Africa News blog

Were NATO strikes on Gaddafi’s home town justified?

Britain’s defence secretary, Liam Fox, sounded a little scripted in Misrata at the weekend when I asked him whether NATO’s airstrikes in Muammar Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte were staying within its remit to protect civilians in Libya.

“NATO has been extraordinarily careful in target selection.”

“NATO has been very careful to minimize civilian casualties.”

“NATO has stayed within its mandate throughout.”

It’s a mantra that NATO, and the countries that have contributed to its Libyan adventure, have had to learn well.  They’ve been accused of stretching the legality of the mission “to protect civilians by all necessary measures” before.

But the problem with sticking to a script, is that the Libyan conflict hasn’t really progressed with any sort of predictable narrative since the fall of Tripoli on the night of August 23rd.

If the then rebels of the now ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) expected that internal insurrections would help them and they’d race into Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte and the other remaining holdout, Bani Walid, to a hero’s welcome, they were mistaken.

Is Africa drought a chance to enact new UK policy?

New ways of managing aid are being debated in Britain as global concerns mount over a hunger crisis devastating the drought-affected Horn of Africa.

Randolph Kent, director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College in London, says the crisis provides a perfect opportunity for the British government to test its recent promise to reform how it responds to humanitarian emergencies.

The severe drought, caused by the driest weather since 1995 in East Africa, has affected an estimated 10 million people and is expected to continue to worsen into early 2012, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

While Kent acknowledges the importance of a $145 million (90.2 million pound) injection of humanitarian aid from the British government, he says the money will not help prevent the next Horn of Africa drought and that the government needs to become more “anticipatory”.

“This disaster has to teach us that the ways we’ve approached such crises in the past is not good enough,” Kent said in a statement. “If we don’t want to be consistently on a back foot when disasters happen, then we need evidence of strategic planning taking place at an international and regional level now.”

The British government’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), released in June, recognises that as a result of the increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters – a trend expected to grow with climate change and population growth – preparedness must be a key goal.

Britain on Sudan: Selling out or cashing in?

Britain’s new coalition government made its priorities on Sudan very clear as Henry Bellingham, the minister for Africa, used 90 percent of his opening remarks at his first press conference in Khartoum to outline how Britain could increase trade with Sudan.

The other 10 percent dealing with the run-up to the south’s referendum on secession, which is likely to create Africa’s newest nation state, and the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide all seemed like just an afterthought.

At first glance many would say Britain was selling out — engaging economically with a government whose head is a wanted man would destroy the global divestment campaign’s years of efforts to make investing in Sudan a poisoned chalice and to pressure Khartoum to stop rights abuses and allow democratic freedoms.

Many Darfuris and rights activists who have been victims of torture and harassment will be dismayed by the move, which clearly extends a hand of friendship to Khartoum, virtually a pariah since the ICC warrant for Bashir last year.

Is Britain selling out?

In fact many ordinary Sudanese say no. They say U.S. sanctions since 1997 have had little effect on the government, which took control in a bloodless coup in 1989 and was elected in disputed elections in April this year.

The economy has grown on average eight percent a year, Khartoum extracted the oil found on its territiry pretty much without Western companies, built hundreds of miles of tarmac roads, and erected high-rise government buildings which sparkle nicely in the sun, visible from the heavily secured U.S. embassy compound.

Gordon Brown resurfaces. In Africa

It’s odd to see a once powerful man walk slowly. And odder still to see him sit in the corner of a restaurant nursing a glass of water for more than an hour. But that’s exactly what delegates to an African Union summit in Ugandan capital Kampala saw former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown do on Saturday.

Brown has been treated as something of a fugitive by the British media since his May election defeat with a slew of “Have you seen this man? type articles published in the country’s newspapers. Speculation on what he was up to ranged from bashing out a book on economics to Alastair Darling’s “he’s reflecting”.

But nobody guessed that when he reappeared it would be in Uganda with a speech about Africa being the potential engine for global economic growth.

The decision will fuel rumours that Brown has his eye on a top job at the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations or a role as a special envoy, but it’s also true that Africa’s development and its economic progress are subjects that fascinate him.

And his track record is rightly respected by African leaders.

He perhaps alluded to the inevitable “Why are you here?” questions with a joke.

Why was Edwin Dyer killed?

Edwin Dyer was among a group of Western tourists kidnapped on the Niger-Mali border after attending a festival of Tuareg culture in late January.

Four months later the Briton was killed by al Qaeda’s North African wing, which had been demanding the release of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian Islamist being held in Britain.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said Dyer’s death was “a tiny portion of what innocent Muslims taste every day at the hands of the Crusader and Jewish coalition”.

Although Dyer was killed on May 31, news of his death was not released until June 3, a day before President Barack Obama gave a speech in Cairo intended to mend fences with the Muslim world.

Analysts suggested that AQIM may have intended Dyer’s death as a message to the American president.

Or was the reason more prosaic?

Last month, Algerian media said AQIM was demanding 10 million euros ($14 million) for Dyer and a Swiss national the group was also holding.

A question of scale

For days now Britons have been regaled with newspaper stories detailing the dubious expense claims of their Members of Parliament.

The Honourable Members, it seems, have been charging for everything from a few thousand pounds for clearing a moat to a few pence for a new bath plug. An outraged nation has risen almost as one to denounce its greedy lawmakers.

But while the various schemes devised by the members of the Mother of Parliaments are ingenious in the way they exploit the generous rules laid down by the “Fees Office” of the House of Commons, they do lack a certain scale.

When it comes to separating the state from its money, politicians in Africa, for example, show none of the inhibitions of their British colleagues.

In Nigeria this month two senior lawmakers investigating corruption in the power sector were detained in connection with a scam involving electricity contracts. How much money involved? $41 million.

In March, Nigerian police arrested a former state governor who is under investigation for misappropriation of funds totalling $170 million.

Enormous sums of money compared with the thousands of pounds involved in Britain, but still small change compared to the billions stolen by Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha.

Should we really care about the Chagossians?

Should we really care that Britain’s House of Lords upheld a British government appeal on Wednesday, blocking the return of hundreds of Chagossians to their Indian Ocean homes?The decision by the House of Lords ends a years-long battle to secure the Chagos Islanders the right to return to their archipelago, from where they were forcibly removed in the 1960s and ’70s to make way for an American airbase on Diego Garcia.

By a ruling of 3-2, the lords backed a British government appeal that argued that allowing the islanders to return could have a detrimental effect on defence and international security. It’s a tough decision and an agonizing result for the Chagos islanders. They continue to suffer appalling injustice because of the British government, who booted them out of the Chagos islands – also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) – to make way for a US military base.

But now the estimated 5,000 Chagossians are mostly scattered between Mauritius, Seychelles, and Britain. And the younger generations (many of whom are half Chagossian) don’t seem so keen to return. One expert has said that about 1,000 Chagossians could return to two of Chago’s six atolls, making a living from coconuts, fishing and ecotourism. But others say this outline plan has grossly underestimated the costs and practical difficulties. Should we, in fact, breathe a sigh of relief at the House of Lords’ decision?

Small islands like those in the Chagos Archipelago tend to have an incredibly rich variety of plants and animals, often found nowhere else. Scientists and sailors visiting the islands describe a near paradise of coral reefs teeming with fish. And examples from elsewhere in the Indian Ocean – Mauritius, Madagascar, Reunion, Comoros, and the Seychelles – show just how badly human populations can damage the environment.

The Chagos Archipelago, for example, has the largest coral atoll in the world, 10 so-called Important Bird Areas, ideal nesting conditions for two turtle species, and – according to tests in 1996 and 2006 – some of the world’s cleanest waters too. And while a 1998 rise in water temperatures killed as much as 95 percent of coral in some areas, Chagos’ reefs grew back probably because there is so little human activity, scientists say. The nearby Maldives were not so lucky.

A sense of justice tells us that Chagossians should be allowed to return. But if these islands truly are on the frontline in the battle against extinctions and if such clean and isolated regions are truly a rarity, then should we really be upset by the block on Chagossians’ return to their homeland?

Time for colonial masters to pay up?

Italy settled its colonial era dispute with Libya at the weekend with $5 billion in compensation for wrongs done during colonial rule. The money will be invested in a major new highway as well as used for clearing mines and other projects. Both sides say that will allow them to make a new start.

Relations between Libya and Italy had been especially difficult and this was a very specific dispute, but Italian colonialism did not last all that long in Africa – even if there were episodes of particular nastiness while it did.

What about the far more important colonial players in Africa: Britain, France and Portugal? Not only was their presence far longer lasting, but they were more heavily involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade, which sapped the strength of west and central Africa for centuries and forced millions of its people into death or slavery. Calls for reparations from some quarters have never died down.

The colonial powers later carved up the map of Africa for their own administrative convenience and with little regard for those living there. Independence movements were often suppressed with heavy force — including in Algeria, the former Portuguese colonies and Kenya.

Since independence, the former colonial powers have given billions of dollars in development aid and other assistance. They generally have far better relationships with former colonies than Italy had with Libya.

But is it time for other former colonial powers to apologise and pay up for misdeeds on the continent? Or should the past be left for the history books?

Colonial borders. Does Africa have a choice?

The lines of Europe’s carve up of Africa were finally taking shape. On March 11, 1913, Britain and Germany agreed who got which bits of a swampy corner of the continent that few in either of the cold and distant countries had heard of.

Two states that did not exist at that time put the border agreement into effect again on Thursday with Nigeria formally handing over the Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon.

That followed a ruling by the World Court in 2002 for which both countries supplied copies of yellowing colonial-era documents to justify claims to territory that had brought them to the brink of war.

Neither might have had as much interest had it not been for the expectation that there is oil there, but it again highlighted Africa’s commitment to colonial borders drawn without consideration for those actually living there.

Should Zimbabwe’s election go ahead?

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai detained twice in a week, U.S. and British diplomats forced from their cars by police, rallies banned, aid workers stopped from working, reports of violence from across the countryside. The campaign for Zimbabwe’s presidential election run-off on June 27 is being hard fought, literally.

The opposition accuses President Robert Mugabe of responsibility for violence and says 65 people have been killed. The ruling party blames Tsvangirai’s followers and says Mugabe’s Western foes and some aid agencies have been campaigning for the opposition.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s economy plumbs ever greater depths. A U.S. dollar could buy more than a billion local dollars on Thursday. But that was then.

Simba Makoni, the ruling party defector who came third in the first round vote on March 29, called this week for the presidential election run-off to be scrapped. He was certainly not the first to suggest that it might be better to abandon the election and have the rivals try to agree some sort of national unity government.

Should the election go ahead? Could it be fair? Who would win?

Have your say.