Ghana's former president receives lavish perks package
Herald News ServicesJanuary 22, 2009
Ghana's former president, John Kufuor, is to be given six chauffeur-driven cars, two houses and annual overseas holidays, all funded by impoverished taxpayers.
Despite the country being "close to bankrupt," a parliamentary committee approved the package for all former presidents. Supporters of the measure said it made it easier for presidents to step down if they lost elections.
Kufuor was feted for being a rare African leader who fought corruption and retired without challenging his country's constitutional two-term limit.
His reputation for honesty has made the outcry over his benefits package all the more fierce in a country that receives more than 85 million pounds ($149 million Cdn) a year in British aid and is still blighted by poverty.
"I have agonized since I heard the package because it is obnoxious and an insult to Ghanaians," said Tony Aidoo, an MP from the ruling party.
A source close to Kufuor told a newspaper he did not want to "suck the state dry," but that some sort of substantial resettlement package was necessary to "dignify" the position of former presidents.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
AFRICA
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world ... babwe.html
January 24, 2009
Desperate Children Flee Zimbabwe, for Lives Just as Bleak
By BARRY BEARAK
MUSINA, South Africa — They bear the look of street urchins, their eyes on the prowl for useful scraps of garbage and their bodies covered in clothes no cleaner than a mechanic’s rags.
Near midnight, these Zimbabwean children can be found sleeping outside almost anywhere in this border city. A 12-year-old girl named No Matter Hungwe, hunched beneath the reassuring exterior light of the post office, said it was hunger that had pushed her across the border alone.
Her father is dead, and she wanted to help her mother and younger brothers by earning what she could here in South Africa — within certain limits, anyway. “Some men — men with cars — want to sleep with me,” she said, considering the upside against the down. “They have offered me 100 rand,” about $10.
With their nation in a prolonged sequence of crises, more unaccompanied children and women than ever are joining the rush of desperate Zimbabweans illegally crossing the frontier at the Limpopo River, according to the police, local officials and aid workers.
What they are escaping is a broken country where half the people are going hungry, most schools and hospitals are closed or dysfunctional and a cholera epidemic has taken a toll in the thousands. Yet they are arriving in a place where they are unwelcome and are resented as rivals for jobs. Last year, Zimbabweans were part of the quarry in a spate of mob attacks against foreigners.
For those in the know, crossing the border can be a simple chore, a bribe paid on one side and a second bribe on the other. But for the uninitiated and the destitute, the journey is as uncertain as the undercurrents of the Limpopo and the appetites of the crocodiles.
Where is it best to enter the river? Where are the holes in the barbed fences beyond? Where do the soldiers patrol? Perhaps the greatest risk is the gumagumas — the swindlers, thieves and rapists who stalk the vulnerable as they wander in the bush.
Williad Fire, 16, who arrived here on Jan. 4, is one of nine boys who came from Murimuka, a town in a mining region of central Zimbabwe. His story is a fairly typical one of serial catastrophe. He was living with an uncle after his parents died, but then the uncle died, too, stricken in November with an illness that Williad described with a mystified shrug: “He was vomiting blood.”
The boy was hungry, and scrounging in South Africa seemed to hold more promise than scrounging at home. To get train fare south, he sold his most valuable possession, a secondhand pair of Puma sneakers two sizes too big. He and eight friends then did odd jobs in Beitbridge, on the Zimbabwean side of the border, until they had saved about $35.
From there, Williad’s story takes another dismal turn. When the boys neared the river, they were confronted by the gumagumas, who pretended to be helpful, then pounced. “They hit me in the forehead with a rock,” Williad said. “I was carrying everyone’s money, so I was the one to beat.”
But they continued across the river, and here in Musina, the boys from Murimuka slept in the streets for a while, as many other youngsters do. Then they staked claim to a patch of sandy soil under the punishing sun at the Showgrounds, an open athletic field that is the designated repository for refugees. The population hovers around 2,000. Each day new people arrive, and each day familiar faces depart.
The South African government issues temporary asylum papers to about 250 of these refugees a day, entitling them to six months without worry of deportation. Unaccompanied minors are ineligible for this status, though, leaving them in an odd limbo, with no specified place in the bureaucratic shuffle.
Williad and his friends share a single blanket. They cook spaghetti over a fire fed with twigs and cardboard. Cans and buckets fetched from the trash are used as pots. Plastic bottles sliced open along one side serve as bowls.
Honest Mapiriyawo, a 13-year-old orphan, is the boys’ best beggar. Children compete at the supermarkets to carry groceries for shoppers in exchange for tips. Honest is tiny and winsome. People are drawn to his proper diction. “May I assist you?” is the phrasing he prefers.
Another of the Murimuka boys is Diallo Butau, 15. He said his father is dead and his mother had tuberculosis. He bears the guilt of abandoning her. “If I could get some medicine, some pills, I would go back and cure her,” he said.
Georgina Matsaung runs a shelter for children at the Uniting Reformed Church. “You’ll sometimes find boys sleeping in ditches and under bridges, but you won’t find the girls,” she said with a regretful shake of her head. “The girls get quickly taken by men who turn them into women.”
The Musina area has a population of about 57,000, with an additional 15,000 foreigners, overwhelmingly Zimbabweans, at any given time, according to Abram Luruli, the municipal manager. “Many children are scattered in the street,” he admitted, though it is plain enough for anyone to see. At night, they can be found sleeping beneath sheets of plastic along the roadside, a few of them with their minds meandering from ethers inhaled from a bottle of glue.
While the stories of the refugee children are troubling — with penury in Zimbabwe being exchanged for penury here — many of the more horrifying stories in the city involve the rapes of helpless women.
Leticia Shindi, a 39-year-old widow from the village of Madamombe, said she left Zimbabwe on Jan. 4, hoping to get piecework so she could send money back to her two daughters. She had never waded across a river before, and as she eyed the muddy flow, she seized up with fear.
Two young men were preparing to lead others across, and she gratefully joined them. The guides used poles to judge the hidden depths while the rest cautiously held hands as they moved through the shoulder-deep water.
Once across, the two men robbed them all. Because Ms. Shindi had insufficient money, payment was exacted otherwise. “Take off your underpants,” she recalled one gumaguma saying. “Today I am going to be your husband.”
Chengetai Mapfuri, 29, left the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, just after Christmas, carrying her 20-month-old son, Willington. Two knife-wielding gumagumas who raped her took turns, she said, one holding the toddler while the other held her.
Aldah Mawuka, 17, is also from the Harare suburbs. She said the first gumagumas she encountered on Jan. 7 only robbed her; it was the second ones who demanded she pull down her jeans. The rapist was very direct and impatient, she recalled: “If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you.”
South Africa’s national police force is exasperated by the crimes. Capt. Sydney Ringane, seated in his office in Musina, said the surrounding wooded terrain made it too hard to catch the gumagumas. Anyway, most victims do not file complaints. After all, they are here illegally, unless remaining in the Showgrounds. “Last week, I had 1,500 ready for deportation,” he said.
The captain stood up, walking over to a computer screen. “We keep photos of the refugees killed near the border.”
He punched the keyboard and clicked with the mouse. “This woman was raped before she was killed,” he said. “She wasn’t wearing underpants. She was identified for us by some street kids.”
Mention of the children seemed to feed his exasperation. “Street kids, more all the time,” he said. “They come in as if they are playing in a game.”
He asked, “What do we do about these kids?”
****
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 24, 2009
A Congolese Rebel Leader Who Once Seemed Untouchable Is Caught
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIGALI, Rwanda — Overnight, the battle in Congo has suddenly shifted.
Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the Congolese rebel leader whose brutal tactics and Congo-size ambitions have threatened to bring about another catastrophic war in central Africa, was arrested late Thursday, removing an explosive factor from the regional equation.
According to United Nations officials and Rwandan authorities, General Nkunda was captured by Rwandan troops as he tried to escape a Congolese-Rwandan offensive that has taken aim at several rebel groups terrorizing eastern Congo.
General Nkunda had seemed untouchable, commanding a hardened rebel force that routinely humiliated Congolese troops and then calmly gliding through muddy villages in impossibly white robes. But he may never have anticipated that his old ally, the Rwandan Army, would take him away.
The surprise arrest could be a major turning point for Congo, which has been mired in rebellion and bloodshed for much of the past decade. It instantly strengthens the hand of the Congolese government, militarily and politically, right when the government seemed about to implode. But it could also empower other, even more brutal rebel figures like Jean Bosco Ntaganda, General Nkunda’s former chief of staff, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.
Still, analysts and politicians say they hope that General Nkunda’s capture at the hands of Rwanda means that the proxy war between Rwanda and Congo is finally drawing to a close.
A United Nations report in December accused high-ranking Rwandan officials of sending money and troops to General Nkunda, a fellow Tutsi who claimed to be protecting Congolese Tutsi from marauding Hutu militias. This cross-border enmity has been widely blamed for much of the turmoil, destruction, killing and raping that has vexed Congo for years.
John Prendergast, a founder of the Washington-based Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide, called it a “massive turn of events.”
“Finally the two countries are cooperating,” he said.
Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo’s Parliament, said General Nkunda’s arrest “could be the beginning of the end of all the misery.”
“Look what happened at Kiwanja,” he said, referring to a small Congolese town where United Nations officials said General Nkunda’s forces went door to door, summarily executing dozens of civilians in November.
Now, if Congo gets its way, General Nkunda will have to face the consequences. The government is urging Rwanda to extradite General Nkunda so he can stand trial in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, where he could face a war crimes tribunal and treason charges, punishable by death.
But Rwandan authorities were tight-lipped on Friday about what they would do with General Nkunda. “I can’t speculate,” said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda’s Defense Forces. All he would say was that General Nkunda was “in the hands of Rwandan authorities.”
Though General Nkunda never controlled more than a handful of small towns in eastern Congo, he was Congo’s No. 1 troublemaker. His troops have been accused of committing massacres dating back to 2002. General Nkunda recently began cultivating national ambitions to overthrow Congo’s weak but democratically elected government, which threatened to draw in Congo’s neighbors and plunge central Africa into a regional war, something that has happened twice before.
General Nkunda’s confidence may have been his undoing. On Thursday night, hundreds of Rwandan troops cornered him near Bunagana. Congolese officials said he refused to be arrested and crossed into Rwanda, where he was surrounded and taken into custody. It is not clear how many men he had with him at the time, but it appears he was taken without a shot.
Just a few days ago, Rwanda sent several thousand soldiers into Congo as part of a joint operation to flush out Hutu militants who had killed countless people in the 1994 Rwanda genocide and were still haunting the hills on Congo’s side of the border.
Few expected the Rwandan troops to go after General Nkunda. Not only is he a Tutsi, like Rwanda’s leaders, but he had risen to power by fighting these same Hutu militants. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers recently revealed a secret operation to slip Rwandan soldiers into Congo to fight alongside General Nkunda. He had been trained by the Rwandan Army in the mid-1990s and was widely believed to be an agent for Rwanda’s extensive business and security interests in eastern Congo.
But it seems that the Rwandan government abruptly changed its tack, possibly because of the international criticism it has endured for its ties to General Nkunda. Several European countries recently cut aid to Rwanda, sending a strong signal to a poor country that needs outside help. Rwanda may have figured the time was ripe to remove General Nkunda, analysts said.
Earlier this month, some of General Nkunda’s top commanders split from him, saying they were fed up with his king-of-the-world brand of leadership. One of those commanders was Mr. Ntaganda. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have accused him of building an army of child soldiers, a war crime.
But Mr. Ntaganda suddenly switched sides, denouncing General Nkunda and saying that he and his men were now eager to join the Congolese Army, which they had been battling for years. Many analysts believe that the Congolese government promised to try to protect Mr. Ntaganda from being sent to The Hague.
According to Jason Stearns, an analyst who recently served on a United Nations panel examining the conflict: “It’s fairly clear that Kigali and Kinshasa have struck a deal. Kinshasa will allow Rwanda onto Congolese soil to hunt down” the Hutu militants, “and in return Rwanda will dethrone Nkunda.”
Congolese officials are now talking about restoring full diplomatic relations with Rwanda, which had been suspended for years, and reinvigorating economic ties. But many uncertainties remain, including a possible power scramble by other militant groups hoping to fill the vacuum.
“Nkunda’s arrest is part of a larger, radical realignment,” Mr. Stearns said. “There are, however, many unknowns and risks.”
Josh Kron contributed reporting.
Josh Kron contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world ... babwe.html
January 24, 2009
Desperate Children Flee Zimbabwe, for Lives Just as Bleak
By BARRY BEARAK
MUSINA, South Africa — They bear the look of street urchins, their eyes on the prowl for useful scraps of garbage and their bodies covered in clothes no cleaner than a mechanic’s rags.
Near midnight, these Zimbabwean children can be found sleeping outside almost anywhere in this border city. A 12-year-old girl named No Matter Hungwe, hunched beneath the reassuring exterior light of the post office, said it was hunger that had pushed her across the border alone.
Her father is dead, and she wanted to help her mother and younger brothers by earning what she could here in South Africa — within certain limits, anyway. “Some men — men with cars — want to sleep with me,” she said, considering the upside against the down. “They have offered me 100 rand,” about $10.
With their nation in a prolonged sequence of crises, more unaccompanied children and women than ever are joining the rush of desperate Zimbabweans illegally crossing the frontier at the Limpopo River, according to the police, local officials and aid workers.
What they are escaping is a broken country where half the people are going hungry, most schools and hospitals are closed or dysfunctional and a cholera epidemic has taken a toll in the thousands. Yet they are arriving in a place where they are unwelcome and are resented as rivals for jobs. Last year, Zimbabweans were part of the quarry in a spate of mob attacks against foreigners.
For those in the know, crossing the border can be a simple chore, a bribe paid on one side and a second bribe on the other. But for the uninitiated and the destitute, the journey is as uncertain as the undercurrents of the Limpopo and the appetites of the crocodiles.
Where is it best to enter the river? Where are the holes in the barbed fences beyond? Where do the soldiers patrol? Perhaps the greatest risk is the gumagumas — the swindlers, thieves and rapists who stalk the vulnerable as they wander in the bush.
Williad Fire, 16, who arrived here on Jan. 4, is one of nine boys who came from Murimuka, a town in a mining region of central Zimbabwe. His story is a fairly typical one of serial catastrophe. He was living with an uncle after his parents died, but then the uncle died, too, stricken in November with an illness that Williad described with a mystified shrug: “He was vomiting blood.”
The boy was hungry, and scrounging in South Africa seemed to hold more promise than scrounging at home. To get train fare south, he sold his most valuable possession, a secondhand pair of Puma sneakers two sizes too big. He and eight friends then did odd jobs in Beitbridge, on the Zimbabwean side of the border, until they had saved about $35.
From there, Williad’s story takes another dismal turn. When the boys neared the river, they were confronted by the gumagumas, who pretended to be helpful, then pounced. “They hit me in the forehead with a rock,” Williad said. “I was carrying everyone’s money, so I was the one to beat.”
But they continued across the river, and here in Musina, the boys from Murimuka slept in the streets for a while, as many other youngsters do. Then they staked claim to a patch of sandy soil under the punishing sun at the Showgrounds, an open athletic field that is the designated repository for refugees. The population hovers around 2,000. Each day new people arrive, and each day familiar faces depart.
The South African government issues temporary asylum papers to about 250 of these refugees a day, entitling them to six months without worry of deportation. Unaccompanied minors are ineligible for this status, though, leaving them in an odd limbo, with no specified place in the bureaucratic shuffle.
Williad and his friends share a single blanket. They cook spaghetti over a fire fed with twigs and cardboard. Cans and buckets fetched from the trash are used as pots. Plastic bottles sliced open along one side serve as bowls.
Honest Mapiriyawo, a 13-year-old orphan, is the boys’ best beggar. Children compete at the supermarkets to carry groceries for shoppers in exchange for tips. Honest is tiny and winsome. People are drawn to his proper diction. “May I assist you?” is the phrasing he prefers.
Another of the Murimuka boys is Diallo Butau, 15. He said his father is dead and his mother had tuberculosis. He bears the guilt of abandoning her. “If I could get some medicine, some pills, I would go back and cure her,” he said.
Georgina Matsaung runs a shelter for children at the Uniting Reformed Church. “You’ll sometimes find boys sleeping in ditches and under bridges, but you won’t find the girls,” she said with a regretful shake of her head. “The girls get quickly taken by men who turn them into women.”
The Musina area has a population of about 57,000, with an additional 15,000 foreigners, overwhelmingly Zimbabweans, at any given time, according to Abram Luruli, the municipal manager. “Many children are scattered in the street,” he admitted, though it is plain enough for anyone to see. At night, they can be found sleeping beneath sheets of plastic along the roadside, a few of them with their minds meandering from ethers inhaled from a bottle of glue.
While the stories of the refugee children are troubling — with penury in Zimbabwe being exchanged for penury here — many of the more horrifying stories in the city involve the rapes of helpless women.
Leticia Shindi, a 39-year-old widow from the village of Madamombe, said she left Zimbabwe on Jan. 4, hoping to get piecework so she could send money back to her two daughters. She had never waded across a river before, and as she eyed the muddy flow, she seized up with fear.
Two young men were preparing to lead others across, and she gratefully joined them. The guides used poles to judge the hidden depths while the rest cautiously held hands as they moved through the shoulder-deep water.
Once across, the two men robbed them all. Because Ms. Shindi had insufficient money, payment was exacted otherwise. “Take off your underpants,” she recalled one gumaguma saying. “Today I am going to be your husband.”
Chengetai Mapfuri, 29, left the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, just after Christmas, carrying her 20-month-old son, Willington. Two knife-wielding gumagumas who raped her took turns, she said, one holding the toddler while the other held her.
Aldah Mawuka, 17, is also from the Harare suburbs. She said the first gumagumas she encountered on Jan. 7 only robbed her; it was the second ones who demanded she pull down her jeans. The rapist was very direct and impatient, she recalled: “If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you.”
South Africa’s national police force is exasperated by the crimes. Capt. Sydney Ringane, seated in his office in Musina, said the surrounding wooded terrain made it too hard to catch the gumagumas. Anyway, most victims do not file complaints. After all, they are here illegally, unless remaining in the Showgrounds. “Last week, I had 1,500 ready for deportation,” he said.
The captain stood up, walking over to a computer screen. “We keep photos of the refugees killed near the border.”
He punched the keyboard and clicked with the mouse. “This woman was raped before she was killed,” he said. “She wasn’t wearing underpants. She was identified for us by some street kids.”
Mention of the children seemed to feed his exasperation. “Street kids, more all the time,” he said. “They come in as if they are playing in a game.”
He asked, “What do we do about these kids?”
****
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 24, 2009
A Congolese Rebel Leader Who Once Seemed Untouchable Is Caught
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIGALI, Rwanda — Overnight, the battle in Congo has suddenly shifted.
Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the Congolese rebel leader whose brutal tactics and Congo-size ambitions have threatened to bring about another catastrophic war in central Africa, was arrested late Thursday, removing an explosive factor from the regional equation.
According to United Nations officials and Rwandan authorities, General Nkunda was captured by Rwandan troops as he tried to escape a Congolese-Rwandan offensive that has taken aim at several rebel groups terrorizing eastern Congo.
General Nkunda had seemed untouchable, commanding a hardened rebel force that routinely humiliated Congolese troops and then calmly gliding through muddy villages in impossibly white robes. But he may never have anticipated that his old ally, the Rwandan Army, would take him away.
The surprise arrest could be a major turning point for Congo, which has been mired in rebellion and bloodshed for much of the past decade. It instantly strengthens the hand of the Congolese government, militarily and politically, right when the government seemed about to implode. But it could also empower other, even more brutal rebel figures like Jean Bosco Ntaganda, General Nkunda’s former chief of staff, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.
Still, analysts and politicians say they hope that General Nkunda’s capture at the hands of Rwanda means that the proxy war between Rwanda and Congo is finally drawing to a close.
A United Nations report in December accused high-ranking Rwandan officials of sending money and troops to General Nkunda, a fellow Tutsi who claimed to be protecting Congolese Tutsi from marauding Hutu militias. This cross-border enmity has been widely blamed for much of the turmoil, destruction, killing and raping that has vexed Congo for years.
John Prendergast, a founder of the Washington-based Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide, called it a “massive turn of events.”
“Finally the two countries are cooperating,” he said.
Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo’s Parliament, said General Nkunda’s arrest “could be the beginning of the end of all the misery.”
“Look what happened at Kiwanja,” he said, referring to a small Congolese town where United Nations officials said General Nkunda’s forces went door to door, summarily executing dozens of civilians in November.
Now, if Congo gets its way, General Nkunda will have to face the consequences. The government is urging Rwanda to extradite General Nkunda so he can stand trial in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, where he could face a war crimes tribunal and treason charges, punishable by death.
But Rwandan authorities were tight-lipped on Friday about what they would do with General Nkunda. “I can’t speculate,” said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda’s Defense Forces. All he would say was that General Nkunda was “in the hands of Rwandan authorities.”
Though General Nkunda never controlled more than a handful of small towns in eastern Congo, he was Congo’s No. 1 troublemaker. His troops have been accused of committing massacres dating back to 2002. General Nkunda recently began cultivating national ambitions to overthrow Congo’s weak but democratically elected government, which threatened to draw in Congo’s neighbors and plunge central Africa into a regional war, something that has happened twice before.
General Nkunda’s confidence may have been his undoing. On Thursday night, hundreds of Rwandan troops cornered him near Bunagana. Congolese officials said he refused to be arrested and crossed into Rwanda, where he was surrounded and taken into custody. It is not clear how many men he had with him at the time, but it appears he was taken without a shot.
Just a few days ago, Rwanda sent several thousand soldiers into Congo as part of a joint operation to flush out Hutu militants who had killed countless people in the 1994 Rwanda genocide and were still haunting the hills on Congo’s side of the border.
Few expected the Rwandan troops to go after General Nkunda. Not only is he a Tutsi, like Rwanda’s leaders, but he had risen to power by fighting these same Hutu militants. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers recently revealed a secret operation to slip Rwandan soldiers into Congo to fight alongside General Nkunda. He had been trained by the Rwandan Army in the mid-1990s and was widely believed to be an agent for Rwanda’s extensive business and security interests in eastern Congo.
But it seems that the Rwandan government abruptly changed its tack, possibly because of the international criticism it has endured for its ties to General Nkunda. Several European countries recently cut aid to Rwanda, sending a strong signal to a poor country that needs outside help. Rwanda may have figured the time was ripe to remove General Nkunda, analysts said.
Earlier this month, some of General Nkunda’s top commanders split from him, saying they were fed up with his king-of-the-world brand of leadership. One of those commanders was Mr. Ntaganda. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have accused him of building an army of child soldiers, a war crime.
But Mr. Ntaganda suddenly switched sides, denouncing General Nkunda and saying that he and his men were now eager to join the Congolese Army, which they had been battling for years. Many analysts believe that the Congolese government promised to try to protect Mr. Ntaganda from being sent to The Hague.
According to Jason Stearns, an analyst who recently served on a United Nations panel examining the conflict: “It’s fairly clear that Kigali and Kinshasa have struck a deal. Kinshasa will allow Rwanda onto Congolese soil to hunt down” the Hutu militants, “and in return Rwanda will dethrone Nkunda.”
Congolese officials are now talking about restoring full diplomatic relations with Rwanda, which had been suspended for years, and reinvigorating economic ties. But many uncertainties remain, including a possible power scramble by other militant groups hoping to fill the vacuum.
“Nkunda’s arrest is part of a larger, radical realignment,” Mr. Stearns said. “There are, however, many unknowns and risks.”
Josh Kron contributed reporting.
Josh Kron contributed reporting.
Mass rape in congo
By Kris Kotarski, For The Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
"I'm press," I muttered into the darkness, bowing my head a little to avoid the blinding beam from an overhead projector shining straight at me.
The room stirred a little, the speaker paused, but a kind hand reached out from the darkness and guided me toward a front-row seat.
As always, I was a few minutes late. As always, people made room.
I was in Ottawa, it was late November, and I sat in a packed Carleton University classroom looking at the words "CONGO--MASS RAPE" projected onto the screen in front of me.
It was a seminar on the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, attended by the usual expatriate groups, with the usual suspects-- Amnesty International, Peacebuild-- speaking to a room full of anguished faces.
The first quotation I wrote down that evening was from Maj.-Gen. Patrick Cammaert, who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping force for the Eastern Congo.
"It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict," said the Dutchman, referring to the practice of mass rape.
That quote seems like the best place to begin.
War in the Congo has raged intermittently since 1996, when forces loyal to Laurent-Desire Kabila set out to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, succeeding in 1997. By 1998, Mobuto was gone, but the conflict raged on with neighbouring countries like Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Namibia, Chad, Zimbabwe and Angola pouring troops, weapons and resources into a conflict that has been dubbed "Africa's World War" because of the massive death toll (more than five million dead).
Like in the Second World War, everyone in the region had a stake. And, like in the Second World War, civilians suffered on a massive scale.
The war is said to have taken place between 1998 and 2003, but even though '03 brought a formal peace, the fighting never really ended with various militias and rebel groups terrorizing the population along with an undisciplined and corrupt Congolese army.
North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri--these are the regions where peace never returned for long, and where men like recently arrested rebel leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda could challenge government and UN troops with a well-trained and terribly brutal militia.
The biggest tragedy of the Congo is that rape has be-come a major weapon of war. Women are systematically raped to intimidate and disrupt communities, and to instil fear and obedience among the population. Because no one group ever holds territory for long, each wave of attacks is followed by a wave of rape.
All groups have been accused of atrocities and rape, and even the UN force (known by its French acronym, MONUC) was tainted with multiple allegations of rape and soliciting child prostitutes.
How bad is it? The UN force seems like a "noble" exception --blue helmets commit their crimes individually, without receiving an order.
I sat in the dark room taking notes, listening to speaker after speaker, and although there were a number of moments when I wanted to look away from the screen in front of me, I smiled when I saw two MPs making their own notes in the row behind me.
Sitting side-by-side were the NDP's Paul Dewar and Dr. Keith Martin, formerly of the Canadian Alliance, and now with the federal Liberals.
Although their presence was private and unannounced, Martin, a longtime advocate for humanitarian causes, got up to speak.
Martin did not say anything unexpected--he expressed Canada's sorrow, he chided the Canadian government for not taking a more proactive role and he suggested even with an overstretched military Ottawa could provide police trainers or fund a serious medical response.
"You know," he said to me after the seminar, "there is a group of us on Parliament Hill who want Canada to do something more about this. No one seems to care about this, we've held seven press conferences in the past couple of years, but we've only had one intern approach, once. We championed the responsibility to protect as a country, so we should begin to take it seriously.
"Mass rape as a weapon of war . . . can you think of a better place to start?"
Kris Kotarski is a Calgary freelance writer.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Kris Kotarski, For The Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
"I'm press," I muttered into the darkness, bowing my head a little to avoid the blinding beam from an overhead projector shining straight at me.
The room stirred a little, the speaker paused, but a kind hand reached out from the darkness and guided me toward a front-row seat.
As always, I was a few minutes late. As always, people made room.
I was in Ottawa, it was late November, and I sat in a packed Carleton University classroom looking at the words "CONGO--MASS RAPE" projected onto the screen in front of me.
It was a seminar on the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, attended by the usual expatriate groups, with the usual suspects-- Amnesty International, Peacebuild-- speaking to a room full of anguished faces.
The first quotation I wrote down that evening was from Maj.-Gen. Patrick Cammaert, who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping force for the Eastern Congo.
"It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict," said the Dutchman, referring to the practice of mass rape.
That quote seems like the best place to begin.
War in the Congo has raged intermittently since 1996, when forces loyal to Laurent-Desire Kabila set out to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, succeeding in 1997. By 1998, Mobuto was gone, but the conflict raged on with neighbouring countries like Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Namibia, Chad, Zimbabwe and Angola pouring troops, weapons and resources into a conflict that has been dubbed "Africa's World War" because of the massive death toll (more than five million dead).
Like in the Second World War, everyone in the region had a stake. And, like in the Second World War, civilians suffered on a massive scale.
The war is said to have taken place between 1998 and 2003, but even though '03 brought a formal peace, the fighting never really ended with various militias and rebel groups terrorizing the population along with an undisciplined and corrupt Congolese army.
North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri--these are the regions where peace never returned for long, and where men like recently arrested rebel leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda could challenge government and UN troops with a well-trained and terribly brutal militia.
The biggest tragedy of the Congo is that rape has be-come a major weapon of war. Women are systematically raped to intimidate and disrupt communities, and to instil fear and obedience among the population. Because no one group ever holds territory for long, each wave of attacks is followed by a wave of rape.
All groups have been accused of atrocities and rape, and even the UN force (known by its French acronym, MONUC) was tainted with multiple allegations of rape and soliciting child prostitutes.
How bad is it? The UN force seems like a "noble" exception --blue helmets commit their crimes individually, without receiving an order.
I sat in the dark room taking notes, listening to speaker after speaker, and although there were a number of moments when I wanted to look away from the screen in front of me, I smiled when I saw two MPs making their own notes in the row behind me.
Sitting side-by-side were the NDP's Paul Dewar and Dr. Keith Martin, formerly of the Canadian Alliance, and now with the federal Liberals.
Although their presence was private and unannounced, Martin, a longtime advocate for humanitarian causes, got up to speak.
Martin did not say anything unexpected--he expressed Canada's sorrow, he chided the Canadian government for not taking a more proactive role and he suggested even with an overstretched military Ottawa could provide police trainers or fund a serious medical response.
"You know," he said to me after the seminar, "there is a group of us on Parliament Hill who want Canada to do something more about this. No one seems to care about this, we've held seven press conferences in the past couple of years, but we've only had one intern approach, once. We championed the responsibility to protect as a country, so we should begin to take it seriously.
"Mass rape as a weapon of war . . . can you think of a better place to start?"
Kris Kotarski is a Calgary freelance writer.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
January 27, 2009
Looking for Peace Openings in Congo
After helping to fuel the horrific war in eastern Congo, Rwanda has created a potential opening for ending the conflict by arresting Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the rebel leader who once seemed untouchable. It is a surprising and positive move. But it is only a start.
Now the international community must keep the pressure on the Rwandan and the Congolese governments to take other steps that could eventually stabilize this traumatized region. That includes continuing to withhold aid to Rwanda and insisting that United Nations peacekeepers be allowed to operate in eastern Congo to discourage fighting and bear witness to atrocities on all sides.
Mr. Nkunda, whose troops have been accused of massacres as far back as 2002, was arrested on Thursday. It was a stunning turnabout since he had long been supported by Rwanda, which twice invaded Congo in pursuit of Hutu rebels who fled there after taking part in the 1994 genocide. We hope his arrest means an end to the proxy war between Rwanda and Congo.
It would be chilling if an even more brutal leader, Jean Bosco Ntaganda — who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes — succeeds him as leader of the rebel forces. (At some point, Mr. Nkunda must be brought to justice. The court is believed to be considering the case against him.) Some experts fear the two countries have struck a deal that would allow Rwandan commandos free rein to go after Hutu militants in eastern Congo. That is extremely risky.
A political settlement is the only hope for a durable peace. African leaders, the United Nations, the United States and China (a major new regional investor) must exert more pressure on all parties — starting with the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, and the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame — to implement such an accord.
Over the past decade, as many as five million Congolese have died and one million have been displaced because of the fighting. It is past time for the suffering to end.
****
January 27, 2009
Islamists Overrun Somalia City as Ethiopians Leave
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and ALAN COWELL
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Islamist insurgents took over the city that houses Somalia’s Parliament on Monday, just hours after Ethiopian troops withdrew and formally ended a failed two-year effort to defeat Islamist militants in the country.
Witnesses reached by telephone in the city of Baidoa, which had been the seat of Parliament since 2006, said that Islamist militias were patrolling the streets and that government offices in the city had been ransacked. There were no immediate reports of clashes with residents.
“The Islamists have taken control of the town this afternoon,” said Xaaji Isaaq, a traditional elder.
Ethiopia began withdrawing its troops earlier this month, leaving a power vacuum that the Islamists rushed to fill — with little to no opposition from the government.
The country now faces a new period of uncertainty. Baidoa was one of the last cities in Somalia where the government had any significant presence. In the capital, Mogadishu, the government controls only a few city blocks, while Islamist factions control most of the southern regions of the country.
In an effort to stabilize the nation, the government reached a power-sharing deal with moderate Islamists last October, hoping to pave the way for a national unity government. Since the Ethiopians began withdrawing, some parts of the country have come under the control of moderate Islamist militias loyal to the government.
Most lawmakers had, in fact, left Baidoa for Djibouti, to the north of Somalia, over the weekend to begin incorporating members of the moderate Islamist opposition into Parliament, leaving the city largely empty of its leadership when the insurgents stormed in.
The change in Baidoa came as the last of the Ethiopians completed their withdrawal from the country, leaving fractious Islamist factions to compete for control.
On Saturday, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives near an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens.
There had been some speculation over whether the Ethiopian troops had merely moved to border areas. But Reuters quoted a government spokesman, Abdi Haji Gobdon, as saying Monday: “The Ethiopians have fulfilled their promise. Their last troops crossed the border this morning.”
International mediators have urged Somali leaders to overcome their divisions in talks in Djibouti this week.
Parliament is supposed to select a new president to replace Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who resigned in late December. Many Somalis, Western diplomats and aid officials have crossed their fingers in the hope that moderate Islamists and transitional government figures would work together to pick a new, unifying leader.
Mr. Yusuf, a former warlord, had been widely criticized for trying to thwart peace negotiations. One of the leading contenders to replace him is a moderate Islamic cleric.
Mohammed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Looking for Peace Openings in Congo
After helping to fuel the horrific war in eastern Congo, Rwanda has created a potential opening for ending the conflict by arresting Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the rebel leader who once seemed untouchable. It is a surprising and positive move. But it is only a start.
Now the international community must keep the pressure on the Rwandan and the Congolese governments to take other steps that could eventually stabilize this traumatized region. That includes continuing to withhold aid to Rwanda and insisting that United Nations peacekeepers be allowed to operate in eastern Congo to discourage fighting and bear witness to atrocities on all sides.
Mr. Nkunda, whose troops have been accused of massacres as far back as 2002, was arrested on Thursday. It was a stunning turnabout since he had long been supported by Rwanda, which twice invaded Congo in pursuit of Hutu rebels who fled there after taking part in the 1994 genocide. We hope his arrest means an end to the proxy war between Rwanda and Congo.
It would be chilling if an even more brutal leader, Jean Bosco Ntaganda — who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes — succeeds him as leader of the rebel forces. (At some point, Mr. Nkunda must be brought to justice. The court is believed to be considering the case against him.) Some experts fear the two countries have struck a deal that would allow Rwandan commandos free rein to go after Hutu militants in eastern Congo. That is extremely risky.
A political settlement is the only hope for a durable peace. African leaders, the United Nations, the United States and China (a major new regional investor) must exert more pressure on all parties — starting with the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, and the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame — to implement such an accord.
Over the past decade, as many as five million Congolese have died and one million have been displaced because of the fighting. It is past time for the suffering to end.
****
January 27, 2009
Islamists Overrun Somalia City as Ethiopians Leave
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and ALAN COWELL
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Islamist insurgents took over the city that houses Somalia’s Parliament on Monday, just hours after Ethiopian troops withdrew and formally ended a failed two-year effort to defeat Islamist militants in the country.
Witnesses reached by telephone in the city of Baidoa, which had been the seat of Parliament since 2006, said that Islamist militias were patrolling the streets and that government offices in the city had been ransacked. There were no immediate reports of clashes with residents.
“The Islamists have taken control of the town this afternoon,” said Xaaji Isaaq, a traditional elder.
Ethiopia began withdrawing its troops earlier this month, leaving a power vacuum that the Islamists rushed to fill — with little to no opposition from the government.
The country now faces a new period of uncertainty. Baidoa was one of the last cities in Somalia where the government had any significant presence. In the capital, Mogadishu, the government controls only a few city blocks, while Islamist factions control most of the southern regions of the country.
In an effort to stabilize the nation, the government reached a power-sharing deal with moderate Islamists last October, hoping to pave the way for a national unity government. Since the Ethiopians began withdrawing, some parts of the country have come under the control of moderate Islamist militias loyal to the government.
Most lawmakers had, in fact, left Baidoa for Djibouti, to the north of Somalia, over the weekend to begin incorporating members of the moderate Islamist opposition into Parliament, leaving the city largely empty of its leadership when the insurgents stormed in.
The change in Baidoa came as the last of the Ethiopians completed their withdrawal from the country, leaving fractious Islamist factions to compete for control.
On Saturday, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives near an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens.
There had been some speculation over whether the Ethiopian troops had merely moved to border areas. But Reuters quoted a government spokesman, Abdi Haji Gobdon, as saying Monday: “The Ethiopians have fulfilled their promise. Their last troops crossed the border this morning.”
International mediators have urged Somali leaders to overcome their divisions in talks in Djibouti this week.
Parliament is supposed to select a new president to replace Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who resigned in late December. Many Somalis, Western diplomats and aid officials have crossed their fingers in the hope that moderate Islamists and transitional government figures would work together to pick a new, unifying leader.
Mr. Yusuf, a former warlord, had been widely criticized for trying to thwart peace negotiations. One of the leading contenders to replace him is a moderate Islamic cleric.
Mohammed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
There is a photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/world ... &th&emc=th
January 31, 2009
Opposition Party to Join Zimbabwe’s Government
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — After months of resisting intense pressure from leaders across southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, announced Friday that he would do as they had insisted and join a coalition government as prime minister with his nemesis, President Robert Mugabe.
The opposition party’s decision on Friday to form a government with the ruling party, ZANU-PF, will usher in a new phase in its decade-long struggle against Mr. Mugabe, 84, who has firmly held onto power since 1980, most recently by claiming victory in a bloody, discredited presidential runoff election against Mr. Tsvangirai in June.
Mr. Tsvangirai now faces the daunting job of sharing control of the nation’s police, reviving Zimbabwe’s moribund economy and rescuing an increasingly famished, sick and impoverished population with a partner, Mr. Mugabe, whose security forces have viciously beaten Mr. Tsvangirai and thousands of his supporters over the past two years.
Even as the power-sharing talks were taking place, Mr. Mugabe’s government abducted dozens more opposition supporters, many of whom said they had been tortured.
Mr. Tsvangirai first agreed to form a joint government in September, but then refused after Mr. Mugabe claimed control of all the ministries that control the repressive state security forces, including the police.
But at the insistence of the Southern African Development Community, the 15-nation regional bloc overseeing the negotiations, the current deal calls for shared oversight of the police — a compromise Mr. Tsvangirai had initially rejected.
Acknowledging the ambivalence of many of his supporters — and perhaps his own, as well — Mr. Tsvangirai said in a statement that the fight for democracy “is neither easy nor straightforward, and often we have had to change the fronts on which we wage the struggle.”
Political analysts said he would have risked the scorn of South Africa, the dominant regional powerhouse, and other neighboring nations, had he pulled out of the deal that they had, with increasing impatience, been pressing him to accept.
But their decision to push for a power-sharing arrangement, even though their own monitors concluded that the presidential runoff was neither free nor fair, has stirred deep unease beyond Zimbabwe’s borders.
Botswana’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, said in a rare interview that allowing leaders to keep power through negotiated deals after fraud-ridden elections, as in Kenya last year and now in Zimbabwe, set a terrible precedent.
“These power-sharing agreements are not the way to go on the continent,” said Mr. Khama, whose government is the only one in the region now openly criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s party for employing intimidation, violence and killings against its opponents. “You can’t have a situation where a ruling party, when it senses it may lose an election, can then manipulate the outcome so they can stay on in power.”
The hunger for change in Zimbabwe was manifest on Friday in the throng of thousands that gathered outside Harvest House, the headquarters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, as word spread that the party was deciding whether to join or stay out of a government.
When Mr. Tsvangirai came out and stood on the bed of a pickup truck with a bullhorn in hand, the crowd fell silent waiting for word of his decision. A wave of cheers rolled over him when he said he would be prime minister, his spokesman, Joseph Mungwari, said.
Mr. Mungwari said the party was confident that it would soon get legislation adopted to place all the state security services, not just the police, under the supervision of all parties, including a small, breakaway faction of the opposition.
He also predicted that by Feb. 11, when Mr. Tsvangirai is scheduled to be sworn in as prime minister, the authorities would release the dozens of abducted opposition and human rights activists now languishing in filthy, overcrowded, cholera-ridden prisons.
But when asked whether Mr. Tsvangirai would refuse to join the government if the imprisoned activists were not freed and the legislation was not passed, he declined to comment.
Diplomats and opposition officials who have spoken recently with Mr. Tsvangirai said he felt a sense of urgency about going into the government because of the extreme human suffering in Zimbabwe.
Mr. Khama described Zimbabwe as a country that has “literally become like one big refugee camp, full of people who are living lives of misery.”
A cholera epidemic is spreading from cities to rural areas where the most basic health services are lacking. More than 60,000 people have gotten the disease since August, and more than 3,100 have died.
Beyond that, the country’s economic crisis has worsened so suddenly and sharply that the number of people needing food aid in the next two months has risen to 7 million from 5 million of the country’s 12 million people, the United Nations World Food Program reported Thursday.
In order to reach more of the needy, the agency is halving monthly rations, which are already insufficient, to 11 pounds of corn per person, hoping the hungry can scavenge enough in wild fruits and other foods to survive until the next harvest.
“People will certainly be more malnourished and vulnerable to disease than if they were getting a full ration,” said a spokesman, Richard Lee.
The United States and Europe have prevented famines in Zimbabwe for years with infusions of food aid, but their willingness to lift sanctions against Mr. Mugabe and senior members of his government and to donate substantial sums for the reconstruction of the country will not come automatically with the formation of a coalition government.
British and American diplomats said they would be awaiting evidence that democracy, human rights and the rule of law were again respected in Zimbabwe — and they doubted Mr. Mugabe would agree to such changes, which would almost inevitably threaten his hold on power.
Some analysts, diplomats and civic leaders worry that Mr. Tsvangirai has thrown Mr. Mugabe a political lifeline just as the governing party’s ability to sustain its patronage machine was crumbling and the international outrage against his rule was increasing.
Some doubt the coalition between such unlikely partners can last, especially considering Mr. Mugabe’s insistence that “Zimbabwe is mine,” as he recently declared.
“It’s a question of when, not if, this thing will collapse,” said Sydney Masamvu, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group. “The government will be hobbled by a fight for turf.”
Others, like Brian Raftopoulos, research director for Solidarity Peace Trust, a nongovernmental organization, contended that joining the government was the opposition’s best option, in part because its long-term survival as a party depends on its relations with regional powers such as South Africa.
But none see any easy resolution of Zimbabwe’s political agony.
“There’s going to be no quick fix for the removal of Mugabe,” Mr. Raftopoulos said. “That, unfortunately, is the reality.”
****
January 31, 2009
A Chaotic Kenya Vote and a Secret U.S. Exit Poll
By MIKE McINTIRE and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
For three days in December 2007, Kenya slid into chaos as ballot counters steadily took what appeared to be a presidential election victory for the challenger and delivered it to the incumbent.
As tensions mounted, Kenneth Flottman sat in Nairobi and grew increasingly frustrated. He had in his hands the results of an exit poll, paid for by the United States government, that supported the initial returns favoring the challenger, Raila Odinga.
Mr. Flottman, East Africa director for the International Republican Institute, the pro-democracy group that administered the poll, said he had believed that the results would promptly be made public, as a check against election fraud by either side. But then his supervisors said the poll numbers would be kept secret.
When the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, was finally declared the winner amid cries of foul, Kenya exploded in violence that would leave more than 1,000 people dead before the two sides negotiated a power-sharing deal two months later. With rioters roaming the streets, Mr. Flottman sent an e-mail message to a colleague saying he was worried that, in rebuffing his pleas to release the poll, the institute had succumbed to political pressure from American officials.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/world ... &th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/world ... &th&emc=th
January 31, 2009
Opposition Party to Join Zimbabwe’s Government
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — After months of resisting intense pressure from leaders across southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, announced Friday that he would do as they had insisted and join a coalition government as prime minister with his nemesis, President Robert Mugabe.
The opposition party’s decision on Friday to form a government with the ruling party, ZANU-PF, will usher in a new phase in its decade-long struggle against Mr. Mugabe, 84, who has firmly held onto power since 1980, most recently by claiming victory in a bloody, discredited presidential runoff election against Mr. Tsvangirai in June.
Mr. Tsvangirai now faces the daunting job of sharing control of the nation’s police, reviving Zimbabwe’s moribund economy and rescuing an increasingly famished, sick and impoverished population with a partner, Mr. Mugabe, whose security forces have viciously beaten Mr. Tsvangirai and thousands of his supporters over the past two years.
Even as the power-sharing talks were taking place, Mr. Mugabe’s government abducted dozens more opposition supporters, many of whom said they had been tortured.
Mr. Tsvangirai first agreed to form a joint government in September, but then refused after Mr. Mugabe claimed control of all the ministries that control the repressive state security forces, including the police.
But at the insistence of the Southern African Development Community, the 15-nation regional bloc overseeing the negotiations, the current deal calls for shared oversight of the police — a compromise Mr. Tsvangirai had initially rejected.
Acknowledging the ambivalence of many of his supporters — and perhaps his own, as well — Mr. Tsvangirai said in a statement that the fight for democracy “is neither easy nor straightforward, and often we have had to change the fronts on which we wage the struggle.”
Political analysts said he would have risked the scorn of South Africa, the dominant regional powerhouse, and other neighboring nations, had he pulled out of the deal that they had, with increasing impatience, been pressing him to accept.
But their decision to push for a power-sharing arrangement, even though their own monitors concluded that the presidential runoff was neither free nor fair, has stirred deep unease beyond Zimbabwe’s borders.
Botswana’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, said in a rare interview that allowing leaders to keep power through negotiated deals after fraud-ridden elections, as in Kenya last year and now in Zimbabwe, set a terrible precedent.
“These power-sharing agreements are not the way to go on the continent,” said Mr. Khama, whose government is the only one in the region now openly criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s party for employing intimidation, violence and killings against its opponents. “You can’t have a situation where a ruling party, when it senses it may lose an election, can then manipulate the outcome so they can stay on in power.”
The hunger for change in Zimbabwe was manifest on Friday in the throng of thousands that gathered outside Harvest House, the headquarters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, as word spread that the party was deciding whether to join or stay out of a government.
When Mr. Tsvangirai came out and stood on the bed of a pickup truck with a bullhorn in hand, the crowd fell silent waiting for word of his decision. A wave of cheers rolled over him when he said he would be prime minister, his spokesman, Joseph Mungwari, said.
Mr. Mungwari said the party was confident that it would soon get legislation adopted to place all the state security services, not just the police, under the supervision of all parties, including a small, breakaway faction of the opposition.
He also predicted that by Feb. 11, when Mr. Tsvangirai is scheduled to be sworn in as prime minister, the authorities would release the dozens of abducted opposition and human rights activists now languishing in filthy, overcrowded, cholera-ridden prisons.
But when asked whether Mr. Tsvangirai would refuse to join the government if the imprisoned activists were not freed and the legislation was not passed, he declined to comment.
Diplomats and opposition officials who have spoken recently with Mr. Tsvangirai said he felt a sense of urgency about going into the government because of the extreme human suffering in Zimbabwe.
Mr. Khama described Zimbabwe as a country that has “literally become like one big refugee camp, full of people who are living lives of misery.”
A cholera epidemic is spreading from cities to rural areas where the most basic health services are lacking. More than 60,000 people have gotten the disease since August, and more than 3,100 have died.
Beyond that, the country’s economic crisis has worsened so suddenly and sharply that the number of people needing food aid in the next two months has risen to 7 million from 5 million of the country’s 12 million people, the United Nations World Food Program reported Thursday.
In order to reach more of the needy, the agency is halving monthly rations, which are already insufficient, to 11 pounds of corn per person, hoping the hungry can scavenge enough in wild fruits and other foods to survive until the next harvest.
“People will certainly be more malnourished and vulnerable to disease than if they were getting a full ration,” said a spokesman, Richard Lee.
The United States and Europe have prevented famines in Zimbabwe for years with infusions of food aid, but their willingness to lift sanctions against Mr. Mugabe and senior members of his government and to donate substantial sums for the reconstruction of the country will not come automatically with the formation of a coalition government.
British and American diplomats said they would be awaiting evidence that democracy, human rights and the rule of law were again respected in Zimbabwe — and they doubted Mr. Mugabe would agree to such changes, which would almost inevitably threaten his hold on power.
Some analysts, diplomats and civic leaders worry that Mr. Tsvangirai has thrown Mr. Mugabe a political lifeline just as the governing party’s ability to sustain its patronage machine was crumbling and the international outrage against his rule was increasing.
Some doubt the coalition between such unlikely partners can last, especially considering Mr. Mugabe’s insistence that “Zimbabwe is mine,” as he recently declared.
“It’s a question of when, not if, this thing will collapse,” said Sydney Masamvu, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group. “The government will be hobbled by a fight for turf.”
Others, like Brian Raftopoulos, research director for Solidarity Peace Trust, a nongovernmental organization, contended that joining the government was the opposition’s best option, in part because its long-term survival as a party depends on its relations with regional powers such as South Africa.
But none see any easy resolution of Zimbabwe’s political agony.
“There’s going to be no quick fix for the removal of Mugabe,” Mr. Raftopoulos said. “That, unfortunately, is the reality.”
****
January 31, 2009
A Chaotic Kenya Vote and a Secret U.S. Exit Poll
By MIKE McINTIRE and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
For three days in December 2007, Kenya slid into chaos as ballot counters steadily took what appeared to be a presidential election victory for the challenger and delivered it to the incumbent.
As tensions mounted, Kenneth Flottman sat in Nairobi and grew increasingly frustrated. He had in his hands the results of an exit poll, paid for by the United States government, that supported the initial returns favoring the challenger, Raila Odinga.
Mr. Flottman, East Africa director for the International Republican Institute, the pro-democracy group that administered the poll, said he had believed that the results would promptly be made public, as a check against election fraud by either side. But then his supervisors said the poll numbers would be kept secret.
When the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, was finally declared the winner amid cries of foul, Kenya exploded in violence that would leave more than 1,000 people dead before the two sides negotiated a power-sharing deal two months later. With rioters roaming the streets, Mr. Flottman sent an e-mail message to a colleague saying he was worried that, in rebuffing his pleas to release the poll, the institute had succumbed to political pressure from American officials.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/world ... &th&emc=th
Moderate Islamist cleric elected Somali president
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 1, 2009
Moderate Islamist leader Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed was elected Somalia's president Saturday, a development welcomed by many as a chance to break the political deadlock and curb raging civil violence.
Hundreds of Mogadishu residents took to the streets to express their support for the young cleric, who vowed to build an inclusive
government, reach out to hardline groups and bring Somalia back into the regional fold.
"My government will come up with an adequate plan to overcome the difficulties the nation is facing," Sheik Sharif said after taking the oath on the Qur'an during a ceremony at the Kempinski hotel in neighbouring Djibouti.
Lawmakers were forced to meet in Djibouti due to security concerns at home.
"I am extending a hand to all Somali armed groups who are still opposed to this process and inviting them to join us," he said moments earlier, after comfortably defeating Maslah Mohamed Siad Barre in the second round of voting.
"Very soon, I will form a government which represents the people of Somalia. We will live peacefully with east African countries and we want to cooperate with them," he said.
Sheik Sharif, a former geography teacher educated in Sudan and Libya, ran as the head of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, an Islamist-dominated opposition umbrella formed in 2007.
In his mid-forties, Sheik Sharif, was one of the main targets when Ethiopian troops invaded in late 2006 to remove what they saw as an extremist Islamic movement on their doorstep.
But after two years of deadly guerrilla war, the Ethiopians have pulled out with little progress to speak of, more radical groups have blossomed and Sheik Sharif is seen by many as occupying the political centre.
The new president is regarded as one of the only men whose clan base and political skills are solid enough to bring about change in the war-ravaged country.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
February 1, 2009
Mayor Declares a Coup in Madagascar
By BARRY BEARAK
There is a multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/world ... &th&emc=th
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — As of Saturday, this exotic island, home to 300 species of frogs, 75 species of chameleons and 3 dozen species of lemurs, also has two species of politicians claiming to run the country.
After days of deadly antigovernment protests, one of those politicians — Andry Rajoelina, this capital city’s mayor — declared that he was now in charge, essentially announcing a coup in this democratic country. So far, the military has yet to take sides.
Mr. Rajoelina and his supporters accuse the president, Marc Ravalomanana, of being a dictator who cares nothing about the people in one of the world’s poorest countries, where more than half of its 20 million people eke by on less than $1 a day.
“Since the president and the government have not taken their responsibilities, I proclaim I will now rule Madagascar and set up a transitional government,” Mr. Rajoelina, 34, declared before an exultant crowd of 3,000 that had lined this former French colony’s main boulevard, the Avenue de la Libération.
“A request for the immediate resignation of the president will soon be filed with Parliament in order to comply with the legal procedure,” he said.
It was hardly clear what procedure he was referring to, but he seemed confident in his presumptions. He insisted that he would now be giving the military and the police their orders and told civil servants to stay home on Monday. He asked foreign nations and the central bank to stop supporting Mr. Ravalomanana, a phenomenally wealthy businessman who has led the country since his election in 2001.
Mr. Ravalomanana, 59, spent the afternoon in a meeting with several of his ministers, then played down the mayor’s attempted power grab as if it were a bureaucratic hiccup.
“It’s up to the minister of justice and the high court to deal with this,” he said. “We have to obey the law in Madagascar.”
It has never seemed likely that the president would simply step aside. Once a peddler who sold homemade yogurt off the back of his bicycle, he has since built a conglomerate that markets not only dairy and other food products but also controls a television station and a number of retail stores.
President Ravalomanana and Mayor Rajoelina — if different species from different political parties — nevertheless share much from the same political gene pool: they have huge egos.
The charismatic Mr. Rajoelina, a former entertainment impresario, goes by the nickname TGV, which is meant to call to mind the energy of France’s high-speed train.
The leader of his own Ready Young Malagasies party, Mr. Rajoelina was elected mayor in December 2007 with 63 percent of the vote, a rare and major defeat for President Ravalomanana’s I Love Madagascar party.
The president was once the capital’s mayor, and the two politicians have feuded over how to run the city. Contentious matters have included how Antananarivo will pay off monstrous municipal debts partly run up by Mr. Ravalomanana.
In the process, the ambitious boyish-looking mayor has become the champion of all the opposition groups, including the many here who are against government talks with the South Korean company Daewoo, which is negotiating to lease three million acres here, or about half the size of Belgium.
Last Monday, the animosity between the two politicians finally turned morbid when the authorities battled anti-Ravalomanana demonstrators.
More than 30 people — most likely looters taking advantage of the rioting — died in a fire at a building full of small shops.
By some estimates there have been more than 100 deaths during two days of protests, and now there is the possibility that more bloodshed lies ahead.
Some soldiers arrived at Saturday’s rally, but quickly left after rocks were thrown from the crowd. “They’re intent on keeping order, but their position now is they want to remain neutral,” said the American ambassador, R. Niels Marquardt, who, along with other diplomats, has tried to talk the two politicians off the ledge.
“The only durable solution is a dialogue between the president and the mayor, and we’ve been pushing for that for two weeks,” Mr. Marquardt added. “They both say they are willing to negotiate without conditions, but then there’s always some obstacle that keeps them apart. It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.”
While better known these days as the title of a computer-animated film, Madagascar is the world’s fourth-largest island, a treasure of ecological diversity off the southeastern coast of Africa where an estimated 70 percent of the wildlife can be found nowhere else.
The flora and fauna have suffered from deforestation and other modern tribulations, and the people have never fared particularly well.
Now, the political turmoil threatens to scare off investors.
“We’ve been bullish on Madagascar, but this has sent a shiver through the international community,” said Mr. Marquardt.
The anti-Ravalomanana rally took place at the historic May 13 Square, the crowd waiting hours beneath a scorching sun for Mayor Rajoelina to appear. “A dictatorship reigns in Madagascar,” he told them, using some of the same oratorical flair he once employed as a disc jockey.
On Monday, rioters set afire several businesses owned by the president, who then vowed they would all be quickly rebuilt. For this, the mayor mocked him at Saturday’s rally. “What of the people who died? Will they be repaired with money?” Playing to the poor — an inclination of both the president and the mayor — usually goes over well. But the Malagasy have now lived under colonialism, socialism and democracy, with the masses still destitute.
“Politicians always use the poor people to get into power, and then they forget us,” said a woman who called into one of the capital’s radio stations. “I don’t believe them anymore.”
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 1, 2009
Moderate Islamist leader Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed was elected Somalia's president Saturday, a development welcomed by many as a chance to break the political deadlock and curb raging civil violence.
Hundreds of Mogadishu residents took to the streets to express their support for the young cleric, who vowed to build an inclusive
government, reach out to hardline groups and bring Somalia back into the regional fold.
"My government will come up with an adequate plan to overcome the difficulties the nation is facing," Sheik Sharif said after taking the oath on the Qur'an during a ceremony at the Kempinski hotel in neighbouring Djibouti.
Lawmakers were forced to meet in Djibouti due to security concerns at home.
"I am extending a hand to all Somali armed groups who are still opposed to this process and inviting them to join us," he said moments earlier, after comfortably defeating Maslah Mohamed Siad Barre in the second round of voting.
"Very soon, I will form a government which represents the people of Somalia. We will live peacefully with east African countries and we want to cooperate with them," he said.
Sheik Sharif, a former geography teacher educated in Sudan and Libya, ran as the head of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, an Islamist-dominated opposition umbrella formed in 2007.
In his mid-forties, Sheik Sharif, was one of the main targets when Ethiopian troops invaded in late 2006 to remove what they saw as an extremist Islamic movement on their doorstep.
But after two years of deadly guerrilla war, the Ethiopians have pulled out with little progress to speak of, more radical groups have blossomed and Sheik Sharif is seen by many as occupying the political centre.
The new president is regarded as one of the only men whose clan base and political skills are solid enough to bring about change in the war-ravaged country.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
February 1, 2009
Mayor Declares a Coup in Madagascar
By BARRY BEARAK
There is a multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/world ... &th&emc=th
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — As of Saturday, this exotic island, home to 300 species of frogs, 75 species of chameleons and 3 dozen species of lemurs, also has two species of politicians claiming to run the country.
After days of deadly antigovernment protests, one of those politicians — Andry Rajoelina, this capital city’s mayor — declared that he was now in charge, essentially announcing a coup in this democratic country. So far, the military has yet to take sides.
Mr. Rajoelina and his supporters accuse the president, Marc Ravalomanana, of being a dictator who cares nothing about the people in one of the world’s poorest countries, where more than half of its 20 million people eke by on less than $1 a day.
“Since the president and the government have not taken their responsibilities, I proclaim I will now rule Madagascar and set up a transitional government,” Mr. Rajoelina, 34, declared before an exultant crowd of 3,000 that had lined this former French colony’s main boulevard, the Avenue de la Libération.
“A request for the immediate resignation of the president will soon be filed with Parliament in order to comply with the legal procedure,” he said.
It was hardly clear what procedure he was referring to, but he seemed confident in his presumptions. He insisted that he would now be giving the military and the police their orders and told civil servants to stay home on Monday. He asked foreign nations and the central bank to stop supporting Mr. Ravalomanana, a phenomenally wealthy businessman who has led the country since his election in 2001.
Mr. Ravalomanana, 59, spent the afternoon in a meeting with several of his ministers, then played down the mayor’s attempted power grab as if it were a bureaucratic hiccup.
“It’s up to the minister of justice and the high court to deal with this,” he said. “We have to obey the law in Madagascar.”
It has never seemed likely that the president would simply step aside. Once a peddler who sold homemade yogurt off the back of his bicycle, he has since built a conglomerate that markets not only dairy and other food products but also controls a television station and a number of retail stores.
President Ravalomanana and Mayor Rajoelina — if different species from different political parties — nevertheless share much from the same political gene pool: they have huge egos.
The charismatic Mr. Rajoelina, a former entertainment impresario, goes by the nickname TGV, which is meant to call to mind the energy of France’s high-speed train.
The leader of his own Ready Young Malagasies party, Mr. Rajoelina was elected mayor in December 2007 with 63 percent of the vote, a rare and major defeat for President Ravalomanana’s I Love Madagascar party.
The president was once the capital’s mayor, and the two politicians have feuded over how to run the city. Contentious matters have included how Antananarivo will pay off monstrous municipal debts partly run up by Mr. Ravalomanana.
In the process, the ambitious boyish-looking mayor has become the champion of all the opposition groups, including the many here who are against government talks with the South Korean company Daewoo, which is negotiating to lease three million acres here, or about half the size of Belgium.
Last Monday, the animosity between the two politicians finally turned morbid when the authorities battled anti-Ravalomanana demonstrators.
More than 30 people — most likely looters taking advantage of the rioting — died in a fire at a building full of small shops.
By some estimates there have been more than 100 deaths during two days of protests, and now there is the possibility that more bloodshed lies ahead.
Some soldiers arrived at Saturday’s rally, but quickly left after rocks were thrown from the crowd. “They’re intent on keeping order, but their position now is they want to remain neutral,” said the American ambassador, R. Niels Marquardt, who, along with other diplomats, has tried to talk the two politicians off the ledge.
“The only durable solution is a dialogue between the president and the mayor, and we’ve been pushing for that for two weeks,” Mr. Marquardt added. “They both say they are willing to negotiate without conditions, but then there’s always some obstacle that keeps them apart. It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.”
While better known these days as the title of a computer-animated film, Madagascar is the world’s fourth-largest island, a treasure of ecological diversity off the southeastern coast of Africa where an estimated 70 percent of the wildlife can be found nowhere else.
The flora and fauna have suffered from deforestation and other modern tribulations, and the people have never fared particularly well.
Now, the political turmoil threatens to scare off investors.
“We’ve been bullish on Madagascar, but this has sent a shiver through the international community,” said Mr. Marquardt.
The anti-Ravalomanana rally took place at the historic May 13 Square, the crowd waiting hours beneath a scorching sun for Mayor Rajoelina to appear. “A dictatorship reigns in Madagascar,” he told them, using some of the same oratorical flair he once employed as a disc jockey.
On Monday, rioters set afire several businesses owned by the president, who then vowed they would all be quickly rebuilt. For this, the mayor mocked him at Saturday’s rally. “What of the people who died? Will they be repaired with money?” Playing to the poor — an inclination of both the president and the mayor — usually goes over well. But the Malagasy have now lived under colonialism, socialism and democracy, with the masses still destitute.
“Politicians always use the poor people to get into power, and then they forget us,” said a woman who called into one of the capital’s radio stations. “I don’t believe them anymore.”
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/world ... &th&emc=th
February 2, 2009
In Wake of Infernos, Kenyans Describe a Muddled Response
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
MOMBASA, Kenya — The death toll rose to more than 100 people after an overturned gasoline tanker exploded on a Kenyan highway as looters tried to scoop up the spilled fuel, officials said Sunday.
The explosion, on Saturday night, was the second deadly inferno in Kenya within a week, after more than two dozen people died in a supermarket blaze on Wednesday. The high death tolls seem to have been exacerbated by a mix of crime, poverty and questionable law enforcement, and the lackluster response to both emergencies is sure to add to the growing resentment toward the Kenyan government.
According to Kenyan officials, a tanker carrying high-grade gasoline overturned around 7 p.m. on Saturday, near the town of Molo, in the Rift Valley.
As the gas began to gush out, word began to spread. Witnesses said villagers swarmed the downed truck, siphoning fuel into plastic jerrycans. Young men on motorcycles raced in from miles away. A handful of Kenyan police officers tried to drive them off, according to Kenyan officials, but the looters fought back. Witnesses said that one vindictive looter whom officers tried to push away lit a match and threw it into a pool of gasoline.
The explosion sent bodies flying into the woods, and it could be heard for miles. The Kenya Red Cross said Sunday afternoon that at least 113 people had been killed and another 178 severely burned. Several children with charred and blistered faces were airlifted by the Kenyan military to burn centers around the country.
After the fire, government officials picked through the charred wreckage and lamented the culture of looting.
“Kenyans are obsessed with free things,” said Hassan Noor Hassan, the Rift Valley provincial commissioner. “You shouldn’t rush to your death for 10 liters of fuel.”
The surrounding hospitals were packed with writhing burn victims. Some had sheets of skin peeling off their backs. Many were young men.
A group of high-ranking ministers visited the burn wards on Sunday, and the politicians were seen on Kenyan television trying to console the victims.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said George Saitoti, Kenya’s internal security minister.
There seemed to be little else to say.
The rising death toll seems to be yet another blow for the Kenyan government, which in the past few months has been rocked by several scandals, including one involving millions of pounds of missing corn at a time of a possible famine. Kenya is ruled by a fractious power-sharing government that was cobbled together last year in the wake of post-election violence that left more than 1,000 people dead.
In the supermarket fire on Wednesday, witnesses said it took more than an hour for firefighters to reach the fully engulfed store, even though it was located along one of the busiest streets in downtown Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The firefighters did not have enough water because of antiquated hydrants and pumps.
Again, looters were a problem and store managers may have chained shut some of the supermarket’s doors to keep looters out, trapping dozens of shoppers inside. Bodies were still being lifted out of the rubble over the weekend.
On Saturday, witnesses in Molo complained of a similarly slow response. They said more than one hour passed before emergency personnel reached the burning tanker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/world ... &th&emc=th
February 2, 2009
In Wake of Infernos, Kenyans Describe a Muddled Response
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
MOMBASA, Kenya — The death toll rose to more than 100 people after an overturned gasoline tanker exploded on a Kenyan highway as looters tried to scoop up the spilled fuel, officials said Sunday.
The explosion, on Saturday night, was the second deadly inferno in Kenya within a week, after more than two dozen people died in a supermarket blaze on Wednesday. The high death tolls seem to have been exacerbated by a mix of crime, poverty and questionable law enforcement, and the lackluster response to both emergencies is sure to add to the growing resentment toward the Kenyan government.
According to Kenyan officials, a tanker carrying high-grade gasoline overturned around 7 p.m. on Saturday, near the town of Molo, in the Rift Valley.
As the gas began to gush out, word began to spread. Witnesses said villagers swarmed the downed truck, siphoning fuel into plastic jerrycans. Young men on motorcycles raced in from miles away. A handful of Kenyan police officers tried to drive them off, according to Kenyan officials, but the looters fought back. Witnesses said that one vindictive looter whom officers tried to push away lit a match and threw it into a pool of gasoline.
The explosion sent bodies flying into the woods, and it could be heard for miles. The Kenya Red Cross said Sunday afternoon that at least 113 people had been killed and another 178 severely burned. Several children with charred and blistered faces were airlifted by the Kenyan military to burn centers around the country.
After the fire, government officials picked through the charred wreckage and lamented the culture of looting.
“Kenyans are obsessed with free things,” said Hassan Noor Hassan, the Rift Valley provincial commissioner. “You shouldn’t rush to your death for 10 liters of fuel.”
The surrounding hospitals were packed with writhing burn victims. Some had sheets of skin peeling off their backs. Many were young men.
A group of high-ranking ministers visited the burn wards on Sunday, and the politicians were seen on Kenyan television trying to console the victims.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said George Saitoti, Kenya’s internal security minister.
There seemed to be little else to say.
The rising death toll seems to be yet another blow for the Kenyan government, which in the past few months has been rocked by several scandals, including one involving millions of pounds of missing corn at a time of a possible famine. Kenya is ruled by a fractious power-sharing government that was cobbled together last year in the wake of post-election violence that left more than 1,000 people dead.
In the supermarket fire on Wednesday, witnesses said it took more than an hour for firefighters to reach the fully engulfed store, even though it was located along one of the busiest streets in downtown Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The firefighters did not have enough water because of antiquated hydrants and pumps.
Again, looters were a problem and store managers may have chained shut some of the supermarket’s doors to keep looters out, trapping dozens of shoppers inside. Bodies were still being lifted out of the rubble over the weekend.
On Saturday, witnesses in Molo complained of a similarly slow response. They said more than one hour passed before emergency personnel reached the burning tanker.
Gadhafi's selection to head African Union proof of rot
By Tim Giannuzzi, Calgary HeraldFebruary 5, 2009 3:07 AM
The African Union's creation in 2002 was supposed to mark a new dawn in African politics, a time when Africans were supposed to unite, take responsibility and solve their continent's multitudinous problems on their own. Outsiders were politely supportive but had doubts aplenty.
Almost seven years on, a lot of the doubts have been vindicated. The continent's worst tyrants like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir are still clinging to power on the weakened bodies of their respective states like the slimy lampreys they are. Bloody conflicts such as civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, endless fighting in Somalia and the genocide in Darfur rage mostly unchecked and the AU's poorly equipped peacekeeping forces in the latter two have proven completely ineffective. About the only success the AU can claim in the fight against tyranny and injustice was last year's invasion of the tiny island of Anjouan, itself a part of the equally tiny African nation of Comoros, where a local leader named Mohamed Bacar was disputing election results and refusing to step down. His few hundred followers were easily put to flight by a multinational African force in a short fight equivalent to a brawl between a grown-up and an angry preschooler.
This week the AU, already saddled with a reputation for lots of talk but little action, made itself even less respectable when it elected the eccentric Libyan autocrat Moammar Gadhafias chairman of the Assembly of the African Union, the AU's chief decision-making body, composed of heads of state and governments. It was North Africa's turn at the top, but surely they could have gotten someone else. Tunisia's President Zine Ben Ali isn't too bad but now, alas, it's too late.
Gadhafiis an odd choice for the honour and not just because he likes to sleep in a giant tent on foreign visits. He has ruled Libya since seizing power in a coup in 1969 and not exactly as a model of enlightenment. Critics have been locked up or allegedly murdered, freedoms are still restricted and human rights are, to put it politely, not exactly at the top of Gadhafi's agenda.
True, Gadhafihas become an old softy in recent years, having renounced his strident anti-westernism and dismantled Libya's weapons-of-mass-destruction program. Just as significantly, he has also set up billion-dollar compensation funds for the families of victims of Libya's past policy of state-sponsored terrorism, which includes the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (although Libya has never officially admitted responsibility).
But, leaving aside these niceties (thought to be partly motivated by concern over the effects of sanctions), Libya remains a prehistoric autocracy ruled by a volatile and self-serving sexagenarian.
Consider Libya's HIV controversy, which was dragging on even as Gadhafiwas putting on his best face for the outside world. The affair began in 1998 when several hundred children were found to be infected with HIV at a Libyan hospital. Blame was ascribed to a Palestinian intern and five Bulgarian nurses who were arrested, tortured, tried multiple times and eventually sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted and the accused were sent back to Europe in 2007 after lengthy negotiations headed by France led to a settlement, in effect a ransom. True to form, Libya reportedly refused to free the accused even after the settlement was brokered and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's then-wife, Cecilia, had to order her bodyguards to shoot the locks off the prisoners' cells. The real culprit behind the infections, incidentally, is widely believed to be poor hygiene standards at the hospital, long predating the foreigners' arrival. Gadhafijust could not admit as much.
With such a record, it's small wonder that a lot of African politicians (and observers abroad) are said to be less than enthusiastic about Gadhafi's year-long tenure at the top. No one can be sure if he'll spit in the world's face or declare International Hug Your Neighbour Day.
If the African Union is truly serious about living up to its mandate, it will have to start actively cleaning up the Dark Continent's vicious wars and brutal leaders. Good intentions, endless promises and a decent website with a snazzy Flash intro aren't enough to do the trick. Anointing an outright dictator to deal with his undemocratic fellows isn't, either.
Timothy Giannuzzi is a Calgary writer specializing in foreign affairs. His column appears every second Thursday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Tim Giannuzzi, Calgary HeraldFebruary 5, 2009 3:07 AM
The African Union's creation in 2002 was supposed to mark a new dawn in African politics, a time when Africans were supposed to unite, take responsibility and solve their continent's multitudinous problems on their own. Outsiders were politely supportive but had doubts aplenty.
Almost seven years on, a lot of the doubts have been vindicated. The continent's worst tyrants like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir are still clinging to power on the weakened bodies of their respective states like the slimy lampreys they are. Bloody conflicts such as civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, endless fighting in Somalia and the genocide in Darfur rage mostly unchecked and the AU's poorly equipped peacekeeping forces in the latter two have proven completely ineffective. About the only success the AU can claim in the fight against tyranny and injustice was last year's invasion of the tiny island of Anjouan, itself a part of the equally tiny African nation of Comoros, where a local leader named Mohamed Bacar was disputing election results and refusing to step down. His few hundred followers were easily put to flight by a multinational African force in a short fight equivalent to a brawl between a grown-up and an angry preschooler.
This week the AU, already saddled with a reputation for lots of talk but little action, made itself even less respectable when it elected the eccentric Libyan autocrat Moammar Gadhafias chairman of the Assembly of the African Union, the AU's chief decision-making body, composed of heads of state and governments. It was North Africa's turn at the top, but surely they could have gotten someone else. Tunisia's President Zine Ben Ali isn't too bad but now, alas, it's too late.
Gadhafiis an odd choice for the honour and not just because he likes to sleep in a giant tent on foreign visits. He has ruled Libya since seizing power in a coup in 1969 and not exactly as a model of enlightenment. Critics have been locked up or allegedly murdered, freedoms are still restricted and human rights are, to put it politely, not exactly at the top of Gadhafi's agenda.
True, Gadhafihas become an old softy in recent years, having renounced his strident anti-westernism and dismantled Libya's weapons-of-mass-destruction program. Just as significantly, he has also set up billion-dollar compensation funds for the families of victims of Libya's past policy of state-sponsored terrorism, which includes the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (although Libya has never officially admitted responsibility).
But, leaving aside these niceties (thought to be partly motivated by concern over the effects of sanctions), Libya remains a prehistoric autocracy ruled by a volatile and self-serving sexagenarian.
Consider Libya's HIV controversy, which was dragging on even as Gadhafiwas putting on his best face for the outside world. The affair began in 1998 when several hundred children were found to be infected with HIV at a Libyan hospital. Blame was ascribed to a Palestinian intern and five Bulgarian nurses who were arrested, tortured, tried multiple times and eventually sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted and the accused were sent back to Europe in 2007 after lengthy negotiations headed by France led to a settlement, in effect a ransom. True to form, Libya reportedly refused to free the accused even after the settlement was brokered and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's then-wife, Cecilia, had to order her bodyguards to shoot the locks off the prisoners' cells. The real culprit behind the infections, incidentally, is widely believed to be poor hygiene standards at the hospital, long predating the foreigners' arrival. Gadhafijust could not admit as much.
With such a record, it's small wonder that a lot of African politicians (and observers abroad) are said to be less than enthusiastic about Gadhafi's year-long tenure at the top. No one can be sure if he'll spit in the world's face or declare International Hug Your Neighbour Day.
If the African Union is truly serious about living up to its mandate, it will have to start actively cleaning up the Dark Continent's vicious wars and brutal leaders. Good intentions, endless promises and a decent website with a snazzy Flash intro aren't enough to do the trick. Anointing an outright dictator to deal with his undemocratic fellows isn't, either.
Timothy Giannuzzi is a Calgary writer specializing in foreign affairs. His column appears every second Thursday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
February 7, 2009
U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.
The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.
The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.
No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.
The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads.
“The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”
American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.
“We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. “In the end, it was not our operation.”
Maj. Felix Kulayigye, a Ugandan military spokesman, declined to discuss the American involvement and simply said, “There was no way to prevent these massacres.”
The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.
In Dungu, a 10-year-old girl lay comatose on a metal hospital cot, her face glazed with sweat, her pulse hammering in her neck. She had been sexually assaulted in a nearby village and shot in both legs, bullet through bone.
“The people who did this,” said her nurse, Rosa Apamato, “are demons.”
This used to be a tranquil, bountiful spot where villagers grew corn, beans and peanuts, more or less untouched by the violence that has plagued Congo’s east. But thousands have recently fled, and the town is now crawling with soldiers, aid workers and United Nations personnel, the movable cast that marks the advent of a serious problem.
The villagers who remain are terrified and confused. The Lord’s Resistance Army is not a Congolese movement. It is from Uganda. But once again, it seems that foreign armies are settling their scores in Congo, and the Congolese are paying the price. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congo became the battlefield for more than a dozen armies and rebel groups from neighboring African countries, and several million Congolese died.
Even now, Rwandan troops are battling militants hundreds of miles south of here. Congo invited the Rwandans in to go after a different rebel group and its commander, much in the same way it allowed Ugandan soldiers to cross the border and hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army.
“Who are these L.R.A.?” asked Bertrand Bangbe, who had been axed in the head and left for dead. “Why are they here? Why are they killing us?”
There are few answers. The Lord’s Resistance Army may have had some legitimate grievances when it started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a prophet and a savior for the historically oppressed Acholi people. The movement even proclaimed to be fighting for the Ten Commandants.
But it soon devolved into something more sinister. The Lord’s Resistance Army killed tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorizing children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Mr. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park, a vast reserve of elephants and swamps near the border of Uganda and Sudan.
The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.
After that, Major Kulayigye said, “the only option left open to us was the military option.”
The Ugandan government asked the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for help, and the request was sent up the chain of command in November to President Bush, who personally authorized it, a former senior Bush administration official said.
The American advisers and Ugandan officers used satellite imagery and Ugandan field intelligence reports to triangulate where they believed Mr. Kony and his fighters were hiding. The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb his camp and then cut off his 700 or so fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese ground troops. On Dec. 13, the day before the attack, several American advisers traveled to a staging site near the Uganda-Congo border for a final coordination meeting, a senior American military official said.
Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.
The Ugandans say they have destroyed the rebels’ control center and food supplies, rescued around 100 abducted children and killed several fighters, including some commanders. But the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest.
On Dec. 25, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush. Most villagers had no idea who they were. Some Congolese towns had been attacked before the offensive, yet the raids were not so widespread that word would have trickled back to remote places like Faradje.
The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Whoever could run, did. Christine Ataputo, who owns the one restaurant in town, watched from the forest floor as the rebels raped, burned and butchered. She was lying on her belly when she saw that her 18-year-old daughter, Chantal, had been captured.
“They took her away on a rope,” she said.
Chantal has not been seen since, and even more than a month later, Faradje still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.
“These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever,” said Charles Gaudry, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. “There’s zero protection.”
The United Nations has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Congo, including about 250 in Dungu. But United Nations officials said they were spread too thin in other war-racked parts of eastern Congo to take on the Lord’s Resistance Army. At the time of the nearby massacres, the peacekeepers in Dungu were guarding the airfield.
Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots. In the past in Congo, home-grown militias have only complicated the dynamic and led to more abuses.
Even where there are Congolese troops, there is not necessarily protection. The family of the 10-year-old girl in the hospital said she might have been shot by a Congolese soldier who missed the rebel who was assaulting her.
The other night, by the light of a flashlight, a young doctor took one look at the girl and ordered her evacuation to Goma, a city along the Congo-Rwanda border. She may lose a leg, he said. But at least in Goma there is a special hospital to treat girls who have been raped. In eastern Congo, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Dungu, and Eric Schmitt from Washington
U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.
The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.
The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.
No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.
The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads.
“The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”
American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.
“We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. “In the end, it was not our operation.”
Maj. Felix Kulayigye, a Ugandan military spokesman, declined to discuss the American involvement and simply said, “There was no way to prevent these massacres.”
The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.
In Dungu, a 10-year-old girl lay comatose on a metal hospital cot, her face glazed with sweat, her pulse hammering in her neck. She had been sexually assaulted in a nearby village and shot in both legs, bullet through bone.
“The people who did this,” said her nurse, Rosa Apamato, “are demons.”
This used to be a tranquil, bountiful spot where villagers grew corn, beans and peanuts, more or less untouched by the violence that has plagued Congo’s east. But thousands have recently fled, and the town is now crawling with soldiers, aid workers and United Nations personnel, the movable cast that marks the advent of a serious problem.
The villagers who remain are terrified and confused. The Lord’s Resistance Army is not a Congolese movement. It is from Uganda. But once again, it seems that foreign armies are settling their scores in Congo, and the Congolese are paying the price. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congo became the battlefield for more than a dozen armies and rebel groups from neighboring African countries, and several million Congolese died.
Even now, Rwandan troops are battling militants hundreds of miles south of here. Congo invited the Rwandans in to go after a different rebel group and its commander, much in the same way it allowed Ugandan soldiers to cross the border and hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army.
“Who are these L.R.A.?” asked Bertrand Bangbe, who had been axed in the head and left for dead. “Why are they here? Why are they killing us?”
There are few answers. The Lord’s Resistance Army may have had some legitimate grievances when it started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a prophet and a savior for the historically oppressed Acholi people. The movement even proclaimed to be fighting for the Ten Commandants.
But it soon devolved into something more sinister. The Lord’s Resistance Army killed tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorizing children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Mr. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park, a vast reserve of elephants and swamps near the border of Uganda and Sudan.
The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.
After that, Major Kulayigye said, “the only option left open to us was the military option.”
The Ugandan government asked the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for help, and the request was sent up the chain of command in November to President Bush, who personally authorized it, a former senior Bush administration official said.
The American advisers and Ugandan officers used satellite imagery and Ugandan field intelligence reports to triangulate where they believed Mr. Kony and his fighters were hiding. The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb his camp and then cut off his 700 or so fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese ground troops. On Dec. 13, the day before the attack, several American advisers traveled to a staging site near the Uganda-Congo border for a final coordination meeting, a senior American military official said.
Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.
The Ugandans say they have destroyed the rebels’ control center and food supplies, rescued around 100 abducted children and killed several fighters, including some commanders. But the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest.
On Dec. 25, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush. Most villagers had no idea who they were. Some Congolese towns had been attacked before the offensive, yet the raids were not so widespread that word would have trickled back to remote places like Faradje.
The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Whoever could run, did. Christine Ataputo, who owns the one restaurant in town, watched from the forest floor as the rebels raped, burned and butchered. She was lying on her belly when she saw that her 18-year-old daughter, Chantal, had been captured.
“They took her away on a rope,” she said.
Chantal has not been seen since, and even more than a month later, Faradje still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.
“These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever,” said Charles Gaudry, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. “There’s zero protection.”
The United Nations has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Congo, including about 250 in Dungu. But United Nations officials said they were spread too thin in other war-racked parts of eastern Congo to take on the Lord’s Resistance Army. At the time of the nearby massacres, the peacekeepers in Dungu were guarding the airfield.
Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots. In the past in Congo, home-grown militias have only complicated the dynamic and led to more abuses.
Even where there are Congolese troops, there is not necessarily protection. The family of the 10-year-old girl in the hospital said she might have been shot by a Congolese soldier who missed the rebel who was assaulting her.
The other night, by the light of a flashlight, a young doctor took one look at the girl and ordered her evacuation to Goma, a city along the Congo-Rwanda border. She may lose a leg, he said. But at least in Goma there is a special hospital to treat girls who have been raped. In eastern Congo, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Dungu, and Eric Schmitt from Washington
SEACOM FIBRE OPTIC CABLE IPS SUBSEA
SEACOM lays first lengths of African subsea cable
An employee of a local data transmission network firm laying a fibre optic cable in Nairobi. Photo/FILE
By REUTERS
Posted Wednesday, February 4 2009 at 16:59
The laying has started of a fast fibre-optic international telecommunications cable link that could be east Africa's first, the owners of the venture said on Wednesday.
The Mauritius-registered private equity project known as SEACOM is investing in a fibre optic cable linking east and southern Africa to Europe and Asia. Its launch is scheduled for June.
"We are delighted to have actual cable in the water and the countdown to June has begun," said Brian Herlihy, SEACOM President, in a statement.
The first lengths of cable are already on the seabed of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
"The cable has been laid from the edge of the South African waters to Mozambique and cable laying is also proceeding in the Red Sea from Egypt towards the coast of Yemen," SEACOM added.
A third ship is currently being loaded with another portion of the deepwater cable to be laid from India towards Africa, where the three cable segments will join up.
The 15,000 km cable will wind around the east of the continent between South Africa and Egypt, then on to Mumbai in India and Marseille in France.
Investors in the $650 million venture include an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Venfin Ltd, and Herakles Telecom LLC, each with stakes ranging between 23.75 percent and 26.25 percent.
Shanduka Group and Convergence Partners each has a 12.5 percent shareholding.
SEACOM said a landing station in Kenya will be complete this month, followed by another two in Tanzania and South Africa by April.
The cable will provide 1.28 terabits per second of broadband capacity to enable high definition TV and provide bandwidth.
Another two fibre optic cable projects, Kenya's The East African Marine System and the East Africa Submarine System, are also in development.
An employee of a local data transmission network firm laying a fibre optic cable in Nairobi. Photo/FILE
By REUTERS
Posted Wednesday, February 4 2009 at 16:59
The laying has started of a fast fibre-optic international telecommunications cable link that could be east Africa's first, the owners of the venture said on Wednesday.
The Mauritius-registered private equity project known as SEACOM is investing in a fibre optic cable linking east and southern Africa to Europe and Asia. Its launch is scheduled for June.
"We are delighted to have actual cable in the water and the countdown to June has begun," said Brian Herlihy, SEACOM President, in a statement.
The first lengths of cable are already on the seabed of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
"The cable has been laid from the edge of the South African waters to Mozambique and cable laying is also proceeding in the Red Sea from Egypt towards the coast of Yemen," SEACOM added.
A third ship is currently being loaded with another portion of the deepwater cable to be laid from India towards Africa, where the three cable segments will join up.
The 15,000 km cable will wind around the east of the continent between South Africa and Egypt, then on to Mumbai in India and Marseille in France.
Investors in the $650 million venture include an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Venfin Ltd, and Herakles Telecom LLC, each with stakes ranging between 23.75 percent and 26.25 percent.
Shanduka Group and Convergence Partners each has a 12.5 percent shareholding.
SEACOM said a landing station in Kenya will be complete this month, followed by another two in Tanzania and South Africa by April.
The cable will provide 1.28 terabits per second of broadband capacity to enable high definition TV and provide bandwidth.
Another two fibre optic cable projects, Kenya's The East African Marine System and the East Africa Submarine System, are also in development.
Zimbabwe's new PM vows to rebuild economy
Herald News ServicesFebruary 12, 2009
Morgan Tsvangirai vowed to rebuild Zimbabwe's shattered economy and to end political violence as he became prime minister Wednesday in a unity government with longtime rival Robert Mugabe.
Tsvangirai spoke to more than 10,000 cheering supporters who filled a stadium and hung from trees and light towers as he laid out ambitious priorities to turn around a country mired in economic and humanitarian crisis.
His speech was an indictment of President Mugabe's record after 29 years in power, highlighting the vast challenges facing a unity government whose very existence raised doubts within his own party as well as overseas.
"Political violence must end today. We can no longer afford brother against brother, because one happened to have a different political opinion," Tsvangirai said to cheers.
"The transitional government will make food available and affordable," he said. "No Zimbabwean will ever go hungry again.
He also vowed to take immediate steps to fix the economy, but warned curbing world-record inflation and 94 per cent unemployment would take time.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
February 12, 2009
Judges Approve Warrant for Sudan’s President
By MARLISE SIMONS and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
THE HAGUE — Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.
It is the first time the court has sought the detention of a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur.
Ever since international prosecutors began seeking an arrest warrant last year, opponents have pressed the United Nations Security Council to use its power to suspend the proceedings. But a majority of Council members have argued that the case should go forward, saying Mr. Bashir has not done enough to stop the bloodshed to deserve a reprieve.
Many African and Arab nations counter that issuing a warrant for Mr. Bashir’s arrest could backfire, diminishing Sudan’s willingness to compromise for the sake of peace. Others, including some United Nations officials, worry that a warrant could inspire reprisal attacks against civilians, aid groups or the thousands of international peacekeepers deployed there.
The precise charges cited by the judges against Mr. Bashir have not been disclosed. But when the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, first requested an arrest warrant in July, he said he had evidence to support charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to a military campaign that “purposefully targeted civilians” and had been “masterminded” by Mr. Bashir.
Lawyers familiar with the case said the court had already sought to freeze the president’s assets but had found his possessions to be hidden behind other names.
The decision to issue a warrant against him, reached by a panel of judges in The Hague, has been conveyed to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and is expected to be formally announced at the court, officials at the United Nations said.
The prosecutor became involved in the case after the Security Council asked him to investigate the conflict in Darfur, where massacres, disease and starvation have led to the deaths of up to 300,000 people and driven millions from their homes.
Although there has been sporadic fighting in Darfur for decades, the conflict significantly intensified in 2003, when rebel groups demanding greater autonomy for the region attacked Sudanese forces. The Arab-led government responded with a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign, which the court’s prosecutor called a genocidal strategy against Darfur’s black African ethnic groups.
Relations between Mr. Ban and Mr. Bashir continue to be strained by Sudanese government actions in Darfur and by Mr. Ban’s refusal to deal with Mr. Bashir directly.
But on Sunday the two men had an unscheduled encounter at a summit meeting in Ethiopia. Diplomats described it as “a stormy meeting” and “a shouting match” in which Mr. Bashir vented his anger at the court, though it is independent of the United Nations. Mr. Ban, in turn, insisted on the safety of United Nations staff members and peacekeepers, and demanded that Mr. Bashir stop the attacks on civilians.
The prospect of an arrest warrant for Mr. Bashir has already caused a diplomatic rift, with the African Union and members of the Arab League asking the Security Council to exercise its right to postpone any moves against the president for a year, arguing that he might still help bring a settlement in Darfur. Once an arrest warrant is issued, the Council can request that it be postponed.
There is broad concern that removing Mr. Bashir from power could threaten a landmark peace treaty between the Sudanese government and rebels in the southern part of the country. The treaty was signed in 2005 to end a civil war in which 2.2 million people died, far more than in Darfur.
Mr. Bashir fought members of his own party to approve that peace deal, and it is widely seen as critical to holding the country together.
But some diplomats said the peace treaty was not at risk, irrespective of Mr. Bashir, because others in the government want to keep the south stable to maintain access to the large oil deposits there.
On Wednesday, the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, dismissed the court’s decision as “not deserving the ink used to print it.” The ambassador accused the court of being a political tool of mostly Western powers that want to fragment Sudan.
Mr. Abdalhaleem contended that in separate talks at the United Nations last fall with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top European officials, Sudan was promised that Western powers would support a suspension of the prosecution if the country cooperated with United Nations peacekeeping efforts, pursued peace talks and more aggressively pursued war criminals.
“We are moving on all those tracks,” he said, though human rights groups and diplomats disagree.
A top United Nations official said Mr. Ban’s advisers were now struggling to forge a policy that supports the court’s pursuit of justice but avoids wrecking Sudanese cooperation with the complex missions there.
The court has issued two other arrest warrants in connection with the Darfur conflict, one for a former government minister, Ahmad Harun, and another for Ali Kushayb, a leader of a government-backed militia. Neither has been arrested.
The prosecutor has also accused three rebel leaders of the killing of 12 African Union peacekeepers. They have said publicly that they will surrender to the court.
Marlise Simons reported from The Hague, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
Herald News ServicesFebruary 12, 2009
Morgan Tsvangirai vowed to rebuild Zimbabwe's shattered economy and to end political violence as he became prime minister Wednesday in a unity government with longtime rival Robert Mugabe.
Tsvangirai spoke to more than 10,000 cheering supporters who filled a stadium and hung from trees and light towers as he laid out ambitious priorities to turn around a country mired in economic and humanitarian crisis.
His speech was an indictment of President Mugabe's record after 29 years in power, highlighting the vast challenges facing a unity government whose very existence raised doubts within his own party as well as overseas.
"Political violence must end today. We can no longer afford brother against brother, because one happened to have a different political opinion," Tsvangirai said to cheers.
"The transitional government will make food available and affordable," he said. "No Zimbabwean will ever go hungry again.
He also vowed to take immediate steps to fix the economy, but warned curbing world-record inflation and 94 per cent unemployment would take time.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
February 12, 2009
Judges Approve Warrant for Sudan’s President
By MARLISE SIMONS and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
THE HAGUE — Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.
It is the first time the court has sought the detention of a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur.
Ever since international prosecutors began seeking an arrest warrant last year, opponents have pressed the United Nations Security Council to use its power to suspend the proceedings. But a majority of Council members have argued that the case should go forward, saying Mr. Bashir has not done enough to stop the bloodshed to deserve a reprieve.
Many African and Arab nations counter that issuing a warrant for Mr. Bashir’s arrest could backfire, diminishing Sudan’s willingness to compromise for the sake of peace. Others, including some United Nations officials, worry that a warrant could inspire reprisal attacks against civilians, aid groups or the thousands of international peacekeepers deployed there.
The precise charges cited by the judges against Mr. Bashir have not been disclosed. But when the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, first requested an arrest warrant in July, he said he had evidence to support charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to a military campaign that “purposefully targeted civilians” and had been “masterminded” by Mr. Bashir.
Lawyers familiar with the case said the court had already sought to freeze the president’s assets but had found his possessions to be hidden behind other names.
The decision to issue a warrant against him, reached by a panel of judges in The Hague, has been conveyed to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and is expected to be formally announced at the court, officials at the United Nations said.
The prosecutor became involved in the case after the Security Council asked him to investigate the conflict in Darfur, where massacres, disease and starvation have led to the deaths of up to 300,000 people and driven millions from their homes.
Although there has been sporadic fighting in Darfur for decades, the conflict significantly intensified in 2003, when rebel groups demanding greater autonomy for the region attacked Sudanese forces. The Arab-led government responded with a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign, which the court’s prosecutor called a genocidal strategy against Darfur’s black African ethnic groups.
Relations between Mr. Ban and Mr. Bashir continue to be strained by Sudanese government actions in Darfur and by Mr. Ban’s refusal to deal with Mr. Bashir directly.
But on Sunday the two men had an unscheduled encounter at a summit meeting in Ethiopia. Diplomats described it as “a stormy meeting” and “a shouting match” in which Mr. Bashir vented his anger at the court, though it is independent of the United Nations. Mr. Ban, in turn, insisted on the safety of United Nations staff members and peacekeepers, and demanded that Mr. Bashir stop the attacks on civilians.
The prospect of an arrest warrant for Mr. Bashir has already caused a diplomatic rift, with the African Union and members of the Arab League asking the Security Council to exercise its right to postpone any moves against the president for a year, arguing that he might still help bring a settlement in Darfur. Once an arrest warrant is issued, the Council can request that it be postponed.
There is broad concern that removing Mr. Bashir from power could threaten a landmark peace treaty between the Sudanese government and rebels in the southern part of the country. The treaty was signed in 2005 to end a civil war in which 2.2 million people died, far more than in Darfur.
Mr. Bashir fought members of his own party to approve that peace deal, and it is widely seen as critical to holding the country together.
But some diplomats said the peace treaty was not at risk, irrespective of Mr. Bashir, because others in the government want to keep the south stable to maintain access to the large oil deposits there.
On Wednesday, the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, dismissed the court’s decision as “not deserving the ink used to print it.” The ambassador accused the court of being a political tool of mostly Western powers that want to fragment Sudan.
Mr. Abdalhaleem contended that in separate talks at the United Nations last fall with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top European officials, Sudan was promised that Western powers would support a suspension of the prosecution if the country cooperated with United Nations peacekeeping efforts, pursued peace talks and more aggressively pursued war criminals.
“We are moving on all those tracks,” he said, though human rights groups and diplomats disagree.
A top United Nations official said Mr. Ban’s advisers were now struggling to forge a policy that supports the court’s pursuit of justice but avoids wrecking Sudanese cooperation with the complex missions there.
The court has issued two other arrest warrants in connection with the Darfur conflict, one for a former government minister, Ahmad Harun, and another for Ali Kushayb, a leader of a government-backed militia. Neither has been arrested.
The prosecutor has also accused three rebel leaders of the killing of 12 African Union peacekeepers. They have said publicly that they will surrender to the court.
Marlise Simons reported from The Hague, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
February 14, 2009
Zimbabwe Opposition Party Official Arrested
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — On the very day Zimbabwe’s new coalition government was sworn in, agents of President Robert Mugabe’s security forces on Friday arrested Roy Bennett, the third highest ranking member of the opposition party that is supposed to share power with Mr. Mugabe.
The authorities picked up Mr. Bennett, the treasurer general of the Movement for Democratic Change and the nominee to become deputy agriculture minister, at a small airport in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. His party said Friday evening that the authorities originally charged Mr. Bennett with trying to leave the country illegally, then later with treason, punishable by death. Mr. Mugabe’s government had recently linked Mr. Bennett once again to a plot allegedly hatched in 2006 to destabilize the government — a charge Mr. Bennett has denied.
Mr. Bennett was about to board a flight to Johannesburg, where he has lived in exile in recent years, for a celebration of his 52nd birthday on Monday, his wife, Heather, said in a telephone interview. He had planned to fly back to Harare to be sworn in on Wednesday along with the other deputy ministers appointed by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change. “I spoke to him just an hour ago,” Mrs. Bennett said Friday afternoon. “Obviously, he’s been worried the whole time he’s been in Zimbabwe, but Morgan had said to him it would be fine to fly out.”
Mr. Bennett’s arrest raises more questions about how much clout Mr. Tsvangirai will have under a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country with an iron hand since 1980. Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in elections last March, but ended his campaign just days before a run-off in June because of violence against thousands of his supporters.
Spokesmen for the police and the Information Ministry could not be reached for comment on Friday.
The treason charges leveled against Mr. Bennett, whose coffee farm was seized during the Mugabe government’s push to confiscate white-owned land, are nothing new for the opposition. Mr. Tsvangirai himself was charged with treason, tried in 2004 and acquitted. Last week, a judge withdrew treason charges against Tendai Biti, the second-ranking official in the party and the finance minister in the new coalition government.
The Movement for Democratic Change said Mr. Bennett had been taken to the police station in Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe; it said that the police had fired live ammunition into the air and taken dogs to disperse a crowd of opposition party supporters who gathered to demand his release, but that the crowd remained there on Friday evening.
In a power-sharing deal negotiated last month under the auspices of regional leaders from across southern Africa, Mr. Tsvangirai and a small breakaway faction of the opposition will have a one-vote edge in cabinet ministers over Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party. But Mr. Mugabe retained control over the military and the intelligence agency and insisted on shared control of the police — giving him a continued hold over the security forces he has employed for years to repress his political opponents.
Mr. Tsvangirai had sought the release of dozens of opposition and human rights activists abducted by security agents in recent months as a condition for joining the government, but relented when Mr. Mugabe refused to free them.
On Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai had an emotional reunion with 16 of his people at Chikurubi prison in Harare, his spokesman, Joseph Mungwari, said. Many of them have submitted affidavits that they were tortured to extract false confessions of their involvement in plots to topple Mr. Mugabe. They are yet to be released on bail.
Since Mr. Bennett returned to Zimbabwe after Mr. Tsvangirai agreed to enter the government, there have been intimations in the state news media that Mr. Bennett might be picked up in connection with an arms cache found in a home in 2006 “tied to attempts to instigate civil strife in the country,” the state-owned Herald, a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, reported two weeks ago.
Mr. Bennett had heard he was being sought by the authorities and, concerned for his safety, spent Thursday night at the German Embassy in Harare, his wife said Friday. She said that when she told him she was worried, he replied, “You can’t keep hiding.”
A reporter in Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed to this article.
Zimbabwe Opposition Party Official Arrested
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — On the very day Zimbabwe’s new coalition government was sworn in, agents of President Robert Mugabe’s security forces on Friday arrested Roy Bennett, the third highest ranking member of the opposition party that is supposed to share power with Mr. Mugabe.
The authorities picked up Mr. Bennett, the treasurer general of the Movement for Democratic Change and the nominee to become deputy agriculture minister, at a small airport in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. His party said Friday evening that the authorities originally charged Mr. Bennett with trying to leave the country illegally, then later with treason, punishable by death. Mr. Mugabe’s government had recently linked Mr. Bennett once again to a plot allegedly hatched in 2006 to destabilize the government — a charge Mr. Bennett has denied.
Mr. Bennett was about to board a flight to Johannesburg, where he has lived in exile in recent years, for a celebration of his 52nd birthday on Monday, his wife, Heather, said in a telephone interview. He had planned to fly back to Harare to be sworn in on Wednesday along with the other deputy ministers appointed by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change. “I spoke to him just an hour ago,” Mrs. Bennett said Friday afternoon. “Obviously, he’s been worried the whole time he’s been in Zimbabwe, but Morgan had said to him it would be fine to fly out.”
Mr. Bennett’s arrest raises more questions about how much clout Mr. Tsvangirai will have under a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country with an iron hand since 1980. Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in elections last March, but ended his campaign just days before a run-off in June because of violence against thousands of his supporters.
Spokesmen for the police and the Information Ministry could not be reached for comment on Friday.
The treason charges leveled against Mr. Bennett, whose coffee farm was seized during the Mugabe government’s push to confiscate white-owned land, are nothing new for the opposition. Mr. Tsvangirai himself was charged with treason, tried in 2004 and acquitted. Last week, a judge withdrew treason charges against Tendai Biti, the second-ranking official in the party and the finance minister in the new coalition government.
The Movement for Democratic Change said Mr. Bennett had been taken to the police station in Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe; it said that the police had fired live ammunition into the air and taken dogs to disperse a crowd of opposition party supporters who gathered to demand his release, but that the crowd remained there on Friday evening.
In a power-sharing deal negotiated last month under the auspices of regional leaders from across southern Africa, Mr. Tsvangirai and a small breakaway faction of the opposition will have a one-vote edge in cabinet ministers over Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party. But Mr. Mugabe retained control over the military and the intelligence agency and insisted on shared control of the police — giving him a continued hold over the security forces he has employed for years to repress his political opponents.
Mr. Tsvangirai had sought the release of dozens of opposition and human rights activists abducted by security agents in recent months as a condition for joining the government, but relented when Mr. Mugabe refused to free them.
On Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai had an emotional reunion with 16 of his people at Chikurubi prison in Harare, his spokesman, Joseph Mungwari, said. Many of them have submitted affidavits that they were tortured to extract false confessions of their involvement in plots to topple Mr. Mugabe. They are yet to be released on bail.
Since Mr. Bennett returned to Zimbabwe after Mr. Tsvangirai agreed to enter the government, there have been intimations in the state news media that Mr. Bennett might be picked up in connection with an arms cache found in a home in 2006 “tied to attempts to instigate civil strife in the country,” the state-owned Herald, a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, reported two weeks ago.
Mr. Bennett had heard he was being sought by the authorities and, concerned for his safety, spent Thursday night at the German Embassy in Harare, his wife said Friday. She said that when she told him she was worried, he replied, “You can’t keep hiding.”
A reporter in Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed to this article.
February 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Invisible War
By BOB HERBERT
Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.
For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.
Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.
“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.
In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.
It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed. As The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, on assignment in Congo, wrote last fall:
“Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.”
Dr. Mukwege visited me at The Times last week. He was accompanied by the playwright, Eve Ensler, who has been passionate in her efforts to bring attention and assistance to the women of Congo.
I asked Dr. Mukwege to explain how it was in the strategic interest of the various armed groups to rape and otherwise brutalize women. He described some of the ramifications of such atrocities and the ways in which they undermine the entire society in which the women live.
“Once they have raped these women in such a public way,” he said, “sometimes maiming them, destroying their sexual organs — and with everybody watching — the women themselves are destroyed, or virtually destroyed. They are traumatized and humiliated on every level, physical and psychological. That’s the first consequence.
“The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.
“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”
The devastating injuries treated by Dr. Mukwege at his hospital can all but stun the imagination. There is no need to detail them further here. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are commonplace. Often the ability to bear children is destroyed. In many other cases, women end up giving birth to the children of their rapists.
“The hospital can take care of 3,600 women every year,” said Dr. Mukwege. “That is our maximum capacity. We can’t take any more.”
He spoke of ambulance teams that would drive into villages and be besieged by rape victims desperately seeking treatment. “It is awful to see 300 women in need of help,” he said, “and you have to take 10 because the ambulance can only take 10.”
Ms. Ensler spoke of her encounter with an 8-year-old girl during one of her trips to Congo. The girl’s father had been killed in an attack, her mother was raped, and the girl herself was abducted. The child was raped by groups of soldiers over a two-week period and then abandoned.
The girl felt too ashamed to allow herself to be held, Ms. Ensler said, because her injuries had left her incontinent. After explaining how she persuaded the child to accept an embrace, to be hugged, Ms. Ensler said, “If we’re living in a century when an 8-year-old girl is incontinent because that many soldiers have raped her, then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.
If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Invisible War
By BOB HERBERT
Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.
For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.
Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.
“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.
In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.
It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed. As The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, on assignment in Congo, wrote last fall:
“Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.”
Dr. Mukwege visited me at The Times last week. He was accompanied by the playwright, Eve Ensler, who has been passionate in her efforts to bring attention and assistance to the women of Congo.
I asked Dr. Mukwege to explain how it was in the strategic interest of the various armed groups to rape and otherwise brutalize women. He described some of the ramifications of such atrocities and the ways in which they undermine the entire society in which the women live.
“Once they have raped these women in such a public way,” he said, “sometimes maiming them, destroying their sexual organs — and with everybody watching — the women themselves are destroyed, or virtually destroyed. They are traumatized and humiliated on every level, physical and psychological. That’s the first consequence.
“The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.
“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”
The devastating injuries treated by Dr. Mukwege at his hospital can all but stun the imagination. There is no need to detail them further here. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are commonplace. Often the ability to bear children is destroyed. In many other cases, women end up giving birth to the children of their rapists.
“The hospital can take care of 3,600 women every year,” said Dr. Mukwege. “That is our maximum capacity. We can’t take any more.”
He spoke of ambulance teams that would drive into villages and be besieged by rape victims desperately seeking treatment. “It is awful to see 300 women in need of help,” he said, “and you have to take 10 because the ambulance can only take 10.”
Ms. Ensler spoke of her encounter with an 8-year-old girl during one of her trips to Congo. The girl’s father had been killed in an attack, her mother was raped, and the girl herself was abducted. The child was raped by groups of soldiers over a two-week period and then abandoned.
The girl felt too ashamed to allow herself to be held, Ms. Ensler said, because her injuries had left her incontinent. After explaining how she persuaded the child to accept an embrace, to be hugged, Ms. Ensler said, “If we’re living in a century when an 8-year-old girl is incontinent because that many soldiers have raped her, then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.
If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.
Praise flows on Mugabe birthday
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 22, 2009 8:01 AMBe the first to post a comment
Party loyalists on Saturday lavished Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe with praise as he marked his 85th birthday against the backdrop of a deadly cholera epidemic and crippling economic crisis.
"Like a mighty crocodile, you have remained resilient, focused and resolute against all odds and stood by the principles of our liberation struggle as well as the sovereignty of our beloved motherland, Zimbabwe," the Defence Ministry said in a newspaper advertisement.
Mugabe will celebrate his birthday with a feast Feb. 28 with party members, government officials and diplomats in the farming town Chinhoyi in his home province Mashonaland west.
Zimbabwe's crisis-ravaged economy has the world's highest inflation, last put in July at 231 million per cent. Cholera has killed 3,759 people while seven million--more than half the population of 12 million--need emergency food aid, UN figures reveal.
"We indeed salute you our commander-in-chief and hero, and further pray that the Almighty God grant you many more years," the ministry added.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 22, 2009 8:01 AMBe the first to post a comment
Party loyalists on Saturday lavished Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe with praise as he marked his 85th birthday against the backdrop of a deadly cholera epidemic and crippling economic crisis.
"Like a mighty crocodile, you have remained resilient, focused and resolute against all odds and stood by the principles of our liberation struggle as well as the sovereignty of our beloved motherland, Zimbabwe," the Defence Ministry said in a newspaper advertisement.
Mugabe will celebrate his birthday with a feast Feb. 28 with party members, government officials and diplomats in the farming town Chinhoyi in his home province Mashonaland west.
Zimbabwe's crisis-ravaged economy has the world's highest inflation, last put in July at 231 million per cent. Cholera has killed 3,759 people while seven million--more than half the population of 12 million--need emergency food aid, UN figures reveal.
"We indeed salute you our commander-in-chief and hero, and further pray that the Almighty God grant you many more years," the ministry added.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
March 1, 2009
Starvation and Strife Menace Torn Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — One year after this country exploded in ethnic bloodshed, trouble is brewing here again.
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear.
At the same time, public confidence in the Kenyan government is plummeting. Top politicians have been implicated in an endless string of scandals involving tourism, fuel, guns and corn.
On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence.
“There’s a lot of anger,” said Maina Kiai, the former director of Kenya’s national human rights commission. “If we don’t start resolving these issues soon, things could be worse than before. There could be complete collapse.”
The grand coalition government that was formed last year between Kenya’s governing party and the opposition, after a deeply flawed election, is now widely dismissed as the “grand letdown.” It managed to stop the bloodletting between different ethnic groups that tore this country apart in 2008, killing more than 1,000 people, but has accomplished little else.
The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries.
“Corruption is the glue holding this government together,” said John Githongo, the director of an anticorruption institute here.
Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.
President Obama, whose father was Kenyan, has become a savior to many people here, in part because Kenyans say their own leaders have been such a disappointment.
Ethnicity and the country’s lingering Balkanization are topics studiously avoided in Parliament. Few of Kenya’s politicians seem ready to tackle land reform, constitutional reform or the dangerous culture of impunity, all of which were called urgent priorities after the bloodshed last year. Many Kenyans are urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to get involved, because they have no faith that the Kenyan justice system will prosecute the well-known political figures suspected of orchestrating last year’s killings.
“This country hasn’t healed,” Mr. Kiai said, “because we haven’t done anything to heal it.”
Many victims of last year’s violence feel totally abandoned. On a recent morning, Mary Macharia stood in a long line of sick people at a hospital near Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, her eyes on the floor.
A shiny, bubbly scar stretches from her ear to her lips. The right side of her face looks melted. A glance in the mirror jolts her mind back to the burning church where her daughter was killed a year ago, along with 30 others.
“Some days,” she said, “I hate myself.”
Across Kenya, near the western town of Kisumu, Millicent Awino is all alone, a young woman who used to have two children and a decent job packing flowers. She is essentially a serf now, her time, her sweat and her body at the beck and call of her ex-husband’s family, the only people who would take her in after she fled the violence that consumed her son and daughter and the ethnically mixed town where she used to live. She recently had another child, by the ex-husband who came into her hut one night, but the baby died of malaria.
“I think I’m done with children,” she said.
She also said she would never return to her former home.
Kenya, once a nation of so much promise, remains a land divided. The country pulled apart in 2008, when hundreds of thousands of people fled ethnically mixed areas for the safety of homogeneous zones. This was the result of a disputed election in which the president, Mwai Kibaki, was widely believed to have rigged the results to stay in power. Supporters of the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who hails from a different ethnic group, then vented their rage on Mr. Kibaki’s people.
On Jan. 1, 2008, Mrs. Macharia and four of her children ran from their farm near Eldoret, in the Rift Valley, to a nearby church to seek shelter.
The Macharias are Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group. A mob made up of men from other ethnic groups surrounded the church, barricaded the doors and set it on fire. Mrs. Macharia tried to escape but tripped on a burning mattress, falling on her right side. She had her 3-year-old daughter, Joyce, tied to her back and the little girl flipped into the flames.
Mrs. Macharia remembers her daughter screaming: “Mommy, don’t leave me here! I don’t want to die!”
But people inside the church panicked and Mrs. Macharia, 41, was trampled at the door.
She spent the next six months in the hospital, getting skin grafts and other painful operations. She wants plastic surgery, she said, “because I don’t like the way people look at me now.”
But for the first time in her life, she is broke. Her family used to have a nice farmhouse, sheep, chickens and cows. Now they live in a one-room apartment atop a sun-baked hill, surrounded by other Kikuyus, living off handouts.
“We used to have it all,” said Haron Macharia, Mary’s husband. “Now, we’re beggars.”
He said he could never go back to Eldoret because his neighbors had turned on him and they were like “snakes.”
The Macharias are worried about their 12-year-old son, James. He, too, was trapped in the church that day, though he survived.
“He won’t stop talking about killing,” Haron said. “He wants to burn everything.”
Over the summer, Kenyan children rioted in hundreds of schools, ransacking classrooms and burning down dorms. Ostensibly, the children were upset about exams. In truth, it may have been a collective outburst after all the violence they had witnessed.
Mrs. Awino’s two children, Wycliffe and Cynthia, were victims of revenge. Mrs. Awino, 24, is a Luo, a large and historically marginalized ethnic group, and while she was at work on Jan. 27, 2008, packing roses for $2 a day, a Kikuyu mob burned the house where her children were staying.
Her losses do not seem to end. After her 3-month-old baby died in early February, Mrs. Awino’s in-laws called her cursed and told her to leave.
“I would,” she said. “But I have nowhere else to go.”
Starvation and Strife Menace Torn Kenya
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — One year after this country exploded in ethnic bloodshed, trouble is brewing here again.
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear.
At the same time, public confidence in the Kenyan government is plummeting. Top politicians have been implicated in an endless string of scandals involving tourism, fuel, guns and corn.
On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence.
“There’s a lot of anger,” said Maina Kiai, the former director of Kenya’s national human rights commission. “If we don’t start resolving these issues soon, things could be worse than before. There could be complete collapse.”
The grand coalition government that was formed last year between Kenya’s governing party and the opposition, after a deeply flawed election, is now widely dismissed as the “grand letdown.” It managed to stop the bloodletting between different ethnic groups that tore this country apart in 2008, killing more than 1,000 people, but has accomplished little else.
The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries.
“Corruption is the glue holding this government together,” said John Githongo, the director of an anticorruption institute here.
Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.
President Obama, whose father was Kenyan, has become a savior to many people here, in part because Kenyans say their own leaders have been such a disappointment.
Ethnicity and the country’s lingering Balkanization are topics studiously avoided in Parliament. Few of Kenya’s politicians seem ready to tackle land reform, constitutional reform or the dangerous culture of impunity, all of which were called urgent priorities after the bloodshed last year. Many Kenyans are urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to get involved, because they have no faith that the Kenyan justice system will prosecute the well-known political figures suspected of orchestrating last year’s killings.
“This country hasn’t healed,” Mr. Kiai said, “because we haven’t done anything to heal it.”
Many victims of last year’s violence feel totally abandoned. On a recent morning, Mary Macharia stood in a long line of sick people at a hospital near Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, her eyes on the floor.
A shiny, bubbly scar stretches from her ear to her lips. The right side of her face looks melted. A glance in the mirror jolts her mind back to the burning church where her daughter was killed a year ago, along with 30 others.
“Some days,” she said, “I hate myself.”
Across Kenya, near the western town of Kisumu, Millicent Awino is all alone, a young woman who used to have two children and a decent job packing flowers. She is essentially a serf now, her time, her sweat and her body at the beck and call of her ex-husband’s family, the only people who would take her in after she fled the violence that consumed her son and daughter and the ethnically mixed town where she used to live. She recently had another child, by the ex-husband who came into her hut one night, but the baby died of malaria.
“I think I’m done with children,” she said.
She also said she would never return to her former home.
Kenya, once a nation of so much promise, remains a land divided. The country pulled apart in 2008, when hundreds of thousands of people fled ethnically mixed areas for the safety of homogeneous zones. This was the result of a disputed election in which the president, Mwai Kibaki, was widely believed to have rigged the results to stay in power. Supporters of the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who hails from a different ethnic group, then vented their rage on Mr. Kibaki’s people.
On Jan. 1, 2008, Mrs. Macharia and four of her children ran from their farm near Eldoret, in the Rift Valley, to a nearby church to seek shelter.
The Macharias are Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group. A mob made up of men from other ethnic groups surrounded the church, barricaded the doors and set it on fire. Mrs. Macharia tried to escape but tripped on a burning mattress, falling on her right side. She had her 3-year-old daughter, Joyce, tied to her back and the little girl flipped into the flames.
Mrs. Macharia remembers her daughter screaming: “Mommy, don’t leave me here! I don’t want to die!”
But people inside the church panicked and Mrs. Macharia, 41, was trampled at the door.
She spent the next six months in the hospital, getting skin grafts and other painful operations. She wants plastic surgery, she said, “because I don’t like the way people look at me now.”
But for the first time in her life, she is broke. Her family used to have a nice farmhouse, sheep, chickens and cows. Now they live in a one-room apartment atop a sun-baked hill, surrounded by other Kikuyus, living off handouts.
“We used to have it all,” said Haron Macharia, Mary’s husband. “Now, we’re beggars.”
He said he could never go back to Eldoret because his neighbors had turned on him and they were like “snakes.”
The Macharias are worried about their 12-year-old son, James. He, too, was trapped in the church that day, though he survived.
“He won’t stop talking about killing,” Haron said. “He wants to burn everything.”
Over the summer, Kenyan children rioted in hundreds of schools, ransacking classrooms and burning down dorms. Ostensibly, the children were upset about exams. In truth, it may have been a collective outburst after all the violence they had witnessed.
Mrs. Awino’s two children, Wycliffe and Cynthia, were victims of revenge. Mrs. Awino, 24, is a Luo, a large and historically marginalized ethnic group, and while she was at work on Jan. 27, 2008, packing roses for $2 a day, a Kikuyu mob burned the house where her children were staying.
Her losses do not seem to end. After her 3-month-old baby died in early February, Mrs. Awino’s in-laws called her cursed and told her to leave.
“I would,” she said. “But I have nowhere else to go.”
March 3, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Africa Let Sudan Off the Hook?
By DESMOND TUTU
Cape Town
THE expected issuance of an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court tomorrow presents a stark choice for African leaders — are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor? The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful.
Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.
In response to news last July that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court’s chief prosecutor, was seeking an arrest warrant for President Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the African Union issued a communiqué to the United Nations Security Council asking it to suspend the court’s proceedings. Rather than condemn the genocide in Darfur, the organization chose to underscore its concern that African leaders are being unfairly singled out and to support President Bashir’s effort to delay court proceedings.
More recently, the Group of 77, an influential organization at the United Nations consisting of 130 developing states and including nearly every African country, gave Sudan its chairmanship. The victory came after African members endorsed Sudan’s candidacy in spite of the imminent criminal charges against its president.
I regret that the charges against President Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system — and in particular, the international court — is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West is demeaning to Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent.
It’s worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa. That the court’s four active investigations are all in Africa is not because of prosecutorial prejudice — it is because three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) themselves requested that the prosecutor intervene. Only the Darfur case was referred to the prosecutor by the Security Council. The prosecutor on his own initiative is considering investigations in Afghanistan, Colombia and Georgia.
African leaders argue that the court’s action will impede efforts to promote peace in Darfur. However, there can be no real peace and security until justice is enjoyed by the inhabitants of the land. There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative — allowing accountability to fall by the wayside — is worse.
The issuance of an arrest warrant for President Bashir would be an extraordinary moment for the people of Sudan — and for those around the world who have come to doubt that powerful people and governments can be called to account for inhumane acts. African leaders should support this historic occasion, not work to subvert it.
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Africa Let Sudan Off the Hook?
By DESMOND TUTU
Cape Town
THE expected issuance of an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court tomorrow presents a stark choice for African leaders — are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor? The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful.
Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.
In response to news last July that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court’s chief prosecutor, was seeking an arrest warrant for President Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the African Union issued a communiqué to the United Nations Security Council asking it to suspend the court’s proceedings. Rather than condemn the genocide in Darfur, the organization chose to underscore its concern that African leaders are being unfairly singled out and to support President Bashir’s effort to delay court proceedings.
More recently, the Group of 77, an influential organization at the United Nations consisting of 130 developing states and including nearly every African country, gave Sudan its chairmanship. The victory came after African members endorsed Sudan’s candidacy in spite of the imminent criminal charges against its president.
I regret that the charges against President Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system — and in particular, the international court — is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West is demeaning to Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent.
It’s worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa. That the court’s four active investigations are all in Africa is not because of prosecutorial prejudice — it is because three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) themselves requested that the prosecutor intervene. Only the Darfur case was referred to the prosecutor by the Security Council. The prosecutor on his own initiative is considering investigations in Afghanistan, Colombia and Georgia.
African leaders argue that the court’s action will impede efforts to promote peace in Darfur. However, there can be no real peace and security until justice is enjoyed by the inhabitants of the land. There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative — allowing accountability to fall by the wayside — is worse.
The issuance of an arrest warrant for President Bashir would be an extraordinary moment for the people of Sudan — and for those around the world who have come to doubt that powerful people and governments can be called to account for inhumane acts. African leaders should support this historic occasion, not work to subvert it.
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
March 3, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Put Peace Before Justice
By FRANKLIN GRAHAM
Nyala, Sudan
IN 2001 a hospital operated by my relief organization in the southern Sudanese town of Lui was bombed nine times by forces of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Two years later, I had what would be my first of three meetings with Mr. Bashir, now one of the most wanted men on the planet. When I confronted him about these attacks he was fully aware of them. After our meeting they stopped. Mr. Bashir is rightly accused of great cruelty and destruction. But I have been able to deal with him.
It now looks as if the International Criminal Court will finally bring Mr. Bashir to his knees. Tomorrow the court is expected to announce its decision to issue an arrest warrant for the president, the first time it has sought the detention of a sitting head of state. Yet arresting Mr. Bashir now will likely only create further chaos in Sudan, which in recent years has been convulsed by separate conflicts in the south and in the Darfur region in the west.
The court may have good intentions. After all, any civilized person would condemn Mr. Bashir for his behavior. I have done so to his face.
In 16 years of relief work in Sudan, I have witnessed much of the violence that his government has inflicted. An estimated 300,000 people in Darfur have died and 2.5 million people have fled their homes in the wake of fighting among rebels, government forces and their allied Janjaweed militias. Nor does the destruction stop there: Our organization has identified nearly 500 churches that were destroyed by Mr. Bashir’s forces.
But arresting Mr. Bashir now threatens to undo the progress his country has made. In 2005, Sudan’s government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed an accord ending the civil war in the south. The agreement paved the way for elections in the south later this year, as well as for a referendum on southern independence scheduled for 2011. The accord has brought benefits to Sudan, but it isn’t clear that they will last. Mr. Bashir, who fought members of his own party to approve the deal, is critical to the peace process.
I want to see justice served, but my desire for peace in Sudan is stronger. Mr. Bashir, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, is hardly an ideal peacemaker. But given all the warring factions in Sudan, there is no guarantee that his replacement would be better.
For all his faults, Mr. Bashir has demonstrated that he is able to cooperate. On several occasions he has complied with my requests. When a hospital we operated in eastern Sudan was seized by government forces, Mr. Bashir granted us limited access. Mr. Bashir also made television time available for us to broadcast a Christian program at Christmas and Easter.
More important, Mr. Bashir helped make the peace agreement a reality. Now, his arrest could threaten the south’s elections and referendum, and hurl the country back into civil war. His removal could also spur retaliation by Bashir loyalists and other forces against civilians, United Nations peacekeepers or international aid workers.
We do have other options. The statute that established the court allows for the United Nations Security Council to postpone the court’s proceedings for 12 months, giving Sudan the time it will need to achieve peace. In that period President Bashir should do everything he can to ensure that the provisions of the agreement go fully into effect, and to cooperate with the United Nations and the United States to bring about political stability in Darfur.
President Obama can also do his part. He should move quickly to appoint a special envoy to Sudan, as he has wisely done in other hot spots of the world. Economic problems at home should not distract America’s president from exerting leadership to avert a crisis that threatens the future of Africa’s largest nation.
The removal of Mr. Bashir will make it harder to negotiate an end to the crisis in Sudan. Ultimately, justice will be served by a power higher than the International Criminal Court. In the meantime, justice without peace would be a hollow victory.
Franklin Graham is the president and chief executive of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
*****
There is a related video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 4, 2009
In Congo, With Rebels Now at Bay, Calm Erupts
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BUKIMA, Congo — Jean-Marie Serundori’s eyes light up when he sees his old hulk of a friend Kabirizi.
War, displacement and bloodthirsty rebels had gotten between them.
But for the first time in years, this section of a venerated Congolese national park is rebel-free. Government wildlife rangers, like Mr. Serundori, are firmly in control — for the moment. And Kabirizi, a 500-pound silverback gorilla with a head as big as an engine block, seems to be flourishing in his kingdom of leaves.
“Haa mmm,” Mr. Serundori says, emitting a special gruntlike gorilla greeting that miraculously stops Kabirizi in midcharge. “Haa mmm.”
If the endangered mountain gorillas are any sign, things may finally be looking up in eastern Congo. In the past several weeks, Congo and its disproportionately mighty neighbor, Rwanda, have teamed up to sweep this area clear of rebels who had been at the center of a vicious proxy battle between the nations.
The enmity of Congo and Rwanda has been one of the most stubborn drivers of the bloodshed here, which has claimed millions of lives in the past decade. But if these two countries continue to cooperate, it could represent a significant step toward ending one of Africa’s most vexing wars.
“This is really good news, that there’s a serious improvement in relations,” said Koen Vlassenroot, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium who specializes in eastern Congo. “But it’s still rather confusing.”
Op-Ed Contributor
Put Peace Before Justice
By FRANKLIN GRAHAM
Nyala, Sudan
IN 2001 a hospital operated by my relief organization in the southern Sudanese town of Lui was bombed nine times by forces of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Two years later, I had what would be my first of three meetings with Mr. Bashir, now one of the most wanted men on the planet. When I confronted him about these attacks he was fully aware of them. After our meeting they stopped. Mr. Bashir is rightly accused of great cruelty and destruction. But I have been able to deal with him.
It now looks as if the International Criminal Court will finally bring Mr. Bashir to his knees. Tomorrow the court is expected to announce its decision to issue an arrest warrant for the president, the first time it has sought the detention of a sitting head of state. Yet arresting Mr. Bashir now will likely only create further chaos in Sudan, which in recent years has been convulsed by separate conflicts in the south and in the Darfur region in the west.
The court may have good intentions. After all, any civilized person would condemn Mr. Bashir for his behavior. I have done so to his face.
In 16 years of relief work in Sudan, I have witnessed much of the violence that his government has inflicted. An estimated 300,000 people in Darfur have died and 2.5 million people have fled their homes in the wake of fighting among rebels, government forces and their allied Janjaweed militias. Nor does the destruction stop there: Our organization has identified nearly 500 churches that were destroyed by Mr. Bashir’s forces.
But arresting Mr. Bashir now threatens to undo the progress his country has made. In 2005, Sudan’s government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed an accord ending the civil war in the south. The agreement paved the way for elections in the south later this year, as well as for a referendum on southern independence scheduled for 2011. The accord has brought benefits to Sudan, but it isn’t clear that they will last. Mr. Bashir, who fought members of his own party to approve the deal, is critical to the peace process.
I want to see justice served, but my desire for peace in Sudan is stronger. Mr. Bashir, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, is hardly an ideal peacemaker. But given all the warring factions in Sudan, there is no guarantee that his replacement would be better.
For all his faults, Mr. Bashir has demonstrated that he is able to cooperate. On several occasions he has complied with my requests. When a hospital we operated in eastern Sudan was seized by government forces, Mr. Bashir granted us limited access. Mr. Bashir also made television time available for us to broadcast a Christian program at Christmas and Easter.
More important, Mr. Bashir helped make the peace agreement a reality. Now, his arrest could threaten the south’s elections and referendum, and hurl the country back into civil war. His removal could also spur retaliation by Bashir loyalists and other forces against civilians, United Nations peacekeepers or international aid workers.
We do have other options. The statute that established the court allows for the United Nations Security Council to postpone the court’s proceedings for 12 months, giving Sudan the time it will need to achieve peace. In that period President Bashir should do everything he can to ensure that the provisions of the agreement go fully into effect, and to cooperate with the United Nations and the United States to bring about political stability in Darfur.
President Obama can also do his part. He should move quickly to appoint a special envoy to Sudan, as he has wisely done in other hot spots of the world. Economic problems at home should not distract America’s president from exerting leadership to avert a crisis that threatens the future of Africa’s largest nation.
The removal of Mr. Bashir will make it harder to negotiate an end to the crisis in Sudan. Ultimately, justice will be served by a power higher than the International Criminal Court. In the meantime, justice without peace would be a hollow victory.
Franklin Graham is the president and chief executive of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
*****
There is a related video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 4, 2009
In Congo, With Rebels Now at Bay, Calm Erupts
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BUKIMA, Congo — Jean-Marie Serundori’s eyes light up when he sees his old hulk of a friend Kabirizi.
War, displacement and bloodthirsty rebels had gotten between them.
But for the first time in years, this section of a venerated Congolese national park is rebel-free. Government wildlife rangers, like Mr. Serundori, are firmly in control — for the moment. And Kabirizi, a 500-pound silverback gorilla with a head as big as an engine block, seems to be flourishing in his kingdom of leaves.
“Haa mmm,” Mr. Serundori says, emitting a special gruntlike gorilla greeting that miraculously stops Kabirizi in midcharge. “Haa mmm.”
If the endangered mountain gorillas are any sign, things may finally be looking up in eastern Congo. In the past several weeks, Congo and its disproportionately mighty neighbor, Rwanda, have teamed up to sweep this area clear of rebels who had been at the center of a vicious proxy battle between the nations.
The enmity of Congo and Rwanda has been one of the most stubborn drivers of the bloodshed here, which has claimed millions of lives in the past decade. But if these two countries continue to cooperate, it could represent a significant step toward ending one of Africa’s most vexing wars.
“This is really good news, that there’s a serious improvement in relations,” said Koen Vlassenroot, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium who specializes in eastern Congo. “But it’s still rather confusing.”
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 5, 2009
Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Sudan’s Leader
By MARLISE SIMONS and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
PARIS — Judges at the International Criminal Court ordered the arrest Wednesday of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan for atrocities committed in Darfur, but Sudanese officials swiftly retaliated, ordering Western aid groups that provide for millions of people to shut down their operations and leave.
After months of deliberation, the judges charged Mr. Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity for playing an “essential role” in the murder, rape, torture, pillage and displacement of large numbers of civilians in Darfur. But the judges did not charge him with genocide, as the prosecutor had requested.
In issuing the order, the three judges put aside diplomatic requests for more time for peace talks and fears that the warrant would incite a violent backlash in Sudan, where 2.5 million Darfur residents have been chased from their homes and 300,000 have died in a conflict pitting non-Arab rebel groups against the Arab-dominated government and its allied militias.
Within minutes of the court’s announcement, thousands of people gathered in central Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, denouncing the decision and waving national flags and posters of Mr. Bashir’s face.
The Sudanese government has long vowed to resist the court, and it summoned several humanitarian organizations to a meeting almost immediately after the warrant was announced, according to aid officials. As many as 10 groups received letters ordering them to leave or curb their work, according to people briefed on the meeting.
The British charity Oxfam said that the government had revoked its license to operate, a decision the group said could affect more than 600,000 people. The Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders, which provides health care in one of the world’s biggest camps for displaced people, in South Darfur, was ordered to leave the country.
“It happened right after the announcement,” said one aid official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of negotiations to persuade the government to back down. “The connection was clear.”
The warrant is the first in which the court, which opened in 2002 in The Hague, has sought the arrest of a sitting head of state. Other war-crimes courts have issued warrants for sitting presidents, including Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and Charles Taylor of Liberia.
“We strongly condemn this criminal move,” said Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, adding that the government would no longer work with aid groups it deemed hostile. “It amounts to an attempt at regime change. We are not going to be bound by it.”
But many human rights groups and Darfur exiles saluted the judges’ decision. Niemat Ahmadi, of the Save Darfur Coalition, called the warrant a lifeline for those living in camps. “It will change the mood of frustration and helplessness for our people,” Ms. Ahmadi said.
Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch, said the warrant was likely to isolate Mr. Bashir internationally. “This means he will be a fugitive, a man on a wanted poster,” he said.
In their statement, the judges called for the cooperation of all countries — not just the 108 that are members of the court — to bring Mr. Bashir to justice.
Legally, Sudan is obliged to arrest Mr. Bashir, but that seems unlikely. The court has no police force or military, and the United Nations peacekeepers in Sudan have no mandate to detain war-crimes suspects.
Beyond that, Mr. Abdalhaleem said, there is little chance that the president will be arrested in a friendly country, because many African and Arab states have rejected the prosecution of Mr. Bashir as counterproductive to peace efforts.
The question of genocide has also been divisive, but the judges said 2 to 1 that the prosecutor had not provided sufficient evidence of the president’s specific intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” the most crucial issue in determining genocide.
The prosecutor had argued that the government tried to exterminate three ethnic groups — the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups — and that after driving them off their lands and killing many people, armed militias continued their genocidal campaign by raping and impregnating the women in the refugee camps.
The arrest warrant is likely to further complicate the debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur. It came despite concerns from United Nations diplomats, the African Union, the Arab League and some humanitarian organizations that such a move could provoke renewed violence and threaten the peace deal that ended an even more deadly civil war in southern Sudan.
One sign of fallout came almost immediately. The Justice and Equality Movement, a major rebel group in Darfur that signed a preliminary accord with Khartoum last month, announced that it would now reject negotiating with Mr. Bashir’s government.
“There will be some violence here and there,” said Alain Le Roy, the United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations.
Mr. Le Roy said there might now be further delays in deploying United Nations peacekeeping troops to Darfur, where only about 64 percent of the force is in place. Still, he said Sudan had reassured United Nations officials that it would protect peacekeeping missions.
Some figures in the government have threatened bloodshed in response to an indictment. Salah Gosh, the head of Sudanese intelligence, was recently quoted in Sudanese news reports as calling for the “amputation of the hands and the slitting of the throats of any person who dares bad-mouth al-Bashir or support” the court’s case against him.
At the United Nations, Michèle Montas, the spokeswoman for the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the Sudanese government had revoked the operating licenses for 6 to 10 humanitarian organizations, as well as seizing the assets of some of them. The Sudanese government has long accused aid organizations of collaborating with the court by providing data and testimony used to build cases against Sudanese officials, something aid groups strongly deny.
While United Nations agencies were not expelled, their work is often carried out by charities like the ones facing suspension, United Nations officials said.
The court issued warrants for two other Sudanese citizens in 2007 — a government minister and a former militia leader — but neither has been arrested.
The United Nations Security Council can postpone the prosecution against Mr. Bashir, but it has remained largely divided. Sudan’s supporters, including the African Union and Arab League, have called for the Council to suspend any indictment. But France, Britain or the United States would probably use a veto to block such a move.
Marlise Simons reported from Paris, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting from Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, and a journalist in Khartoum, Sudan, contributed reporting.
*****
There is a related video and a photo linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/opini ... ?th&emc=th
March 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A President, a Boy and Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When the International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrant for Sudan’s president on Wednesday, an 8-year-old boy named Bakit Musa would have clapped — if only he still had hands.
I met Bakit a couple of weeks ago in eastern Chad, near the border of Darfur. He and two friends had found a grenade left behind in fighting after Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, armed and dispatched a proxy force to wreak havoc in Chad. The boys played with the grenade, and it exploded, taking both of Bakit’s hands, one eye and the skin on half of his face.
So Bakit became, inadvertently, one more casualty of the havoc and brutality that President Bashir has unleashed in Sudan and surrounding countries. Other children laugh at him, so Bakit plays by himself in the dust on the outskirts of a huge camp for people displaced by Mr. Bashir.
One of Mr. Bashir’s first actions after the arrest warrant was to undertake yet another crime against humanity: He expelled major international aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee and the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders. In effect, he is now preparing to massacre the Darfuri people in still another way, for Darfuris are living in camps and depend on aid workers for food, water and health care — even as deadly meningitis has broken out in one of the camps.
“The consequences are going to be dire,” notes George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee, on which 1.75 million Sudanese depend for water, sanitation, education and health care. “If Sudan persists in this decision, it’s difficult to see how the outcome will be anything other than serious suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of people.”
Mr. Bashir is now testing the international community, and President Obama and other world leaders must respond immediately and decisively, in conjunction with as many non-Western nations as possible.
The first step is to insist that aid groups be reinstated immediately to prevent this genocide in slow motion. A second step could be to destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force.
Yet it’s also important to understand that Mr. Bashir engages in a consistent pattern of destruction and slaughter, not because he is a sadistic monster, but because he is a calculating pragmatist.
Mr. Bashir saw early in his career that atrocities can constitute an effective policy — shooting villagers and gang-raping women is quite useful to depopulate rural areas, thereby denying support to rebel militias. Best of all from Mr. Bashir’s perspective, there’s no downside as long as the international community averts its eyes or backs down. His aim in expelling aid groups is apparently to divide the international community and to try to force the United Nations Security Council to delay International Criminal Court proceedings.
Mr. Bashir assumes, not unreasonably, that he can get away with it. That culture of impunity is what the I.C.C. arrest warrant may begin to change. It is one way of attaching costs to systematic brutality, and thus to change the calculations of pragmatists like Mr. Bashir in Sudan and elsewhere.
So now President Obama and other leaders — hello, Gordon Brown, you there? — need to back up the I.C.C. arrest warrant and push to reverse the expulsion of aid workers, while working with Arab countries like Qatar that want to help.
Intriguingly, Khartoum is full of rumors that the handful of leaders just below Mr. Bashir are thinking of throwing him overboard to save themselves. We can encourage that by making it clear that Sudan will pay a price if the killings continue.
We also must call on China to stop training the military pilots used by Mr. Bashir to strafe villages, and to stop supplying weapons and spare parts to Sudan as long as Mr. Bashir is in office. There are precedents: China was a strong supporter of the Khmer Rouge and of Slobodan Milosevic, but distanced itself from both when they came under the spotlight for genocide.
President Obama could also announce that from now on, when Sudan violates the U.N. ban on offensive military flights in Darfur by bombing villagers, we will afterward destroy a Sudanese military aircraft on the ground in Darfur (we can do this from our base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa).
I won’t pretend that we can end all genocides. But we can attach enough costs so that it is no longer in a leader’s interests to dispatch militias to throw babies into bonfires. The I.C.C. arrest warrant marks a wobbly step toward accountability and deterrence.
So let’s applaud the I.C.C.’s arrest warrant, on behalf of children like Bakit who can’t.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 5, 2009
Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Sudan’s Leader
By MARLISE SIMONS and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
PARIS — Judges at the International Criminal Court ordered the arrest Wednesday of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan for atrocities committed in Darfur, but Sudanese officials swiftly retaliated, ordering Western aid groups that provide for millions of people to shut down their operations and leave.
After months of deliberation, the judges charged Mr. Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity for playing an “essential role” in the murder, rape, torture, pillage and displacement of large numbers of civilians in Darfur. But the judges did not charge him with genocide, as the prosecutor had requested.
In issuing the order, the three judges put aside diplomatic requests for more time for peace talks and fears that the warrant would incite a violent backlash in Sudan, where 2.5 million Darfur residents have been chased from their homes and 300,000 have died in a conflict pitting non-Arab rebel groups against the Arab-dominated government and its allied militias.
Within minutes of the court’s announcement, thousands of people gathered in central Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, denouncing the decision and waving national flags and posters of Mr. Bashir’s face.
The Sudanese government has long vowed to resist the court, and it summoned several humanitarian organizations to a meeting almost immediately after the warrant was announced, according to aid officials. As many as 10 groups received letters ordering them to leave or curb their work, according to people briefed on the meeting.
The British charity Oxfam said that the government had revoked its license to operate, a decision the group said could affect more than 600,000 people. The Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders, which provides health care in one of the world’s biggest camps for displaced people, in South Darfur, was ordered to leave the country.
“It happened right after the announcement,” said one aid official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of negotiations to persuade the government to back down. “The connection was clear.”
The warrant is the first in which the court, which opened in 2002 in The Hague, has sought the arrest of a sitting head of state. Other war-crimes courts have issued warrants for sitting presidents, including Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and Charles Taylor of Liberia.
“We strongly condemn this criminal move,” said Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, adding that the government would no longer work with aid groups it deemed hostile. “It amounts to an attempt at regime change. We are not going to be bound by it.”
But many human rights groups and Darfur exiles saluted the judges’ decision. Niemat Ahmadi, of the Save Darfur Coalition, called the warrant a lifeline for those living in camps. “It will change the mood of frustration and helplessness for our people,” Ms. Ahmadi said.
Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch, said the warrant was likely to isolate Mr. Bashir internationally. “This means he will be a fugitive, a man on a wanted poster,” he said.
In their statement, the judges called for the cooperation of all countries — not just the 108 that are members of the court — to bring Mr. Bashir to justice.
Legally, Sudan is obliged to arrest Mr. Bashir, but that seems unlikely. The court has no police force or military, and the United Nations peacekeepers in Sudan have no mandate to detain war-crimes suspects.
Beyond that, Mr. Abdalhaleem said, there is little chance that the president will be arrested in a friendly country, because many African and Arab states have rejected the prosecution of Mr. Bashir as counterproductive to peace efforts.
The question of genocide has also been divisive, but the judges said 2 to 1 that the prosecutor had not provided sufficient evidence of the president’s specific intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” the most crucial issue in determining genocide.
The prosecutor had argued that the government tried to exterminate three ethnic groups — the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups — and that after driving them off their lands and killing many people, armed militias continued their genocidal campaign by raping and impregnating the women in the refugee camps.
The arrest warrant is likely to further complicate the debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur. It came despite concerns from United Nations diplomats, the African Union, the Arab League and some humanitarian organizations that such a move could provoke renewed violence and threaten the peace deal that ended an even more deadly civil war in southern Sudan.
One sign of fallout came almost immediately. The Justice and Equality Movement, a major rebel group in Darfur that signed a preliminary accord with Khartoum last month, announced that it would now reject negotiating with Mr. Bashir’s government.
“There will be some violence here and there,” said Alain Le Roy, the United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations.
Mr. Le Roy said there might now be further delays in deploying United Nations peacekeeping troops to Darfur, where only about 64 percent of the force is in place. Still, he said Sudan had reassured United Nations officials that it would protect peacekeeping missions.
Some figures in the government have threatened bloodshed in response to an indictment. Salah Gosh, the head of Sudanese intelligence, was recently quoted in Sudanese news reports as calling for the “amputation of the hands and the slitting of the throats of any person who dares bad-mouth al-Bashir or support” the court’s case against him.
At the United Nations, Michèle Montas, the spokeswoman for the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the Sudanese government had revoked the operating licenses for 6 to 10 humanitarian organizations, as well as seizing the assets of some of them. The Sudanese government has long accused aid organizations of collaborating with the court by providing data and testimony used to build cases against Sudanese officials, something aid groups strongly deny.
While United Nations agencies were not expelled, their work is often carried out by charities like the ones facing suspension, United Nations officials said.
The court issued warrants for two other Sudanese citizens in 2007 — a government minister and a former militia leader — but neither has been arrested.
The United Nations Security Council can postpone the prosecution against Mr. Bashir, but it has remained largely divided. Sudan’s supporters, including the African Union and Arab League, have called for the Council to suspend any indictment. But France, Britain or the United States would probably use a veto to block such a move.
Marlise Simons reported from Paris, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting from Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, and a journalist in Khartoum, Sudan, contributed reporting.
*****
There is a related video and a photo linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/opini ... ?th&emc=th
March 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A President, a Boy and Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When the International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrant for Sudan’s president on Wednesday, an 8-year-old boy named Bakit Musa would have clapped — if only he still had hands.
I met Bakit a couple of weeks ago in eastern Chad, near the border of Darfur. He and two friends had found a grenade left behind in fighting after Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, armed and dispatched a proxy force to wreak havoc in Chad. The boys played with the grenade, and it exploded, taking both of Bakit’s hands, one eye and the skin on half of his face.
So Bakit became, inadvertently, one more casualty of the havoc and brutality that President Bashir has unleashed in Sudan and surrounding countries. Other children laugh at him, so Bakit plays by himself in the dust on the outskirts of a huge camp for people displaced by Mr. Bashir.
One of Mr. Bashir’s first actions after the arrest warrant was to undertake yet another crime against humanity: He expelled major international aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee and the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders. In effect, he is now preparing to massacre the Darfuri people in still another way, for Darfuris are living in camps and depend on aid workers for food, water and health care — even as deadly meningitis has broken out in one of the camps.
“The consequences are going to be dire,” notes George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee, on which 1.75 million Sudanese depend for water, sanitation, education and health care. “If Sudan persists in this decision, it’s difficult to see how the outcome will be anything other than serious suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of people.”
Mr. Bashir is now testing the international community, and President Obama and other world leaders must respond immediately and decisively, in conjunction with as many non-Western nations as possible.
The first step is to insist that aid groups be reinstated immediately to prevent this genocide in slow motion. A second step could be to destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force.
Yet it’s also important to understand that Mr. Bashir engages in a consistent pattern of destruction and slaughter, not because he is a sadistic monster, but because he is a calculating pragmatist.
Mr. Bashir saw early in his career that atrocities can constitute an effective policy — shooting villagers and gang-raping women is quite useful to depopulate rural areas, thereby denying support to rebel militias. Best of all from Mr. Bashir’s perspective, there’s no downside as long as the international community averts its eyes or backs down. His aim in expelling aid groups is apparently to divide the international community and to try to force the United Nations Security Council to delay International Criminal Court proceedings.
Mr. Bashir assumes, not unreasonably, that he can get away with it. That culture of impunity is what the I.C.C. arrest warrant may begin to change. It is one way of attaching costs to systematic brutality, and thus to change the calculations of pragmatists like Mr. Bashir in Sudan and elsewhere.
So now President Obama and other leaders — hello, Gordon Brown, you there? — need to back up the I.C.C. arrest warrant and push to reverse the expulsion of aid workers, while working with Arab countries like Qatar that want to help.
Intriguingly, Khartoum is full of rumors that the handful of leaders just below Mr. Bashir are thinking of throwing him overboard to save themselves. We can encourage that by making it clear that Sudan will pay a price if the killings continue.
We also must call on China to stop training the military pilots used by Mr. Bashir to strafe villages, and to stop supplying weapons and spare parts to Sudan as long as Mr. Bashir is in office. There are precedents: China was a strong supporter of the Khmer Rouge and of Slobodan Milosevic, but distanced itself from both when they came under the spotlight for genocide.
President Obama could also announce that from now on, when Sudan violates the U.N. ban on offensive military flights in Darfur by bombing villagers, we will afterward destroy a Sudanese military aircraft on the ground in Darfur (we can do this from our base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa).
I won’t pretend that we can end all genocides. But we can attach enough costs so that it is no longer in a leader’s interests to dispatch militias to throw babies into bonfires. The I.C.C. arrest warrant marks a wobbly step toward accountability and deterrence.
So let’s applaud the I.C.C.’s arrest warrant, on behalf of children like Bakit who can’t.
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 7, 2009
Crash Injures Zimbabwe Premier, a Mugabe Rival
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HARARE, Zimbabwe — The prime minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was hurt and his wife, Susan, was killed Friday in a car crash about 45 miles south of the capital, according to officials of Mr. Tsvangirai’s political party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mr. Tsvangirai was heading to his rural home for a Saturday rally when the crash occurred Friday afternoon. From his hospital bed in Harare afterward, he told one of his aides that a large truck driving on the other side of the road had come toward his Land Cruiser, the middle vehicle in a three-car convoy.
“What he told me was that the truck went for his car,” said Dennis Murira, director of public affairs in the prime minister’s office. “That’s how he put it.”
The truck driver told the police that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, Mr. Murira added.
The crash, coming less than a month after Mr. Tsvangirai was sworn in as prime minister in a tense and long-negotiated power-sharing government with his rival, President Robert Mugabe, stirred deep suspicions in his party. But most officials were careful to say that not enough was known about the collision to make any accusations of foul play.
Mr. Tsvangirai has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts during his years as an opposition leader. Last year, he fled the country, fearing for his life, after he outpolled Mr. Mugabe in March presidential elections. Forces loyal to Mr. Mugabe had begun a campaign of violence, trying to intimidate the opposition before a June runoff election for president.
Mr. Tsvangirai ended up withdrawing before the runoff because of attacks on thousands of his supporters. When the international community concluded the election was neither free nor fair, protracted negotiations led to a coalition government, with Mr. Mugabe as president and Mr. Tsvangirai as prime minister.
On Friday night, officials with Mr. Tsvangirai’s party expressed concern that the crash had not been an accident, but they resisted reaching any conclusions.
“This will certainly demand an independent investigation,” said Eddie Cross, the policy coordinator for the Movement for Democratic Change. “We won’t accept a police report.”
Mr. Mugabe and his wife paid a condolence call to Mr. Tsvangirai at the hospital on Friday evening, Mr. Murira said.
Ian Makone, a secretary in the prime minister’s office, said he arrived at the crash scene about a half hour after the fact. He said one of the drivers in Mr. Tsvangirai’s convoy told him that an oncoming truck “had clipped the right rear fender of Morgan’s car.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said the driver of his vehicle swerved to avoid the truck, according to Mr. Murira. But a trailer attached to the truck hit the prime minister’s Land Cruiser, which rolled over three times. Mr. Makone confirmed that the vehicle had flipped over, saying it was lying on its roof when he arrived.
As soon as they heard about the crash, opposition officials began trying to figure out what had happened. “I was looking for someone to get to the site because I was very suspicious about the circumstances around the accident,” said Hendrick O’Neill, a party member from the area where the crash occurred. So he contacted Deon Theron, the vice president of the Commercial Farmers Union, who lives near the scene. “Morgan has been a target for some time.”
Mr. Theron rushed to the crash site and began to investigate, Mr. O’Neill said. “Just as he finished, the police arrived and grabbed the video camera from him, started questioning him and took him into custody.”
Mr. O’Neill said he spoke to Mr. Theron by cellphone as he was being arrested. “He told me the left front tire had burst and the vehicle was on its roof,” Mr. O’Neill said. “He climbed on the vehicle. Some of the undercarriage was loose or broken. It could have been the result of the accident. That’s what he was filming when they seized him.”
Mr. Tsvangirai and his wife were married for more than three decades. They have six children, including twins, age 14.
“They were a team; they were very effective and extremely close,” Mr. Cross said of the couple. “She was very much a pillar of support, spiritually and in every other way. Morgan will feel her loss enormously. I can’t think of many couples as close as those two.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/world ... ?th&emc=th
March 7, 2009
Crash Injures Zimbabwe Premier, a Mugabe Rival
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HARARE, Zimbabwe — The prime minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was hurt and his wife, Susan, was killed Friday in a car crash about 45 miles south of the capital, according to officials of Mr. Tsvangirai’s political party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mr. Tsvangirai was heading to his rural home for a Saturday rally when the crash occurred Friday afternoon. From his hospital bed in Harare afterward, he told one of his aides that a large truck driving on the other side of the road had come toward his Land Cruiser, the middle vehicle in a three-car convoy.
“What he told me was that the truck went for his car,” said Dennis Murira, director of public affairs in the prime minister’s office. “That’s how he put it.”
The truck driver told the police that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, Mr. Murira added.
The crash, coming less than a month after Mr. Tsvangirai was sworn in as prime minister in a tense and long-negotiated power-sharing government with his rival, President Robert Mugabe, stirred deep suspicions in his party. But most officials were careful to say that not enough was known about the collision to make any accusations of foul play.
Mr. Tsvangirai has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts during his years as an opposition leader. Last year, he fled the country, fearing for his life, after he outpolled Mr. Mugabe in March presidential elections. Forces loyal to Mr. Mugabe had begun a campaign of violence, trying to intimidate the opposition before a June runoff election for president.
Mr. Tsvangirai ended up withdrawing before the runoff because of attacks on thousands of his supporters. When the international community concluded the election was neither free nor fair, protracted negotiations led to a coalition government, with Mr. Mugabe as president and Mr. Tsvangirai as prime minister.
On Friday night, officials with Mr. Tsvangirai’s party expressed concern that the crash had not been an accident, but they resisted reaching any conclusions.
“This will certainly demand an independent investigation,” said Eddie Cross, the policy coordinator for the Movement for Democratic Change. “We won’t accept a police report.”
Mr. Mugabe and his wife paid a condolence call to Mr. Tsvangirai at the hospital on Friday evening, Mr. Murira said.
Ian Makone, a secretary in the prime minister’s office, said he arrived at the crash scene about a half hour after the fact. He said one of the drivers in Mr. Tsvangirai’s convoy told him that an oncoming truck “had clipped the right rear fender of Morgan’s car.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said the driver of his vehicle swerved to avoid the truck, according to Mr. Murira. But a trailer attached to the truck hit the prime minister’s Land Cruiser, which rolled over three times. Mr. Makone confirmed that the vehicle had flipped over, saying it was lying on its roof when he arrived.
As soon as they heard about the crash, opposition officials began trying to figure out what had happened. “I was looking for someone to get to the site because I was very suspicious about the circumstances around the accident,” said Hendrick O’Neill, a party member from the area where the crash occurred. So he contacted Deon Theron, the vice president of the Commercial Farmers Union, who lives near the scene. “Morgan has been a target for some time.”
Mr. Theron rushed to the crash site and began to investigate, Mr. O’Neill said. “Just as he finished, the police arrived and grabbed the video camera from him, started questioning him and took him into custody.”
Mr. O’Neill said he spoke to Mr. Theron by cellphone as he was being arrested. “He told me the left front tire had burst and the vehicle was on its roof,” Mr. O’Neill said. “He climbed on the vehicle. Some of the undercarriage was loose or broken. It could have been the result of the accident. That’s what he was filming when they seized him.”
Mr. Tsvangirai and his wife were married for more than three decades. They have six children, including twins, age 14.
“They were a team; they were very effective and extremely close,” Mr. Cross said of the couple. “She was very much a pillar of support, spiritually and in every other way. Morgan will feel her loss enormously. I can’t think of many couples as close as those two.”
March 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Watching Darfuris Die
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The first gauntlet thrown at President Obama didn’t come from Iran, Russia or China. Rather, it came from Sudan, in its decision to expel aid groups that are a lifeline keeping more than a million people alive in Darfur.
Unfortunately, the administration’s initial reaction made Neville Chamberlain seem forceful. The State Department blushingly suggested that the expulsion “is certainly not helpful to the people who need aid.”
Wow.
Since then, the administration has stiffened its spine somewhat. Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations and designated hitter on Sudan, told me, “If this decision stands, it may well amount to genocide by other means.”
That’s exactly what we may be facing, for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is confirming the International Criminal Court’s judgment when it issued an arrest warrant for him on Wednesday for “extermination,” murder and rape. Now Mr. Bashir is preparing to kill people en masse, not with machetes but by withholding the aid that keeps them alive.
More than one million people depend directly on the expelled aid groups for health care, food and water. I’ve been in these camps, so let me offer an educated guess about what will unfold if this expulsion stands.
The biggest immediate threat isn’t starvation, because that takes time. Rather, the first crises will be disease and water shortages, particularly in West Darfur.
The camps will quickly run out of clean water, because generator-operated pumps bring the water to the surface from wells and boreholes. Fuel supplies to operate the pumps may last a couple of weeks, and then the water disappears.
Health clinics have already closed, and diarrhea is spreading in Zam Zam camp and meningitis in Kalma camp. These are huge camps — Kalma has perhaps 90,000 people — and diseases can spread rapidly. Children will be the first to die.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the camps may try to flee to Chad, but that would overwhelm Chad’s own impoverished and vulnerable population. And to top it off, Mr. Bashir has armed a large proxy force of Chadian rebels who are said to be preparing an attack on the Chadian government.
“This is a whole new kind of hell for the people of Darfur,” Josette Sheeran, the head of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “The life bridge for more than a million people has just been dismantled.”
My hunch is that Mr. Bashir’s calculation is twofold. First, he hopes that if there’s enough suffering in Darfur, the United Nations Security Council will approve a one-year delay in the court’s proceedings (he miscalculated, for that won’t happen). Second, he has long wanted to get rid of aid workers in Darfur, partly because they are the world’s eyes and ears there.
I was on the Chad-Darfur border a couple of weeks ago, talking to Darfuri refugees, and they worried that Mr. Bashir might lash out after an arrest warrant. But they still rejoiced at the prospect, as a sign that the deaths of their loved ones mattered and as a sign that impunity for murder and rape might be coming to an end. Not a single Darfuri I spoke to favored a delay in International Criminal Court proceedings.
Our greatest problem in responding to Darfur is that we have never held either carrots or sticks. It’s difficult at this point to offer carrots, but the United States and other countries can wield some sticks.
Gen. Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff and a co-chairman of the Obama presidential campaign, suggested one in an op-ed article in The Washington Post on Thursday: a no-fly zone over Darfur. The aim is to attach costs to brutality and gain leverage.
Sudan cares deeply about maintaining its air force, partly because it is preparing for renewed war against South Sudan. That means that a denial of air cover or the loss of helicopter gunships would deeply alarm Sudan’s military, and that gives us leverage.
Another option is for the government of South Sudan to take over administration of Darfur. The leaders of South Sudan have periodically offered to send 10,000 of their troops into Darfur, and if the north Sudanese government cannot provide security or look after Darfur’s needs then the south can try, with international backing.
Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, says she was intrigued by General McPeak’s proposal for a no-fly zone and adds, “I don’t think the international community can stand by and watch as thousands more people starve to death.”
“We were criticized, rightfully so, on Rwanda,” Ms. Albright said. But she noted that the Rwandan genocide ended quickly, while Darfur has dragged on for years. “You can’t watch this and not feel that there has to be something done,” she said.
Op-Ed Columnist
Watching Darfuris Die
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The first gauntlet thrown at President Obama didn’t come from Iran, Russia or China. Rather, it came from Sudan, in its decision to expel aid groups that are a lifeline keeping more than a million people alive in Darfur.
Unfortunately, the administration’s initial reaction made Neville Chamberlain seem forceful. The State Department blushingly suggested that the expulsion “is certainly not helpful to the people who need aid.”
Wow.
Since then, the administration has stiffened its spine somewhat. Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations and designated hitter on Sudan, told me, “If this decision stands, it may well amount to genocide by other means.”
That’s exactly what we may be facing, for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is confirming the International Criminal Court’s judgment when it issued an arrest warrant for him on Wednesday for “extermination,” murder and rape. Now Mr. Bashir is preparing to kill people en masse, not with machetes but by withholding the aid that keeps them alive.
More than one million people depend directly on the expelled aid groups for health care, food and water. I’ve been in these camps, so let me offer an educated guess about what will unfold if this expulsion stands.
The biggest immediate threat isn’t starvation, because that takes time. Rather, the first crises will be disease and water shortages, particularly in West Darfur.
The camps will quickly run out of clean water, because generator-operated pumps bring the water to the surface from wells and boreholes. Fuel supplies to operate the pumps may last a couple of weeks, and then the water disappears.
Health clinics have already closed, and diarrhea is spreading in Zam Zam camp and meningitis in Kalma camp. These are huge camps — Kalma has perhaps 90,000 people — and diseases can spread rapidly. Children will be the first to die.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the camps may try to flee to Chad, but that would overwhelm Chad’s own impoverished and vulnerable population. And to top it off, Mr. Bashir has armed a large proxy force of Chadian rebels who are said to be preparing an attack on the Chadian government.
“This is a whole new kind of hell for the people of Darfur,” Josette Sheeran, the head of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “The life bridge for more than a million people has just been dismantled.”
My hunch is that Mr. Bashir’s calculation is twofold. First, he hopes that if there’s enough suffering in Darfur, the United Nations Security Council will approve a one-year delay in the court’s proceedings (he miscalculated, for that won’t happen). Second, he has long wanted to get rid of aid workers in Darfur, partly because they are the world’s eyes and ears there.
I was on the Chad-Darfur border a couple of weeks ago, talking to Darfuri refugees, and they worried that Mr. Bashir might lash out after an arrest warrant. But they still rejoiced at the prospect, as a sign that the deaths of their loved ones mattered and as a sign that impunity for murder and rape might be coming to an end. Not a single Darfuri I spoke to favored a delay in International Criminal Court proceedings.
Our greatest problem in responding to Darfur is that we have never held either carrots or sticks. It’s difficult at this point to offer carrots, but the United States and other countries can wield some sticks.
Gen. Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff and a co-chairman of the Obama presidential campaign, suggested one in an op-ed article in The Washington Post on Thursday: a no-fly zone over Darfur. The aim is to attach costs to brutality and gain leverage.
Sudan cares deeply about maintaining its air force, partly because it is preparing for renewed war against South Sudan. That means that a denial of air cover or the loss of helicopter gunships would deeply alarm Sudan’s military, and that gives us leverage.
Another option is for the government of South Sudan to take over administration of Darfur. The leaders of South Sudan have periodically offered to send 10,000 of their troops into Darfur, and if the north Sudanese government cannot provide security or look after Darfur’s needs then the south can try, with international backing.
Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, says she was intrigued by General McPeak’s proposal for a no-fly zone and adds, “I don’t think the international community can stand by and watch as thousands more people starve to death.”
“We were criticized, rightfully so, on Rwanda,” Ms. Albright said. But she noted that the Rwandan genocide ended quickly, while Darfur has dragged on for years. “You can’t watch this and not feel that there has to be something done,” she said.
March 18, 2009
Madagascar’s President Quits After Weeks of Chaos
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — President Marc Ravalomanana of Madagascar resigned on Tuesday and handed control of the government to the military, which then passed the power to rule this poor island off Africa’s southeast coast to his archrival, Andry Rajoelina.
This odd turn of events comes after two months of political turmoil during which Mr. Rajoelina, the former mayor of the capital, Antananarivo, repeatedly declared a parallel government with himself in charge, essentially announcing a coup in a democratic country.
Late in the evening it was unclear if all elements of the military were in agreement with the changeover, but it was certain that the embattled president had finally succumbed to irreversible momentum.
“After deep reflection, I have decided to dissolve the government and give up power so a military directorate can be established,” Mr. Ravalomanana said in an afternoon radio address.
His preference was that a handful of senior officers succeed him. But in a ceremony broadcast from a military camp in the capital, Vice Adm. Hippolyte Rarison Ramaroson said that he and two generals had decided to install Mr. Rajoelina as the head of a transitional government.
“We have categorically rejected the authority that Ravalomanana asked us to set up after his resignation,” the admiral said.
If these events hold, it will be an astonishing triumph for Mr. Rajoelina, a former disc jockey and entertainment impresario who at 34 is not even old enough according to the Constitution to be Madagascar’s president. He takes the place of a man democratically elected in 2001 and reelected in 2006.
Mr. Rajoelina became the mayor of Antananarivo in December 2007, besting the candidate from the president’s party. Eventually, he projected himself as the people’s champion against Mr. Ravalomanana, 59, a self-made tycoon, calling him a dictator more interested in promoting his own business interests than in elevating the masses out of poverty.
In late January, Mr. Rajoelina began a string of protests that sometimes led to lootings and confrontations with security forces. More than 100 people have died during the recent political violence, including at least 28 shot by security forces on Feb. 7. During a time when Mr. Ravalomanana seemed to have the upper hand, he fired the younger man as mayor.
While Mr. Rajoelina enjoys considerable popularity, he also is widely disliked. He does not come to power at the crest of a wave of support but as the result of an opportunity created by a divided military.
Earlier in the week, army mutineers declared support for Mr. Rajoelina while other military officers professed neutrality. Some of that divide may remain.
Indeed, there were reports of acrimony and drawn guns at a Tuesday afternoon meeting where both Mr. Rajoelina and some army officers rejected the idea of an interim military directorate. Diplomats and church leaders were also present.
“It was terrible,” said one person who was present, asking to remain anonymous for fear of recriminations. “Andry Rajoelina showed his anger and left after five minutes.”
A second person, also requesting anonymity, confirmed this account and said some military men at the meeting ended up “detaining four generals and taking them away” along with a church leader.
The unfolding situation remained puzzling, and people on the street expressed confusion about whether they were now being governed by the military, the former mayor or even some unseen foreign hand.
Rumors were plentiful. “The problem is France,” said Harinanga Ranilisoa, 42, a dressmaker. “It wants to again run Madagascar, and it is doing so through Andry Rajoelina.”
Madagascar is a former French colony with a population of 20 million that is overwhelmingly poor. The terrain on the island, the fourth largest in the world, is beguilingly varied, some of it rain forest, some desert, some swamp. The plant and animal life are among the most diverse on earth.
This exotic beauty has spawned a huge tourist trade, which has now been crippled by the political turmoil. Many foreign investors interested in the country’s mineral wealth have likewise been scared away.
“This trouble means there will be no more investment for Madagascar,” said Jean Rakotoarisoa, 47, a construction worker.
Mr. Ravalomanana, a dynamic entrepreneur, once seemed the answer to the island’s problems. But many people grew impatient for change.
Last Sunday, the beleaguered president, unnerved by the mutinous soldiers, offered to hold a referendum to end the crisis. Mr. Rajoelina rejected the idea, and on Monday disaffected troops bulldozed the gate of one of the palaces used as government offices.
On Tuesday morning, the former mayor, escorted by gun-wielding soldiers, entered that same elegant chateau in the city’s center and claimed to be decisively in charge.
“We can say we are free,” he declared.
Mr. Ravalomanana, who had sworn that he would never turn the presidency over to the unelected opposition, instead decided to pass the job to the military.
Andry Ralijaona, one of the president’s advisers, on Tuesday repeated something that many in the presidency had alleged for weeks, that some army officers had been bribed. “This is about money and jealousy,” he said, alleging that payoffs were made by politicians allied against Mr. Ravalomanana and businessmen who suffered during his years in office.
But Mr. Ralijaona had no proof to offer, just dismay at the government’s ouster and second-guessing about where it had all gone wrong.
“We put a lot of money in education and health,” he said. “More money should have gone for security.”
A researcher contributed reporting from Antananarivo, Madagascar.
****
West snubs installation of Madagascar's new leader
Canwest News ServiceMarch 22, 2009 8:01 AM
Jubilant supporters cheered the installation Saturday of Madagascar's army-backed new leader Andry Rajoelina-- but foreign ambassadors did not attend due to world condemnation of his takeover.
Music blasted and military marksmen stood on rooftops at the ceremony attended by 40,000 people in the main sports stadium of the Indian Ocean island's sweltering capital Antananarivo.
Envoys had intended to snub the event, to underline global disapproval of the manner of Rajoelina's rise, but his new foreign minister said they were not invited anyway.
"The government is going to try and negotiate with them,"Minister Nyhasina Andriamanjato told reporters afterwards.
Rajoelina, 34, took over after leading months of opposition protests against President Marc Ravalomanana. That unrest killed at least 135 people.
Ravalomanana, 59, handed over to the military, who in turn conferred power on Rajoelina to be president.
Major western powers including the U. S. and the EU have termed Rajoelina's rise a coup d'etat and called for early elections. Several nations have suspended aid.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Madagascar’s President Quits After Weeks of Chaos
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — President Marc Ravalomanana of Madagascar resigned on Tuesday and handed control of the government to the military, which then passed the power to rule this poor island off Africa’s southeast coast to his archrival, Andry Rajoelina.
This odd turn of events comes after two months of political turmoil during which Mr. Rajoelina, the former mayor of the capital, Antananarivo, repeatedly declared a parallel government with himself in charge, essentially announcing a coup in a democratic country.
Late in the evening it was unclear if all elements of the military were in agreement with the changeover, but it was certain that the embattled president had finally succumbed to irreversible momentum.
“After deep reflection, I have decided to dissolve the government and give up power so a military directorate can be established,” Mr. Ravalomanana said in an afternoon radio address.
His preference was that a handful of senior officers succeed him. But in a ceremony broadcast from a military camp in the capital, Vice Adm. Hippolyte Rarison Ramaroson said that he and two generals had decided to install Mr. Rajoelina as the head of a transitional government.
“We have categorically rejected the authority that Ravalomanana asked us to set up after his resignation,” the admiral said.
If these events hold, it will be an astonishing triumph for Mr. Rajoelina, a former disc jockey and entertainment impresario who at 34 is not even old enough according to the Constitution to be Madagascar’s president. He takes the place of a man democratically elected in 2001 and reelected in 2006.
Mr. Rajoelina became the mayor of Antananarivo in December 2007, besting the candidate from the president’s party. Eventually, he projected himself as the people’s champion against Mr. Ravalomanana, 59, a self-made tycoon, calling him a dictator more interested in promoting his own business interests than in elevating the masses out of poverty.
In late January, Mr. Rajoelina began a string of protests that sometimes led to lootings and confrontations with security forces. More than 100 people have died during the recent political violence, including at least 28 shot by security forces on Feb. 7. During a time when Mr. Ravalomanana seemed to have the upper hand, he fired the younger man as mayor.
While Mr. Rajoelina enjoys considerable popularity, he also is widely disliked. He does not come to power at the crest of a wave of support but as the result of an opportunity created by a divided military.
Earlier in the week, army mutineers declared support for Mr. Rajoelina while other military officers professed neutrality. Some of that divide may remain.
Indeed, there were reports of acrimony and drawn guns at a Tuesday afternoon meeting where both Mr. Rajoelina and some army officers rejected the idea of an interim military directorate. Diplomats and church leaders were also present.
“It was terrible,” said one person who was present, asking to remain anonymous for fear of recriminations. “Andry Rajoelina showed his anger and left after five minutes.”
A second person, also requesting anonymity, confirmed this account and said some military men at the meeting ended up “detaining four generals and taking them away” along with a church leader.
The unfolding situation remained puzzling, and people on the street expressed confusion about whether they were now being governed by the military, the former mayor or even some unseen foreign hand.
Rumors were plentiful. “The problem is France,” said Harinanga Ranilisoa, 42, a dressmaker. “It wants to again run Madagascar, and it is doing so through Andry Rajoelina.”
Madagascar is a former French colony with a population of 20 million that is overwhelmingly poor. The terrain on the island, the fourth largest in the world, is beguilingly varied, some of it rain forest, some desert, some swamp. The plant and animal life are among the most diverse on earth.
This exotic beauty has spawned a huge tourist trade, which has now been crippled by the political turmoil. Many foreign investors interested in the country’s mineral wealth have likewise been scared away.
“This trouble means there will be no more investment for Madagascar,” said Jean Rakotoarisoa, 47, a construction worker.
Mr. Ravalomanana, a dynamic entrepreneur, once seemed the answer to the island’s problems. But many people grew impatient for change.
Last Sunday, the beleaguered president, unnerved by the mutinous soldiers, offered to hold a referendum to end the crisis. Mr. Rajoelina rejected the idea, and on Monday disaffected troops bulldozed the gate of one of the palaces used as government offices.
On Tuesday morning, the former mayor, escorted by gun-wielding soldiers, entered that same elegant chateau in the city’s center and claimed to be decisively in charge.
“We can say we are free,” he declared.
Mr. Ravalomanana, who had sworn that he would never turn the presidency over to the unelected opposition, instead decided to pass the job to the military.
Andry Ralijaona, one of the president’s advisers, on Tuesday repeated something that many in the presidency had alleged for weeks, that some army officers had been bribed. “This is about money and jealousy,” he said, alleging that payoffs were made by politicians allied against Mr. Ravalomanana and businessmen who suffered during his years in office.
But Mr. Ralijaona had no proof to offer, just dismay at the government’s ouster and second-guessing about where it had all gone wrong.
“We put a lot of money in education and health,” he said. “More money should have gone for security.”
A researcher contributed reporting from Antananarivo, Madagascar.
****
West snubs installation of Madagascar's new leader
Canwest News ServiceMarch 22, 2009 8:01 AM
Jubilant supporters cheered the installation Saturday of Madagascar's army-backed new leader Andry Rajoelina-- but foreign ambassadors did not attend due to world condemnation of his takeover.
Music blasted and military marksmen stood on rooftops at the ceremony attended by 40,000 people in the main sports stadium of the Indian Ocean island's sweltering capital Antananarivo.
Envoys had intended to snub the event, to underline global disapproval of the manner of Rajoelina's rise, but his new foreign minister said they were not invited anyway.
"The government is going to try and negotiate with them,"Minister Nyhasina Andriamanjato told reporters afterwards.
Rajoelina, 34, took over after leading months of opposition protests against President Marc Ravalomanana. That unrest killed at least 135 people.
Ravalomanana, 59, handed over to the military, who in turn conferred power on Rajoelina to be president.
Major western powers including the U. S. and the EU have termed Rajoelina's rise a coup d'etat and called for early elections. Several nations have suspended aid.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun Mar 22, 2009 3:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
March 21, 2009
Pope Urges Angolans to Help the Poor and Embrace Democracy
By BARRY BEARAK
LUANDA, Angola — Pope Benedict XVI, midway through his first trip to Africa, arrived in oil-rich Angola on Friday and admonished those enjoying the nation’s newfound wealth not to ignore the justifiable demands of the poor.
“The multitude of Angolans who live below the threshold of absolute poverty will not be forgotten,” he said in a speech moments after getting off his airplane. “Do not disappoint their expectations!”
In a second address, this one delivered hours later at the residence of President José Eduardo dos Santos, he challenged Angola and other African countries to free their people “from the scourges of greed, violence and unrest” through “modern civic democracy.”
He defined this civic liberation as one respectful of human rights with transparent governance, an independent judiciary, a free press, properly functioning schools and hospitals, “and — most pressing — a determination born from the conversion of hearts to excise corruption.”
These antidotes to kleptocratic government are commonly prescribed for Africa in general and this nation in particular. But if the message was difficult to swallow, President dos Santos showed no signs of discomfort as he stood only feet away from Benedict. The pope is a prestigious visitor for a man who has held power for 29 years while running for election only once.
“If I were the president and I heard what the pope said, I would conclude that he thought the real issue in my country was my own leadership,” said Fernando Macedo, a professor of constitutional law here in Luanda, the capital, and a frequent critic of Mr. dos Santos.
But in companion speeches, Mr. dos Santos seemed to agree with the pope’s every exhortation. “Yes, there is a necessity to help those in need,” he said, ruing a national unemployment rate he put at 48 percent and the lack of water and electricity in 60 percent of all homes. He said Angola was devoting billions of dollars to solving its substantial problems.
Angola, which is about twice the size of Texas, may be a nation with a vaguely familiar ring to many Americans. Seven years ago, it emerged from a civil war that dated back nearly three decades to some of the most chilling times of the cold war, when conflict here was thought vital to the interests of the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba and apartheid-era South Africa.
The fighting laid waste to most of the infrastructure that dated back to the days of Portuguese colonizers, and left the land so seeded with explosives that the accumulation of land mines roughly equaled the number of people.
But peace finally allowed the government to exploit Angola’s natural wealth of diamonds and petroleum. This soon seemed a nation poised to lift much of its population — variously estimated at 14 million to 20 million — from penury.
And yet so far, revenues have mostly supported the ostentatious consumption of a free-spending elite. Two-thirds of the country’s people still live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
Angolans, if lacking in purse, are rich in faith. “This is a very religious country, and though not all of it is Catholic, almost all is religious,” said the Rev. Mauricio Camuto, the director of Radio Ecclesia, a Catholic radio station and one of the few independent voices in the Angolan news media. “Go anywhere in the provinces, even among 20 huts, you will find a church.”
Pope Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, made 42 visits to Africa during his nearly 27-year papacy. There are an estimated 158 million Catholics on the continent, and the huge growth of the church in Africa during the past century is widely seen as one of its greatest missionary feats — as well as its likely future, with church attendance in deep decline in Europe.
Some 70 percent of Angola is Catholic, President dos Santos said Friday. Other estimates put the number at 55 to 65 percent.
Cameroon was the first stop in Africa for Benedict. He spent three days there, and his trip to Angola will end Monday morning.
For the government, the pope’s visit is a geopolitical coming of age. “The Angolans see themselves as a continental power, and the pope’s visit is a further reaffirmation of that,” said the United States ambassador, Dan Mozena.
For the masses, the papal visit is an unprecedented thrill. Friday was declared a national holiday, and in the morning, the main street from the airport — Revolução de Outubro — was well lined with thousands of people hours before the pope arrived.
Churches had bused in the faithful, most of them already wearing T-shirts that commemorated the occasion. “I want to be reborn in heaven,” some chanted in Kimbundu, one of the local languages. Others sang in Portuguese, “Pope, our friend, Angola is with you!” Small paper banners carried Benedict’s face on one side and the Angolan flag on the other.
In the plane en route from Rome to Africa, the pope had renewed the church’s objection to the use of condoms as a prevention against AIDS, going so far as to say this precaution actually “increases the problem” of H.I.V. infection. Africa is the continent hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, and many activists, medical researchers and politicians quickly took issue with the pope’s statement, calling it unscientific and dangerous.
Most people in the anticipating crowd were aware of the controversy. “The only people who use condoms are those with no faith,” said Simba Teresa, a 45-year-old street vendor, trying to wave away the heat with a continuing flap of her hand. She said three of her five children had died as infants, a common story in a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world. “Faith is everything,” she said. “You put your life in God’s hands.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/world ... nted=print
Pope Urges Angolans to Help the Poor and Embrace Democracy
By BARRY BEARAK
LUANDA, Angola — Pope Benedict XVI, midway through his first trip to Africa, arrived in oil-rich Angola on Friday and admonished those enjoying the nation’s newfound wealth not to ignore the justifiable demands of the poor.
“The multitude of Angolans who live below the threshold of absolute poverty will not be forgotten,” he said in a speech moments after getting off his airplane. “Do not disappoint their expectations!”
In a second address, this one delivered hours later at the residence of President José Eduardo dos Santos, he challenged Angola and other African countries to free their people “from the scourges of greed, violence and unrest” through “modern civic democracy.”
He defined this civic liberation as one respectful of human rights with transparent governance, an independent judiciary, a free press, properly functioning schools and hospitals, “and — most pressing — a determination born from the conversion of hearts to excise corruption.”
These antidotes to kleptocratic government are commonly prescribed for Africa in general and this nation in particular. But if the message was difficult to swallow, President dos Santos showed no signs of discomfort as he stood only feet away from Benedict. The pope is a prestigious visitor for a man who has held power for 29 years while running for election only once.
“If I were the president and I heard what the pope said, I would conclude that he thought the real issue in my country was my own leadership,” said Fernando Macedo, a professor of constitutional law here in Luanda, the capital, and a frequent critic of Mr. dos Santos.
But in companion speeches, Mr. dos Santos seemed to agree with the pope’s every exhortation. “Yes, there is a necessity to help those in need,” he said, ruing a national unemployment rate he put at 48 percent and the lack of water and electricity in 60 percent of all homes. He said Angola was devoting billions of dollars to solving its substantial problems.
Angola, which is about twice the size of Texas, may be a nation with a vaguely familiar ring to many Americans. Seven years ago, it emerged from a civil war that dated back nearly three decades to some of the most chilling times of the cold war, when conflict here was thought vital to the interests of the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba and apartheid-era South Africa.
The fighting laid waste to most of the infrastructure that dated back to the days of Portuguese colonizers, and left the land so seeded with explosives that the accumulation of land mines roughly equaled the number of people.
But peace finally allowed the government to exploit Angola’s natural wealth of diamonds and petroleum. This soon seemed a nation poised to lift much of its population — variously estimated at 14 million to 20 million — from penury.
And yet so far, revenues have mostly supported the ostentatious consumption of a free-spending elite. Two-thirds of the country’s people still live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
Angolans, if lacking in purse, are rich in faith. “This is a very religious country, and though not all of it is Catholic, almost all is religious,” said the Rev. Mauricio Camuto, the director of Radio Ecclesia, a Catholic radio station and one of the few independent voices in the Angolan news media. “Go anywhere in the provinces, even among 20 huts, you will find a church.”
Pope Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, made 42 visits to Africa during his nearly 27-year papacy. There are an estimated 158 million Catholics on the continent, and the huge growth of the church in Africa during the past century is widely seen as one of its greatest missionary feats — as well as its likely future, with church attendance in deep decline in Europe.
Some 70 percent of Angola is Catholic, President dos Santos said Friday. Other estimates put the number at 55 to 65 percent.
Cameroon was the first stop in Africa for Benedict. He spent three days there, and his trip to Angola will end Monday morning.
For the government, the pope’s visit is a geopolitical coming of age. “The Angolans see themselves as a continental power, and the pope’s visit is a further reaffirmation of that,” said the United States ambassador, Dan Mozena.
For the masses, the papal visit is an unprecedented thrill. Friday was declared a national holiday, and in the morning, the main street from the airport — Revolução de Outubro — was well lined with thousands of people hours before the pope arrived.
Churches had bused in the faithful, most of them already wearing T-shirts that commemorated the occasion. “I want to be reborn in heaven,” some chanted in Kimbundu, one of the local languages. Others sang in Portuguese, “Pope, our friend, Angola is with you!” Small paper banners carried Benedict’s face on one side and the Angolan flag on the other.
In the plane en route from Rome to Africa, the pope had renewed the church’s objection to the use of condoms as a prevention against AIDS, going so far as to say this precaution actually “increases the problem” of H.I.V. infection. Africa is the continent hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, and many activists, medical researchers and politicians quickly took issue with the pope’s statement, calling it unscientific and dangerous.
Most people in the anticipating crowd were aware of the controversy. “The only people who use condoms are those with no faith,” said Simba Teresa, a 45-year-old street vendor, trying to wave away the heat with a continuing flap of her hand. She said three of her five children had died as infants, a common story in a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world. “Faith is everything,” she said. “You put your life in God’s hands.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/world ... nted=print
There is a related multi media linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/world ... &th&emc=th
March 23, 2009
New Status in Africa Empowers an Ever-Eccentric Qaddafi
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
TRIPOLI, Libya — Forty years after he seized power in a bloodless coup d’état, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader once called the mad dog of the Middle East by President Ronald Reagan, has achieved the international status he always craved, as chairman of the African Union.
Colonel Qaddafi’s selection last month to lead the 53-nation African Union coincided with his emergence as a welcomed figure in Western capitals, where heads of state are eager to tap Libya’s vast oil and gas reserves and to gain access to virgin Libyan markets. Once vilified for promoting state terrorism, Colonel Qaddafi is now courted.
But Colonel Qaddafi remains the same eccentric, unpredictable revolutionary as always. He has used his new status to promote his call for a United States of Africa, with one passport, one military and one currency. He has blamed Israel for the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, defended Somali pirates for fighting “greedy Western nations” and declared that multiparty democracy was not right for the people of Africa.
“This is a role that Qaddafi has been looking for for 40 years,” said Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of Egypt’s largest research institute, the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “He kept shifting and changing directions in search of this role.”
Each step of Colonel Qaddafi’s calculated transformation from terrorist sponsor to would-be statesman has bolstered the next. The thaw in relations with the West, which began in 2003 when he gave up Libya’s nuclear weapons program, gave him more credibility in Africa; and his rising status in Africa has made him more acceptable to the West. All of which has been aimed at one primary objective: bolstering his image.
At one time, Colonel Qaddafi, who was born in 1942, tried to position himself as the next pan-Arab leader. But he was rejected, at times mocked, for his eccentric style and pronouncements. His country was isolated for decades because he sent his agents to kill civilians, including in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
But now in Africa, he has found traction. African heads of state view him suspiciously, and his one-Africa agenda is generally dismissed as unworkable. But he is embraced for his growing status in the West, the lack of credible alternatives across the continent and his money. Many stories are told in Tripoli of African leaders visiting Colonel Qaddafi and leaving with suitcases full of cash, stories that cannot be confirmed but that have become conventional wisdom.
“They don’t want to lose him because he is a gold mine for solving crises, usually financial crises,” said Attia Essawy, an Egyptian writer with expertise in African affairs. “He is searching for a role; he wants to have a role regardless of where.”
While Libya’s strongman is enjoying his burnished image, it has come at a cost to his nation of 5.5 million people and to the approximately two million Africans who have flocked to Libya believing that they would find warm receptions, good jobs and, perhaps, an easy path to Europe. Instead, they found a hostile environment and a struggle just to eat.
“It is a burden,” Ali Abd Alaziz Isawi, who served for two years as the minister of economy, trade and investment, said of the army of illegal immigrants living in Libya. “They are a burden on health care, they spread disease, crime. They are illegal.”
All over this capital city, illegal African immigrants line up along roadways, across bridges and at traffic circles hoping to be selected for menial day jobs that pay about $8. They call the areas where they congregate “the hustling grounds,” which are always crowded with desperate faces from early morning until well past sundown.
Many people in Tripoli said they resented the presence of so many illegal workers. “We don’t like them,” said Moustafa Saleh, 28, who is unemployed, echoing a popular sentiment. “They smuggle themselves through the desert, and the way they deal with us is not good.”
For the African migrants themselves, life in Libya is often a dead end. “They call us animals and slaves,” said Paul Oknonghou, 28, a Nigerian who lives with about a dozen other Nigerians in a house under construction that lacks glass in the window frames, running water, a bathroom or a kitchen. He said he and his friends considered themselves lucky that they did not have to sleep on the streets.
Thomas Thtakore, 26, who is from Ghana, entered Libya illegally a year ago after a three-month journey across mountains and desert. “I have no help; I sleep under a bridge near the river,” He said. He said his younger brother died on the way. “If I stay here, I will die.”
Mr. Thtakore was about to be flown back to Ghana by the International Organization for Migration, a nongovernmental group that helps migrants return home. Since 2006, the group has helped about 3,000 travel home.
“If they find a job it can be good, but if they don’t, it can be a nightmare,” said Michele Bombassei, an official with the migration group, adding that most do not find jobs.
That hostile reality contrasts sharply with the image that Colonel Qaddafi likes to portray. His capital city is filled with billboards showing Libya as the one bright spot on the continent. In one billboard, Colonel Qaddafi appears as a savior as sun rays break over his shoulder and a crowd of black men and women reach toward him with outstretched arms.
His Africa agenda helps empower him in other ways, too.
Diplomats here said it gave him leverage in keeping African and European leaders listening and their doors open. If Libya sent all the migrants home, they would become a burden to poorer African nations, which would have to absorb them while losing out on the remittances they send home. At the same time, diplomats here said, Libya has made it plain to European countries, especially Italy, that if Libya chose to look the other way, most of those migrants would head for European shores.
“It’s a kind of soft power they use,” said one Western diplomat who works on Libyan affairs but requested anonymity for fear of antagonizing Libyan authorities.
Colonel Qaddafi will serve only a one-year term as chairman of the African Union, but his quest to use Africa as a stepping stone to greater world influence and credibility is likely to continue well past that. Last August, 200 kings and traditional African leaders traveled to Libya and anointed him with a more permanent moniker; they crowned him king of kings.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/world ... &th&emc=th
March 23, 2009
New Status in Africa Empowers an Ever-Eccentric Qaddafi
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
TRIPOLI, Libya — Forty years after he seized power in a bloodless coup d’état, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader once called the mad dog of the Middle East by President Ronald Reagan, has achieved the international status he always craved, as chairman of the African Union.
Colonel Qaddafi’s selection last month to lead the 53-nation African Union coincided with his emergence as a welcomed figure in Western capitals, where heads of state are eager to tap Libya’s vast oil and gas reserves and to gain access to virgin Libyan markets. Once vilified for promoting state terrorism, Colonel Qaddafi is now courted.
But Colonel Qaddafi remains the same eccentric, unpredictable revolutionary as always. He has used his new status to promote his call for a United States of Africa, with one passport, one military and one currency. He has blamed Israel for the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, defended Somali pirates for fighting “greedy Western nations” and declared that multiparty democracy was not right for the people of Africa.
“This is a role that Qaddafi has been looking for for 40 years,” said Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of Egypt’s largest research institute, the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “He kept shifting and changing directions in search of this role.”
Each step of Colonel Qaddafi’s calculated transformation from terrorist sponsor to would-be statesman has bolstered the next. The thaw in relations with the West, which began in 2003 when he gave up Libya’s nuclear weapons program, gave him more credibility in Africa; and his rising status in Africa has made him more acceptable to the West. All of which has been aimed at one primary objective: bolstering his image.
At one time, Colonel Qaddafi, who was born in 1942, tried to position himself as the next pan-Arab leader. But he was rejected, at times mocked, for his eccentric style and pronouncements. His country was isolated for decades because he sent his agents to kill civilians, including in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
But now in Africa, he has found traction. African heads of state view him suspiciously, and his one-Africa agenda is generally dismissed as unworkable. But he is embraced for his growing status in the West, the lack of credible alternatives across the continent and his money. Many stories are told in Tripoli of African leaders visiting Colonel Qaddafi and leaving with suitcases full of cash, stories that cannot be confirmed but that have become conventional wisdom.
“They don’t want to lose him because he is a gold mine for solving crises, usually financial crises,” said Attia Essawy, an Egyptian writer with expertise in African affairs. “He is searching for a role; he wants to have a role regardless of where.”
While Libya’s strongman is enjoying his burnished image, it has come at a cost to his nation of 5.5 million people and to the approximately two million Africans who have flocked to Libya believing that they would find warm receptions, good jobs and, perhaps, an easy path to Europe. Instead, they found a hostile environment and a struggle just to eat.
“It is a burden,” Ali Abd Alaziz Isawi, who served for two years as the minister of economy, trade and investment, said of the army of illegal immigrants living in Libya. “They are a burden on health care, they spread disease, crime. They are illegal.”
All over this capital city, illegal African immigrants line up along roadways, across bridges and at traffic circles hoping to be selected for menial day jobs that pay about $8. They call the areas where they congregate “the hustling grounds,” which are always crowded with desperate faces from early morning until well past sundown.
Many people in Tripoli said they resented the presence of so many illegal workers. “We don’t like them,” said Moustafa Saleh, 28, who is unemployed, echoing a popular sentiment. “They smuggle themselves through the desert, and the way they deal with us is not good.”
For the African migrants themselves, life in Libya is often a dead end. “They call us animals and slaves,” said Paul Oknonghou, 28, a Nigerian who lives with about a dozen other Nigerians in a house under construction that lacks glass in the window frames, running water, a bathroom or a kitchen. He said he and his friends considered themselves lucky that they did not have to sleep on the streets.
Thomas Thtakore, 26, who is from Ghana, entered Libya illegally a year ago after a three-month journey across mountains and desert. “I have no help; I sleep under a bridge near the river,” He said. He said his younger brother died on the way. “If I stay here, I will die.”
Mr. Thtakore was about to be flown back to Ghana by the International Organization for Migration, a nongovernmental group that helps migrants return home. Since 2006, the group has helped about 3,000 travel home.
“If they find a job it can be good, but if they don’t, it can be a nightmare,” said Michele Bombassei, an official with the migration group, adding that most do not find jobs.
That hostile reality contrasts sharply with the image that Colonel Qaddafi likes to portray. His capital city is filled with billboards showing Libya as the one bright spot on the continent. In one billboard, Colonel Qaddafi appears as a savior as sun rays break over his shoulder and a crowd of black men and women reach toward him with outstretched arms.
His Africa agenda helps empower him in other ways, too.
Diplomats here said it gave him leverage in keeping African and European leaders listening and their doors open. If Libya sent all the migrants home, they would become a burden to poorer African nations, which would have to absorb them while losing out on the remittances they send home. At the same time, diplomats here said, Libya has made it plain to European countries, especially Italy, that if Libya chose to look the other way, most of those migrants would head for European shores.
“It’s a kind of soft power they use,” said one Western diplomat who works on Libyan affairs but requested anonymity for fear of antagonizing Libyan authorities.
Colonel Qaddafi will serve only a one-year term as chairman of the African Union, but his quest to use Africa as a stepping stone to greater world influence and credibility is likely to continue well past that. Last August, 200 kings and traditional African leaders traveled to Libya and anointed him with a more permanent moniker; they crowned him king of kings.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
Qaddafi
My friend was writing an essay for class and made a list of why Qaddafi was her most favourite dictator. I couldn't help but share it.
1. Although commonly referred to as the president, Qadafi actually has no official role in Libya. His preferred title is “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
2. He is more often referred to as “al-Majnoon” (“the Mad One”).
3. He refers to Barack Obama as “our Kenyan brother of American nationality.”
4. His bodyguards are all female.
5. But he often travels without them, in a Volkswagen he drives himself.
6. While traveling, he sleeps in a tent. If he must stay in a hotel, he will pitch the tent inside the hotel.
7. He once deported a group of Palestinians to the desert no-man’s land border between Egypt and Libya, then denounced the government (i.e. himself) who had sent them into exile and offered to go stay with them, as a gesture of solidarity. (“I’ll bring my own tent,” he offered.)
8. In UN meetings he has been known to put on his sunglasses and stare into the fluorescent lighting.
9. He has also been known to change his clothes several times during such meetings, a Bedouin bridal custom.
10. Although his willingness to compensate the victims of various terrorist acts has been heralded as a triumph of American might, Qadafi himself has called it nothing more than a pay-off. "The Libyans said they'll buy their way out of these three [terrorism] black lists. We'll pay so much, to hell with $2 billion or more. It's not compensation. It's a price. The Americans said it was Libya who did it. It is known that the president was madman Reagan who's got Alzheimer's and has lost his mind. He now crawls on all fours."
11. In the early 1990s he decided his political manifesto, “The Green Book,” was filled with lies and buried it in his backyard.
12. When accused of targeting Danish nationals in an attack on the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Qadafi clarified this was never the intent: “Libyans do not know Denmark, they do not hate Denmark. They know Italy and they hate Italy.”
13. In 1986 he put Ronald Reagan’s name on an ox and had it slaughtered at a rally in Tripoli.
14. In 1988 he declared that Shakespeare was actually an Arab named Sheikh Zbir, and accused the Western world of cultural theft.
15. Qadafi’s fourth son, Moatessem-Billah, participated in an Egyptian-backed coup against his father. Qadafi forgave him but presumably admired his spunk, for Moatessem-Billah is now one of Qadafi’s likely successors.
16. Alternatively, it might be his second son, Saif al-Islam, who has sponsored an environmental program encouraging schoolchildren to clean up Libya.
17. His third son runs the Libyan Football Federation and had a brief career as a professional footballer in Italy until he was thrown out for doping.
18. His oldest son runs the Libyan Olympic Committee. He has encouraged the Pope to convert to Islam.
19. His only surviving daughter, Aisha, is a lawyer who worked on Saddam Hussein’s defense.
20. His daughter Hannah was killed in infancy by the Americans in 1986.
21. His fifth son is named Hannibal.
21a. In 2001, Hannibal attacked three Italian policemen with a fire extinguisher in Rome.
21b. In 2004, Hannibal was stopped in Paris driving his Porsche at 90 m.p.h. through red lights on the wrong side of the Champs Elysées while drunk.
21c. In 2005, Hannibal beat up his pregnant girlfriend when she refused him access to her room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris.
21d. Later that night police were called to a different hotel, where Hannibal was smashing up the furniture.
21e. In 2008, Hannibal was arrested for abusing two of his servants in Geneva. He was freed after two days in jail after posting a $490,000 bail.
21f. In all cases Hannibal has claimed diplomatic immunity. One French policeman was quoted as saying, “Luckily this boy is a nutter and a rare case.”
22. Until Switzerland apologizes for Hannibal’s arrest, Libya has boycotted Swiss imports, stopped issuing visas to Swiss citizens, recalled Libyan diplomats from Bern, closed the offices of Swiss companies in Tripoli, reduced oil shipments to Switzerland, and reduced flights between the two countries.
23. A few years ago Qadafi cleared out some rusted junk he had laying around and handed it over to the Americans, claiming it was his nuclear weapons program. Bush declared this a victory in the War on Terror and was (very briefly) heralded as a diplomatic genius by the American press.
24. Qadafi was one of the first leaders from a Muslim country to denounce the September 11 attacks, calling all Islamists – quote – “crazy.”
25. Qadafi is the longest-serving head of state currently in office. He has been in power for 40 years.
1. Although commonly referred to as the president, Qadafi actually has no official role in Libya. His preferred title is “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
2. He is more often referred to as “al-Majnoon” (“the Mad One”).
3. He refers to Barack Obama as “our Kenyan brother of American nationality.”
4. His bodyguards are all female.
5. But he often travels without them, in a Volkswagen he drives himself.
6. While traveling, he sleeps in a tent. If he must stay in a hotel, he will pitch the tent inside the hotel.
7. He once deported a group of Palestinians to the desert no-man’s land border between Egypt and Libya, then denounced the government (i.e. himself) who had sent them into exile and offered to go stay with them, as a gesture of solidarity. (“I’ll bring my own tent,” he offered.)
8. In UN meetings he has been known to put on his sunglasses and stare into the fluorescent lighting.
9. He has also been known to change his clothes several times during such meetings, a Bedouin bridal custom.
10. Although his willingness to compensate the victims of various terrorist acts has been heralded as a triumph of American might, Qadafi himself has called it nothing more than a pay-off. "The Libyans said they'll buy their way out of these three [terrorism] black lists. We'll pay so much, to hell with $2 billion or more. It's not compensation. It's a price. The Americans said it was Libya who did it. It is known that the president was madman Reagan who's got Alzheimer's and has lost his mind. He now crawls on all fours."
11. In the early 1990s he decided his political manifesto, “The Green Book,” was filled with lies and buried it in his backyard.
12. When accused of targeting Danish nationals in an attack on the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Qadafi clarified this was never the intent: “Libyans do not know Denmark, they do not hate Denmark. They know Italy and they hate Italy.”
13. In 1986 he put Ronald Reagan’s name on an ox and had it slaughtered at a rally in Tripoli.
14. In 1988 he declared that Shakespeare was actually an Arab named Sheikh Zbir, and accused the Western world of cultural theft.
15. Qadafi’s fourth son, Moatessem-Billah, participated in an Egyptian-backed coup against his father. Qadafi forgave him but presumably admired his spunk, for Moatessem-Billah is now one of Qadafi’s likely successors.
16. Alternatively, it might be his second son, Saif al-Islam, who has sponsored an environmental program encouraging schoolchildren to clean up Libya.
17. His third son runs the Libyan Football Federation and had a brief career as a professional footballer in Italy until he was thrown out for doping.
18. His oldest son runs the Libyan Olympic Committee. He has encouraged the Pope to convert to Islam.
19. His only surviving daughter, Aisha, is a lawyer who worked on Saddam Hussein’s defense.
20. His daughter Hannah was killed in infancy by the Americans in 1986.
21. His fifth son is named Hannibal.
21a. In 2001, Hannibal attacked three Italian policemen with a fire extinguisher in Rome.
21b. In 2004, Hannibal was stopped in Paris driving his Porsche at 90 m.p.h. through red lights on the wrong side of the Champs Elysées while drunk.
21c. In 2005, Hannibal beat up his pregnant girlfriend when she refused him access to her room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris.
21d. Later that night police were called to a different hotel, where Hannibal was smashing up the furniture.
21e. In 2008, Hannibal was arrested for abusing two of his servants in Geneva. He was freed after two days in jail after posting a $490,000 bail.
21f. In all cases Hannibal has claimed diplomatic immunity. One French policeman was quoted as saying, “Luckily this boy is a nutter and a rare case.”
22. Until Switzerland apologizes for Hannibal’s arrest, Libya has boycotted Swiss imports, stopped issuing visas to Swiss citizens, recalled Libyan diplomats from Bern, closed the offices of Swiss companies in Tripoli, reduced oil shipments to Switzerland, and reduced flights between the two countries.
23. A few years ago Qadafi cleared out some rusted junk he had laying around and handed it over to the Americans, claiming it was his nuclear weapons program. Bush declared this a victory in the War on Terror and was (very briefly) heralded as a diplomatic genius by the American press.
24. Qadafi was one of the first leaders from a Muslim country to denounce the September 11 attacks, calling all Islamists – quote – “crazy.”
25. Qadafi is the longest-serving head of state currently in office. He has been in power for 40 years.
March 26, 2009
As Chinese Investment in Africa Drops, Hope Sinks
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CONAKRY, Guinea — Chinese and Guinean workers toil shoulder to shoulder on a sun-blasted construction site at this crumbling city’s edge, building the latest symbol of an old and sturdy alliance: a $50 million, 50,000-seat stadium.
This city is littered with such tokens of a friendship that first flowered when Guinea was an isolated and struggling socialist state in the late 1950s.
But so far Guinea has not gotten what it really wants from the world’s fastest growing economy: a multibillion-dollar deal to build desperately needed infrastructure in exchange for access to the impoverished nation’s vast reserves of bauxite and iron ore.
As global commodity prices have plummeted and several of China’s African partners have stumbled deeper into chaos, China has backed away from some of its riskiest and most aggressive plans, looking for the same guarantees that Western companies have long sought for their investments: economic and political stability.
“The political situation is not very stable,” Huo Zhengde, the Chinese ambassador here, said in an interview, explaining the country’s hesitation to invest billions in Guinea, where a junta seized power after the death of the longtime president in December. “The international markets are not favorable.”
Just a year ago China appeared to be upending the decades-old order in Africa, stepping into the void left by large Western companies too timid to invest in the continent’s resource-rich but fragile states as the market for copper, tin, oil and timber soared to new heights. In the new scramble for Africa’s riches, China sought a hefty share.
With a no-strings-attached approach and a strong appetite for risk, China seemed to offer Africa a complete economic and political alternative to the heavily conditioned aid and economic restructuring that Western countries and international aid agencies pressed on Africa for years, often with uninspiring consequences. Rising China, seeking friends and resources, seemed to be issuing blank checks.
Today, China’s quest for commodities has not stalled. State-owned companies are bargain-hunting for copper and iron ore in more stable places like Zambia and Liberia. But Chinese companies are now driving harder bargains and avoiding some of the most chaotic corners of the continent. African governments facing falling revenues are realizing that they may still need the West’s help after all.
Multimedia and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/world ... frica.html
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March 26, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Island of Instability
By JOHARY RAVALOSON
Antananarivo, Madagascar
IF I had written this a few days ago, I would have discussed the classic choice between legality and legitimacy, urging the return of a state of law. I would have concluded by calling for adherence to a peculiarly Madagascan concept, fihavanana, which places the highest good on maintaining existing social ties. But things here have taken an odd turn and I no longer know what to think.
This island nation became a country of two presidents and two governments at the end of January. That was when the 34-year-old mayor of Antananarivo, Andry Rajoelina, declared himself the head of a populist parallel government in opposition to Marc Ravalomanana, a self-made tycoon who had been president since 2002. And between the two presidents, we had a military that changed sides twice a week.
That was also when Antananarivo, whose name means “the place of 1,000 warriors,” became a city seemingly without law. Restraint and decorum disappeared from this capital of 1.5 million people. More than 100 people died in political violence. A city of 1,000 boutiques closed its doors and became a city of 1,000 garbage cans in the streets. The thousands of alleys and stairs linking the upper town on the hills and the lower town below were blocked by 1,000 barriers where 1,000 robbers lurked.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opini ... nted=print
As Chinese Investment in Africa Drops, Hope Sinks
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CONAKRY, Guinea — Chinese and Guinean workers toil shoulder to shoulder on a sun-blasted construction site at this crumbling city’s edge, building the latest symbol of an old and sturdy alliance: a $50 million, 50,000-seat stadium.
This city is littered with such tokens of a friendship that first flowered when Guinea was an isolated and struggling socialist state in the late 1950s.
But so far Guinea has not gotten what it really wants from the world’s fastest growing economy: a multibillion-dollar deal to build desperately needed infrastructure in exchange for access to the impoverished nation’s vast reserves of bauxite and iron ore.
As global commodity prices have plummeted and several of China’s African partners have stumbled deeper into chaos, China has backed away from some of its riskiest and most aggressive plans, looking for the same guarantees that Western companies have long sought for their investments: economic and political stability.
“The political situation is not very stable,” Huo Zhengde, the Chinese ambassador here, said in an interview, explaining the country’s hesitation to invest billions in Guinea, where a junta seized power after the death of the longtime president in December. “The international markets are not favorable.”
Just a year ago China appeared to be upending the decades-old order in Africa, stepping into the void left by large Western companies too timid to invest in the continent’s resource-rich but fragile states as the market for copper, tin, oil and timber soared to new heights. In the new scramble for Africa’s riches, China sought a hefty share.
With a no-strings-attached approach and a strong appetite for risk, China seemed to offer Africa a complete economic and political alternative to the heavily conditioned aid and economic restructuring that Western countries and international aid agencies pressed on Africa for years, often with uninspiring consequences. Rising China, seeking friends and resources, seemed to be issuing blank checks.
Today, China’s quest for commodities has not stalled. State-owned companies are bargain-hunting for copper and iron ore in more stable places like Zambia and Liberia. But Chinese companies are now driving harder bargains and avoiding some of the most chaotic corners of the continent. African governments facing falling revenues are realizing that they may still need the West’s help after all.
Multimedia and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/world ... frica.html
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March 26, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Island of Instability
By JOHARY RAVALOSON
Antananarivo, Madagascar
IF I had written this a few days ago, I would have discussed the classic choice between legality and legitimacy, urging the return of a state of law. I would have concluded by calling for adherence to a peculiarly Madagascan concept, fihavanana, which places the highest good on maintaining existing social ties. But things here have taken an odd turn and I no longer know what to think.
This island nation became a country of two presidents and two governments at the end of January. That was when the 34-year-old mayor of Antananarivo, Andry Rajoelina, declared himself the head of a populist parallel government in opposition to Marc Ravalomanana, a self-made tycoon who had been president since 2002. And between the two presidents, we had a military that changed sides twice a week.
That was also when Antananarivo, whose name means “the place of 1,000 warriors,” became a city seemingly without law. Restraint and decorum disappeared from this capital of 1.5 million people. More than 100 people died in political violence. A city of 1,000 boutiques closed its doors and became a city of 1,000 garbage cans in the streets. The thousands of alleys and stairs linking the upper town on the hills and the lower town below were blocked by 1,000 barriers where 1,000 robbers lurked.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opini ... nted=print
March 30, 2009
Editorial
Villains and Victims in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government isn’t ideal. Robert Mugabe remains president, despite losing last year’s election. His loyalists remain in charge of the army, the Justice Ministry and other key posts that allow them to arrest and intimidate opponents.
Yet respected and competent former opposition leaders now run important ministries like health, education and finance. These reformers ran on the promise of improving the lives of Zimbabwe’s long-suffering people.
The United States and Europe can help them deliver on those promises by providing increased financial resources. Zimbabwe’s own economy has been bled dry by decades of Mr. Mugabe’s disastrous policies, which have destroyed its currency, crippled its agriculture, mining and industry, and blighted millions of lives through preventable famine and epidemics.
Any new resources must be packaged in ways that ensure they are used for their intended purposes. And without continued sanctions targeted against Mr. Mugabe and his thuggish collaborators, even the limited progress so far achieved could easily be reversed. The challenge is to keep the pressure on the relatively few villains committed to keeping Mr. Mugabe in power, while providing some relief to the millions of victims of his catastrophic misrule.
To this end, the United States and the European Union have rightly restricted travel and frozen assets of Mr. Mugabe and his top collaborators. They have banned trade with businesses and banks used to finance the repressive apparatus. These targeted steps mainly discomfit a narrow, privileged elite.
Washington has also suspended direct development aid to Zimbabwe’s government but provides considerable humanitarian aid, channeled through private and international agencies, to pay for emergency shipments of food, medicine and clean water. Over the last 18 months, while Zimbabwe has been ravaged by a cholera epidemic, American aid has been more than $250 million.
That conduit should now be expanded to cover such life-sustaining items as seed, fertilizer and water and sewage systems to help Zimbabwe stand on its own feet.
At least for now, American aid should continue to be channeled indirectly, not to Zimbabwe’s government. But increased humanitarian aid could free up more of Zimbabwe’s own funds to pay living wages to teachers, doctors and other essential civil servants. If Zimbabwe’s government acts on that opportunity, it might then be time to reopen discussion on resuming direct aid.
Editorial
Villains and Victims in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government isn’t ideal. Robert Mugabe remains president, despite losing last year’s election. His loyalists remain in charge of the army, the Justice Ministry and other key posts that allow them to arrest and intimidate opponents.
Yet respected and competent former opposition leaders now run important ministries like health, education and finance. These reformers ran on the promise of improving the lives of Zimbabwe’s long-suffering people.
The United States and Europe can help them deliver on those promises by providing increased financial resources. Zimbabwe’s own economy has been bled dry by decades of Mr. Mugabe’s disastrous policies, which have destroyed its currency, crippled its agriculture, mining and industry, and blighted millions of lives through preventable famine and epidemics.
Any new resources must be packaged in ways that ensure they are used for their intended purposes. And without continued sanctions targeted against Mr. Mugabe and his thuggish collaborators, even the limited progress so far achieved could easily be reversed. The challenge is to keep the pressure on the relatively few villains committed to keeping Mr. Mugabe in power, while providing some relief to the millions of victims of his catastrophic misrule.
To this end, the United States and the European Union have rightly restricted travel and frozen assets of Mr. Mugabe and his top collaborators. They have banned trade with businesses and banks used to finance the repressive apparatus. These targeted steps mainly discomfit a narrow, privileged elite.
Washington has also suspended direct development aid to Zimbabwe’s government but provides considerable humanitarian aid, channeled through private and international agencies, to pay for emergency shipments of food, medicine and clean water. Over the last 18 months, while Zimbabwe has been ravaged by a cholera epidemic, American aid has been more than $250 million.
That conduit should now be expanded to cover such life-sustaining items as seed, fertilizer and water and sewage systems to help Zimbabwe stand on its own feet.
At least for now, American aid should continue to be channeled indirectly, not to Zimbabwe’s government. But increased humanitarian aid could free up more of Zimbabwe’s own funds to pay living wages to teachers, doctors and other essential civil servants. If Zimbabwe’s government acts on that opportunity, it might then be time to reopen discussion on resuming direct aid.
Our moral calculus values some lives less
By Tim Giannuzzi, For The Calgary HeraldApril 2, 2009 9:15 AM
The financial crisis raging across the globe has altered attitudes in a remarkable way. It is no longer odd to see high and mighty captains of industry appearing on television with the dejected air of a teenager who shows up on his parents' doorstep at three in the morning accompanied by a police officer. Mistakes were made. Lessons have been learned. We'll be good.
A pair of violent incidents which took place in African politics last month should have elicited --but predictably did not --equally honest responses from world leaders about the way Africa is treated and held to account for its failures. The fact that dirty dealings among Africa's elite are generally ignored or tolerated by the First World is one of the major obstacles which prevents the place from developing. An admission that the West often falls well short of its professed standards in its African dealings would be a good step toward helping the continent change.
Instead, both incidents were greeted by the rest of the world with reflexive condemnations and then just as quickly forgotten. Although Africa's statesmen have made a show of condemning the events, it won't be long before their collective amnesia sets in again, too. The first incident took place in the minuscule West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, a country notable only as a handy transit point for shipping illegal drugs to Europe (Keeping Amy Winehouse's Creative Juices Flowing could be their national motto). On
March 2, Guinea-Bissau President Joao Vieira was shot to death by soldiers, the day after he had his nemesis, the head of the armed forces, killed.
Vieira considered himself God's gift to his country, an attitude which adequately sums up why the place was becoming a failed narcostate under his rule, but his murder is still regrettable and has failed to spark much of an outcry.
The second incident took place on the east African island of Madagascar, mostly known for its bizarre ecology and for having a language with twice as many syllables as it needs, such as the name of the capital, Antananarivo. In late March, Marc Ravalomanana, the country's democratically elected president, was overthrown in a populist uprising led by Andry Rajoelina, the mayor of the island's capital and a former superstar radio personality (Nobody tell Rush Limbaugh). Several donors have withheld foreign aid, but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to turn the screws strongly enough to force Rajoelina from power and impart the message that coups are unacceptable.
The outside world's failure to react strongly enough to these events (and plenty of others) only reinforces the notion that, despite oodles of high-flown rhetoric and rising social concern, human lives still have differing values which in practice run roughly like this:
1) First World countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand).
2) Inhabitants of places that make the news a lot and tug at the heartstrings (Israel, Palestinian territories, Tibet, Afghanistan and Darfur).
3) Former Communist countries which are presumably used to suffering and deprivation anyway (Russia, central and eastern Europe).
4) Densely populated East Asian countries with collectivist traditions and contemplative belief systems thought to inure people to suffering (China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea).
5) Places that have a lot of oil or are near to such places (the Middle East, Turkey and Iran).
6) Tourist traps with libertine beach cultures (Thailand, Cambodia, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean).
7) Developing countries in our hemisphere (Central and South America).
Overpopulated hot countries (Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia).
9) Developing countries that don't make the news a lot and may have funny names (any place not in the other categories).
10) Conflict-prone places where many of the natives are none too friendly (Somalia, Yemen and Sudan).
Honesty would go a long way toward changing this unsavoury moral calculus. Taking a stronger line on good behaviour, especially in obscure countries, would do even more.
Timothy Giannuzzi is a Calgary writer specializing in foreign affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Tim Giannuzzi, For The Calgary HeraldApril 2, 2009 9:15 AM
The financial crisis raging across the globe has altered attitudes in a remarkable way. It is no longer odd to see high and mighty captains of industry appearing on television with the dejected air of a teenager who shows up on his parents' doorstep at three in the morning accompanied by a police officer. Mistakes were made. Lessons have been learned. We'll be good.
A pair of violent incidents which took place in African politics last month should have elicited --but predictably did not --equally honest responses from world leaders about the way Africa is treated and held to account for its failures. The fact that dirty dealings among Africa's elite are generally ignored or tolerated by the First World is one of the major obstacles which prevents the place from developing. An admission that the West often falls well short of its professed standards in its African dealings would be a good step toward helping the continent change.
Instead, both incidents were greeted by the rest of the world with reflexive condemnations and then just as quickly forgotten. Although Africa's statesmen have made a show of condemning the events, it won't be long before their collective amnesia sets in again, too. The first incident took place in the minuscule West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, a country notable only as a handy transit point for shipping illegal drugs to Europe (Keeping Amy Winehouse's Creative Juices Flowing could be their national motto). On
March 2, Guinea-Bissau President Joao Vieira was shot to death by soldiers, the day after he had his nemesis, the head of the armed forces, killed.
Vieira considered himself God's gift to his country, an attitude which adequately sums up why the place was becoming a failed narcostate under his rule, but his murder is still regrettable and has failed to spark much of an outcry.
The second incident took place on the east African island of Madagascar, mostly known for its bizarre ecology and for having a language with twice as many syllables as it needs, such as the name of the capital, Antananarivo. In late March, Marc Ravalomanana, the country's democratically elected president, was overthrown in a populist uprising led by Andry Rajoelina, the mayor of the island's capital and a former superstar radio personality (Nobody tell Rush Limbaugh). Several donors have withheld foreign aid, but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to turn the screws strongly enough to force Rajoelina from power and impart the message that coups are unacceptable.
The outside world's failure to react strongly enough to these events (and plenty of others) only reinforces the notion that, despite oodles of high-flown rhetoric and rising social concern, human lives still have differing values which in practice run roughly like this:
1) First World countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand).
2) Inhabitants of places that make the news a lot and tug at the heartstrings (Israel, Palestinian territories, Tibet, Afghanistan and Darfur).
3) Former Communist countries which are presumably used to suffering and deprivation anyway (Russia, central and eastern Europe).
4) Densely populated East Asian countries with collectivist traditions and contemplative belief systems thought to inure people to suffering (China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea).
5) Places that have a lot of oil or are near to such places (the Middle East, Turkey and Iran).
6) Tourist traps with libertine beach cultures (Thailand, Cambodia, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean).
7) Developing countries in our hemisphere (Central and South America).
Overpopulated hot countries (Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia).9) Developing countries that don't make the news a lot and may have funny names (any place not in the other categories).
10) Conflict-prone places where many of the natives are none too friendly (Somalia, Yemen and Sudan).
Honesty would go a long way toward changing this unsavoury moral calculus. Taking a stronger line on good behaviour, especially in obscure countries, would do even more.
Timothy Giannuzzi is a Calgary writer specializing in foreign affairs.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
April 7, 2009
South Africa Drops Charges Against Leading Presidential Contender
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Corruption charges against Jacob Zuma — the man almost certain to become South Africa’s president after elections later this month — were dropped Monday by prosecutors who said the case had been tainted by a tawdry, secret manipulation of the legal process from within their own ranks.
The case has deeply divided the country and struck at one of its core political questions: how to uphold the rule of law, a particular point of pride in this nascent democracy, when the nation is dominated by a single party and the party’s most influential figures vie for power.
South Africa has the continent’s largest economy, and while the decision to halt the prosecution may spare the country the discomfort of being led by a defendant in a corruption case, it did not resolve the underlying allegations that Mr. Zuma, the leader of the governing African National Congress, thrived off 783 payments over a decade’s time from a convicted briber.
“It’s very sad to see Africa’s major country now going down the same route by which corruption is easily excused by political authorities in other African countries,” said Laurence Cockcroft, a board member of the British chapter of Transparency International, an anticorruption group.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/healt ... ?th&emc=th
South Africa Drops Charges Against Leading Presidential Contender
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Corruption charges against Jacob Zuma — the man almost certain to become South Africa’s president after elections later this month — were dropped Monday by prosecutors who said the case had been tainted by a tawdry, secret manipulation of the legal process from within their own ranks.
The case has deeply divided the country and struck at one of its core political questions: how to uphold the rule of law, a particular point of pride in this nascent democracy, when the nation is dominated by a single party and the party’s most influential figures vie for power.
South Africa has the continent’s largest economy, and while the decision to halt the prosecution may spare the country the discomfort of being led by a defendant in a corruption case, it did not resolve the underlying allegations that Mr. Zuma, the leader of the governing African National Congress, thrived off 783 payments over a decade’s time from a convicted briber.
“It’s very sad to see Africa’s major country now going down the same route by which corruption is easily excused by political authorities in other African countries,” said Laurence Cockcroft, a board member of the British chapter of Transparency International, an anticorruption group.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/healt ... ?th&emc=th
April 10, 2009
Mugabe Aides Said to Use Violence to Get Amnesty
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.
Mr. Mugabe’s generals and politicians have organized campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in power. But now that the opposition has a place in the nation’s new government, these strongmen worry that they are suddenly vulnerable to prosecution, especially for crimes committed during last year’s election campaign as the world watched.
“Their faces were immediately pasted on the wall for everyone to see that they were behind the killing, the violence, the torture and intimidation,” said a senior official in Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, who, like others in the party, spoke anonymously because he was describing its criminal history.
To protect themselves, some of Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants are trying to implicate opposition officials in a supposed plot to overthrow the president, hoping to use it as leverage in any amnesty talks or to press the opposition into quitting the government altogether, ruling party officials said.
Like South Africa at the end of apartheid or Liberia at the close of Charles Taylor’s reign, Zimbabwe is in the midst of a treacherous passage from authoritarian rule to an uncertain future. After a bloody election season last year stained by the state-sponsored beatings and killings of opposition supporters, Mr. Mugabe and his rivals in the Movement for Democratic Change agreed to a power-sharing government that includes both victimizers and victims.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world ... nted=print
Mugabe Aides Said to Use Violence to Get Amnesty
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.
Mr. Mugabe’s generals and politicians have organized campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in power. But now that the opposition has a place in the nation’s new government, these strongmen worry that they are suddenly vulnerable to prosecution, especially for crimes committed during last year’s election campaign as the world watched.
“Their faces were immediately pasted on the wall for everyone to see that they were behind the killing, the violence, the torture and intimidation,” said a senior official in Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, who, like others in the party, spoke anonymously because he was describing its criminal history.
To protect themselves, some of Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants are trying to implicate opposition officials in a supposed plot to overthrow the president, hoping to use it as leverage in any amnesty talks or to press the opposition into quitting the government altogether, ruling party officials said.
Like South Africa at the end of apartheid or Liberia at the close of Charles Taylor’s reign, Zimbabwe is in the midst of a treacherous passage from authoritarian rule to an uncertain future. After a bloody election season last year stained by the state-sponsored beatings and killings of opposition supporters, Mr. Mugabe and his rivals in the Movement for Democratic Change agreed to a power-sharing government that includes both victimizers and victims.
More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world ... nted=print
April 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Stockbridge, Mass.
PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or their equivalents.
Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.
The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger crafts, often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or Taiwanese, taking the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship to take a larger vessel, and then another, working up the food chain. Eventually, they let the smaller boats and crews go free. In this way, over the years, Somali pirates have graduated to attacking oil tankers and container ships; the bigger the vessel, the higher the ransoms, which the pirate confederations can then invest in more sophisticated equipment.
As Braudel suggested, there is nothing new here. Piracy has been endemic to the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, and particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as “sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number and audacity as trade increased, so that piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who was the victim of pirates off western India in the 14th century, informed us that commercial ships in the Indian Ocean of his day traveled in armed convoys as a defense. Slightly earlier, Marco Polo described many dozens of pirate vessels off Gujarat, India, where the pirates would spend the whole summer at sea with their women and children, even as they plundered merchant vessels.
The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.
So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.
In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis reveals, it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for patrolling the major sea lines, thus guarding the global commons. It packs enough precision weaponry on its warships to project power on land against adversaries like North Korea and Iran. But it still does not have enough of a sea-based, counterinsurgency component to deal with adversaries like Somali pirates and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features speedboats loaded with explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s coastline, which could ram ships on suicide missions.)
The Navy has plans to build 55 new Littoral Combat Ships to deal with this deficiency. Yes, these fast, maneuverable ships have low drafts and are thus suited for many different kinds of unorthodox missions close to shore. But the oceans are vast, and ships cannot be in two places at once. Without sufficient numbers of them, it’s hard to believe that they will make much of a difference. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his recent budget statement, indicated that only a few of these ships will be built at first, even as he endorsed the whole program.
In recent years the American public has been humbled by the limits of our military power in dirty land wars. But navies have historically been a military indicator of great power. That a relatively small number of pirates from a semi-starving nation can constitute enough of a menace to disrupt major sea routes is another sign of the anarchy that will be characteristic of a multipolar world, in which a great navy like America’s — with a falling number of overall ships — will be in relative, elegant decline, while others will either lack the stomach or the capacity to adequately guard the seas.
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Op-Ed Contributor
Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Stockbridge, Mass.
PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or their equivalents.
Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.
The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger crafts, often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or Taiwanese, taking the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship to take a larger vessel, and then another, working up the food chain. Eventually, they let the smaller boats and crews go free. In this way, over the years, Somali pirates have graduated to attacking oil tankers and container ships; the bigger the vessel, the higher the ransoms, which the pirate confederations can then invest in more sophisticated equipment.
As Braudel suggested, there is nothing new here. Piracy has been endemic to the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, and particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as “sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number and audacity as trade increased, so that piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who was the victim of pirates off western India in the 14th century, informed us that commercial ships in the Indian Ocean of his day traveled in armed convoys as a defense. Slightly earlier, Marco Polo described many dozens of pirate vessels off Gujarat, India, where the pirates would spend the whole summer at sea with their women and children, even as they plundered merchant vessels.
The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.
So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.
In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis reveals, it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for patrolling the major sea lines, thus guarding the global commons. It packs enough precision weaponry on its warships to project power on land against adversaries like North Korea and Iran. But it still does not have enough of a sea-based, counterinsurgency component to deal with adversaries like Somali pirates and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features speedboats loaded with explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s coastline, which could ram ships on suicide missions.)
The Navy has plans to build 55 new Littoral Combat Ships to deal with this deficiency. Yes, these fast, maneuverable ships have low drafts and are thus suited for many different kinds of unorthodox missions close to shore. But the oceans are vast, and ships cannot be in two places at once. Without sufficient numbers of them, it’s hard to believe that they will make much of a difference. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his recent budget statement, indicated that only a few of these ships will be built at first, even as he endorsed the whole program.
In recent years the American public has been humbled by the limits of our military power in dirty land wars. But navies have historically been a military indicator of great power. That a relatively small number of pirates from a semi-starving nation can constitute enough of a menace to disrupt major sea routes is another sign of the anarchy that will be characteristic of a multipolar world, in which a great navy like America’s — with a falling number of overall ships — will be in relative, elegant decline, while others will either lack the stomach or the capacity to adequately guard the seas.
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.