From the U.S. Capitol riot to COP26, CBC correspondents on 2021's biggest international news stories
Chris Brown, Susan Ormiston and Salimah Shivji reflect on stories unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic
It was a year that seemed to be dominated by news about the COVID-19 pandemic.
But from the attack on the U.S. Capitol to protests by farmers in India, 2021 was also a year of major stories from around the world.
CBC foreign correspondents Chris Brown, Susan Ormiston and Salimah Shivji joined Cross Country Checkup host Ian Hanomansing on Sunday to reflect on some of the year's biggest stories from beyond Canada's borders.
U.S. Capitol riot
On Jan. 6, 2021, thousands of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump descended upon the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with the aim of overturning the election, which saw his defeat to Joe Biden.
"It wasn't a peaceful protest," said Ormiston, a senior reporter based in Washington. "It was either an insurrection or a riot, and it was violent."
In the year since the attack, two major investigations led to hundreds of protesters being arrested and charged for their role in the event. Congress is in the midst of an investigation to understand what happened on that day.
"What I've heard from people who live here and the many people I've spoken to is many wish this were a one off ... but in fact, it isn't over," Ormiston said.
"People who assess these things are worried that the forces that gave rise to that attack on Capitol Hill are still circulating in the United States," she added, noting that experts believe the November midterm elections could be a flashpoint for further violence.
COP26 and climate change
Delayed for a year due to the global pandemic, politicians and experts alike gathered in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26.
The aim was to strengthen climate change mitigation efforts set out in the Paris Agreement signed six years earlier.
"This was a year of tremendously large climate disasters, climate-related disasters. We saw them lots in Canada, but we also had, really, an unprecedented amount of political focus on trying to do something about this at COP26," Brown said from London.
"Obviously only time will tell how that's going to work," he said. "I heard one analyst suggest this was like running a marathon where you sort of hand off a baton, almost like a relay race, and the baton got handed off to the next country, which is going to be Egypt."
The conference was criticized for doing too little to address climate change. Though almost 200 nations signed on to a new climate agreement, critics say it was watered down due to last-minute changes around the goal of phasing out coal-powered energy globally.
Indian farmers' protests
For nearly the entirety of 2021, farmers in India protested against three agriculture reform laws passed without consultation by the Indian government in 2020.
Those laws, they argued, would have severely limited their ability to make a livelihood from farming and caused smaller farms to be squeezed out by corporations. Tens of thousands of farmers left their farms to protest outside India's capital.
"This was a giant protest, really, billed as the largest in world history just because of the scale of it, but also the length of it," said Shivji, CBC's new India correspondent.
Though the government insisted that the laws would benefit farmers, the protests came to an end in November after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced they would be repealed.
"In the end, it sent the message that in a country that has been leaning — a government that's been leaning — towards more authoritarian tendencies, there is still the capacity for a large-scale, largely peaceful demonstration to change things, to change laws," she said.
U.S.-led withdrawal from Afghanistan
After President Joe Biden announced that the United States, along with allies including Canada, would withdraw from Afghanistan last August, the Middle Eastern country fell into chaos.
The Taliban took control of the country earlier that month. In the weeks that followed, countless Afghans struggled to flee over fears of the repressive regime.
"We saw that chaos," said Ormiston, who covered stories from Afghanistan over the last two decades. "No one will forget the image of those men, Afghan men, running after the U.S. transport plane taking off from Kabul airport, hanging on to the fuselage. Some died trying to get out."
Afghans are now facing an economic crisis, a famine and the limiting of human rights. Ormiston notes that the future of the country under Taliban rule remains unclear.
"I can't underscore enough that we don't know yet how this is all going to turn out and whether the Taliban can secure that country sufficiently to keep al-Qaeda and ISIS at bay. And if it can't, that will impact all of us," Ormiston said.
Russian authoritarianism
After spending half of 2021 as CBC's Moscow correspondent, Brown says several major stories from that corner of the world have signalled "Russia's extremely hard turn towards harsh authoritarianism that happened shockingly fast."
According to Brown, "the destruction of Russian civil society by [President] Vladimir Putin" — including the arrest of Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, the eradication of opposition groups and ongoing concerns about a potential invasion of Ukraine — all made headlines throughout the last year.
"Some would say perhaps what Vladimir Putin's trying to [do is] reconstruct the Soviet Union," he told Hanomansing.
More than a 100,000 Russian troops are currently stationed at the border of Ukraine, with mobile hospitals and other infrastructure set up. Western governments have warned against further action in Ukraine, with Biden warning last week of "grave consequences" if an invasion occurs.
"It's extremely worrying because Putin plays the long game. We know that. They've really spent a lot of time rebuilding up the Russian military, psyching up the population for whatever comes next," Brown said.
Written by Jason Vermes. Produced by Ashley Fraser, Arsheen Shamaila and Steve Zhang.
