Africa's other pirate problem

The attack on the Maersk Alabama focused the United States' attention on the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia. But, as The Economist magazine noted in A clear and present danger last week, Western Africa has its own piracy problem as well, and it’s one that could have a far greater long-term impact on American foreign policy.

The why is simple – oil. The countries of West Africa currently supply about 20% of the oil the United States imports, which is basically the same amount as America currently imports from the Persian Gulf. It is projected that by the middle of the next decade West Africa will become the United States' chief source of foreign oil, supplying as much as a quarter of all America's oil imports. And while there is concern that the Gulf States may be running dry, new sources of oil keep being discovered in sub-Saharan Africa.

The "how" of the West Africa pirate problem is more complex. Piracy exists along the east coast of Africa because Somalia is a failed state that hasn't really had a functioning government in almost two decades; that lack of rule of law gives the pirates a safe base of operations.

There aren't any failed states per se in West Africa, but there's plenty of instability. Liberia and Sierra Leone are trying to recover from long civil wars, their resources are dedicated to keeping the peace on land rather than enforcing the law at sea; Nigeria has been struggling with its own rebel movement in its oil-rich south, rebels who often target the facilities and personnel of international oil companies operating in the Niger River delta; Guinea-Bissau is now being referred to as Africa's first narco-state - Latin American drug cartels have, essentially, taken over portions of the country and are now using it as a hub to ship drugs into Europe - with the support of at least some members of Guinea-Bissau's government.

All of that instability means that, like in Somalia, pirates have a fairly free hand to operate in the waters of the Gulf of Guinea (which stretches along much of the West African coastline) - the countries in the neighborhood have too many of their own problems ashore to dedicate much of their resources to enforcing the law at sea (or in the case of Guinea-Bissau they just don't seem to have much interest in enforcing the law to begin with).

Like in Somalia, the conditions that enable piracy to occur in West Africa have been a long time coming and are at least somewhat the fault of the "developed" nations of the world for actively ignoring Africa’s problems. Both Liberia and Sierra Leone suffered for decades through coups and civil wars, yet little was done by the global community to stop the fighting and bring peace - in fact the trade of illegally mined diamonds largely fueled the conflicts in both countries. Several years ago the United Nations warned that Guinea-Bissau was in danger of becoming a narco-state, the country languished at the bottom of the UN's development index. Many of the country's law enforcement officers were faced with a choice: accept money from drug traffickers or do their job for a government that wasn't paying them - for many it turned out to be a simple choice.

The United States response to the growing West Africa piracy problem has been the USS Nashville. As The Economist reports, the amphibious transport ship is on a five-month tour of the region to as the “Africa Partnership Station” - providing training to the navies of the countries along the Gulf of Guinea. No doubt the training will be helpful, but one has to question how worthwhile it is in the long run if the African countries don't have the resources to then patrol their own waters?

As West Africa plays a larger and larger role in America's energy policy, the chances of a pirate attack against American interests also increases. When it does happen, expect the same type of panicked response, the same calls to do something that we heard about Somalia following the Maersk Alabama attack. Keep in mind though that, like Somalia, the problems in this region have been developing for years; they've developed, in part, because we haven't wanted to invest the time or effort in preventing them from happening in the first place.

And long-term problems don't have overnight solutions.

Pakistan says bin Laden is dead (or maybe not)

Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari raised some eyebrows on Monday when he said that Pakistani intelligence agencies believe that terrorist mastermind and the world's number one fugitive, Osama bin Laden, is in fact dead. Zardari didn't explain why the intelligence agencies thought that bin Laden was dead, though one reason seemed to be simply because he hasn't been caught after eight years of intensive searching.

US officials rushed to say that they believed bin Laden was still alive and that the hunt for him continues. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani also worked to backtrack, at least a little, from Zardari's comments by saying that "nobody knows" whether bin Laden is alive or dead.

Part of the problem with the hunt for bin Laden is that in an absence of factual evidence, like a physical sighting of the man, much of it tends to be built on the prevailing conventional wisdom of the situation. For example, one reason given to believe that bin Laden is still alive is that there would be a lot of "noise" among the tribes along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, where he's believed to be hiding out, if he died. "Bin Laden's death will likely be celebrated by the group and its affiliates as him having achieved martyrdom," according to Ben Venzke, director of IntelCenter (which tracks extremist propaganda).

That's true, assuming that bin Laden died a martyr's death fighting the infidels. But what if he just died of pneumonia, or fell off his horse, or died some other un-martyrly death, would his supporters still celebrate? Or might they keep it a secret to preserve his mythic status?

While we're on the topic, I’ve had a problem with the idea of bin Laden running from cave to cave for much of the past decade, especially since the capture last summer of Radovan Karadzic. If you recall, Karadzic was the former president of the Bosnian Serb Republic in the former Yugoslavia; he was charged with war crimes for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the wars that swept through the region in the mid-1990s. Like bin Laden, he spent almost a decade on the run, the prevailing thought was that Karadzic was sheltering among a clutch of die-hard supporters in remote Orthodox monasteries in the mountains of Serbia. In reality, Karadzic lived a very public life (in a very flimsy disguise) in Serbia's capital city, Belgrade - he even practiced medicine as 'alternative healer', before finally being captured one day on a city bus.

So isn't it possible that rather than a cave, bin Laden might just be living in a city like Kandahar or Islamabad? Somehow blending into the hustle and bustle of a large city seems an easier way to hide than to scurry between caves that are under the constant surveillance of the world's most hi-tech military.

Just a thought...

Why I'm not a diplomat (North Korea version)

See, this is why I'd never make it as a diplomat. On the heels of the United Nations Security Council condemning North Korea's (failed) ballistic missile launch earlier this month, the North Koreans announced that they would be forced to take "self-defensive measures" if the UN didn't apologize. These "self-defensive measures" translate into more tests of their missile program and perhaps even a second nuclear weapons test.

The diplomatic thing to do is to again try to talk North Korea down from their threats and back to the negotiating table. My feeling though is that the global community should tell Kim Jong-Il and the rest of the cabal running North Korea to go ahead and test away. I'd ask them which are they planning to test first - the ballistic missiles with the faulty second and third stages, or the nuclear bombs that fizzle? North Korea's first a-bomb was generally believed to the worst initial nuclear weapon test, ever. It was such a dud, there is some doubt whether the North Koreans even tested a nuke in the first place, or whether it was all an elaborate ruse concocted to scare the international community.

Then I'd tell Dear Leader Kim if he really wanted to do something to amaze the world, something the global community thinks he's incapable of doing, he'd provide a chicken dinner to every family in North Korea.

Hopefully the global community will give this latest threat all the attention it deserves - namely none - and not allow themselves to be threatened back to the negotiating table.

Somalis take fight to pirates

The pirates operating off the coast of Somalia are now facing a new threat - some of their fellow Somalis.

Fisherman in the Puntland region of Somalia, along the pirate-plagued Gulf of Aden, have formed their own militia to take the fight to the pirates. Local fishermen say they're fed up with would-be pirates snatching their fishing boats at gunpoint to then use on attacks against commercial vessels. The new militia has had some early success, capturing 12 suspected pirates in two boats.

Officials in Somalia's fragile national government are promising tough justice for pirates, including possibly the death penalty under newly-enacted laws, according to the BBC. But for all the tough talk, its questionable whether the 12 men detained will face any justice past being plucked off their boats by some angry fishermen.

Puntland is a self-described autonomous region in northern Somalia. While it hasn't pushed for independence, it also doesn't recognize the shaky central government in Mogadishu. In the past, suspected pirates turned over to the authorities in Puntland have tended to be quickly released, facing little actual punishment. Part of the reason is likely because piracy is one of the few activities that brings money into the impoverished costal regions of Somalia.

Meanwhile, the Russian navy is claiming one of the biggest victories yet off the coast of Somalia, where on Tuesday the destroyer Admiral Panteleyev captured 29 pirates aboard a pirate vessel, along with their firearms and navigational equipment. The day before the same pirate ship attacked a Russian-owned oil tanker, but the tanker's crew was able to repel the would-be hijacking. No word yet on what will happen to the 29 suspected pirates.

Another election, another controversy in Russia

The Russian city of Sochi held a mayoral election on Sunday, and like all election these days in Russia, this one is surrounded in controversy.

Acting Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov won the election handily, but Pakhomov is a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, and that’s where the controversy begins. Former Deputy Prime Minister, and Sochi mayoral candidate Boris Nemtsov cried foul - saying not only had the Kremlin directed a smear campaign against him in the run-up to the election, but that the government was guilty of widespread vote-rigging. Billionaire Alexander Lebedev, the only other “serious” candidate, was disqualified weeks before the election, another indication, critics say, that the vote was fixed.

Not only does the spectre of Vladimir Putin hang over the Sochi race, so to does the 2014 Winter Olympics – Putin’s pet project - that are to be held in the city. The Olympics, while touted as an engine of economic development for the whole Sochi region, has its fair share of critics, who say that the region can’t handle an event the size of the Olympics. Nemtsov himself suggested spreading the Games around to a number of Russian cities.

Nemtsov claims that the Olympics were part of the reason Putin felt the Sochi race had to be rigged - to ensure that one of ‘his own’ was in charge of the city in time for the Games. Opposition candidates say that they were regularly harassed, that government officials blocked rallies and denied them access to radio and television stations; meanwhile Sochi’s main TV station aired a 20-minute program that among other things accused Nemtsov of being a South Korean spy (a wide-spread rumor was that if elected mayor Nemtsov would endorse the idea of moving the Winter Games to South Korea, the runner-up in the IOC vote that awarded the Games to Sochi).

Golos, an independent Russian election-monitoring group claimed that 25% of all votes cast were early ballots (votes cast before election day). This, critics say, is a tactic the government uses to ensure that people - like government workers and students vote the “right” way, since the ballots can be checked by a third party (like a worker’s supervisor) before being cast. Other sources put the early vote totals at 11%.

Pakhomov though won more than 76% of the vote, with Nemtsov finishing a very distant second with just 13.6%. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the worst about Putin, the Russian government and vote-rigging. Let’s even subtract all of the early voting using Golos’ 25% figure; Pakhomov still would have easily won the election.

That’s what makes the Kremlin’s apparent interference in Russian elections so stupid. Vote rigging makes sense if you are worried you're going to lose, but if you're going to win? And I don't think its a stretch to think that the odds were in favor of Pakhomov, the incumbent mayor and member of the (still) popular United Russia Party over Nemtsov, who is a co-founder of the Union of Right Forces (SPS in Russian), one of the liberal parties that many Russians still blame for the economic chaos of the 1990s. Even in last year’s presidential election (again, filled with allegations of vote-rigging), was it realistic to think that Dmitry Medvedev would have lost to the candidates put up by the Communists (whose support languishes around 10%, mostly among older voters), or the nationalistic (and perhaps ironically-named) Liberal Democrats (who also hang around the 10% mark) or the SPS or Yabloko, the two liberal factions relegated to near-irrelevance nationally because of their linkages to the bad old days of the 90s and internal divisions?

Maybe it’s just a lingering Soviet mentality then among Putin and his inner circle - that elections are fine so long as you know the outcome in advance. But perhaps there are signs of change. Last week Anton Chumachenko, a United Russia member, newly-elected to a legislative council seat in St. Petersburg, renounced his own victory because of what he said were votes falsified in his favor. On the surface the 23-year old Chumachenko looks like one of what are sometimes called the ‘Putin Youth’, he was a member of the pro-Kremlin Youth Guard turned political activist. But in an open letter to his constituents, Chumachenko wrote: “I don't need this kind of victory! I don't want to begin my political career with a cynical mockery of rights, laws and morality.”

Maybe it’s a small sign of a maturing democracy in Russia.

Karzai blinks on controvesial law

News today out of Afghanistan is that President Hamid Karzai has promised to amend a new law that prompted an international outcry over what it contained. Critics blasted Karzai over the 'Shia Family Law' he signed last month saying that, among other things, it legalized spousal rape and child marriage.

Now, after weeks of international outrage that included government officials in Europe and pundits in Canada asking why they were supporting his government in the first place if this was the kind of 'change' he was bringing to Afghanistan, Karzai announced that he would amend the law to take out the Taliban-style provisions regarding women. Hopefully though Karzai will actually take the time to read the amendments before signing them - one excuse given for the Shia Family Law in the first place was that Karzai signed it without actually reading it so he simply didn't know about all of its horrible details.

Karzai is now promising that a new Family Law will respect the Afghan constitution, which itself has provisions to protect gender and human rights - all of which the Family Law violated.

We'll see what take two of the Family Law includes, and whether Afghanistan's hard line clerics, who were big backers of the original Shia Family Law and its anti-women provisions, will accept a new version.

Update on the "Twitter Revolution"

Three weeks after a mass public uprising in Moldova that threatened the country's newly-elected Communist government, the BBC scored an interview with the woman who it's believed was the mastermind behind the 'Twitter Revolution'.

The Beeb spoke with Natalia Morar, freshly released from house arrest about the uprising earlier this month on the streets of Chisinau, Moldova's capital. According to Morar, she never planned to spark a revolution, but only to hold a peaceful protest against what she and her friends thought was an election rigged in favor of the ruling Communist party (observers from the OSCE, while suspicious, found little evidence of voter fraud). They expected a few hundred Moldovans to turn out, instead 15,000 did.

But like a tweet, the Moldovan revolution proved to be short, with government forces quickly tossing protesters out of an occupied building and clearing the streets of the capital. Three weeks later, everyone is still trying to figure out just what happened, with the role of Twitter itself as the driving force of the revolution now being called into question.

The Twitter community in Moldova is tiny - estimated at only 100 to 200 users, and an analysis of Moldova-related traffic on Twitter just before the protests doesn't show the kind of jump in traffic you'd expect if people were organizing a massive event. Ms. Morar tacitly admits that Twitter was only one of a number of new media technologies being used to organize the protests, along with blogs, websites and SMS text messages - so perhaps in this case its best to think of "Twitter" as a catchall for a whole stew of new media techniques.

The unexpected size of the turnout has also led to speculation that there were larger forces behind the protests that were trying to use what looked like a spontaneous public uprising as a front for a more organized coup d'etat. Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin almost immediately accused Romania of trying to oust him from power in a bid to annex Moldova (Romania and Moldova have deep cultural ties and for part of the 20th Century Moldova was part of Romania, before being carved out and turned into one of the republics of the Soviet Union).

Russia has also been accused of being behind the coup attempt either to 1) solidify the control of Moldova's Communist government and pull the country into Russia's orbit; or 2) to cause such a level of chaos in Moldova that it boosts the independence claims of the separatist-minded, pro-Moscow Transdnestr region in eastern Moldova, which has been struggling for independence from Moldova since the early 1990s. The CIA, the go-to suspects anytime there is a coup attempt anywhere in the world, also has gotten their share of suspicion, though its hard to gather what US foreign policy gain there is to be had by overthrowing the government in Europe's poorest country.

That last fact probably comes closest to explaining why what should have been a fairly benign protest grew so wildly. It's estimated that more than 500,000 of Moldova's four million citizens live and work abroad, supporting families back in Moldova through remittances. At least that's how things worked until the recent economic crisis. Many of those Moldovans working across Europe though lost their jobs and were forced to return home, causing a spike in Moldova's already high unemployment, as well as a spike in anger among these newly unemployed Moldovans.

Even though the Twitter Revolution may have failed to materialize, the tensions still remain, so to then does the potential for another mass uprising.

Amnesty International accuses NATO of war crimes, ten years later

One of the world's top human rights groups is demanding that NATO be investigated for possible war crimes committed in Serbia ten years ago.

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the bombing campaign NATO launched to force Serbia to end military operations against separatists in the (then) Serbian province of Kosovo. At the time, NATO said the air campaign was needed to force a halt to atrocities NATO claimed the Serbs were committing against the Kosovars (since then evidence has come out that the Kosovars were committing atrocities of their own against the Serbs, but that's another post).

Now Amnesty International is calling for an investigation into what they're describing as a 'war crime' committed by NATO forces – the bombing of the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) on April 23, 1999, an attack that killed 16 civilians and wounded 16 others. At the time, NATO claimed that RTS – located in the heart of Belgrade, far removed from Kosovo - was a legitimate target because it was the source of a massive anti-Kosovar propaganda that was stoking the Serbs to fight.

Amnesty disputes this claim, saying that RTS was a civilian installation, and thus exempt from attack under international law, and even if you accept the propaganda claim, NATO used 'disproportionate' force in the attack – then also grounds for a war crimes charge. They are calling on NATO member states to launch their own investigations.

That's pretty unlikely, but it’s (yet) another blow to NATO's credibility, which is at a pretty low level these days. For a different slant on the RTS bombing, check out this piece by Belgrade-based media outlet B92. The RTS headquarters still remains in ruins in the middle of Belgrade, the families of those killed in the attack are pushing for the site to remain a memorial to their loved ones.

Car thefts, the new Russian economic indicator?

According to Realclearworld.com the economic downturn is having a powerful effect on one group of Russians – professional car thieves.

It seems that the slowing Russian economy has forced car thieves to change their tactics, traditional Russian brands like Ladas are now flying off the streets, with the rate of theft for those makes being higher in 2009 than ever recorded; while high-end rides like Bentleys and Maybachs can now park on the Moscow streets in relative safety. The number of Russian cars stolen this year in Moscow has even surpassed the numbers of modest foreign brands like Hondas and Toyotas combined.

The explanation seems to be that criminals can't fence stolen luxury rides, while demand remains high for cheaper domestic models. I don't think this is exactly what Vladimir Putin had in mind though when he stepped in to prop up the Russian auto industry.

Another call to just ignore Kim

Well I'm feeling a bit vindicated today.

After North Korea tested its second would-be intercontinental missile earlier in the month (another failure as you'll recall), amid the panic that was swirling about the North Korean 'threat', I argued that the best response would be to just ignore the whole thing. Why? Because the North Koreans have yet to have a test of any of these feared weapons (the ICBMs or nuclear bombs) end in success. But past that, North Korea uses weapons tests like a five year old uses a temper tantrum – as a desperate bid to get your attention and give them what they want. So why play the game?

It seems that the Cato Institute agrees. Earlier in the week Doug Bandow, one of Cato's senior fellows, argued that in dealing with North Korea, we need to change the rules of the game - namely to not get sucked into negotiations in order to stop the North Koreans from developing another dreaded weapon, and that the best way for the US to react is "with bored contempt rather than excited fear" the next time Dear Leader Kim decides to play with one of his missiles or bombs.

All of this isn't to make light of the situation in North Korea, which is fairly dreadful. Bandow correctly states that there really are no good options when it comes to dealing with North Korea. Kim Jong-Il's health is obviously poor, though he has no clear successor, meaning when he does die, there will likely be a power struggle (check this BBC piece for a possible contender to replace Kim). And this will happen in a country that already has a starving population and a crippled economy (both thanks to Kim's fetish for dumping billions of dollars into weapons like ICBMs and nuclear bombs).

Of course even after all that sacrifice North Korea still can't make one that actually works properly. And that's the point of the Cato Institute article - in dealing with North Korea its best to focus on the very real problems posed by the country and not to scare ourselves silly over imaginary threats.