Killing Off Fence

November 18, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

There’s a growing worldwide link against sport hunting and culling with the world’s fatigue with war.

A macho lady, Melissa Bachman (not to be confused with her fellow Minnesotan and not closely related Michelle Bachman) recently drew the ire of much of the world when she proudly Tweeted about the lion she killed recently on a “canned” hunt in South Africa.

Bachman is a long-time cable show producer and presenter for the radical outdoors including sports hunting, although some of her antics finally broke even the now despicable threshold of National Geo’s cable production.

Nevertheless, her fame (and now possibly infamy) was born specifically of her military like approach to sport hunting, out to prove that a dame was just as good as a dude with a big gun.

The specific incident over the weekend has an important nuance to it, though, and it has provoked so much negativity in South Africa that Bachman actually took down her Twitter account, where the trophy was first posted, as well as several of her associated websites.

The specific criticism is that Bachman shot the lion on what is known as a “canned hunt.”

Canned hunting is done all over the world, especially in the United States and South Africa. The hunt is on private land that is beyond the regulation that the larger government may impose on hunting in wild and federal areas.

The South African Parliament is wrestling with a recent court decision enjoining a government regulation that allows canned hunting after a two-month period of “wilding.”

According to that regulation, wild animals like lions may be bought as captive or even tamed onto private land, set free for two months, and then the owner may sell that animal’s hunt to whomever he wishes.

With no regulation: and that’s a big part of the problem. It’s presumed that many of these canned hunts are hardly fair: that the animals aren’t very wild, and in some places, even tranquilized for the inexperienced hunter.

This is hardly a South African disease.

One Texas canned hunting ranch, the Circle ERanch offers the following African animal hunts:
Kudu – $15,000
Nile Lechwe – $8,000
Nyala – too expensive to quote on-line
Sable – too expensive to quote on line
Red Lechwe – $4,000
Waterbuck – $4,000
Wildebeest – $4.750
Zebra – $5,500

You don’t have to study ecology in an univeresity to know that the natural habitats of those animals mentioned above spans nearly an entire continent, and that not even Texas is big enough to provide any kind of natural environment for all of these animals at once. They have to be fed and cared for like cows.

Likely then, their ability and/or desire to avoid being hunted is greatly diminished.

Canned hunting isn’t so different from contrived wars. And we’re all getting sick and tired of them both.

Anti-hunting sentiment is similar to anti-war sentiment. It crosses ideological boundaries. Just as many of Africa’s most prominent big game hunters are now coming out against canned hunting, so do many of America’s most liberal politicians oppose Obama’s militarism.

When Obama announced his “red line” in Syria last September, conservatives like Rand Paul joined liberals like Alan Grayson in denouncing the strategy.

In fact in town meetings right across the country last September, the sentiment against any type of Syrian intervention was overwhelming. The shared position was simply that we don’t want anymore war.

And the coalition “against killing” is growing well beyond American politics. Whether killing be for sport hunting or preemptive national security: offense is no longer defense.

Veterans Day

November 11, 2013November 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Today is an American holiday. Banks and other federal agencies are closed and most American school children are also staying home. It’s known as “Veterans Day.”

First declared by President Woodrow Wilson after the end of World War I and later codified by The Congress, it’s a holiday in America that evokes many different emotions from different groups of people.

During my life time, which began just after the end of World War II, America has fought far too many wars. And when someone like myself becomes critical, it’s an intellectual challenge to praise the soldiers who carried them out.

Immediately on the other hand, however, foreigners should realize how radically different our armies are today than when I was a boy.

Today America’s fighting forces are entirely voluntary (with the subtle distinction that “reserve” soldiers, those who have technically retired or enrolled mostly as home guards are now being routinely called upon as active troops).

This differs radically from when I was young, when the bulk of the armies were conscripted from young men. It was a mandated responsibility for young men approaching their third decade to be prepared to serve in the military if called.

The transition to an all-volunteer force was accomplished fairly easily by raising soldier pay and benefits. As America became more of a war fighting country, the rich also become more powerful, the poor parts of society enlarged, and for much of this time unemployment remained high.

Joining one of America’s armies not only provided reasonable and regular pay, but gave the recruit enormous valuable training in all sorts of skills, and at least until recently, when released from even the shortest contracts also provided excellent extended benefits, such as healthcare and higher educational subsidies.

Much of America’s armies, like ancient Rome’s and Persia’s, are opportunities for the oppressed and downtrodden to break out of an endless cycle of hopelessness. It’s therefore hard to criticize these young people for joining the American military.

So today there are many of us reluctant to celebrate anything that has to do with America’s wars. Yet we can’t ignore the life stories of those that have become conflated with them.

Plant the Corn

November 7, 2013November 7, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Don’t turn away from the DRC-Congo just because NPR says peace is imminent. There’s much more to the story.

I, myself, predicted a type of peace would come to the DRC-Congo just about a month ago. And this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, former Senator Russ Feingold in his capacity as Obama’s special envoy to the region, said fighting was ending.

Good. We’re all glad, and the story behind why this decades-old fighting might, in fact, be ending is an extraordinary one that goes all the way back to when Belgium and the US colluded to disrupt the first democratically elected government of the newly independent Congo in 1961. I called that “Where Terror Was Born.”

The many fascinating chapters of barbarism and war that have followed have included X-Boxes and your cell phone.

To understand the current “peace” it would be helpful to understand all the foregoing but that’s challenging. Let me try to simplify it not too much.

The decades-long fighting in the eastern Kivu province of the DRC-Congo is very much unlike anything in the rest of Africa. The rest of Africa’s wars (excluding those that involved South Africa) are mostly guerila-based, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram jungle and mountain fighters, characterized by suicide bombings and village terrorism.

Traditional military action is pretty new for modern Africa. Obama started it when he came to the presidency and it became apparent to all the world when Kenya invaded Somalia in October, 2011.

Kenya, armed anew by America, trained by America, advised by America, we even saw American soldiers, was America’s proxy. And they “did well.” The Kenyan Army effectively disrupted and ultimately dislodged al-Shabaab from Somalia.

But prior to that 2011 action, organized military action of the sort undertaken by the OAU and UN in such places as Somalia, Rwanda, Angola and so forth, either suffered from a total lack of training (the soliders just didn’t know how to fight, didn’t want to, or just didn’t), or there was no good equipment.

That changed with Kenya’s action in Somalia and it radically continued this year when the UN Security Council approved an aggressive military unit to enter the DRC-Congo, the first ever for the UN in Africa.

And that unit was immediately joined by crack and very well trained and equipped South African troops.

And that’s what defeated the main military group in Kivu, the M23. On Monday they announced a cease-fire and on Tuesday they surrendered.

That’s good, as Feingold said. But it’s hardly the end of the story.

There are many rebel groups in the area, although the dominant one was definitely M23, and I don’t mean to minimize the good news this is. But keep in mind that M23’s leaders have all escaped.

The respectable Think Africa Press said today that M23’s “senior command has dispersed to Uganda and Rwanda,” while many of the expert soldiers of M23 have “gone into hiding, whether fleeing out of the DRC or dispersing into the Virunga forests.”

NPR’s foolish question about accountability, whether the M23 leaders will be tried for crimes against humanity, begs the question whether they will be first captured.

And even if they are, the OAU has already ordered all member states to cease cooperating with the ICC in The Hague, and Kenya’s two leaders on trial there have both been given extraordinary passes from attending their own proceedings: The ICC is falling apart and Africa is instrumental in bringing Humpty Dumpty’s walls down.

Rwanda is furious. Rwanda is ruled by a minority ethnic Tutsi dictator who came to power after the genocide that tried to wipe out his people by the opposing Hutu majority in 1993/94. M23 was formed by Tutsis fleeing Rwanda at that time.

So Rwanda has been supporting the rebellion in The Congo led by M23 for some time. It has facilitated not only an increased clamp on its own oppressed Hutu minority, but an extremely profitable rare earth mining industry overseen by M23 commanders in Kivu.

Here’s what will determine the next stage:

If the UN reaffirms its unusual aggressive mission, peace will be maintained. That itself is so unusual for this area that I wonder what exactly will then happen. Consider that there have been three generations of Congolese in Kivu who have known nothing but warlords.

Peace means fewer people will be killed. That means more people need to eat, have jobs, become somehow productive in a society that has not existed for 53 years.

And that’s where current global and western society fails so miserably. Once the field is cleared of tanks, no one plants the corn.

We Need Shrinks not Generals

October 29, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Under the noise of Snowden, dysfunction of Congress, frantic media and lackluster personality of Obama, the War Against Terrorism is being massively ratcheted up in Africa.

The French Foreign Legion was dispatched last week to the remote deserts of Mali, to support a freely elected government that is being newly challenged by rebel groups in its most outlying cities.

Crack South African troops added to increased United Nations peacekeeping forces and ruthless Congolese government troops newly armed by the west, have been crushing the last of the known rebel groups in the eastern Congo, an area of conflict for nearly a half century.

How’s it going?

Hard. The unspoken but terribly obvious Hollande/Obama alliance to make Africa the last great military battleground against organized terrorism began five years ago in Somalia. American advisers were everywhere in northern Kenya and the port of Mombasa, and French warships were just off the coast of Somalia.

Drones were added and the war begun. Kenya was enlisted as the visible front army and Somalia was “liberated.” Its al-Qaeda affiliates were scattered and what was left of anything organized raced through Uganda into the center of the continent.

The world watched 90 U.S. soldiers chase them across the Uganda.

But Hollande and Obama miscalculated the arsenal of weapons that liberated Libya would make available, and scattered groups in Mali benefited enormously. France’s end-game mission to America’s chasing of the rebels into the center of the continent was to crush them in the Central African Republic (CAR).

But instead, it had to focus on Mali, far northwest of the CAR. So today the CAR is essentially anarchistic. A report published this morning by Amnesty International describes the CAR in the most horrific, barbaric terms. Every civilized person seems to have abandoned the country, making it ripe for organized terrorist control.

Hardly two years ago the focus of visible battles between the west and its proxies, and al-Qaeda and its proxies was in Somalia. Only a few months ago it reemerged in Mali where it persists. And the riffraff, disparate, heavily armed leftovers of a dozen so-called al-Qaeda affiliates or older rebel groups (like the LRA) are now duking it out like barbarians in the CAR.

You cannot eliminate terrorism, Mr. & Monsieur President.

You cannot eliminate unless you had global gun control the likes of which evades my most fanciful dreams. Where there are weapons and the materials for making them, there will be terrorism.

The question is, Are We Safer Now?

Before I give you my opinion, don’t you think it’s important to also ask, Is Africa Safer Now? What right does the west presume in order to use Africa as the backforty into which the wolves are chased and kept at bay?

If the world ever runs out of weapons, we’ll be forced to deal with conflicting ideologies, as well as crazy terrorists, in ways we should develop, now.

Modern force is so omnipresent, as easily mastered by an internet keyboard, that it can’t possibly end conflict, today. It will only interrupt or delay it.

Consider this, first. The conflict in the DRC’s Kivu Province is a half century old. It’s based largely on the same ethnic divisions that caused the Rwandan genocide. Those divisions are festering. The calm in Rwanda is the calm of a benevolent strongman. Once his biceps snap, all hell is going to break loose.

Consider this, second. Organized terrorism is fanatical. Unlike ethnic conflict, terrorism may have no other explanation except the obsession to rule and control.

Both turn men into beasts eager to die – to kill themselves – for reasons they don’t wholly understand. Hypnotic or simply psychotic.

You can’t get them all. We don’t need any more generals. We need shrinks.

A Horizon of Peace

October 11, 2013October 11, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Militarism in Africa is growing fast, started almost the day Obama began his first term, and now totally out of the closet. Across the continent, successful wars – both waged from abroad and locally – are bringing stability to a continent known for its instability.

News this week from probably the most troubled place on the continent, the DRC-Congo, suggests that ace South African troops and Tanzanian soldiers are cleaning up a place that has been known for nothing but blood and brutality for nearly 40 years.

With enormous French involvement, Mali is once again stable, its terrifying short submission to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb completely ended.

Yesterday, the UN Security Council approved strengthening its military involvement in the CAR, which descended into chaos about six months ago, a perfect domino example of Obama’s chasing what was left of al-Shabaab through Uganda and the DRC.

And Kenyan forces (trained, guided and funded by Obama) has pacified most of Somali. And we all know about Egypt, where that country’s short flirtation with real democracy was ended by its own military.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world with more than a quarter of the world’s countries and about a sixth of its population. But there is no question it is the most widely troubled continent.

There are places like Korea and the Mideast where conflict is more intense and concentrated, but look over a period of a decade or more, tabulate the casualties and miseries of wanton guerrilla war and untold brutality, and Africa wins.

Lack of strong governments and the consequential lack of development that follows has kept the Dark Continent darker than we could ever have imagined. Until, perhaps, now.

I think that the fatigue of war is the reason we see new stability. African societies are exhausted by conflict, and this is hard to explain, because it isn’t as if a single individual like you or I closes his eyes and throws the back of his hand onto his forehead in exasperation as we recount the chapters of conflict in the past.

Many people in these conflict areas die as children. More live an entire life in conflict, navigating their daily routines through competing authorities that are usually swiftly brutal if disobeyed.

In many cases like the DRC-Congo, multiple generations have plowed through their lives in a virtual anarchistic state, learning to submit to nothing but violence. Concepts like democracy or peaceful change are foreign if laughable. You do what the man with the gun tells you to do.

But as these conflicts were not settled for so many years, they festered and grew. At the periphery were more developed societies that were suddenly impacted by refugees, disease and trade disruptions.

That’s what’s happening in the DRC-Congo, now. “Peacekeeping is changing,” writes South African analyst Liesl Louw-Vaudran, because “there was no peace to keep.”

So the UN Security Council’s attempt to send peacekeepers into the Congo wasn’t even good enough to stop the M23 rebels from earlier this year taking over the main city of Goma where the UN peacekeepers were garrisoned.

The South African and Tanzanian brigades aren’t as polite, receiving their mandate not from the Security Council but from the African Union. Not satisfied with protecting any status quo, these guys – like Obama – are chasing the bad guys away.

Obama’s strong and sustained hunt of terrorists has cleaved the continent with war, as American and French covert forces, with their Kenyan and Ugandan proxies, disrupted one terrorist group after another.

But five years into the exercise, with drones like birthday balloons all over the place, it seems to be working.

The spectacular terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya several weeks ago, much less the less spectacular but terrifyingly frequent smaller attacks the country has been suffering almost on a weekly basis, is the expected reaction to this growing militarism.

And it will continue. As the bad guys are routed from the cities, they will regroup in the hills. And then as they’re chased from the hills, they’ll regroup in virtual space as we learned when investigating the Westgate attack.

And while they don’t command attack helicopters, they’ve figured out pretty awful IEDs.

So it’s hard to see an end point. Yes, the conflict points have been pushed much further away from most of Africa’s peoples than ever before, and this is why the continent is becoming more peaceful. But they aren’t gone.

And until the fundamental motivations for those conflicts are more fully resolved, they will never disappear.

Revealing the Terrible Truth

October 8, 2013October 7, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This past weekend’s Navy Seal operations in Libya and Somalia mark a turning point in the Obama Administration’s successes against terrorism in the U.S: the Somali raid in particular has made America more vulnerable now to terrorism.

I’ve not been a particular fan of the five years of growing American military involvement in Africa, but as I’ve written my judgment was suspended because it seemed to be working … for America. It was definitely not working for Africa.

The Westgate Mall attack, and a year before an even great attack on a bar in Kampala, were all announced revenge attacks for military successes ostensibly achieved by Kenya and Ugandan armies.

They were more fundamentally military actions by France and the United States, using Ugandans and Kenyans as their proxies. That fact alone is disturbing. It’s a bitter return to Cold War mentalities on how to resolve conflicts.

But the covert operations, in spite of lots of good professional journalism that unmasked the French and American involvement, seemed to be making America safer as Obama systematically took out his enemies one by one through drones and targeted battles.

But last weekend’s operations, intentionally or not, have been brought into the front of the public conscience, in both the U.S. and Somalia. Five years of covert action seem to be over. It’s now admitted and explained, with scant regards for the sovereignty of African nations.

The New York Times detailed explanation of the Barawe attack followed by the BBC report of the Liby capture mean that either the Obama Administration is no longer capable of keeping a secret, or that journalistic interest has just become too intense.

Either way, the cat is truly out of the bag, now. No longer covert, in my opinion, hardens the terrorists’ resolve and challenges them for a response.

It’s academic whether this change is a result of sequester stressed by a government shutdown, or more conspiratorially an attempt to deflect criticism of Obama in general at a critical time for American politics, or just plain journalism finally catching up with public interest.

You see I don’t believe terrorists are all that aware, so to speak. I don’t think they’re news junkies like us or have any more of a sense of geography of America than Americans do of Africa. I believe, for example, that the Nairobi airport fire was definitely an act of botched terrorism, and that likely most acts terrorists attempt are botched and never heard of.

In part this is because of the West’s increased security, but it’s also because the main terrorist organizations are falling apart.

There is little left of al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab. As we saw several weeks ago in Nairobi that doesn’t mean there won’t be more dramatic terrorist events. It just means that it’s less likely, and unlikely that such events will further the power goals of their organizers.

This will be particularly true if like the Kenyans it’s understood that a response of the sort American organized after 9/11 is counterproductive. And I think most of the world, maybe even America, gets that now.

Terrorists today are unorganized. We’ve learned how transnational they are. We’ve discovered that many are truly deranged and that political or religious aspirations are no longer their principal motivating forces.

That’s why I can’t understand the change from covert to overt action.

The terrorists and their local supporters were as shielded from the truth of American involvement as Americans were. There was less of a chance when operations remained covert that any response would be against America.

But we’ve taken off our boxing gloves and mask. We’ve invited them to fight.

I still think their remaining reach is far more limited than it was before 9/11, for many good and for many bad reasons. But my judgment is no longer suspended about America’s militaristic involvement. I don’t think there’s a possibility of a net good from the type of operations which concluded last weekend in Africa.

Hedgefunds Hurting

October 3, 2013October 3, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

OK, here’s the deal. Invest a thousand dollars to extract minerals from Africa, today, and your return will be $150,000 … after the rebels win the civil war.

Kilimanjaro Capital is a Belize-based company, with a Canadian website, and European capital listed on some Danish and other northern European exchanges. The CEO, Zulfikar Rashid, was born in Uganda and believes the best way to make money in Africa is to bet on civil wars.

I remember once trying to get into the business center at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, before we were all drowned in wifi, and became a part of a congested line of anxious and poorly dressed white businessmen who were courting the then president of Somalia.

There have been many presidents of Somalia, until the recent spat of stability brought on by the Kenyan invasion last year. This was probably ten years ago.

The poorly dressed white businessmen had contracts coming out of their wazoo, busting briefcases and literally shoving one another to get this mercurial and previously unknown individual to sign his name on a contract for various and many mineral rights.

I’m sure in turn he was paid something on the spot, because I also picked up a few loose Euros at my feet in the line to the photocopier.

I got only a fleeting look at Abdul. He seemed a very thin if frail individual with very large black eyes and a scraggly, narrow black beard. He was dressed in native Somalia, all white robes with a white turban, and was dwarfed by two handlers, or body guards, who looked southern Italian and overfed.

As our line into the business center seemed to stop while one poorly dressed white businessman seemed to be copying the last ten Somalia constitutions, I started a conversation with the pretty rotund slightly dressed poor white businessman in front me.

He was a jolly Scotsman. Just flew in from Heathrow when he heard Abdul was going to be in town. He wanted the fishing rights just off the coast from Kismayo that were currently being pirated by French fishermen.

At the time Kismayo was the capital of world pirates. But this jolly dressed, poor white red-faced Scott was beaming. He wouldn’t tell me how much those rights would cost. Nor did he express sufficient confidence from my point of view that he would be able to fish in the sea dominated by professional pirates. But for some reason, it didn’t seem to matter.

Kilimanjaro Capital, though, is the first of such venture renegades that has achieved such respectability. And its still rather small portfolio is quite diversified, including some normal mineral rights claims even in North America.

But its success depends upon rebels, which are mostly today terrorists, taking control of African land rich with minerals but poor with organized society. Like Kivu province in the eastern DRC, or Biafra in Nigeria, or southern Cameroon.

These are all areas which have seen conflict for more than a half century. The mineral rights are critical to funding the rebel movements.

One of the biggest accomplishments of the Obama Administration from my point of view was a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that made illegal such dealings with American interests.

It’s probably why Kilimanjaro Capital is located in Belize, has a website in Canada, is listed on a Danish exchange and is run by an Ugandan. I don’t think Dodd-Frank extends quite that far.

Betting on misery is, of course, nothing new. The Great Recession was caused by many such components. But more germane to the moment, I think that Director Rashid is doomed to fail, because rebel movements … well, they just aren’t doing too well lately.

Terrorism, yes. But actual regime changes or national secessions … no. And a contract with Osama probably wouldn’t work.

So let’s just marvel at how amoral, greedy and maybe just crazy part of the investment world is. And let’s just hope that there’s more and more Dodd-Frank worldwide to keep these renegades from spreading.

I’ve got a much better lead on a penny stock, anyway.

Child of 9/11

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

“While these terrorists have visited unbelievable savagery on us, we must collectively avoid the temptation towards unthinking revenge, the path the US took after 9/11.”

Those remarks published this morning in Nairobi actually made me reflect on our own looming national crises coming up this midnight and again and again right through the end of the year.

The American Right’s paths since 9/11 have been terribly “unthinking,” reflexive and self-destructive to be sure, but also a great misery for us all.

I began to wonder if the stew we’re in right now in America really has its roots in the bad policies which came out of 9/11, and if Kenya will avoid that same destructive path.

Both societies had regular terrorist attacks before these great ones. Kenya, in fact, has suffered as many deaths and injuries as Westgate from nearly three terrorist attacks monthly in the last two years, and more in the single 1998 bombing of the American embassy. American had an almost regular series of attacks starting all the way back to the Achille Lauro and Pan Am 103.

But like 9/11, Westgate was different. The difference with 9/11 in America was its scale. The difference with Westgate was its savagery:

“The killing of young children in cold blood, and the reported acts of torture constitute a new level of barbarity with which terrorism [in Kenya] is usually not associated,” George Kegoro reflected today in Nairobi.

The American Congress made historic, incorrect decisions in the 15 years since 9/11. The loss of national resources wasted in useless wars, and the diversion of attention to our own needs at home combined to produce a vengeful, angry, hard-nosed and “unthinking” America.

And so we arrive at today, where legislators don’t legislate and politicians defined by the political system want to shut it down. They want to eliminate themselves and replace it with nothing.

Like some child incapable of saying, “Sorry,” they lash out at everything.

Self-destruction supreme. Are we punishing ourselves with all the misdeeds of the last one and half decades?

Don’t follow us, Kenya. So far it looks like you won’t.

In fact, lead this angry child into something better. Please.

Whiteness over Westgate

September 27, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This horrible week is ending. Finally, whiffs of smoke have stopped coming out of the Westgate Mall. But some facts must be tidied up before we surpass the media’s modicum of attention.

Technically, the White Widow is not yet implicated, but I believe she is. Britain’s arrest warrant for her yesterday is the clue. Conceivably she was not there as reported by several witnesses, as she is devious enough to have ordered one of her henchmen to masquerade her. But I for one believe she was the mastermind.

Given the secrecy of the investigation it will be a long time before we have hard evidence of who led the attack. But enough has already leaked out to seriously suggest westerners from the U.S. and Britain were involved, if not leading the effort.

Just as the attackers were likely from around the world, so were the victims. This morning 33 of the victims have been identified, including 3 Canadians, a famous Ghanian author, 2 Indians, a physician from Peru, a South Korean woman who had recently moved from Dubai, 3 Australians, a tourist from China, 2 tourists from France, a man from Trinidad & Tobago and 3 South Africans.

As happens with so many tragic events in Africa, this is a global story as much if not more than an African one. Its causes, strategies and ultimately its implications are pointedly universal in nature. Thinking of this as a Kenyan or African “problem” is intellectually juvenile.

Al-Shabaab is not resurgent. It drives me nuts the way American media and politicians believe this is some clarion call to urgency that rabid Muslims are again on the crusade. Rather, it looks to me like a dying gasp of an organization in great disarray that has received a spark from wayward westerners. But that’s far too complicated a story for a 4-minute segment on the evening news.

The subsequent attack in Wajir was not unusual, I’m terribly sad to say.

Fox News was not the only one to grossly exaggerate this event and irresponsibly tie it to Westgate. More than 70 people have already been killed this year in this troubled border region of Somalia where fighting has gone on more or less nonstop since 1993.

Life will return to normal in Nairobi and Kenya much faster than it did in New York and the U.S. after 9/11, and not because 9/11 was so much larger an event. Remember that Kenya suffered 3 to 4 times as many people killed and injured in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy as it did last weekend.

But last weekend truly had a greater impact on Kenya than 1998 and I think it equal to 9/11’s attack on America. The country is far more educated, interconnected, cosmopolitan and developed than in 1998. There is a greater shock because the attack interrupted a life routine that is so much more complex and modern than in 1998.

Life will return to normal more quickly, because that’s the African way. As I said in yesterday’s blog, that’s why ultimately terrorism as we know it today will be defeated by the African’s remarkable compassion and forgiveness.

“Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering–remembering and not using your right to hit back,” Desmond Tutu said.

A long journey to break the endless cycle of violence.

Now That It’s Not Over

September 26, 2013September 26, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

The wound is still raw. Healing has hardly begun. But one of the most powerful and critical lessons ever for America to embrace is being taught right now: Mwalimu Kenya.

Al-Qaeda “won its war against America,” Kenya’s famous writer Obbo said today. But in Kenya in stark contrast al-Qaeda has released “the compassionate side of the nation” and by so doing, has already lost its battle.

How simply true. Please follow the link above and read Obbo’s column that appeared today in Kenya’s main newspaper.

Obbo meticulously details the aftermath of 9/11, carefully enumerating deaths and money spent on our retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also reminding us of equally vindictive actions that ultimately backfire:

“Thousands of students could no longer get into America. Many ended up in Canada, whose universities now have an edge over America’s in scientific research.”

He joins the large global body of scholars and analysts who refer to the years since 9/11 as “America’s imperial overstretch.”

The sadness/grief that I’ve been walking around with since the weekend has a pretty simple explanation and is, of course, nowhere near as great as Nairobi residents. We can’t find some people, and that’s the current breathless fear that they are among those lost.

But there is a unique character to this sadness that is uniquely African, something I’ve been trying to understand all my life. We in the west often call it fatalism and sometimes with even greater denigration, nihilism.

It’s neither. It’s what Obbo understands as compassion. It’s counterintuitive to us in the west to link compassion with sadness, but how simply true! If you are truly empathetic to suffering you can’t help but be saddened by it.

That’s the African way. And it’s the excruciatingly depressing reason that slavery flourished there, that colonialism raped its lands, that the Cold War treated states as puppets, that western pharmaceuticals considered it hardly more than a mad scientist’s lab.

And that now it is destined to take the brunt of the War on Terror. And take it, it will, and by so doing, it will defeat terror, just like Obbo says.

The west is already revving up its war cries. There’s nothing our hell-bent right would like better than another war.

And that, as Obbo so beautifully points out, is exactly what the terrorists want. If you invoke the Israeli mantra of an eye-for-an-eye, you lose, they win.

Obama should read Obbo. There are as many fatalities and injuries from the “collateral” damage of a few drones attacks as in the single attack on Westgate. This back-and-forth retribution will never end. America will never get weaker. The terrorists will never be eliminated. It is an endless cycle of violence.

So do you just turn the other cheek?

Yes, sort of. Security will improve in Kenya, now. The west who started the wars on terror will perforce be more involved and that will, in fact, likely better protect at least urban Kenyans.

But it’s going to be a long, hard slug for Kenya, a miserable journey that in fact started several years ago. Although the scale of the many smaller attacks throughout the country was not as dramatic as Westgate, there have been many of them. As in Nigeria, and Pakistan, and of course now Iraq and Afghanistan, a week hardly passes without some kind of terror attack.

Obbo’s right that in the end compassion prevails over terror. There is no other civilized alternative.

But it’s also time to get real, folks. This isn’t the 17th century. Nairobi is no further from Chicago using a cell phone than your neighbor down the street.

Kenya is far less capable of uplifting the world than America: of building not just bridges over rivers but between countries. It’s time that we tone it down, realize our global responsibilities and do so with the type of unqualified compassion that Africa has miraculously sustained through the entire modern era, a period of history where Africa is never more than a victim.

It’s time that change. It’s time that the entire world recognize that the enduring compassion of Africa is the final solution for attaining world peace.

The Real Disneyland

September 24, 2013September 24, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Westgate Mall attack was al-Shabaab’s dying gasp. There will be more attacks in East Africa, in London, in the U.S., but not from the old al-Shabaab. Not from what was left of the group that was wiped out in Westgate.

Many British analysts believe the attack was led by a fellow Brit, Samantha Lewthwaite. If this is true, it means the organization al-Shabaab has imploded.

The “White Widow” as she was called was essentially the last well-known al-Shabaab commandant. All the others had been killed over the last year.

Possibly less than a month or two ago, an Alabama citizen, al-Shabaab leader Omar Hammami, was killed in an internicine fire fight. He died along with a British compatriot, Osama al-Britani.

So three of the fragile top leadership of al-Shabaab who remained after Kenya routed the group from Somalia are dead. Two Brits, one a woman, and one American.

On PBS yesterday, Kenya’s foreign minister said there were an additional “two or three” Americans fighting as jihadists in the Westgate battle who were killed.

Think about this. Think about this carefully.

Few true journalists or analysts of anything will ever predict the near end to some movement, for fear they’ll be wrong and lose their position. I don’t have to worry about that. I hired myself.

And yes I could be wrong and by so saying I’m honestly diminishing my conviction, but my gut nevertheless tells me otherwise.

Reports that al-Shabaab still controls much of Somalia are incomplete. Al-Shabaab was rarely a coherent single organization, although it did coalesce for several years.

What I suspect is that the warlord society of Somalia, part of which loosely allied itself to al-Shabaab, may be doing so, again. If that’s true, al-Shabaab today is not a trans-national affiliate of al-Qaeda but rather a local political movement, retracting into what it was more than a decade ago.

The Council on Foreign Relations has prepared an excellent and brief primer on al-Shabaab that demonstrates this possibility well.

Does it matter that this one terrorist organization is expiring?

Yes, but it hardly ensures Kenya or the rest of the world that there will be no future attacks. What was left of al-Shabaab were foreigners, not Somalis and many weren’t even Arabs. They may have been Muslims but not even that is certain.

What they are, CBS reported yesterday evening, are wayward kids from developed countries like the U.S. and Britain.

The end of al-Shabaab does not bring an end to wayward kids from Minneapolis.

And that’s the second thought I want you to revisit. A terrorist act is pretty easy to pull off, today. It’s a rush for someone depressed. It’s a mission for someone ungrounded and otherwise uninspired.

“It’s the real Disneyland,” one al-Shabaab fighter told CBS.

Fighting clubs exist all around the world. The normal amoralism of a criminal is easily coopted by some ideology, whether that’s jihadism or some other cultism, and I seriously doubt that any of the actual fighters have studied Zen or Marx.

They’re looking for action and meaning, something they’re unable to get at home. And when they do something bad, we tax our poor to fund a megalothic war machine when we should be taxing the rich to fund schools that inspire young people.

When they pull off a mission at a poorly protected Westgate that a inner city gang from Chicago could have pulled off just as well, we respond by sending a dozen generals and Navy Seals when we should respond by sending social workers and community aid.

And when things go south for the jihadists, their amoralism becomes nihilism. They go out with a bang.

“It’s the real Disneyland,” one al-Shabaab fighter told CBS.

Backfires at the West Gate

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Kenya didn’t deserve this, but as America’s proxy in the war against terror in Africa, it was all but inevitable. This is Kenya’s 9/11.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until little more than a year ago, Kenya stayed out of the fray between terrorists and The West that was combating them worldwide. With the greatest terrorist state to its side, Somalia, it managed peaceful coexistence.

Not that it was easy. The massive Dadaab refugee camp on the border with Somalia was numbered in fractions of a million people and was putting enormous strains on the Kenyan economy and security forces.

Home grown sympathizers of the Somalia terrorists, particularly in the heavily Muslim coastal areas of Kenya, had carried out small grenade attacks and kidnapings, several of tourists.

But compared to the steady and growing breadth and scale of terrorism throughout the country all this year, culminating with Saturday’s attack on the Westgate Mall, it was almost par for the course in the age of world terrorism.

What changed a year ago?

It is widely called the Kenyan invasion of Somalia, and Kenyan troops remain in Somalia having successfully ousted al-Shabaab from power. But it is more accurately America and France’s war, using Kenya as our proxy.

And I don’t mean only ideologically or symbolically. If you’ve read my blogs since the October, 2011, invasion, you’ll have followed the growing presence of American troops and advisors, the large number of drones and the many French warships in the area.

This is all going to plan. And the plan, Obama’s and Hollande’s, was to make the west and their own countries in particular, safer. And they’ve done that.

At the expense of Kenya.

I am an American with my past and part of my soul in Kenya. Do I feel safer? As an American, yes.

But Kenyans have taken the hit, so that we Americans didn’t. And the garbage we heard this weekend from the hate-mongers in Congress and the T-Party people like Steve King of Iowa, make my blood boil. They are so intensely ignorant of the facts, and so wholly unsympathetic to misery, I’m not sure what those of us with reasonable minds can possibly do.

Kenya had been dealing with terrorism – as painful as it was – in a much more correct way until America and France got heavily involved in the last several years. Now, like America in the aftermath of 9/11, Kenya has no choice but to increase the fight they didn’t start.

And that will intensify the battle in Kenya even as worldwide terror diminishes painfully slowly.

It is so sad and such a replay of history. The age of slavery, the period of colonialism which followed and the subsequent Cold War dependencies foisted on new African states … all of these seemingly endless periods of African misery enormously benefitted the developed world with little regards for the African human being.

And so it happens, again.

Terrorism against America and France is much diminished for all sorts of reasons, but in very large part because we’ve found a way to keep it keep it far from our shores. Obama may be ending America’s great fires of war, but he’s done so in part by starting back fires.

If the Kenyan gate burns down, the fire comes home. So don’t worry, Kenya, we’ll be sure to help… you burn some more.

The Trials Begin

September 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The opening day in the trial of Kenya’s Deputy President, William Ruto, lifted the curtains from a gruesome, planned ethnic genocide that he allegedly orchestrated with the precision of an all-out war, including purchases of weapons from Uganda and The Sudan.

Accused of “enlisting political collaborators, former military friends, elders and media allies to commit crimes against humanity,” ICC Prosecutor Ms. Fatou Bensouda said she will call 22 witnesses.

Ruto is being tried simultaneously with Joshua Arap Sang, a radio broadcaster, who is specifically accused of using the radio station KASS-FM to mobilize ethnic forces when requested by Ruto.

“The prosecution alleges that the accused William Samoei Ruto and Joshua arap Sang intentionally exploited to their own advantage these deep-seated political, ethnic, social and economic issues during the 2007 electoral campaign.”

The 64-page indictment is a gruesome, detailed description of backdoor meetings, careful organization of weapons and money, and the meticulous assembly of a chain of command the prosecution is now calling “The Network.” Ruto was the alleged head of The Network.

Former ministers in the civilian government, former Army and police generals and commanders, district commissioners and even local youth leaders were all carefully organized into a chain of command with the sole intention of eliminating “unwanted communities,” in particular, the Kikuyu.

The Network was organized well in advance of the 2007/2008 election and would go into action, according to the ICC prosecution, if the election were lost by Ruto. Ruto was part of a coalition of western Kenyan tribes including the Kalenjin and Luo, contesting the reelection of Mwai Kibaki, who was a member of the country’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu.

As I explained yesterday, the Kikuyu and Luo and Kalenjin were historical blood enemies. Also as I’ve written earlier, the ethnic division over many years adopted social and economic characteristics, just as Northern Ireland became Catholic and poor and southern Ireland was protestant and rich; or as Christian Serbs in Bosnia were far better off than Muslims, there.

So the ostensible election of 2007 was almost quintessentially typical of the modern era: the poor, socialists, redistribute-the-wealth group versus the established, rich, capitalists already in power.

Yesterday’s first day of the Ruto trial did make real news. The ICC prosecutor backed off her public suggestions that Ruto explicitly was involved in the ethnic cleansing and painted him more as the backroom organizer, using Kalenjin proverbs and winks of the eye to order attacks.

That is a serious blow to the prosecution in this world court where proof of guilt is a much higher bar to attain than in most other sovereign courts around the world.

The only judgment issued by the Court yesterday was that the other trial of Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, will be held on alternating four-week periods with this one, so that the sovereign nation of Kenya is never without a leader.

Remarkable.

And as you’ve guessed, Kenyatta’s trial will be very similar to Ruto’s. The two, now serving together as Kenya’s chief executives, are accused of trying to eliminate each other through ethnic cleansing.

Talk about Team of Rivals…

But at long last things are beginning to make sense, in the extraordinary Kenyan way that makes Shakespearean dramas look like third grade fairy tales.

Presuming Kenyatta’s strategy is similar to Ruto’s, the accused really believe they will prevail as not guilty. And with the ICC backing off the contention they gave explicit orders, for the first time in public, that seems possible.

And if that comes to pass, and if the two leaders of the historical arch enemies that wanted to kill each other, raise a modern Kenya from the ashes, what does that mean?

That like Obama threatening to bomb Syria was all that was needed to eliminate its chemical weapons, that trying to put the two Kenyan leaders in the clinker for the rest of their lives for trying to kill each other makes them friendly nation builders?

How good are these bad guys? Are miracles real?

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” – C. S. Lewis

And Now! Live! From The Hague!!!

September 9, 2013September 10, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

If you were riveted by the O.J. Simpson trial, you’ll want to adjust your cable contract to get NTV-Kenya: “Tomorrow! Live! The World Trial of Kenya’s sitting President and Vice President for Crimes Against Humanity!”

This doesn’t sound real. Neither Steven Spielberg or William Shakespeare could have concocted this one. This isn’t like a revolutionary tribunal. It isn’t Madame DeFarge and her fellow citizen hookers watching the old king hanged.

William Ruto, the Deputy (Vice) President of Kenya, flew to The Netherlands yesterday … with, by the way, 100 elected members of the current Kenyan Parliament … to stand trial in The Hague’s International Criminal Court (ICC) which the country of Kenya agrees has the authority to imprison those the ICC finds guilty for up to life.

The President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, will begin his trial on November 12.

Oh, and by the way, the crux of the charges against Ruto was that he tried to kill Kenyatta’s supporters, and the crux of the charges against Kenyatta is that he tried to kill Ruto’s supporters.

The ICC initially was going to try them (and 4 others) all at the same time, but accommodated a Kenyan request that the country’s two top leaders ought not be out of the country at the same time.

How civil.

The bill to the Kenyan government for participating in this ultimate fiasco is astronomical by Kenyan standards. Just consider today’s expense report: Imagine George Bush flying back and forth in Air Force One (and probably Air Force Two to bring Republican Senators and Congressmen) to Amsterdam to allow himself to answer unpressed indictments by the ICC regarding his War in Iraq.

I thought a review of why we’re here might help you.

The court in question is the World Court, the ICC. Americans don’t know much about it, because America refuses to participate:

THE COURT
As of May 2013, 122 states are parties to the ICC, including all of South America, nearly all of Europe, most of Oceania and roughly half of Africa. Another 31 countries, including Russia, have signed but not ratified the treaty.

The progenitors of the ICC originated more than a century ago and include the Red Cross, when the world tried (and failed) to prosecute those responsible for the Franco-Russian War of 1872. The idea was reborn after World War I and then, again, after World War II. The Nuremberg trials finally prompted the United Nations to embrace the idea.

But having studied it endlessly and virtually created it, the UN was stymied
from setting up The Court by the politics of the Cold War.

In June, 1989, in response to worldwide drug trafficking and the imminent Bosnian War, the world more or less (including no America) got together and formed the court as an entity separate from the UN.

So even without America, China and full Russian participation, the Court has grown to represent world justice. Its famous trials include the wicked men of Bosnia, Liberia and Rwanda. These managers of genocide are now behind bars in Holland.

HOW DID KENYA GET THERE?
The democratic election in Kenya at the end of 2007 was miserably mishandled, almost certainly fraudulent and whatever else, too close to call. It was, however, the first truly free election Kenya had ever had, because the two main contestants for the Presidency were so far apart ideologically.

One was for the poor and socialist. One was for the rich and capitalist. And …

…one was from the country’s largest tribe, the Kikuyu; and the other from its second largest tribe, the Luo, who until that moment had basically spent all their history trying to massacre one another.

And so they did, again. This time with the extremely legitimate pretext of a major election gone awry. Within a month of the election, more than 1300 people had been killed but more importantly, in vicious videoed attacks that devolved into ethnic cleansing.

And even more important than that, really, more than a quarter million people were displaced.

The U.S., Britain and Kofi Annan put Kenya back together. Six months after the catastrophe, the two contestants were sharing power, and things were working out. In fact, they worked out so beautifully that Kenya’s then newly written constitution is really a model for modern governance.

Part of the all-party agreement that put the country back together was to determine who had fomented the violence and to prosecute them … in Kenya. It was almost an afterthought that added to the agreement that if Kenya couldn’t get it together to hold the trials, or to mount the investigation, that if Kenya wanted, the ICC would step in.

That’s what happened. Kenya couldn’t get it together. At first it just seemed like too herculean albeit too expensive a task. So the old Parliament that wrote the new constitution hemmed and hawed, debated and ignored, and finally defaulted to the ICC.

Which was really quite reluctant to take the case on. After all, as horrible as 2007/2008 was to every Kenyan, it was nowhere near as horrible as the cases the ICC had been hearing: like the Hutu massacre of 800,000 Watutsis.

The ICC did its work. Among those to be indicted were the leaders of Kenya’s biggest tribe, the capitalists, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the founder of the country; and the leader of an influential smaller tribe hated by the Kikuyu and who had supported the socialists, the Kalenjin, William Ruto.

For organizing, financing and managing the slaughter of hundreds and attempted slaughter of hundreds of thousands.

Whoa. Embarrassing, to be sure. Kind of riled Kenyans of similar stripes. Parliament exploded but did nothing. Parliament considered giving immunity to these guys, but didn’t. The trials were set.

Then …

William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta filed to contest the election of 2012 after they’d been indicted.

Parliament choked. The Presidential Commission authorizing candidates didn’t know what to do. Parliament said do it. The two men indicted for crimes against humanity became candidates.

And then …

… these two murderous rivals combined to form a single party. The leader of the biggest tribe, Kenyatta, would stand for the presidency. The other guy, William Ruto and former arch enemy, would stand with him for the vice president.

And then …

… they won.

Tomorrow, I speculate on what the hell is going on, or, “How Good can a Bad Guy be?”

All But Nothing

September 3, 2013September 4, 2013 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

The West’s recent history in Africa tells America clearly what it should do in Syria.

Twenty years ago the international community led then by Bill Clinton decided to let the mad dogs kill themselves in Somalia, and the international community abandoned a festering civil war that lasted until today.

Somalia is today less lawless than it was with an emerging society and government yet threatened internally by remnants of the warlords who had wrecked havoc of the place, but in sum … peaceful and actually, pretty free.

A year after abandoning Somalia Clinton and his staunch ally, France, blocked the Security Council from stopping the Rwandan genocide. Up to a million people were killed and twice that displaced in one of the most brutal and horrific genocides the world has ever seen.

Today Rwanda is run by a merciless if beneficial dictator and peace is as strong as its many new steel prison gates. The economy fueled by western aid is booming, but be careful what you say in public.

Peace came quickly to Rwanda. It took a generation in Somalia. One is utterly peaceful but not free; and the other is free but not utterly peaceful. Neither outcome is pleasant, but many fewer people are dying miserably.

The west was perfectly able to send missiles, tanks and soldiers into Rwanda and Somalia and create a pacified society, just as it did in the Balkans.

That’s something I wanted to happen at the time in Somalia and Rwanda, and something I might support, now, in Syria.

But anything less than everything is wrong. Clinton couldn’t morally justify intervention in Rwanda or Somalia, he said, because intervention he felt would only make matters worse.

That may have been true in Somalia; it certainly wasn’t true in Rwanda, but regardless, it wasn’t his reason. His real reason having been burned by Blackhawk Down’s failure was that it would be too expensive to be effective, or possibly that such a larger involvement would invoke restraints from other world powers.

Africa is rife with histories of such conflicts that could have been pacified in addition to Rwanda and Somalia: The Congo, Central African Republic, Burundi, Sudan and today, contemporary Zimbabwe. In all these places absolutely horrific situations exist or have existed but did not reach the threshold of western military involvement.

Because in every one of these, however tiny they may seem relative to Syria today, we knew that anything less than a complete occupation and Marshall Plan for rebuilding, would fail. So .. we did nothing.

It was “all” which was not possible, or nothing. I have never forgiven Clinton or his ally France from not going into Rwanda in 1993, but over the years I’ve grown comfortable with having abandoned Somalia, growing to embrace the cogent argument that involvement would only have made matters worse. It was a hard lesson to learn, a very bitter pill to swallow.

Now, for some reason, America is turning away from this learned lesson. Limited involvement in Syria will make matters worse.

America is trying as it does so well to find a loophole, a way around this clear maxim that it is all or nothing. Obama would have us believe that we have an obligation to uphold global human rights, that as the strict parent or stern teacher or Global Policeman, we must punish those who go too far.

In his speech, he called the use of nerve gas “an assault on human dignity” that had to be redressed.

Why are the 1426 people killed last week in Syria by nerve gas more of an assault on human dignity than the 800,000+ that we allowed to be massacred in Rwanda? Or the same number today in The Congo?

Yes, it’s an assault on human dignity in all cases, but selectively applied it loses its imperative force. Presumably nerve gas and the world’s conventions against it violate the ethics of war. That’s rather laughable, of course. Machetes were as effective a weapon of mass destruction in Rwanda, and would have been much easier to prevent.

Obama defined this Red Line, because he believed incorrectly that we have the power to define. We don’t. There is no Red Line. There is massive injustice fueled by ethnic hatred, exacerbated by a capitalistic system gamed by the United States. There is war. There is no point at which that war is bad and then good. Red Lines may have meaning in quantity, but certainly not in quality.

No, the real motivation for Obama to intervene in Syria is the same motivation that kept Clinton from intervening in Somalia and Rwanda: “national security.” Clinton didn’t think national security was threatened. He was right in Rwanda but wrong in Somalia, where al-Qaeda was refueled in the years that followed.

From the amoral point of view of national security, Clinton made one right and one wrong decision. But he did it honestly. No “assault on dignity” was proferred.

Obama should take heed.

Obama and Congress and the military are now obsessed by 9-11. The guilt-ridden ideologues among which are Obama and the second Bush and most of our lot of ineffective politicians are terrified at the notion they might be sitting on their thrones while a 9-11 happens, again.

So they’ll throw the kitchen sink at every shadow of a mouse trying to get into the house. They forget that Somalia and Yemen spawned more terrorists than Syria or Afghanistan:

“The greatest irony of this era in the Middle East is that the two rulers most committed to crushing Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gadaffi, were overthrown by the West. And in Afghanistan and Iraq, Western countries won the war but failed to replace the dictators with effective governments,” explains the African analyst, Richard Dowden.

You cannot stop terrorism with itself. In today’s interconnected, high tech world you cannot fight fire with fire. You learn to live with it, stopping it closer to home when you can. Otherwise, anything short of “The All” as was the case in Afghanistan and Iraq, is destined to backfire.

The time has come for America to accept the following:

(1) We cannot stop terrorism against ourselves with preemptive military actions like those currently anticipated in Syria.

(2) We are not powerful enough to reverse a civil war far away from home, without the entire world with us (as it was in the Balkans).

(3) Only the UN is left as world policeman. And it will be a very long time before there is enough unanimity again in the world to so act as it did in Balkans.

(4) America does not have enough power to punish without worse repercussions.

It’s a sad, sad time. But there is no alternative that isn’t even sadder.

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Category: War