April 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Gang Up on Pirates
By WAYNE LONG
Chester, Md.
THE Navy’s heroic rescue of the sea captain Richard Phillips from his captors has left the rest of the world trying to figure out how to safely free the 200 or so seamen being held hostage by pirates in the Indian Ocean.
There are generally two approaches to hostage situations. One is to negotiate with the kidnappers to gain a conditional release of the hostages. The other is to stage a violent rescue in which kidnappers, hostages and rescuers alike all run the risk of losing their lives.
I have been involved in both hostage negotiations and in hostage rescues. In the case of pirates off eastern Africa, it would appear that having many hostages of different nationalities, spread over a large area, favors the first approach. And yet the Navy’s rescue of Capt. Phillips, and the universal condemnation of piracy, suggests that negotiation and the payment of ransom might not be a good idea.
But there might be another way — an approach that could be run through the United Nations and that would be available both to governmental and nongovernmental authorities acting for the interned seamen.
During my 10 years as the chief security adviser for the United Nations in Somalia, my team and I negotiated releases in more than a dozen hostage cases, several of which involved piracy. Some of the hostages were United Nations personnel, and some were not.
In the situations that did not involve United Nations workers, our team was asked by the concerned embassies in Nairobi to pursue cases on their behalf. These countries, whose citizens had been taken hostage, had no presence in fractious Somalia — and we did.
Figuring out how to be of help wasn’t easy. Eventually, after long and heated internal discussion, the United Nations security team persuaded the United Nations country team that the most effective approach would be to use humanitarian aid and assistance as a lever to gain release of hostages.
Somalia is pretty much a stateless state. Humanitarian aid and clan association are major centers of gravity. In fact, clan leaders stay in power in part by controlling the distribution of aid. Our strategy was therefore simple: United Nations assistance was withheld from the Somali clan or region by which or in which hostages were being held until those hostages were released. In every case there was a release, and in no case were hostages harmed or ransom paid. (On the downside, no pirates were brought to trial or punished in any way.)
In 1995, for example, the water supply for Mogadishu, the capital, was shut off by the United Nations humanitarian agencies until a hostage who worked for another aid organization was released. On the first day of the shutoff, the women who collected water from public distribution points yelled at the kidnappers; on the second day they stoned them; on the third day they shot at them; on the fourth day, the hostage was released.
On another occasion, in 2000, two French yachtsmen were taken by pirates in their 40-foot sloop off Somalia as they made passage from Djibouti to Zanzibar. The French Embassy in Nairobi asked the United Nations team to help, and I entered into face-to-face negotiations in the remote port of Bossaso.
After demonstrating that the hostages were alive, the pirates demanded $1 million in ransom. I responded that the United Nations would suspend all civic improvement in the region — education, animal husbandry, vaccination, water projects. The aid would resume when the hostages were released.
This drove a wedge between the pirates and their home clan, the Darod. Clan elders put pressure on the pirates. After several weeks, the Frenchmen were released to me in return for resumption of all United Nations humanitarian aid. (I was unable to negotiate the release of the yacht.)
Although this tactic sometimes took longer to get results than the hostages’ home countries liked, the divisions that arose in hostage takers’ clans when aid was suspended were extremely effective in creating the conditions for release.
It’s worth noting, too, that though pirates are at sea, their families and clans are not. If life can be made uncomfortable in their communities, there’s a good chance that pirates can be persuaded to give up their hostages. (This negotiation equation could change if the Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group that has become increasingly powerful in Somalia, gets in the kidnapping business.)
The Obama administration has indicated that it sees piracy as a global threat and that it will therefore reach out to international partners to fight the problem. A partnership with the United Nations is probably not the best course for aggressive suppression of the pirates. But when it comes to the hostages being held, the targeted application of United Nations leverage just might result in the release of innocent people who have been held hostage for far too long.
Wayne Long, a former Army colonel, was the United Nations’ chief security officer in Somalia from 1993 to 2003.
AFRICA
New policies set to boost E.A trade
By MAZERA NDURYA
Posted Tuesday, April 21 2009 at 18:54
Operations of development agencies within the region will benefit from the planned harmonisation of policies and legal frameworks of the East African Community, the government has said.
East African Community minister Amason Kingi said the new measures will enable the business community and development agencies play their rightful role as engines of growth in the region.
Customs union
“The East African Community is implementing a customs union which provides for free movement of goods within the region while applying a common external tariff structure.
“We are currently in the process of signing the protocol for the establishment of a common market which will provide free movement of factors of production and services,” said Mr Kingi.
He spoke during the Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) annual reception at the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa.
Under the common market, he said, it will be easier and more convenient for development agencies such as the AKDN, which has a network of development and corporate establishments, to practice and provide their services without unnecessary hindrances.
He commended the development agency for its contribution to the development of the country and the region citing a wide range of economic development activities that include financial, tourism, agro-processing, media and power generation.
Lower costs
AKDN resident representative for Kenya Aziz Bhaloo said development activities are geared towards promoting entrepreneurship and building economically sound enterprises in the developing world.
Singling out the progress in telecommunication, Mr Bhaloo said the Seacom Fibre optic cable, which will land in Mombasa in June will result in lower costs.
“There will be new opportunities across many sectors that will include the call centre and business process outsourcing as well as linking East and Southern Africa to Europe and Asia,” he said.
Mr Bhaloo called for more partnerships saying that the government alone cannot meet the requirements and expectations of the people yet no development can meet its mandate without the support of the government.
http://www.nation.co.ke/business/news/- ... iyyt2sz/-/
By MAZERA NDURYA
Posted Tuesday, April 21 2009 at 18:54
Operations of development agencies within the region will benefit from the planned harmonisation of policies and legal frameworks of the East African Community, the government has said.
East African Community minister Amason Kingi said the new measures will enable the business community and development agencies play their rightful role as engines of growth in the region.
Customs union
“The East African Community is implementing a customs union which provides for free movement of goods within the region while applying a common external tariff structure.
“We are currently in the process of signing the protocol for the establishment of a common market which will provide free movement of factors of production and services,” said Mr Kingi.
He spoke during the Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) annual reception at the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa.
Under the common market, he said, it will be easier and more convenient for development agencies such as the AKDN, which has a network of development and corporate establishments, to practice and provide their services without unnecessary hindrances.
He commended the development agency for its contribution to the development of the country and the region citing a wide range of economic development activities that include financial, tourism, agro-processing, media and power generation.
Lower costs
AKDN resident representative for Kenya Aziz Bhaloo said development activities are geared towards promoting entrepreneurship and building economically sound enterprises in the developing world.
Singling out the progress in telecommunication, Mr Bhaloo said the Seacom Fibre optic cable, which will land in Mombasa in June will result in lower costs.
“There will be new opportunities across many sectors that will include the call centre and business process outsourcing as well as linking East and Southern Africa to Europe and Asia,” he said.
Mr Bhaloo called for more partnerships saying that the government alone cannot meet the requirements and expectations of the people yet no development can meet its mandate without the support of the government.
http://www.nation.co.ke/business/news/- ... iyyt2sz/-/
April 24, 2009
The West Turns to Kenya as Piracy Criminal Court
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world ... ?th&emc=th
MOMBASA, Kenya — In the shadow of Fort Jesus, a 16th-century Portuguese stronghold that truly belongs to the era of slave raiders and pirate ships, is the office of Kenya’s premier pirate lawyer.
And these days, the lawyer, Francis Kadima, is very busy.
On Thursday morning, his newest batch of clients suddenly arrived: 11 thin-faced, bewildered suspects who were marched into a Mombasa courtroom to face charges of piracy on the high seas. This month, French commandos captured them — and a small arsenal — after they were suspected of trying to commandeer a cargo ship.
“When I first started handling pirate cases, I thought these guys would be like kidnappers, strong, you know, and really crafty and sophisticated,” Mr. Kadima said. “But not these guys. They’re just ordinary. If anything, they’re expressionless.”
Kenya is emerging as the venue of choice for piracy cases and an important piece of the worldwide crackdown on piracy. The spate of recent hijackings off Somalia’s coast has stiffened international resolve. Just a few months ago, foreign warships would catch suspected pirates cruising around in speedy skiffs with guns and ladders and then dump them back on the Somali beach because of sticky legal questions. Those days are just about gone.
Now, the piracy suspects are getting a one-way ticket to Mombasa, a historic port town where Kenyan officials are all too eager to punish the seafaring thugs imperiling their vital shipping industry. Under recent, innovative agreements with the United States, Britain and the European Union, Kenya has promised to try piracy suspects apprehended by foreign navies. In return, the other countries have agreed to improve Kenya’s antiquated courts. Many Kenyan judges still wear wigs and take everything down by hand, making trials agonizingly slow.
In a few cases, countries that have caught piracy suspects accused of attacking their own citizens have chosen to prosecute them back home. That was demonstrated this week, when a wide-eyed young Somali man landed in New York to face charges that he had kidnapped an American sea captain. But according to maritime law experts, that is not necessary.
“The law on piracy is 100 percent clear,” said Kenneth Randall, dean of the University of Alabama School of Law and an international law expert. “Any country can arrest these guys and prosecute them at home.”
When it comes to putting pirates on trial, there are some practical complications, like serving papers to witnesses who may be Filipino or Kenyan sailors with no mailing addresses who spend all year at sea. Or finding a Somali translator in Mumbai, India, or Copenhagen.
In light of those problems, most nations have been hesitant to undertake piracy trials. As a result, there is growing support for the Kenyan solution. Today, more than three dozen Somali pirates sit behind bars in Shimo la Tewa, Mombasa’s notoriously decrepit prison, which just so happens to be a few miles up the beach from some of this country’s most magnificent palm-fringed resorts.
Western diplomats are hoping that this courtroom effort, coupled with a reinvigorated military response involving warships from more than a dozen nations, will put a dent in Somalia’s stubborn piracy problem. At a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, donor nations pledged more than $200 million for Somalia, much of it for security, on land and at sea.
Last year, Somali pirates hijacked more than 40 ships, netting tens of millions of dollars in ransom. Many major shipping companies are now opting to sail all the way around Africa instead of risking the Somali seas.
Antti Lehmusjarvi, a legal adviser for the European Union who came to the Mombasa courthouse on Thursday to observe the arraignment of the 11 piracy suspects, said Kenya was the best solution — for now.
“Obviously, Kenya needs assistance,” Mr. Lehmusjarvi said. He rattled off all the help the European Union was providing, including computers and money to bring more qualified Kenyan judges to Mombasa. “But the law here is very clear,” he said. “And in Somalia, a stable legal framework doesn’t exist.”
Section 69 (1) of the Kenyan penal code reads, “Any person who, in territorial waters or upon the high seas, commits any act of piracy jure gentium is guilty of the offence of piracy.” The punishment can be life in prison.
But Mr. Kadima, a former magistrate himself, takes issue with this. Kenya has not ratified international maritime conventions, he said, and the recent agreements signed with other countries were not approved by Kenya’s Parliament and therefore are not enforceable.
“You can’t just go around making up laws, you know,” he said. “There is a process.”
Mr. Kadima, 50, who took on his first piracy case in March, said he had yet to see a shilling from any of his piracy cases, though he conceded that the publicity was good for business.
He said all of his clients had uttered the same excuse for why they had been caught on the high seas with serious firepower.
“They said they were just fishermen,” he said. “Fishermen who needed to protect themselves.”
Does he really believe that?
“A lawyer doesn’t need to believe,” Mr. Kadima explained. “He goes by what he is told.”
The West Turns to Kenya as Piracy Criminal Court
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world ... ?th&emc=th
MOMBASA, Kenya — In the shadow of Fort Jesus, a 16th-century Portuguese stronghold that truly belongs to the era of slave raiders and pirate ships, is the office of Kenya’s premier pirate lawyer.
And these days, the lawyer, Francis Kadima, is very busy.
On Thursday morning, his newest batch of clients suddenly arrived: 11 thin-faced, bewildered suspects who were marched into a Mombasa courtroom to face charges of piracy on the high seas. This month, French commandos captured them — and a small arsenal — after they were suspected of trying to commandeer a cargo ship.
“When I first started handling pirate cases, I thought these guys would be like kidnappers, strong, you know, and really crafty and sophisticated,” Mr. Kadima said. “But not these guys. They’re just ordinary. If anything, they’re expressionless.”
Kenya is emerging as the venue of choice for piracy cases and an important piece of the worldwide crackdown on piracy. The spate of recent hijackings off Somalia’s coast has stiffened international resolve. Just a few months ago, foreign warships would catch suspected pirates cruising around in speedy skiffs with guns and ladders and then dump them back on the Somali beach because of sticky legal questions. Those days are just about gone.
Now, the piracy suspects are getting a one-way ticket to Mombasa, a historic port town where Kenyan officials are all too eager to punish the seafaring thugs imperiling their vital shipping industry. Under recent, innovative agreements with the United States, Britain and the European Union, Kenya has promised to try piracy suspects apprehended by foreign navies. In return, the other countries have agreed to improve Kenya’s antiquated courts. Many Kenyan judges still wear wigs and take everything down by hand, making trials agonizingly slow.
In a few cases, countries that have caught piracy suspects accused of attacking their own citizens have chosen to prosecute them back home. That was demonstrated this week, when a wide-eyed young Somali man landed in New York to face charges that he had kidnapped an American sea captain. But according to maritime law experts, that is not necessary.
“The law on piracy is 100 percent clear,” said Kenneth Randall, dean of the University of Alabama School of Law and an international law expert. “Any country can arrest these guys and prosecute them at home.”
When it comes to putting pirates on trial, there are some practical complications, like serving papers to witnesses who may be Filipino or Kenyan sailors with no mailing addresses who spend all year at sea. Or finding a Somali translator in Mumbai, India, or Copenhagen.
In light of those problems, most nations have been hesitant to undertake piracy trials. As a result, there is growing support for the Kenyan solution. Today, more than three dozen Somali pirates sit behind bars in Shimo la Tewa, Mombasa’s notoriously decrepit prison, which just so happens to be a few miles up the beach from some of this country’s most magnificent palm-fringed resorts.
Western diplomats are hoping that this courtroom effort, coupled with a reinvigorated military response involving warships from more than a dozen nations, will put a dent in Somalia’s stubborn piracy problem. At a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, donor nations pledged more than $200 million for Somalia, much of it for security, on land and at sea.
Last year, Somali pirates hijacked more than 40 ships, netting tens of millions of dollars in ransom. Many major shipping companies are now opting to sail all the way around Africa instead of risking the Somali seas.
Antti Lehmusjarvi, a legal adviser for the European Union who came to the Mombasa courthouse on Thursday to observe the arraignment of the 11 piracy suspects, said Kenya was the best solution — for now.
“Obviously, Kenya needs assistance,” Mr. Lehmusjarvi said. He rattled off all the help the European Union was providing, including computers and money to bring more qualified Kenyan judges to Mombasa. “But the law here is very clear,” he said. “And in Somalia, a stable legal framework doesn’t exist.”
Section 69 (1) of the Kenyan penal code reads, “Any person who, in territorial waters or upon the high seas, commits any act of piracy jure gentium is guilty of the offence of piracy.” The punishment can be life in prison.
But Mr. Kadima, a former magistrate himself, takes issue with this. Kenya has not ratified international maritime conventions, he said, and the recent agreements signed with other countries were not approved by Kenya’s Parliament and therefore are not enforceable.
“You can’t just go around making up laws, you know,” he said. “There is a process.”
Mr. Kadima, 50, who took on his first piracy case in March, said he had yet to see a shilling from any of his piracy cases, though he conceded that the publicity was good for business.
He said all of his clients had uttered the same excuse for why they had been caught on the high seas with serious firepower.
“They said they were just fishermen,” he said. “Fishermen who needed to protect themselves.”
Does he really believe that?
“A lawyer doesn’t need to believe,” Mr. Kadima explained. “He goes by what he is told.”
There is a video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/world ... &th&emc=th
May 9, 2009
The Pirate Chronicles
For Somali Pirates, Worst Enemy May Be on Shore
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GAROOWE, Somalia — Abshir Boyah, a towering, notorious Somali pirate boss who admits to hijacking more than 25 ships and to being a member of a secretive pirate council called “The Corporation,” says he’s ready to cut a deal.
Facing intensifying naval pressure on the seas and now a rising backlash on land, Mr. Boyah has been shuttling between elders and religious sheiks fed up with pirates and their vices, promising to quit the buccaneering business if certain demands are met.
“Man, these Islamic guys want to cut my hands off,” he grumbled over a plate of camel meat and spaghetti. The sheiks seemed to have rattled him more than the armada of foreign warships patrolling offshore. “Maybe it’s time for a change.”
For the first time in this pirate-infested region of northern Somalia, some of the very communities that had been flourishing with pirate dollars — supplying these well-known criminals with sanctuary, support, brides, respect and even government help — are now trying to push them out.
Grass-roots, antipirate militias are forming. Sheiks and government leaders are embarking on a campaign to excommunicate the pirates, telling them to get out of town and preaching at mosques for women not to marry these un-Islamic, thieving “burcad badeed,” which in Somali translates as sea bandit. There is even a new sign at a parking lot in Garoowe, the sun-blasted capital of the semiautonomous region of Puntland, that may be the only one of its kind in the world. The thick red letters say: No pirates allowed.
Much like the violence, hunger and warlordism that has engulfed Somalia, piracy is a direct — and some Somalis say inevitable — outgrowth of a society that has languished for 18 years without a functioning central government and whose economy has been smashed by war.
But here in Garoowe, the pirates are increasingly viewed as stains on the devoutly Muslim, nomadic culture, blamed for introducing big-city evils like drugs, alcohol, street brawling and AIDS. A few weeks ago, Puntland police officers broke up a bootlegging ring and poured out 327 bottles of Ethiopian-made gin. In Somalia, alcohol is shunned. Such a voluminous stash of booze is virtually unheard of.
“The pirates are spoiling our society,” said Abdirahman Mohamed Mohamud, Puntland’s new president. “We will crush them.”
In the past 18 months, Somali pirates have netted as much as $100 million hijacking dozens of ships and holding them ransom, according to international maritime groups. It will be exceedingly difficult for these men — or the local businesses that they support — to make that kind of money doing anything else in this beleaguered nation.
Still, the Puntland pirate bosses insist they are ready to call it quits, if the sheiks find jobs for their young underlings and help the pirates form a coast guard to protect Somalia’s 1,880-mile coastline from illegal fishing and dumping. These are longstanding complaints made by many Somalis, including those who don’t scamper up the sides of cargo ships, AK-47 in hand.
It is a stretch, to say the least, that the world would accept being policed by rehabilitated hijackers. But on Monday, Mr. Boyah and two dozen other infamous Puntland pirates, many driving Toyota Surfs, a light, fast sport utility vehicle that has become the pirate ride of choice, arrived at an elder’s house in Garoowe to make their case nonetheless.
“Negotiation is our religion,” said one pirate, Abdirizak Elmi Abdullahi.
Puntland officials acknowledge, grudgingly, that the pirates have helped them in a way: bringing desperately needed attention and aid.
“Sad but true,” said Farah Dala, Puntland’s minister of planning and international cooperation. “After all the suffering and war, the world is finally paying attention to our pain because they’re getting a tiny taste of it.”
Last month, after an American sea captain was kidnapped by Somali pirates, donor nations pledged more than $200 million for Somalia, in part to fight piracy.
Since then, foreign navies have increased their patrols and arrested dozens of pirates. Mr. Boyah conceded that business was getting riskier. But, he said, there are still plenty of merchant ships — and plenty of ocean.
“It’s like hunting out there,” Mr. Boyah said through an interpreter. “Sometimes you get a deer, sometimes you get a dik-dik,” a runty antelope common in Somalia.
Mr. Boyah, 43, was born in Eyl, a pirate den on the coast. He said he dropped out of school in third grade, became a fisherman and took up hijacking after illegal fishing by foreign trawlers destroyed his livelihood in the mid-1990s.
“He’s respected as a pioneer,” said Yusuf Hassan, the managing editor of Garoowe Online, a Somali news Web site.
When Mr. Boyah walked into a restaurant recently, he had to shake half a dozen hands before sitting at a plastic, fly-covered table with two foreign journalists.
“Ha!” he said, through a mouthful of spaghetti. “Me eating with white men. This is like the cat eating with the mice!”
The restaurant sat across from the presidential palace. Mr. Boyah cut right through a crowd of Puntland soldiers to enter. He is hard to miss, about 6 foot 4 and dangerously thin. Earlier, he had been sitting on a couch, thigh to thigh, next to a high-ranking police chief. The two joked — or maybe it was not a joke — that they were cousins.
Puntland’s last president, Mohamud Muse Hirsi, was a former warlord widely suspected of collaborating with pirates and voted out of office in January. The new president, Mr. Abdirahman, is a technocrat who had been living in Australia and came back with many Western-educated advisers — and an ambition to be Somalia’s first leader to do something substantive about piracy. He formed an antipiracy commission and even issued a “First 100 Days” report.
Yet, Puntland officials are doing precious little about the pirate kings under their noses — reluctant, perhaps, to provoke a war with crime lords backed by hundreds of gunmen. When asked why they weren’t arresting the big fish, Mr. Abdirahman said, “Rumors are one thing, but we need evidence.”
Indeed, it is hard to see exactly where all those millions went, at least here in Garoowe. There are some nice new houses and a few new hotels where pirates hang out, including one encased in barbed wire called “The Ladies’ Breasts.” Dozens of dusty Surfs prowl the streets. But not much else.
Mr. Boyah, who lives in a simple little house, explains: “Don’t be surprised when I tell you all the money has disappeared. When someone who never had money suddenly gets money, it just goes.”
He claims that his estimated take of several hundred thousand dollars disappeared down a vortex of parties, weddings, jewelry, cars and qat, the stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum.
Also, because of the extended network of relatives and clansmen, “it’s not like three people split a million bucks,” he said. “It’s more like 300.”
Oh, Mr. Boyah added, he also gives 15 percent to charity, especially to the elderly and infirm.
“I’d love to give them more,” he said.
Over all, he seemed like a man on a genuine quest for redemption — or a very good liar.
“We know what we’re doing is wrong,” he said gravely. “I’m asking forgiveness from God, the whole world, anybody.”
And then his silver Nokia phone chirped yet again. He would not say what he needed to do, but it was time to go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/world ... &th&emc=th
May 9, 2009
The Pirate Chronicles
For Somali Pirates, Worst Enemy May Be on Shore
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GAROOWE, Somalia — Abshir Boyah, a towering, notorious Somali pirate boss who admits to hijacking more than 25 ships and to being a member of a secretive pirate council called “The Corporation,” says he’s ready to cut a deal.
Facing intensifying naval pressure on the seas and now a rising backlash on land, Mr. Boyah has been shuttling between elders and religious sheiks fed up with pirates and their vices, promising to quit the buccaneering business if certain demands are met.
“Man, these Islamic guys want to cut my hands off,” he grumbled over a plate of camel meat and spaghetti. The sheiks seemed to have rattled him more than the armada of foreign warships patrolling offshore. “Maybe it’s time for a change.”
For the first time in this pirate-infested region of northern Somalia, some of the very communities that had been flourishing with pirate dollars — supplying these well-known criminals with sanctuary, support, brides, respect and even government help — are now trying to push them out.
Grass-roots, antipirate militias are forming. Sheiks and government leaders are embarking on a campaign to excommunicate the pirates, telling them to get out of town and preaching at mosques for women not to marry these un-Islamic, thieving “burcad badeed,” which in Somali translates as sea bandit. There is even a new sign at a parking lot in Garoowe, the sun-blasted capital of the semiautonomous region of Puntland, that may be the only one of its kind in the world. The thick red letters say: No pirates allowed.
Much like the violence, hunger and warlordism that has engulfed Somalia, piracy is a direct — and some Somalis say inevitable — outgrowth of a society that has languished for 18 years without a functioning central government and whose economy has been smashed by war.
But here in Garoowe, the pirates are increasingly viewed as stains on the devoutly Muslim, nomadic culture, blamed for introducing big-city evils like drugs, alcohol, street brawling and AIDS. A few weeks ago, Puntland police officers broke up a bootlegging ring and poured out 327 bottles of Ethiopian-made gin. In Somalia, alcohol is shunned. Such a voluminous stash of booze is virtually unheard of.
“The pirates are spoiling our society,” said Abdirahman Mohamed Mohamud, Puntland’s new president. “We will crush them.”
In the past 18 months, Somali pirates have netted as much as $100 million hijacking dozens of ships and holding them ransom, according to international maritime groups. It will be exceedingly difficult for these men — or the local businesses that they support — to make that kind of money doing anything else in this beleaguered nation.
Still, the Puntland pirate bosses insist they are ready to call it quits, if the sheiks find jobs for their young underlings and help the pirates form a coast guard to protect Somalia’s 1,880-mile coastline from illegal fishing and dumping. These are longstanding complaints made by many Somalis, including those who don’t scamper up the sides of cargo ships, AK-47 in hand.
It is a stretch, to say the least, that the world would accept being policed by rehabilitated hijackers. But on Monday, Mr. Boyah and two dozen other infamous Puntland pirates, many driving Toyota Surfs, a light, fast sport utility vehicle that has become the pirate ride of choice, arrived at an elder’s house in Garoowe to make their case nonetheless.
“Negotiation is our religion,” said one pirate, Abdirizak Elmi Abdullahi.
Puntland officials acknowledge, grudgingly, that the pirates have helped them in a way: bringing desperately needed attention and aid.
“Sad but true,” said Farah Dala, Puntland’s minister of planning and international cooperation. “After all the suffering and war, the world is finally paying attention to our pain because they’re getting a tiny taste of it.”
Last month, after an American sea captain was kidnapped by Somali pirates, donor nations pledged more than $200 million for Somalia, in part to fight piracy.
Since then, foreign navies have increased their patrols and arrested dozens of pirates. Mr. Boyah conceded that business was getting riskier. But, he said, there are still plenty of merchant ships — and plenty of ocean.
“It’s like hunting out there,” Mr. Boyah said through an interpreter. “Sometimes you get a deer, sometimes you get a dik-dik,” a runty antelope common in Somalia.
Mr. Boyah, 43, was born in Eyl, a pirate den on the coast. He said he dropped out of school in third grade, became a fisherman and took up hijacking after illegal fishing by foreign trawlers destroyed his livelihood in the mid-1990s.
“He’s respected as a pioneer,” said Yusuf Hassan, the managing editor of Garoowe Online, a Somali news Web site.
When Mr. Boyah walked into a restaurant recently, he had to shake half a dozen hands before sitting at a plastic, fly-covered table with two foreign journalists.
“Ha!” he said, through a mouthful of spaghetti. “Me eating with white men. This is like the cat eating with the mice!”
The restaurant sat across from the presidential palace. Mr. Boyah cut right through a crowd of Puntland soldiers to enter. He is hard to miss, about 6 foot 4 and dangerously thin. Earlier, he had been sitting on a couch, thigh to thigh, next to a high-ranking police chief. The two joked — or maybe it was not a joke — that they were cousins.
Puntland’s last president, Mohamud Muse Hirsi, was a former warlord widely suspected of collaborating with pirates and voted out of office in January. The new president, Mr. Abdirahman, is a technocrat who had been living in Australia and came back with many Western-educated advisers — and an ambition to be Somalia’s first leader to do something substantive about piracy. He formed an antipiracy commission and even issued a “First 100 Days” report.
Yet, Puntland officials are doing precious little about the pirate kings under their noses — reluctant, perhaps, to provoke a war with crime lords backed by hundreds of gunmen. When asked why they weren’t arresting the big fish, Mr. Abdirahman said, “Rumors are one thing, but we need evidence.”
Indeed, it is hard to see exactly where all those millions went, at least here in Garoowe. There are some nice new houses and a few new hotels where pirates hang out, including one encased in barbed wire called “The Ladies’ Breasts.” Dozens of dusty Surfs prowl the streets. But not much else.
Mr. Boyah, who lives in a simple little house, explains: “Don’t be surprised when I tell you all the money has disappeared. When someone who never had money suddenly gets money, it just goes.”
He claims that his estimated take of several hundred thousand dollars disappeared down a vortex of parties, weddings, jewelry, cars and qat, the stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum.
Also, because of the extended network of relatives and clansmen, “it’s not like three people split a million bucks,” he said. “It’s more like 300.”
Oh, Mr. Boyah added, he also gives 15 percent to charity, especially to the elderly and infirm.
“I’d love to give them more,” he said.
Over all, he seemed like a man on a genuine quest for redemption — or a very good liar.
“We know what we’re doing is wrong,” he said gravely. “I’m asking forgiveness from God, the whole world, anybody.”
And then his silver Nokia phone chirped yet again. He would not say what he needed to do, but it was time to go.
Gwynne Dyer: Neocolonialists' African land grab
By Gwynne Dyer
In the past two years, various nonAfrican countries--China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack--have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase.
This is to produce food or biofuels for their own use. Critics call them "neocolonialists", but they will not be as successful as the old ones.
The scale of the land grab is truly impressive. In Sudan, South Korea has acquired 690,00 hectares of land to grow wheat. The United Arab Emirates, which already has 30,000 hectares in Sudan, is investing in another 378,000 hectares to grow corn, alfalfa, wheat, potatoes and beans. In Tanzania, Saudi Arabia is seeking 500,000 hectares.
Even bigger chunks of land are being leased to produce biofuels. China has acquired 2.8 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo to create the world's largest oil-palm plantation (replacing all that messy rain-forest and useless wildlife with tidy lines of palm trees), and is negotiating for two million hectares in Zambia to grow jatropha.
British firms have secured big tracts of land in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania.
Only rarely is there protest from local people. One striking exception is in Madagascar, where the announcement of a 99-year contract to lease 1.3 million hectares to South Korea's Daewoo corporation to grow corn helped to trigger the recent revolution.
"Madagascar's land is neither for sale nor for rent," said the new leader, Andry Rajoelina, who cancelled the deal.
After the revolution, it turned out that another 465,000 hectares of land in Madagascar had been leased to an Indian company, Varun International, to grow rice for consumption in India.
That deal is also being cancelled by the new government--but elsewhere, the acquisition of huge tracts of African land by Asian and European governments and companies goes ahead almost unopposed.
Why Africa? Because that's the last place where there are large areas of good agricultural land that aren't already completely occupied by local farmers. There are usually some peasants scratching a living from the land, but they are few and poor, and they can easily be bought or driven out.
For the foreigners, the lure is profit, or food security, or both. For those who are investing in biofuels, there are real profits to be made, at least in the short term. But for those seeking food security, the new African food resources will probably become unavailable just when they are needed most.
The surge in grain prices in 2007-2008 drove many countries that depend heavily on imported food to start acquiring African farmland. The immediate reason for a doubling or tripling of the price of wheat, rice and corn (maize) was a couple of local crop failures and the diversion of large amounts of American corn into biofuel production, but the underlying cause was that the global food supply is falling further and further behind demand.
Since 1945 the world's population has tripled, and so has its food production, growing at an average of about three percent annually through the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and most of the '90s. But for most of the past decade, grain production has essentially flat-lined, while the global population has gone on growing.
By 2006, just before the prices soared, the world grain reserve--the amount that is left in the storage bins each year just before the new harvest comes in--had shrunk from 116 days of food for everybody in the world in 1999 to only 57 days.
Last year's generally good harvests brought prices back down, but the outlook for this year is dire, with drought in about half of the world's main grain-growing areas.
So wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to compete for scarce stocks of grain at inflated prices on the international grain market when prices soar?
Wouldn't it be great if you could rely instead on your own food supply, even if it isn't located in your own country?
That's why it's mostly countries that depend heavily on food imports that are involved in the current land-rush in Africa, but they are forgetting two things.
The first is that sovereignty trumps contractual obligations every time. If the African countries that are leasing their land fall into difficulties in feeding their own populations, as they are likely to do if world grain prices rise sharply, the first resource they will turn to is the foreign plantations on their territory.
Governments that cannot feed their populations face overthrow, and will break contracts without the slightest hesitation.
The second is that when things really get tough--when climate change starts to bite, grain yields are falling in most places, and what remains of the international grain market cannot meet demand at any price--Africa is not the place to be sourcing your emergency supply of grain. Almost the entire continent lies in the tropics or the sub-tropics, which is where food production will be hit worst.
The neocolonialists will make some money in the short term, and they may even enjoy a false sense of security for a while, but they will not get much for their investment in the long run. Trouble is, Africans will not get much out of it either, although some of their leaders certainly will.
Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by Random House.
http://www.straight.com/article-219867/ ... -land-grab
By Gwynne Dyer
In the past two years, various nonAfrican countries--China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack--have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase.
This is to produce food or biofuels for their own use. Critics call them "neocolonialists", but they will not be as successful as the old ones.
The scale of the land grab is truly impressive. In Sudan, South Korea has acquired 690,00 hectares of land to grow wheat. The United Arab Emirates, which already has 30,000 hectares in Sudan, is investing in another 378,000 hectares to grow corn, alfalfa, wheat, potatoes and beans. In Tanzania, Saudi Arabia is seeking 500,000 hectares.
Even bigger chunks of land are being leased to produce biofuels. China has acquired 2.8 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo to create the world's largest oil-palm plantation (replacing all that messy rain-forest and useless wildlife with tidy lines of palm trees), and is negotiating for two million hectares in Zambia to grow jatropha.
British firms have secured big tracts of land in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania.
Only rarely is there protest from local people. One striking exception is in Madagascar, where the announcement of a 99-year contract to lease 1.3 million hectares to South Korea's Daewoo corporation to grow corn helped to trigger the recent revolution.
"Madagascar's land is neither for sale nor for rent," said the new leader, Andry Rajoelina, who cancelled the deal.
After the revolution, it turned out that another 465,000 hectares of land in Madagascar had been leased to an Indian company, Varun International, to grow rice for consumption in India.
That deal is also being cancelled by the new government--but elsewhere, the acquisition of huge tracts of African land by Asian and European governments and companies goes ahead almost unopposed.
Why Africa? Because that's the last place where there are large areas of good agricultural land that aren't already completely occupied by local farmers. There are usually some peasants scratching a living from the land, but they are few and poor, and they can easily be bought or driven out.
For the foreigners, the lure is profit, or food security, or both. For those who are investing in biofuels, there are real profits to be made, at least in the short term. But for those seeking food security, the new African food resources will probably become unavailable just when they are needed most.
The surge in grain prices in 2007-2008 drove many countries that depend heavily on imported food to start acquiring African farmland. The immediate reason for a doubling or tripling of the price of wheat, rice and corn (maize) was a couple of local crop failures and the diversion of large amounts of American corn into biofuel production, but the underlying cause was that the global food supply is falling further and further behind demand.
Since 1945 the world's population has tripled, and so has its food production, growing at an average of about three percent annually through the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and most of the '90s. But for most of the past decade, grain production has essentially flat-lined, while the global population has gone on growing.
By 2006, just before the prices soared, the world grain reserve--the amount that is left in the storage bins each year just before the new harvest comes in--had shrunk from 116 days of food for everybody in the world in 1999 to only 57 days.
Last year's generally good harvests brought prices back down, but the outlook for this year is dire, with drought in about half of the world's main grain-growing areas.
So wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to compete for scarce stocks of grain at inflated prices on the international grain market when prices soar?
Wouldn't it be great if you could rely instead on your own food supply, even if it isn't located in your own country?
That's why it's mostly countries that depend heavily on food imports that are involved in the current land-rush in Africa, but they are forgetting two things.
The first is that sovereignty trumps contractual obligations every time. If the African countries that are leasing their land fall into difficulties in feeding their own populations, as they are likely to do if world grain prices rise sharply, the first resource they will turn to is the foreign plantations on their territory.
Governments that cannot feed their populations face overthrow, and will break contracts without the slightest hesitation.
The second is that when things really get tough--when climate change starts to bite, grain yields are falling in most places, and what remains of the international grain market cannot meet demand at any price--Africa is not the place to be sourcing your emergency supply of grain. Almost the entire continent lies in the tropics or the sub-tropics, which is where food production will be hit worst.
The neocolonialists will make some money in the short term, and they may even enjoy a false sense of security for a while, but they will not get much for their investment in the long run. Trouble is, Africans will not get much out of it either, although some of their leaders certainly will.
Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by Random House.
http://www.straight.com/article-219867/ ... -land-grab
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world ... &th&emc=th
May 21, 2009
Witch Hunts and Foul Potions Heighten Fear of Leader in Gambia
By ADAM NOSSITER
JAMBUR, Gambia — This tiny West African nation’s citizens have grown familiar with the unpredictable exploits of its absolute ruler, who insists on being called His Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya Jammeh: his herbs-and-banana cure for AIDS, his threat to behead gays, his mandate that only he can drive through the giant arch commemorating his coup in the moldering capital, Banjul, and his ubiquitous grinning portrait posted along roadsides.
Not to mention the documented disappearances, torture and imprisonment of dozens of journalists and political opponents.
But then came a campaign so confounding and strange that the citizens are still reeling and sickened from it, literally, weeks after it apparently ended.
The president, it seems, had become concerned about witches in this country of mango trees, tropical scrub, dirt roads, innumerable police checkpoints and Atlantic coastline frequented by sun-seeking European tourists mostly unaware of the activities at nearby Mile 2 State Central Prison, where many opponents of the regime are taken.
To the accompaniment of drums, and directed by men in red tunics bedecked with mirrors and cowrie shells, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Gambians were taken from their villages and driven by bus to secret locations. There they were forced to drink a foul-smelling concoction that made them hallucinate, gave them severe stomach pains, induced some to try digging a hole in a tiled floor, made others try climbing up a wall and in some cases killed them, according to the villagers themselves and Amnesty International.
The objective was to root out witches, evil sorcerers who were harming the country, the villagers were told. Terrified, dozens of other people fled into the bush or across the border into Senegal to escape the dragnet, villagers said, leaving whole regions deserted. Amnesty estimates that at least six people died after being forced to drink the potion, whose composition is unknown.
The roundups occurred from late January through March, according to people here. But even in recent weeks, the same witch doctors in red, accompanied by others identified as government agents, have circulated in the dirt-poor countryside — Gambia was ranked 195th of 209 countries by the World Bank in 2007, with a per capita income of $270 a year — demanding that villagers make animal sacrifices, of a red he-goat and a red rooster, to root out the sorcery supposedly in their midst.
Gambian government officials did not respond to e-mail messages and phone calls, and the government has not commented on articles recounting the anti-witch campaign in the opposition newspaper Foroyaa (“Freedom,” in the local Mandinka language), according to the paper’s editor, Sam Sarr. Amnesty International says it received a press release from the country’s attorney general declaring such witch-hunting activities “inconceivable.”
Yet the testimonies are numerous, and experts on this former British colony have little doubt that the witch hunts occurred, and on the scale described.
The roundups were guided by the president’s “Green Boys,” villagers say. The Green Boys are Mr. Jammeh’s most militant supporters, “vigilante die-hards,” said Abdoulaye Saine, a political scientist at Miami University of Ohio. They dress in green and sometimes paint their faces green, the color of Mr. Jammeh’s political party, the Alliance for Patriotic Re-Orientation and Construction. The roundups were conducted with force, guns in evidence and directed largely at the elderly, witnesses and local journalists said.
Even in the often brutal context of his 15-year dictatorship, this year’s roundups stand out, the president’s few open critics in Gambia say. Since the 1994 coup that brought him to power, at least 27 journalists have fled the country. One was murdered and another has not been seen since his arrest by the dreaded National Intelligence Agency. Others have described prolonged torture by electric shock and the use of knives and lighted cigarettes in Mr. Jammeh’s jails.
But this time, it was not critical journalists or political opponents who were singled out. “There’s a feeling that if this can happen, anything can happen,” said the opposition leader Halifah Sallah, the minority leader in Parliament from 2002 to 2007, who has himself been arrested four times, most recently for speaking out against the witch hunts.
“People no longer have the protection of the laws,” Mr. Sallah said. During the witch hunts, “people were in a state of panic” throughout Gambia, a country of 1.7 million, he said.
On the teeming streets of Serrekunda, a suburb of Banjul, people expressed fear. “All of them are opposition, but they are not talking, because if you are talking, you are going to the police,” said Lalo Jaiteh, a building contractor, gesturing nervously at a bustling row of vendors.
The anxiety has persisted. The witchcraft accusation brings shame in a society where belief in sorcery “was pervasive and still is pervasive,” according to Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born history professor at Yale University. Beyond that is the trauma of being uprooted and the illnesses that people say linger from the bitter potion.
“This stigma will follow us into our grave,” said Dembo Jariatou Bojang, the village development committee chairman in Jambur, a dusty town 15 miles from the capital. “We will never forget this.”
He said he was taken, along with about 60 others, after being assembled in the village square, attracted by the beating of the drums. Driven by bus to a place they did not recognize, Mr. Jariatou Bojang was made to drink and bathe in the foul liquid.
“My head is still paining sometimes,” Mr. Jariatou Bojang said.
As he spoke, an elderly man sitting on the floor of the village imam’s house shook his head uncontrollably from side to side. The men in the room said the symptom developed after the man, said to be in his 80s, was forced to drink the liquid.
Omar Bojang, the son of the imam, Karamo Bojang, recalled being told to undress, and ordered to drink “filthy water from a tin.”
“Once you drink that, you become unconscious, you can’t think,” he said.
Forty miles away in the village of Bintang, Mamadou Kanteh, a fisherman, recounted the visit of the men in red several weeks ago. “ ‘It’s the president who sent us,’ ” Mr. Kanteh recalled their saying. “ ‘There are witches in the country who are hurting people, and killing people,’ ” they said.
They demanded the sacrifice of a red goat and a rooster. The imam of Bintang recalled drawing about $40 from the village treasury to pay for the animals, which were slaughtered at the graveyard beyond the town’s unlighted dirt streets.
Back in Serrekunda, pedestrians hastened away when asked about the president. Mr. Jaiteh, the contractor, ducked inside a darkened shack, hidden from the street by two towering stacks of tires, to talk about the government with a friend.
“Human rights is not here right now,” the friend, Yaya Gasam, said in halting English. “Human rights is ... pop.”
May 21, 2009
Witch Hunts and Foul Potions Heighten Fear of Leader in Gambia
By ADAM NOSSITER
JAMBUR, Gambia — This tiny West African nation’s citizens have grown familiar with the unpredictable exploits of its absolute ruler, who insists on being called His Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya Jammeh: his herbs-and-banana cure for AIDS, his threat to behead gays, his mandate that only he can drive through the giant arch commemorating his coup in the moldering capital, Banjul, and his ubiquitous grinning portrait posted along roadsides.
Not to mention the documented disappearances, torture and imprisonment of dozens of journalists and political opponents.
But then came a campaign so confounding and strange that the citizens are still reeling and sickened from it, literally, weeks after it apparently ended.
The president, it seems, had become concerned about witches in this country of mango trees, tropical scrub, dirt roads, innumerable police checkpoints and Atlantic coastline frequented by sun-seeking European tourists mostly unaware of the activities at nearby Mile 2 State Central Prison, where many opponents of the regime are taken.
To the accompaniment of drums, and directed by men in red tunics bedecked with mirrors and cowrie shells, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Gambians were taken from their villages and driven by bus to secret locations. There they were forced to drink a foul-smelling concoction that made them hallucinate, gave them severe stomach pains, induced some to try digging a hole in a tiled floor, made others try climbing up a wall and in some cases killed them, according to the villagers themselves and Amnesty International.
The objective was to root out witches, evil sorcerers who were harming the country, the villagers were told. Terrified, dozens of other people fled into the bush or across the border into Senegal to escape the dragnet, villagers said, leaving whole regions deserted. Amnesty estimates that at least six people died after being forced to drink the potion, whose composition is unknown.
The roundups occurred from late January through March, according to people here. But even in recent weeks, the same witch doctors in red, accompanied by others identified as government agents, have circulated in the dirt-poor countryside — Gambia was ranked 195th of 209 countries by the World Bank in 2007, with a per capita income of $270 a year — demanding that villagers make animal sacrifices, of a red he-goat and a red rooster, to root out the sorcery supposedly in their midst.
Gambian government officials did not respond to e-mail messages and phone calls, and the government has not commented on articles recounting the anti-witch campaign in the opposition newspaper Foroyaa (“Freedom,” in the local Mandinka language), according to the paper’s editor, Sam Sarr. Amnesty International says it received a press release from the country’s attorney general declaring such witch-hunting activities “inconceivable.”
Yet the testimonies are numerous, and experts on this former British colony have little doubt that the witch hunts occurred, and on the scale described.
The roundups were guided by the president’s “Green Boys,” villagers say. The Green Boys are Mr. Jammeh’s most militant supporters, “vigilante die-hards,” said Abdoulaye Saine, a political scientist at Miami University of Ohio. They dress in green and sometimes paint their faces green, the color of Mr. Jammeh’s political party, the Alliance for Patriotic Re-Orientation and Construction. The roundups were conducted with force, guns in evidence and directed largely at the elderly, witnesses and local journalists said.
Even in the often brutal context of his 15-year dictatorship, this year’s roundups stand out, the president’s few open critics in Gambia say. Since the 1994 coup that brought him to power, at least 27 journalists have fled the country. One was murdered and another has not been seen since his arrest by the dreaded National Intelligence Agency. Others have described prolonged torture by electric shock and the use of knives and lighted cigarettes in Mr. Jammeh’s jails.
But this time, it was not critical journalists or political opponents who were singled out. “There’s a feeling that if this can happen, anything can happen,” said the opposition leader Halifah Sallah, the minority leader in Parliament from 2002 to 2007, who has himself been arrested four times, most recently for speaking out against the witch hunts.
“People no longer have the protection of the laws,” Mr. Sallah said. During the witch hunts, “people were in a state of panic” throughout Gambia, a country of 1.7 million, he said.
On the teeming streets of Serrekunda, a suburb of Banjul, people expressed fear. “All of them are opposition, but they are not talking, because if you are talking, you are going to the police,” said Lalo Jaiteh, a building contractor, gesturing nervously at a bustling row of vendors.
The anxiety has persisted. The witchcraft accusation brings shame in a society where belief in sorcery “was pervasive and still is pervasive,” according to Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born history professor at Yale University. Beyond that is the trauma of being uprooted and the illnesses that people say linger from the bitter potion.
“This stigma will follow us into our grave,” said Dembo Jariatou Bojang, the village development committee chairman in Jambur, a dusty town 15 miles from the capital. “We will never forget this.”
He said he was taken, along with about 60 others, after being assembled in the village square, attracted by the beating of the drums. Driven by bus to a place they did not recognize, Mr. Jariatou Bojang was made to drink and bathe in the foul liquid.
“My head is still paining sometimes,” Mr. Jariatou Bojang said.
As he spoke, an elderly man sitting on the floor of the village imam’s house shook his head uncontrollably from side to side. The men in the room said the symptom developed after the man, said to be in his 80s, was forced to drink the liquid.
Omar Bojang, the son of the imam, Karamo Bojang, recalled being told to undress, and ordered to drink “filthy water from a tin.”
“Once you drink that, you become unconscious, you can’t think,” he said.
Forty miles away in the village of Bintang, Mamadou Kanteh, a fisherman, recounted the visit of the men in red several weeks ago. “ ‘It’s the president who sent us,’ ” Mr. Kanteh recalled their saying. “ ‘There are witches in the country who are hurting people, and killing people,’ ” they said.
They demanded the sacrifice of a red goat and a rooster. The imam of Bintang recalled drawing about $40 from the village treasury to pay for the animals, which were slaughtered at the graveyard beyond the town’s unlighted dirt streets.
Back in Serrekunda, pedestrians hastened away when asked about the president. Mr. Jaiteh, the contractor, ducked inside a darkened shack, hidden from the street by two towering stacks of tires, to talk about the government with a friend.
“Human rights is not here right now,” the friend, Yaya Gasam, said in halting English. “Human rights is ... pop.”
There is a related video and multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world ... malia.html
May 24, 2009
For Somalia, Chaos Breeds Religious War
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
DUSA MARREB, Somalia — From men of peace, the Sufi clerics suddenly became men of war.
Their shrines were being destroyed. Their imams were being murdered. Their tolerant beliefs were under withering attack.
So the moderate Sufi scholars recently did what so many other men have chosen to do in anarchic Somalia: they picked up guns and entered the killing business, in this case to fight back against the Shabab, one of the most fearsome extremist Muslim groups in Africa.
“Clan wars, political wars, we were always careful to stay out of those,” said Sheik Omar Mohamed Farah, a Sufi leader. “But this time, it was religious.”
In the past few months, a new axis of conflict has opened up in Somalia, an essentially governmentless nation ripped apart by rival clans since 1991. Now, in a definitive shift, fighters from different clans are forming alliances and battling one another along religious lines, with deeply devout men on both sides charging into firefights with checkered head scarves, assault rifles and dusty Korans.
It is an Islamist versus Islamist war, and the Sufi scholars are part of a broader moderate Islamist movement that Western nations are counting on to repel Somalia’s increasingly powerful extremists. Whether Somalia becomes a terrorist incubator and a genuine regional threat — which is already beginning to happen, with hundreds of heavily armed foreign jihadists flocking here to fight for the Shabab — or whether this country finally steadies itself and ends the years of hunger, misery and bloodshed may hinge on who wins these battles in the next few months.
“We’re on terra incognito,” said Rashid Abdi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group that tries to prevent deadly conflicts. “Before, everything was clan. Now we are beginning to see the contours of an ideological, sectarian war in Somalia for the first time, and that scares me.”
For two years, Islamist insurgents waged a fierce war against Somalia’s transitional government and the thousands of Ethiopian troops protecting it. In January, the insurgents seemed to get what they wanted: the Ethiopians pulled out; an unpopular president walked away; and moderate Islamists took the helm of the internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia, raising hopes for peace.
But since then, the verdict on the moderates has been mixed. In the past two weeks, the Shabab have routed government forces in Mogadishu, the capital. The tiny bit of the city the government controls is shrinking, block by block, and Ethiopian troops have once again crossed the border and are standing by. As many as 150 people have been killed, and the relentless mortar fire has spawned streams of shellshocked civilians trudging into the arid countryside, where they face the worst drought in a decade.
If Mogadishu falls, Somalia will be dragged deeper into the violent morass that the United Nations, the United States and other Western countries have tried hard to stanch, and the country will fragment even further into warring factions, with radical Islamists probably on top.
But out here, on the wind-whipped plains of Somalia’s central region, it is a different story. The moderates are holding their own, and the newly minted Sufi militia is about the only local group to go toe-to-toe with the Shabab and win.
The several-hundred-square-mile patch of central Somalia that the Sufis control is not nearly as strategic as Mogadishu. But the Sufis have achieved what the transitional government has not: grass-roots support, which explains how they were able to move so quickly from a bunch of men who had never squeezed a trigger before — a rarity in Somalia — into a cohesive fighting force backed by local clans.
Many Somalis say that the Sufi version of Islam, which stresses tolerance, mysticism and a personal relationship with God, is more congruent with their traditions than the Wahhabi Islam espoused by the Shabab, which calls for strict separation of the sexes and harsh punishments like amputations and stonings.
“We see the Sufis as part of us,” said Elmi Hersi Arab, an elder in the battered central Somalia town of Dusa Marreb. “They grew up here.”
The Sufis also tapped into an anti-Shabab backlash. The Shabab, who recruit from all clans, and, according to American officials, are linked to Al Qaeda, controlled Dusa Marreb for the better part of last year. Residents described that period as a reign of terror, with the Shabab assassinating more than a dozen village elders and even beheading two women selling tea.
“We respected the Shabab for helping drive out the Ethiopians,” said one woman in Dusa Marreb who asked not to be identified for safety reasons. “But when the Ethiopians left and the Shabab kept the war going, that to us didn’t make sense.”
The Sufis, a loosely organized, religious brotherhood, also drawing from many different clans, had studiously avoided getting gummed up in Somalia’s back-and-forth clan battles, often no more than thin cover for power struggles between businessmen and warlords. But in November, Sheik Omar said, the Shabab shot dead several Sufi students. The next month, the Shabab tore apart Sufi shrines.
A spike of panic shot through the Sufi schools, where young men like Siyad Mohammed Ali were studying Islamic philosophy. “We had never told the Shabab how to worship,” he said. “But now we were under attack.”
Men like Mr. Siyad became the backbone of the new Sufi militia, which got a crate of AK-47s from one set of clan elders or a sputtering armored truck from another. In December, the Sufis, whose organization is called Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama, which roughly translates as the followers of the Prophet Muhammad, drove the Shabab out of Dusa Marreb. Since then, the Sufis have defended their territory several times against Shabab incursions.
Hassan Sheik Mohamud, the dean of a college in Mogadishu, said the rise of the Sufis was “absolutely, totally new historically.”
“They had a reputation for being peaceful,” he said.
The Sufis are loosely allied to the transitional government, which has promised to rule Somalia with some form of Islamic law. The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, is a bit of an enigma, coming from a long line of Sufi clerics, yet rising to power in 2006 as part of an Islamist alliance with a decidedly Wahhabi bent. He has said that he wants women to play an important role in government, but several prominent Somali women said that during a recent meeting, he would not look them in the eye.
Many Somalis say that Sheik Sharif is making the same mistake his predecessors made, spending more time riding around foreign capitals in a Mercedes than working Mogadishu’s streets to cultivate local allies.
Out here, the Sufis are moving ahead with their own small administration, meeting with United Nations officials and running patrols. At night, in a circle under a tree, they rest their AK-47s on their Korans, drop their foreheads to the earth and pray.
“We have jihad, too,” said Sheik Omar, a tall man with a long beard and warm eyes. “But it’s inner jihad, a struggle to be pure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world ... malia.html
May 24, 2009
For Somalia, Chaos Breeds Religious War
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
DUSA MARREB, Somalia — From men of peace, the Sufi clerics suddenly became men of war.
Their shrines were being destroyed. Their imams were being murdered. Their tolerant beliefs were under withering attack.
So the moderate Sufi scholars recently did what so many other men have chosen to do in anarchic Somalia: they picked up guns and entered the killing business, in this case to fight back against the Shabab, one of the most fearsome extremist Muslim groups in Africa.
“Clan wars, political wars, we were always careful to stay out of those,” said Sheik Omar Mohamed Farah, a Sufi leader. “But this time, it was religious.”
In the past few months, a new axis of conflict has opened up in Somalia, an essentially governmentless nation ripped apart by rival clans since 1991. Now, in a definitive shift, fighters from different clans are forming alliances and battling one another along religious lines, with deeply devout men on both sides charging into firefights with checkered head scarves, assault rifles and dusty Korans.
It is an Islamist versus Islamist war, and the Sufi scholars are part of a broader moderate Islamist movement that Western nations are counting on to repel Somalia’s increasingly powerful extremists. Whether Somalia becomes a terrorist incubator and a genuine regional threat — which is already beginning to happen, with hundreds of heavily armed foreign jihadists flocking here to fight for the Shabab — or whether this country finally steadies itself and ends the years of hunger, misery and bloodshed may hinge on who wins these battles in the next few months.
“We’re on terra incognito,” said Rashid Abdi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group that tries to prevent deadly conflicts. “Before, everything was clan. Now we are beginning to see the contours of an ideological, sectarian war in Somalia for the first time, and that scares me.”
For two years, Islamist insurgents waged a fierce war against Somalia’s transitional government and the thousands of Ethiopian troops protecting it. In January, the insurgents seemed to get what they wanted: the Ethiopians pulled out; an unpopular president walked away; and moderate Islamists took the helm of the internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia, raising hopes for peace.
But since then, the verdict on the moderates has been mixed. In the past two weeks, the Shabab have routed government forces in Mogadishu, the capital. The tiny bit of the city the government controls is shrinking, block by block, and Ethiopian troops have once again crossed the border and are standing by. As many as 150 people have been killed, and the relentless mortar fire has spawned streams of shellshocked civilians trudging into the arid countryside, where they face the worst drought in a decade.
If Mogadishu falls, Somalia will be dragged deeper into the violent morass that the United Nations, the United States and other Western countries have tried hard to stanch, and the country will fragment even further into warring factions, with radical Islamists probably on top.
But out here, on the wind-whipped plains of Somalia’s central region, it is a different story. The moderates are holding their own, and the newly minted Sufi militia is about the only local group to go toe-to-toe with the Shabab and win.
The several-hundred-square-mile patch of central Somalia that the Sufis control is not nearly as strategic as Mogadishu. But the Sufis have achieved what the transitional government has not: grass-roots support, which explains how they were able to move so quickly from a bunch of men who had never squeezed a trigger before — a rarity in Somalia — into a cohesive fighting force backed by local clans.
Many Somalis say that the Sufi version of Islam, which stresses tolerance, mysticism and a personal relationship with God, is more congruent with their traditions than the Wahhabi Islam espoused by the Shabab, which calls for strict separation of the sexes and harsh punishments like amputations and stonings.
“We see the Sufis as part of us,” said Elmi Hersi Arab, an elder in the battered central Somalia town of Dusa Marreb. “They grew up here.”
The Sufis also tapped into an anti-Shabab backlash. The Shabab, who recruit from all clans, and, according to American officials, are linked to Al Qaeda, controlled Dusa Marreb for the better part of last year. Residents described that period as a reign of terror, with the Shabab assassinating more than a dozen village elders and even beheading two women selling tea.
“We respected the Shabab for helping drive out the Ethiopians,” said one woman in Dusa Marreb who asked not to be identified for safety reasons. “But when the Ethiopians left and the Shabab kept the war going, that to us didn’t make sense.”
The Sufis, a loosely organized, religious brotherhood, also drawing from many different clans, had studiously avoided getting gummed up in Somalia’s back-and-forth clan battles, often no more than thin cover for power struggles between businessmen and warlords. But in November, Sheik Omar said, the Shabab shot dead several Sufi students. The next month, the Shabab tore apart Sufi shrines.
A spike of panic shot through the Sufi schools, where young men like Siyad Mohammed Ali were studying Islamic philosophy. “We had never told the Shabab how to worship,” he said. “But now we were under attack.”
Men like Mr. Siyad became the backbone of the new Sufi militia, which got a crate of AK-47s from one set of clan elders or a sputtering armored truck from another. In December, the Sufis, whose organization is called Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama, which roughly translates as the followers of the Prophet Muhammad, drove the Shabab out of Dusa Marreb. Since then, the Sufis have defended their territory several times against Shabab incursions.
Hassan Sheik Mohamud, the dean of a college in Mogadishu, said the rise of the Sufis was “absolutely, totally new historically.”
“They had a reputation for being peaceful,” he said.
The Sufis are loosely allied to the transitional government, which has promised to rule Somalia with some form of Islamic law. The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, is a bit of an enigma, coming from a long line of Sufi clerics, yet rising to power in 2006 as part of an Islamist alliance with a decidedly Wahhabi bent. He has said that he wants women to play an important role in government, but several prominent Somali women said that during a recent meeting, he would not look them in the eye.
Many Somalis say that Sheik Sharif is making the same mistake his predecessors made, spending more time riding around foreign capitals in a Mercedes than working Mogadishu’s streets to cultivate local allies.
Out here, the Sufis are moving ahead with their own small administration, meeting with United Nations officials and running patrols. At night, in a circle under a tree, they rest their AK-47s on their Korans, drop their foreheads to the earth and pray.
“We have jihad, too,” said Sheik Omar, a tall man with a long beard and warm eyes. “But it’s inner jihad, a struggle to be pure.”
May 28, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Bring Zimbabwe in From the Cold
By GREG MILLS and JEFFREY HERBST
AFTER years of rightly criticizing President Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe, Western countries now face a different, and difficult, set of decisions.
Since February, Zimbabwe has operated under a unity government led by Mr. Mugabe with the opposition’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister. Had last year’s elections been free and fair, Mr. Tsvangirai would have been elected president, but instead of continuing to contest the results he eventually agreed to serve as prime minister. The transition has not been smooth; cabinet posts have been divided up awkwardly, while many people inside and outside the country have criticized Mr. Tsvangirai for seemingly being co-opted by Mr. Mugabe.
As a result, Western governments have been standoffish even though the unity government has taken important steps, notably lowering Zimbabwe’s 231 million percent inflation by abandoning the Zimbabwean dollar in favor of the American dollar and other foreign currencies. Last week, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States wasn’t ready to resume aid to Zimbabwe and urged the ouster of Mr. Mugabe, while other Western donors have said they will not provide significant development assistance until there is firm evidence that the power-sharing agreement is working. Human Rights Watch has gone further by arguing that development aid should not be released until there are “irreversible changes on human rights, the rule of law and accountability.”
The reluctance of Western governments and human rights groups to embrace the current Zimbabwean government is understandable. There is, in particular, no real reason to believe that Mr. Mugabe, after decades of dictatorial rule and abuse, has suddenly embraced multiparty democracy. If he had, after all, he would not be president now.
But Zimbabwe may well be a case where the best is the enemy of the good. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, went into the unity government with its eyes open. “We had won the election but we did not have the support of the military,” Mr. Tsvangirai told us this month in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. “We did not want to be the authors of chaos. Instead we need to soft-land the crisis, stabilize the situation through peace and stability and democratic consolidation.” Accordingly, he views Mr. Mugabe as “both part of the problem and part of the solution: we cannot untangle the tentacles of the state without him.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has set himself the difficult task of trying to dislodge Mr. Mugabe’s ousted party from the state apparatus that it has controlled for more than a quarter-century. In many countries that process would require extensive violence against the regime. The “soft landing” that the Movement for Democratic Change has chosen is a difficult path but one which it has firm strategic reasons to opt for, reasons that deserve more careful consideration from international donors.
And Mr. Tsvangirai and Zimbabwe need help desperately. Per capita income is half what it was in 1997. Once the largest economy in the region after South Africa, Zimbabwe is now the smallest, after tiny Swaziland and Lesotho.
The United Nations calculates that just 6 percent of the work force is formally employed. More than 65 percent of the population urgently needs food assistance. Nearly 100,000 people have been struck by cholera in the last six months. While it used to be called the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe now produces only about one-third of the grain it needs; tobacco, once its main export crop, has fallen to around one-sixth of the 2000 peak, the effect of the seizure of white-owned farms begun in earnest this decade.
Revealing as they are, these figures do not tell the full story. Take the University of Zimbabwe. Once a prestigious southern African institution, today it is without functioning sewers or running water. Many of its 12,000 students have left, its two teaching hospitals close intermittently, and departments like geology and surveying are shuttered. Lacking chemicals and equipment, the chemistry department stopped all experiments in 2007.
To consolidate progress, donors should end their ambivalence about the unity government and begin to support Mr. Tsvangirai’s aims. Development assistance can be allocated directly. Replenishing the hospitals and re-equipping schools are measurable and defined projects. More generally, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should become more publicly enthusiastic about the unity government, especially because they haven’t been able to offer a better option.
The Movement for Democratic Change has also recognized that the only way to deal with the tsunami of advisers and aid agencies that will eventually come is to establish a single entry point into the government for donors, likely in the prime minister’s office, instead of allowing aid to go directly to ministries that may be run by Mugabe partisans. Donors should support this effort as a way to strengthen Mr. Tsvangirai.
There will be setbacks in Zimbabwe, but they can be overcome. As Mr. Tsvangirai told us, “Ask any Zimbabwean in the street — no one wants to reverse the process.” Instead of standing back and waiting, donors should do their part to help bring Zimbabwe back from the brink.
Greg Mills is the director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a research organization in Johannesburg that promotes economic growth in Africa. Jeffrey Herbst, the provost of Miami University of Ohio, is the author of “States and Power in Africa.”
Op-Ed Contributors
Bring Zimbabwe in From the Cold
By GREG MILLS and JEFFREY HERBST
AFTER years of rightly criticizing President Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe, Western countries now face a different, and difficult, set of decisions.
Since February, Zimbabwe has operated under a unity government led by Mr. Mugabe with the opposition’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister. Had last year’s elections been free and fair, Mr. Tsvangirai would have been elected president, but instead of continuing to contest the results he eventually agreed to serve as prime minister. The transition has not been smooth; cabinet posts have been divided up awkwardly, while many people inside and outside the country have criticized Mr. Tsvangirai for seemingly being co-opted by Mr. Mugabe.
As a result, Western governments have been standoffish even though the unity government has taken important steps, notably lowering Zimbabwe’s 231 million percent inflation by abandoning the Zimbabwean dollar in favor of the American dollar and other foreign currencies. Last week, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States wasn’t ready to resume aid to Zimbabwe and urged the ouster of Mr. Mugabe, while other Western donors have said they will not provide significant development assistance until there is firm evidence that the power-sharing agreement is working. Human Rights Watch has gone further by arguing that development aid should not be released until there are “irreversible changes on human rights, the rule of law and accountability.”
The reluctance of Western governments and human rights groups to embrace the current Zimbabwean government is understandable. There is, in particular, no real reason to believe that Mr. Mugabe, after decades of dictatorial rule and abuse, has suddenly embraced multiparty democracy. If he had, after all, he would not be president now.
But Zimbabwe may well be a case where the best is the enemy of the good. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, went into the unity government with its eyes open. “We had won the election but we did not have the support of the military,” Mr. Tsvangirai told us this month in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. “We did not want to be the authors of chaos. Instead we need to soft-land the crisis, stabilize the situation through peace and stability and democratic consolidation.” Accordingly, he views Mr. Mugabe as “both part of the problem and part of the solution: we cannot untangle the tentacles of the state without him.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has set himself the difficult task of trying to dislodge Mr. Mugabe’s ousted party from the state apparatus that it has controlled for more than a quarter-century. In many countries that process would require extensive violence against the regime. The “soft landing” that the Movement for Democratic Change has chosen is a difficult path but one which it has firm strategic reasons to opt for, reasons that deserve more careful consideration from international donors.
And Mr. Tsvangirai and Zimbabwe need help desperately. Per capita income is half what it was in 1997. Once the largest economy in the region after South Africa, Zimbabwe is now the smallest, after tiny Swaziland and Lesotho.
The United Nations calculates that just 6 percent of the work force is formally employed. More than 65 percent of the population urgently needs food assistance. Nearly 100,000 people have been struck by cholera in the last six months. While it used to be called the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe now produces only about one-third of the grain it needs; tobacco, once its main export crop, has fallen to around one-sixth of the 2000 peak, the effect of the seizure of white-owned farms begun in earnest this decade.
Revealing as they are, these figures do not tell the full story. Take the University of Zimbabwe. Once a prestigious southern African institution, today it is without functioning sewers or running water. Many of its 12,000 students have left, its two teaching hospitals close intermittently, and departments like geology and surveying are shuttered. Lacking chemicals and equipment, the chemistry department stopped all experiments in 2007.
To consolidate progress, donors should end their ambivalence about the unity government and begin to support Mr. Tsvangirai’s aims. Development assistance can be allocated directly. Replenishing the hospitals and re-equipping schools are measurable and defined projects. More generally, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should become more publicly enthusiastic about the unity government, especially because they haven’t been able to offer a better option.
The Movement for Democratic Change has also recognized that the only way to deal with the tsunami of advisers and aid agencies that will eventually come is to establish a single entry point into the government for donors, likely in the prime minister’s office, instead of allowing aid to go directly to ministries that may be run by Mugabe partisans. Donors should support this effort as a way to strengthen Mr. Tsvangirai.
There will be setbacks in Zimbabwe, but they can be overcome. As Mr. Tsvangirai told us, “Ask any Zimbabwean in the street — no one wants to reverse the process.” Instead of standing back and waiting, donors should do their part to help bring Zimbabwe back from the brink.
Greg Mills is the director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a research organization in Johannesburg that promotes economic growth in Africa. Jeffrey Herbst, the provost of Miami University of Ohio, is the author of “States and Power in Africa.”
June 10, 2009
Battle to Halt Graft Scourge in Africa Ebbs
By CELIA W. DUGGER
LUSAKA, Zambia — The fight against corruption in Africa’s most pivotal nations is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined or disbanded and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile.
“We are witnessing an era of major backtracking on the anticorruption drive,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an authority on corruption who works at the Brookings Institution. “And one of the most poignant illustrations is the fate of the few anticorruption commissions that have had courageous leadership. They’re either embattled or dead.”
Experts, prosecutors and watchdog groups say they fear that major setbacks to anticorruption efforts in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are weakening the resolve to root out graft, a stubborn scourge that saps money needed to combat poverty and disease in the world’s poorest region. And in Zambia, a change of leadership has stoked fears that the country’s zealous prosecution of corruption is ebbing.
The perils of challenging deeply rooted patterns of corruption have been brought home recently with the suspicious deaths of two anticorruption campaigners. Ernest Manirumva, who worked with a nonprofit group, Olucome, investigating high-level corruption in Burundi, was stabbed to death in the early morning hours of April 9. A bloodstained folder lay empty on his bed. Documents and a computer flash drive were missing, said the president of Olucome, Gabriel Rufyiri.
And in the Congo Republic, Bruno Jacquet Ossebi, a journalist who had announced he was joining a lawsuit brought by Transparency International to reclaim the ill-gotten wealth of his country’s president, died of injuries from a fire that raced through his home in the early hours of Jan. 21.
The broader anxieties about Africa’s resolve to combat corruption have emerged from troubled efforts in several countries.
In oil-rich Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where watchdog groups say efforts to combat corruption are backsliding, Nuhu Ribadu, who built a well-trained staff of investigators at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said he fled his homeland into self-imposed exile in England in December. Officials had sent Mr. Ribadu away to a training course a year earlier, soon after his agency charged a wealthy, politically connected former governor with trying to bribe officials on his staff with huge sacks stuffed with $15 million in $100 bills. Mr. Ribadu, who was dismissed from the police force last year, said he had received death threats and was fired upon in September by assailants.
“If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” he said.
In South Africa, home to the region’s biggest economy, a new crime unit with less statutory protection from political interference was stripped of the authority to both investigate and prosecute crimes. It will take over from the Scorpions, the prosecuting authority’s elite investigating unit that had achieved high conviction rates and built potent corruption cases against Jacob Zuma, who became president of South Africa in April, and Jackie Selebi, the national police commissioner and an ally of former President Thabo Mbeki. The Scorpions were abolished last year and the country’s chief prosecutor, Vusi Pikoli, who had pushed forward with both cases, was fired.
“Even people of good will would be slow to take on people in high places again because history will have told them it comes at a high cost,” said Wim Trengrove, a private lawyer who assisted the state with the prosecution of Mr. Zuma.
And in Kenya, the economic anchor of east Africa, scandals have continued to flourish and anticorruption prosecutions have languished since John Githongo, who was the country’s anticorruption chief, sought safety in self-imposed exile in England in 2005. Aaron Ringera, who apparently advised Mr. Githongo in taped conversations in 2005 not to push for prosecutions of President Mwai Kibaki’s ministers, is the current anticorruption chief. Mr. Ringera said in an e-mail message that Mr. Githongo had twisted advice he offered him “in his own best interests.” In an interview, he said he had recommended prosecuting eight ministers, but had been blocked by either the courts or the attorney general.
The search is on for more effective ways to tackle corruption, including intensified legal efforts to prosecute multinational corporations that pay the bribes and reclaim loot that African political elites have stashed abroad.
Transparency International’s suit seeks to force the French justice system to investigate how the leaders of Gabon, the Congo Republic and Equatorial Guinea and their families acquired tens of millions of dollars in assets there. Still others say rich countries and international organizations that provide billions of dollars in aid to African countries each year must more vigorously use their leverage to make sure aid does not fuel corruption.
Based on his finding that more than $1 trillion a year is paid in bribery globally, Mr. Kaufmann, formerly director of global programs at the World Bank Institute, estimates there are tens of billions of dollars of corrupt transactions each year in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr. Githongo, who failed in trying to fight corruption from the inside, has returned to Nairobi to start a nonprofit group to mobilize rural people to press politicians to clean up a rotten system.
“Going after big fish hasn’t worked,” he said. “The fish will not fry themselves.”
Zambia recently won rare convictions against former military commanders and Regina Chiluba, the wife of its former president, on corruption charges. Frederick Chiluba, president from 1991 to 2001, will himself face a verdict in July on corruption charges. His sumptuous wardrobe — Lanvin suits, silk pajamas and handmade Italian shoes of snakeskin, satin and ostrich — became an emblem of greed in one of the world’s poorest countries.
But anticorruption leaders say they sense less commitment to tackle corruption since the election of President Rupiah Banda. “I’m inside,” said Maxwell Nkole, who leads a task force set up to investigate the Chiluba-era abuses. “The tempo, the intensity to tackle corruption is dropping.”
The Banda administration vigorously denies that charge, and says it will prosecute officials who stole $2 million from the Ministry of Health. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the United States’ Millennium Challenge Corporation that Zambia is eligible for. On a recent afternoon, ambassadors from rich nations, the United States and Britain among them, mingled at a party on the lawn of Mark Chona, the first chief of the Zambian anticorruption task force. In welcoming them, he issued a sharp warning.
“Your money is being stolen,” he said. “Don’t sit silent. You don’t know how much influence you have.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/world ... nted=print
Battle to Halt Graft Scourge in Africa Ebbs
By CELIA W. DUGGER
LUSAKA, Zambia — The fight against corruption in Africa’s most pivotal nations is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined or disbanded and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile.
“We are witnessing an era of major backtracking on the anticorruption drive,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an authority on corruption who works at the Brookings Institution. “And one of the most poignant illustrations is the fate of the few anticorruption commissions that have had courageous leadership. They’re either embattled or dead.”
Experts, prosecutors and watchdog groups say they fear that major setbacks to anticorruption efforts in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are weakening the resolve to root out graft, a stubborn scourge that saps money needed to combat poverty and disease in the world’s poorest region. And in Zambia, a change of leadership has stoked fears that the country’s zealous prosecution of corruption is ebbing.
The perils of challenging deeply rooted patterns of corruption have been brought home recently with the suspicious deaths of two anticorruption campaigners. Ernest Manirumva, who worked with a nonprofit group, Olucome, investigating high-level corruption in Burundi, was stabbed to death in the early morning hours of April 9. A bloodstained folder lay empty on his bed. Documents and a computer flash drive were missing, said the president of Olucome, Gabriel Rufyiri.
And in the Congo Republic, Bruno Jacquet Ossebi, a journalist who had announced he was joining a lawsuit brought by Transparency International to reclaim the ill-gotten wealth of his country’s president, died of injuries from a fire that raced through his home in the early hours of Jan. 21.
The broader anxieties about Africa’s resolve to combat corruption have emerged from troubled efforts in several countries.
In oil-rich Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where watchdog groups say efforts to combat corruption are backsliding, Nuhu Ribadu, who built a well-trained staff of investigators at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said he fled his homeland into self-imposed exile in England in December. Officials had sent Mr. Ribadu away to a training course a year earlier, soon after his agency charged a wealthy, politically connected former governor with trying to bribe officials on his staff with huge sacks stuffed with $15 million in $100 bills. Mr. Ribadu, who was dismissed from the police force last year, said he had received death threats and was fired upon in September by assailants.
“If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” he said.
In South Africa, home to the region’s biggest economy, a new crime unit with less statutory protection from political interference was stripped of the authority to both investigate and prosecute crimes. It will take over from the Scorpions, the prosecuting authority’s elite investigating unit that had achieved high conviction rates and built potent corruption cases against Jacob Zuma, who became president of South Africa in April, and Jackie Selebi, the national police commissioner and an ally of former President Thabo Mbeki. The Scorpions were abolished last year and the country’s chief prosecutor, Vusi Pikoli, who had pushed forward with both cases, was fired.
“Even people of good will would be slow to take on people in high places again because history will have told them it comes at a high cost,” said Wim Trengrove, a private lawyer who assisted the state with the prosecution of Mr. Zuma.
And in Kenya, the economic anchor of east Africa, scandals have continued to flourish and anticorruption prosecutions have languished since John Githongo, who was the country’s anticorruption chief, sought safety in self-imposed exile in England in 2005. Aaron Ringera, who apparently advised Mr. Githongo in taped conversations in 2005 not to push for prosecutions of President Mwai Kibaki’s ministers, is the current anticorruption chief. Mr. Ringera said in an e-mail message that Mr. Githongo had twisted advice he offered him “in his own best interests.” In an interview, he said he had recommended prosecuting eight ministers, but had been blocked by either the courts or the attorney general.
The search is on for more effective ways to tackle corruption, including intensified legal efforts to prosecute multinational corporations that pay the bribes and reclaim loot that African political elites have stashed abroad.
Transparency International’s suit seeks to force the French justice system to investigate how the leaders of Gabon, the Congo Republic and Equatorial Guinea and their families acquired tens of millions of dollars in assets there. Still others say rich countries and international organizations that provide billions of dollars in aid to African countries each year must more vigorously use their leverage to make sure aid does not fuel corruption.
Based on his finding that more than $1 trillion a year is paid in bribery globally, Mr. Kaufmann, formerly director of global programs at the World Bank Institute, estimates there are tens of billions of dollars of corrupt transactions each year in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr. Githongo, who failed in trying to fight corruption from the inside, has returned to Nairobi to start a nonprofit group to mobilize rural people to press politicians to clean up a rotten system.
“Going after big fish hasn’t worked,” he said. “The fish will not fry themselves.”
Zambia recently won rare convictions against former military commanders and Regina Chiluba, the wife of its former president, on corruption charges. Frederick Chiluba, president from 1991 to 2001, will himself face a verdict in July on corruption charges. His sumptuous wardrobe — Lanvin suits, silk pajamas and handmade Italian shoes of snakeskin, satin and ostrich — became an emblem of greed in one of the world’s poorest countries.
But anticorruption leaders say they sense less commitment to tackle corruption since the election of President Rupiah Banda. “I’m inside,” said Maxwell Nkole, who leads a task force set up to investigate the Chiluba-era abuses. “The tempo, the intensity to tackle corruption is dropping.”
The Banda administration vigorously denies that charge, and says it will prosecute officials who stole $2 million from the Ministry of Health. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the United States’ Millennium Challenge Corporation that Zambia is eligible for. On a recent afternoon, ambassadors from rich nations, the United States and Britain among them, mingled at a party on the lawn of Mark Chona, the first chief of the Zambian anticorruption task force. In welcoming them, he issued a sharp warning.
“Your money is being stolen,” he said. “Don’t sit silent. You don’t know how much influence you have.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/world ... nted=print
Working next to your attempted murderer
By Michael Gerson, For The Calgary HeraldJune 17, 2009
Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is attempting something rare and difficult--sharing power with the man who tried to murder him.
Every Monday morning, Tsvangirai conducts public business across the table from Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, founder and oppressor.
During a recent interview in Washington, Tsvangirai observed to me that the 85-year-old Mugabe "is someone who can be charming when he wants. I am on guard when he becomes charming. It is when I'm most suspicious of his intentions."
Mugabe has a long history of co-opting his political opponents--or killing them. "He has not co-opted me," says Tsvangirai. The killing part is not for want of trying. In 1997, regime thugs attempted to throw Tsvangirai out of a 10-storey window. In 2002, he was charged with treason and threatened with a death sentence. In 2007, he was beaten bloody during a protest. And the presidential election Tsvangirai won last year was clearly stolen by Mugabe.
Yet Tsvangirai is now part of an unlikely power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, becoming prime minister in a unity government. It is, he admits, a "calculated risk."
Tsvangirai describes two calculations. First, he was concerned Zimbabweans were too weary to take to the streets to contest a stolen election. "You don't want people to reach struggle fatigue. People wanted to try this cohabitation, to ease their economic plight."
Second, Tsvangirai is making the extraordinary calculation that "Mugabe is part of the solution." While most of the rest of the world insists that Mugabe must go, Tsvangirai believes his presence is necessary "to create stability and peace during the transition." The alternative, he fears, could be a destructive militarization of the conflict. And he hopes the aging Mugabe is considering his own legacy --choosing to finish his career as the founder of his country, not as the villain of his country.
Given Mugabe's history, this smacks of naivete. But Tsvangirai believes he has a realistic political approach. "You don't expect people who were violent yesterday to wake up one morning and become peaceful." So his strategy is to "build institutions in the course of time"--particularly through the process of writing a new constitution, leading to new elections. Tsvangirai talks again and again of "institutions" and "mechanisms" and "political architecture" as the methods to make democracy irreversible. His intention is to fight arbitrary and personal rule with the weapons of process--a Madisonian response to a Neronian dictator.
Four months into the unity government, the results are mixed. The prime minister deserves credit for beginning to stabilize the economy, particularly controlling Zimbabwe's legendary inflation. In August 2008, Zimbabwe's central bank revalued its currency by removing 10 zeros from its currency; five months later, it removed 12 more. Now the country has essentially scrapped its currency and moved to an economy based on the American dollar and the South African rand. While 70 per cent of the population still depends on food aid, goods are back in the stores.
But Mugabe's ruling party remains in charge of the secret police and key ministries. It continues to harass opponents and confiscate farmland.
Tsvangirai optimistically calls these elements a "dwindling remnant" --but it's hard to imagine they will dwindle without a fight. And Mugabe has asserted his dominance with the appointment of political cronies in blatant violation of the power-sharing agreement-- so far with little consequence.
It was this point that Tsvangirai emphasized during his recent U. S. visit, calling on Mugabe's brutal attorney general and corrupt reserve bank governor to step down--and the world to insist upon these outcomes. This represents a test for South Africa's new president, Jacob Zuma: Will he abandon the "quiet diplomacy" of his predecessor, which often amounted to permission for Mugabe's abuses, and insist that the power-sharing agreement be enforced? It is a test for President Barack Obama: Will he pressure Zuma to do the right thing? And it is a test for the power-sharing agreement itself. A stalemate on these appointments, Tsvangirai admits, would "undermine the credibility of the new dispensation."
Tsvangirai's strategy --using a power-sharing arrangement with a tyrant to gradually end a tyrant's power--has little precedent of success. If Tsvangirai fails, he will be just another victim of Mugabe's charming ruthlessness. But if the prime minister succeeds, he will be an exceptional statesman, who set aside his own claims of justice for the peace and progress of his country. And he would become Zimbabwe's true founder.
Michael Gerson Is A Syndicated Columnist With The Washington Post Writers Group.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
By Michael Gerson, For The Calgary HeraldJune 17, 2009
Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is attempting something rare and difficult--sharing power with the man who tried to murder him.
Every Monday morning, Tsvangirai conducts public business across the table from Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, founder and oppressor.
During a recent interview in Washington, Tsvangirai observed to me that the 85-year-old Mugabe "is someone who can be charming when he wants. I am on guard when he becomes charming. It is when I'm most suspicious of his intentions."
Mugabe has a long history of co-opting his political opponents--or killing them. "He has not co-opted me," says Tsvangirai. The killing part is not for want of trying. In 1997, regime thugs attempted to throw Tsvangirai out of a 10-storey window. In 2002, he was charged with treason and threatened with a death sentence. In 2007, he was beaten bloody during a protest. And the presidential election Tsvangirai won last year was clearly stolen by Mugabe.
Yet Tsvangirai is now part of an unlikely power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, becoming prime minister in a unity government. It is, he admits, a "calculated risk."
Tsvangirai describes two calculations. First, he was concerned Zimbabweans were too weary to take to the streets to contest a stolen election. "You don't want people to reach struggle fatigue. People wanted to try this cohabitation, to ease their economic plight."
Second, Tsvangirai is making the extraordinary calculation that "Mugabe is part of the solution." While most of the rest of the world insists that Mugabe must go, Tsvangirai believes his presence is necessary "to create stability and peace during the transition." The alternative, he fears, could be a destructive militarization of the conflict. And he hopes the aging Mugabe is considering his own legacy --choosing to finish his career as the founder of his country, not as the villain of his country.
Given Mugabe's history, this smacks of naivete. But Tsvangirai believes he has a realistic political approach. "You don't expect people who were violent yesterday to wake up one morning and become peaceful." So his strategy is to "build institutions in the course of time"--particularly through the process of writing a new constitution, leading to new elections. Tsvangirai talks again and again of "institutions" and "mechanisms" and "political architecture" as the methods to make democracy irreversible. His intention is to fight arbitrary and personal rule with the weapons of process--a Madisonian response to a Neronian dictator.
Four months into the unity government, the results are mixed. The prime minister deserves credit for beginning to stabilize the economy, particularly controlling Zimbabwe's legendary inflation. In August 2008, Zimbabwe's central bank revalued its currency by removing 10 zeros from its currency; five months later, it removed 12 more. Now the country has essentially scrapped its currency and moved to an economy based on the American dollar and the South African rand. While 70 per cent of the population still depends on food aid, goods are back in the stores.
But Mugabe's ruling party remains in charge of the secret police and key ministries. It continues to harass opponents and confiscate farmland.
Tsvangirai optimistically calls these elements a "dwindling remnant" --but it's hard to imagine they will dwindle without a fight. And Mugabe has asserted his dominance with the appointment of political cronies in blatant violation of the power-sharing agreement-- so far with little consequence.
It was this point that Tsvangirai emphasized during his recent U. S. visit, calling on Mugabe's brutal attorney general and corrupt reserve bank governor to step down--and the world to insist upon these outcomes. This represents a test for South Africa's new president, Jacob Zuma: Will he abandon the "quiet diplomacy" of his predecessor, which often amounted to permission for Mugabe's abuses, and insist that the power-sharing agreement be enforced? It is a test for President Barack Obama: Will he pressure Zuma to do the right thing? And it is a test for the power-sharing agreement itself. A stalemate on these appointments, Tsvangirai admits, would "undermine the credibility of the new dispensation."
Tsvangirai's strategy --using a power-sharing arrangement with a tyrant to gradually end a tyrant's power--has little precedent of success. If Tsvangirai fails, he will be just another victim of Mugabe's charming ruthlessness. But if the prime minister succeeds, he will be an exceptional statesman, who set aside his own claims of justice for the peace and progress of his country. And he would become Zimbabwe's true founder.
Michael Gerson Is A Syndicated Columnist With The Washington Post Writers Group.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
Tanzania: Dual Citizenship Will Be Welcome
28 June 2009
Two weeks ago, Tanzania's former Minister for Home Affairs, Capt. John Chiligati, now Minister for Lands and Urban Development, said in an interview with the Voice of America that the government had reached an advanced stage in considering adoption of a dual citizenship policy.
That is welcome news for thousands of Tanzanians and non-Tanzanians alike living or wishing to live abroad, but have vested family and business interests in this country.
Chiligati said there are a few issues that are currently being finalized by Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar, citing the issue of whether a person with dual citizenship could be allowed to run for president of either the United Republic of Tanzania or Zanzibar.
Thousands of Zanzibaris fled Zanzibar during the bloody revolution in 1964 to live permanently in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This anticipated new development will place such people in a position to enjoy the best of both worlds. Thousands more from the mainland who left as students and never returned from Europe, the United States of America and Canada where they have amassed enough capital to return 'home' to invest it will also like the planned policy development. It also affects women who got married to non-Tanzanians but wish to regain their birth rights.
Dual citizenship is important because Tanzania's current law on citizenship forbids dual citizenship. One is either a Tanzanian or non-Tanzanian. This restriction has prevented thousands of people from returning to Tanzania to invest their wealth in their motherland. It could also mark the beginning of political participation in their home country by voting in presidential and parliamentary elections at foreign embassies.
Tanzanians living overseas have repeatedly told President Kikwete they wish to return to invest in Tanzania's economy which has a huge potential for growth in the services sector, hotels and hospitality, tourism, transport, agro-businesses, fishing and livestock sectors.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200906291036.html
28 June 2009
Two weeks ago, Tanzania's former Minister for Home Affairs, Capt. John Chiligati, now Minister for Lands and Urban Development, said in an interview with the Voice of America that the government had reached an advanced stage in considering adoption of a dual citizenship policy.
That is welcome news for thousands of Tanzanians and non-Tanzanians alike living or wishing to live abroad, but have vested family and business interests in this country.
Chiligati said there are a few issues that are currently being finalized by Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar, citing the issue of whether a person with dual citizenship could be allowed to run for president of either the United Republic of Tanzania or Zanzibar.
Thousands of Zanzibaris fled Zanzibar during the bloody revolution in 1964 to live permanently in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This anticipated new development will place such people in a position to enjoy the best of both worlds. Thousands more from the mainland who left as students and never returned from Europe, the United States of America and Canada where they have amassed enough capital to return 'home' to invest it will also like the planned policy development. It also affects women who got married to non-Tanzanians but wish to regain their birth rights.
Dual citizenship is important because Tanzania's current law on citizenship forbids dual citizenship. One is either a Tanzanian or non-Tanzanian. This restriction has prevented thousands of people from returning to Tanzania to invest their wealth in their motherland. It could also mark the beginning of political participation in their home country by voting in presidential and parliamentary elections at foreign embassies.
Tanzanians living overseas have repeatedly told President Kikwete they wish to return to invest in Tanzania's economy which has a huge potential for growth in the services sector, hotels and hospitality, tourism, transport, agro-businesses, fishing and livestock sectors.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200906291036.html
There is a related video and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/opini ... &th&emc=th
July 10, 2009
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Rebranding Africa
By BONO
DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.
And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)
But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/opini ... &th&emc=th
July 10, 2009
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Rebranding Africa
By BONO
DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.
And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)
But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.
July 11, 2009
News Analysis
Ghana Visit Highlights Scarce Stability in Africa
By ADAM NOSSITER
NIAMEY, Niger — Amid the fever of excitement over President Obama’s first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, the debate over why he chose Ghana has been almost as prevalent as the many bars, stores and barbershops bearing his name across the region.
Was it a not-so-subtle snub of Kenya, his father’s homeland? Even more broadly, was he giving short shrift to other African governments and citizens by visiting a single country on such a diverse continent?
Mr. Obama says he chose Ghana to “highlight” its adherence to democratic principles and institutions, ensuring the kind of stability that brings prosperity. “This isn’t just some abstract notion that we’re trying to impose on Africa,” he told AllAfrica.com. He added: “The African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges. We’re not going to be able to fulfill those promises unless we see better governance.”
With that as his objective, a harsh reality emerged: Mr. Obama did not have too many options. From one end of the continent to the other, the sort of peaceful, transparent election that Ghana held last December is still an exception rather than the norm, analysts said. The same is true for the country’s comparatively well-managed economy.
“The choice was, in fact, quite limited,” said Philippe Hugon, an Africa expert at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris. “It wasn’t huge.”
Countries like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa have consistently received better-than-average global scores for their governance in recent years, according to rankings based on World Bank research.
But a cartoon in this week’s Jeune Afrique, the French magazine widely followed on the continent, seemed to sum up Mr. Obama’s dilemma: John Atta-Mills, Ghana’s president, is depicted holding back the door of a hut labeled “West Africa” from which blood, a grenade and explosions with the names of various countries in the region are bursting.
The list of exploding countries, unstable countries, corrupt countries, is long. Military coups still break out with regularity, as in Guinea and Mauritania within the last year. Journalists in a number of countries continue to be killed, jailed, tortured, forced into exile or otherwise muzzled. A day after Mr. Obama’s visit to Ghana, the Congo Republic will hold elections that have already been attacked as flawed, after the country’s constitutional court recently rejected the candidacies of opponents to incumbent Denis Sassou-Nguesso, leaving the president as a heavy favorite.
Mr. Obama seemed to acknowledge as much in his interview, saying that the democratic progress in recent years had been accompanied by “some backsliding.” He even singled out Kenya as a worrisome example, noting the political paralysis that had plagued the country since its bout of postelection violence last year.
Despite the obvious wincing such criticism may cause, many Kenyans not only seem to understand Mr. Obama’s choice to visit Ghana, but endorse it. Kenyans often follow politics like a sport, so it was not uncommon to hear them in recent weeks describing Mr. Obama’s choice as a savvy one, insulating him from any accusations that he was favoring his father’s country.
That said, the gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in its attempt to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, over the mass killings in Darfur. Even Mr. Atta-Mills was reported to back the refusal as “best for Africa.”
Human rights groups denounced the decision, as did some African leaders on Friday, when a smaller African Union panel headed by South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, backed the court’s indictment and called on the accused to appear in court, news agencies reported.
Despite the various rejections of the court, Mr. Obama’s top adviser for Africa, Michelle Gavin, praised for the African Union, telling reporters that it “has really been sort of forging ahead, commenting much more strongly than in the past on unconstitutional transfers of power.”
Yet some of the recent evidence from the continent only partly supports Ms. Gavin’s point. African leaders, for instance, flocked to the funeral of the recently deceased president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, lavishing praise and benedictions on a long-ruling autocrat widely seen in the West as having stolen his country’s oil wealth on the way to becoming immensely rich himself, while his country remained impoverished.
This region’s recent history underscores the extent to which Ghana is now an odd man out on the continent, after its own long history of dictatorship and coups: The election in December was extremely close, there was no violence, and the loser, the candidate of the party that had been in power, Nana Akufo-Addo, accepted his defeat without fuss.
Mr. Obama is expected to meet with Mr. Atta-Mills on Saturday, then deliver a speech to the country’s Parliament, after which he will visit Cape Coast Castle, a former slave trading post. And while his speech is meant for that audience, it will also be about his administration’s hopes to engage with the continent, including the responsibilities of both parties.
“It’s a big picture sort of framing of the way the president sees this relationship going forward,” Ms. Gavin said. “It’s definitely not a sort of laundry list of sets of programs.”
Peter Baker contributed reporting from L’Aquila, Italy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world ... nted=print
News Analysis
Ghana Visit Highlights Scarce Stability in Africa
By ADAM NOSSITER
NIAMEY, Niger — Amid the fever of excitement over President Obama’s first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, the debate over why he chose Ghana has been almost as prevalent as the many bars, stores and barbershops bearing his name across the region.
Was it a not-so-subtle snub of Kenya, his father’s homeland? Even more broadly, was he giving short shrift to other African governments and citizens by visiting a single country on such a diverse continent?
Mr. Obama says he chose Ghana to “highlight” its adherence to democratic principles and institutions, ensuring the kind of stability that brings prosperity. “This isn’t just some abstract notion that we’re trying to impose on Africa,” he told AllAfrica.com. He added: “The African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges. We’re not going to be able to fulfill those promises unless we see better governance.”
With that as his objective, a harsh reality emerged: Mr. Obama did not have too many options. From one end of the continent to the other, the sort of peaceful, transparent election that Ghana held last December is still an exception rather than the norm, analysts said. The same is true for the country’s comparatively well-managed economy.
“The choice was, in fact, quite limited,” said Philippe Hugon, an Africa expert at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris. “It wasn’t huge.”
Countries like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa have consistently received better-than-average global scores for their governance in recent years, according to rankings based on World Bank research.
But a cartoon in this week’s Jeune Afrique, the French magazine widely followed on the continent, seemed to sum up Mr. Obama’s dilemma: John Atta-Mills, Ghana’s president, is depicted holding back the door of a hut labeled “West Africa” from which blood, a grenade and explosions with the names of various countries in the region are bursting.
The list of exploding countries, unstable countries, corrupt countries, is long. Military coups still break out with regularity, as in Guinea and Mauritania within the last year. Journalists in a number of countries continue to be killed, jailed, tortured, forced into exile or otherwise muzzled. A day after Mr. Obama’s visit to Ghana, the Congo Republic will hold elections that have already been attacked as flawed, after the country’s constitutional court recently rejected the candidacies of opponents to incumbent Denis Sassou-Nguesso, leaving the president as a heavy favorite.
Mr. Obama seemed to acknowledge as much in his interview, saying that the democratic progress in recent years had been accompanied by “some backsliding.” He even singled out Kenya as a worrisome example, noting the political paralysis that had plagued the country since its bout of postelection violence last year.
Despite the obvious wincing such criticism may cause, many Kenyans not only seem to understand Mr. Obama’s choice to visit Ghana, but endorse it. Kenyans often follow politics like a sport, so it was not uncommon to hear them in recent weeks describing Mr. Obama’s choice as a savvy one, insulating him from any accusations that he was favoring his father’s country.
That said, the gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in its attempt to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, over the mass killings in Darfur. Even Mr. Atta-Mills was reported to back the refusal as “best for Africa.”
Human rights groups denounced the decision, as did some African leaders on Friday, when a smaller African Union panel headed by South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, backed the court’s indictment and called on the accused to appear in court, news agencies reported.
Despite the various rejections of the court, Mr. Obama’s top adviser for Africa, Michelle Gavin, praised for the African Union, telling reporters that it “has really been sort of forging ahead, commenting much more strongly than in the past on unconstitutional transfers of power.”
Yet some of the recent evidence from the continent only partly supports Ms. Gavin’s point. African leaders, for instance, flocked to the funeral of the recently deceased president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, lavishing praise and benedictions on a long-ruling autocrat widely seen in the West as having stolen his country’s oil wealth on the way to becoming immensely rich himself, while his country remained impoverished.
This region’s recent history underscores the extent to which Ghana is now an odd man out on the continent, after its own long history of dictatorship and coups: The election in December was extremely close, there was no violence, and the loser, the candidate of the party that had been in power, Nana Akufo-Addo, accepted his defeat without fuss.
Mr. Obama is expected to meet with Mr. Atta-Mills on Saturday, then deliver a speech to the country’s Parliament, after which he will visit Cape Coast Castle, a former slave trading post. And while his speech is meant for that audience, it will also be about his administration’s hopes to engage with the continent, including the responsibilities of both parties.
“It’s a big picture sort of framing of the way the president sees this relationship going forward,” Ms. Gavin said. “It’s definitely not a sort of laundry list of sets of programs.”
Peter Baker contributed reporting from L’Aquila, Italy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world ... nted=print
There is a related video and multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/world ... ?th&emc=th
July 12, 2009
Obama Delivers Call for Change to a Rapt Africa
By PETER BAKER
CAPE COAST, Ghana — President Obama traveled in his father’s often-troubled home continent on Saturday, where he symbolized a new political era but brought a message of tough love: American aid must be matched by Africa’s responsibility for its own problems.
“We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans,” Mr. Obama said in an address televised across the continent. For all its previous sins, he said, “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”
To build a prosperous future, he said, Africa needs to shed corruption and tyranny and take on poverty and disease.
“These things can only be done if you take responsibility for your future,” he told Parliament in Accra, Ghana’s capital. “And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way, as a partner, as a friend.”
The visit of the first African-American president, the son of a onetime Kenyan goat herder, electrified this small coastal nation and much of the region. Thousands of people lined streets, crowded rooftops, packed balconies, climbed trees, leaned out windows, even hung off scaffolding to glimpse his motorcade.
His face was everywhere, from billboards to T-shirts to dresses. His name and campaign theme became the refrains of songs played in his honor.
His one-day stop blended his vision of the future with echoes of the past. He stood in the Door of No Return at Cape Coast Castle, a notorious slave port perched on the windswept sea here where men who looked like him were once held in dungeons until they were marched in shackles to waiting ships. He brought his wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha.
Mr. Obama, rarely one to display emotion, seemed especially sober. He said the castle reminded him of the Buchenwald concentration camp and underscored the existence of “pure evil” in the world.
“Obviously, it’s a moving experience, a moving moment,” he said. “As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that, sadly, still exist in our world.”
One evil he came here to fight is the pernicious mix of greed, famine and war that has kept Africa down. He delivered a blunt message that from his predecessors might not have been received the same way. Instead, it was cast by aides as hard truths from a loving cousin.
“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”
Mr. Obama added: “Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions.”
The message of responsibility is one that he has conveyed to different audiences, from African-Americans at home to Muslims abroad. In Cairo last month, he said pointedly that even as America needed to better understand the Muslim world, Muslims needed to confront their own anti-American elements.
As in Cairo, he used personal history to soften stern language. “After all,” the president said, “I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family’s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story. Some of you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life.”
Mr. Obama’s first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president was his fourth to the continent that has played a distant yet central role in his life. When he first came as a college student, he had little more than a backpack and a train ticket. On Friday, he arrived on Air Force One.
But Mr. Obama’s ties to Africa barely go beyond biography. He met his father only once as a child, and was raised largely by his white mother and grandparents. He has written about coming to terms with his biracial upbringing, neither a product of African-American culture nor a native son of Africa.
Despite all the attention, the White House worked to keep his visit relatively low-key. A president accustomed to crowds of hundreds of thousands, Mr. Obama chose instead smaller venues, aware of the chaotic scene when hundreds of thousands of people nearly engulfed President Bill Clinton and injured one another during a 1998 visit.
Still, the excitement was hard to miss. At a breakfast with dignitaries, Mr. Obama made his way down the center aisle with President John Atta Mills while a reggae artist, Blakk Rasta, crooned in the background: “Barack, Barack, Barack Obama.”
An announcer kept up a steady patter of commentary. “The first black president of the United States!” he called out. “Africa meets one of its illustrious sons, Barack Obama.”
Before his speech to Parliament, the legislators were chanting his old campaign slogan: “Yes we can! Yes we can!”
Then Mr. Atta Mills introduced Mr. Obama as a long-lost relative. “You’re welcome. You’re welcome,” Ghana’s president declared. “You’ve come home.”
With a functioning democracy that has managed several peaceful transitions of power, this nation of 23 million is the favorite American success story in sub-Saharan Africa. But the choice of Ghana illustrated how few models there are. Both Mr. Clinton and President George W. Bush came here too. By contrast, Mr. Obama bypassed his father’s native Kenya, a reflection of the instability plaguing it recently.
His approach follows that of Mr. Bush, who was widely credited with doing more for Africa than any previous president. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush tried to frame policy by rewarding good governance and building institutions through programs like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an antipoverty effort that gave Ghana $547 million in 2006.
Even Mr. Obama, who typically talks about the problems his administration inherited, said he was “building on the strong efforts of President Bush” in Africa. Before flying here, Mr. Obama pressed the world’s rich nations to pool $20 billion over three years to fight hunger, not only by delivering food, but also by teaching struggling farmers how to better grow crops.
He said little about what America would do for Africa, however, focusing instead on what Africa should do for itself. He called on the people of his father’s continent to build the sort of society he never saw, prosperous, democratic, honest and healthy.
“You can do that,” he said. “Yes, you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/world ... ?th&emc=th
July 12, 2009
Obama Delivers Call for Change to a Rapt Africa
By PETER BAKER
CAPE COAST, Ghana — President Obama traveled in his father’s often-troubled home continent on Saturday, where he symbolized a new political era but brought a message of tough love: American aid must be matched by Africa’s responsibility for its own problems.
“We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans,” Mr. Obama said in an address televised across the continent. For all its previous sins, he said, “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”
To build a prosperous future, he said, Africa needs to shed corruption and tyranny and take on poverty and disease.
“These things can only be done if you take responsibility for your future,” he told Parliament in Accra, Ghana’s capital. “And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way, as a partner, as a friend.”
The visit of the first African-American president, the son of a onetime Kenyan goat herder, electrified this small coastal nation and much of the region. Thousands of people lined streets, crowded rooftops, packed balconies, climbed trees, leaned out windows, even hung off scaffolding to glimpse his motorcade.
His face was everywhere, from billboards to T-shirts to dresses. His name and campaign theme became the refrains of songs played in his honor.
His one-day stop blended his vision of the future with echoes of the past. He stood in the Door of No Return at Cape Coast Castle, a notorious slave port perched on the windswept sea here where men who looked like him were once held in dungeons until they were marched in shackles to waiting ships. He brought his wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha.
Mr. Obama, rarely one to display emotion, seemed especially sober. He said the castle reminded him of the Buchenwald concentration camp and underscored the existence of “pure evil” in the world.
“Obviously, it’s a moving experience, a moving moment,” he said. “As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that, sadly, still exist in our world.”
One evil he came here to fight is the pernicious mix of greed, famine and war that has kept Africa down. He delivered a blunt message that from his predecessors might not have been received the same way. Instead, it was cast by aides as hard truths from a loving cousin.
“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”
Mr. Obama added: “Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions.”
The message of responsibility is one that he has conveyed to different audiences, from African-Americans at home to Muslims abroad. In Cairo last month, he said pointedly that even as America needed to better understand the Muslim world, Muslims needed to confront their own anti-American elements.
As in Cairo, he used personal history to soften stern language. “After all,” the president said, “I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family’s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story. Some of you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life.”
Mr. Obama’s first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president was his fourth to the continent that has played a distant yet central role in his life. When he first came as a college student, he had little more than a backpack and a train ticket. On Friday, he arrived on Air Force One.
But Mr. Obama’s ties to Africa barely go beyond biography. He met his father only once as a child, and was raised largely by his white mother and grandparents. He has written about coming to terms with his biracial upbringing, neither a product of African-American culture nor a native son of Africa.
Despite all the attention, the White House worked to keep his visit relatively low-key. A president accustomed to crowds of hundreds of thousands, Mr. Obama chose instead smaller venues, aware of the chaotic scene when hundreds of thousands of people nearly engulfed President Bill Clinton and injured one another during a 1998 visit.
Still, the excitement was hard to miss. At a breakfast with dignitaries, Mr. Obama made his way down the center aisle with President John Atta Mills while a reggae artist, Blakk Rasta, crooned in the background: “Barack, Barack, Barack Obama.”
An announcer kept up a steady patter of commentary. “The first black president of the United States!” he called out. “Africa meets one of its illustrious sons, Barack Obama.”
Before his speech to Parliament, the legislators were chanting his old campaign slogan: “Yes we can! Yes we can!”
Then Mr. Atta Mills introduced Mr. Obama as a long-lost relative. “You’re welcome. You’re welcome,” Ghana’s president declared. “You’ve come home.”
With a functioning democracy that has managed several peaceful transitions of power, this nation of 23 million is the favorite American success story in sub-Saharan Africa. But the choice of Ghana illustrated how few models there are. Both Mr. Clinton and President George W. Bush came here too. By contrast, Mr. Obama bypassed his father’s native Kenya, a reflection of the instability plaguing it recently.
His approach follows that of Mr. Bush, who was widely credited with doing more for Africa than any previous president. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush tried to frame policy by rewarding good governance and building institutions through programs like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an antipoverty effort that gave Ghana $547 million in 2006.
Even Mr. Obama, who typically talks about the problems his administration inherited, said he was “building on the strong efforts of President Bush” in Africa. Before flying here, Mr. Obama pressed the world’s rich nations to pool $20 billion over three years to fight hunger, not only by delivering food, but also by teaching struggling farmers how to better grow crops.
He said little about what America would do for Africa, however, focusing instead on what Africa should do for itself. He called on the people of his father’s continent to build the sort of society he never saw, prosperous, democratic, honest and healthy.
“You can do that,” he said. “Yes, you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”
July 22, 2009
Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
HULUGHO, Kenya — A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab, a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia, beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any Americans or Europeans who get in their way.
In most places this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.
Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda did in 1998.
Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text messages warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass buildings.”
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world ... nted=print
*****
A Death in Burundi
By TRACY KIDDER
Damariscotta, Me.
A YOUNG man named Claude Niyokindi was shot to death the other day, on the morning of July 13, on the outskirts of a rural village in the east-central African nation of Burundi. It is a country so little known in the West that an immigration agent at Kennedy Airport recently admitted that she’d never heard of it. (“Are you sure it isn’t Burma?” she asked.) Why should Americans take notice of one killing more or less, in a faraway country in a world full of murder and mayhem? Maybe it ought to be enough to paraphrase John Donne and say that any death diminishes all of us. But there are other circumstances that seem worth mentioning.
Burundi is a small, ancient, landlocked, mountainous nation that exports excellent tea and coffee and not much else, a country with a rich and, in modern times, a tragic history, tragic in large part because of European colonialism. It is a history intimately connected with the history of Rwanda, its neighbor to the north. In the post-colonial era, Rwanda and Burundi accentuated each other’s path toward mass violence. Most Americans surely remember hearing news of Rwanda’s infamous genocide, which began in 1994. But many know little or nothing of Burundi’s related catastrophe, an ethnic civil war that began in October 1993, lasted 13 long years and killed, it is estimated, about 300,000 Burundians.
The country now has a democratically elected government, but it receives considerably less aid than Rwanda, and is in desperate shape. The war has turned a poor country into one of the very poorest in the world and also into one of the sickest. In almost every category, Burundi’s public health statistics rank among the world’s most abysmal. Collectively the numbers describe an excruciating burden of suffering for a population that has already endured more than a decade of deprivation, terror and loss — of rainy nights spent hiding in forests, of meals made out of the leaves of bean plants, of the brutal deaths of friends and family.
In 2006, a small group of Americans, led by a Burundian-American, created an organization called Village Health Works. They dreamed of helping Burundi find a new beginning. They started by trying to bring decent public health and medicine to a rural village named Kigutu. The system they created now provides, among many other services, food to the hungriest people in the area and clean water to all of them, and it is also a medical center that in its first year and a half has treated 28,000 patients, most of them without charge.
The sick come there not just from the local area, but from all parts of Burundi and even on weeklong treks from other countries, from Congo and Tanzania. And some visitors have come, not for medical help, but only to look at the clinic. When asked why he was there, one of these travelers replied, “To see America.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/opini ... nted=print
Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
HULUGHO, Kenya — A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab, a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia, beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any Americans or Europeans who get in their way.
In most places this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.
Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda did in 1998.
Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text messages warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass buildings.”
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world ... nted=print
*****
A Death in Burundi
By TRACY KIDDER
Damariscotta, Me.
A YOUNG man named Claude Niyokindi was shot to death the other day, on the morning of July 13, on the outskirts of a rural village in the east-central African nation of Burundi. It is a country so little known in the West that an immigration agent at Kennedy Airport recently admitted that she’d never heard of it. (“Are you sure it isn’t Burma?” she asked.) Why should Americans take notice of one killing more or less, in a faraway country in a world full of murder and mayhem? Maybe it ought to be enough to paraphrase John Donne and say that any death diminishes all of us. But there are other circumstances that seem worth mentioning.
Burundi is a small, ancient, landlocked, mountainous nation that exports excellent tea and coffee and not much else, a country with a rich and, in modern times, a tragic history, tragic in large part because of European colonialism. It is a history intimately connected with the history of Rwanda, its neighbor to the north. In the post-colonial era, Rwanda and Burundi accentuated each other’s path toward mass violence. Most Americans surely remember hearing news of Rwanda’s infamous genocide, which began in 1994. But many know little or nothing of Burundi’s related catastrophe, an ethnic civil war that began in October 1993, lasted 13 long years and killed, it is estimated, about 300,000 Burundians.
The country now has a democratically elected government, but it receives considerably less aid than Rwanda, and is in desperate shape. The war has turned a poor country into one of the very poorest in the world and also into one of the sickest. In almost every category, Burundi’s public health statistics rank among the world’s most abysmal. Collectively the numbers describe an excruciating burden of suffering for a population that has already endured more than a decade of deprivation, terror and loss — of rainy nights spent hiding in forests, of meals made out of the leaves of bean plants, of the brutal deaths of friends and family.
In 2006, a small group of Americans, led by a Burundian-American, created an organization called Village Health Works. They dreamed of helping Burundi find a new beginning. They started by trying to bring decent public health and medicine to a rural village named Kigutu. The system they created now provides, among many other services, food to the hungriest people in the area and clean water to all of them, and it is also a medical center that in its first year and a half has treated 28,000 patients, most of them without charge.
The sick come there not just from the local area, but from all parts of Burundi and even on weeklong treks from other countries, from Congo and Tanzania. And some visitors have come, not for medical help, but only to look at the clinic. When asked why he was there, one of these travelers replied, “To see America.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/opini ... nted=print
Ghanaian king's severed head returned
Agence France-PresseJuly 26, 2009 7:37 AM
The severed head of Ghanaian King Badu Bonsu 11, executed by colonialists in the 1880s, was flown home from the netherlands friday to a solemn ceremony and members of the beheaded king's clan. a funeral is planned for cape coast, ghana's region formerly notorious for its slave trade.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Agence France-PresseJuly 26, 2009 7:37 AM
The severed head of Ghanaian King Badu Bonsu 11, executed by colonialists in the 1880s, was flown home from the netherlands friday to a solemn ceremony and members of the beheaded king's clan. a funeral is planned for cape coast, ghana's region formerly notorious for its slave trade.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
There is a related multimedia andmore linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world ... &th&emc=th
August 5, 2009
Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GOMA, Congo — It was around 11 p.m. when armed men burst into Kazungu Ziwa’s hut, put a machete to his throat and yanked down his pants. Mr. Ziwa is a tiny man, about four feet, six inches tall. He tried to fight back, but said he was quickly beaten down.
“Then they raped me,” he said. “It was horrible, physically. I was dizzy. My thoughts just left me.”
For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world ... &th&emc=th
August 5, 2009
Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GOMA, Congo — It was around 11 p.m. when armed men burst into Kazungu Ziwa’s hut, put a machete to his throat and yanked down his pants. Mr. Ziwa is a tiny man, about four feet, six inches tall. He tried to fight back, but said he was quickly beaten down.
“Then they raped me,” he said. “It was horrible, physically. I was dizzy. My thoughts just left me.”
For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/africa/index.html
Clinton Seeks South African Support on Zimbabwe
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Pool photo by Denis Farrell
Former South African President Nelson Mandela with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was short on specifics after meeting South African officials on Friday.
Interactive: Hillary Rodham Clinton in Africa
Times Topics: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Clinton Offers Assurances to Somalis
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated the U.S. commitment to help the fledgling security services.
.President Claims More Power in Niger’s Disputed Referendum
By ADAM NOSSITER
Mamadou Tandja has secured another three years in office and unlimited runs at future terms in a referendum that opposition officials have called a coup d’état in all but name.
Times Topics: Niger
.Gambia: U.S. Condemns Convictions
By REUTERS
The United States described as “outrageous” and a “travesty” the conviction of six journalists in Gambia on charges of sedition and defamation and demanded their immediate release.
.Somali Extremists Deny Link to Terror Plot
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A powerful insurgent group in Somalia has denied having any links to an alleged plot to shoot up an Australian military base.
. Kenya’s Volatile Politics Shadow Clinton
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for accountability for the perpetrators of election-driven bloodshed last year.
Times Topics: Hillary Rodham Clinton | Kenya
.Nigeria Begins 2-Month Amnesty for Oil Militants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the main militant group fighting in the country’s oil-rich Delta region, said it would not participate in the temporary government pardon.
Clinton Seeks South African Support on Zimbabwe
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Pool photo by Denis Farrell
Former South African President Nelson Mandela with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was short on specifics after meeting South African officials on Friday.
Interactive: Hillary Rodham Clinton in Africa
Times Topics: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Clinton Offers Assurances to Somalis
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated the U.S. commitment to help the fledgling security services.
.President Claims More Power in Niger’s Disputed Referendum
By ADAM NOSSITER
Mamadou Tandja has secured another three years in office and unlimited runs at future terms in a referendum that opposition officials have called a coup d’état in all but name.
Times Topics: Niger
.Gambia: U.S. Condemns Convictions
By REUTERS
The United States described as “outrageous” and a “travesty” the conviction of six journalists in Gambia on charges of sedition and defamation and demanded their immediate release.
.Somali Extremists Deny Link to Terror Plot
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A powerful insurgent group in Somalia has denied having any links to an alleged plot to shoot up an Australian military base.
. Kenya’s Volatile Politics Shadow Clinton
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for accountability for the perpetrators of election-driven bloodshed last year.
Times Topics: Hillary Rodham Clinton | Kenya
.Nigeria Begins 2-Month Amnesty for Oil Militants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the main militant group fighting in the country’s oil-rich Delta region, said it would not participate in the temporary government pardon.
August 16, 2009
Op-Ed ColumnistThe Land of ‘No Service’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chief’s Island, Botswana
If you travel long enough and far enough — like by jet to Johannesburg, by prop plane to northern Botswana and then by bush plane deep into the Okavango Delta — you can still find it. It is that special place that on medieval maps would have been shaded black and labeled: “Here there be Dragons!” But in the postmodern age, it is the place where my BlackBerry, my wireless laptop and even my satellite phone all gave me the same message: “No Service.”
Yes, Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, there is still a “Land of No Service” — where the only “webs” are made by spiders, where the only “net” is the one wrapped around your bed to keep out mosquitoes, where the only “ring tones” at dawn are the scream of African fish eagles and the bark of baboons, where the only GPS belongs to the lioness instinctively measuring the distance between herself and the antelope she hopes will be her next meal, and where “connectivity” refers only to the intricate food chain linking predators and prey that sustains this remarkable ecosystem.
I confess, I arrived with enough devices to stay just a teensy-weensy connected to e-mail. I wasn’t looking for the Land of No Service. But the Okavango Delta’s managers and the Wilderness Trust — a South African conservation organization that runs safaris to support its nature restoration work — take the wilderness seriously. The staff at our camp on the northwestern tip of Chief’s Island, the largest island in the delta, did have a radio, but otherwise the only sounds you heard were from Mother Nature’s symphony orchestra and the only landscapes, sunsets and color combinations were painted by the hand of God.
So, like it or not, coming here forces you to think about the blessings and curses of “connectivity.” “No Service” is something travelers from the developed world now pay for in order to escape modernity, with its ball and chain of e-mail. For much of Africa, though, “No Service” is a curse — because without more connectivity, its people can’t escape poverty. Can there be a balance between the two?
For the normally overconnected tourist, the first thing you notice in the Land of No Service is how quickly your hearing, smell and eyesight improve in an act of instant Darwinian evolution. It is amazing how well you can hear when you don’t have an iPod in your ears or how far you can see when you’re not squinting at a computer screen. In the wild, the difference between hearing and seeing with acuity is the difference between survival and extinction for the animals and the difference between a rewarding experience and a missed opportunity for photographers and guides.
It was our guide spotting a half-eaten antelope lodged high in a tree that drew our attention to its predator, a leopard, calmly licking her paws nearby and then yawning from her midday meal. The cat’s stomach was heaving up and down, still digesting her prey. The leopard had suffocated the antelope — you could still see the marks on its neck — and then dragged it up the tree, holding it in her jaws, and placed the kill perfectly in the V between two branches. And there the antelope dangled, head on one side, dainty legs on the other, with half her midsection eaten away. The rest would be tomorrow’s leopard lunch, stored high above where the hyenas could not get it.
But while maintaining “No Service” in the wild is essential for Africa’s ecotourism industry, the rest of the continent desperately needs more connectivity. Eric Cantor, who runs Grameen Foundation’s Application Laboratory in Uganda, explains what a huge difference cellphones and Internet access can make to people in Africa:
“A banana farmer previously limited to waiting for a buyer truck to pass his farm to sell the week’s harvest can now use a mobile-phone marketplace to publicize the availability of his stock or to search for buyers who might be in the market or have truck transport available to a larger market,” said Cantor. “They can also compare going prices to gain more power in a negotiation. Teenagers too shy to ask parents about causes and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases can research them privately and improve their own health outcomes. A farmer with no money who needs a remedy for the pest attacking her primary crop can find one that uses locally available materials, when they need it.”
Botswana, about the size of Texas, luckily has enough diamonds to be able to turn 40 percent of its land into nature preserves. Its urban connectivity with the global diamond exchanges enables it to maintain “No Service” in its wilderness. Zimbabwe, by contrast, has become virtually a country of “No Service” after decades of dictatorship by Robert Mugabe, and, as a result, both its people and wildlife are endangered species.
The more African countries where “No Service” can be a choice, not a fate — an offering for the eco-tourist to enjoy, not a condition for the entrepreneur to overcome — the more hope that this continent will be able to enhance its natural wonders and its people at the same time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed ColumnistThe Land of ‘No Service’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chief’s Island, Botswana
If you travel long enough and far enough — like by jet to Johannesburg, by prop plane to northern Botswana and then by bush plane deep into the Okavango Delta — you can still find it. It is that special place that on medieval maps would have been shaded black and labeled: “Here there be Dragons!” But in the postmodern age, it is the place where my BlackBerry, my wireless laptop and even my satellite phone all gave me the same message: “No Service.”
Yes, Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, there is still a “Land of No Service” — where the only “webs” are made by spiders, where the only “net” is the one wrapped around your bed to keep out mosquitoes, where the only “ring tones” at dawn are the scream of African fish eagles and the bark of baboons, where the only GPS belongs to the lioness instinctively measuring the distance between herself and the antelope she hopes will be her next meal, and where “connectivity” refers only to the intricate food chain linking predators and prey that sustains this remarkable ecosystem.
I confess, I arrived with enough devices to stay just a teensy-weensy connected to e-mail. I wasn’t looking for the Land of No Service. But the Okavango Delta’s managers and the Wilderness Trust — a South African conservation organization that runs safaris to support its nature restoration work — take the wilderness seriously. The staff at our camp on the northwestern tip of Chief’s Island, the largest island in the delta, did have a radio, but otherwise the only sounds you heard were from Mother Nature’s symphony orchestra and the only landscapes, sunsets and color combinations were painted by the hand of God.
So, like it or not, coming here forces you to think about the blessings and curses of “connectivity.” “No Service” is something travelers from the developed world now pay for in order to escape modernity, with its ball and chain of e-mail. For much of Africa, though, “No Service” is a curse — because without more connectivity, its people can’t escape poverty. Can there be a balance between the two?
For the normally overconnected tourist, the first thing you notice in the Land of No Service is how quickly your hearing, smell and eyesight improve in an act of instant Darwinian evolution. It is amazing how well you can hear when you don’t have an iPod in your ears or how far you can see when you’re not squinting at a computer screen. In the wild, the difference between hearing and seeing with acuity is the difference between survival and extinction for the animals and the difference between a rewarding experience and a missed opportunity for photographers and guides.
It was our guide spotting a half-eaten antelope lodged high in a tree that drew our attention to its predator, a leopard, calmly licking her paws nearby and then yawning from her midday meal. The cat’s stomach was heaving up and down, still digesting her prey. The leopard had suffocated the antelope — you could still see the marks on its neck — and then dragged it up the tree, holding it in her jaws, and placed the kill perfectly in the V between two branches. And there the antelope dangled, head on one side, dainty legs on the other, with half her midsection eaten away. The rest would be tomorrow’s leopard lunch, stored high above where the hyenas could not get it.
But while maintaining “No Service” in the wild is essential for Africa’s ecotourism industry, the rest of the continent desperately needs more connectivity. Eric Cantor, who runs Grameen Foundation’s Application Laboratory in Uganda, explains what a huge difference cellphones and Internet access can make to people in Africa:
“A banana farmer previously limited to waiting for a buyer truck to pass his farm to sell the week’s harvest can now use a mobile-phone marketplace to publicize the availability of his stock or to search for buyers who might be in the market or have truck transport available to a larger market,” said Cantor. “They can also compare going prices to gain more power in a negotiation. Teenagers too shy to ask parents about causes and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases can research them privately and improve their own health outcomes. A farmer with no money who needs a remedy for the pest attacking her primary crop can find one that uses locally available materials, when they need it.”
Botswana, about the size of Texas, luckily has enough diamonds to be able to turn 40 percent of its land into nature preserves. Its urban connectivity with the global diamond exchanges enables it to maintain “No Service” in its wilderness. Zimbabwe, by contrast, has become virtually a country of “No Service” after decades of dictatorship by Robert Mugabe, and, as a result, both its people and wildlife are endangered species.
The more African countries where “No Service” can be a choice, not a fate — an offering for the eco-tourist to enjoy, not a condition for the entrepreneur to overcome — the more hope that this continent will be able to enhance its natural wonders and its people at the same time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opini ... nted=print
August 25, 2009
S. Africa Embraces Study Critical of Health Policy
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Leading South African scientists challenged the governing party on Monday to break with its deeply flawed record on AIDS and public health, spurring the country’s new health minister to say that he and his party shared their diagnosis of systemic problems and were determined to repair them.
The decision by the health minister, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, to embrace the often withering assessment of his party’s failings, laid out in six papers published online Monday by The Lancet, a medical journal based in London, provided a strong signal that the governing party’s new leadership intended to shake up a badly managed health system.
It was also evidence that the long often strained relationship between the government and the country’s senior medical researchers, who at times saw their cutting-edge scientific findings ignored by their political leaders, could be coming to an end.
“We do take responsibility for what has happened and responsibility for how we move forward,” said Dr. Motsoaledi, who took charge of the Health Ministry in May.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world ... nted=print
****
August 31, 2009
Editorial
Hope in South Africa
For years, South Africa was an international laughing stock for its tragically absurd approach to the deadly AIDS epidemic. Now, that national nightmare may be ending.
The new government of President Jacob Zuma seems to have a clearer-eyed view of the problem, its remedies and the need to improve the overall health care system than its predecessor did. Fixing what’s broken will not be easy, but we are encouraged by signs of a commitment to do so.
To see how far South African leaders have come, one needs to recall where the country was.
The former president, Thabo Mbeki, compiled a record that is still hard to fathom: he embraced crackpot theories that disputed the demonstrable fact that AIDS was transmitted by a treatable virus. He insisted that antiretroviral drugs were toxic and encouraged useless herbal folk remedies instead. He even claimed he knew nobody with the disease, although nearly 20 percent of the adult population is said to be living with H.I.V.
Thousands of Africans were needlessly sickened and died. And the most influential country in sub-Saharan Africa squandered the opportunity to contain the AIDS epidemic. Although it has less than 1 percent of the world’s population, South Africa now accounts for 17 percent of the world’s burden of H.I.V. infection.
A saner approach began to take shape last year after Mr. Mbeki was forced out of office and Barbara Hogan was named health minister. Last week, the new health minister, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, went further.
He accepted a withering critique by South African scientists, who said the governing African National Congress party’s record on AIDS and health care was deeply flawed, and promised remedial action. “We do take responsibility for what has happened and responsibility for how we move forward,” Dr. Motsoaledi said in an article by The Times’s Celia Dugger.
South Africa’s leaders must espouse sensible, scientifically based advice about AIDS and put in place programs that seek to both treat and prevent the disease. That means expanding efforts to prevent mothers from infecting their babies, discouraging people from having multiple sex partners and offering circumcision to men, a relatively simple surgical procedure proved to have greatly reduced the risk of infection in South Africa.
The problem is bigger than AIDS. Even though South Africa spends more on health than any other African country, tuberculosis is rampant and child mortality rates are rising. The government must work to improve the quality of health care, ensure that all South Africans have access to the system and fire incompetent staff.
None of this will reverse the damage and deaths of Mr. Mbeki’s disastrous legacy, but it can offer the people of South Africa a better future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opini ... nted=print
S. Africa Embraces Study Critical of Health Policy
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Leading South African scientists challenged the governing party on Monday to break with its deeply flawed record on AIDS and public health, spurring the country’s new health minister to say that he and his party shared their diagnosis of systemic problems and were determined to repair them.
The decision by the health minister, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, to embrace the often withering assessment of his party’s failings, laid out in six papers published online Monday by The Lancet, a medical journal based in London, provided a strong signal that the governing party’s new leadership intended to shake up a badly managed health system.
It was also evidence that the long often strained relationship between the government and the country’s senior medical researchers, who at times saw their cutting-edge scientific findings ignored by their political leaders, could be coming to an end.
“We do take responsibility for what has happened and responsibility for how we move forward,” said Dr. Motsoaledi, who took charge of the Health Ministry in May.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world ... nted=print
****
August 31, 2009
Editorial
Hope in South Africa
For years, South Africa was an international laughing stock for its tragically absurd approach to the deadly AIDS epidemic. Now, that national nightmare may be ending.
The new government of President Jacob Zuma seems to have a clearer-eyed view of the problem, its remedies and the need to improve the overall health care system than its predecessor did. Fixing what’s broken will not be easy, but we are encouraged by signs of a commitment to do so.
To see how far South African leaders have come, one needs to recall where the country was.
The former president, Thabo Mbeki, compiled a record that is still hard to fathom: he embraced crackpot theories that disputed the demonstrable fact that AIDS was transmitted by a treatable virus. He insisted that antiretroviral drugs were toxic and encouraged useless herbal folk remedies instead. He even claimed he knew nobody with the disease, although nearly 20 percent of the adult population is said to be living with H.I.V.
Thousands of Africans were needlessly sickened and died. And the most influential country in sub-Saharan Africa squandered the opportunity to contain the AIDS epidemic. Although it has less than 1 percent of the world’s population, South Africa now accounts for 17 percent of the world’s burden of H.I.V. infection.
A saner approach began to take shape last year after Mr. Mbeki was forced out of office and Barbara Hogan was named health minister. Last week, the new health minister, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, went further.
He accepted a withering critique by South African scientists, who said the governing African National Congress party’s record on AIDS and health care was deeply flawed, and promised remedial action. “We do take responsibility for what has happened and responsibility for how we move forward,” Dr. Motsoaledi said in an article by The Times’s Celia Dugger.
South Africa’s leaders must espouse sensible, scientifically based advice about AIDS and put in place programs that seek to both treat and prevent the disease. That means expanding efforts to prevent mothers from infecting their babies, discouraging people from having multiple sex partners and offering circumcision to men, a relatively simple surgical procedure proved to have greatly reduced the risk of infection in South Africa.
The problem is bigger than AIDS. Even though South Africa spends more on health than any other African country, tuberculosis is rampant and child mortality rates are rising. The government must work to improve the quality of health care, ensure that all South Africans have access to the system and fire incompetent staff.
None of this will reverse the damage and deaths of Mr. Mbeki’s disastrous legacy, but it can offer the people of South Africa a better future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opini ... nted=print
Last edited by kmaherali on Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
August 28, 2009
As Darfur Fighting Diminishes, U.N. Officials Focus on the South of Sudan
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — As the fighting in Darfur diminishes after years of conflict, senior United Nations officials say they are focused increasingly on the deteriorating situation in another part of Sudan: the south.
The shift in alarm has been building for months, but was reinforced late Wednesday when Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the departing commander of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, told reporters that the war in Darfur was essentially over.
“As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,” Reuters quoted him as saying. “Militarily, there is not much. What you have is security issues more now. Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.”
Senior United Nations officials said that while General Agwai was basically correct, they did not want to play down the dire consequences some three million displaced people face in Darfur. Still, they noted, the escalating skirmishes in the south could reignite the civil war there, which in years past proved far more deadly than the conflict in Darfur.
“Whether it is characterized as a war or not, the reality is that threats against civilians do remain” in Darfur, said Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping. Though the level of fighting has diminished there, he said, an additional 140,000 people have sought refuge in camps since January. “It is still far from peaceful,” he said.
Factors contributing to the diminished fighting include a splintering of opposition groups and reduced outside support, officials said. Most current deaths in Darfur come from criminal activity, United Nations officials said, while hundreds of people have been killed in recent months in clashes in the south.
The peace agreement between Khartoum and southern rebels signed in 2005 ended more than 20 years of fighting that killed some two million people. Since then, fighting has renewed along the possible border between north and south, an area rich in oil, as the 2011 deadline approaches for a referendum on southern independence.
The Obama administration has been publicly divided over how to characterize the Darfur conflict.
Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has continued to call the conflict in Darfur genocide, and officials said she upbraided Rodolphe Adada, the departing civilian head of the peacekeeping forces, after he described Darfur as a “low-intensity conflict” this year.
Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, “While the nature of the violence in Darfur may have changed, the crisis over all remains serious and unresolved.”
Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a retired Air Force officer who is President Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, has described the situation in Darfur as the “remnants of genocide.” He issued a statement Thursday saying he was focused on “ensuring that any government-backed militias are disarmed, displaced persons can ultimately return to their homes, and the people of Darfur who have suffered so much can live in peace and security.”
Mr. Adada resigned after sustained criticism that he was too soft on the Khartoum government. General Agwai is rotating out, to be succeeded by another officer. Some United Nations officials and Darfur activists called it self-serving of the departing peacekeeping leaders to describe the conflict as settled.
“It undermines international urgency in resolving these problems if people are led to believe that the war in Darfur is over,” said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide campaign.
The United Nations has long been criticized for failing to fulfill its mandate for some 26,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. It currently has 18,462 uniformed troops there, and predicts a 95 percent deployment by the end of the year, said Nick Birnback, the spokesman for peacekeeping operations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world ... nted=print
As Darfur Fighting Diminishes, U.N. Officials Focus on the South of Sudan
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — As the fighting in Darfur diminishes after years of conflict, senior United Nations officials say they are focused increasingly on the deteriorating situation in another part of Sudan: the south.
The shift in alarm has been building for months, but was reinforced late Wednesday when Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the departing commander of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, told reporters that the war in Darfur was essentially over.
“As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,” Reuters quoted him as saying. “Militarily, there is not much. What you have is security issues more now. Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.”
Senior United Nations officials said that while General Agwai was basically correct, they did not want to play down the dire consequences some three million displaced people face in Darfur. Still, they noted, the escalating skirmishes in the south could reignite the civil war there, which in years past proved far more deadly than the conflict in Darfur.
“Whether it is characterized as a war or not, the reality is that threats against civilians do remain” in Darfur, said Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping. Though the level of fighting has diminished there, he said, an additional 140,000 people have sought refuge in camps since January. “It is still far from peaceful,” he said.
Factors contributing to the diminished fighting include a splintering of opposition groups and reduced outside support, officials said. Most current deaths in Darfur come from criminal activity, United Nations officials said, while hundreds of people have been killed in recent months in clashes in the south.
The peace agreement between Khartoum and southern rebels signed in 2005 ended more than 20 years of fighting that killed some two million people. Since then, fighting has renewed along the possible border between north and south, an area rich in oil, as the 2011 deadline approaches for a referendum on southern independence.
The Obama administration has been publicly divided over how to characterize the Darfur conflict.
Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has continued to call the conflict in Darfur genocide, and officials said she upbraided Rodolphe Adada, the departing civilian head of the peacekeeping forces, after he described Darfur as a “low-intensity conflict” this year.
Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, “While the nature of the violence in Darfur may have changed, the crisis over all remains serious and unresolved.”
Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a retired Air Force officer who is President Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, has described the situation in Darfur as the “remnants of genocide.” He issued a statement Thursday saying he was focused on “ensuring that any government-backed militias are disarmed, displaced persons can ultimately return to their homes, and the people of Darfur who have suffered so much can live in peace and security.”
Mr. Adada resigned after sustained criticism that he was too soft on the Khartoum government. General Agwai is rotating out, to be succeeded by another officer. Some United Nations officials and Darfur activists called it self-serving of the departing peacekeeping leaders to describe the conflict as settled.
“It undermines international urgency in resolving these problems if people are led to believe that the war in Darfur is over,” said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide campaign.
The United Nations has long been criticized for failing to fulfill its mandate for some 26,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. It currently has 18,462 uniformed troops there, and predicts a 95 percent deployment by the end of the year, said Nick Birnback, the spokesman for peacekeeping operations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world ... nted=print
August 30, 2009
Op-Ed ContributorNo ‘Hero’s Welcome’ in Libya
By SAIF AL-ISLAM EL-QADDAFI
Tripoli, Libya
CONTRARY to reports in the Western press, there was no “hero’s welcome” for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi when he returned to Libya earlier this month.
There was not in fact any official reception for the return of Mr. Megrahi, who had been convicted and imprisoned in Scotland for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The strong reactions to these misperceptions must not be allowed to impair the improvements in a mutually beneficial relationship between Libya and the West.
When I arrived at the airport with Mr. Megrahi, there was not a single government official present. State and foreign news media were also barred from the event. If you were watching Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, at the time the plane landed, you would have heard its correspondent complain that he was not allowed by Libyan authorities to go to the airport to cover Mr. Megrahi’s arrival.
It is true that there were a few hundred people present. But most of them were members of Mr. Megrahi’s large tribe, extended families being an important element in Libyan society. They had no official invitation, but it was hardly possible to prevent them from coming.
Coincidentally, the day Mr. Megrahi landed was also the very day of the annual Libyan Youth Day, and many participants came to the airport after seeing coverage of Mr. Megrahi’s release on British television. But this was not planned. Indeed, we sat in the plane on the tarmac until the police brought the crowd to order.
So, from the Libyan point of view, the reception given to Mr. Megrahi was low-key. Had it been an official welcome, there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of people at the airport. And the event would have been carried live on state television.
At the same time, I was extremely happy for Mr. Megrahi’s return. Convinced of his innocence, I have worked for years on his behalf, raising the issue at every meeting with British officials.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair recently confirmed my statement that Libya put Mr. Megrahi’s release on the table at every meeting. He also made it clear that there was never any agreement by the British government to release Mr. Megrahi as part of some quid pro quo on trade — a statement I can confirm.
Mr. Megrahi was released for the right reasons. The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed Mr. Megrahi, who is dying of cancer, on compassionate grounds. Mr. MacAskill’s courageous decision demonstrates to the world that both justice and compassion can be achieved by people of good will. Despite the uproar over the release, others agree. A recent survey of Scottish lawyers showed that a majority of those surveyed agreed with the secretary’s decision.
It’s worth pointing out that we Libyans are far from the only ones who believe that Mr. Megrahi is innocent of this terrible crime. In June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission determined that a “miscarriage of justice” may have occurred and referred the case to the High Court. A retired Scottish police officer who worked on the case has signed a statement saying that evidence was fabricated. The credibility of a key witness, a shopkeeper in Malta, has subsequently been disputed by the Scottish judge who presided in the review. Even the spokesman of a family group of Lockerbie victims has said that the group was not satisfied that the verdict in the Megrahi case was correct.
What’s more, although we Libyans believe that Mr. Megrahi is innocent, we agreed in a civil action to pay the families of the victims, and we have done so. In fact, we could have withheld the final tranche of payments last year, because the United States had not kept its part of the deal, to fully normalize relations within the formally agreed-upon time frame. Still, we made the final payment as an act of good will.
The truth about Lockerbie will come out one day. Had Mr. Megrahi been able to appeal his case through the court, we believe that his conviction would have been overturned. Mr. Megrahi made the difficult decision to give up his promising appeal in order to spend his last days with his family.
Libya has worked with Britain, the United States and other Western countries for more than five years now to defuse the tensions of earlier times, and to promote trade, security and improved relations. I believe that clarifying the facts in the Lockerbie case can only further assist this process.
I once again offer my deepest sympathy to the families and loved ones of those lost in the Lockerbie tragedy. They deserve justice. The best way to get it is through a public inquiry. We need to know the truth.
Saif Al-Islam El-Qaddafi is the chairman of the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed ContributorNo ‘Hero’s Welcome’ in Libya
By SAIF AL-ISLAM EL-QADDAFI
Tripoli, Libya
CONTRARY to reports in the Western press, there was no “hero’s welcome” for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi when he returned to Libya earlier this month.
There was not in fact any official reception for the return of Mr. Megrahi, who had been convicted and imprisoned in Scotland for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The strong reactions to these misperceptions must not be allowed to impair the improvements in a mutually beneficial relationship between Libya and the West.
When I arrived at the airport with Mr. Megrahi, there was not a single government official present. State and foreign news media were also barred from the event. If you were watching Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, at the time the plane landed, you would have heard its correspondent complain that he was not allowed by Libyan authorities to go to the airport to cover Mr. Megrahi’s arrival.
It is true that there were a few hundred people present. But most of them were members of Mr. Megrahi’s large tribe, extended families being an important element in Libyan society. They had no official invitation, but it was hardly possible to prevent them from coming.
Coincidentally, the day Mr. Megrahi landed was also the very day of the annual Libyan Youth Day, and many participants came to the airport after seeing coverage of Mr. Megrahi’s release on British television. But this was not planned. Indeed, we sat in the plane on the tarmac until the police brought the crowd to order.
So, from the Libyan point of view, the reception given to Mr. Megrahi was low-key. Had it been an official welcome, there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of people at the airport. And the event would have been carried live on state television.
At the same time, I was extremely happy for Mr. Megrahi’s return. Convinced of his innocence, I have worked for years on his behalf, raising the issue at every meeting with British officials.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair recently confirmed my statement that Libya put Mr. Megrahi’s release on the table at every meeting. He also made it clear that there was never any agreement by the British government to release Mr. Megrahi as part of some quid pro quo on trade — a statement I can confirm.
Mr. Megrahi was released for the right reasons. The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed Mr. Megrahi, who is dying of cancer, on compassionate grounds. Mr. MacAskill’s courageous decision demonstrates to the world that both justice and compassion can be achieved by people of good will. Despite the uproar over the release, others agree. A recent survey of Scottish lawyers showed that a majority of those surveyed agreed with the secretary’s decision.
It’s worth pointing out that we Libyans are far from the only ones who believe that Mr. Megrahi is innocent of this terrible crime. In June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission determined that a “miscarriage of justice” may have occurred and referred the case to the High Court. A retired Scottish police officer who worked on the case has signed a statement saying that evidence was fabricated. The credibility of a key witness, a shopkeeper in Malta, has subsequently been disputed by the Scottish judge who presided in the review. Even the spokesman of a family group of Lockerbie victims has said that the group was not satisfied that the verdict in the Megrahi case was correct.
What’s more, although we Libyans believe that Mr. Megrahi is innocent, we agreed in a civil action to pay the families of the victims, and we have done so. In fact, we could have withheld the final tranche of payments last year, because the United States had not kept its part of the deal, to fully normalize relations within the formally agreed-upon time frame. Still, we made the final payment as an act of good will.
The truth about Lockerbie will come out one day. Had Mr. Megrahi been able to appeal his case through the court, we believe that his conviction would have been overturned. Mr. Megrahi made the difficult decision to give up his promising appeal in order to spend his last days with his family.
Libya has worked with Britain, the United States and other Western countries for more than five years now to defuse the tensions of earlier times, and to promote trade, security and improved relations. I believe that clarifying the facts in the Lockerbie case can only further assist this process.
I once again offer my deepest sympathy to the families and loved ones of those lost in the Lockerbie tragedy. They deserve justice. The best way to get it is through a public inquiry. We need to know the truth.
Saif Al-Islam El-Qaddafi is the chairman of the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/opini ... nted=print
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 8, 2009
Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya’s Hopes
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
LOKORI, Kenya — The sun somehow feels closer here, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for a scoop of food, heat waves dance up from the desert floor, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.
So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.
“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.
A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.
The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.
Ethiopia. Sudan. Somalia. Maybe even Niger and Chad. These countries have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya? This nation is one of the most developed in Africa, home to a typically robust economy, countless United Nations offices and thousands of aid workers.
The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.
Some government officials have even been implicated in a scandal to illegally sell off thousands of tons of the nation’s grain reserves as a famine was looming.
More at the link mentioned above...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 8, 2009
Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya’s Hopes
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
LOKORI, Kenya — The sun somehow feels closer here, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for a scoop of food, heat waves dance up from the desert floor, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.
So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.
“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.
A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.
The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.
Ethiopia. Sudan. Somalia. Maybe even Niger and Chad. These countries have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya? This nation is one of the most developed in Africa, home to a typically robust economy, countless United Nations offices and thousands of aid workers.
The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.
Some government officials have even been implicated in a scandal to illegally sell off thousands of tons of the nation’s grain reserves as a famine was looming.
More at the link mentioned above...
There is a related video and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world ... &th&emc=th
September 20, 2009
Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy
By CELIA W. DUGGER
KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school sang freedom songs and protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class. With looming national examinations that would determine whether they were bound for a university or joblessness, they demanded a replacement.
“We kept waiting, and there was no action,” said Masixole Mabetshe, who failed the exams and who now, out of work, passes the days watching TV.
The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do beyond giving the teacher a warning. Finally the students’ frustration turned riotous. They threw bricks, punched two teachers and stabbed one in the head with scissors, witnesses said.
The traumatized school’s passing rate on the national exams known as the matric — already in virtual free fall — tumbled to just 44 percent.
Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students who dream of being the accountants, engineers and doctors this country desperately needs, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.
Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one veteran commentator has called another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade. Many who finish at rural and township schools are so ill educated that they qualify for little but menial labor or the ranks of the jobless, fueling the nation’s daunting rates of unemployment and crime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world ... &th&emc=th
September 20, 2009
Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy
By CELIA W. DUGGER
KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school sang freedom songs and protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class. With looming national examinations that would determine whether they were bound for a university or joblessness, they demanded a replacement.
“We kept waiting, and there was no action,” said Masixole Mabetshe, who failed the exams and who now, out of work, passes the days watching TV.
The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do beyond giving the teacher a warning. Finally the students’ frustration turned riotous. They threw bricks, punched two teachers and stabbed one in the head with scissors, witnesses said.
The traumatized school’s passing rate on the national exams known as the matric — already in virtual free fall — tumbled to just 44 percent.
Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students who dream of being the accountants, engineers and doctors this country desperately needs, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.
Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one veteran commentator has called another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade. Many who finish at rural and township schools are so ill educated that they qualify for little but menial labor or the ranks of the jobless, fueling the nation’s daunting rates of unemployment and crime.
October 7, 2009
U.S. Envoy Protests Violence in Guinea
By ADAM NOSSITER
CONAKRY, Guinea — The Obama administration has injected itself into the crisis in Guinea, taking the unusual step of sending a senior diplomat to protest the mass killings and rapes here last week.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for “appropriate actions” against a military government that she said “cannot remain in power.”
“It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters in Washington. She said that the nation’s leader, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, and his government “must turn back to the people the right to choose their own leaders.”
The military seized power here last December, and pressure has been rising as Captain Camara, 45, backed off a pledge not to run in this country’s presidential elections in January. At a demonstration against him on Sept. 28, witnesses said soldiers opened fire on the crowds and raped and sexually assaulted female protesters. Human rights officials estimate that as many as 157 people were killed. The government has put the number at 56.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/world ... ?th&emc=th
U.S. Envoy Protests Violence in Guinea
By ADAM NOSSITER
CONAKRY, Guinea — The Obama administration has injected itself into the crisis in Guinea, taking the unusual step of sending a senior diplomat to protest the mass killings and rapes here last week.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for “appropriate actions” against a military government that she said “cannot remain in power.”
“It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters in Washington. She said that the nation’s leader, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, and his government “must turn back to the people the right to choose their own leaders.”
The military seized power here last December, and pressure has been rising as Captain Camara, 45, backed off a pledge not to run in this country’s presidential elections in January. At a demonstration against him on Sept. 28, witnesses said soldiers opened fire on the crowds and raped and sexually assaulted female protesters. Human rights officials estimate that as many as 157 people were killed. The government has put the number at 56.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/world ... ?th&emc=th
October 12, 2009
Easy Money Fuels Rise in Kidnappings in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Little Emmanuel Aguer was one of the most recent victims.
A month ago, he was snatched on the way to his grandmother’s house. Four days later, after his middle-class family received calls asking for $70 or else — calls the family was not sure were even genuine — his uncle found his corpse stuffed in a sugar sack. His head had been bludgeoned and his eyes were gouged out.
Emmanuel was 6 years old.
“These people knew what they were doing,” said his uncle, Mariak Aguek. “What they did was so traumatizing, I can’t even express it.”
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is a teeming city of have-nots and have-lots, so notorious for violent crime that it is often called “Nai-robbery.” But there is a new problem, or at least one that is causing new fear — kidnapping, and several recent attacks have been on children and Western women.
Parents in the packed, iron-shanty slums that ring downtown Nairobi like a collar of rust are now walking hand in hand with their children, even short distances. In the frangipani-scented enclaves where the diplomats live, security is being stepped up at schools and e-mail kidnapping alerts are spreading faster than a computer virus.
More than 100 Nairobi residents have been abducted for ransom this year, security consultants say, a huge increase over years past. Big chunks of money are changing hands. And as the security experts say, the minute you start paying ransom, kidnapping goes from a crime to a business. Just ask those in Mexico City, in Baghdad or in Bogotá, Colombia.
Blindfolds, safe houses, military-grade assault rifles and complex, well-practiced maneuvers with cars to block in unsuspecting prey — they are all part of Kenya’s emerging kidnapping industry.
The kidnappings are highly organized and often ruthless. One Belgian woman who was recently held for more than a week was stripped naked, according to security consultants who worked on her case. A second foreigner, a German woman, was seized in a subsequent attack and then locked in a closet with the Belgian woman in the same squalid house, indicating that a criminal gang may now have its sights on Western women.
In July, two smartly dressed young men walked into the workshop of an Indian trader in Nairobi and asked him to give them an estimate for a new well. When the trader went out to the site, he was jumped by a gang of six, bundled into a car and cruelly beaten with hammers and belts until his family cobbled together $3,000 for his release.
“It was a set-up,” the trader said. “They must have been monitoring me for some time.”
Many people here are beginning to wonder if the Kenyan thugs may have been inspired by their Somali brethren next door, who have made millions snatching foreigners on land and sea.
“Their appetite is growing,” said Charles Owino, a Kenyan police spokesman. “And if we don’t manage it, it can grow to be big.”
Kenyan security companies see the spike in kidnappings as proof that their other security measures may be working — possibly too well. Yesterday’s big fear in Nairobi was an armed home invasion, in which rough men with machetes and guns would scale the walls of a house in the wee hours of the night, burst in and terrorize the family in a quest for jewelry and electronics.
Executives for KK Security, a private security force that protects 4,000 homes in Nairobi, said they used to respond to a home invasion every week. Now, it is more like a couple of times a year.
But as it gets harder to break into homes because of all the security devices people deploy these days (like silent alarm systems and electrified fences) and with the Kenyan police force more mobile (because companies like KK are now driving them around), criminals are looking to the streets, where people have less control over their environment.
“It’s shifting from brutal crime to smart crime,” said Patrick Grant, a KK executive.
And kidnapping, he says, “is easy money.”
Who’s safe? Just about no one. Nairobi seems to be in the swell of another crime wave and though the police say they are cracking down (which often means simply shooting suspects on sight), a general feeling of foreboding seems to be spreading. In May, gun-toting robbers hijacked a bus along Kenya’s busiest road, the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, robbing all the passengers and raping the women.
In June, a Kenyan member of Parliament was carjacked and kidnapped, and when he finally got home, he heard a strange thumping noise in the trunk — it was the desperate sounds of another man who had been kidnapped and locked in there.
In July, carjackers robbed and kidnapped a senior police commander. An assistant minister was also terrorized in his own home by an armed gang. But he got little sympathy, at least online.
“A thugs who robs a minister, president or an incompetent m.p. is the ROBINHOOD of today and what a good job,” read a recent post on a Kenyan blog. “If the government cannot afford security, sometimes nature has its own way of dealing with it.”
Even the prime minister’s private office was recently looted.
“I don’t know if it’s the global recession or what,” said the wife of one Western diplomat, who preferred to remain anonymous. “But there’s been a lot of crime lately and everybody’s talking about it in the diplomatic circles.”
The German woman kidnapped in September described three days of terror. Her abductors threatened to rape her, slice her into pieces and kidnap her child. They knocked her in the head with a pistol butt and then incongruously offered her marijuana.
“You’re thinking they will never let you go,” said the woman, whose family handed over an undisclosed ransom for her release. “Time just doesn’t pass.”
But it is not just the haves who are getting hit. Take Emmanuel’s family. They have enough money for a stereo and a refrigerator and cold sodas for the occasional guest. But they are hardly rich. They are refugees from southern Sudan who have been through hell and back — civil war, squalid camps, persecution, even fears of being enslaved. Now they have to worry about their children getting chopped up when they step outside to take a stroll past the dirt soccer fields or corrugated iron gates of their middle-class neighborhood.
“My son was really intelligent, he was really honest, when I sent him to the store to fetch something, he always came back with the right change,” said Emmanuel’s father, Ater Aguek. “Sometimes, I still have dreams I’m playing with him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/world ... nted=print
Easy Money Fuels Rise in Kidnappings in Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Little Emmanuel Aguer was one of the most recent victims.
A month ago, he was snatched on the way to his grandmother’s house. Four days later, after his middle-class family received calls asking for $70 or else — calls the family was not sure were even genuine — his uncle found his corpse stuffed in a sugar sack. His head had been bludgeoned and his eyes were gouged out.
Emmanuel was 6 years old.
“These people knew what they were doing,” said his uncle, Mariak Aguek. “What they did was so traumatizing, I can’t even express it.”
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is a teeming city of have-nots and have-lots, so notorious for violent crime that it is often called “Nai-robbery.” But there is a new problem, or at least one that is causing new fear — kidnapping, and several recent attacks have been on children and Western women.
Parents in the packed, iron-shanty slums that ring downtown Nairobi like a collar of rust are now walking hand in hand with their children, even short distances. In the frangipani-scented enclaves where the diplomats live, security is being stepped up at schools and e-mail kidnapping alerts are spreading faster than a computer virus.
More than 100 Nairobi residents have been abducted for ransom this year, security consultants say, a huge increase over years past. Big chunks of money are changing hands. And as the security experts say, the minute you start paying ransom, kidnapping goes from a crime to a business. Just ask those in Mexico City, in Baghdad or in Bogotá, Colombia.
Blindfolds, safe houses, military-grade assault rifles and complex, well-practiced maneuvers with cars to block in unsuspecting prey — they are all part of Kenya’s emerging kidnapping industry.
The kidnappings are highly organized and often ruthless. One Belgian woman who was recently held for more than a week was stripped naked, according to security consultants who worked on her case. A second foreigner, a German woman, was seized in a subsequent attack and then locked in a closet with the Belgian woman in the same squalid house, indicating that a criminal gang may now have its sights on Western women.
In July, two smartly dressed young men walked into the workshop of an Indian trader in Nairobi and asked him to give them an estimate for a new well. When the trader went out to the site, he was jumped by a gang of six, bundled into a car and cruelly beaten with hammers and belts until his family cobbled together $3,000 for his release.
“It was a set-up,” the trader said. “They must have been monitoring me for some time.”
Many people here are beginning to wonder if the Kenyan thugs may have been inspired by their Somali brethren next door, who have made millions snatching foreigners on land and sea.
“Their appetite is growing,” said Charles Owino, a Kenyan police spokesman. “And if we don’t manage it, it can grow to be big.”
Kenyan security companies see the spike in kidnappings as proof that their other security measures may be working — possibly too well. Yesterday’s big fear in Nairobi was an armed home invasion, in which rough men with machetes and guns would scale the walls of a house in the wee hours of the night, burst in and terrorize the family in a quest for jewelry and electronics.
Executives for KK Security, a private security force that protects 4,000 homes in Nairobi, said they used to respond to a home invasion every week. Now, it is more like a couple of times a year.
But as it gets harder to break into homes because of all the security devices people deploy these days (like silent alarm systems and electrified fences) and with the Kenyan police force more mobile (because companies like KK are now driving them around), criminals are looking to the streets, where people have less control over their environment.
“It’s shifting from brutal crime to smart crime,” said Patrick Grant, a KK executive.
And kidnapping, he says, “is easy money.”
Who’s safe? Just about no one. Nairobi seems to be in the swell of another crime wave and though the police say they are cracking down (which often means simply shooting suspects on sight), a general feeling of foreboding seems to be spreading. In May, gun-toting robbers hijacked a bus along Kenya’s busiest road, the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, robbing all the passengers and raping the women.
In June, a Kenyan member of Parliament was carjacked and kidnapped, and when he finally got home, he heard a strange thumping noise in the trunk — it was the desperate sounds of another man who had been kidnapped and locked in there.
In July, carjackers robbed and kidnapped a senior police commander. An assistant minister was also terrorized in his own home by an armed gang. But he got little sympathy, at least online.
“A thugs who robs a minister, president or an incompetent m.p. is the ROBINHOOD of today and what a good job,” read a recent post on a Kenyan blog. “If the government cannot afford security, sometimes nature has its own way of dealing with it.”
Even the prime minister’s private office was recently looted.
“I don’t know if it’s the global recession or what,” said the wife of one Western diplomat, who preferred to remain anonymous. “But there’s been a lot of crime lately and everybody’s talking about it in the diplomatic circles.”
The German woman kidnapped in September described three days of terror. Her abductors threatened to rape her, slice her into pieces and kidnap her child. They knocked her in the head with a pistol butt and then incongruously offered her marijuana.
“You’re thinking they will never let you go,” said the woman, whose family handed over an undisclosed ransom for her release. “Time just doesn’t pass.”
But it is not just the haves who are getting hit. Take Emmanuel’s family. They have enough money for a stereo and a refrigerator and cold sodas for the occasional guest. But they are hardly rich. They are refugees from southern Sudan who have been through hell and back — civil war, squalid camps, persecution, even fears of being enslaved. Now they have to worry about their children getting chopped up when they step outside to take a stroll past the dirt soccer fields or corrugated iron gates of their middle-class neighborhood.
“My son was really intelligent, he was really honest, when I sent him to the store to fetch something, he always came back with the right change,” said Emmanuel’s father, Ater Aguek. “Sometimes, I still have dreams I’m playing with him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/world ... nted=print
October 22, 2009
Editorial
Robert Mugabe vs. Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his party have been trying to blow up the power-sharing arrangement ever since neighboring states put it together last year. They are now perilously close to succeeding.
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announced last week that he and his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would boycott cabinet meetings to protest the arrest and detention of an important party leader, one of a long series of arrests ordered by Mr. Mugabe to make power-sharing unworkable.
The departure of Mr. Tsvangirai and his allies from government would be a disaster for Zimbabwe’s long-suffering people. The Southern African Development Community, the 15-member regional organization that brokered the deal, must demand that Mr. Mugabe finally abide by its terms and spirit. If he refuses, the community should withdraw recognition from his government and insist on new, internationally supervised elections.
Mr. Tsvangirai clearly won the first round of Zimbabwe’s 2008 presidential vote. Then Mr. Mugabe let loose the army and thugs from his party, ZANU-PF, who made it impossible for Mr. Tsvangirai to continue campaigning for the decisive second round. Mr. Mugabe claimed re-election by default, but few recognized his rule as legitimate. The United States and the European Union applied constructive pressure by tightening financial sanctions against Mr. Mugabe’s close associates.
At that point other African leaders should have pressed Mr. Mugabe to organize new elections or step aside. Instead, they devised a deeply flawed “power-sharing” deal. It provided for Mr. Mugabe to continue as president and Mr. Tsvangirai to be named prime minister. Cabinet jobs were apportioned. But Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists kept control of the army, police and the courts and used that power to arrest and intimidate opposition leaders, including members of the new government.
The new cabinet put honest and competent opposition leaders in charge of education, health, housing and child welfare. Their efforts, along with the help they enlisted from international relief agencies, turned back a deadly cholera epidemic and famine, slowed the crippling exodus of teachers and made it possible for Zimbabwe’s next generation to imagine a better future.
If power-sharing can be saved, those ministries need to stay in qualified hands. ZANU-PF’s grip on the army and courts must be loosened and a nonpolitical expert should be named to run the central bank. If Mr. Mugabe won’t agree to those terms, new elections must be scheduled, with active international supervision, so that democracy, not intimidation, determines their outcome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
Robert Mugabe vs. Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his party have been trying to blow up the power-sharing arrangement ever since neighboring states put it together last year. They are now perilously close to succeeding.
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announced last week that he and his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would boycott cabinet meetings to protest the arrest and detention of an important party leader, one of a long series of arrests ordered by Mr. Mugabe to make power-sharing unworkable.
The departure of Mr. Tsvangirai and his allies from government would be a disaster for Zimbabwe’s long-suffering people. The Southern African Development Community, the 15-member regional organization that brokered the deal, must demand that Mr. Mugabe finally abide by its terms and spirit. If he refuses, the community should withdraw recognition from his government and insist on new, internationally supervised elections.
Mr. Tsvangirai clearly won the first round of Zimbabwe’s 2008 presidential vote. Then Mr. Mugabe let loose the army and thugs from his party, ZANU-PF, who made it impossible for Mr. Tsvangirai to continue campaigning for the decisive second round. Mr. Mugabe claimed re-election by default, but few recognized his rule as legitimate. The United States and the European Union applied constructive pressure by tightening financial sanctions against Mr. Mugabe’s close associates.
At that point other African leaders should have pressed Mr. Mugabe to organize new elections or step aside. Instead, they devised a deeply flawed “power-sharing” deal. It provided for Mr. Mugabe to continue as president and Mr. Tsvangirai to be named prime minister. Cabinet jobs were apportioned. But Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists kept control of the army, police and the courts and used that power to arrest and intimidate opposition leaders, including members of the new government.
The new cabinet put honest and competent opposition leaders in charge of education, health, housing and child welfare. Their efforts, along with the help they enlisted from international relief agencies, turned back a deadly cholera epidemic and famine, slowed the crippling exodus of teachers and made it possible for Zimbabwe’s next generation to imagine a better future.
If power-sharing can be saved, those ministries need to stay in qualified hands. ZANU-PF’s grip on the army and courts must be loosened and a nonpolitical expert should be named to run the central bank. If Mr. Mugabe won’t agree to those terms, new elections must be scheduled, with active international supervision, so that democracy, not intimidation, determines their outcome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/opini ... nted=print
October 24, 2009
Repent or Resign, Bishops Tell African Politicians
By RACHEL DONADIO
ROME — Declaring that Africa needed more “saints” in public life, African bishops issued a strong statement on Friday calling on corrupt Catholic politicians on that continent to “repent” or leave office.
They did not name names, but two of Africa’s most prominent Catholic leaders are President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, whose repressive policies and ruling elite are seen to have led his country to economic ruin, and President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, whose government is perceived as one of the most corrupt in the world.
“Many Catholics in high office have fallen woefully short in their performance in office,” the bishops wrote in an unusually direct document wrapping up a month-long synod, or meeting, at the Vatican on the issues facing the church in Africa. “The synod calls on such people to repent, or quit the public arena and stop causing havoc to the people and giving the Catholic Church a bad name.”
With its large Catholic population, estimated at 158 million, Africa in many ways represents the future of the Catholic Church. It is expected that by 2025, one-sixth of the world’s Catholics, or about 230 million, will be African, and Africa produces a large percentage of the world’s priests. Pope Benedict XVI, who visited Cameroon and Angola in March, has often spoken out against the poverty, disease, corruption and violence that threaten African countries, and has said he sees the church as a force for democracy and social justice.
In their document on Friday, the bishops singled out crises in northern Uganda, South Sudan and Darfur and said that “those who control the affairs of those nations must take full responsibility for their woeful performance.”
They added: “Whatever may be the responsibility of foreign interests, there is always the shameful and tragic collusion of the local leaders: politicians who betray and sell out their nations, dirty businesspeople who collude with rapacious multinationals, African arms dealers and traffickers who thrive on small arms that cause great havoc on human lives.”
Echoing a theme in Benedict’s latest encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” about morality and global economics, albeit in more provocative language, the approximately 300 bishops who attended the meeting also called on multinational corporations to stop their “criminal devastation of the environment in their greedy exploitation of natural resources.”
Calling women “the backbone” of the church in Africa, the bishops urged them “to be fully involved” in women’s programs, but said they should “make sure that the good ideas are not hijacked by the peddlers of foreign and morally poisonous ideologies about gender and human sexuality.”
The bishops did not veer from Vatican policy opposing the use of condoms to prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS. “The problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics,” they wrote. Instead, they urged abstinence among the unmarried and fidelity among the married. “Such a course of action not only offers the best protection against the spread of this disease but is also in harmony with Christian morality,” they wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/world ... nted=print
Repent or Resign, Bishops Tell African Politicians
By RACHEL DONADIO
ROME — Declaring that Africa needed more “saints” in public life, African bishops issued a strong statement on Friday calling on corrupt Catholic politicians on that continent to “repent” or leave office.
They did not name names, but two of Africa’s most prominent Catholic leaders are President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, whose repressive policies and ruling elite are seen to have led his country to economic ruin, and President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, whose government is perceived as one of the most corrupt in the world.
“Many Catholics in high office have fallen woefully short in their performance in office,” the bishops wrote in an unusually direct document wrapping up a month-long synod, or meeting, at the Vatican on the issues facing the church in Africa. “The synod calls on such people to repent, or quit the public arena and stop causing havoc to the people and giving the Catholic Church a bad name.”
With its large Catholic population, estimated at 158 million, Africa in many ways represents the future of the Catholic Church. It is expected that by 2025, one-sixth of the world’s Catholics, or about 230 million, will be African, and Africa produces a large percentage of the world’s priests. Pope Benedict XVI, who visited Cameroon and Angola in March, has often spoken out against the poverty, disease, corruption and violence that threaten African countries, and has said he sees the church as a force for democracy and social justice.
In their document on Friday, the bishops singled out crises in northern Uganda, South Sudan and Darfur and said that “those who control the affairs of those nations must take full responsibility for their woeful performance.”
They added: “Whatever may be the responsibility of foreign interests, there is always the shameful and tragic collusion of the local leaders: politicians who betray and sell out their nations, dirty businesspeople who collude with rapacious multinationals, African arms dealers and traffickers who thrive on small arms that cause great havoc on human lives.”
Echoing a theme in Benedict’s latest encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” about morality and global economics, albeit in more provocative language, the approximately 300 bishops who attended the meeting also called on multinational corporations to stop their “criminal devastation of the environment in their greedy exploitation of natural resources.”
Calling women “the backbone” of the church in Africa, the bishops urged them “to be fully involved” in women’s programs, but said they should “make sure that the good ideas are not hijacked by the peddlers of foreign and morally poisonous ideologies about gender and human sexuality.”
The bishops did not veer from Vatican policy opposing the use of condoms to prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS. “The problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics,” they wrote. Instead, they urged abstinence among the unmarried and fidelity among the married. “Such a course of action not only offers the best protection against the spread of this disease but is also in harmony with Christian morality,” they wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/world ... nted=print
Wars have harmed Africa, but have led to a great genetic mix
By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO (email the author)
Posted Monday, October 26 2009 at 00:00
The lack of citizenship rights is wrecking Africa, so said a report by billionaire George Soros’ founded Open Society Institute (OSI).
In the report, released in Kampala on Thursday, OSI said the denial of citizenship rights has had devastating human consequences.
Millions of Africans without citizenship are deprived of the right to vote, to cross borders, and to access state health or education services.
It also notes that there is a record 12 million suffering internally displaced Africans. The reality, of course, is worse.
These displaced people also endure other heinous crimes like rape (not least at the hands of UN peacekeepers).
In the Democratic Republic of Congo — as in Kenya during the post-election violence of 2008, and recently in Guinea — rape is becoming a frightening medium scale industry.
That said, the torment of African refugees and displaced persons might not all be in vain.
In 1990, Rwandan refugees organised under the Rwanda Patriotic Front in Uganda took on the Kigali regime of the day, which had refused to repatriate refugees who were scattered around Eastern Africa. They took power in 1994.
Earlier Ugandan exiles (mainly the ones based in Kenya and Tanzania) were cobbled together in a united front by Julius Nyerere, and together with the Tanzanian army, ousted military dictator Idi Amin in 1979.
Refugees can take advantage of the freedoms they have in their host country to organise, and apply pressure on the regime back home to change its ways or be kicked out of power.
But there are more benefits, possibly bigger, benefits beyond that.
Most victims of conflict are peasants or workers, who would never have travelled far from their villages or hometowns.
To find sanctuary as refugees or IDPs in districts or countries far away from their own, they must pass through new places, encounter different cultures, and see a world they would never have in peaceful times.
Yes, people are left bitter by the humiliations and suffering of being refugees or IDPs, and sometimes get radicalised into seeking revenge upon their oppressors when the tables turn. However, they also become more cosmopolitan and worldly.
Uganda and Kenya provide a very good example.
The factor that is most responsible for intermarriage between Ugandans and Kenyans (excluding those who live at the borders) is Amin.
Thousands of Ugandans, including a large chunk of its elite, many with their families, fled to Kenya in exile.
They created a new pool of eligible young men and women, who married locally.
This may sound cold-hearted, but because it is happening all over Africa, I would argue that refugees and displaced persons are dramatically improving Africa’s genetic pool by hooking up with the people in the societies where they have taken refuge.
It is striking to me just how many people have Ugandan names, and how many Kenyans I know who travel to remote parts of Uganda to visit grandparents, elderly aunts and uncles.
When you marry someone from a town or village that you had never heard of before you met him or her, then you have taken a big step toward becoming a global citizen. Not a bad thing.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/opOrEd/ ... index.html
By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO (email the author)
Posted Monday, October 26 2009 at 00:00
The lack of citizenship rights is wrecking Africa, so said a report by billionaire George Soros’ founded Open Society Institute (OSI).
In the report, released in Kampala on Thursday, OSI said the denial of citizenship rights has had devastating human consequences.
Millions of Africans without citizenship are deprived of the right to vote, to cross borders, and to access state health or education services.
It also notes that there is a record 12 million suffering internally displaced Africans. The reality, of course, is worse.
These displaced people also endure other heinous crimes like rape (not least at the hands of UN peacekeepers).
In the Democratic Republic of Congo — as in Kenya during the post-election violence of 2008, and recently in Guinea — rape is becoming a frightening medium scale industry.
That said, the torment of African refugees and displaced persons might not all be in vain.
In 1990, Rwandan refugees organised under the Rwanda Patriotic Front in Uganda took on the Kigali regime of the day, which had refused to repatriate refugees who were scattered around Eastern Africa. They took power in 1994.
Earlier Ugandan exiles (mainly the ones based in Kenya and Tanzania) were cobbled together in a united front by Julius Nyerere, and together with the Tanzanian army, ousted military dictator Idi Amin in 1979.
Refugees can take advantage of the freedoms they have in their host country to organise, and apply pressure on the regime back home to change its ways or be kicked out of power.
But there are more benefits, possibly bigger, benefits beyond that.
Most victims of conflict are peasants or workers, who would never have travelled far from their villages or hometowns.
To find sanctuary as refugees or IDPs in districts or countries far away from their own, they must pass through new places, encounter different cultures, and see a world they would never have in peaceful times.
Yes, people are left bitter by the humiliations and suffering of being refugees or IDPs, and sometimes get radicalised into seeking revenge upon their oppressors when the tables turn. However, they also become more cosmopolitan and worldly.
Uganda and Kenya provide a very good example.
The factor that is most responsible for intermarriage between Ugandans and Kenyans (excluding those who live at the borders) is Amin.
Thousands of Ugandans, including a large chunk of its elite, many with their families, fled to Kenya in exile.
They created a new pool of eligible young men and women, who married locally.
This may sound cold-hearted, but because it is happening all over Africa, I would argue that refugees and displaced persons are dramatically improving Africa’s genetic pool by hooking up with the people in the societies where they have taken refuge.
It is striking to me just how many people have Ugandan names, and how many Kenyans I know who travel to remote parts of Uganda to visit grandparents, elderly aunts and uncles.
When you marry someone from a town or village that you had never heard of before you met him or her, then you have taken a big step toward becoming a global citizen. Not a bad thing.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/opOrEd/ ... index.html
Aga Khan inspired Buganda
http://www.sundayvision.co.ug/detail.ph ... sId=701201
Buganda should emulate the Aga Khan
THE Mengo establishment should emulate the Aga Khan dynasty of economic and infrastructural development rather than political agitation. The Aga Khan royals decided to venture into economic development and it has developed into one of the world’s economic giant empires.
The Aga Khan empire can seek and arrange audience with world leaders and their demands are easily integrated into world economic policies.
The royals and administration at Mengo should start courting economic partners rather than starting up political marriages which will not stand the test of time (until death do them apart). It will be through economic and social development that Mengo and her subjects will realise their emancipation (federo emancipation).
They could start by building shopping malls in the redundant land at Lubiri, a leisure centre at Kasubi and many more vast lands within or outside the city centre and thereafter, start school projects and hospitals.
They could also think of starting up royal hospitals and schools across the region and beyond just like those belonging to Aga Khan.
Mengo could also borrow a leaf from the missionaries who built health and education institutions. Many Ugandans are being educated, treated and employed in former missionary society establishments like Mengo, Rubaga and Nsambya hospitals, St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, Gayaza High School, Bweranyangi Girls’ School.
Let Buganda seek and search for development partners across the world and they will sure fight poverty among its subjects through joint economic ventures.
Buganda is endowed with vast natural and human resources which can attract investors worldwide. It should use these resources to ensure development.
Patrick Ainomugisha
Kampala
Published on: Saturday, 14th November, 2009
Buganda should emulate the Aga Khan
THE Mengo establishment should emulate the Aga Khan dynasty of economic and infrastructural development rather than political agitation. The Aga Khan royals decided to venture into economic development and it has developed into one of the world’s economic giant empires.
The Aga Khan empire can seek and arrange audience with world leaders and their demands are easily integrated into world economic policies.
The royals and administration at Mengo should start courting economic partners rather than starting up political marriages which will not stand the test of time (until death do them apart). It will be through economic and social development that Mengo and her subjects will realise their emancipation (federo emancipation).
They could start by building shopping malls in the redundant land at Lubiri, a leisure centre at Kasubi and many more vast lands within or outside the city centre and thereafter, start school projects and hospitals.
They could also think of starting up royal hospitals and schools across the region and beyond just like those belonging to Aga Khan.
Mengo could also borrow a leaf from the missionaries who built health and education institutions. Many Ugandans are being educated, treated and employed in former missionary society establishments like Mengo, Rubaga and Nsambya hospitals, St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, Gayaza High School, Bweranyangi Girls’ School.
Let Buganda seek and search for development partners across the world and they will sure fight poverty among its subjects through joint economic ventures.
Buganda is endowed with vast natural and human resources which can attract investors worldwide. It should use these resources to ensure development.
Patrick Ainomugisha
Kampala
Published on: Saturday, 14th November, 2009