Mea culpa: Can it liberate?

And your silence is all to no avail; today the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does not betray our disgust, and our complicity.

-- Sartre, Preface to Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth

In my recurring fantasy, Americans awake in toxic shock at an administration so far beyond the pale that each of us, asphyxiated and sputtering with rage, simultaneously grasps our complicity, our guilt by association. If nothing else appalls and shames us into action, passivity as complicity just might. In that Rorschach moment where silence and complicity meet, responsibility for national wrongs becomes ours, just as the parents of bullying, violent children know they too are to blame. Once the floodgates of popular rage are open, our leaders will remember to whom they are accountable.

Find the rest of this post on the absence of outrage in American culture over at 3 Quarks Daily.

Victor Bout arrested

The infamous Russian, known to anyone who's worked in African conflicts over the last twenty years, was arrested today in a sting operation by US DEA officials in Thailand. The so-called 'Merchant of Death', the subject of a book and movie ('Lord of War', with Nicolas Cage) supplied arms and military hardware to all sides of almost every major global conflict, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet lived openly in a Moscow luxury high rise until his Thailand trip. His links to African blood diamonds and Al Qaeda financing have been the subject of much research, mostly by Doug Farah, formerly of the Washington Post.

Hopefully this will stop the US from hiring him as a subcontractor on its 'heavy lift' cargo operations, under KBR, Fedex and others. More on his liaisons with the very governments ostensibly seeking his arrest over the years on Doug Farah's blog here.

Here is Bout on an airfield in North Kivu in Eastern DRC during the war.

Franco, King of African Rumba

Africa has produced many musical giants. Some, like Fela Kuti and Cesaria Evora, achieve international renown; others influence a wide swathe of musicians but remain relatively unknown to a wider public. François Luambo Makiadi (6 July 1938 - 12 Oct. 1989), the Congolese bandleader and guitarist, is definitely in the latter category. Considered the father of the modern Congolese sound, he is a towering figure even in death, and certainly the greatest the DR Congo (formerly Zaire) has ever produced.

Read the rest of this story, with links to various Franco tracks and videos, over at 3QuarksDaily.

Bosana mayele ya bakoko te!

Surviving survival school

The novelty of the new year is only starting to dawn on me. Last year was amazing; ecstatic and sad in equal measure, like any satisfying novel or credible cosmology. This year started with an unexpected blast in the face: a week of wilderness survival training in southern Florida. Not of the 'me alone against nature' school, this approach emphasizes the acquisition of primitive/ancestral lifeskills over grin-and-bear-it privation and endurance. Its aims are far-reaching and total--providing one is ripe for conversion, the experience is nothing if not transformative. On the mundane, pragmatic level, its lessons will enable you to park you car and walk into Nature's green veil without a knife, food, water or clothing and 'live lavishly', or so the instructors like to repeat.

Read the rest of my article on the experience over at 3QD. The place is called Tom Brown's Tracker School, found here.

Some other good articles on the School and the man have appeared in Outside and the London Times.

The Ongoing Saga of South Sudan

Between northern Uganda and now Southern Sudan, heavily armed Nilotic pastoralists have been much on my plate these last two months. I wrote about Karamoja in November, a remote and volatile region of Uganda where life revolves around livestock, primarily the bovine variety. Tending and stealing cattle is how most Karamojong spend their time. I’m now in Southern Sudan where related Nilotic tribes live the same way, but in the context of a long civil war. Bullets fly and cattle reigns supreme.

Read the rest of this missive here.

Karamoja's Militant Pastoralism

Under colonial rule and since independence, the Ugandan state flag has rarely flown over Karamoja, the remote and semi-arid northeastern region bordering Kenya and Sudan. Armed violence was first documented there among resident pastoralist tribes in the early 1900s. Muskets and rifles gradually replaced spears, bows and arrows. Violence spiked to new levels when automatic weapons flooded the area after Idi Amin’s local armories were abandoned in his 1979 flight from power. At the same time a regional arms market encompassing seven local nations saw escalating armament and munitions stockpiling among Karamoja’s disparate clans.

Read the rest of this article over at 3 Quarks Daily.

This curious inscription was found on the door of a hut behind the local bishop's house in Kotido.

Karamoja's amazing bird life

I've been in Uganda's remote and arid Karamoja region for the last few weeks looking at abuses against children by local warriors and in the government's forcible disarmament program. A fascinating context, but the real attraction has been the bird life!

Clockwise: African Hoopoe, Go-away Bird, Secretary Bird, Lilac-breasted Roller, and the Crowned Crane, Uganda's national symbol. These arent my photos but I have seen all these during my visit, plus many others. Birds dont scatter from gunfire, it seems.

Independent Media in Sri Lanka

“These days, we have a saying among journalists,” a radio features reporter in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province told me. “Don’t open your mouth—except to eat.” Disappearances and killings of journalists are on the increase. Diplomats and aid officials characterize the Lankan media as “one of the most closed in the world.” Little wonder that the country’s ongoing civil war rarely makes the international news wires. For those with a vested interest in waging war by any means, a carefully cultivated information blackout is key to sustaining the pugilistic Lebensraum.

Read the rest of this piece here.

The Reluctant Swami

Leaving Zimbabwe in 1991 for my first visit to India, I traveled directly to the Sivananda Vedanta Ashram in the wooded hills above Thiruvananthapuram, capital of Kerala.

Through a friend I knew the Ashram would be holding a five-week intensive training for aspiring yoga teachers, which I was not. I knew nothing of yoga besides its sequence of warm-up of postures, the so-called “sun salutation.” The training would force me to dive deeply into yoga, well over my head—exactly how I like learning experiences to be.

Read the rest of this post about the absurdities and rewards of seeking spiritual insight in a foreign place, at 3 Quarks Daily.

India Turns Sixty

Over at 3 Quarks Daily, find this travelogue account of the Indian subcontinent as it celebrates its sixtieth anniversary since independence.

Monrovia mural

For the rest of my article on current conditions in Liberia and the region, please click here.

Congolese Pygmies in a master/slave dynamic with local Bantu

I just returned from a trip to assess access to basic services (health, education, etc) of Congolese Pygmies in the province of Equateur. They are largely sedentary but have little access to their own land, and work as day laborers in the fields of the Bantu families who 'own' them. An article on the experience can be found here on 3 quarks daily.

Could France’s new odd couple—Sarkozy and Kouchner—spell the end of French privilege for Africa’s most venal?

In the 1960s, post-colonial Africa was the most hopeful place on the planet. Post-partum exuberance in Europe’s former colonies was infectious and abundant. Yet fate has not been kind to sub-Saharan Africa. From Namibia to Guinea to Somalia, the path of most sub-Saharan nations has traced an arc of intimate complicity with the predatory appetites of their former colonial masters. Nowhere has this neo-colonial continuation of anti-development and enrichment by and for the few been more evident than in France’s former colonies.

The nature of governance in these ex-colonies attests to the abiding power of the self-serving instinct and immediate gain, over and against the long-term goal of national progress. Such is the confounding irony of Africa’s entire post-colonial era in nations previously occupied by France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium alike: why is the colonial, predatory model of governance so faithfully re-enacted by ruling African elites? It’s as if all that negative conditioning only succeeded in instilling a predatory instinct in the new ruling class. Why are Mandela-style visions for collective prosperity not more common, given the shared experience of subjugation and occupation across the continent?

read the rest of this article, posted at 3quarksdaily, here.

Evaluating hurricane recovery in the US

Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area early morning August 29, 2005. The storm surge breached the city's levees at multiple points, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, and hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita re-flooded much of the area.

As someone who works on disaster relief programs worldwide, I was invited to come for a month and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various projects in New Orleans and Biloxi, two centers of urban devastation. The experience thus far has been surprisingly positive and inspiring, an unexpected antidote to my entrenched cynicism regarding relief efforts in places like Darfur or Congo, where I typically work.

[...] I've pondered over some perhaps facile but nonetheless empirical truths about the dynamic of human response to extreme disasters.

Read the rest of this post at 3 Quarks Daily...

The ICC and the war in northern Uganda

'By today’s measures of geopolitical relevance, Uganda would seem an insignificant country. Its name may trigger a few neuron firings among those who’ve read Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, or seen its recent film adaptation starring Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin.

Ugandans who’ve seen the film are less than delighted. Amin’s son allegedly complained to reporters, “He [Whitaker] doesn’t even look like my father.” More clueful viewers writing in local newspapers claim the film relies on the tired reference of African dysfunction to tell and sell a story to an international audience. Much agreed—although I appreciated the film’s portrayal of complicity with evil as a creeping, dimly conscious evolution, capable of crippling the purest intentions.'

Read more from my April article for 3 Quarks Daily on the war with the LRA and how the ICC indictments and the UN Security Council are affecting change here.

The ICC: ‘A giant without arms or legs’

'A gripping and maddening slow-motion spectacle, last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Situation in Afghanistan (available on C-Span), drifted predictably to Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan as senators and experts grappled over why Afghans, like Iraqis, could not ‘get it together after all we’ve done for them’. Another exasperated senator demanded, uncomprehending of why the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was still inconclusive: ‘Why not raise the price on Osama’s head by a million USD a week?’ It is currently valued at $25 million. Surely more millions would do the trick.'

Read more of a piece I wrote in early March 07 for 3 quarks daily on international justice for war crimes and the ICC experiment here.

Evangelical aid agencies finally under scrutiny

Often operating below the radar and marching to their own drum, humanitarian relief efforts funded and implemented by evangelical Christians are a common feature in many of the world's emergencies.

An AP report from Uganda addresses the professionalism and qualifications of one such organization, Samaritan's Purse, led by Franklin Graham, Reverend Billy Graham's son. Billy Graham was described by Time magazine as an American 'hero and icon' of the twentieth century.


The AP story begins:
"Telephone to Jesus. Hello?" the children of Aler refugee camp in northern Uganda sing, their bare feet thumping the ground as they dance wildly in their concrete chapel. Most camp residents have never used a phone, but they are learning about Jesus. The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, smiled as he watched the children — members of a club run by Samaritan's Purse, the Christian missionary organization he leads.


Critics accuse them of taking advantage of vulnerable communities — forcing people to abandon traditional beliefs in exchange for desperately needed goods and medicine. Graham, though, says his group is meeting spiritual as well as physical needs, and he's proud of what has been accomplished.

Read the rest of the story here.


In 2003, Slate reported on Franklin's global vision as informed by his faith. It is worth a read, and starts thus:

"Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham and a far more influential figure in the evangelical Christian community than Jerry Falwell or even Pat Robertson. Graham is viewed as the torch-carrier for his father, who is still among the most beloved figures in American Christianity. Moreover, the Graham family is close to Bush. Billy Graham led Bush to Christianity in the 1980s; Franklin Graham delivered the invocation at his presidential inauguration.

In addition to being publicly allied with the Bush administration, Graham also happens to be stridently anti-Islam. His list of anti-Islam comments is long; his most succinct was that Islam is a "very evil and wicked religion."

Guinea: Arising after two decades of civic slumber

From ICG's new report: "Guinea has been dominated for nearly 23 years by the unique figure of General Conté, corrupt and desperate to hold onto his privileges. The opposition to the Conté regime, begun during the general strike at the beginning of the year, has taken a bloody turn and has mutated into an unprecedented popular uprising.

Guinea now faces two possible scenarios. There is still a chance, though a diminishing one, for a negotiated solution involving key Guinean, regional and wider international actors. Alternatively, if the Conté regime continues to rely on military repression, it could rapidly bring Guinea to a dramatic spiral of violence: full popular insurgency, with increasing chaos that is likely to stimulate a military take-over in a blood-bath, leading in turn to a possible civil war comparable to those that have torn apart its neighbours in the past decade and with uncontrollable consequences.

Western governments as well as multinational firms that benefit from the country’s natural resources value political quiet but they would be making a serious mistake if this led them to support, even by passivity, an effort to retain the Conté system (with or without its creator)."


Read more from the new Crisis Group Report on recent events, called "Guinea: Change or Chaos"

BBC is doing some good reporting as well here.

Paris: New proscriptions against use of child soldiers

From the Unicef website:

"Fifty-eight countries represented at a high-level conference in Paris today committed themselves to stopping the unlawful recruitment and use of children in
armed conflicts.

[Former child soldier Ishmael Beah holds up the Paris Commitments at the end of the historic ‘Free Children from War’ conference in Paris.]

The Paris Commitments, as they are now known, lay out detailed guidelines for protecting children from recruitment and for providing assistance to those already involved with armed groups or forces. They will complement the political and legal mechanisms already in place at the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court and other bodies trying to protect children from exploitation and violence.

The conference, which was jointly organized by the French Government and UNICEF, attracted dozens of government ministers, donors, the heads of several UN agencies – including UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman – and many non-governmental organizations."

Read more about the Paris conference here.

And read the recent NYT article on Ishmael Beah and his forthcoming memoir called “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” babout life as a child soldier here.

UN Reform: "Death by 1,000 meetings"

So stands the threat of fillibuster by poor nation member states, who oppose the UN reform agenda that new Secretary General Ban Ki-moon inherited from Kofi Annan.

"Developing nations withheld approval on Monday of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's reorganization plans, supported by the United States and Europeans, who warned of death by 1,000 meetings.

The secretary-general, in an effort to balance posts between major contributors and poor nations, urged 192 member states in the General Assembly to back his proposals to split the peacekeeping department in two and downgrade disarmament affairs but attach it to his own office."

The new SG is finding out that "when you want to change anything at the United Nations, the first question is, who moved my cheese?" (Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman)

Read more from the Reuters text here.

My Life in the Bush of ... 3 Quarks Daily

If I'm not here clicking and typing away for this blog, I'm probably at 3 Quarks Daily where I write longer pieces as a guest columnist every fourth Monday.

3 Quarks is a happy place, and comes highly recommended from notable big brains Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, even David Byrne.

Editor and friend S. Abbas Raza describes the aim and structure of the site:

On this website, my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating. We want to provide you with a one-stop intellectual surfing experience by culling good stuff from all over and putting it in one place. In other words, we are what has come to be known as a "filter blog." And we try not to be afraid of challenging material. Though we are a filter blog on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists.

Hope you will drop by for a visit...

NGOs to UN: 'Stop Playing Donor!'

Research released today by Save the Children UK says that the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), which was created almost a year ago to accelerate funding for agencies addressing rapid-onset emergencies, is inefficient and actually reduces the amount of money going directly to work on the ground.

The fundamental flaw of the CERF mechanism is that non-UN aid agencies, like Save the Children, are not allowed to receive direct funding from international donors, despite the fact they are usually first on the ground and deliver more than half of all emergency relief.

Basically, where NGOs like Save the Children traditionally get their money directly from donor governments to implement aid programs on the ground, the creation of large funding pools like the CERF mean the introduction of two new 'middle men' into the equation: the CERF itself (located in Geneva) and the UN agency dispensing the cash in country to the receiving NGO. I recently evaluated a similar fund called the Rapid Response Mechanism and found more positive results in terms of impact for beneficiaries. Donors tend to like the CERF and other UN-created funds because it fits with donor governments' desires to see a more robust, accountable UN. NGOs are divided on whether the new middle men are an added value, and Save is clearly opposed.

Their points about overheads are valid. Both UN agencies and the aid agencies carrying out project work are entitled to take a 7% cut of donor funding to pay for overheads and support. Save the Children’s research finds that, if both the UN agency and the implementing aid agency take overheads, only 86p per pound reaches the beneficiaries compared to 93p if non-UN agencies were given funding directly.

Save the Children is calling on the UN, and specifically the CERF board members, to cut out the middle-man and change the rules to allow aid agencies to access the fund directly in the same way as UN agencies.

Read the SC-UK report here: Exclusion of NGOs: The Fundamental Flaw of the CERF

'Third World': Expect spacejunk from Davos

Davos luminaries will soon be launching laptops to Africa's poorest, or so runs the current saviour complex of today's tech gurus. An article from yesterday's NY Times offered a revealing glimpse into the type of utopian fantasies circulating at this year's Davos World Econcomic Forum.

"How to Wire the Third World" describes how today's technology CEOs dream of global relevance via the salvation of the world's poor. Their debates over how to solve the global 'digital divide' bear the mark of all starry-eyed social engineering endeavors, with the world's digitally illiterate providing a conveniently captive set of guinea pigs. Lack of food, water, education and safety for many in the developing world apparently matter little when you can throw a $100 laptop at the problem.

[An MIT rep demonstrates the $100 laptop]

I'm not one to call the kettle black, for the international development and disaster relief business is rife with fantasies and funding dedicated to a 'better world' for the most destitute of the planet. But at Davos, where so many rich people and self-proclaimed visionaries mingle annually, one would expect their underlings to have researched what prior forms of literacy, infrastructure and knowledge are required if a computer is to mean anything other than spacejunk to an subsistence farmer, a former child soldier, or the third wife of a man with 27 children to feed.

I'm soon headed to northern Uganda to research violations against children by the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan National Army. I'll keep one eye skyward for any falling laptops--although such spacejunk is already common in rural Africa. I used to work with Dinka pastoralists in Southern Sudan who decorated their cattle by hanging discarded CDs from their horns. The CDs were recovered from the trash pits of international NGOs working to improve the lives of southerners during the war with Khartoum. Of course they had no idea what the CDs were, other than round reflective disks once used by foreigners. What would the Dinka do with laptops? Maybe trap wild game in the mighty jaws of the hinge mechanism connecting keyboard and screen.

Sudan, Chad and CAR: a cauldron for civilians

 The nexus of conflict and refugee flows between Darfur, Eastern Chad and the Central African Republic continues to boil over, with tragic impact on civilian lives. The Council on Foreign Relations just released this concise summary of the dynamic and its humanitarian consequences.

Rwanda mediates between DRC govt and Nkunda

Rwanda is mediating in talks between a government delegation from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and renegade Congolese General Laurent Nkunda, a Rwandan military spokesman said Wednesday. "This shows the confidence the Congolese government has in the government of Rwanda," he said.

Nkunda launched attacks on Congolese army positions near North Kivu's provincial capital Goma in late November, sparking on-off fighting.

Read the Reuters article here.




 

DRC: "Dubious mining deals..."

John LeCarre, the celebrated author, and Jason Stearns, 
analyst for the International Crisis Group, published an op-ed in the Boston Globe just before Christmas describing the 
challenges to establishing fiscal legitimacy in DRC post-elections. 

"JOSEPH KABILA was recently sworn in as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ceremony marked the end of a tumultuous peace process that led the country out of seven years of war. [...] But dubious mining deals between the Congolese government and international corporations may be threatening the nation's chances of rising from the ashes."

Read "Getting Congo's wealth to its people" here...

Uganda: Is the ICC a carrot or stick to the LRA?

[LRA: children killing children]

The answer is much more complicated. Local perceptions and opposition to the ICC in Uganda are extremely high, despite popular will to see an end to the ruthless terror of the Lord's Resistance Army in the north. Published by Zed Books, Tim Allen's recent book defends the institution's pursuit of LRA leaders and tries to understand Ugandan opposition to the ICC.

From the publisher's note, "The International Criminal Court has run into serious problems with its first big case - the situation in northern Uganda. There is no doubt that appalling crimes have occurred here. Joseph Kony‘s Lord‘s Resistance Army have abducted thousands, many of them children, and have systematically tortured, raped, maimed and killed their victims.

Nevertheless, the ICC has confronted outright hostility from a wide range of groups, including traditional leaders, representatives of the Catholic and Anglican Churches, and non-governmental organizations. Even the Ugandan government, which invited the ICC to become involved in 2003, has been expressing serious reservations. For many, the Court is spoiling the peace process and is making continued warfare and suffering more likely.

This book argues that much of the antipathy to the ICC is based upon ignorance and misconception. Drawing on field research in Uganda, it shows that victims are much more interested in punitive international justice than has been suggested, and that the ICC has made resolution of the war more likely."

Darfur: Western diplomats press for sanctions

From today's Financial Times:

Sanctions would force change of policy in Sudan.
A proposal from 15 former foreign ministers...

"The surest way to save lives in Darfur would be through a fully observed ceasefire leading to a sustained political settlement that allows refugees and the displaced to return to their homes. In the interim, the under-manned and under-equipped African Union peacekeeping force must be enlarged and strengthened. In meetings in Addis Ababa and Abuja last month, a broad diplomatic coalition recommended a hybrid force that would combine AU personnel with financial, logistics and other support from the United Nations.

In the past, President Bashir has claimed that outside efforts to save lives in Darfur were a ploy to mask western interference in Sudan’s internal affairs. The Addis-Abuja proposal clearly negates that claim, coming as it does with support from the AU, Arab League and UN Security Council (including China). This is an African and Arab-supported plan to save Sudanese lives. Mr Bashir has no more excuses. [...]"

About 2.5 million Darfuris have been made homeless by the conflict

Ethiopia: Mengistu convicted... of genocide?

The BBC reports on the conclusions of the marathon Mengistu trial:

"Ethiopia's Marxist ex-ruler, Mengistu Haile Mariam, has been found guilty of genocide after a 12-year trial.

The former leader was tried in his absence. He has been in exile in Zimbabwe since being ousted in 1991 and many fear he will never face justice. In a notorious campaign - known as the Red Terror - thousands of suspected opponents were rounded up and executed and their bodies tossed on the streets. Mengistu and dozens of his officials could face the death penalty. " [read rest here]

Mugabe in Zimbabwe of course refuses to extradite Mengistu. Hoorah, the African Old Boy's Club is alive and well. No surprise there.

Still, the Mengistu conviction is surprising. Mostly, why genocide--what 'genus' of Ethiopians were targeted and killed, besides those sharing the non-physical trait of opposing socialist policies implemented by the Dirgue, the military junta that ousted Haile Selassie in 1974?

Literature on Ethiopia's 'Red Terror' tends to amalgamate the government-sanctioned killing of political dissidents with those who died from famine (approx. 1.5 million) in rural areas in the late 70s and early 80s. These deaths resulted, so the argument goes, from land redistribution programs that forced the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of farmers to uncultivated, barren areas of the country. Little information is available on the legal arguments used to frame the totality of these deaths as genocidal, which would require proof of a state apparatus constructed deliberately for the single purpose of identifying and terminating the lives of individuals exhibiting certain physical traits. Rwanda and Nazi Germany are the classic examples.

My sense has always been that Mengistu's Ethiopia fashioned itself (with Soviet support) a laboratory for Marxist land reform schemes that failed miserably, such that millions perished, as lab rats do in any controlled environment when an experiment runs amok. Large scale humanitarian tragedy, yes, made even worse by a lack of justice for its victims. Social engineering in hyper-drive, yes, but a genocide?

The affair also made me do a quick mental inventory of other African dictators who absconded with their crimes--where are they now?

Idi Amin, the self-proclaimed 'King of Scotland', died in Jeddah in 2003 after a long exile. His ouster by Tanzanian troops ('regime change' a l'africaine) in 1979 ended an eight year rule. Amin never faced trial for his alleged crimes. Up to 400,000 people are believed to have been killed under his rule. [Amin in reflection: "No coffee, just more medals."]

Chad's Hissein Habre is still alive in Senegal, having fled in 1990 after ouster by Idriss Deby, the country's currently beleaguered president. A Chadian government inquiry accused Habre's regime of 40,000 political killings and 200,000 cases of torture during his 1982-1990 rule. After significant international pressure and a call for extradition for trail in Belgium, Senegal agreed to undertake Habre's trial. It has requested international funding to do so.

[With Mitterand, looking rather like a Whirling Dervish.]

Liberia's Charles Taylor first found refuge in Nigeria, but has since been extradited to the ICC in the Hague. He is accused of funding Sierra Leone's former rebels, the Revolutionary United Front by selling diamonds on their behalf and buying weapons for them. RUF fighters were notorious for hacking off the arms and legs of the civilian population with machetes, as well as killing, raping and robbing them.
[See other charges against Taylor here]

UN Convention against Corruption: will it have teeth?

Transparency International released its Global Corruption Barometer 2006 on Dec 7 last week, in advance of the third annual International Anti-corruption Day.

Transparency International looks at corruption from several angles. Its Global Corruption Barometer tries to show corruption through the eyes of ordinary citizens, by polling around 59,000 people in 62 different countries. It asks people their opinions about which public sectors are most corrupt, and which spheres of life are most affected by corruption (family, politics, business), and how their government is doing in its fight against corruption. This Barometer report investigates bribery particularly--who pays what to whom, why and how much--particularly regarding the forces of order (police, military, civil servants).

International Anti-corruption Day is in recognition of the signing of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in Mexico three years ago. This agreement (in PDF here) came into force last year: 140 countries have now signed on, and 80 have ratified. DR Congo is not among them.

From 10 to 14 December, the UNCAC countries will meet in Jordan to decide the fate of the agreement: the funding of monitoring, how to ensure compliance and secure the repatriation of stolen wealth, among other issues. Compliance, or enforcement of norms, and the repatriation of stolen wealth are of obvious relevance to numerous African countries, particularly those with natural resources and little effective control over their extraction.

On unregulated resource extraction in Africa, the lobby group Fatal Transactions is active and interesting. Their March 2006 report on extractive mining in Katanga, DRC, is worth a look: "The State vs. the People. Governance, mining and the transitional regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo".

CAR: Staging ground for regional conflicts

And is itself a powderkeg.... Intelligent coverage about dynamics in this little understood region in today's NYT:

The Central African Republic — so important as a potential bulwark against the chaos and misery of its neighbors in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan — is being dragged right into the dangerous and ever-expanding conflict that has begun to engulf central Africa.
So porous are its borders and ungoverned are parts of its territory that foreign rebels are using the Central African Republic as a staging ground to mount attacks over the border, spreading what the United Nations has called the world’s “gravest humanitarian crisis.”

Read more here...

DRC: Volcanoes, rebel attacks and tense elections all in one day

What other country can boast such diverse forms of crippling instability, all occuring simultaneously? If the Bemba fanatics in Kinshasa dont lynch you for speaking Swahili and supporting Kabila, Nkunda's men around Goma will gladly terminate you on suspicion of 'oppressing Tutsis'. And don't go seeking refuge in the wilds around Goma, as you're sure to get cooked by fresh lava flows from Mt. Nyamuragira, which erupted last night just outside of town.

Official election results were announced last night by Supreme Court officials in Kinshasa. They spoke under heavy armed guard from their temporary digs in the Ministry of the Interior, following last week's incendiary ravaging of the Supreme Court building by rabid Bemba supporters. Never has the thirst for lawlessness been more accurately expressed. Dont care for rule of law? Just burn down the Supreme Court.

In any other country, tanks would have flooded the streets in retaliation, and martial law immediately declared. In Kinshasa, police forces stood agape for a few reflective moments before the ravenous crowd of assailants, and promptly fled. UN peacekeepers arrived after the fact. The national army did not respond. Days later, Kabila formally asked Bemba to remove some of his estimated 1000-strong private army, of which around 60 were reported to have left the city. Congolese pundits blamed the international community for letting this 'blow to the heart and soul of Congo's national integrity' transpire uncontested, and in broad daylight. When will Congolese leaders assume the minimum of responsibility for their predicament?

From the BBC election graphic above one notes the clear division in voter preference between East and West, as though little mattered more than the geographical origin of the candidates themselves. Throughout their respective campaigns, neither candidate ever developed much in the way of political platform or agenda for reform. It was largely a high school popularity contest, costing the international community over $400 million. The cult of personality as the primary ingredient of political success in the Congo has changed little from the Mobutu era. Old habits, like dictators, die hard.

Now, Kabila has five years to address the country's problems, or will otherwise (one hopes) be voted out of office. Perhaps that in itself is worth all the effort, risk and cost of introducing democratic process to this country. Immediate benefits are intangible at this point.

On a different front here in the far East of the country, on the Rwandan border, the town of Goma has been on tenterhooks these last few days for very different reasons. Dissident general Laurent Nkunda of the national army has been rallying his forces to take the town of Sake, some 15 miles from Goma.


His apparent intention was to repeat his bloody takeover of Bukavu in June 2004. Then, UN peacekeepers stood by and watched, as the national army itself was crushed by Nkunda's powerful but limited number of men. This time, however, MONUC forces were intent on defending Goma, and spent much of yesterday reclaiming Sake and pursuing Nkunda's men with a combination of ground fire and helicopter gunships.

[displacements in Sake]

Nkunda's attack was reportedly triggered by the summary execution of a Tutsi man at a Sake checkpoint, a man with direct ties to Nkunda. Given Nkunda's pretense of defending his oppressed Tutsi brethren across eastern Congo, the murder provided a convenient pretext to begin military operations again, silent since August 2006.

Having been routed by MONUC forces, today the rumor is that Nkunda is ready to negotiate, although his exact terms and conditions are not clear. Amnesty for war crimes committed during his Bukavu invasion are likely among them.


On a final front, just outside Goma at 8pm last night, Mt. Nyumalugira erupted, sending lava 150m into the night sky. There is no threat to the town or its residents, as happened with Nyiragongo in January 2002. Goma town was eviscerated, and thousands were displaced. Whether the gods are crazy, angry or celebrating current events in Congo, no one bothers to speculate. Brute life soldiers on.

[satellite image of Goma, Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira]

Rwanda: France weighs in on genocide

In the event of any lingering doubts you might have about the facts of the Rwandan genocide, have no fear. France is now the self-proclaimed expert on what triggered the genocide, and who is responsible. A French court has issued warrants for their arrest. The indicted happen to be nine of President Paul Kagame's closest government aides--including armed forces chief James Kabarebe and army chief-of-staff Charles Kayonga.

They are accused of involvement in the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwanda's former president - an incident the French judge claims sparked the mass slaughter.

The elephant in the room here is the preposterous notion that the downing of then President Habyarimana's aircraft was what triggered the genocide. The French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, is investigating the case because the crew of the plane were French and the families filed a case in France in 1998. The credibility of the case appears to rest on a brazen re-reading of history, whereby the Hutu extremists who murdered over 800,000 Tutsis were somehow directed or at least in collaboration with the Tutsi-led army (RPF), supposedly directed by Kagame from exile in Uganda.

Go France! Invent the facts and make it up as you go--the rest of the world does it equally shamelessly!

I cant believe anyone is taking this seriously. Habyarimana's assassination by surface-to-air missile and the assassination of 800,000 Tutsis by machete and petrol fires are separate events. Thousands of eyewitnesses and survivors to the genocide have already attested to the identity of hundreds of convicted genocidaires, all Hutu, most unapologetic: none of them claimed direction or affiliation from Kagame, or any other Tutsi on the planet. Why would they?

BBC and AFP have been reporting on recent developments:

"The French allegations have sparked anger in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, where around 25,000 people are reported to have taken part in a government-organised demonstration against France. Foreign Minister Charles Murigande told AFP news agency Kigali had recalled its ambassador to Paris as they didn't "see why he should be there at this point"." I'm tempted to drive over to Kigali this weekend and savor all the anti-French ruckus.


On an entirely different front -- I'm a big fan of flags, so I cant avoid commenting on Rwanda's 'new look'.


Here's the new Rwandan flag, since Kagame took power after the events of 1994. It looks kind of South Pacific to me, less austere than the old one below.

Such was the old Rwandan flag, so devoid of creativity they had to put a big 'R' in the middle to distinguish it from the dozens of other African countries with this same color format.

DRC: Effects of Kabila's victory

Last week's announcement of the final results from the presidential elections were met with widespread celebration here in the Eastern provinces. I was in Beni, a commercial center in the Grand Nord part of North Kivu province, and everyone went wild. Not so in the Western provinces, particularly in Kinshasa, where Bemba had the majority. "Awa tozo sepila, kuna na Kin bazo lela" was the assessment of one smiling man here. (Here we're celebrating, there they're crying). Kabila won with 58.3% percent of the vote; turnout was pretty poor but I dont have the exact figure.

Bemba, the loser, claims he will contest the elections through legal process, which remains to be seen. Kinshasa is still tense, but no acts of violence since the announcement have been reported.

Here in Ituri it is relatively calm, although populations continue to be displaced in clashes between FARDC (govt army) and local militia groups. As the wider Congolese context is pacified, Ituri no longer qualifies as a 'war within a war', as was long the case. Kabila's election is likely to have a positive effect on the disarmament negotiations with local militia leaders, currently underway. Three leaders of different groups "want to be generals in Kabila's army" (they probably didnt vote Bemba!), and this may provide the carrot that should string them down the path of pacification. They are also demanding amnesty from ICC indictment, which remains to be seen. DRC government negotiators are in the area now meeting with the three leaders, something that has never been able to transpire in the past.

Kinshasa voted in favor of Bemba, from Equateur province north of Kinshasa, claiming he's the "son of the soil" (mwana mboka) -- not Kabila, who they argue is really a Rwandan, nor does he speak Lingala. The two candidates represent the two major cultures (east and west) defining and dividing the national psyche. The electoral contest has strained the limits of their compatibility: between east and west, that is.

Perhaps this grievance will abate with time, particularly if Kabila actually does something to improve the lot of the country, which wouldn’t be hard since its lows have never been lower. Political will to do so has been absent in this country for 40 years. For reasons I find incredibly myopic, people in Kinshasa think that whoever runs the country has to speak lingala and hail from Equateur, like Mobutu.

Very little time to blog or even breathe here but hope to catch up soon.

DRC: ICC 'pre-trial' hearing of Ituri militia leader

From a recent Human Rights Watch press release:
"Under rebel leader Thomas Lubanga, in ICC custody since March 2006, the Union des Patriotes Congolaises committed serious crimes in Ituri, including murder, torture, rape and mutilation of civilians. "

[Lubanga with underage cannon fodder]

"For example, UPC combatants under the leadership of Lubanga slaughtered at least 800 civilians on the basis of their ethnicity in the gold mining region of Mongbwalu between November 2002 and June 2003. More than 60,000 civilians have been slaughtered by armed groups in Ituri since the beginning of the conflict, according to the UN."

Human Rights Watch further reports that Lubanga's case will be considered for sufficient evidence before passing to trial, although the only current charges against him concern the recruitment and use of child soldiers. Numerous other rebel leaders, active in Ituri and elsewhere, have much blood on their hands but have been given military posts in the newly integrated national army as a means of securing the cessation of hostilities.

Impunity for rebel leaders is a useful bargaining tool when trying to pacify on the cheap, as the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the Congo is learning. Lubanga was handed over to the ICC as a 'stick' to encourage other rebels to concede to ceasefire terms, though this is not working out as planned. For victims and their families, an ICC trial of Lubanga on the basis of child soldiers is mere theatre, a miniscule comfort given the scale of carnage associated with this war. Yet this possibility for justice in the Hague is the only light in Congo's legal darkness, whose judiciary system is non-existent and revenge the only form of justice available to victims today.

Read the ICC press release here.

Congo's Pygmies: Can they be 'made equal'?

For 2007 UN agencies are considering intensive programming aimed at establishing the equal rights of Congolese Pygmies (Bambuti and other groups) long denied by the Bantu groups dominating Congolese society, politics and administration. There is little to romanticize in the Pygmy's remote and rustic lifestyle, whose perpetuation is largely the direct result of relentless discrimination by the Congolese majority.

A National Geographic site covers their status in the country today, complete with accusations of cannibalism committed against various Pygmy groups by presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba's armed group, the Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo (MLC). The degree to which they are subjected to an unparalleled degree of humiliation, ridicule and abuse by Bantu groups across the country explains their currently abject state.

Within the last five years, I have had the occasion to work directly with Pygmy groups outside Isiro, Orientale, and in the Mai Ndombe region of northern Bandundu. In both instances I was struck by the automatic and fierce prejudice with which they were treated by the surrounding Bantu Congolese, people who were living at basically the same level of extreme indigence and dispossession as the Pygmies themselves. The other primary characteristic of their misery was the degree to which they had internalized the Bantu discourse of their inferiority and ignorance.

They were at such a nadir that they actually believed the racist slander to which they were constantly subjected; their inferiority complex was total and all-consuming. Every aspect of their lives was to them proof not of the injustice of the discriminatory discourse around them but of their own failure, their incompetence, their baseness. Their identity as they expressed it in focus group discussions consisted precisely of the very insults they heard throughout their lives from their Bantu neighbors. It was stunning and tragic—they were totally brainwashed. I would not be surprised if the majority of Pygmy communities in the DRC suffered this same degree of self-abnegation, the result of the extreme prejudice and humiliation to which they are constantly subjected.

I am curious to see how the UN approaches this issue: clearly Congolese society is at fault, rife as it is with profound racism and prejudice towards its original inhabitants. Project proposals I have seen base themselves on UN legal precedents recognizing and protecting the rights of indigenous groups, based on the principle of 'autochthony'.

I’m not convinced that in a Congolese context the autochthony argument is the most appropriate to defend/restore their rights and equality. Autochthony as the right to equal treatment of oppressed indigenous groups has its role in international law, although I'm quite sure no such precedent exists in Congolese law.

But are victimhood and a history of oppression the most constructive rhetorical arguments to restore equality between peoples? Victimhood as a tool of empowerment—'victimhood' being a placeholder for autochthony given the oppression indigenous peoples have universally experienced—does not seem to result in sustainable integration or equality between peoples; it simply perpetuates a discourse of difference, resentment and the ‘you owe us’ mentality. If such is the result, I dont see how it can serve the objectives of integration or equality at all.

Even the Congolese see themselves largely as the ‘victims’ of Rwanda, the international community, colonialism, ad infinitum, to the point where they take no responsibility for their predicament because ‘the world owes them’. As anyone who has spent a long time in this country would agree, this enormous and largely vacuous grievance has achieved nothing for the Congolese. My sense is that autochthony—often a sanitized synonym for ‘oppressed group’—as a rhetorical argument to assert the equality of minorities can backfire with disastrous consequences. What worse fate for the Pygmies to go from the frying pan into the fire by trying to beat back ingrained Bantu prejudice with the victim argument... . But, who knows, there are definitely no geniuses at the helm.

More as the 'plotting for Pygmy equality' unfolds...