Month: March 2012

These Guys Are Worse Than Pirates

These Guys Are Worse Than Pirates

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

By Conor Godfrey
Last week, Greenpeace shadowed an unlicensed 120-foot Russian Trawler off the Senegalese coast.

Ships like these often pull in 250 tons of fish a day by dragging 700 meter nets behind them. Some of them use incredibly damaging bottom trawling and other techniques that increase hauls while destroying marine habitats.

To put the effect of these super trawlers in perspective, allow me to quote a few statistics from the Greenpeace report on illegal fishing published last week:

1. “It would take 56 traditional Mauritanian pirogue boats one year to catch the volume of fish a [super trawler] can capture and process in a single day.”

2. “The amount of fish discarded at sea, dead or dying, during one [super] trawler’s fishing trip at full capacity is the same as the average annual fish consumption of 34,000 people in Mauritania.”

Green Peace struggles to unmask illegal fishing ship off West African Coast
These ships rotate the same license among a number of ships, or more crudely, simply cover up the name of the vessel to prevent anyone from documenting their breach.

In short, bloated European fishing fleets have already overfished their own territorial waters, and are now taking advantage of poor African countries inability to enforce their maritime borders. (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese companies are all guilty as well.)

The vast majority of these illegally caught fish are ‘fenced’ through Los Palmas in the Canary Islands, owned by Spain, and through a few other ports of convenience where illegally caught fish can enter lucrative European markets.

(The European commission estimates that at least 10% of seafood sold in the E.U. could be illegally caught; other groups put the estimate considerably higher.)

This gets me riled up.

My home away from home in West Africa – Guinea — has the most overfished territorial waters in the world.

The U.K.’s development agency estimated that in 2009 about 110 million USD worth of stock was illegally fished off the Guinean coast.

That might not sound like much to a country such as Portugal or Japan (culprits in the overfishing), but that is serious money to a country that cannot even provide reliable power to its capital city.

The 110 million USD estimate does not even take into account the near permanent damage done to the habitat and reproductive stocks.

So why can’t the next foreign super trawler without a license in Guinean territorial waters be given a warning, then boarded, then confiscated and the crew thrown in Guinean jail until their host country groveled for their release?

Of course – there is the rub.

Guinea (and most of its neighbors) does not even have patrol boats and crews capable of executing that type of interdiction.

(Also, the last thing you want to do is give unruly Guinean soldiers the authority to start shaking down fisherman arbitrarily.)

Of course, some harbor masters, judges, and other gatekeepers in the maritime industry are probably on the take or could be easily paid off at a number of points (giving out licenses, enforcing fines, etc.)

This can also happen legally.

Even though almost all West African fisheries are now in critical condition, many licenses are sold legally for hard-to-turn-down sums.

Some ideas:

1. The U.S., France, and other bi-lateral donors should kill a few of their grossly ineffective aid programs, and spend the money on professionalizing and equipping a local coast guard interdiction team. (Just one small ship would do it.)

If the E.U. is as concerned as they say, then this should be right up their alley.

Most West African countries (excluding Mali and Mauritania and Niger perhaps) could not care less about anti-terrorism, while illegal fishing on the other hand is a hot button domestic political issue.

The local authorities will be ready, willing, and receptive to assist in kicking the bums out of their territorial waters.

*Interesting model: Australia was concerned that other Pacific countries’ lax fisheries enforcement was hurting Australian interests. So the Australian government created a training program along these lines for a number of neighboring countries that has been very successful in curbing illegal maritime activity.

EJFoundation Photograph
2. Lock down Los Palmas in the Canaries.

This is the Sodom and Gomorrah of illegal fishing, and as long as it continues to offer a back door to E.U. markets, I refuse to believe that Spain is at all concerned with the plight of West African fisheries.

3. West African countries might enlist the help of international companies that are also concerned with maritime criminality.

The obvious partner would be the oil companies operating in their territorial waters.

The oil companies might allow host country customs officers to ride on their ships, or use their surveillance helicopters, etc.

This idea needs to be fleshed out, but it seems like a natural partnership.

I get tired of the numerous conspiracy theories that accuse Europe or the U.S. or China of commercially pillaging Africa; most of the less nuanced theories are simply critiques of capitalism.

This fishing business, however, is as clear as day: more developed countries (including some more developed African countries) are plundering poor countries’ fisheries simply because they can.

And they are doing it as fast as possible because someone else will if they don’t, and because they need to do it before these countries get their act together and start enforcing their own laws.

What Political Evolution looks Like –
Invasions Not Included

What Political Evolution looks Like –
Invasions Not Included

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By Conor Godfrey
[The daily song: I am going to talk about Senegal, so today the musical shout out goes to Senegal’s virtuoso ( and almost presidential candidate)….Mr. Youssu N’Dour. Here are some free streaming songs/videos from his fan site.]

I believe that political evolution takes generations.

The media cycles in the United States magnify off-hand, irrelevant political utterances and give the impression of a political roller coaster when the real ride is, in fact, considerably smoother and longer.

The increasingly powerful office of the U.S presidency, the role of the U.S. judiciary, party platforms—these things change at the margins relatively frequently, but those small alterations accumulate into major developments over the course of a generation, not one election cycle.

The Arab Spring might seem like a spontaneous combustion—near instant change—but the political culture that provided fertile ground for the sparks of the Arab spring was in the works for decades.

It was the generational divide in Arab countries, the slow but accelerating growth of political Islam, increasing social inequality and other longer term trends that drove the evolution of political culture across the Arab world.

One street protest or one election is just a blip unless political culture has opened up space for the event to reverberate. (There are interesting points to be made here about the role of technology in accelerating political evolution.)

Senegal offers a powerful case study in the slow, steady evolution of political culture. I am more interested by the meta-story and will not get lost in the weeds of the current situation here, but read these excellent articles if you are interested in details of the current exciting election:
Towards a Second Round in Senegal

Senegal’s famous founding politician poet– Leopold Senghor—governed for twenty years before leaving office voluntarily.

Then there was what I will call an “electoral phase;” Senghor’s successor (Abdou Diouf) won mildly rigged elections every five or six years for two decades.

The entire patronage network that kept leaders in power was in Mr. Diouf’s hands. He did not have to resort to massive bribing or brutality to win elections.

Decision makers understood that he controlled access to the trough. However, at that time, a number of other things were changing in Senegal’s political culture.

The people that made their names during the independence period were slowly fading from the scene. Along those same lines, Senegal was getting much younger.

These younger people adopted new technologies and ideas faster than their parents and grandparents.

When 2000 rolled around, technology advances had made vote counting more fair and efficient, and young people were looking for someone to reflect the changes they saw in society.

The patronage networks behind the incumbent (Abdou Diouf) had also seen this writing on the wall and had begun to hedge their bets.

Enter the current president- Abdoulaye Wade- who won in the second round of that 2000 election.

Abdoulaye Wade is now the victim of these same long term trends.

One of his key legal maneuvers to rig the election in his favor (lowering the threshold to win outright in the first round) was blocked by civil society in the form of pressure on politicians from young Senegalese that probably got their first taste of electoral power when they voted in Wade in 2000!

Now the youth on the street are cheering “Degage!” – or “clear out!”

The electoral system has seeped into Senegal’s political culture over the past forty years.

That same culture has, in fits and starts, tolerated a loyal opposition, and adopted the technologies and legal methods necessary to enforce an electoral framework.

This is obviously simplifying generations of political developments in a complex country, but my point is this…

Senegal represents a realistic pace of political evolution.

No matter how the current election turns out, it is obvious that the country’s long term trajectory is headed toward more inclusion and more transparency.

If this election goes poorly, or the military over-reacts and makes mistakes in Casamance, those are likely just blips.

In the same way that one election in Libya or Afghanistan does not mean much at all, even if CNN and Al-Jazeera trip over themselves to see how many synonyms for important and game-changing and critical they can use in one broadcast.

The Desert Speaks –
Tuaregs in the News

The Desert Speaks –
Tuaregs in the News

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

By Conor Godfrey
(Hello to all Jim’s readers! The actual Answerman is off finding answers in Southern Africa, so I have been asked to amuse and entertain for the better part of March—I will do my upmost.
Jim and I share some interests and opinions, and diverge quite a bit in others, so I hope you enjoy a brief change, and please feel free to leave comments or email me at [email protected] if there is an issue you would like to see covered.)

The Blue People, the People of the Veil, the Tuareg: to the people-groups that live south of the great desert, these veiled nomads are known as warriors, slavers, merchants and cattle raiders, and have been doing all of the above ever since the camel was introduced to N. Africa around 0 B.C.

For the last millennia, the Tuaregs have controlled the five most lucrative trade and smuggling routes across the Sahara – after all, the 1.2 million Tuaregs that roam the Sahara are more intimate with the desert than we are with our kitchens and bedrooms.

E.g. We call the sandy expanse from Algeria to the Red Sea the Sahara Desert; the Tuaregs see this as dozens of different deserts, each with its own name depending on its aridity, elevation, vegetation, etc…

This interlocking web of deserts goes by the name “Tinariwen”, in Tamasheq, the main dialect of the Tuareg people.

Tinariwen is also the name of a Tuareg band that won the Best World Music Grammy last week.

The band Tinariwen is what I imagine the Sahara Desert would sound like if you gave it an acoustic guitar and a drum.

“Tenere” – the Tamasheq word for the true, deep desert, is the band’s ancestral and spiritual home. Have a listen here.

They were even on the Colbert Report when they were promoting the music Festival au Desert in Timboctu. NPR calls them the best acoustic rock group of the 21st century.

There was, however, another reason the Tuaregs were in the news last week. While Tinariwen was sporting their best Boubous to collect their prize, other Tuaregs were rolling over strategic towns in Northern Mali and skirmishing with the Malian army (See map of conflict on the right.)

The ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ of this conflict (and the other Tuareg rebellions over the last century) is very difficult to parse, and probably immaterial.

When African states in the Sahel gained their independence in the 1960s from, in this case, France, they attempted to assert control

Tuareg Area
over their desert interiors, putting them in conflict with the Tuaregs who refused to acknowledge imaginary lines drawn in the sand (literally)

At the same time, the trans-African trade was increasingly moved by sea, making the two thousand year old caravan routes less and less profitable.

The Tuaregs turned their dessert expertise toward less savory commerce– hostages, drugs, and guns for hire—which put at least some Tuaregs in contact with al-Qaeda and other nefarious groups.

The Tuaregs are NOT Islamic extremists – their brand of nomadic Islam is heavily blended with millennia old animist traditions, and would probably give a hard line Islamist a heart attack.

Tuaregs that do come in contact with al-Qaeda do so for pragmatic, financial reasons.

Also, the various governments abutting the Sahara have every incentive to play up the al-Qaeda – Tuareg link because the U.S. then shells out cash and personnel for military and anti-insurgency training.

(It did not help the Tuareg case that 800 Tuareg warriors fought alongside Moammar Gadhafi’s troops in the recent civil war.)

The Indigo people are a relic of the pre-nation state era; a trans-national people so intimately tied to their land that modern borders are not only unenforceable but totally irrelevant.

Ironically, Tuareg champions are now adopting the modern world’s nationalist rhetoric to express their people’s aspirations.

Malian Tuaregs and some non-Tuaregs have formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad… Azawad being the local name for the Tamasheq speaking regions of Mali, Niger, and Algeria.

The Associated armed group has been renewing the armed struggle for a Tuareg homeland since late January, 2012.

In many ways the Tuaregs have a more coherent cultural and geographic claim to nationhood than many of the modern world’s balkanized republics. Said another way, they are arguably as distinct from their Southern neighbors as the South Sudanese were from their Arab neighbors to the North.

It is difficult to watch some of the last trans-national nomads locked in a losing struggle with the modern world.

As many of the world’s nation states splinter along civilizational lines (Iraq and Syria, Sudan(s), Nigeria, etc… ), and identity politics grows stronger in developed and developing world alike, I wonder the Tuaregs were not simply ahead of their time in thinking that national boundaries were just imaginary lines in the sand.