Vultures Dreaming

Somalia - AMISOM under fire

"The African Union is not in Somalia to fight or to be drawn into any conflict we are not part of. We are there as an impartial and neutral peacekeeping force."

So said Nicholas Bwakira, the AU's special envoy to Somalia, in condemning recent attacks by insurgents on Ugandan soldiers deployed in Mogadishu as members of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

Unfortunately this is not true.

The decision to establish AMISOM was made by the Peace and Security Council of the African Union on 19 January 2007, three weeks after the Ethiopian Army had invaded Somalia and routed the Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) from Mogadishu.

Referring to the Ethiopian action, the communique of the council reiterates

its conviction that, following the recent developments that have enabled the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to take over Mogadishu and take control of the country, there exists today a unique and unprecedented opportunity to restore structures of governance in Somalia ...

and decides

to provide, as appropriate, protection to the Transitional Federal Institutions (TFIs) and their key infrastructure, to enable them to carry out their functions.

If AMISOM had been established and deployed in 2005 things might have been different, but by the beginning of 2007 the TFG had already lost most of the little credibility it ever had, and it was wishful thinking that the ICU would simply disappear. 

 AMISOM is now stuck with protecting what increasingly appears to be the losing side in a civil war. The sooner it can withdraw the better.

US Presidential Foreign Affairs Debate

Here's a nice way to view the issues discussed (created by Wordle which is a great toy).

How many times was Africa mentioned? Not Once.

Somalia - Why does Africa Partnership Station not help against the pirates?

The Africa Partnership Station (APS), AFRICOM's naval element, now has an almost permanent presence in the Gulf of Guinea, where it is indeed very busy: training up local navies, installing a network of Maritime Domain Awareness sensors, painting schools, hugging natives (hadn't this 'hearts and minds' stuff already passed its sell-by-date in Vietnam?) and no doubt preparing a few contingency plans to protect energy supplies.

I would have thought a spell in the Indian Ocean would do AFRICOM's foundering PR campaign a world of good. Although APS doesn't need a land base it would have both Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and a 'lily pad' in Mombassa nearby.

And the whole world agrees that pirates are criminals and deserve to be dealt with: the whole world does not agree that Al-Shabaab are terrorists or that missile attacks against civilians are a good idea, even if they are aimed at an Al Qaeda suspect.

The EU, led by French action, has approved plans for a naval mission. US bluewater forces are already involved in a coalition patrolling international waters but could do with the brownwater capacity of APS.

The ICC and Africa - Peace, Justice and the New Humanitarian Order

The International Criminal Court was established in 1998 to try "persons accused of the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes." It is currently dealing with four situations, all African.

John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen take to the not so moral high ground in Enough's latest paper on Sudan: Opportunity in the Midst of Crisis, which is a follow-on from the campaign's July defence of the ICC's prosecution of President Bashir in The Merits of Justice (with it's astonishingly patronising subtitle: "Would more people, or less people, rob banks if there was no penalty for robbing banks?").

Firstly they huff and puff about those "beyond the pale" who have succumbed to the "dispatched envoys" of Khartoum, and complain how

"disillusioning it is to see the President of Tanzania - which invaded Uganda in 1979 to halt Idi Amin's reign of terror - lobbying for an accused war criminal".

Those past redemption, according to the authors, include the entire membership of the African Union and the Arab League.

Surely they could have taken the time, as did Alex de Waal, to try to understand the African position.

Africa believes that the stability of Sudan is too important to be jeopardized by an abrupt adoption of a regime change policy, and that justice should be pursued in the context of peace. The AU and its member states are unanimous about this and, having made their position clear to the UN and its member states, will hold them responsible for the consequences should their advice not be heeded.

The Chairperson of the AU Commission, Jean Ping, expressed Africa’s disappointment with the ICC. He noted that thirty African countries had ratified the Rome Statute, expecting that the ICC would aid them in the pursuit of justice. But rather than pursuing justice around the world—including in cases such as Columbia, Sri Lanka and Iraq—the ICC was focusing only on Africa and was undermining rather than assisting African efforts to solve its problems. Most importantly, Ping said that the UN had passed the responsibility for addressing the ICC issue in Sudan to the AU. He said that he had learned that the UN Secretary General had, before the July 14 ICC announcement, the opportunity to block the indictment but had said that the Court was wholly independent and it was none of his business.

AU leaders said that Sudan should continue to pursue peace, democracy and justice irrespective of whether the arrest warrant is issued or not. They pointed out that it is Africa that suffers if things go wrong. It is African soldiers who will die if Darfur goes up in flames.

Secondly Prendergast and Thomas-Jensen manage a legal skip and a hop to argue that the indictment of Bashir is not aimed at bringing him to justice, but rather to the negotiating table.

With the ICC’s move, President Bashir and his government are finally confronting real consequences for their actions, consequences that go well beyond the harsh rhetoric and empty threats that have characterized the world’s response since 2003. This time it is different because the threat of an arrest warrant is potent enough to inform the calculations of a government that is as pragmatic as it is reprehensible.

Article 16 of the Rome Statute, the charter that established and governs the ICC, enables the Security Council to suspend an ICC investigation on a one-year renewable basis—if such a move is deemed in the interest of peace. The Sudanese government’s preoccupation with the ICC charges indicates that Bashir and his inner circle view international justice as a serious threat, and the actions of Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo have given Bashir a vested interest in reaching a peace deal in Darfur, possibly for the first time since the crisis began.

Mahmood Mamdani, as ever, has useful insights on this issue. In an article excerpted from his forthcoming book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror Mamdani weaves a well-constructed argument against what he calls the "New Humanitarian Order".

When World War II broke out, the international order could be divided into two unequal parts: one privileged, the other subjugated; one a system of sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere, the other a colonial system in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Postwar decolonization recognized former colonies as states, thereby expanding state sovereignty as a global principle of relations between states. The end of the cold war has led to another basic shift, heralding an international humanitarian order that promises to hold state sovereignty accountable to an international human rights standard. Many believe that we are in the throes of a systemic transition in international relations.

The standard of responsibility is no longer international law; it has shifted, fatefully, from law to rights. As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the "war on terror."

This new humanitarian order, officially adopted at the UN's 2005 World Summit, claims responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations. That responsibility is said to belong to "the international community," to be exercised in practice by the UN, and in particular by the Security Council, whose permanent members are the great powers. This new order is sanctioned in a language that departs markedly from the older language of law and citizenship. It describes as "human" the populations to be protected and as "humanitarian" the crisis they suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even antipolitical. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is not a global but a partial transition. The transition from the old system of sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as "failed" or "rogue" states. The result is once again a bifurcated system, whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East.

He argues that there is an alternative to big power intervention: "Survivor's Justice" rather than victor's justice.

If peace and justice are to be complementary rather than conflicting objectives, we must distinguish victors' justice from survivors' justice: if one insists on distinguishing right from wrong, the other seeks to reconcile different rights. In a situation where there is no winner and thus no possibility of victors' justice, survivors' justice may indeed be the only form of justice possible.

If Nuremberg is the paradigm for victors' justice, South Africa's postapartheid transition is the paradigm for survivors' justice. The end of apartheid was driven by a key principle: forgive but do not forget. The first part of the compact was that the new power will forgive all past transgressions so long as they are publicly acknowledged as wrongs. There will be no prosecutions. The second was that there will be no forgetting and that henceforth rules of conduct must change, thereby ensuring a transition to a postapartheid order. It was South Africa's good fortune that its transition was in the main internally driven.

South Africa is not a solitary example but a prototype for conflicts raging across Africa about the shape of postcolonial political communities and the definition of membership in them. The agreement that ended the South Sudan war combined impunity for all participants with political reform. The same was true of the settlement ending Mozambique's civil war. Had the ICC been involved in these conflicts in the way it is now in Darfur, it is doubtful there would be peace in either place.

AFRICOM - The 'misunderstanding' won't go away

There is a line put out by AFRICOM that the original search for an African headquarters led to a terrible misunderstanding, on the part of African Governments, as to AFRICOM's intentions. And to clarify, there will be no bases and no forces. This line has been repeated endlessly over the past six months.

And it's come up again. During Condoleezza Rice's visit to Libya she reported that Colonel Qadhafi expressed

"concerns about what the United States was doing with AFRICOM, were we looking to military bases on the African continent, were we looking to a large military presence."

Sounding somewhat exasperated, Rice said she told Qadhafi

"that we clearly weren't getting through about what we meant for AFRICOM; that this was to be -- to help Africans help themselves in peacekeeping, in counterterrorism work. We were able to clear up misunderstandings of that kind."

Three points.

• Africans don't get it because they don't believe it.
• No bases is not true. The AFRICOM position is no bases for the moment.
• Help developing peacekeeping forces is much needed, but counterterrorism? Surely this is best handled by intelligence, law and order, and justice?

Zimbabwe - Cracks in the Presidential Guard

The independent Zimbabwean radio station, Voice of the People, reported last week that Army commander, Lt Gen Phillip Sibanda, was heckled by soldiers from the Presidential Guard, unhappy over wages. The soldiers had been expecting a top-up to their wages to allow them to pay school fees. Sibanda went to the Harare barracks to tell the soldiers not only that there was no top-up, but also that their regular wages would be late.

A fortnight earlier ZimDaily reported that a petition had been drawn up by soldiers at the Army headquarters protesting at low salaries and threatening "a highly likely failure of us to report for duty or take orders as required by the law". Despite a massive pay rise at the beginning of the year, a rank and file soldier's wage is now little more than the cost of a loaf of bread on the black market. The brief petition was printed on fliers and "thrown round the barracks".

Over the years there have been reports of rumblings in the armed forces. Organised acts of protest may mean that disaffection is reaching a new level.

Somalia - ICU consolidating in South

The Islamic Courts Union appears to be going from strength to strength in consolidating its control over the southern regions of Somalia. Michael Weinstein has a very useful piece at Garowe Online which looks at their resurgence since being driven out of Mogadishu by the Ethiopians in December 2006.

Their successes, Weinstein argues, have come from learning the lessons of the 2006 defeat.

The successes of the Courts movement on the ground are due to a consistent and prudent strategy that is not the product of design, but of convergence of the viewpoints of its components, and that indicates learning from defeat. As is the case with all revolutionary movements, the Courts in their early revolutionary phase over-valued their strength and support, and under-valued the strength and resolve of their external adversaries, Ethiopia and the Western donor powers to Somalia led by the United States. ........

In 2008, the strategy matured as the Courts began to hold and administer territory, forging alliances with local sub-clans; that is, rather than aspiring to institute an Islamic state based on Shari'a law in one fell swoop, the Courts movement has now dug in at the local level, accommodating to local differences by setting up Courts administrations where it can, mixed administrations as a rule and benevolently neutral administrations where it must. This flexibility and respect for local power structures and sentiment have allowed the movement to take root and gain back a measure of the popular legitimacy that it had lost when revolution came to ruin.

The problem is, can they maintain unity, or will the three ideological strands represented in their ranks - Jihadism, Islamic Nationalism and pragmatism - drive them apart.

Having taken control of Kismayo, the Courts movement has gained confidence and
now envisages a genuine possibility that it will prevail in Somalia. With its success, however, new problems arise for the movement - as its components sense a possible victory, they have begun to think not only of removing the Ethiopian occupation, but also of which of them will dominate the re-liberation process and which vision of the desired future might be actualized.

It is only to be expected that rifts would appear in the ranks of the Courts movement on the ground, because its components share sufficient confidence to compete for influence among themselves - and that has happened in Middle Shabelle and seems to be occurring in Kismayo. How the Courts movement handles internal competition will in great part determine whether it maintains its role as protagonist and continues to deepen its roots and spread its branches, or whether it breaks down in mutual hostility and cuts itself apart in fragments in the familiar pattern of Somali factionalism: the Courts are at a cross roads.

The international agenda would appear to be set on ensuring that the ICU does in fact implode. This approach is short-sighted in the extreme. As Weinstein concludes:

A collapse into in-fighting by the Courts on the ground will mean yet a further descent into political entropy for Somalia - a fragmenting dynamic to compound the ruptures within the T.F.G. and the A.R.S., persistent clan divisions, and freelancing militias and criminal gangs.

Priority number one for the people of Somalia has to be peace, stability and governance. The rest can follow.

Somalia - Policy Nightmare

ENOUGH's new strategy paper, Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Policy Nightmare by Ken Menkhaus is the kind of definitive work it would be a godsend to have to help one understand all complex crises.

Menkhaus calmly and succintly unravels the internal, regional and international machinations that have led to this tragedy. Noone escapes his clear and simply reasoned critique. I will not even attempt to summarise his arguments as to do them justice the summary would be almost as long as the original. I do have one question and one criticism.

My question: Is it not time to accept that the Transitional Federal Government is a spent force, an artificial construct that has become so divisive that it hinders any serious progress, and that, taking a long view, it would be better to scrap it now and go a step back to the drawing board?

My criticism: The western liberal idea that peace can only be brokered by a consensus of moderates is perhaps the greatest hindrance to the peace process. Menkhaus observes

The cornerstone of international policy in Somalia today is peace-building—specifically, the hope that moderates from the TFG and the opposition can be brought together in a new centrist coalition that will lead to a cease-fire, a power-sharing accord, and a unity government.

and then agrees that

a peace-building agenda that is built on a strategy of building up a centrist coalition of government and opposition leaders is unlikely to succeed if those moderates are far weaker than hardliners on both sides. The peace-building agenda needs to be linked to a robust strategy designed to strengthen the moderates and contain or marginalize the hardliners in both camps

This is unecessary ideological meddling, no different from the hypocritical US-led opposition to the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine. Where would South Africa and Ireland be today if the 'hardliners' had been 'marginalised'?

Angolan Elections - Is Nearly Free and Fair Not Enough?

Angolans go to the polls tomorrow for the first time since 1992. The government has received across-the-board praise for its preparations. The head of the EU observer mission said the election, despite an imbalance in media coverage for the ruling MPLA, the elections

will really be a step forward for democracy.

An SADC observer said

We believe the conditions for a free, fair and democratic election are in place.

The BBC

It was never going to be easy holding an election in a country after so many years of war with damaged infrastructure and millions of displaced people. But as polling day approaches, it seems as if the authorities may be about to pull it off.

The Economist

But even UNITA acknowledges that the violence has been isolated and that it has generally been able to campaign freely. The authorities have agreed to hold the vote over one day instead of two, to assuage fears of manipulation. International observers are already on the ground and thousands of independent local ones are being deployed. Opposition parties have received state money to campaign. Though state radio and television spend much time singing the government’s praises, they also run advertisements for the opposition and report on its campaign.

The consensus is well summed up by Chatham House's Indira Campos

Although the election process may not be perfect, it provides, for the first time in Angola’s post-colonial history, the opportunity for all parties to actively campaign for new leadership. This is a key step in the political and constitutional normalization of the country, but most importantly in the development of mutual tolerance. Elections are also a key part of the process that will allow Angolans to take important steps towards democracy, free speech, the rule of law and improved human rights.

Standing alone against these pragmatic assesments is Human Rights Watch

On the final day of campaigning before Angola's national legislative elections, an international human rights group says the vote is not likely to be free and fair. In a statement issued Wednesday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says the Angolan government is failing to safeguard the basic freedoms of assembly and expression. The group also alleges the government is not providing access to the media by all candidates, and is not ensuring security for opposition parties. Human Rights Watch says it has documented abuses including intimidation of the opposition and the media, as well as government interference with the electoral commission.

I doubt whether any of those quoted above would doubt the evidence that HRW can present. It's how one contextualises it. Or, as I am sure the supporters of the human rights line would argue, should the standards adopted by such organisations ever be contexualised. The most famous case of this was Amnesty International refusing to recognise Nelson Mandela as a Prisoner of Conscience.

US Counterterrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa

The US Army War College has again published a paper critical of the AFRICOM mission (see here for my comment on Dennis Penn's paper).

US Counterterrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Understanding Costs, Cultures and Conflicts is by Donovan Chau, Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University. This is his second paper on the subject (the first was for an Institute for Security Studies seminar in 2006).

Chau argues that development and defense are

"fundamentally divergent theoretical approaches to US counterterrorism policy in SSA" which are "mutually exclusive".

In his book the defense approach

"involves any and all uses of the military; this includes the use of the military for nonmilitary purposes such as humanitarian assistance and intervention."

Since 2001 the Pentagon has been winning the policy debate and

"AFRICOM was certainly and is a victory for DoD within the USG interagency process."

"Operationally and tactically, AFRICOM may make humanitarian operations in SSA more succinct and logistically feasible. The situation nevertheless leaves DoD as the lead strategic planning organization for counterterrorism in SSA, to the overall detriment of the development approach to counterrorism."

While recognising that the defense approach has the resources at its disposal and "the expeditionary nature of the US military naturally lends itself to tackle problems facing US interests abroad.", Chau argues that the costs outweigh the benefits. The perception of military involvement and the military's lack of "substantial depth and breadth of knowledge of foreign peoples and lands, especially in SSA" count heavily against the defense approach.

Given the views of terrorism and counterterrorism in SSA, as well as the state of civil-military and civil-law enforcement relations, the defense approach is not the most prudent one in the long term. Moving DoD operations into the development realm (the so-called "Phase Zero" strategy) does not alter the fact that the U.S. military remains the primary organization conducting operations in SSA. This is not a balance between the two approaches; rather, it is the dominance of one over the other. In the long view, the development approach to counterterrorism in SSA is more sustainable and would have a more lasting impact.

... if the USG and DoD had a better comprehension of civil-military (and civil-law enforcement) relations in SSA, creating a separate unified command would not have been such a priority or as publicly touted."

While perhaps bringing him to the correct conclusions, the "Cultures" part of the essay allows Chau to hoist himself by his own petard. A twenty page journey around the religious and cultural perceptions of Africa (political perceptions don't appear to exist) is highlighted by such gems as

"West Africa may be characterized by 'chronic armed conflict, extremely high rates of poverty, porous border security and governmental inefficiency and corruption'".

Well now we know all we need to know about West Africa then ...