Why The Road To Genocide Can Be Distrubingly Short

The ongoing situation in Ukraine is, sadly, another illustration of how quickly conflicts can explode, even among people who previously had lived together as neighbors and friends.

This was illustrated by a video clip shown by the BBC on Monday, April 14.  It showed the aftermath of the seizure of a police station in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian militias.  Two men, presumably Ukrainian police officers, were being assaulted by a mob at the foot of a staircase.  The makeup of the mob at first was typical – a group of young men in their late teens/early twenties, but then something unexpected happened: two older women, perhaps in their forties, who had been watching the attack, stepped forward and got their own licks in on one of the prone men.  According to the BBC, the man thankfully survived his beating.

The video serves as an illustration of a disturbing, yet fascinating, phenomenon: how quickly peaceful, multi-ethnic communities can devolve into open sectarian - and often brutal - war.  

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been a nation with a large Russian minority population.  While there has been some occasional tension between the groups over issues like whether or not Russian should be recognized as an official language in Ukraine, the two ethnicities have basically lived together peacefully – there have been no reports of systematic violence between the two groups.  This is especially true in eastern Ukraine, where the bulk of Ukraine's Russian population is located.  There, the two ethnicities lived together and intermarried; it was not uncommon for families to be spread out between Russia and Ukraine and crossing the border of the two nations was usually given about as much thought as crossing the street.  Certainly there are no outward physical signs to distinguish a Russian from a Ukrainian.  Even just a few months ago such inter-ethnic violence in Ukraine would have been unthinkable.  Yet now, cities across eastern Ukraine are being roiled by just such attacks.  Ethnic Russians in Ukraine have been flooded by messages from Russian-based media outlets condemning the “Fascist putsch” that overthrew the government of President Viktor Yanukovych and ominous warnings that Fascist mobs were heading east from Kiev to brutalize the ethnic Russian population (a comprehensive United Nations report could find no evidence of these alleged attacks).  For their part, some ultra-nationalist groups that became involved with the Maidan protests in Kiev have talked openly about their desire for Ukraine to be “for Ukrainians” - meaning ethnic Ukrainians and not Russians who happen to also be citizens of Ukraine; though again, the anti-Russian, Ukrainian-nationalist mobs that the Russian media constantly warns about have not materialized.

The BBC video brings to mind another recent European conflict: the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990s.  Before the conflict – Europe's bloodiest since World War II – Yugoslavia had been a fairly prosperous multi-ethnic nation, of Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), who peacefully co-existed.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in Sarajevo, a vibrant, multi-ethnic city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.  A decade later, the city would lie largely in ruins, having borne witness to the worst acts of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.  The roots of the Yugoslavian Civil War can be traced back to then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, himself an ethnic Serb.  In an effort to bolster his regime, Milosevic filled the airwaves with Serbian nationalist rhetoric, some of it reviving ancient ethnic tensions that dated back to the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 between the Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire.  A conflict soon emerged with neighbors who had lived together, sometimes for decades, beating, killing and raping each other in a brutal inter-ethnic war.

The Ukrainian crisis also comes along at the 20^th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the past century; the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.  Here again, two ethnicities – the Hutus and the Tutsi – who had lived side-by-side were soon embroiled in a genocide that would kill more than 800,000 people in the space of just three months.  The roots of that conflict can be traced back to Rwanda's time as a colony when the ruling Belgian empire used minor physiological characteristics to create a division between the two very similar Hutu and Tutsi peoples.  A century later, these differences would be exploited - again through a deliberate mass-media campaign - to sow division between the two groups that would eventually lead to the genocide.

In the United States even today tension exists between the Caucasian and African-American communities; occasionally the rhetoric employed around this tension can be ugly and hateful.  But with these two communities, there are outward signs of difference; a way for one to cite the “otherness” of the opposite community.  These outward differences are minor in the cases of the ethnicities involved in the Rwandan and Yugoslav conflicts and totally absent in Ukraine where the “Russian” and “Ukrainian” ethnicities are entirely social constructs with no basis in physiology.  Yet in each case it has been remarkably easy for some actors within one community to use the mass-media to portray the other ethnicity as something evil or dangerous, an existential threat to the welfare of the actor's ethnicity.  What is disturbing is how willingly people are to buy into the victimization narrative and turn on the others, even if they were their friends and neighbors.  During the heights of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda conflicts it was not uncommon for people to rape and murder the neighbors they had lived next to for many years just because they belonged to the other ethnicity.  

Ukraine has not sunk to that level of violence yet, but recent history has shown that it can sadly be a very short descent.

US Sources Question French Intervention Strategy In Mali

Sometimes the most interesting nugget in a story comes buried all the way at the end; that is the case here with this story on Reuters about France's sudden involvement in the slow-burning civil war in Mali. Near the end of the Reuters piece is this comment from the infamous “anonymous source”, identified by Reuters as a US military official, who asks: “I don't know what the French endgame is for this. What is their goal? It reminds me of our initial move into Afghanistan.”

Before we unpack that statement, a little background on the current situation in Mali. Until last year, Mali had been considered one of the more successful states in West Africa, though a state that still dealt with a long-simmering issue of civil unrest in the northern part of the country where separatists hoped to carve out their own homeland. In one of the great examples of the law of unintended consequences, this bid received a massive shot in the arm from the US/French/British-led campaign to support the rebels in Libya in their bid to oust Moammar Gadhafi. His overthrow meant the return of thousands of Tuareg mercenaries, formerly employed by Gadhafi, to their homelands in northern Mali, where they teamed up with al-Qadea-leaning militias and turned a minor bit of civil unrest into a full-blown civil war.

The Malian army, not happy with the way the war was being run, staged a coup, overthrowing Mali's president (The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald notes this is a double-irony for the West since the coup was led by a US-trained army captain). With no functioning military, the Tuareg/al-Qaeda alliance took control over half of the country before having their own setback when the Islamist militias turned on their Tuareg allies. 2012 ended with the situation in Mali an utter mess and Mali's neighbors pleading for assistance to prevent Mali from turning into a failed state haven for al-Qaeda-linked groups.

The US has been promoting a strategy built on the “Somali model”, at least the most recent version of foreign intervention in Somalia, which has been the most successful in the past 20 years. In practice, this means providing funding and logistical support to troops from neighboring African nations who will do the actual fighting. In Somalia this, has been a mix of primarily Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian troops who have managed to largely defeat Somalia's homegrown Islamist militia, al-Shabaab, and restore some semblance of a functioning government to Somalia.

That was the plan, at least for Mali as well, until last week when the French began spearheading their own much more direct intervention, which started with airstrikes against Islamist positions, most notably surrounding the city of Gao. There are now also reports of French special forces troops on the ground in Mali. Why France decided to launch their Mali mission is a topic that is actively being discussed, though it could likely be because the force of 2,000-3,000 peacekeepers from a collection of West African nations would not have been ready to deploy for several months, perhaps not until September, and perhaps not even then.

And that brings us back to our unnamed US military source.  He/she goes on to add: “Air strikes are fine. But pretty soon you run out of easy targets. Then what do you do? What do you do when they [the  militias] head up into the mountains?”  Sadly, since he/she is anonymous, it is impossible to know if they asked these same important questions when the US went stumbling into Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps they are offering up these comments as a sort of advice, hard-won knowledge from the foibles of those two US interventions. But it is hard not to read these comments as being both hypocritical and condescending given the past decade of US foreign involvement, our continued questionable presence in Afghanistan and the calls by the DC warhawks, particularly those of the neoconservative stripe, for a US campaign against Iran, yet another military mission that is unlikely to achieve its tactical goal – elimination of Iran's nuclear program – while possessing a high likelihood of spurring a whole chain of unexpected and unintended consequences.

The “Somali model” idea pushed by the United States sounds good on paper, the problem is that while Somalia had several neighbors with large populations – Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia – to supply troops, the would-be ECOWAS force for Mali is being drawn from a collection of fairly small states like Ghana and Sierra Leone, not countries known for having large and robust armies. Nigeria is the one large neighbor that is pledging troops, but Nigeria is also dealing with their own separatist movement (MEND – the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) and their own Islamist uprising (Boko Harum), so it is hard to understand why the Nigerians would then suddenly have such better luck when operating in Mali when they have struggled so much against these two groups at home. The proposed Malian peacekeeping force is also made up of only 2,000-3,000 soldiers; by contrast, the Ugandans alone contributed up to 16,000 troops to the ANISOM mission in Somalia. 

Our unnamed source is asking some good and important questions, but they are questions that highlight the problem with the international community since 9/11: there is now a far greater motivation to intervene in troubled nations (especially when supposed “al-Qaeda” forces are involved) and to intervene right away!  But these proposed interventions are launched without clear military objectives in mind, and more importantly, without a plan for the “day after” the initial military campaign is launched, or in other words, without an exit strategy.  The United States has spent 12 years trying to find a way out of Afghanistan, you have to wonder if France will now find that it was very easy to get into Mali, but that it will be very hard to get out.

Closing Time For The Somali Pirates

It has been awhile since we checked in with our old friends the Somali pirates. A big part of the reason was simply that 2012 was not a good year for piracy, with successful pirate raids dropping off sharply.  This turn in fortune seems to be the motivation for one of Somalia's most infamous pirates to call it quits.  The New York Times is reporting that Mohamed Abdi Hassan, better known by his nom de guerre “Big Mouth”, announced his retirement last week in a press conference broadcast on YouTube.

 

Big Mouth's retirement is a big deal in that he was thought to be the head of a notorious pirate network and was identified in a United Nations report last year as one of Somalia's most influential and most dangerous pirates.  But a host of factors are now working against the Somali pirates, including more effective naval patrols in the Indian Ocean, on-shore raids aimed at disrupting pirating operations ashore and the emergence of effective governments in the capital, Mogadishu, and in the semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland.  These factors have combined to reduce the pirate's haul down to a mere 13 captured vessels in 2012, making pirating a far more dangerous and far less lucrative business today than it was a couple of years ago.

Big Mouth seems to have been further enticed by the issuance of a passport by the new Somali government that allowed him to travel abroad to visit his family, according to the Times.  In his farewell press conference, Big Mouth claimed to have also influenced a number of his pirate brethren to give up their pirating ways as well.  But while piracy seems to be on the decline off the coast of Somalia, there is concern that the pirates could come back if international navies scale back their patrols, thinking that the pirate problem has passed; at the same time, the pirate problem may be shifting to the coast of West Africa, where pirate attacks are on the rise.

What The United States Could Learn From Ghana About Elections

In case you missed it, we had a presidential election in the US last month. After a seemingly endless campaign, President Barack Obama defeated his challenger Mitt Romney in a race that wasn't all that close – Obama won just over 50% of the vote to Romney's 47.3%. Of course this didn't stop the opposition from alleging that Obama “stole” the election: Romney himself claimed that Obama only won by promising lower-income voters undefined “free stuff”. Meanwhile, groups of Americans across the country (but primarily in the South) responded by starting petitions encouraging their respective states to secede from the Union, with the Texas petition gathering more than 100,000 signatures.

Perhaps that's why with piece on the BBC last week about reactions to another hard-fought presidential election, this time in the African nation of Ghana, stuck with me.  In Ghana, incumbent President John Mahama of the NDC party defeated opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo of the NPP.  Even though Ghana is one of Africa's most stable democracies, the election was marked by technical glitches which caused long delays at some polling places.  This, in turn, led the NPP to allege that the election was “stolen” from them.

That's where the BBC piece comes in.  The BBC interviewed five Ghanaians, including supporters of the NPP. What's noteworthy is that rather than join in their party's call to contest the election, the NPP supporters seemed rather embarrassed by the party's stance, with both saying that the party should just accept the results of the election and one voter questioning whether he made a mistake voting for the NPP if this was the way they were going to react.  Another voter explained that the reason the NPP lost was not due to fraud, but because of the party's inability to realize their message wasn't resonating in several of the country's key swing states (and doesn't that sound like an explanation that could apply to the US Republicans as well?)

It was refreshing to see voters not blame their political party's loss on some poorly-defined notions of fraud, or call for unrest, but to accept the results of the election and to blame the loss on the shortcomings of the losing party.  Perhaps the United States could learn a thing or two from the way that Ghanaians practice democracy.

Tanzania Facing Blowback From US-Iran Sanctions Spat

The East African nation of Tanzania has wound up in the middle of the sanctions fight between the United States and Iran.

The reason is Tanzania's decision to allow at least ten Iranian-owned oil tankers to re-register themselves in Tanzania; the ships, according to Bloomberg, are owned by Iran's NITC corporation but will fly Tanzania's flag and will, for all legal purposes be Tanzanian.  The move would allow the tankers to effectively skirt the sanctions regime imposed by the US and European Union on Iran over that country's nuclear research program.  While most of the focus on the sanctions has been on their embargo against Iran's oil exports, another piece of the sanctions also bans the issuing of insurance for Iranian ships carrying cargoes of Iranian oil.  Since a tanker's cargo can be worth millions, or tens of millions, of dollars and the liability involved in an accident that leads to an oil spill can exceed even those figures, companies aren't willing to run the risk of sending out uninsured oil cargoes.  Flagging these tankers as Tanzanian though could help Iran to skirt the insurance ban.

As expected, the US isn't happy about this move, and officials are already saying that the re-registering could harm US-Tanzanian relations.  Howard Berman, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs issued this warning: “If Tanzania were to allow Iranian vessels to remain under Tanzanian registry, we in the Congress would have no choice but to consider whether to continue the range of bilateral U.S. programs with Tanzania.”  That would likely include $571 million worth of US financial aid and investment earmarked for Tanzania in 2013.

For their part, the Tanzanian government is saying very little.  Most requests for comment from Bloomberg went unanswered, though one official did say that the stories were inaccurate since the tankers in question were previously registered in Cyprus and Malta, which while apparently true does not mean that they were not also owned by NITC.

So the US seems to be involved in another diplomatic game of chicken over the Iranian sanctions.  If the US government can't successfully pressure Tanzania into dropping their registration of the Iranian  tankers then the decision has to be made over whether or not to levy sanctions against Tanzania, including cutting off more than a half-billion dollars worth of foreign aid.  But if the US decides to go that route, it will hard to see the decision as anything but hypocritical.  Recently the US granted an “exemption” to the sanctions to China – Iran's biggest oil customer.  China had been openly defying the US over the sanctions, arguing that they didn't need to abide by them since the sanctions were not authorized by the United Nations, the only body, China argued, that had the ability to levy such wide-ranging sanctions in the first place.  But rather than engage in a diplomatic fight and possible trade war with China, the US quietly exempted them from the sanctions.

Should the US punish Tanzania for their actions, the clear message sent will be that the United States is more than willing to play the role of the world's policeman, so long as you're too weak to do anything about it.    

African Nations Calling For Intervention in Mali

In case you were wondering where the world's next armed conflict will be, the West African nation of Mali is looking like a good candidate. 

Members of ECOWAS, the Economic Community Of West African States, is building support for a resolution they will present to the United Nations Security Council requesting an armed force be deployed to the northern part of Mali to combat a growing Islamist movement that ECOWAS says could destabilize the entire region.

Map of Mali

“It is not just a threat for the region, but the world,” said President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger and the man leading the charge on ECOWAS' appeal to the UN.  Issoufou called Mali a potential “West African Afghanistan”, alleging that terror groups from Afghanistan and Pakistan are recuriting among young Islamic militiamen in northern Mali, adding that: “it is an international threat that needs an international response so this is why we have decided to take this to the Security Council.”

Mali, once held up as a model of stability in Africa, has suffered a bizarre and sudden collapse in recent months.  Mali's problems were kicked off in March when a group of army officers overthrew the government of democratically-elected President Amadou Toumani Toure over, what the army guys thought, was Toure's mishandling of an ongoing uprising by Tuareg tribesmen in the north of the country.  The Tuaregs were once the favored mercinaries of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.  When the Gadhafi regime fell, thousands of well-trained, well-armed Tuaregs flooded back into their native Mali and began causing trouble.  The coup plotters claimed that Pres. Toure was not giving them the material and support they needed to effectively fight the Tuaregs.

But it quickly became clear that the coup plotters had no grand plan for governing and Mali fell into chaos, which, ironically, allowed the Tuaregs to launch a major offensive and seize half of Mali.  A power-sharing agreement ended the coup crisis, but the problems with the newly empowered Tuaregs remains; now they are pushing for the creation of an Islamic state carved out of northern Mali.

This is too much for ECOWAS, which claims that the only way to stop the Tuaregs and their Islamist supporters now would be through an international military force.  ECOWAS hopes that the bulk of the support for any UNSC-mandated mission will come from the United States and France.  French President Francois Hollande has stated that France would be ready to support such a mission if it receives the Security Council's blessing.  No word from the US about their possible support for the ECOWAS proposal.

Mystery Surrounds European Union Raid in Somalia

The initial story last week received little attention from the global media: a raid carried out by helicopters from unidentified naval vessels belonging to European Union members destroyed several fast attack boats used by Somali pirates in the port city of Haradheere.  The attack was mostly noteworthy in that it was the first reported attack on Somali pirates in one of their port cities and a rare military action by the European Union.  But all is not apparently as it seems with the story of the raid.

The European website DefenseReport claims that the Haradheere raid was carried out not by helicopters, but by actual EU troops on the ground.  If true, this would mark a new, dramatically different approach to dealing with the Somali pirate problem.

According DefenseReport, ground troops were used to ensure that there would not be any civilian casualties in Haradheere and to guarantee that high-speed, high-horsepower (and hard to acquire) engines of the skiffs Somali pirates use to surround and board target vessels would be destroyed in the raid.  According to a military official familiar with the raid, only by using ground forces could you be sure that the engines themselves were destroyed.  Some confirmation of the ground troops story came when records showed that the only EU vessel capable of launching the helicopter raid as described was no where near Haradheere on the night of the raid.

Some military officials have wanted to use troops against pirate strongholds like Haradheere for some time since intercepting pirates in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean is a hit-and-miss affair.  It seems that the go-ahead was finally given because more and more ships sailing through the Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden sea lanes off of Somalia - which is the route to the Red Sea, Suez Canal and Europe – are using armed security guards, a situation which has led to some unfortunate shooting incidents with innocent fishing vessels mistaken for pirates by jumpy ship guards.

On a related note, if the European Union is starting to undertake their own military missions as a group rather than as individual nations, what does this mean for the future of NATO, which is suppose to serve as the pan-European organization to promote military cooperation among the Europeans?    

How The US Media Gets It Wrong On Africa

Foreign Policy has a great piece of journalism critique currently up on its website that's well worth your time to read.  In it, author Laura Seay discusses the generally lousy state of reportage coming out of Africa, though her critique can be extended to the entire way that the profession is currently practiced in America.

Part of her critique is quite familiar: that the US media only turns to Africa during times of outright disaster/war or when there is an “American” angle to a story: the viral media sensation of the KONY2012 campaign being an example of the latter.  And African reporting tends to quickly fallback on to outright ethnic stereotypes – comparing events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness, for example.

But the why of this situation is where the story really starts to get interesting.  Seay lays the blame on American press outlets trying to do African reportage on the cheap and accuses American journalists of frankly being rather lazy in their duties.  Most major US media outlets rely on only two or three correspondents to cover the entire vast African continent.  Based in some of Africa's most metropolitan cities – Nairobi, Johannesburg – they are expected to parachute (figuratively, not literally) into hotspots as the need arises, even if that hotspot is on the other side of the continent.  Imagine if a foreign news outlet expected their New York City-based reporter to run out to Iowa to cover a sudden blight of the corn crop, a topic well outside their expertise, and you get an idea of the point Seay is trying to make.

Meanwhile, those journalists who do find themselves in Africa, tend to be rather lazy.  Seay gives the example of reporters headed to the war-torn borderlands between Sudan and South Sudan.  With no knowledge of the local situation or language, reporters tend to rely on locally-based “fixers”.  In South Sudan, one prominent fixer is an American expat named Ryan Boyette, who was the subject of several human interest profiles by outlets like NBC and the New York Times in the span of just a few weeks.

It wasn't always this way, once outlets like NBC or the Times maintained extensive networks of locally-based foreign correspondents.  But these positions have been a victim of cost-cutting measures.  The result has been a noticeable decline in both the quality and quantity of foreign affairs reporting by US media outlets.  All of which reminds me of a recent discussion I had with a friend whom I hadn't seen in a long time.  We talked about the world, and the media coverage of it.  For world news, it turns out we both relied primarily on a selection of foreign sources: the BBC, al-Jazeera English, even the occasional program on Russia Today; given Seay's critique, perhaps that's no surprise.

Pirates From Somalia, Weapons From Libya

So along with the coup in Mali, it looks like we can add another unintended consequence to the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya: better armed Somali pirates.

According to this report on the website of Foreign Policy, since the fall of his regime, weapons that formerly belonged to Gadhafi's military have been flowing out of Libya.  And some of those arms seem to have made their way to Somalia though a circuitous route moving first through arms merchants located in Sierra Leone and Liberia on Africa's west coast, before traveling east to Somalia.

And, sadly, we're not just talking about the ubiquitous AK-47 here; according to FP, based on research conducted by the African Centre for the Study and Research on Terrorism, the weapons procured by the Somali pirates include anti-ship mines and Stinger hand-held anti-aircraft missiles.  Weapons of that magnitude could give the pirates more ability to fight back against the international navy patrols who have been trying to tamp down piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean to the east of Somalia.

So far, attacks by Somali pirates are said to be down this year from last.  The question now is whether the pirates will start to feel bolder thanks to all these new weapons at their disposal.

Africa's Next War: Sudan

Sudan has all but formally declared war on their newest neighbor (and their former countrymen) South Sudan.  That is the message from Sudan's National Assembly, where the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has voted that a state of war officially exists between the two nations.  They are now urging Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to make an outright declaration of war.

The already poor relations between the two states collapsed last week when the South Sudan military charged across the border and seized the region around the Sudanese city of Heglig.  The South Sudanese maintain that the move was necessary because Sudan was using the city as a base for cross-border military raids and bombing runs against towns and villages in the Nuba Mountains.

But Heglig also happens to be one of the few oil producing regions left in Sudan.  Before the Sudan/South Sudan split last summer, Sudan was an oil exporting nation.  But most of the oil production came from fields located in what's now South Sudan, which has left Sudan with far fewer resources under their control.  Oil continues to be a sore point between the two nations.  Almost all of the oil infrastructure in South Sudan is designed to ship oil north to refineries around Khartoum and export facilities in Port Sudan, both located in Sudan.  The two nations fought over transportation rates for the use of this pipeline network, with South Sudan eventually cutting off all of their exports to Sudan in protest of what they thought was an unfair deal.  While this has been an economic blow to Sudan, it has also been a crushing blow to the fledgling economy of South Sudan, which relies on oil exports for almost 100% of their revenues.

A new war between these two sides is a very real possibility.  For decades they engaged in what was one of Africa's longest-running civil wars.  In 2005, a peace agreement was signed, which stipulated that a referendum on independence would be held in six years.  That vote was held in 2011, with almost 99% of the South Sudanese voting in favor of independence.  The two countries formally split last July.

Is Zimbabwe's Mugabe Dying?

According to a report in Monday's The Australian newspaper, Zimbabwe's controversial President Robert Mugabe may be dying in a hospital in Singapore from an undisclosed illness.  The paper goes on to suggest that the illness may be cancer, which has spread throughout his body.  According to one of the many diplomatic documents unearthed in the WikiLeaks data dump, Mugabe had previously battled prostate cancer in 2008.

The 88-year old leader was allegedly in Singapore to oversee his daughter's enrollment in a post-graduate program.  Again, according to The Australian, members of Mugabe's family have rushed to be at his bedside.

Zimbabwe has not known another leader since gaining its independence from Great Britain in 1980.  That leads analysts to predict that Zimbabwe may likely fall into chaos should Mugabe die, since he has not groomed a successor to take either the presidency or leadership of his ZANU-PF party.  Currently Mugabe's ZANU-PF is locked in an uneasy power-sharing agreement with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which was forged in the wake of the violently-contested 2008 presidential election.  After Mugabe lost the first round of voting to Tsvangirai, Mugabe's supporters launched a campaign of violence against the MDC that drove Tsvangirai out of the run-off election.  International pressure eventually forced the two men to share power.

In a troubling sign of what could happen following the death of Robert Mugabe, there are reports that he has tapped Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa to fill-in for him should he die.  Mnangagwa has been loyal to Mugabe since the struggle to drive out the British.  Over the years Mnangagwa has earned a fearsome reputation and is believed to have been the leader behind the campaign of violence directed against MDC supporters in 2008.

Somalia: When Good Stories Go Bad

There's an interesting piece in Foreign Policy that illustrates the dangers of trying to get out in front of a story from a turbulent region in this era of instant information.

In case you didn't hear, overnight Wednesday a suicide bomber struck at a performance at the National Theater in Mogadishu, Somalia, killing as many as 7 people, including the head of Somalia's Olympic committee and chair of their national football (soccer) program.  The militant group al-Shabaab, which has recently suffered from a string of defeats at the hands of Kenyan, Ethiopian and African Union troops, quickly claimed responsibility and identified the bomber as a 16-year old girl.

The reopening of the National Theater for the first time in 21 years was being widely cited as a sign that a sense of normalcy was finally returning to the capital of what is arguably the world's most war-torn state (I even referenced it in this post).  The theater was the centerpiece of a story by the New York Times Jeffrey Gettleman, who has done some incredible reporting from the region, entitled “A Taste of Hope in Somalia's Battered Capital.”  Gettleman even tweeted up his story with the line: “Who says it's just bad news coming out of Somalia?”

The New York Times webpage with Somali story

Of course as Gettleman was hitting the Twitterverse a teenage girl was blowing herself up in front of a collection of Somali dignataries.  This isn't to criticize Gettleman, who, as I mentioned above, is one of the few Westerners doing solid reporting from this region; rather it is a story that illustrates just how fast information moves today, and how quickly a story can change.

How's That Coup Working Out For You?

That's a question that a group of army officers in the West African nation of Mali have to be asking themselves right about now.  Two weeks ago, a group of mid-level officers overthrew the democratically-elected government of President Amadou Toumani Toure over what they felt was President Toure's incompetent handling of the uprising by Tuareg tribesmen in the northern part of Mali, which began in January. 

But since a group of officers led by Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo siezed the presidential residence, Mali's army has been in disarray, and the Tuaregs have been taking full advantage, seizing a string of Malian cities, including the historic Timbuktu.  For their part, the Tuaregs say that they launched their uprising in response to continued oppression by the Malian government in Bamako, located in the southern part of the country.  The Tuaregs are fighting for an independent homeland that they would carve out of the northern section of Mali.  They have dubbed their militia the “National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad”; there are reports that the Tuareg numbers have been bolstered by fighters formerly employed by Moammar Gadhafi's regime- since the Libyan leaders is known to have favored Tuareg mercenaries for their loyalty and fearsome reputation across west Africa.  Of course, since Gadhafi's downfall, these men have been mercenaries without a job.

The Malian military was upset by the government's handling of the uprising and by the heavy casualties they were taking in fighting the Tuaregs.  But many international observers are saying that the actions of Capt. Sanogo and his fellow coup plotters were impulsive, and that they seized the presidential residence without any plan as to what to do next.  That their coup seems to be having the exact opposite of its intended effect – rather than improving its effectiveness, the military campaign against the Tuaregs has all but fallen apart – seems to back up this assessment.  To make matters worse, it has been discovered that Capt. Sanogo was actually one of a group of elite Malian soldiers who were selected to receive advanced anti-terroristtraining in the United States, which makes you wonder just what the US was teaching these “elite” soldiers since they seem to have totally screwed up their own anti-insurgency campaign with the coup they impulsively decided to stage against a president who was scheduled to leave office next month anyway.

What happens now is anybody's guess.  Mali's neighbors are taking moves to seal their borders, isolating Mali in response to the coup.  But, at the same time, it is clear that the Tuareg uprising has gotten past the Malian army's ability to handle, so without foreign assistance, it is likely to continue.  Also in question are the whereabouts of President Toure, who hasn't been seen since the coup.  Everyone seems to agree that he is safe, somewhere within the country, though reports then differ, suggesting that he is either trying to seek asylum with the French government, or that he is being protected by a cadre of loyal soldiers, which also suggests the possibility of a counter-coup.   

Post of the Month: Somalia and the Resoure Curse

FYI - the most popular post on A World View for the month of March was this one about Somalia and the potential for them to suffer the "resource curse".

Oil has been discovered in the autonomous region of Puntland in north central Somalia.  On the surface, this should be a great deal for Somalia, a source of revenue that the war-torn country needs to try to start a new future.  But too often for developing countries, a valuable natural resource only leads to more poverty and more instability.  Will this happen again in Somalia?  Only time will tell.

Is Kony2012's Gain The African Union's Loss?

The African Union has announced they will be sending 5,000 troops to put an end to the vicious reign of warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army once and for all.  The AU's action comes on the heels of the most successful viral video ever, the Kony2012 campaign, which brought the attrocities of the LRA to a global audience.  But is the mission to stop Kony coming at the expense of the African Union's peacekeeping mission in Somalia?  Head on over to PolicyMic and check out my latest post to see the rest of the story.

Kenya Joins The Big Oil Club

It looks like we can add Kenya to the list of the world's petro-states.

Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki made the announcement live Monday on Kenyan TV that a prospect well had struck a reservoir of crude oil in the northwestern part of the country.  The test well was drilled by Tullow Oil Plc, a Britsih company that specializes in oil prospecting and production in Africa.  Previously, Tullow discovered oil in neighboring Uganda, kickstarting the oil industry in that country.

It is still too early to determine the true value of the Kenyan oil reserve, more test wells will first need to be drilled.  But the early indications are positive – the oil drawn from the reserve appears to be of good quality, while Tullow said that the strike went “beyond their expectations”.  Kenyan officials, meanwhile, seemed to be incredibly optimistic during the press conference.  President Kibaki talked about Kenya becoming an oil exporter in three years, while Kenya's Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi promised that: “we will make sure that the oil in Kenya is a blessing for the people of Kenya and not a curse.”

Murungi was referring there to the “resource curse” - the paradox that often strikes developing countries when a natural resource is discovered: rather than sparking the development of the nation as a whole, the resource often leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, widespread corruption, and rampant poverty for the masses.  We talked about the resource curse here recently when oil was discovered in the Puntland region of Somalia.

Kenya should be well-positioned to avoid the resource curse though.  The country has reached a fair level of development already and has a democratic government, albeit a somewhat flawed one, two factors that should help to ensure that any future oil revenues are distributed properly among Kenya's citizens.  A few weeks ago Kenya announced the construction of a multi-billion port facility outside the coastal city of Lamu, that will include an oil import/export terminal.  Originally this facility was meant to be at the end of a pipeline running from South Sudan, allowing the South Sudanese to export their oil without sending it north to export facilities in Sudan, since relations between the two nations are generally terrible.  But the facility at Lamu could also be used to export any Kenyan crude to eagerly-awaiting markets in Asia as well.

Senegal's Surprise Election Result

One of the nice things in writing about international affairs is that sometimes you get pleasant surprises.

Count the election results out of Senegal as one of those surprises.  Heading into last Sunday's election, Senegal showed signs of following that all-to-familiar African script: an aging strongman leader trying to hold onto power by any means necessary.  But then 85-year old President Abdoulaye Wade made a surprise move, he conceded defeat to his opponent, former Prime Minister Macky Sall, just hours after the polls closed when early results showed that Wade was heading to a solid defeat in the runoff election.

Given the circumstances in the previous few months, this wasn't the expected outcome of Sunday's vote.  At the start of the year, Senegal's most-famous singer, Youssou N'Dour, made a splash when he announced he'd be setting aside his musical career to take on Wade in the upcoming presidential election.  He and Wade had once been incredibly close, but had a falling out several years ago when Wade tried to persuade N'Dour to quash an embarrassing story about Wade's son Karim that was about to be run by a newspaper N'Dour owned.  N'Dour refused, citing his belief in journalistic freedom; the relationship between the two men soured.

It deteriorated further when Wade decided to run for a third term as president, sidestepping a change to Senegal's constitution that limited the president to two terms in office on the grounds that the amendment had been passed after he first took office. Then, on the eve of the election, several opposition candidates, including N'Dour, were barred from the ballot.  All were signs that Wade was trying to turn Senegal's presidency into a vehicle for his continued grip on power, which made Wade's quick concession to Sall all the more surprising.

Sall won by running on a platform that promised an improved quality of life for Senegal's more than 12 million residents by providing increased employment opportunities and cutting taxes on staples like rice.  Wade had become unpopular in Senegal over the perception that he had become out of touch with the problems faced by average Senegalese.  An ill-conceived plan to electrify Senegal's rural areas had left the country suffering from frequent black-outs, which had a negative effect on the economy; meanwhile, Wade spent more than $27 million on a massive statue called “African Renaissance” that looms above the capital, Dakar, from a hillside on the outskirts of the city.

Many Senegalese are hoping that the quick and peaceful democratic transition will serve as a signal to the international community about the stability of Senegal, which remains the only nation in western Africa never to have suffered from a military coup in its 50 years since independence, and will lead to an increase in foreign aid and investment.

Somalia's Latest Problem: The Resource Curse

It is looking like Somalia may have another problem to soon deal with: the resource curse.

The first oil from a new well drilled in northern Somalia could flow to the surface just weeks from now.  As is typically the case when a new national resource is discovered in an under-developed nation, the new oil patch is being described as the cure for Somalia's ills – a domestic source of income that will promote stability and development for the nation that will bring the Somalia diaspora home.  The reality is much more problematic.

While Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has signed deals for oil exploration, the oil field is actually located in the northern part of the country in Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia that has little to do with the TFG.  To further complicate matters, the TFG's mandate runs out in August (it is suppose to be a “transitional” government after all), so what will happen to their authority to enter into contracts such as this is a question.  And the presence of foreigners looking for wealth in their land has drawn the attention of Somalia's Islamist militants.  A little-known Islamist militia, which according to The Guardian is led by the ridiculously named Shiekh Atom, has pledged loyalty to Somalia's top terror group, al-Shabaab and has declared all oil contracts signed in Puntland to be null and void.

Some Somalis are also skeptical about the potential for oil to save their country.  It is a promise that seldom works out as well as promised, especially in Africa.  One only has to look at oil-producing countries like Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, where the quality of life for the population in the oil-producing regions has actually gotten worse since the discovery of oil, for evidence of this trend.  A number of Somalis cited in articles about Puntland's oil are skeptical of the alleged windfall coming to their nation and worry that most of the wealth will wind up in the hands of foreign companies.

There also seems to be a little confusion over what's actually being drilled in Puntland in the first place.  When a potential new oil or gas reserve is discovered, it is practice to first drill a test well to analyze the quality and commercial viability of the field.  Yet in a conference on Somalia last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that not only was the first oil expected to flow from the Puntland well in the coming weeks, but that pipelines had also already been laid to the coast so that the oil could be exported – construction of a pipeline typically doesn't occur until you know you have a viable field on your hands, otherwise it is a lost investment.

The oil news out of Puntland also puts this story from December 2010 in greater context.  The government of Puntland had announced the signing of a deal with a shadowy private security firm; the deal was allegedly to fight pirates along the Somali coast, yet security efforts were focused inland.  The suggestion at the time was that firm's real purpose was to protect foreign workers who were prospecting for natural gas reserves in Puntland's interior.  

Kenya's Big Port Gamble

Amid much fanfare and in the presence of international dignitaries, Kenya broke ground today on a major port complex that, if successful, could propel the country into the ranks of “developed” nations and serve as a catalyst for regional stability.  Or it could also turn into a multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the East African nation....

The port complex near the town of Lamu on the Indian Ocean coastline in southern Kenya will be the country's largest-ever infrastructure project, with initial construction costs budgeted at a whopping $24.5 billion.  It will include berths for 32 ocean-going ships along with an oil export facility.  But the port will not just be for Kenya's benefit – a new railway, super-highway and oil pipeline will link Lamu to Ethiopia and South Sudan as well.

This last link is especially important.  When South Sudan left Sudan last summer, they took with them the bulk of Sudan's oil reserves.  The South Sudanese economy is almost totally reliant on oil sales for revenue, but all of the existing infrastructure links South Sudan's oil fields with refineries and export terminals in Sudan.  When South Sudan embargoed shipments of oil north to Sudan over a payment dispute earlier this year, there was some fear that the dispute could reignite fighting between the two sides – South Sudan previously fought a decades-long war for independence against the Khartoum-based government in the north.

For South Sudan Lamu represents nothing short of an economic lifeline, a way to export their only commodity while avoiding the bottleneck in Sudan.  South Sudan's President Salva Kiir was on hand for the official groundbreaking along with his counterpart, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi – Ethiopia lost their own Red Sea coastline following the independence of the region of Eritrea in 1993.  For their part, Kenya is banking on Lamu to help to move them towards their goal of being considered a developed nation by 2030.

There are, however, some problems with the Lamu project.  It is a huge expense for Kenya to undertake right now, despite the potential it provides for future economic growth; those projections though are speculative, Kenya is assuming that Lamu will become a transportation hub in the decades to come, something that is far from a sure bet.  Pristine mangrove forests and coral reefs are being destroyed so that the port facilities can be constructed, leaving environmentalists to worry about the long-term impacts the project will have on the local ecosystem.  And according to the BBC World Service, the indigenous Lamu people opposed the project as an unnecessary seizure of their historic lands.  The Lamu have also said that they have not been adequately compensated for their losses because land in their society was traditionally handed down through extended families by custom and without official land deeds, meaning official ownership of much of the land was difficult, if not impossible, to prove.

But the Lamu port project is moving forward, whether it becomes the catalyst for regional development and stability that leaders promised at the groundbreaking remains to be seen.

US Politics: Zambian Soccer and Gingrich's Gas Fantasies

I realized that I've been terribly remiss in shamelessly promoting my recent writing on other websites.

You've probably heard Newt Gingrich's claim that if elected president, he'll give everyone $2.00/gal gasoline.  I take on Newt's latest political flight of fancy over at PolicyMic and explain why market dynamics show that Newt's moonbase idea is more likely to happen than his $2.00/gal gasoline promise.

Meanwhile, over at The Mantle we take a look at the unlikely pairing of Zambian soccer and US politics.  Zambia's national team recently won Africa's Cup of Nations continent-wide tournament.  In their piece about the victory, CBS threw in some tidbits about Zambia's government.  Zambia is engaging in a series of social/economic reforms, reforms that are so sensible they don't have a chance of occurring in the United States.  See why over at The Mantle.