Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive on the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Pope Francis’ visit to Marseille, meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un… In twelve drawings, “La Matinale” offers you an overview of the times strengths of the past month.
After more than thirty years of conflict, Azerbaijan forcibly brought down the self-proclaimed authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh. A ceasefire agreement was signed on Wednesday, September 20, under the aegis of Russia, putting an end to the large-scale offensive launched the day before by Baku’s forces on the Armenian-majority enclave. By September 28, more than 65,000 Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh – more than half the territory’s population – had arrived in Yerevan, according to Armenian authorities, who denounced “ethnic cleansing”. The same day, the self-proclaimed separatist republic of Nagorno-Karabakh announced its dissolution on January 1, 2024.
An unprecedented telescoping in the history of the Fifth Republic, Emmanuel Macron spoke on the 8 p.m. television news broadcast on TF1 and France 2, Sunday, September 24, as the results of the senatorial elections held on the same day and confirming the majority fell. from the right and the center. During this interview, decided less than twenty-four hours earlier, the Head of State spoke on the major subjects – immigration, ecology, inflation, geopolitics – to set, himself, the “tone” of the start of the school year.
A small Italian island of 7,000 inhabitants located less than 150 kilometers from the African coast, Lampedusa welcomed, on Wednesday September 13, around 6,800 people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa and arriving from Tunisia aboard makeshift boats – the center reception of the island was designed for 600 accommodation places… Since January, nearly 130,000 people have arrived by sea in Italy, twice as many as in 2022 at the same period, while an agreement final decision on the asylum and migration pact has been under discussion for four years now in the European Union.
During a visit to Marseille, Pope Francis launched a vibrant appeal on behalf of migrants on Friday, September 22: “We can no longer witness the tragedies of shipwrecks caused by the fanaticism of indifference. » In front of the memorial in honor of sailors and migrants who died at sea, the sovereign pontiff called for “acts” in the face of the tragedies “which are bloodying the Mediterranean”, urging the Old Continent to choose the “culture of humanity” .
The putsch that overthrew the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, on July 26, forced Paris to fundamentally review the conditions of its presence in the Sahel. The former colonial power is no longer welcome in its “backyard” in Africa, delimited by its former colonies. On Sunday September 24, Emmanuel Macron even had to announce the return to France of the French ambassador to Niamey, Sylvain Itté, who landed in Paris on Wednesday September 27, and the withdrawal of some 1,500 French soldiers deployed in Niger for the fight against terrorism .
From September 20 to 22, King Charles III and Queen Camilla made their first official visit to France since their accession to the throne. Initially scheduled for March, it was postponed because of the violence which accompanied the adoption of the pension reform. The goal, for the Elysée as for Buckingham Palace, was to showcase the proximity and friendship between France and the United Kingdom to strengthen ties weakened by Brexit.
September 16 marked the first anniversary of the Iranian popular uprising following the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested for a “badly worn” veil. The brutal repression left around 500 dead and a year later, if no political change has emerged, the standoff continues between the power and the people in the form of discreet but tenacious resistance from women and also the men who support them.
The baccalaureate specialty tests, which had been brought forward in March during the reform of the major exam marking the end of high school, leading to absenteeism and demotivation of certain students in the last term, will now be held in June, announced Gabriel Attal, the minister of national education, at the end of August. At the same time, on September 11, an investigation by SNES-FSU, the main teachers’ union in middle and high schools, confirmed the shortage of teachers in secondary schools, noting the absence of at least one teacher in almost half of the 508 establishments surveyed.
Powerful magnitude 7 earthquake in western Morocco on September 8, with innumerable destruction and a human toll of around 3,000 dead and more than 5,500 injured; apocalyptic floods caused by storm Daniel in Derna, Libya, with a final official toll of 3,351 deaths (more than 10,000 according to the Red Cross) and some 43,000 displaced people: the planet was hit in September by a series devastating natural disasters. Tuesday September 19, Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, declared for his part that humanity had “opened the gates of hell” by refusing to detoxify from fossil fuels, citing “terrible heat” and “ historic fires” in 2023.
The Russian president welcomed his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, to the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East on September 13, a first since 2019. Vladimir Putin suggested that Moscow would be ready to help Pyongyang with its programs of ballistic missiles and satellite launches for military use, probably in exchange for deliveries of weapons, particularly artillery ammunition, known to be abundant in North Korean arsenals and which Russia needs for its war in Ukraine.
Demonstrations against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad took place in southern Syria at the end of August and beginning of September. They were triggered by the end of fuel subsidies, accentuating economic tensions in a country that emerged ruined from a devastating civil war, and where 80% of the inhabitants now live below the poverty line.
