As I write this Sunday night in East Africa, a man indicted for crimes against humanity is Kenya’s 4th president, and the place is quiet if solemn.
None of the foregoing may last long.
Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the 4th President of Kenya by the election authority, having won 50.07% of the vote. His nearest rival, Raila Odinga, had less than 44%. Nearly 85% of the registered voters participated.
If less than 10,000 votes are reversed, and nearly a half million are being challenged in court right now, then a run-off election will be mandated. In Kenya if less than 50% of the votes are received, the top two of the original 8 contenders must vie in a run-off election.
What that would mean is that Raila Odinga would have to command nearly all the votes that were cast for the other six candidates combined, and that seems to me unlikely. However, note that I also thought it unlikely Kenyatta would win.
The strength of Kenyatta’s polling rested heavily on his success in getting out the ethnic voters in the Rift Valley. I’m sure he would be similarly successful a second time around.
If Kenyatta remains president, or is confirmed in a run-off election, he will be the first sitting president in the world to be on trial for crimes against humanity in The Hague.
Those charges stem from the World Court’s assessment of years of fact-finding that Kenyatta was instrumental in provoking and sustaining the horrible violence that followed the 2007 elections.
The U.S. and Britain have already warned Kenya that Kenyatta as president would have “repercussion” on bilateral relationships.
It doesn’t really matter whether Kenyatta fulfills his promise to attend the trial.
The very fact he stands accused in a criminal court system which rarely arrives at the point of a trial without substantial evidence to convict is alarming.
Kenya is still peaceful.
Raila Odinga is aggressively challenging the decision in the courts, and he has substantial evidence behind him, but he is also constantly telling Kenyans to remain peaceful.
So what now?
What is a peaceful Kenya with a rogue president?
Oh, and by the way, his Vice President, William Ruto, is on trial with him, and from my point of view, is evil incarnate, by far worse than Kenyatta.
I don’t know. I don’t know whether to trust the people of Kenya so long as they remain peaceful and work within the system they so tirelessly created, or to trust the world system whose suspicions about Kenyatta and Ruto are deep and severe.
We must let more time pass. That’s the African way.
by Conor Godfrey For how long? Photo by New York TimesThis is my last blog before turning the reins back over to Jim, so I thought I would sign out with the state of play in Mali, a country near and dear to my heart.
4,000 French troops, along with several hundred Chadians, and smaller contingents from Benin, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Senegal, have retaken the three main Northern cities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, and pushed the main body of insurgents northward into the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains on the border with Algeria.
Estimates put total insurgent numbers, spread among three or four different groups, around 4,000 – 6,000, and French forces report the rebels are well armed and better trained than expected.
The Good:
– The hardcore Islamist leadership is dropping like horses in the Tse-Tse belt. A mess of confirmed and unconfirmed reports claim that French and/or Chadian forces killed two leading figures in the assorted extremist groups currently fighting in Northern Mali.
– These leaders— Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid—are committed international Jihadis from outside Mali, with long histories of murder and kidnapping. (Disclaimer: Belmoktar’s death remains unconfirmed)
As much as some readers may hate force, or the idea of the French using it in West Africa, I would argue that brute force helps separate the committed jihadis from opportunistic locals.
Joining a rebel movement seems like a much better play when they run your hometown, claim to fight your traditional enemies, or pay the best of any employer in town.
That line of work looks far less attractive when your foreign (likely Algerian or Mauritanian) boss is running for his life through the dessert.
The Bad:
– So far, diverse Northern communities are broadly receptive of the French intervention.
However, this is horrendously complicated and could turn at any moment. A few things you should keep in mind regarding about popular opinion in Mali:
This xenophobia will complicate the post-conflict scenario, as Southern elites will come under serious pressure to punish the North. In the North, communal divisions make coalescing behind moderate representation nigh impossible.
Essentially, the Tuaregs have been slavers for most of the territory’s history, so the former slaves find it rather difficult to see Tuaregs as victims.
The Ugly:
– There is no centrifugal force currently capable of creating a unified, functional Mali. Watch this two-minute Stratfor video on Mali’s geographic challenge.
Nothing has changed.
A military occupation by a superior force can enforce a temporary peace, but not make a state. The French are facing intense domestic pressure to make good on Hollande’s claim that this would be a short term operation, and every French soldier that dies (three so far) makes Mali look more like Iraq to the folks back home.
Optimism…?:
– Sure. But really just for optimism’s sake.
Mali needs representative, viable, and politically palatable representation in the North that can lead a constituent assembly, or at least claim to speak for Northern communities in negotiations with the South.
An armed peace held together by regional forces and or the (proposed) UN Peacekeeping mission might give Northern elites time to bargain over such a coalition.
However, I don’t think any of the current groups would be acceptable to the entire Northern population – the MNLA are too Tuareg centric, and the others are mostly too extreme.
The international community – especially the French – should immediately begin using whatever leverage they have to kick-start the bargaining process before the extremists come get back from the mountains.
by Conor Godfrey
I’ve been accused of being a relentless Africa booster… this is almost certainly true.
To fight back, however, I am going to offer a scarier version of the continent’s next thirty years that has taken up serious mind share recently.
This idea will hopefully pass muster as a research topic, so I would certainly appreciate your feedback as I am just getting the full proposal together now.
From the late 90s to the present, we have seen tremendous agitation around African intra and inter-state borders.
I would argue that this started with the Ethiopia Eritrea war (1998-2000) and would include the escalation of civilizational conflict inside Nigeria and Mali, the 2006 Ethiopian and the 2012 Kenyan invasions of Somalia, and, of course, the separation of Sudan and South Sudan.
Dozens of conflicts—including many in the DRC—do not make this list because they did or do not fundamentally challenge the status-quo colonial borders.
You can quibble with or add to my list – that is not the point.
Before this decade the Colonial borders exhibited nigh unprecedented durability. Here is a list of African border changes post WW1… 90% of them were trades between colonial powers.
My point (or wild hypothesis if you will) is this… from independence to 2000, most African states did not possess the material capabilities to mount a sustained challenge to the territorial status quo; doing so requires states to centralize political control, neutralize domestic opponents that pose a threat to the state, and have the material resources necessary to take, hold, and administer territory.
As the U.S. knows well, this requires lots and lots of money (not to mention a professional military and a tolerant domestic audience).
For this entire period, states concentrated on papering over the inconsistencies built into their illogical creations, and, if hostile foreign action were required, they relied on cheap and effective proxy militias and other irregular activity rather than large-scale mobilization.
The Council on Foreign relations writes —not totally persuasively in my opinion—that keeping colonial borders gave African leaders “reciprocal insurance” against invasion, and that leaders were more concerned with arguing over who controlled state resources than fighting over borders.
So why are things coming apart at the seams (pun very much intended)?
This could, after all, just be a blip, a decade long aberration on an otherwise century long consolidation along the lines drawn on a cocktail napkin in Europe.
Here is what I think:
1) Differential Growth: The continent is booming, but not everywhere feels the love.
As some countries outpace their neighbors they will be tempted to acquire the military capabilities to favorably alter the territorial status quo.
Colonialism left hundreds of potential territorial flash points, and for the first time since independence, some African states can likely do something about them.
Differential growth also exacerbates tensions within countries.
As globally connected and well endowed regions grow faster than other provinces inside the same country, resentments build and fuel long simmering separatist ambitions.
This narrative plays itself out most visibly today in Mali, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire, and to a lesser extent in Kenya and Uganda.
2) Resources: As mentioned in this post, Africa is massively under prospected and companies are racing to catch up.
A powerful country may have let unfavorable borders lie when no rents could be extracted from the disputed territory, but what happens when billions of dollars of oil and gas hang on a few lousy kilometers, and investing in a miniscule navy would be sufficient to enforce a fait accompli on the border?
There are a number of possible mitigating factors—colonial withdrawal, regional integration, economic integration, etc… — but I will save those for some future post.
This is worth getting right. I would hate to see a decade of phenomenal growth and progress undone in an orgy of territorial revisionism, and reasonable precautions could help stop spirals of security competition before they begin.
South Africa provides an excellent platform to explain why so many American tourists make bad decisions about their African touring.
Probably most tourists to Africa travel on referral from friends or family. It’s a very small percentage that buy strictly off the internet without vetting what they’ve found with people they know and trust. That’s all well and good but where it goes wrong is when these referrals are from friends or family who have very limited experience.
And the fact is that a single trip, or even two trips to some area, is very limited experience. So you’ve got to guard against personal referrals being …well, too personal.
South Africa is an excellent example of how past travelers get it wrong.
The first is that the best time to go is during America’s summer.
The second is the enormous perception particularly in America that Johannesburg and surroundings are unsafe to visit, and even if they were safe, uninteresting.
The third is that you should avoid the “touristy” places to stay, like the Waterfront in Cape Town or Sandton City north of Johannesburg.
These three entrenched notions are essentially 180 degrees wrong.
I’m currently guiding a small, private group through South African into Botswana and Victoria Falls. We started in Cape Town, they took Rovos Rail and we are now in Johannesburg. It’s South Africa’s summer, and I just checked that the temperature at my home is 2F with a winter storm on its way.
I think before any other information is known, the best time to visit virtually any place outside of the equatorial regions or great deserts is their summer.
The flowers and trees are in bloom, the golf courses are beautiful; surfing, swimming, diving, sailing and everything to do with waters and oceans is at its peak (including some of the finest seafood in the world), outdoor concerts and flea markets are in their hay day, and … it’s comfortable!
South Africa’s winter doesn’t begin to compare to Chicago’s, but it is quite similar to much of the upper south in the United States, like northern Georgia and Tennessee. All the trees lose their leaves. Daylight is diminished. Grass is brown and it’s usually dismal and chilly or cold. Now does that sound like a fun place to be?
And while it’s true that moving north into our safari tomorrow in Botswana increases the temperatures, today’s better camps are so brilliantly constructed – some with air conditioning – that it really isn’t so uncomfortable, now. And this is the time for the best animal viewing!
Two: Time and again you hear so-called “experienced travelers” warning new comers away from places they feel are dangerous, like Lima or St. Petersburg, or … Johannesburg. This is balderdash.
To begin with every city is huge and there are safe parts and unsafe parts, so to lump everything together reveals immediately the silliness of the statement. We are staying in the posh suburb of Sandton. We leave our luggage two floors below reception on the curb to be attended by the porters, we leave our purses in the tour vehicles, we dangle bracelets and necklaces when we go out for a nice dinner.
It’s perfectly safe. And also time-and-again these same naysayers will claim that the “unsafe” city has nothing to offer, anyway.
Like the Apartheid Museum? One of the greatest museums on earth. Or the Cradle of Humankind, which is an exceptional – probably the best – museum complex on earth describing what we know about early man? Or the Sandton museum of the country’s 4 Nobel Laureates? Or absolutely some of the best restaurants and certainly the best shopping complexes anywhere in Africa?
Or jazz and cabaret cafes, theaters, symphonies, multiple festivals at any given time, sports events out the wazoo … in a nutshell, an urban setting difficult to match anywhere on earth.
Three. Avoid the “touristy places.”
Why, exactly? Aren’t you a tourist? Do you not go to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty or Ground Zero or Disneyland or Hollywood boulevard, or the Miracle Mile, or on and on? That’s what these things are for! This isn’t skid row for the leisure class!
Cape Town’s best hotels are at the Waterfront, a complex not so dissimilar to my Chicago’s Navy Pier. The old hotels in the city and outlying areas like the Mt. Nelson are musty and away from all the good action. The best restaurants, the best shops, the best information centers, the best galleries and some of the best museums – they are in the “tourist areas.”
And this is true I suppose anywhere in the world. No matter how you try, if you aren’t committed to actually living somewhere for a good period of time, the best experience you can have of that place is to for at least part of the time join the crowds.
Tomorrow we head into the bush. It’s remarkable to think our last week has been in anything but. It’s hard for me, an East African freak, to really believe our incredible week is only a few hours airplane ride away from the wilds.
So tune in, again, and I’ll let you know if it was just all a fantasy! Everything you see in the picture above -- except of course my wonderful friends and clients Sally Downey and Ada Addington -- is made from beads and discarded wire. This is "Streetwires," a fabulous Cape Town artists' coop.
by Conor Godfrey Africa needs more intra-regional transport links..
Africa needs more improved water sources.
If only Africa had enough eight-cent vaccines, free elections, power plants, kids toys or TOMS shoes then it would all fall together. Sigh.
How often have you heard these quasi-truisms?
(Quick note: Can’t mention the 6% continental growth rate enough, and TOMS Shoes is one of the worst charity ideas since Scrooge recommended putting poor people in debtor’s prisons in A Christmas Carol.)
I have undoubtedly used such intellectually lazy reasoning myself in moments of confusion or frustration.
Believing that A+B would equal C if only those poor, unfortunate wretches could get their act together defers the substantial effort that would be required to understand more difficult questions, and strokes our sub-conscious bias telling us that we would do better in someone else’s shoes.
The dirty little secret of self-help books, aid industries, and all manner of 12-step plans to success is that everyone already knows 95% of the right answers.
Distributional politics—not misinformation—scuttles good ideas in favor of bad ones. Permit me a few examples.
Why are there so few roads linking secondary cities to each other in Africa, or roads between markets across borders?
Mainly because second tier cities are usually opposition strongholds, and linking them by road or rail would increase the likelihood of an alliance against the group in power.
Why do wealthy African countries consistently fail to meet the demand for electricity?
I doubt anyone believes that leaders don’t understand the relationship between power and economic growth. Of course they do. The problem revolves around who gets what! Who gets the contract, who pays which price for electricity, and which neighborhood/city will have access?
There are dozens of similar examples in the United States.
The most famous example is U.S. government research and academic funding: investing more in a few large projects would yield more break-throughs, but instead, the government spreads ineffectually small amounts to hundreds of organizations to appease political and/or state-based interests.
These political or distributional problems are even more salient in weaker states where sub-sate actors are more powerful.
The best articulation of why politics torpedoes policies that all actors agree would increase aggregate welfare concerns the difference between relative and absolute gains.
(I here begin stealing liberally from the Realist school of thought in international politics, led in its modern incarnation by Kenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau.)
Actors care less about large increases in absolute welfare than about gaining small advantages over strategic rivals or adversaries.
After all, if a given policy makes an entire country richer, but makes a competing ethno-regional grouping slightly wealthier than your in-group, then that competing group might use their newfound power to snuff you out. This security-dilemma often forces all actors to pursue sub-optimal policies.
These dynamics, however, do not lend themselves to easy solutions, and therefore we mostly prefer to pretend that African leaders don’t understand how important roads are, or that LSE trained African Foreign Ministers just don’t get how high tariffs distort trade.
If you ever get tired of hearing about the next big thing in development, read through some of the case studies at the Institute For Successful Societies. These are the stories of battle hardened reformers trying to implement the small or large changes that everyone knows their country or community needs.
Nicholas Kristof’s white “transition” characters not included.
By Conor Godfrey. Two days ago the first Malian in history blew himself up in an attempt to kill others.
Americans have become so inured to suicide bombings that this fact may seem tragic but inconsequential.
Most Malians, however, have yet to recover.
This simply does, or did, not happen in the land of Sundiata Keita.
Nowhere in Songhai chants, or Fulani poems, or even marshal Bambara stories do people talk about strapping bombs to their waist and taking innocent lives.
In centuries of warfare between Arab and Bantu, nomad and farmer, Muslim and pagan, such a thing as never happened.
Let us try for one moment to return to our pre-9/11 innocence and feel some shock, and some sympathy for a corner of the world previously uncontaminated by this particular evil.
I remember when the first Boko Haram suicide bomber blew himself up in Nigeria.
My Nigerian friends and colleagues were stunned. It seemed as though they took the attack as an indictment of the culture they thought they knew and understood.
Even mass killings of Muslims and Christians on the Nigerian central plateau did not generate one-tenth the moral outrage of that single suicide bombing.
Inter-communal conflict was something they understood intuitively. This business with bombs was not.
Americans have become unconscious experts at shielding ourselves from the emotive power of a suicide bombing. We have had too.
Erecting effective psychological defenses against suicide bombing requires neutering all the emotional content of a suicide attack.
In silent partnership, the news consumer and the news provider reduce an attack to its purported essentials – the death toll, the mechanics of delivering the bomb, and which group of crazies was claiming responsibility.
In Mali’s virgin case—two deaths, by bicycle, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO).
Why do we wallow in the raw emotionality of a natural disaster, or school shooting, or even an individual suicide, but culturally divorce ourselves from the most heinous and powerful act of violence and protest available to today’s discontents?
I think it remains much easier to homogenize people we don’t understand in far away places by reducing their actions to banalities like numbers of wounded and how the attack took place.
Stop and think about what we’re saying; someone was just willing to die in order to kill!
If we let ourselves feel the tragedy of a homegrown suicide bombing in Mali, we would probably have to ask why the attacker felt strongly enough to blow himself to pieces.
Through this we would learn, to our concernment, that he was not ‘crazy’ in the sense of being insane, and all this introspection might lead us to think more clearly about the blowback from our global war on terror.
These thoughts will of course feel vaguely (and wrongly) treasonous.
It is far easier just to think of Mali or Africa as somewhere used to getting a raw deal.
Maybe somewhere where life comes a little cheaper, and craziness prevails. This is nonsense, but hard to shake if you were raised on the same images and news coverage I was.
Fight the urge to disassociate and dismiss.
The new normal is NOT normal in Mali, and an entire society will need to rebuild its sense of self (or senses of selves) in a world where the tears in the cultural fabric are large enough to permit boys with bombs bent on self-annihilation.
An American bluebird perches tentatively on a heated bird bath during the Blizzard of 2012. The photo was taken by Carol Mantey. Her home is near mine in the American Midwest.
These birds were nearly extinct before American conservationists began to actively support them. They are cavity nesters like African hoopoes and hornbills, but more and more of their habitat was being destroyed, and even in areas protected as forest reserves, poorly trained rangers would clear away all the dead wood providing no suitable trees for nesting.
American conservationists began building bird boxes and erecting them along cultivated areas and the birds began actively using them. Today in my area of the Midwest the bluebird is thriving.
A little problem, though. When they were truly wild, few remained during winter. They migrated south like many birds, to warmer climates.
As the newly reconstituted species, many seem to have forgotten about migration. So the same conservationists that built their bluebird boxes for nesting now provide food during the winter and heat bird baths (as above) so the bird can have unfrozen water in temperatures that fall to -30C.
The Blizzard of 2012 at the home of the AfricaAnswerman, three hours west of Chicago where the states of Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois converge. Seven miles from the Mississippi River on the hilly bluffs of the Driftless Area.
In Africa the effects of global warming have resulted in more droughts and more floods, extremes in weather, with rainy seasons and dry seasons often shifting through the calendar.
At my home in America’s Midwest, a half world away, climate change has also been severe. Droughts and floods have seriously impacted the farmers of the area, and snow falls are as often blizzards as simple winter storms.
This was the case last week as depicted in the photo above. For an entire day it was not possible to leave my home, because despite having a good 4×4 car, the roads were packed too high with snow. It took road workers nearly two full days to clear all the roads.
The biggest terrorist attack yet in Kenya against two frontier churches Sunday is the straw that breaks the tourist’s back.
At least 17 congregants were killed and more than 60 injured by two carefully orchestrated, simultaneous grenade and gunmen attacks Sunday on Christian churches in Garissa during morning services. Garissa is a large and fairly developed town about 150 miles inland from the Indian Ocean coast half-way between Malindi and Lamu.
The coordination of the two attacks by uniformed masked al-Shabaab fighters seriously increases the instability of the region and demonstrates a level of terrorism not experienced in Kenya before.
While al-Shabaab has not yet taken responsibility, it is a signature terrorist attack, capable only by organized fanatics. Shabaab is increasingly fractured in Somalia as Kenyan and OAU forces sweep through the country creating a stability there that hasn’t been seen for decades.
There are reports Kenya is ready to take the Shabaab capital of Kismayo shortly. This long awaited military victory would effectively end al-Shabaab control of almost all of Somalia.
But I guess one inevitable result is that those most fanatic of the fanatics will truly seek martyrdom as their own earthly kingdom crashes before them.
So while the news is good for even the mid-term in Kenya, as for Somalia, it’s terrible for tourism. The fact remains that Kenya has achieved good security outside the coast and the area which borders Somalia in the northeast. There have been attacks in Nairobi and elsewhere, but for more than a year they have been small, mostly bungled and of little more note than near random terrorist attacks happening throughout most of the world.
Nothing outside the Kenyan coast, for example, has begun to achieve the spectacle or precision of the Shabaab terrorist attack in neighboring Uganda.
Religious terrorist attacks, whether by the IRA in a London subway or al-Shabaab in a Kenyan church, cannot happen without local involvement. Somewhere close to the attack the devices must be assembled. The cars must be fueled or the subway tickets must be purchased. The eyes of a wary public always discover the suspicious.
The question is always whether the public eyes will unmask the perpetrators, call the police, or let them pass.
The Kenyan coast is Muslim. To be sure, Kenyan Muslim leaders condemn the attacks without exception. So this is totally different from Yemen or Afghanistan or even Pakistan where religious leaders are not uniform in their condemnation of the terrorists.
But this gives brother Muslims an edge; they look, act and speak similarly. And of course in a large population there will always be sympathizers, likely relatives. And the horribly stressful Dadaab refugee camp now approaching a half million users inside the Kenyan border becomes its own terrorist base. One of the ironic but inevitable outcomes of helping those dispossessed is that it also helps those who chased them away.
But a vacation, as wonderfully educational and enlightening as the better ones should be, should never be so worrisome about security that all the good parts are diluted. Kenya (of the coast) is Kenya (of the highlands) is Kenya (of Nairobi). The level of terrorism evidenced by the Garissa attacks Sunday is empirical escalation.
I’m afraid Kenya is just not the place to go, now.
By Conor Godfrey
The situation in Mali gets more complicated every day.
As predicted in an earlier blog, regional and national bodies are moving (slowly) toward a negotiated solution to the governance crisis brought on by the March 22nd coup.
The North, however, is a total mess.
The French defense minister called Northern Mali a West African Afghanistan.
That is too alarmist, but the situation certainly calls for some alarm.
There are half a dozen players in Northern Mali at the moment, but they can generally be corralled into two camps – Tuareg nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists.
(This obviously soothes over some nuances.) Of course, to confuse matters, all of the Tuareg nationalists are Muslim, and many of the fundamentalists are Tuareg.
Put simply, the Tuareg nationalists, led by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), demand recognition of the independent republic of Azawad in Northern Mali as the Tuareg homeland.
The Islamic Fundamentalists, led by Ansar Dine (loosely “Defenders of the Faith”), demand the implementation of Islamic law across Mali.
They have also declared allegiance to al-Qaeda, and can be seen as a Qaeda franchise similar to AL-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
So the obvious compromise was tentatively reached on May 26th – the two groups merged and declared independence for the independent state of Azawad, and announced that the Koran would be the basis for Azawad’s legal system.
The point here is that a group openly aligned with al-Qaeda now controls territory the size of France.
Luckily or unluckily, I think the marriage between the Tuareg nationalists and the Qaeda sympathizers will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
No sooner had their deal been signed did the two sides begin spinning the agreement to their respective constituencies. (In fact, there are rumors as I am writing this that the pact has already been called off.)
One spokesperson for the Tuareg nationalists (MNLA) hedged as follows: “The Koran will be a source of the laws of the state…but we will apply the things we want and leave aside those we don’t. It will not be a strict application of the law.” (Source)
While the MNLA spokespeople were all assuring domestic supporters and foreign analysts of their moderation and anti-terror agenda, their new partners Ansar Dine were busy beating female protesters, whipping people out of bars, and banning soccer.
Banning soccer of course led to the largest protests.
In this power struggle, any sane person is routing for the Tuareg nationalist elements to prevail.
Once the government stops imploding in Bamako they will at least be able to negotiate with the MNLA.
Conceivably, a strong government in Bamako backed by an implicit ECOWAS or French military threat could make the Tuaregs settle for drastically increased autonomy and other perks. (Whether this is fair or not is a different question.)
If Ansar Dine and AQIM marginalize the Tuareg nationalists however, then Bamako and/or the region will be obligated to solve the conflict by force.
There is little room for compromise with abject fundamentalism.
Using force will spin off other problems such as increasing the distrust and dislike between Tuareg civilians and the rank and file of the Malian army.
The MNLA has about 1,000 fighters at its command, while Ansar Dine and AQIM have approximately 500 a piece.
Unfortunately, the Islamists are much better armed and funded than their MNLA partners cum rivals. (Source)
The main hope for the MNLA and other Tuareg nationalists is that the civilian Tuareg population in Northern Mali (or Azawad if you wish) has no interest in Ansar Dine’s social program.
They may have welcomed Ansar Dine momentarily as a cure for the total lawlessness of the military campaign, but in general, Tuareg Muslims like to attend a soccer match from time to time, and have little appetite for returning to 7th century Islamic social law.
It will also be interesting to watch the U.S., France, and regional bodies debate intervention: will they really let an al-Qaeda aligned group control three airstrips and that much territory?
The Malian army will not be ready to handle the crisis any time soon.
I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for ECOWAS to show its teeth, but I have an awful feeling that France might end up wielding the stick.
By Conor Godfrey
Earlier this month the last of the Rwandan Gacaca (‘Lawn’) courts closed down.
These communal tribunals, chaired by a council of elders in each community, have processed over 100,000 cases pertaining to the Rwandan genocide.
Since 2001, almost all of the civilian cases have been heard in Gacaca courts, while the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has dealt with abuses committed by the military and other high-ranking officials.
The closure of this judicial chapter has prompted a number of retrospectives from supporters and detractors alike.
If you are unfamiliar with the Gacaca system, read the first two pages of this report for a very evocative depiction of a typical proceeding.
Imagine 9 village leaders elected for their ‘moral character’ arrayed in the village square.
A proposed genocidaire is then marched in front of the elders, with the entire community looking on.
The perpetrator confesses to one or several acts of violence, and then the elders query the crowd to see if anyone else has any other charges to bring against the accused.
After the community has weighed in, the elders determine the punishment and the matter is closed.
These courts were empowered to level sentences of up to life in prison.
My “made in America” mind immediately jumps to all the possible ways that this arrangement could go wrong, but the more I think about it, the less confident I feel condemning the Gacaca system.
Sure- the opportunities for local corruption are huge.
Witness intimidation and other forms of extra-judicial pressure, along with highly variable sentencing, probably led to many miscarriages of justice.
Read this Human Rights Watch report for a really negative view of the whole affair.
And yes, I think it is a rather horrid idea to deal with sexual violence in such a public manner.
However – how else could a country process hundreds of thousands of victims and hundreds of thousands of perpetrators?
Also, as flawed as this process might have been, the public airing of accusations seems to have had a cathartic effect on Rwandan society.
This largely laudatory article points specifically to the fact that many relatives were able to learn where their relatives were buried—a long festering obstacle to reconciliation.
When Americans use the word justice in an international context they really mean western justice.
Western countries also financially underwrite many of the international community’s judicial institutions, thus further entrenching one form of justice as the international norm.
However, that particular system’s focus on free will, individual responsibility and retribution jive poorly with communal conflicts and systemic abuse of any particular group. (Just think of how poorly the U.S. justice system has dealt with racial issues over the last century.)
The truth and reconciliation model allows more people to participate, lends itself to resolving communal conflicts as opposed to punishing aberrant individuals, and, on a more mundane level, is financially and logistically feasible in a country with hundreds of thousands of cases and very limited legal resources
Gacaca courts were far from perfect, but I am glad that 130,000 ex-combatants are no longer rotting in jail waiting for a trial, and hundreds of thousands of victims have been able to yell their accusations out in public.
Confusing, remarkable situation in Kenya.
