Africa

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s head of state and, let’s not mince words, war criminal, is leaving Sudan for the first time since his indictment for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. He is visiting Turkey, which does not recognize the ICC, to attend a summit of African leaders. Too many African states have been unwilling to condemn the leadership in Khartoum for its many sins, and one fears that Bashir’s attendance at this conference will only provide legitimacy for his government.

Three stories caught my eye this morning, all of which fall into the category of disappointing, but not surprising.

1) The power-sharing talks over Zimbabwe have broken down over the question of what role Morgan Tsvangirai will play. The sides appear to have rather different conceptions of the role the Movement for Democratric Change leader will have in any new government. Mugabe’s people want him shuffled off to the post of third vice president, a post about as useful as teats on a bull. Tsvangirai wants to be the country’s Prime Minister with considerable powers. This news should come as a shock to absolutely no one. Mugabe does not want to share leadership. And without being forced to do so, he surely sees these negotiations as just another way to buy time and apply window dressing without actually yielding an inch on issues that matter.

2) In Uganda, the Baganda people are growing increasingly discontented with the rule of President Yoweri Museveni. Tired of feeling marginalised, the people of the ancient kingdom, and now state, of Buganda have a long list of grievances, beginning with seemingly ubiquitous contestations over land.  Museveni needs to find a way to compromise and to reach out to the Baganda, or else the stability of his country, not to mention his leadership, are in jeopardy.

3) The precarious health of Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa has led to fears of a power vacuum emerging in that country. Mwanawasa, who recently suffered a stroke, and whose rumors of death were premature but very real across Africa, has been silent and absent for more than a month, leading to unseemly but very real struggles for leadership in Zambia.

At 4:00 am tomorrow (or five hours from now) I’ll get up and begin a winding journey that will land me in South Africa Thursday afternoon. I’ll be there for three weeks, will be traveling extensively for two conferences, some research, travel and holiday, and reportage. I may be out of touch for a bit, but will be updating the blog all along the way as internet access allows.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.] 

The dueling headlines tell of the tricky course South Africa has chosen for itself with regard to the situation in Zimbabwe. It is widely recognized that South Africa has the potential to be the biggest external power broker, whether through sticks or carrots, words or deeds. And so far, it is no secret, South Africa has chosen to act so tepidly that the country’s virtual inaction can only qualify as appeasing Robert Mugabe.

And so for readers of, say, the Cape Argus, it may have been reassuring that At Last, SA Condemns Mugabe. But for readers of The New York Times the message was quite different: A.N.C. Rejects Pressure on Zimbabwe. So which is it?

Well, as the Argus story makes clear, while South Africa did finally speak out against Mugabe, it also helped to block even stronger statements from the United Nations Security Council, which has unanimously rebuked Zimbabwe.  And in so doing, South Africa’s leaders have once again forced the world, which little understands the situation to begin with, to wonder, rightly, what on earth Thabo Mbeki could be thinking? Loyalty, even fairly blind loyalty, to the revolutionary generation is one thing. But at some point that currency was long ago spent. The idea that South Africa owes fealty to ZANU-PF at the expense of the masses of Zimbabweans desperate for change is absurd. Mbeki’s approach mystifies and infuriates much of the rest of the world. It is hard to see how either Zimbabweans or South Africans benefit from such an approach to the gravest regional crisis in years.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.] 

This week The Washington Post “Book World” profiles Africanist Alex de Waal, who contributes a piece in Book World’s “The Writing Life” feature. De Waal is best known for his work on the Sudan and the Darfur crisis. I met de Waal at this year’s Sudan Studies Association meeting. He has a fierce intellect and an unquestionable commitment to his work.

I am no supporter of President George W. Bush. I voted against him twice and would vote against him again if given the chance. I believe that he has done irreparable harm to the United States and to the world and that he has left a mess that future generations will have to clean up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he has been a terrible president.

That said, I am pleased to see president Bush press the other leaders of the G8 to honor their commitments  to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria on the continent. On this point he is right, and in asking the other leaders of the world’s most prominent industrialized nations to match the commitments President Bush has made is taking the sort of leadership that his administration has so often lacked.

How does a country reconcile itself after horrific paroxysms of violence? Numerous countries have had to deal with precisely this dilemma. South Africa, through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), did so most famously and most extensively. And the TRC process has served as a model, an inspiration, and as a template for several other countries that have followed with processes of their own to reconcile the past with the present and with a hoped-for future, though the process was also fraught with imperfections and faced sometimes intense criticism from across the political spectrum.

Zimbabwe will almost surely have to go through a comparable process, whether in a matter of weeks and months or years. And today Kenya is trying to deal with its relatively brief but still nightmarish political violence of a few months ago. President Mwai Kibaki has declared categorically that his coalition government will not provide blanket amnesty for the perpetrators of post-election violence, once again putting him at odds with his erstwhile rival and uncomfortable supposed government coalition partner Raila Odinga. Kenya’s violence did not endure like that in most of the countries that have gone through formal reconciliation processes, but the chaos that exploded nationwide nonetheless reveals fissures in Kenyan society that runs deeper than the mere electoral divide that provided the proximate causes of violence. At some point Kenya is going to have to address those divisions in something other than a patchwork manner.   

The costs of food and fuel are hurting Africa perhaps more than any other continent, and of course on the whole Africans can least afford the economic disruption. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian has a feature revealing the myriad ways Africa is effected and how different countries are responding to the newest global economic crisis to disproportionately impact the continent.

The United States has announced a fairly serious scaling-back of its plans for AFRICOM, the American African Command. Is the US finally responding to the will of Africans on the ground? Or is it merely taking the most expedient path? The answer is probably a combination of factors, but it is clear that the ambitious scale of AFRICOM butted against realities on the ground and the realities on the ground seem to have prevailed.  

In a short “Editorial Notebook” piece in The Boston Globe Donald MacGillis explores the problem of brain drain in Uganda, which is a nearly universal problem across the continent, and what the west might be able yo do to stanch the flow of talented doctors (and others) without limiting personal freedoms of those who so often choose to leave their native lands for the lures of the West.