Category World News

On Wednesday, China will host a significant military parade in Beijing’s capital to commemorate the 80th anniversary of World War II.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will introduce world leaders like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the country’s largest military parade, showcasing the military prowess and future plans of the country.

What can I expect from the parade, and why is it significant.

What time does the Victory Day parade in China begin?

According to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, the event will begin on Wednesday at 9am (01:00 GMT).

Ten years ago, China held a military parade on victory day. China first staged a grand military parade to honor the victory of the war.

What might be in store?

A choreographed display of cutting-edge military equipment, including drones, hypersonic missiles, and fighter jets, will be featured in the parade as a display of Chinese military might.

According to Chinese military officials, the parade will feature hundreds of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft.

The parade will feature 80 buglers, honoring the 80 years since Imperial Japan’s defeat in World War II, according to state media reports.

Since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, more than 1, 000 musicians have been seated in 14 rows, representing each year how China has responded.

According to China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, seated spectators will be seated on chairs adorned with green, red, and gold, which represent fertile land, the people’s sacrifices, and peace, respectively.

45 troop contingents will march past Xi in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the “Victory Day” parade, which is scheduled to last about 70 minutes. A speech is also anticipated by Xi.

Beginning in August, when the parade rehearsals began, China increased security in Beijing.

Who will be present?

26 foreign leaders will be present at the military parade, according to China’s Assistant Foreign Minister, Hong Lei, at a press conference on August 28.

Putin has already been in China, having spent Sunday and Monday at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin.

Other leaders who traveled to China to attend the SCO summit or other related meetings, including Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Prime Minister of Pakistan Shehbaz Sharif, Mongolian President Khurelsukh Ukhnaa, and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyev, will also be present for the September 3 parade.

However, they are also welcoming more people.

Kim’s armored train crossed the border between North Korea and China early on Tuesday, according to the state-controlled Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

A North Korean leader has not been in 66 years to watch a Chinese military parade. Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea and Kim’s late grandfather, was the last North Korean leader to attend a 1959 military parade in China.

Only two leaders from Europe, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, are scheduled to attend the Beijing gathering.

Fico has pushed for closer ties with Russia and traveled to Moscow for talks with Putin in December 2024, despite the country’s membership in the EU and NATO. Similar to Fico, Vucic has recently visited Moscow and criticized Russia’s sanctions against it for its war in Ukraine.

What is the purpose of China’s Victory Day parade and why?

In the West, the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which led to the British and French declaring war on Germany, is widely accepted as the start of World War II.

By that time, Asia had been facing the most Japanese aggression.

Japanese and Chinese troops engaged in a number of skirmishes after the Manchuria invasion in 1931, primarily under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, Japan made significant advances while the KMT and the CCP were still at war with China in the early stages of their own civil war.

Then, outside of Beijing, Japanese and Chinese troops engaged in combat in July 1937. By the time the KMT and CCP had agreed to a united front against the Japanese that would last until 1945, this had grown into a full-fledged conflict.

Invading eastern cities, including Nanjing, the Japanese military began to massacre civilians, rape children, and kill townspeople. The CCP and KMT remained in opposition. According to some estimates, the war left 20 million Chinese casualties, the majority of whom were civilians.

Under Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1941. The US entered the war at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941 when the Japanese army launched a surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet.

In addition to capturing parts of modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and parts of modern-day India in the 1940s, Japan also seized other parts of Asian nations.

The US Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and Nagasaki, Japan, three days later. The Soviet Union then launched a military conflict with Japan.

On September 2, Japan officially gave up.

After the communists under Mao Zedong’s leadership fled to Taiwan, where the CCP and KMT both found themselves, and the two eventually won the civil war in 1949, when Chiang and his remaining KMT troops retreated and established a parallel government there.

The Chinese government designated September 3, 2014, as Victory Day, the day Japan’s surrender occurred.

Veterans were invited to the military march in 2015 by the CCP to honor the sacrifices made by KMT soldiers during the war. Taiwan was once ruled by the KMT, which has long sought to have closer ties with mainland China under the CCP despite its historical strife.

Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has remained assertive about the self-governing territory’s sovereignty, has been in power since 2016 to date. China has criticized the DPP, insisting that Taiwan must reunite with the mainland.

As many as 1, 000 people are feared dead after a landslide in the western region of Sudan’s Tarasin mountain village. Only one person is thought to have survived after days of torrential rains in the Marrah Mountains. Mohamed Vall from Al Jazeera explains what we currently know.

Francois Bayrou, the prime minister of France, requested that parliament give him an earlier-than-expected vote of confidence last week. The centrist government’s fallout could be the result of the next week’s ballot, which could also set off a period of unrest in the second-largest economy of the EU.

Bayrou will attempt to secure approval for both his unpopular budget and himself and his government at the Monday vote in the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly. However, opposition parties have stated that they will support him and limit the terms of his government’s term in power.

President Emmanuel Macron, who has pledged to serve until 2027, may soon have to make the difficult decision to appoint a third prime minister in a year following his swift dissolution of parliament in June 2024.

Following Bayrou’s announcement on August 26th, financial markets erupted. On Monday, the interest rates on 10-year bonds increased by 3.5%, more than Greece’s 3.36 percent, which is higher.

What are the budgetary recommendations made by Bayrou?

France’s economy appears to be doing fairly well at first glance. In comparison to Italy, where the government’s debt pile is located, the debt pile is smaller. And the cost of paying the UK’s annual interest rate on its debt is significantly lower.

However, Paris is having trouble regulating its spending. France’s budget deficit, which surpassed its GDP, reached 5.8% (168.6 billion euros, or $ 96 billion) last year. No more than 3 percent of the official EU goal is achieved. Investors are concerned that France’s persistent deficits will lead to ever higher debt ratios and lower its credit rating.

Bayrou’s plan is to reduce the government’s borrowing by 4.6% of GDP in 2026 and by 2.8% by 2029. In turn, that would reduce the overall debt-to-GDP ratio by 127.2% in 2029 from 127.3% if no changes were made.

His strategy calls for savings of 43.8 billion euros ($51 billion) for 2026, 80% of which would come from spending cuts, such as a rise in the public sector’s hiring, a rise in pension indexation, and the repeal of two public holidays.

Other proposals that have been taken into account include higher taxes on high-earners.

Macron’s unpopular 2023 decision to raise France’s retirement age by two years to 64 is supported by the prime minister’s proposals. The president claimed at the time that excessive pension contributions were a financial drag on the nation.

The French leadership has once more attempted to influence the discussion surrounding the country’s future before the confidence vote.

The prime minister’s ouign, not the government’s fate, is the issue, not the question. The question is “the fate of France,” Bayrou said.

Finance Minister Eric Lombard warned on August 26 that there is a risk in front of us unless France is able to control its debt. Interventions from the International Monetary Fund, the world’s top lender of last resort, are typically for emerging market nations.

What responses did Bayrou’s gamble have from other political parties?

The prime minister will need to rely on the support of opposing parties on the left and right to pass his budget because Bayrou’s centrist and allies’ coalition does not have a majority in France’s parliament.

However, opposition parties, which control more than 320 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, have already declared that they will support Bayrou. The current government would not be able to survive if they continue to do that.

Unbowed lawmakers, who are opposed to a “make the government fall,” have pledged to reject an “unfair budget.” Marine Tondelier, the Greens’ national secretary, called Bayrou’s confidence vote “a resignation de facto.”

Its leader, Olivier Faure, declared that it would oppose the government. Faure said that Bayrou had “chosen to go.”

In another instance, the National Rally’s head, Jordan Bardella, stated that his far-right party would “never vote for a government whose decisions are making the French suffer.” Bardella claimed that Bayrou has actually signaled “the end of his government.”

What has the response of the financial markets been?

Due to political instability, shares of major French companies, including BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, and Societe Generale, all dropped 8 to 10% last week, raising the cost of government debt (otherwise known as the yield) and lowering the value of those companies.

Continued political conflict has increased the difference between the costs of French and German 10-year borrowing, according to Davide Oneglia, a European analyst at the political research firm TS Lombard.

A crucial indicator of macroeconomic risk, France’s borrowing premium has grown by almost 1 percentage point since the start of this year. France’s 10-year yields are now among the EU’s highest, recently surpassing those of Portugal and Greece.

“The political climate is causing wider spreads]between France’s borrowing costs and those of its European peers.” Oneglia told Al Jazeera, “We’re not yet in a full-blown debt crisis, but the fiscal situation is getting worse.”

Due to pressure on Paris’s tight finances, Moody’s rating agency decreased France’s credit score from “Aa3” to “Aa2” in December. Similar ratings from rival agencies S&amp, P, and Fitch, which have also downgraded their ratings for France since 2023, are now available with Moony’s move.

What might come next?

Bayrou’s confidence vote, according to the majority of commentators, is likely to result in Macron replacing him with another prime minister. The president hasn’t addressed the budget since holding snap elections last year, which would put him in a bind.

Additionally, it wouldn’t alter the parliament’s arithmetic. Political gridlock appears to be a result because Macron is unlikely to nominate a premier who supports a looser fiscal policy that might win the support of parliament.

In order to reshape the political landscape before France’s 2027 presidential election, some politicians, including Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, have urged Macron to call new legislative elections. However, that choice will be viewed with caution by the French president.

Since last year’s vote, which resulted in the current parliament, there hasn’t been much of a change in voting intentions, according to the most recent opinion polls. In addition, the chances of the National Rally winning the upcoming presidential election are better than ever because the party has consistently led polls for that vote for the past two years. Jordan Bardella, the most likely candidate for the National Rally, was polled at 30 and 31 percent, with the next candidate at 21 percent, according to two polls in May.

Oneglia thinks the 2022 Italian elections will provide a useful blueprint in the event of a National Rally presidential victory. He cited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as a reference to Meloni’s right-wing populist party, which “sealed fiscally centrist” when it gained power.

When two police officers entered the emergency room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, in the middle of May, Tewodros* was treating patients there. &nbsp, Earlier that same month, the doctor had participated in a public sector health workers ‘ strike, protesting poor working conditions and low pay.

The government had immediately declared the strike unlawful, causing a contentious standoff among the nation’s health professionals. The emergency room where Tewodros was working was one of the places where that played out.

Tewodros claims that the officers had no justification for their questioning of him. They grabbed him and pulled him out of the ward. His coworkers tried to intervene, but the police ignored them and took him to a nearby station, where he spent more than three weeks detained.

“That was the moment I felt helpless. When I first described the incident, Tewodros told Al Jazeera, “I was ashamed of my country.”

His detention was only the beginning of his ordeal. He claims that 15 other people crammed into him. They weren’t permitted to wash, and he never got to see or speak with his family. Ethiopia’s police contacted them for a response to the accusations, but they did not respond.

The strike was led by the Ethiopian Health Professionals Movement (EHPM), a loose collective of doctors that had formed in 2019. A 12-point list of demands to the government was released on May 19 that included requests for better working conditions, fair pay, health insurance, and transportation. When the deadline passed with no meaningful engagement from authorities, hundreds of doctors began walking out of hospitals across the country.

Rights groups claim that the Ethiopian government used “repressive tactics” against the injured doctors, arresting 47 people nationwide in a few days and dozens more in the coming weeks.

Tewodros was one of more than 140 doctors arrested in a sweeping crackdown in May and June, according to the EHPM. To track their arrested colleagues, how long they were detained for, and when they were released, they created a website called Health Voice Ethiopia.

All the doctors have since been released, and the strikes have ended following a government promise to address their concerns, though no concrete commitments have been made, the doctors say.

The government should stop berating and locking up healthcare workers and their representatives, Human Rights Watch’s director of Horn of Africa, said. “The government should finally engage with them in a meaningful dialogue about their complaints.”

Ethiopia’s federal police said the detained doctors had organised an “illegal strike” and accused them of endangering patients ‘ lives.

paid $60 per month

Ethiopia’s doctors are among the lowest-paid in East Africa, according to World Bank figures, with some earning as little as $60 a month, compared with neighbouring Kenya, where doctors expect to be paid closer to $1, 800.

One Ethiopian pathologist who worked in Hargeisa, the self-declared republic of Somaliland, claimed her $2,500 monthly salary was enough to cover the expenses of 20 of her coworkers in the country. She was later arrested.

Doctors have reported having trouble paying for their own medical expenses, including food, transportation costs, and living expenses.

Al Jazeera interviewed half a dozen doctors – some of whom were arrested for participating in the strike – who cited biting inflation, stagnant wages and extremely difficult working conditions as having pushed them to take industrial action.

According to one doctor, he uses what he calls “side hustles” like content creation for local businesses, where he claims to spend far more than two-thirds of his $73 monthly salary on rent. Other doctors, he added, work at pharmacies and even as Uber drivers to make it through the month.

He claimed that, “I am not really able to take care of myself, let alone consider a family.” “I struggle to travel to work, it is hard to eat, and being a doctor isn’t a job that leaves much time. Simply put, we must work incredibly hard to survive. We had higher expectations”.

In recognition of their difficulties, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed claimed in June that his government was aware that doctors are “being crushed by life.” But he accused those striking of being “political opportunists” and “politicians in white coats”.

Since last year, Ethiopia’s currency was floated, sharply lowering the value of wages as a result of rising consumer prices in the capital. Ethiopia’s currency, the birr, hit an all-time low of 174 to the US dollar in black markets in July, a sign that despite reassurance from the central bank that inflation would subside, the economy remains fragile.

The country is also recovering from COVID-19’s combined effects, which, according to one report, are expected to cause economic damage of nearly $ 125 billion by 2027 as a result of a devastating two-year conflict in the northern Tigray region.

These overlapping crises have placed immense strain on Ethiopia’s already fragile public services, and the health sector is among the hardest hit.

30-hour shifts, fixed salaries

The effects of inflation and currency depreciation have been particularly severe for the country’s doctors, who are paid fixed and paid in birr, and many of them find themselves unable to even meet their most basic needs.

When they arrive at work, they often face long, gruelling shifts as long as 30 hours in some cases, are understaffed, and lack the equipment needed to carry out their duties.

The Ethiopian healthcare system attempted to address a previous shortage of qualified doctors, but its roots date back to that time. In 2003, Ethiopia had 0.26 physicians per 10, 000 people, lower than Kenya, which had 1.38 doctors per 10, 000 and Eritrea which had 0.42.

Meles Zenawi, a former medical student himself, then took over the presidency, promising to push for the expansion of health insurance and access to doctors as well.

The government adopted a “flooding policy” to address the shortage, rapidly increasing enrolment in medical courses and expanding the number of medical schools in the country.

The policy was successful, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, increasing the country’s doctors’ total from an estimated 1, 936 to 18, 413 in a decade.

Yet, despite the significant increase in the number of doctors during those years, successive governments have been unable to raise doctors ‘ salaries to competitive levels, in a country that already ranks among Africa’s lowest in gross domestic product per capita. The real value of doctors’ salaries has steadily decreased as a result of a health sector that is heavily reliant on aid and a high inflationary period.

Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, an Ethiopia researcher at the World Peace Foundation, said the government has shifted its focus to “vanity infrastructure projects”, such as reshaping the capital’s skyline, abandoning the development ethos of earlier administrations. He told Al Jazeera, “They’re more focused on the way things look.”

More money can be made for truck drivers.

“This was the only way to make our voices heard”, Tewodros said about the strikes. He stated that the country’s service sector offers better-paying positions and that he is now seriously considering leaving the medical field.

“One of my relatives is employed as a truck driver and earns about $250 per month, which is more than three times my salary as a medical doctor”.

Dagwami Mulugeta, a doctor who fled Ethiopia during the sweeping arrests in May, has since settled in the US. He left shortly after two friends of his were arrested and his Facebook profile was hacked, fearing he would be next due to his role in organising and supporting the strike.

He told Al Jazeera, “We have to make such a huge sacrifice, and we end up being unpaid fairly and having to struggle to cover basic costs,” and that he and many of his fellow workers feel unpaid for their labor.

Many doctors leave the country, and those who do not go abroad leave the job, he added.

He claimed that doctors who worked 36-hour shifts and had little to no sleep when they first started practicing medicine had to use outdated equipment. This triggered strikes back then, which helped reduce their hours to 30 per week in most government hospitals, but without significant changes to their salaries.

According to Dagwami, “there were some improvements, but overall the conditions for doctors didn’t improve enough.”

Lulit* is a doctor who left medicine for humanitarian work. She recalled the 2019 strikes she took part in saying, “There was more hope back then.” She said many doctors had expected Prime Minister Abiy – who had branded himself as a reformist at the time – to meet their demands. Doctors were disappointed and their issues were left untreated, she said, “but there was a compromise.”

The most prominent doctor arrested in the strikes was Daniel Fentaneh, a resident in gynaecology and obstetrics and a lecturer at Bahir Dar University in northwest Ethiopia, who was detained at the end of June and is regarded by some of his colleagues as a Che Guevara-like figure.

He was charged with “inciting, mobilizing, and organizing” and played a significant role in organizing his colleagues during the strikes.

Rights groups like Amnesty International called for his “unconditional release”, which followed 27 days later. However, his arrest was a “shameful betrayal of justice and conscience,” according to the EHPM, and it severely affected the morale of his fellow doctors.

We don’t want to leave our jobs, we say.

A 2020 study by a group of Ethiopian academics found that just more than half of Ethiopian doctors were satisfied with their jobs, while only 6.8 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with their income. According to another study conducted in 2022, roughly six out of ten doctors in the nation were considering leaving their jobs.

Ethiopia allocated 8.3 percent of its budget to healthcare in 2023 and 2024, an increase from the previous year. The real value of this allocation has decreased, according to the UN Children’s Fund, which is UNICEF. It also remains well below the 15 percent target set by the 2001 Abuja Declaration, in which African Union countries pledged to allocate that share of their national budgets to health.

This makes staff recruitment and retention issues even more difficult.

Ethiopia was lauded for the dramatic expansion of its healthcare system in the early 2000s, led by then health minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who later became director-general of the WHO. Between 1990 and 2013, maternal deaths per 100, 000 live births decreased from 1, 400 to 420, and the share of facility births increased from 5 percent to 48 percent between 2000 and 2019.

But for a new generation of medical professionals, the legacy of that progress sits uneasily alongside new realities. Dagwami, who just finished his training, claims to be aware of many doctors who have left their fields to work in more lucrative fields, including social media management and starting their own businesses.

“Doctors are passionate about their work”, he said, “and we don’t want to leave our jobs. However, these working conditions put our patients at risk and make life difficult for them. It isn’t good for anybody”.

In a meeting with a select group of health workers in late June, Abiy attempted to strike a delicate balance between outlining their “valid concerns” about salaries and launching verbal attacks on those who took industrial action. The prime minister said the striking doctors do not understand what it means to provide a service or how to build a nation. He claimed that “these are people who reduce everything from high schools to science museums,” referring to his contemporaries.

Dagwami said “witnessing the condescension, public belittling, and imprisonment of dedicated professionals was one of the most heartwrenching and unparalleled experiences of my life”.

Doctors made an effort to be “concouraging” and “solutions-oriented,” but he believes the government fell short.

Al Jazeera reached out to the government in Addis Ababa for a response, but received no reply.

The doctors are currently anticipating the government’s response to a pledge to address the concerns they have raised. But on the Health Voice website – that was set up to track the arrests and release of their colleagues – a clock steadily ticks down.

They have pledged to resume the strike if their concerns are not addressed before the deadline.