Category World News

As hundreds of pounding earthquakes have rattled Santorini island and its neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has appealed for calm.

As of 7am on Tuesday (05:00 GMT), the quakes continued to occur a few minutes apart, according to records from the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC), with the largest quake being 5.11 magnitude on Monday afternoon.

In a statement from Brussels, Mitsotakis urged “our islanders first and foremost to remain calm” while claiming that authorities have been monitoring a “very intense” geological phenomenon for some time.

In order to prevent more earthquakes from causing little harm and no injuries, thousands of locals and tourists have packed onto ferries and flights from Santorini and the nearby islands of Anafi, Ios, and Amorgos.

A dormant volcano is located on the picturesque crescent-shaped island of Santorini, but an expert committee established to monitor the situation estimated 200 quakes of magnitude 3 or more had been recorded, but emphasized that the phenomenon was “not linked to volcanic activity.”

The current earthquake sequence, which is visible on live seismic maps as a growing cluster of dots between Santorini, Ios, Amorgos, and Anafi, could point to a larger impending event, warned renowned Greek seismologist Gerasimos Papadopoulos.

“All scenarios remain open”, Papadopoulos wrote in an online post.

“The number of tremors has increased, magnitudes have risen, and epicentres have shifted northeast. While these are tectonic quakes, not volcanic, the risk level has escalated”, he said.

An intense earthquake swarm is rattling the island of Santorini, Greece, leading to evacuations. Earlier today, a M5.1 earthquake joined this swarm — the strongest so far. pic. twitter.com/YYJfWv7aSQ

Santorini’s whitewashed villages, which are thought to be among the largest in human history, are visited by more than three million people each year.

A large area of the island was covered in meters of ash by the eruption, which is thought to have contributed to the demise of the region’s ancient Minoan civilization.

The most recent notable eruption took place in 1950, Santorini, despite the volcano still active.

The Santorini volcano explodes very loudly every 20 000 years, according to Efthymios Lekkas, the head of the Hellenic Volcanic Arc’s scientific monitoring committee, last week.

“It’s been 3, 000 years since the last explosion, so we have a very long time ahead of us before we face a big explosion”.

Ferries and planes full

Around 2, 000 people left Santorini by sea on Sunday and Monday, according to the AFP news agency, with ferry operators and airlines claiming to be adding services to increase their departures in response to a request from the island’s Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection.

Although it is still far beyond its peak season due to the island’s cooler winter weather, Instagram fame has recently increased tourism there.

Tourist guide Kostas Sakavaras, who has lived on the island for 17 years, claimed he had never before experienced this level of seismic activity.

“It was shaking every three to four hours yesterday. This feels different from the other times”, he said.

Sakavaras said he left the island on Sunday with his wife and two children, on a ferry full of passengers. “We plan to stay]on the mainland] until the end of the week. He said, “I hope it will calm down tomorrow and that it will escalate.”

While schools on all four islands are closed, emergency personnel have assisted in setting up tents next to the island’s main hospital as a staging area.

Mobile phones have also been subject to push-alerts that warn against entering some coastal areas and to stay away from areas where rockslides might occur.

After a dramatic day of telephone diplomacy, United States President Donald Trump has agreed to pause 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada that were to come into effect on Tuesday.

But the pause is only for a month, and a 10 percent tariff that Trump announced on Chinese imports, on top of existing tariffs kicked in on Tuesday morning.

The threat of an all-out multifront tariff war still looms: before Trump pulled back, for now, on his threat, Mexico and Canada had both also warned that they would launch retaliatory tariffs on the US if Washington goes ahead with the president’s tariff plan. And China has announced tit-for-tat tariffs of its own.

Trump’s threats have also spooked global markets and drawn condemnation from around the world, even as he has threatened to impose tariffs on the European Union and India.

But for all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, he isn’t the first US president to wage tariff wars. In fact, he is following in steps of a series of predecessors who tried to use tariffs as a bludgeon to get other countries to follow Washington’s interests.

What happened in those instances? Who were the key players involved? And what is Trump’s rationale for trying to impose tariffs?

Why did Trump impose tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico?

Trump has justified his threat by accusing the three targeted countries of not doing enough to prevent drugs, specifically fentanyl, from entering the US. He has also insisted that Canada and Mexico are flooding the US with unauthorised immigrants by permitting them access to US borders. Finally, he has alluded to the trade deficits that the US has with each of these nations – its top three trading partners.

“Number one is the people that have poured into our country, so horribly and so much … number two are the drugs, fentanyl and everything else that have come into the country … and number three are the massive subsidies we’re giving to Canada and Mexico over deficits,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday.

On Saturday, Trump declared a state of emergency by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and imposed tariffs on the three countries. These tariffs were to come into effect from 12:01am EST (05:01 GMT) on Tuesday.

But after a telephone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and two conversations with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump agreed to put the tariffs on the two neighbours on pause for a month.

Canada and Mexico announced that they would each send 10,000 soldiers to their borders to crack down on undocumented migrants trying to enter the US, and to stop fentanyl from seeping across the borders.

Yet this reprieve is temporary and does not extend to China – and on Sunday, Trump warned that Europe is his next target. “They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products. They take almost nothing and we take everything from them,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, threatening tariffs.

So how have tariff wars played out in the past?

1930: The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs

In 1929, the stock market crashed on Wall Street, sending shock waves through the US and the rest of the world. The Great Depression, a period of global economic turmoil that would last a decade, had begun.

Months later, in June 1930, US President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Act into law. The law was originally aimed at imposing tariffs to protect US farmers from foreign competition, but it was extended to a wider array of products and increased tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods by about 20 percent.

The law was named after its top supporters, Republican Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Republican Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon.

Almost immediately, the act caused trade wars. Several countries, including Canada, France and Spain, imposed retaliatory tariffs on US products. Canada slapped tariffs on 16 US products which accounted for about a third of US exports at the time, according to US-based nonprofit research organisation, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

The slowdown of trade weakened the US economy. By 1933, US exports dropped by 61 percent. Smoot-Hawley is often cited by experts as a factor which aggravated the US economic crisis.

Hoover’s popularity tumbled and his re-election bid failed, when Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt defeated him in the 1932 presidential election.

In June 1934, Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which called for bilateral trade deals with other countries to negate the effects of Smoot-Hawley. The Act said “that a full and permanent domestic recovery depends in part upon a revived and strengthened international trade”. Between 1934 and 1939, the Roosevelt administration negotiated trade agreements with 19 countries.

1960s: Chicken War

In the 1960s, the US and European nations played an expensive game of chicken across the Atlantic Ocean.

During World War II from 1939 to 1945, red meat was rationed. The US government began a campaign to encourage Americans to eat fish and poultry instead. In the years that followed, the US ramped up the factory farming of chicken, which lowered the price of poultry.

The period after World War II also saw the acceleration of globalisation. Europe started buying cheap chicken from the US. As a result, European farmers were scared of being priced out of the market with fast, inexpensive American chickens out-clucking slower, pricier European ones.

In 1962, members of the European Economic Community (EEC), which was later absorbed into the European Union, imposed tariffs on American chicken. France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg increased their tariff on US poultry to 13.43 cents (around $1.4 today), per pound of chicken.

US poultry exports to Europe fell sharply. Between 1962 and 1963, US global chicken exports dropped by about 30 percent, according to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture.

In 1963, President Lyndon B Johnson imposed retaliatory tariffs on: potato starch, 25 cents ($2.57 now) per pound; brandy, $5 ($51.3 now) per gallon if over $9 ($92.4 now) per gallon; dextrin, a chemical used to manufacture paper, 3 cents ($0.31 now) per pound; and automobile trucks valued more than $1,000 ($10,267.7 now) by 25 percent.

The “chicken tax” on light trucks remains in force. This has led to a cat-and-mouse game between foreign manufacturers trying to access US markets, and regulators. Manufacturers tried to build models that could either meet specifications for passenger vehicles, or could be assembled in the US. Eventually though, Asian automakers, particularly from Japan, mostly set up factories in North America.

1982: The lumber war between the US and Canada

The US was convinced that it could see the wood for the trees, as it battled Canada over softwood lumber.

The root of the conflict was the fact that Canada grows and harvests lumber from public land, with prices determined by the government. On the other hand, the US harvests lumber from privately owned lots.

In 1982, the US argued that Canada was unfairly subsidising its softwood lumber, which led to several rounds of conflict, tariffs and retaliatory tariffs.

The lumber war continues. Canadian lumber faces an existing 14 percent tariff in the US, even before Trump’s threat to add 25 percent more.

The US imports almost half of its wood products from Canada, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

1987: Tariffs on Japanese automobiles

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan imposed 100 percent tariffs on $300m worth of Japanese imports, affecting, in particular, automobiles from the East Asian nation.

The Reagan administration said it had imposed these tariffs as a result of Tokyo reneging on the terms of a 1986 semiconductor trade agreement with Washington. The agreement asked Japan to open its market to exports of computer semiconductors made by the US.

Japan did not retaliate. “Hoping to prevent this issue from causing severe damage to the world’s free-trading system, the Japanese government has decided, from this broader perspective, not to take any retaliatory measures immediately,” Japan’s international trade minister, Hajime Tamura, told the press.

Things soured for the Japanese economy, the value of the yen appreciated and exports dropped. In the 1990s, Japan fell into a recession which ended in 2002.

Prior to the tariffs, the US had a massive trade deficit with Japan. In 1986, the deficit was about $55bn. The deficit dropped slightly, to under $52bn in 1988 and $43bn in 1991. The deficit has since fluctuated, rising in recent times. In 2023 it stood at $72bn.

1993: Banana split

In 1993, soon after the EU was formed, the bloc placed tariffs on bananas from Latin American countries to give small farmers in its former Caribbean and African colonies an upper hand in the market.

The US argued that this went against the rules of free trade. Its interest? Most banana plantations in Latin America were owned by American companies whose profits were at risk.

The US filed eight separate complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO), an international body that oversees trade between countries. In the first case filed in 1997, the WTO ruled in favour of the US. The WTO then consistently ruled against the EU.

While the EU said that it was lowering the tariffs, the US argued that fair trade had not been restored. In retaliation, the US imposed 100 percent tariffs on European products such as Scottish cashmere or French cheese. It was bananas for brie.

The resolution began with the Geneva Banana Agreement in December 2009, agreed upon by the US, EU and 10 Latin American countries. It called for tariffs on bananas from Latin American countries to be reduced from 148 euros per tonne to 114 euros per tonne by 2017.

In 2012, the EU signed an agreement with the Latin American countries to formally end the WTO cases. The Latin American countries were Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.

2002: Steel war with Europe

To boost the American steel industry, President George W Bush places tariffs ranging from 8 to 30 percent on steel from foreign countries. Mexico and Canada were exempt from this, but it hit Europe.

Imports of steel from countries affected by Bush’s tariff targets plummeted by about 28 percent on average in 2002, and a further 37 percent by 2003, according to an analysis by the French research institute Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII). However, the US started importing more steel from countries that the tariffs were not targeting. Overall, US steel imports grew by 3 percent in the 12 months after the tariff was imposed.

These tariffs affected the US steel industry. Some smaller steel companies either went bankrupt or were acquired by larger ones.

In retaliation, Europe threatened tariffs on a range of American products worth $2.2bn (about $3.85bn now), ranging from oranges from Florida to Harley Davidson motorbikes. Days before Europe would have imposed these tariffs, Bush lifted the steel tariffs in 2003.

2018: Trump’s first tariff war

Trump’s first term as president was from 2016 to 2020.

In January 2018, he introduced tariffs on all solar panels and washing machines. While the tariffs didn’t differentiate between the source country of these products, China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels.  In June 2018, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on more than 800 products from China.

In between, in April 2018, Beijing responded with a retaliatory 178.6 percent tariff on sorghum from the US. These tariffs were removed in May 2018. China also imposed 25 percent tariffs on 128 US products including soybeans and aeroplanes.

That year, Trump also slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel, and a 10 percent tariff on aluminium, from Canada, Mexico and EU countries.

Like China, other targeted countries also hit back.

Canada placed 25 percent tariffs and 10 percent tariffs on a range of products coming in from the US. From the summer of 2019 into 2020, the US and China imposed multiple tariffs on each other, while trying to negotiate an end to their dispute. China lost its position as the top trade partner of the US to Mexico in 2019. After negotiations between the US and China, a truce was announced in January 2020.

New Delhi, India – Every morning, Mohammad*, 32, watches his 12-year-old daughter, Fatima*, waking up with the same enthusiasm – putting on her worn-out uniform, neatly braiding her hair and sprinting to the government school in New Delhi’s Khajuri Khas area in the northeast, where they live with about 40 other Rohingya families in cramped rented rooms.

Fatima is among a handful of Rohingya children in Khajuri Khas with access to formal education in a government school. Many other children like her, including her younger brother Ahmed*, have been denied school admission for years.

As a new academic year begins next month, Fatima fears she may suffer the same fate.

On Christmas Day in December, as tens of thousands of Delhi’s pupils looked forward to a winter break, the national capital territory’s Chief Minister Atishi, who goes by her first name, posted on X: “Today, the Education Department of the Delhi Government has passed a strict order that no Rohingya should be given admission in the government schools of Delhi.”

Atishi, a former Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford, is a leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party or AAP), a relatively new political force in India that owes its foundation in 2012 to a popular “pro-poor” and anticorruption movement.

The AAP, which has been governing the national capital territory of Delhi for more than a decade, is seeking a return to power in the provincial assembly elections to be held on Wednesday. The results will be declared on Saturday.

But this year, AAP faces a serious challenge from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which controls 20 of India’s 36 states and federally-run provinces (called Union Territories) – either directly or through coalition partners – but has been out of power in the national capital for more than 25 years.

‘Parties trying to outcompete each other’

On December 11, the BJP-appointed lieutenant governor of Delhi ordered a special drive to identify and act against “all illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” who may be “involved in criminal activities” in the city.

Bangladesh, India’s neighbour in the east, hosts more than a million Rohingya, a mainly Muslim ethnic group, most of whom fled what the United Nations described as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” by Myanmar’s military in 2017. It was the largest exodus of the community which had been fleeing state persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar for decades.

Nearly 40,000 Rohingya, like Mohammad, came to India in search of security and livelihoods, and settled in several parts of the country. New Delhi is home to about 1,100 of them, according to a 2019 estimate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), most of them confined to predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods of the city.

The BJP and other right-wing groups, whose politics hinges on an anti-Muslim platform, have been attacking the Rohingya for years, accusing them of “terrorist” links and demanding their arrests and deportation from the country. Many have been put in detention centres in the capital and other parts of the country.

During a news conference on Monday, BJP spokesman Sambit Patra accused the AAP government of causing a “demographic manipulation” to affect the electoral process in the national capital. The Hindu majoritarian party has repeatedly accused the AAP of adding “illegal Bangladeshis” to voter lists in order to expand its vote base.

Addressing an election rally last week, federal Home Minister Amit Shah promised that if the BJP came to power, it “would free Delhi of illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingyas in two years”. Shah – and many in his party – have in the past referred to Bangladeshi migrants as “termites” and “infiltrators”.

Not to be outdone by the BJP in the race for power in Delhi, the incumbent AAP government also raised the pitch against the Rohingya, in turn accusing the BJP of poor border control that facilitates their entry into the country.

On December 15, four days after Delhi’s lieutenant governor ordered a drive against Bangladeshi migrants, Atishi accused the BJP of “appeasing” the Rohingya. She referred to a 2022 social media post by federal minister Hardeep Singh Puri about relocating Rohingya refugees in government-owned apartments. Modi’s government quickly backtracked on the issue and denied issuing any such directive.

Days later, Atishi banned all Rohingya children from seeking admission to Delhi’s public schools.

“Now this [election] campaign has reached a low where both the parties are trying to outcompete each other in attacking the Rohingya,” Angshuman Choudhary, a PhD scholar at the National University of Singapore who works on migrant issues, told Al Jazeera.

Choudhary said it was the first time he saw a government systematically deny education to children.

“Earlier, there was discrimination, but humane officials at some schools would apply their minds and give admissions to kids. That scope has ended since this order has come from the top,” he said.

“Now the BJP would also not mind doubling down and proving its own anti-Rohingya credentials if cornered,” he said, adding that the trend can have “particularly devastating consequences” and a spillover effect, especially in BJP-ruled states.

“There have been many occasions when the AAP has outdone the BJP in targeting the Rohingya,” Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University who also goes by one name, told Al Jazeera.

He said AAP is “no different from the BJP when it comes to ultranationalist posturing and anti-refugee rhetoric”.

“AAP has presented itself as a staunch nationalist and anti-corruption alternative party. Its current anti-Rohingya rhetoric is in line with what the party has stood for for a long time. It goes without saying that the final destination of this nationalism is the same as the BJP.”

‘Our struggle for safety continues’

Caught in the electoral crossfire between the two political parties, many Rohingya say they cannot return to Myanmar. “Two weeks ago, two of my cousins in Burma were murdered by the military,” Mohammad told Al Jazeera, using the previous name for Myanmar.

He added, however, that it was becoming increasingly difficult for the community to live in Delhi.

About 25km (16 miles) away from Mohammad’s home, in the southeast corner of the city, lies Madanpur Khadar, a dusty, impoverished colony that houses a camp for the Rohingya.

For eight months, the camp’s residents have been living without electricity. There are no toilets, and drinking water is supplied through tankers twice a week. Most families here rely on charity, with some of their children attending a neighbourhood school.

But in the wake of another anti-Rohingya election campaign, they are unsure about their children’s future education.

“The problem is not just the elections. This [targeting of Rohingya] has been happening for many years in India. We did not come here for politics, we came to save our lives. But sadly, it seems we cannot find peace even here. For years, we have been criminalised in the name of politics, and our struggle for safety continues without end,” Sabber Kyaw Min, a Rohingya activist and founder of the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative, told Al Jazeera.

Fatima’s father Mohammad says denying Rohingya children education is not a new phenomenon in the city. He says unlike Fatima, his 10-year-old son Faizan has not been able to join school.

“At this age, I don’t want him to feel that he is different,” Mohammad told Al Jazeera, adding that he approached at least four government schools in the last five years for Faizan. But all of them declined.

‘Deeply shameful’

Mohammad says the situation worsened in late 2019 when Modi’s government passed a controversial citizenship law and his party pushed for a national register of citizens – both seen as anti-Muslim moves that triggered nationwide protests and deadly communal riots in New Delhi in early 2020.

“Post-2020, most Rohingya children were not given school admissions,” said Mohammad, adding that the authorities started asking for government documents that refugees cannot possess. Earlier, children such as Fatima secured admission by using identity cards issued by the UNHCR.

“I have met and pleaded with the local authorities at least 25 times,” Mohammad said. “They ask for Aadhaar [India’s biometric ID] cards. We don’t have them and we cannot get one because that would be illegal.”

In October last year, Social Jurist, a New Delhi-based NGO, filed a petition before the Delhi High Court, asking why Rohingya children were being denied education when the same rights were available to refugees from other countries. The petition was dismissed.

The NGO approached the Supreme Court, which held a hearing last week, in which it asked the petitioners to find out if the Rohingya lived in makeshift camps or regular neighbourhoods. The top court will next hear the matter later this month.

“Even in Delhi, where education was previously accessible, this exclusion is now taking place. It is deeply shameful that highly educated individuals take pride in barring these children from schools,” New Delhi-based Rohingya activist Ali Johar told Al Jazeera.

“Now, I realise the importance of education,” says Ali’s brother, Salimullah. Their sister, Tasmida, is the first Rohingya female graduate from India and is now pursuing her master’s in politics from Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University under a UNHCR-Duolingo programme.

“Earlier my family and I were opposed to her education but our brother [Ali] insisted on it and supported her throughout. Today, she has made us proud and also supports us,” said Salimullah.

Mohammad says that is why he wants his kids to be educated.

“It is the only way for our progress. I cannot read and write. But I feel proud when my daughter reads phone messages for me and replies in English,” he said.

Since Atishi’s order, Fatima has been pleading with her father to get her admitted to a private school. Mohammad, a daily wage worker who also depends on aid from charities, cannot afford the exorbitant fees at private schools.

But he hopes the Supreme Court will come to his rescue. “The Indian law treats people fairly,” he says.

When asked what profession Fatima wants to pursue in future, he said: “She wants to become a teacher … She will teach everyone that all kids are kids – and equal.”