Slate: An Armenian Tragedy

COVID-19, unsurprisingly, is rampant in Karabakh and new arrivals at the center get their temperature checked and a face mask if they don’t have one. Many of these people had spent days or weeks in crowded underground bomb shelters in Karabakh before fleeing to Armenia. I couldn’t help but notice that the mask-wearing rate was maybe 60 percent, but who can worry about an invisible threat like the coronavirus when a very tangible one is landing and exploding around you? Besides, it’s pretty much impossible to socially distance when you’re a refugee. [...]

Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation. [...]

Losing Karabakh would be not only a national defeat but also a blow, possibly fatal, to the hopes engendered by Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, in which the man-of-the-people ex-journalist Pashinyan improbably toppled the corrupt, strongman regime that had ruled the country for two decades. For Pashinyan to be the one to lose to Azerbaijan would threaten the country’s prospects for democracy.[...]

The Armenian media had, however, uncritically picked up the official line. This was partly due to a censorship regime: Shortly after fighting started, the government instituted martial law, one of the provisions of which was that it was illegal “to call into question the military capabilities” of the armed forces. But it also seemed to be partly a self-censorship in response to popular demand: There was no appetite for news about how Armenia was losing. [...]

This war had been coming for a long time. In the late 1980s, Armenians demanded that Karabakh—which was inside the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan—be transferred to Soviet Armenia. Interethnic violence broke out and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all-out war. By the time a cease-fire was signed in 1994, Armenia controlled a substantial part of Azerbaijani territory. That included Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as large swaths of other territory surrounding it, which Armenian forces captured during the fighting. Those territories had been almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, who all fled. In total, more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from this area, according to United Nations figures.

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The Conversation: Why so many Syrian women get divorced when they move to western countries

 But many of the refugee women in question have taken advantage of their new lives in western, secular societies to ask for divorce – often from abusive husbands they had to marry as young girls. They had not been forced to marry the men for religious reasons but often because they came from rural backgrounds where patriarchy (and patriarchal interpretations of Islam) were predominant. The personal status laws in most Arab countries also often deprive women of basic rights such as alimony or custody of their children after divorce.

But patriarchal laws are not the main reason for Syrian women’s silence and acceptance of the status quo when in their homeland. The concept of ‛ayb (shame) rather than the concept of haram (religiously forbidden), has often governed these women’s behaviour. For example, while ‛isma (an additional clause in the marriage contract allowing women to initiate divorce) is permissible in Islam, it is socially frowned upon in most Muslim communities. Women who have such a clause in their marriage contract are often seen as morally and sexually suspect. [...]

This phenomenon is not unique to Syrian refugees in Germany. It can also be observed in Sweden, where Syrian women have been increasingly empowered by the feminist policies of the Swedish government. They also started demanding separation from abusive husbands they had to marry as young girls. [...]

The Syrian government itself has seemingly recently realised its laws are problematic and amended the Syrian Personal Status laws in February 2019. The amendments included more than 60 legal articles. They not only raised the age of marriage, and granted women custody of their children after divorce, but also gave all Syrian women ‛isma – the right to petition for divorce without anyone’s permission.

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Psyche: When does a human embryo have the moral status of a person?

 As these arguments rage on, technological breakthroughs in embryo culture that make it easier to keep embryos alive in the lab for longer are putting greater pressure on the 14-day rule. For decades, the rule was relatively academic. In reality, sustaining an embryo outside of the human body beyond seven days was long considered a near-impossible feat. But this has begun to change. In 2016, scientists in both New York and Cambridge grew human embryos for 13 days, pushing against the limit of the regulations. Then in November 2019, a group of scientists at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in the Chinese city of Kunming published a study that sent reverberations throughout the world of reproductive medicine – they’d successfully cultivated monkey embryos for 20 days. [...]

So, the benefits to human health of extending the 14-day rule could be sizeable, but those who oppose the change fear that it will be a slippery slope towards an ever-increasing time window for human embryo research, and also lead to the approval of other reproductive technologies that remain highly contentious. For instance, concerns were raised at a discussion held by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2017 that extending the 14-day rule could help pave the way for the legalisation of human germline engineering, which would allow clinics to create genetically modified babies via the editing of embryo genomes. Giulia Cavaliere, a bioethicist at Lancaster University, is among those warning that extending the limit for embryo research could risk undermining public trust in scientists and regulators. [...]

In this debate, the ultimate dilemma has to do with the moral status that we attribute to embryos. Some people feel that any embryo, from the point of fertilisation, has the same right to protection as a newborn baby, and so cultivating it purely for research would be wrong. Others maintain that embryos are simply a ball of cells, and so don’t warrant any special rules. Somewhere in the middle lies the gradualist viewpoint whereby an embryo is seen as growing in moral value as it develops, eventually acquiring, at some point before birth, the status of a person.

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Wendover Productions: Why Long-Haul Low-Cost Airlines Always Go Bankrupt

 

Vox: Why government agencies should move from DC to the Midwest

Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other former industrial powerhouses in the Midwest are struggling. The industries that have supported those cities have gone away, leaving them overbuilt and underpopulated. Meanwhile, coastal cities like New York and Washington, DC are overcrowded and absurdly expensive. So, why not relocate some well-paying federal jobs from the capitol area to the Midwest? Vox's Matt Yglesias explains how such a plan might work.

Deutsche Welle: Moroccan-Israeli peace rapprochement: An (un)expected surprise?

Morocco's reconnection with Israel marks the return to their previous low-level diplomatic relations which had developed in the context of the Oslo accords in the 1990s and had ended with the Second Intifada in 2000. However, cultural ties date back to the pre-Roman Jewish colonies of Mauretania Tingitana around 2,000 years ago.

Despite major waves of migration from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, Morocco is still home to the largest remaining Jewish community in North Africa, while Jews with Moroccan heritage make up the largest minority group of Jewish immigrants in Israel, totaling around 900,000. [...]

In Israel, however, the destiny of the Sahrawi nation does not appear to be a priority. On Thursday, the first day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu focused on celebrating the new ties with Morocco.

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Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands

 How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]

This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.

Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.

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