes or malfeasance on the part of the outgoing president. They are the inevitable outcome of the entire arc of development of not only the MAS, but the whole of the so-called Pink Tide that emerged in Latin America at the dawn of the present century.

As with similar Latin American governments, from Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela to Correa in Ecuador, Lula in Brazil and others, the MAS utilized pseudo-socialist, anti-imperialist and indigenist rhetoric to mask a policy that defended capitalist ownership and governed on behalf of the national and international bourgeoisie. In Bolivia, as elsewhere, the government was able to harness the commodities boom of the early 2000s, driven by China’s growth, to implement limited social assistance programs that failed to either transform class relations or fundamentally alter Bolivia’s status as one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

In Bolivia, the rise to power of the MAS, founded by Evo Morales, the leader of an organization representing the interests of coca-growers, followed the mass upheavals known as the “water war” and the “gas war,” which pitted workers and oppressed peasants against the attempts of reactionary oligarchic governments to privatize and sell off basic resources.

The role played by the MAS was to divert this mass rebellion back into the safe channels of bourgeois politics and limited forms of national reformism. After winning the 2005 election by a landslide, Morales and the MAS were able to tap into the precipitous rise in gas and mineral prices to fund cash assistance programs for children, the elderly and new mothers that reduced the rate of poverty by 40 percent.

In 2006, the government announced the “nationalization” of the country’s main export earner, the gas industry. In reality, production remained in the hands of giant transnationals, including Brazil’s Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, Total from France, British Gas and British Petroleum as well as the US Exxon Mobil Corporation. Operating under the guise of “joint ventures” with the Bolivian state corporation, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), the companies were persuaded to pay the government a larger share of earnings while still reaping generous profits.

With the collapse of the commodity boom in 2014, gas production was halved, and income from hydrocarbon exports plummeted.

The class character of the MAS government emerged with ever greater clarity. Allied with Bolivia’s agro-industrial oligarchs, it used its cooption of the trade union bureaucracies and social movements with positions and perks, and, increasingly, naked state repression, to guarantee capitalist stability. Strikes and protests were denounced as acts of “economic sabotage” and met with claims that social struggles only strengthened the right.

Meanwhile, Morales’ claim to represent the interests of the long-oppressed indigenous populations, expressed in the 2009 constitution’s defining of Bolivia as a “plurinational” state, also wore thin as the government repressed indigenous protests against extractivist projects backed by foreign capital.

The MAS’s political support was further eroded after Morales called a referendum in 2016 on overturning term limits in order to stay in office. After his proposal was defeated, he utilized MAS-controlled courts to nullify the results and ran for reelection in 2019, before the coup that forced him into exile.

Under Arce, the MAS deepened its austerity measures, effectively following the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund. It attacked the coup regime from the right on the issue of the COVID-19 pandemic, accusing it of having prioritized “health over the economy.” Its ending of preventive measures contributed to Bolivia having one the highest rates of COVID deaths in the Americas.

In the run-up to the election, Bolivia was gripped by multiple crises, with inflation approaching 16 percent, public debt reaching 84 percent of GDP and fuel shortages leading to long lines at filling stations.

The shipwreck of the MAS’s petty-bourgeois nationalist project led to an increasingly bitter internecine struggle between Arce and Morales, who were divided not by issues of program, but over who would occupy the presidential palace. Barred from running, Morales called for his supporters to spoil their ballots in protest in the first round of the 2025 elections. Reflecting the hostility toward all of the parties, the rate of abstention together with spoiled ballots reached 36 percent in the first round, exceeding the vote for any single candidate.

Proxy war for Sudan by regional powers has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis

Jean Shaoul

More than 80,000 people have fled el-Fasher, the capital of the Darfur region in western Sudan, and the surrounding areas since the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the parties in Sudan’s brutal civil war, on October 26 after an 18-month siege.

Most are fleeing on foot to Tawila, 60 kms to the north east. They have told of mass rape, abductions and streets lined with corpses. Satellite imagery shows streets awash with blood and strewn with bodies and earth markings indicative of mass graves. Many of the city’s 250,000 residents remain unaccounted for.

Sudanese who fled el-Fasher city, after Sudan's paramilitary forces killed hundreds of people in the western Darfur region, crowd to receive food at their camp in Tawila, Sudan, Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025. [AP Photo/Mohammed Abaker]

The UN Human Rights Office said that RSF militia—born out of the notorious Janjaweed that devastated Darfur 20 years ago—carried out atrocities in el-Fasher, including “summary executions” of civilians trying to flee their attacks, “with indications of ethnic motivations for killings”, while Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the “risk of further large-scale, ethnically motivated violations and atrocities in el-Fasher is mounting by the day.”

This has plunged the people of el-Fasher city and the refugees who have fled the city, many of whom are living out in the open, into a catastrophic situation, with the IPC global hunger watchdog declaring a famine. The UN and international aid agencies have warned that Sudan is in the midst of one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world and that 14 million children need vital assistance to survive, with health and livelihood conditions continuing to deteriorate.

Since the fighting started in April 2023, 40,000 people have been killed and at least 12.6 million have been displaced in what the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) has called the world’s largest displacement crisis. Of these, around 3.3 million have taken refuge in neighbouring countries including Chad, South Sudan and Egypt, overwhelming their slim resources. The vast majority remain inside Sudan, many in internally displaced people (IDP) camps.

Amnesty International said that the RSF had committed crimes, including house-to-house killings and brutal attacks on civilians, in horrific conditions that exacerbate the suffering of the people and raise concerns about war crimes.

The RSF has now acceded to calls for a humanitarian ceasefire by the so-called Quad—comprised of the United States, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt and Saudi Arabia—in the face of the international outcry and general combat weariness.

The war between two former allies and military chiefs, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the Sovereign Council, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and de facto ruler of the country, and his deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary RSF, began when vicious fighting broke out in April 2023. The intensely bitter conflict has been characterised on both sides by war crimes, including targeting civilians and blocking humanitarian aid.

It split Sudan, with the RSF, based in the Darfur region, seizing the west of the country, and the SAF taking the eastern part of the country, including the Red Sea Port Sudan. But al-Burhan’s forces recaptured Khartoum in March this year, with Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian and other outside backing. Al-Burhan appointed Kamil Idris to head a government, the first civilian prime minister since the resignation of Abdalla Hamdok and the collapse of the Transitional Government in 2022, which had been put in place by the preemptive military coup backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE after months-long mass demonstrations against longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir ,in a bid to draw Sudan into their axis.

Both rival military factions, composed of sub-ethnic groups with competing economic interests, have the backing of various local militias and constantly shifting support from outside forces. Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Eritrea and Iran have backed al-Burhan and the SAF, while the UAE and Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group have supported Dagalo and the RSF, mobilising regional allies in Libya, Chad and South Sudan, although more recently Russia has supported al-Burhan.

These Arab and African states are using Sudan’s conflict to gain power, influence and access to resources, gold, minerals and agricultural land in the war-torn country. As the gateway to the Sahara, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, Sudan’s location, bordering on seven countries and its 800-kilometre coastline along the Red Sea that carries around 15 percent of world trade by volume, gives it enormous geostrategic importance.

Multiple sources have found evidence that the UAE has supplied the RSF with arms. Bulgaria had found mortar rounds exported to the UAE in Sudan. Similarly, parts supplied by the UK to the UAE have been found on the battlefield in Sudan, used by the RSF. Evidence has also emerged that the UAE has provided Dagalo and the RSF with weapons and mercenaries from Colombia, transported via Somalia’s UAE-controlled base in Bosaso to Libya, Chad and elsewhere in the region to RSF-controlled territory.

While Abu Dhabi has denied supplying weapons to the RSF, its ties to Dagalo go back to when he helped recruit RSF fighters along with soldiers from the SAF to fight the war against the Houthis in Yemen. Dagalo, a multi-millionaire who chairs a vast array of companies with interests in gold, farming and construction, has also funneled gold to the UAE. The UAE views him as the best way of combating the resurgent Islamists in the SAF, some associated with the regime of President Omar al-Bashir, which had the support of Qatar and Turkey and hosted militant Islamists, including Osama bin Laden.

But another member of the Quad, President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, Egypt’s dictator and a close Washington ally, has close links with SAF leader al-Burhan, whose forces hold Port Sudan on the Red Sea near the entrance to the Suez Canal. He views the SAF and al-Burhan as a useful bulwark against any democratic resolution to the crisis in Sudan and by inference in Egypt, as well as a key ally against Ethiopia, whose recently inaugurated Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam he views as a potential threat to Egypt’s water supply. To that end, he welcomed Sudan’s SAF-installed Prime Minister Kamil Idris to a meeting at the Presidential Palace in August.

Earlier this year, as-Burhan signed an agreement with Moscow that would allow Russia to build and operate a naval base at Port Sudan that would host up to 300 Russian personnel and accommodate four warships, including nuclear-powered vessels, giving Russia a foothold in one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints—the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

The United Nations, faced with the imperialist powers’ refusal to oppose the UAE—a crucial ally in their preparations for war against Iran in the resource-rich Middle East and beyond—has failed to take any measures to enforce its declared arms embargo on Sudan. Weapons and technologies made in the US, UK, China, Russia and France have been identified as being used by the RSF.

The UN and aid agencies launched a $6 billion appeal for humanitarian aid in February. As of last month the UN agencies had raised just $1.13 billion, leaving millions without food, water, shelter, or medical care.

Now with the capture of el-Fasher and the SAF’s withdrawal, the RSF controls all of Darfur’s regional capitals and has direct access to trans-Saharan trade routes and the ability to impose blockades and extract resources.

This creates a de facto partition of the country, some 14 years after South Sudan seceded from Sudan, with the RSF under Dagalo controlling the west and south, and the SAF under al-Burhan, controlling the centre and east of the country, including the capital Khartoum, the riverine breadbasket and Port Sudan. Such a division would be unstable, with the foreign backers of the two military forces competing to entrench their position and influence in the region, leading to further fragmentation along ethnic and tribal lines as has happened in Libya and Somalia.

It would further destabilize a region already contending with multiple crises amid drought and famine: increasingly tense relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea that could escalate into war as Ethiopia pushes for Red Sea access; political tensions in South Sudan that could reignite civil war; Somalia’s fragile political order; and, across the Red Sea, the civil war in Yemen between Houthi rebels and Saudi and UAE-backed forces.

A war in this region could disrupt maritime traffic, threaten Red Sea port infrastructure, and draw in outside powers already invested in the area—from Eygpt, Sudan, Turkey and Russia to the Gulf monarchies and the navies of the US, Japan, China, France and Italy stationed in Djibouti.