Kigali, Rwanda
Lopsided election: Rwandan President Paul Kagame won re-election this week with a stunning 93 percent of the vote, a count that observers said was “largely accurate.” The vote reflects the genuinely high popularity of Kagame, who first took power in 1994, after the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Kagame, a Tutsi, has led the country to stability and relative prosperity since then. But his electoral dominance was also a sign of political repression. Two people who wanted to run against him were arrested before the campaign began; another fled abroad. The three candidates who did oppose Kagame spent most of their campaigns praising his rule.
Tehran
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Down with the dollar: Iran said this week it would retaliate against the U.S. and European countries whose sanctions are clamping down on its economy by refusing to accept dollars or euros for its oil. “We consider these currencies dirty and won’t sell oil in dollars and euros,” said Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi. The U.N. Security Council imposed a fourth round of sanctions on Iran in June after it refused to halt uranium enrichment. The U.S. and EU imposed still more severe sanctions last month, which stranded Iranian ships in port without access to international financing. Rahimi also denounced countries that recently joined the sanctions regime, saying the South Koreans “need to be slapped” and the Australians are “a bunch of cattlemen.”
Zhouqu, China
Deadly landslides: Monsoon-season floods hit China with a fury this week, causing catastrophic landslides. More than 1,100 people were killed in the northwest when heavy rains caused a mountain to collapse, flattening three villages. Officials had long warned that deforestation was making the mountainous terrain around Zhouqu unstable; a recent government report called the area a “high-probability disaster zone for landslides.” Monsoons across Asia have been especially fierce this year. In Pakistan, nearly 14 million people have been displaced by flooding—more than twice the worldwide number uprooted by the 2005 tsunami. Despite the scope of the calamity, the U.N. says international response has been weak, with donor nations pledging far less aid than they did in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami.
Pyongyang, North Korea
Saber rattles again: North Korea ratcheted up pressure on South Korea this week, seizing a South Korean fishing boat with seven crew members that it claimed had strayed into its territory and firing artillery shells into South Korean waters. The aggression was viewed as a response to naval exercises by South Korea last week, as well as to previous U.S.–South Korean military exercises. South Korea responded with a statement from its Defense Ministry: “If North Korea continues its provocative rhetoric and acts, we will deal sternly with them.” Short of military action, which it has all but ruled out, South Korea’s options are few. The South reduced business ties and cut off aid to the North following the March sinking of the South Korean ship Cheonan, which it blamed on North Korea.
Tokyo
Our bad: One hundred years after annexing the Korean Peninsula and subjecting Koreans to decades of brutal colonial rule, Japan has apologized. “For the enormous damage and suffering caused by this colonization, I would like to express once again our deep remorse and sincerely apologize,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said. The official statement specifically addressed South Korea, while Japan’s earlier apologies for wartime atrocities were addressed somewhat vaguely to the whole of Asia. During the 1910–1945 occupation, hundreds of thousands of Korean men were forced to work in labor camps or to fight on the front lines, while tens of thousands of women were kept as sex slaves for the Japanese military. Seoul accepted Japan’s apology. Victims’ groups, however, said they’d prefer financial compensation.
Vladivostok, Russia
Top guns, together: U.S. and Russian fighter jets carried out their first joint exercise this week, in a test of their ability to work together during an international crisis. In the exercise, a passenger plane carrying U.S. and Russian officers was cast in the role of a hijacked aircraft, which was pursued across the Pacific Ocean first by U.S. F-22s and then by Russian Su-27s and a MiG-31. “To see those Russian fighters pull up right on time,” to take over the pursuit from U.S. pilots was “just incredible,” said U.S. Army Maj. Michael Humphreys. Both militaries said the exercise, which required extensive communication between the two Cold War adversaries, went perfectly. As a precaution, the fighter jets were unarmed.
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