Global News Journal

from Africa News blog:

Could Islamist rebels undermine change in Africa?

Creeping from the periphery in Africa’s east and west, Islamist militant groups now pose serious security challenges to key countries and potentially even a threat to the continent’s new success.

The biggest story in Africa south of the Sahara over the past few years hasn’t been plague, famine or war but the emergence of the world’s poorest continent as one of its fastest growing – thanks to factors that include fresh investment, economic reform, the spread of new technology, higher prices for commodity exports and generally greater political stability.

Nigeria and Kenya, the most important economies in West and East Africa respectively, are pillars of the change in Africa as well as having the largest and most easily accessible markets for foreigners.

Both now face growing battles with Islamist groups; Kenya throwing troops into neighbouring Somalia in pursuit of al Shabaab fighters, Nigeria struggling with bombings and shootings by its homegrown Boko Haram sect.

Kenyan forces have pushed into southern Somalia to drive back al Qaeda-linked militants blamed by Nairobi for a string of border incursions and kidnappings, including the abductions of foreign tourists from coastal resorts which have damaged one of Kenya’s most important industries.

Shabaab has in return called for all out war on Kenya and “huge blasts” by its unknown number of supporters there. Grenade attacks this week have killed one person, wounded more than 20 and jangled nerves in Nairobi, where more than 200 people died in an al Qaeda bombing of the U.S. embassy in 1998.

Killings by Nigeria’s Boko Haram sect (whose name means Western education is sinful) had been largely confined to a remote corner of the semi-desert northeast and ignored by much of the country until bombings struck the capital Abuja a few months back. A suicide car bombing on the U.N. headquarters in August killed 24 people.

from Africa News blog:

Was South Africa right to deny Dalai Lama a visa?

By Isaac Esipisu

Given that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner and given the close relationship between Beijing and the ruling African National Congress, it didn’t come as a huge surprise that South Africa was in no hurry to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama.

Tibet’s spiritual leader will end up missing the 80th birthday party of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a fellow Nobel peace prize winner. He said his application for a visa had not come through on time despite having been made to Pretoria several weeks earlier. (Although South Africa’s government said a visa hadn’t actually been denied, the Dalai Lama’s office said it appeared to find the prospect inconvenient). Desmond Tutu said the government’s action was a national disgrace and warned the President and ruling party that one day he will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government.

It’s the second time the Dalai Lama has been unable to honour an invitation to South Africa by Tutu after failing to make it to a meeting in 2010.

South Africa will certainly win more plaudits in Beijing, which last week agreed to $2.5 billion in investment projects with during a visit by South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.

But pro-Tibet activists say South Africa is undermining its credentials as a country of freedom and democracy, established after the end of white minority rule a generation ago.

UN tells Mbeki he got it wrong on Ivory Coast

This week U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon‘s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, defended the United Nations’ record on Ivory Coast.  In a highly unusual public rebuttal, Nambiar told former South African President and African Union mediator for the Ivory Coast conflict, Thabo Mbeki, that it was he – not the international community — who got it wrong in the world’s top cocoa producer.

In April, Ivory Coast’s long-time President Laurent Gbagbo was ousted from power by forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara, who won the second round of a U.N.-certified election in November 2010, with the aid of French and U.N. troops. According to Mbeki — who has also attempted to mediate in conflicts in Sudan and Zimbabwe – there never should have been an election last fall in the country that was once the economic powerhouse of West Africa.

Mbeki wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy magazine at the end of April: “The objective reality is that the Ivorian presidential elections should not have been held when they were held. It was perfectly foreseeable that they would further entrench the very conflict it was suggested they would end.”

Ivory Coast was split in two by the 2002-3 civil war and the failure to disarm the northern rebels meant the country held an election last year with two rival armies in place, leading to a new outbreak of hostilities when Gbagbo rejected the internationally-accepted election results.

The solution to the conflict, Mbeki wrote, was not to insist that Ouattara take office as president, as the United Nations, France and others did at the time, but a political solution that would have satisfied everybody in the francophone nation. “The African Union understood that a lasting solution of the Ivorian crisis necessitated a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ivorian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity.”

The United Nations took nearly four months to come up with a public response to Mbeki. It finally appeared this week in an article in Foreign Policy by Nambiar entitled “Dear President Mbeki: The United Nations Helped Save the Ivory Coast.” In his rebuttal, Nambiar vehemently rejects the idea that that the world should have pushed Ouattara to negotiate a power-sharing deal with election-loser Gbagbo.

UN sends mixed signals on civilian deaths in Libya

The United Nations has been sending mixed signals lately about NATO’s record with civilian casualties in the alliance’s sixth month of air strikes against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s troops and military sites. U.N. officials and diplomats said it was hardly surprising that different senior officials at the world body are finding it hard to keep a consistent line on the conflict, which, back in March, most of them had hoped would be over in a few weeks. 

But it has dragged on. Now Gaddafi’s government is complaining about what it says are mounting civilian casualties caused by NATO bombs, many of them children. Diplomats from alliance members acknowledge that there have been some civilian casualties, which they regret. But they question some of the figures that have been coming out of Tripoli. Libya’s state television, which was targeted by NATO late last month, regularly broadcasts gory images of blood-soaked bodies it says are civilians being pulled from rubble after NATO bomb attacks.

Last week the head of the U.N. cultural and scientific agency UNESCO, Irina Bokova, issued an unusually sharp rebuke of the alliance for its July 30 air strikes against Libyan state television, which she said killed several “media workers.”

“I deplore the NATO strike on Al-Jamahiriya and its installations,” Bokova said in a statement. “Media outlets should not be targeted in military actions.”

Several U.N. diplomats from NATO member states privately expressed surprise at the statement from Bokova, herself a citizen of NATO member Bulgaria. Asked about her criticism, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s deputy spokesman Farhan Haq suggested that Ban was not overly concerned with the performance of NATO in Libya.

“In terms of that, we would need further details about what the operations were that were conducted. But certainly, the Secretary-General believes that resolution 1973 has been used properly in order to protect civilians in Libya and he has continually emphasized the need, as this proceeds, to make sure that civilians in Libya will be protected.”

NATO defended the attack on Libyan television and said it had no evidence that anyone was killed during the strikes.

from Africa News blog:

Nigeria’s non-vote: Incompetence or sabotage?

According to the shame-faced head of Nigeria’s electoral commission, one of the excuses given by suppliers who failed to get ballot papers to the country in time for Saturday’s parliamentary ballot was that there had been problems as a result of the tsunami in Japan.

Contractors in Nigeria tend to be pretty adept with their excuses, whether it’s about a failure to fix the plumbing or to build a highway on time, but this one stands out for its audacity.

Whatever the reason for the two-day delay to the vote, it has inevitably put another question mark over the credibility of a series of elections seen as a chance for a break from a history of ballots where fraud and thuggery have been the order of the day.

Because this is Africa’s giant, the conduct of elections matters all the more for the rest of the continent - whether as a sign of what other governments think they can get away with or whether investors can feel more comfortable in improving institutions.

Electoral Commission Chairman Attahiru Jega was enormously apologetic. The academic has generally been credited with independence and with trying to make sure the job gets done well this time.

The chaos now raises doubts over what can be done with ballots that had already been cast – as they had in some places – and what to do with electoral materials now in place. The whole point of delivering them at the last minute had been to avoid tampering.

As well as the disappointment, the delay to the vote was the cause for much hand-wringing. Some Nigerians asked whether their country could organise anything successfully.

from Africa News blog:

Could revolt spread in Africa?

So far there hasn’t been much political fallout in the rest of Africa from the revolts in the northernmost states.

Of course there are lots of differences between sub-Saharan African countries themselves let alone when you compare them to those north of the desert.

But there are plenty of similarities too: the rest of Africa can point to those leaders entrenched for decades, to so-called democracies where ballots are no more than a waste of paper and to a lack of opportunities for youths even where official growth figures appear startlingly good.

Could the revolt against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi change that dynamic in some places?

After all, he is the man who was once crowned ‘King of Kings’ of Africa by a group of friendly traditional leaders.

Although he is holding out defiantly, a security apparatus more pervasive and better equipped than most on the continent was unable to prevent the uprising - even if ultimately it prevails.

If Gaddafi falls, would it send a message that anyone can be challenged by their people?

from Africa News blog:

Africa’s trying tradition of sit-tight leaders

It may seem odd to ask the question only a day after he was sworn in, but will Guinea’s President Alpha Conde go when the time comes?

Long-suffering opposition leader Conde is the first freely-elected president of a country that has known dictatorship, with varying degrees of brutality and oppression, for pretty much the entire period since independence from France in 1958. And French rule wasn’t that much fun for Guineans either.

Conde took office with the pledges that might be expected; to heal division, to improve services, to fight corruption, to put food on every table etc. etc. In particular, he said he would work to unify his ethnically-divided country in the way Nelson Mandela did for South Africa after apartheid.

Nobody could wish him anything but the best of luck, but what if he doesn’t do well enough in the face of such immense challenges? What if his people tire of him or simply want to give someone else a chance?

As the situation in neighbouring Ivory Coast makes only too clear, the record of African leaders in allowing that someone might replace them is poor at best.

Ivory Coast was once the example of what Guinea could have been without its despots. Lacking the resources of France’s “Pearl of West Africa”, an independent Ivory Coast prospered under more liberal rule and became the new jewel.

More than a decade of crisis has put an end to that. Fears for the country are deepening again as incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo defies calls to step down made by the United Nations, African Union and regional group ECOWAS. They say opposition leader Alassane Ouattara won November elections and is now the president.

from Africa News blog:

Ivory Coast puts African credibility on the line

Mediation has already started after another bad election in Africa.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki was in Ivory Coast at the weekend to try to sort out the mess after election results ratified by the United Nations were rejected by the Constitutional Court, the army and incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, who had himself sworn in again as president quickly. His opponent Alassane Ouattara said he was president.

Mbeki, all smiles as he met Gbagbo, is used to brokering deals. He helped negotiate the deal for Zimbabwe’s unity government between President Robert Mugabe and now Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, ending months of turmoil at the time. Tsvangirai had led in the first round in early 2008 but boycotted the second after violence against his supporters.

That unity deal came months after former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan came up with an agreement in Kenya following an election in which incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was also accused of rigging, but had himself quickly sworn in. Violence followed in which at least 1,300 people were killed before a power-sharing pact was reached.

The agreements in Kenya and Zimbabwe certainly ended ruinous crises (or at least put them on hold), but could they also have been lessons in how to keep a shot at power when all might seem lost?

Until the early 1990s, most African presidents were there for life - comfortable as long as that life was not curtailed by an ambitious chief of army staff. Then came elections - some good and many not so good - under donor and popular pressure.

Could there now be a new model? Hold an election and if you win then great – you are a democrat after all - but even if you don’t there’s an escape route. The worst that happens is that an elder statesman shows up to mediate a deal which may still leave you in a strong position – perhaps even the strongest position?

In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence

It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.

Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence.  Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state.  (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)

The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.

But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.

The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.

from Africa News blog:

Nigeria on the brink? Of what?

Former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell sparked a furore when he suggested in Foreign Affairs magazine  that elections due in Nigeria in January could trigger a conflict between Muslim north and Christian south or even precipitate a coup.

In his article entitled “Nigeria on the Brink”, Campbell argued that the ending of a power-sharing agreement between north and south in the ruling party -- and a lack of consensus for the first time since the end of military rule over who its candidate should be -- could be a recipe for disaster.

“Nigerians have long danced on the edge of the cliff without falling off,” he said. “Yet at this juncture, the odds are not good for a positive outcome, and it is difficult to see how Nigeria can move back from the brink.”

Campbell’s comments were slammed as irresponsible by Foreign Minister Odein Ajumogobia, who accused him of “seeming to relish in willing a worst case scenario to occur”.

Other critics say references to the “Muslim north and Christian south” and “religious and ethnic unrest” without setting out the context are misleading, painting Nigeria as a radicalized country engulfed by violence.

Horrific as the unrest in the country’s Middle Belt has been, claiming thousands of lives over the past decade, it has been periodic and localised, and born of rivalry for political and economic power rather than religious fervour, they say.

Nigerian friends in the commercial capital Lagos – heaving and chaotic, but also dynamic and full of opportunity – often comment that the country feels permanently “on the brink”. But not necessarily of disaster. In fact, far from it.