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Your 8-Country Chaos Tour
By Shlomo Maital
Caution: This blog is rather long.
Welcome to our First Annual Chaos Tour – first-hand inside look at wild unprecedented chaos in North and East Africa and the Mideast. Please join us as we tour eight chaotic countries, comprising 144.1 million hapless people.
Libya: This nation of 6.9 million rose up against the murderous whacky dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, who flees and is caught and killed. NATO airpower aids the rebels. The result: This oil-rich country becomes a non-country, fragmented into cantons led by local militias, part of them Islamic State. Small indicator of chaos: In October 2023, two poorly maintained dams collapse and cause catastrophic floods that smash into the city of Derna, destroying much of the city.
Yemen: A country of 34 million is torn apart by an eight-year conflict between a Saudi-led government military coalition and Houthi rebels supported by Iran. There is widespread hunger, disease, and attacks on civilians, leading to what is said to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – until it was superseded by the disaster in Sudan and South Sudan.
Sudan and South Sudan: Sudan, population 48 million and South Sudan, population 11 million, are torn apart by an ongoing power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023 and is causing enormous mass displacement, hunger, and a collapse of health services. More than 11 million people have had to leave their homes, as the crisis adds to what was already a growing humanitarian famine and disaster – “the largest displacement crisis in the world”, affecting 15.8 million people in desperate need of aid.
Iraq: Largely forgotten, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, 21 years ago, was a huge catastrophe for this country and its 45.5 million people. The invasion has plunged the country into decades of chaos. The BBC reports that “the political system that the Americans instigated, which divides power along ethnic and sectarian lines, offered prodigious chances for corruption.” Amounts stolen from this country with oil resources: Some $320 b. Iraqis face power cuts, theft, bad water and inadequate medical care, in hospitals once thought as good as those in Europe. Children beg in the streets, when Iraq once had one of the best educational systems in the Mideast.
Somalia: This nation of 18.1 million suffers as an ongoing Islamic rebellion by Al-Shabab wreaks havoc in the country; US airstrikes in support of the Somali army are ineffective. Some 650,000 Somalis have fled the conflict. The European Union halted funding for the UN World Food program temporarily, as an investigation revealed widespread theft and diversion of assistance.
Syria: This nation of 23.2 million has suffered under the rule of Hafez Asad and his son Bashaar Asad for 50 years. A London-trained ophthalmologist, Bashar Asad responded to a rebellion about a dozen years ago by dropping barrel bombs on civilians and by using chemical weapons to kill thousands and impose fear and terror. His Damascus prison was infamous for killing and torturing thousands. Rebels have taken over Syria and Asad and family have fled. The Spectator website cautions that chaos could return to Syria once again. Millions of Syrians fled their country, many to Lebanon. The country is now divided between Kurdish enclaves in the North, rebel controlled areas around Irbid, Alawi towns on the coast, and former Asad-controlled territory around Damascus. Like Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, Syria is a once unified country now fragmented into cantons controlled by militias.
Lebanon, 5.4 million people, once the jewel of the Mideast, financial capital where oil-rich sheikhs came to spend the summer in the cool foothills of Lebanon. An enormous disastrous explosion of nitrate fertilizer in Lebanon’s port in 2020 killed 218 and injured 7,000. Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, has dragged once-peaceful Lebanon into a disastrous conflict with Israel, bringing mass destruction. Lebanon has no real government, nor a President, and is bankrupt; many educated Lebanese have migrated.
And then, there’s Gaza.
True, there is chaos elsewhere in the world. But it pales in comparison to what we see in Gaza and the other eight North and East Africa and Mideast countries.
My word count is already bordering on illegal. So – can you find common sources for this chaos? Can you see ways to resolve it? And do you perceive why the West has caused more chaos than helped resolve it? Finally – Is there a way to help feed starving people in these countries, when their humanitarian needs surpass the resources available to meet them?
Refugee Energy: Tap It!
By Shlomo Maital
My friend and colleague Prof. Dan Shechtman (Nobel, Chemistry, 2011) has been tirelessly touring the world with a message: For poor and emerging countries, the way to a better life is technology-driven entrepreneurship and startups.
Today’s Hebrew language newspaper Haaretz has some proof.
Journalist Zvi Barel, who tracks events in countries bordering Israel, writes about startup energy in the midst of great misery – in refugee camps in Turkey and in Jordan, packed with Syrians fleeing the chaos and genocide in their country.
Al-Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan and other camps have one million refugees, living in great squalor. Turkey has camps with even more refugees, 2.5 million.
In Za’atari, recounts Barel, “Ra’shim” , from Aleppo, ravaged by war, fled his city three years ago. In the camp there are a great many shops opened by refugees. By one count – there are 3,000 small businesses (in the camp, and in nearby Jordanian cities) with monthly revenues of $13 million. I wrote about one such shop in an earlier blog – a shop that rents wedding dresses. Aided by the Oasis 500 fund in Jordan, Ra’shim opened a website to enable these shops to sell on the Internet, and raised 3 million dollars. He now has branches in Dubai and Oman, employs many young Jordanians and Syrians and plans to expand.
Some of the small shops and businesses in the camps in Turkey have been begun to employ local Turks, in significant numbers.
Satellite photos show that nearly 60 per cent of Aleppo has been destroyed. It will take 7-8 billion dollars to rebuild it. Oil-rich Arab nations have the money, but will never contribute such sums. So when this awful Syrian civil war ends, it will be up to people like Ra’shim, with entrepreneurial energy, to rebuild their country, with minimal resources.
And they will.
The incompetent EU has now more or less decided to bribe Turkey to stop the flow of immigrants. Does anyone in the EU wonder, whether an injection of entrepreneurial energy like that of Ra’shim could revive Europe’s dead economy, and generate entrepreneurship where virtually none exists, like in France? Did anyone in the EU consider giving a small fraction of the $3 billion bribe to Turkey, directly to refugees and refugee entrepreneurs?
In Silicon Valley, a high percentage of startups are launched by Indians, Israelis, Chinese and others? Precisely what the EU needs – but will now not get, because it cannot see its nose in front of its face.
TIMnovate 