Nigerians in Diaspora Remitted U.S. $7 Billion to Nigeria 2008

Nigerians in Diaspora Remitted U.S. $7 Billion to Nigeria 2008:

Bank of Industry revealed that remittances from about 20 million Nigerians in Diaspora accounted for more than $7 billion of Africa ’s $14 billion in 2008.
The amount, which represented more than 50 percent of the whole of remittances in Africa , was based on BoI’s research findings. The Bank said it was also revealed that [...]

Why did One Laptop Per Child fail?

from FP Passport by Joshua Keating

Over at UN Dispatch, Alanna Shaikh has a thought-provoking eulogy for Nicholas Negroponte's fizzling One-Laptop-Per-Child program:

Americans wanted the OLPC. We fell in love with
its tremendous promise and adorable shape. (note: I own an OLPC) We
were the first market it conquered. OLPC launched a give one-get one
promotion that let individuals pay $400 to donate one laptop and
receive one for themselves. It was a huge success, except that OLPC
wasn’t set up for that kind of customer order fulfillment. Laptops arrived far later than promised, and several thousand orders were simply lost.

Once the laptop finally started arriving in the
developing world, its impact was minimal. We think. No one is doing
much research on their impact on education; discussions are largely theoretical.
This we do know: OLPC didn’t provide tech support for the machines, or
training in how to incorporate them into education. Teachers didn’t
understand how to use the laptops in their lessons; some resented them.
Kids like the laptops, but they don’t actually seem to help them learn.

It’s time to call a spade a spade. OLPC was a failure. ...

As Shaikh suggests, OLPC is a classic case of a development program more tailored to the tastes and interests of its funders, than the needs of the people it was supposed to help. Back to the drawing board.

Mapping for disasters with UNOSAT

Mapping for disasters with UNOSAT
Seasonal floods are currently affecting West Africa. Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Mali, Liberia and Guinea are all experiencing significant damage to infrastructure and agriculture due to heavy rainfall causing floods in numerous locations. More than 350,000 people have been impacted thus far.

Based on requests from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, theSpace Charter - created to acquire imagery in the wake of disasters - was activated, and UNITAR/UNOSAT started satellite mapping. UNITAR/UNOSAT is formally recognized by the Space Charter as “Charter User Intermediary” -- this status grants the privilege “to act as gateway for request submissions on behalf of UN users related with humanitarian actions”. Imagery from Space Charter members was sent to UNOSAT within a few hours after being taken. A dedicated technical team immediately started the analysis, and turned this near real-time satellite imagery into useful information products, which were disseminated to a range of users in the field, at national & regional offices, and in headquarters. This rapid mapping production chain ensures all relevant parties simultaneously receive the same crucial information as quickly as possible.

One important component in this process was the use of the Google Map Maker data to clearly map the transport networks, allowing emergency managers to plan and implement relief assistance. For example, they could avoid roads that are marked on the maps as likely to be flooded by comparing satellite flood layers with road layers.

Satellite image derived flood map showing current situation in Niger - flooded areas in red.

Courtesy: UNITAR/UNOSAT & International Charter Space and Major Disasters

We've been pleased to hear positive feedback directly about this combination of the UNITAR/UNOSAT imagery with Map Maker data directly from those in the field -- as one simply stated, 'Thumbs up!'

Posted by Einar Bjorgo, Head, Rapid Mapping, Applications and User Relations, UNITAR/UNOSAT; France Lamy, Program Manager, Google.org

Mapping availability of HIV, AIDs and TB Services in Kenya

Mapping availability of HIV, AIDs and TB Services in Kenya

Ushahidi is delighted to announce a collaboration with AIDSPortal in the UK, and KANCO – Kenya AIDS NGO Consortium in Kenya to map the availability of HIV, AIDS, and TB services in Kenya. This collaboration is supported by Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google. The Geo-Challenge grant awarded will make this endeavor possible. We are looking forward to making this mapping a tool that will be useful to KANCO and NGOs working in the Kenyan health space.

KANCO and AIDSportal were one of the first testers of the Alpha version of the Ushahidi platform, and we are grateful for their continued support of Ushahidi. Feedback received has been instrumental to the ‘Goma’ release and we look forward to working together on this important project.

More about Aidsportal

More about KANCO

More about Google.org

The test site is http://kanco.ushahidi.com/, we will update you once the site is customized fully and becomes operational.

"

Sudan: Oil Production Figures Underpinning Peace Agreement Don't Add Up, Warns Global Witness

allAfrica.com: Sudan
Global Witness (London)
7 September 2009
press release

The 2005 peace agreement, which brought to an end to the conflict between north and south Sudan, one of Africa's longest-running and most bloody wars, was based on an agreement to share oil revenues. However, new evidence uncovered by Global Witness raises serious questions about whether the revenues are being shared fairly.

"If the oil figures published by the Khartoum government aren't right, the division of the money from that oil between north and south Sudan won't be right," said Global Witness campaigner Rosie Sharpe.

The Global Witness report, Fuelling Mistrust: the need for transparency in Sudan's oil industry, is the first public analysis of Sudan's oil figures. It documents how the oil figures published by the Government of National Unity in Khartoum are smaller than the equivalent figures published by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the operator of the oil blocks. While the respective figures for the only block located entirely in the north, and therefore not subject to revenue sharing, approximately match, those for blocks which are subject to revenue sharing do not. There were discrepancies of:

• 9% for the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company's blocks in 2007

• 14% for the Petrodar Operating Company's blocks in 2007

• 26% for the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company and Petro Energy's blocks in 2005

These findings cover six of the seven productive oil blocks in Sudan. A comparison of government and company figures was not possible for the White Nile Petroleum Operating Company's block as no company figures were available.

Mismatches of this magnitude represent potentially massive sums of money. If it were found that the oil figures published by the Government of National Unity had been under-reported by, for example, 10%, the southern government would be owed more than $600 million (on the basis that the Government of Southern Sudan has received more than $6 billion in oil revenues since the signing of the peace agreement). This is more than three times the south's combined annual budgets for health and education.

"Our findings do not necessarily mean that Khartoum has cheated the south out of money, but they do highlight the need for transparency. Unless the Government of Southern Sudan and Sudanese citizens can verify that the revenue sharing is fair, mistrust will grow and the peace agreement could be jeopardised," said Sharpe.

The Khartoum government publishes figures on its earnings from the oil industry but neither the Government of Southern Sudan nor Sudanese civil society have any way of verifying them. Khartoum is wholly responsible for marketing and exporting the south's oil: it compiles the figures on how much oil is produced and the price for which it sold. The southern government is not involved, despite the fact that oil revenues make up 98% of their income.

"The oil production and sales figures upon which the revenue sharing depend should be verified by independent third party audit and by legislation passed by Sudanese lawmakers that requires oil companies to disclose their payments," said Sharpe. "The peace agreement's international guarantors, including the UK, US and Norway, need to do more to promote transparency. China and Japan, who are the main customers for Sudanese oil, should also push for greater transparency, which will help ensure stability and a reliable supply.

http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_get.php/1027/en/v12_final_sudan_fuelling_mistrust_lowres.pdf

Jatropha World Series - PANGEA

Jatropha World Series
Partners for Euro-African Green Energy (PANGEA) is an international biofuels trade association based in Brussels, Belgium that acts as a platform to support the creation of sustainable bioenergy industries in Africa. PANGEA lobbies governments, provides a network for the industry, and shares knowledge on best practices in both the EU and Africa. Its members produce, blend, trade, research and support the development of bioenergy in Africa and beyond.

In terms of lobbying, PANGEA works closely with the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) Group of States as well as regional and national governments in Africa to develop their bioenergy strategies and policies internally, as well as advises them on relations with the EU. In the EU, PANGEA is consulted on similar matters, most recently concerning the Renewable Energy Directive and Sustainability Criteria consultations with the European Commission’s Directorate General of Energy and Transport (DG TREN).

PANGEA’s knowledge and capacity is based on its experience in EU & ACP policy building and both its members’ and network’s experience in business development and management. To make the information as useful as possible, PANGEA is currently building the largest database of biofuels projects and potentials in Africa.

Casamance - Hundreds displaced after clashes

IRIN Africa

ZIGUINCHOR, 4 September 2009 (IRIN) - At least 600 people have fled their homes on the outskirts of Ziguinchor, the main city of Senegal’s Casamance region, after clashes between the Senegalese army and separatist rebels.

On 4 September families were seen streaming out of the Diabir neighbourhood – which is just outside of Ziguinchor proper – toting mattresses, televisions, clothing, suitcases and other belongings on their heads, on bicycles or on donkey-carts. People also fled their homes in nearby Baraf.

Many families walked toward areas of Ziguinchor; they told IRIN they were going to join relatives who live in the city. But as of late afternoon at least 150 people were sitting on luggage or on the ground in an area on the edge of Ziguinchor called Grand Yoff.

“We have nowhere to go,” said one man, standing next to his wife and four young sons.

“Rebels came into Diabir,” he said. “Initially we all hid under beds and did not move. Then eventually we decided to leave because we were afraid something worse was to come.”

Heavy weapon fire could be heard in the centre of Ziguinchor throughout the morning of 4 September. The mortar fire followed an attack by rebels of the separatist Movement for the Democratic Forces of Casamance on an army base.

Into the night on 4 September humanitarian organizations and local authorities were evaluating the situation and determining people’s immediate needs.

“It is yet not clear exactly how many people fled their homes,” said Christina de Bruin, head of UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Ziguinchor and UN area security coordinator. “A rapid estimation is that at least 600 people – 85 households – have left the areas of Diabir and Baraf.”

She added: “For UNICEF protection is the first concern. We need to find out first whether people are safe and whether any children are separated from their families.”

UNICEF’s de Bruin told IRIN the situation appears to have reached a new level of gravity. “For a long time the situation in Casamance has been described as ‘neither war, nor peace’. But things have degraded significantly in the last month and these latest events, sadly, have a direct impact on the population.”

The governor of Ziguinchor on 4 September called an emergency meeting with UN agencies and their partner organizations.

The UN has temporarily suspended movement of staff outside of Ziguinchor.

The incident marks the third time since 21 August rebels have clashed with the army.

Casamance is the site of one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts, sparked when MFDC separatists launched a rebellion in 1982. The region – where agriculture is the main source of local income – is hit by sporadic violence as a definitive settlement has yet to be achieved, five years after the government and rebels signed a peace agreement.

Vast parts of the lush region are not cultivated because of land mines and the recent fighting has many people afraid to return to their fields and so they risk losing what they recently planted.

Sudan's neighbors push for unification of North/South

FP Passport - Elizabeth Dickinson

Another piece of news from today's roundtable with Sudan envoy Scott Gration comes more subtlely, but perhaps just as importantly for anyone watching Sudan. "The neighbors" are pushing for unification when a vote comes in 2011. In other words, they are not keen on an independent Southern Sudan.

Gration says: "In many ways, the neighbors are all pushing for unity because they understand that the instability caused by a fledgling nation that is not ready for independence will have ramifications that spread far and wide across Africa. So countries like Ethiopia and Egypt and others are fearing, to some degree, an independence [vote]."

To recap: the 2005 peace agreement signed between North and South Sudan, ending a decades long war, stipulated that in 2011, the autonomous South would hold a referendum in which it would be allowed to decide whether it would prefer independence or unification. If the vote were to happen today, it's almost certain they would vote to become Africa's newest state.

If only it were that easy. In recent months, tensions have picked up along the border. The South blames the North for stirring up trouble and arming militias. The North blames the South for the same. More importantly, there has yet to be a settlement on the referendum law that will govern the 2011 vote. So it's far from clear that Khartoum is ready to let its Southern half... go.

If the neighbors are reluctant, matters are even more complicated. (Imagine moving into a 7 person townhouse with 6 hostile roommates... multiplied by South Sudan's between 7.9 and 9.5 million people.... and you've got the idea). Reticient neighbors would, uh, complicate the process that Gration already described as seriously daunting: "We're trying to bring about an environment [such] that, in five months, we can help make a country -- a country that will have its own currency, if they choose independence, have embassies around the world, have a central bank, control it's own airspace... there's a lot of work."

Gration promised to push ahead with the referendum law, acknowledging the overwhelming popular support for independence.

Unrelated, one more piece of news from the briefing: queried about the statement by the outgoing peacekeeping chief that the war in Darfur is essentially over, Gration replied that the he agreed, but said the tasks ahead in Darfur were no less daunting: "Even though the war, where the technical answer in terms of military view is that the war is over, the insecurity and the fear associated -- fearing for your life -- is still there."

"

Sierra Leone: Border Dispute - Time for Ecowas to Intervene

allAfrica.com
Lansana Gberie
3 September 2009

Once again, the source of an African conflict can be traced back to unsustainable demarcations of territories arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers and the resulting civil war, argues Lansana Gberie in this week's Pambazuka News.

Drawing on interviews as well as personal experience of the Guinea-Sierra Leone border dispute, Gberie focuses on issues such as how the discovery of diamonds escalated the border conflict and proposes a set of steps needed - mainly through the involvement of ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) - to see the dispute brought to an end.

A necessary and mutually applauded security measure taken by Guinean forces during Sierra Leone's brutal rebel war has escalated into a border dispute which threatens the stability of both states. But while the issue - the Yenga dispute - is often cast in romantic and highly inflammatory terms by Sierra Leonean poets, so-called civil society activists and journalists, the entire story is steeped in bathos. Before the war, Yenga was a tiny impoverished fishing village of fewer than 100 people and 10 old shacks. But it is strategically placed among a system (albeit largely undeveloped) of inter-connected waterways tied to the large Moa river and formed by the convergence of three other rivers emanating from Guinea, the Mellacourie, Fourecaria and Bereira. Much of this area, extending far into northern Sierra Leone and including Rio Pongas and Rio Nunez in Guinea was once known collectively as Mellacourie.

Until its recent notoriety, hardly anyone emerging into Yenga from the humungous grassed and potholed road would take any particular notice; the more important places were Kailahun, Koindu, Bomaru and Sienga on the Sierra Leonean side and Guekecdou and Forecariah on the Guinean side. It was a sleepy fishing hamlet, separated from Guinea by the Moa river. However, this cartographic factor was purely fictive for the people living on both sides of the river: movement from Sierra Leone into Guinea and vice versa was unrestrained by border guards, and people on either side of the river maintained families on both sides.

Believe it or not, this was exactly the vision of the colonial powers, Britain and France, when they demarcated the area between the two competing empires. The new political and geographical reality was only expressed in the two dozen or so beacons planted by the Europeans, over them flying two flags at the close of the 19th century. They rudely separated the Kissy people and even separated families living in the area, forcing them into states they never bargained for. The border demarcation wasn't exactly as perfunctory as the carving out of Uganda, given as a birthday gift to Britain's Queen Victoria by an English adventurer marauding through East Africa, but the logic was the same: there was scant consideration for the Africans living in these places and of course no concern about the future viability of the hastily created states. It is mainly for this reason that Amos Sawyer has made the important suggestion, as of yet not taken up elsewhere, that more concrete steps should be taken towards a political union of all three Mano river basin states (Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia).

So why do people in the poverty-stricken and militarily disabled Sierra Leone and Guinea, who just recently emerged from brutal wars (with Guinea still crippled by political instability) speak about this strip of land as though they want to ignite another violent conflict in the region? There is obviously a need for a serious reality check.

I recently spent a grim afternoon with a very senior (and overfed) Sierra Leonean army officer who told me rather blithely and against all available evidence that all the Sierra Leonean military needed was the order from 'the civilians' and Yenga would be recaptured from the Guineans promptly. And as I write, there is a virtual movement in Sierra Leone quaintly named 'Save Yenga Save Salone', a campaign that has attracted media activists, poets, 'civil society' and some politicians. One such politician, Musa Tamba Sam, belonging to the opposition Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) recently tried to get Yenga debated in parliament, but the effort was wisely rebuffed by the speaker. The issue, the speaker said, was being handled diplomatically by the government. The honourable Sam is from Yenga, born at a time when the village was still part of the Kissi-Teng Chiefdom in Kailuhun District in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone.

The (uncharacteristic) restraint of the Ernest Koroma government on the Yenga issue, which mirrors that of the previous Kabbah's, is admirable. If every serious national issue since Koroma came to power would have been approached the same way, calmly and deliberately, then a lot of the serious errors of judgment - the churlish sacking of civil officials believed to be supporters of the opposition, attacks on opposition infrastructure and many other acts of venality and peevishness that his government has committed - would have been avoided.

The Yenga issue is, as hinted above, the legacy of two searing historical factors: European colonialism and a brutal post-colonial civil war. Surprisingly, both now carry equal resonance. However, for all the right reasons the emphasis should be on the more recent past. For Guinea entered Yenga not as an enemy but as a friend in pursuit of a common enemy, a 'rebel' force of medieval barbarity. Guinea, in fact, has been a very good neighbour of Sierra Leone, on countless occasions coming to the aid of the desperately inept Sierra Leonean army as well as taking up tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans fleeing the depredations of the rebels, as refugees. I will return to this point, but first to the colonial provenance.

Ian Brownlie's 'African Boundaries: A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopaedia', published by Hurst (London) for the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1979, at 1355 pages long is the invaluable guide to the historical basis of African borders. I picked up a copy at Hurst's offices in London recently. The book reproduces a number of documents, including agreements and letters and memoranda from British and French officials which formed the basis of the Sierra Leone-Guinea border. The first was the Anglo-French Convention of 28 June 1882 (preceding the Berlin Conference which officially partitioned the African continent among the Europeans, by two years). The British recognised French claims to Mellacourie (of which, as I noted earlier, Yenga would have formed a part) which now meant French control of the entire Futa Jallon region, the basis of their colony of Guinea. Article 11 of the convention stated that the 'Island of Yelboyah and all islands claimed or possessed by Great Britain on the West Coast of Africa lying to the south ... as far as the southern limit of the ... colony of Sierra Leone' shall henceforth be recognised by France as belonging to Great Britain and the 'Matacong and all islands claimed or possessed by France on the West Coast of Africa to the north ... as far as Rio Nunez' shall be recognised by Great Britain as belonging to France.

This document is rather imprecise when broken down into parts and successive agreements between the two European powers would modify it considerably. In fact, the present border was only firmly agreed on in 1912-13. The original agreement, for example, placed Pamalap and a large part of Kabala District under French jurisdiction. However, pressure from British merchants (the area was lucrative in the groundnut trade) forced the British authorities to renegotiate with the French. Consequently, these places were ceded to the British. Then British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who never visited West Africa, proposed the final adjustments in January 1911. The new agreement defined the Moa or Makona river as the physical boundary dividing the two entities; none of the documents - which are exact about place names and physical conditions ('ruined villages', etc.) - mention Yenga. It almost certainly did not exist at the time. But the final protocol delimiting the boundary is precise: 'the frontier ... follows the thalweg [a line connecting the lowest points of successive cross-sections of a valley] of the River Meli [from Guinea] to its meeting with the Moa, or Makona, on the understanding that the islands marked by Letters A and B on the attached map belong to France and that the island marked C belongs to Great Britain.' The protocol, signed at Pendembu on 1 July 1912, accepted Grey's proposal that within six months of the signing of the agreement 'the natives in the transferred territories shall be permitted to cross the frontier to settle on the other side and to carry with them their portable property and harvested crops.'

Grey had also proposed - and this was accepted - that where 'a river forms the boundary, the populations on both banks shall have equal rights of fishing'. And there's the rub. What if something more valuable than fish, oil or diamonds say, are found in the river? How would this agreement work? The agreement simply said that the use of 'hydraulic power' in the river would only be authorised by agreement between the two states. Furthermore, using a river as a boundary is problematic, since rivers can dry up (there is the greenhouse effect, which no one knew about then) and damming can change the course of any river.

In fact, it all worked well until the recent war in Sierra Leone and with it, the Revolutionary United Front's (RUF) discovery of diamonds in the Moa and subsequent Guinean occupation, initialised by RUF incursions into Guinea. It worked rather too well, in fact. Graham Greene, idling for a day or so at that border area in the early 1930s walked from Kailahun into Guinea (then French Guinea), but of course he does not mention Yenga in his classic travel book of this West African trip, 'Journey without Maps' as almost certainly, he wouldn't have taken notice. The border between the two colonies, Greene wrote, 'is the Moa River, about twice the width of Thames at Westminster'. Then Greene makes a very sapient observation: 'The curious thing about these boundaries, a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no Customs, no barriers to wandering tribesmen, is that they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping out of a canoe one was in a different country. Even nature had changed; instead of forest ... a narrow path ran straight forward for mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass.'

I recently visited the area. The lush rainforest on the Sierra Leonean side that so impressed Greene has been largely denuded by unrestrained logging activity, generally no husbandry, etc. One now sees the same humungous or elephant grass that Greene saw on the Guinean side harassing the tiny motor road leading to Yenga. Guinean troops are now firmly in control and recently forced a Sierra Leone political contingent to disarm its security before entering the place.

A bad sign, but in fact it was not always like that. The problem began in September 2000 when the RUF attacked a number of Guinean border towns south of the capital, Conakry. The area had become home to tens of thousands of Sierra Leonean refugees fleeing attacks on civilians inside Sierra Leone, part of the RUF's 10-year campaign of terror and destruction in that country. Not long afterwards, the RUF attacked Guinean towns and villages in the 'Parrot's Beak' area of the country, emerging from Sierra Leone and from points along the Liberian border. Here they caused much greater destruction and dislocation, driving Guineans out of their homes along with as many as 75,000 Sierra Leonean refugees who had been living on the Guinean side of the border for several years.

The RUF attacks attracted little attention, except as a humanitarian footnote to the more notorious conflict in Sierra Leone. I spent two weeks in Guinea at the time researching a report for Partnership Africa Canada and I reported then that Guineans themselves appeared to be confused. Following rebel attacks on Forecariah, less than 100km from the capital Conakry and home to tens of thousands of refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia, in early September 2000 the Guinean President Lansana Conté broadcast an inflammatory statement on state radio and television. He blamed the incursions on the refugees, provoking widespread attacks by Guinean police, soldiers and civilian militias on the already traumatised refugees.

The attacks on Forecariah, by RUF rebels operating from Kabala, a Sierra Leonean town close to the Guinean border, were diversionary and the rebels withdrew without much resistance after Guinean forces counter-attacked. However, better planned and more coordinated incursions were soon to follow. In January 2001 the RUF moved from Sierra Leone, along with Charles Taylor's forces into the diamond-rich areas around Macenta (in the so-called Forest Region), Madina Oula (near Kindia) and the important trading city of Guéckedou, which like Forecariah, was home to tens of thousands of refugees. The attacks on Macenta and the destruction of Guéckedou alerted Guineans to the seriousness of the crisis. The attacks quickly spread, threatening to engulf the districts around Bonankoro.

Then finally Guinea responded proportionately. With crucial help from the United States (which maintained an annual C-JET training program with the Guinean army) and France, Guinea acquired some armoured helicopters and some old MiG fighter bombers which were used to pound rebel bases in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. Guinea also helped to train over 1,000 Donsos (the Kono name for Kamajors or the Civil Defence Forces) made up of Konos and Kissis from the Yenga area and Kono District, all along the Guinea-Sierra Leone border, deploying them against the RUF. I saw about a thousand of them during my visit and also saw British officers who had an open-ended military commitment to Sierra Leone, helping to train the Guineans and the Donsu militia. Guinea routed the RUF, helping to accelerate the disarmament process in Sierra Leone; in effect, Guinea defeated the RUF. It then occupied the Sierra Leonean side of the border, including Yenga.

After the war ended, Kabbah negotiated the withdrawal of most of the Guinean forces but renegade officers, now engaged in lucrative mining at Yenga, refused to move and the ailing Guinean leader was simply a hostage of the military. An agreement was signed on 15 November 2002, months after the war officially ended by Sierra Leone's internal affairs minister the late Hinga Norman and his Guinean counterpart, El-Haj Moussa Solano, affirming the colonial-era border agreement. But the agreement was not conclusive, it called for the setting-up of a committee to work towards a resolution that would restore Yenga to Sierra Leone but assure Guinean border security - a very legitimate issue obviously. But the talks have become open-ended and there is no assurance that Yenga will be restored to Sierra Leone soon, or perhaps ever at the current pace.

Personally, I see little problem with the Guinean presence at Yenga, but clearly it is a volatile issue, what with the attempt to politicise it. But all loose talk about reclaiming the village by force should be discouraged. Inflammatory steps by some NGOs like World Vision's (a notoriously vulgar group which is in the habit of showing poor and sick black and brown kids on TV to raise money) which a couple of years ago claimed that it was prevented from building a school at Yenga by Guinean troops, should be firmly suppressed. Many of the impoverished villages on both sides of the border do not have functioning schools, so why pick on beleaguered Yenga?

The flamboyant Sierra Leonean Defence Minister Paolo Conteh has been quoted saying that there is no point in negotiating with the Guinean junta since it has not been recognised by either the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) or the African Union (AU). He has a point, though it is utterly impolitic of him to have gone public with such a statement; street corner talk has its place, but it should be allowed in the Defence Ministry or State House.

While President Koroma can make his very loud votaries and supporters feel good by declaring that Sierra Leone and Guinea are sister countries who are working together to resolve the Yenga issue without resort to international mediating bodies, the overheated rhetoric elsewhere is not reassuring. I think it is time that ECOWAS takes tentative steps to engage both nations on the issue. There is a clear early warning signal here...

Lansana Gberie is a Sierra Leonean academic and journalist.

Solana Calls for Sudan's Unity, Not South Sudan's Independence.

Solana Calls for Sudan's Unity, Not South Sudan's Independence.
European Union (EU)’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana said today in favor of unity of Sudan as opposed to the establishment to an independent state in southern Sudan.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) stipulates that a referendum is to be held in 2011 by which Southern Sudanese will vote to decide on whether they want to have their own state or remain part of united Sudan.

The possible separation of southern Sudan is seen as possible source of troubles and instability in Sudan and the region by some Western and regional countries.

The shaky implementation of the CPA is leading many diplomats to view a need to postpone the referendum and seek to ensure some interdependence between two entities in the country.

However, the southern Sudan ruling party said it rejects any delay and considers referendum 2011 as read line.

'It is very important to have that country united,' Solana told reporters in Cairo after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Arab League chief Amr Moussa.

'I do look at the map, I do look at the distribution of resources, I do look at the situation... I am for the unity of the country,' he further said.

Last June the EU organized a meeting in Paris on the future of Sudan where some 40 experts took part.

The participants agreed on the need to promote dialogue between north and south Sudan to avoid war between the two parties.

Southern Sudan oil was seen limited and would not ensure a financial sustainability for a future state. Also the exploitation of oil reserves implies cooperation with the north as the south has no pipelines or refineries and the construction of such infrastructure need money and time.

Furthermore the southern heavy crude was seen as difficult to transport though the mountainous region of east Africa.

The US special envoy to Sudan Scott Gration is exerting efforts to facilitate an advancing implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in order to avoid political vacuum between the signatories.

The International experts also expressed fears over the negative impact of southern Sudan independence on Darfur the three areas and eastern Sudan.

On the other hand some experts consider southern Sudan independence as a sole solution for the conflict and supported separation insisting the Islamist regime in Khartoum would not implement the needed arrangements to make coexistence possible between the two parts of the country.

Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) issued a strong rebuke to statements made by Solana today.

Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, head of Southern Sudan’s mission to the United States told Voice of America (VOA) that Solana’s statement was ill-advised.

'The statement is not in line with the CPA spirit because in the CPA one of the options is united Sudan and another option is separation of the south to be an independent state. So, yes all of us have agreed that we are going to make unity attractive to the southerners so that they can vote for unity in 2011. But if the unity is not attractive to them at all, then they also have another option, which is separation,' Gatkuoth said.

'It will not be wise for one person or individual to say that this is the only option that the people of Southern Sudan should explore… we want to say to the EU that in the CPA there are two options,' he said.

AMISOM’s Five Challenges

Center for Strategic and International Studies
By Paul D. Williams

In January 2007, the African Union launched its fourth peacekeeping operation, the AU mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Now approximately two and a half years old, AMISOM’s short life has not been a happy one. It was deployed to Mogadishu essentially in support of the Ethiopian government’s preferred faction in Somalia’s ongoing civil war. Not surprisingly, and like the three UN-authorized peace operations deployed to Somalia during the early 1990s, AMISOM faced serious challenges which severely restricted its ability to operate. In January 2009 the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces, the election of Somalia’s new transitional government led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and the arrival of Barrack Obama’s administration in the United States renewed the debate over how AMISOM should relate to the new Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and how the mission might be brought to an end.

This article reflects upon AMISOM’s five main challenges: the legacy of the “Black Hawk Down” episode of October 1993; the shadow of Ethiopia’s military campaign; the African Union’s capacity problems; the conflict environment in Mogadishu; and finding an appropriate exit strategy. It concludes that AMISOM was an ill-conceived mission which attracted few serious political champions. The predictable results were a dangerously under-resourced operation that placed several thousand peacekeepers in harm’s way for morally and politically dubious reasons.

The Legacy of Black Hawk Down

All contemporary discussions of peacekeeping in Somalia are colored by the events of October 3-4, 1993, and the images of a violent country awash with arms that they left behind. The deaths of American soldiers not only sparked the Clinton administration’s retreat from UN peacekeeping (codified in Presidential Decision Directive 25) but also acted as a major warning against putting boots on the ground in African war zones. Second, the subsequent U.S. disengagement from Somalia left Ethiopia as the central plank in Washington’s regional policy in the Horn. Third, when U.S. troops did return to the Horn, it was primarily to conduct counter-terrorism operations initially after the 1998 embassy bombings and then in the aftermath of 9/11. U.S. policy thus looked at Somali and regional politics through the narrow and distorting prism of counterterrorism.

The Shadow of Ethiopia’s Intervention

Established during Ethiopia’s attempt to forcibly install the TFG in Mogadishu, AMISOM was born into a war zone. Ethiopia’s 2006 campaign was the latest in a long series of military incursions aimed at degrading Islamist bases in Somalia, initially focused on al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, and more recently elements within the coalition of local Shari’a courts known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). The main sticking point was that the regime Ethiopia was trying to install was deeply unpopular with many Somalis and once installed, made little effort to build its political legitimacy or reach out to its opponents. AMISOM was thus mandated to support a weak, divided, and (in the view of many Somalis) illegitimate government which was widely seen as being one faction in the country’s ongoing civil war. It didn’t help that the TFG was unable to control many of its security forces and demonstrated virtually no capacity to govern effectively.

There was also considerable skepticism within the African Union about the legitimacy and effectiveness of Ethiopia’s actions and the wisdom of deploying into a violent, chaotic vacuum with no apparent peace strategy. As a direct consequence, few African countries contributed troops to AMISOM. It was also widely noted that Ethiopia’s representative in the Peace and Security Council’s (PSC) had ignored the internal procedures when AMISOM was established – specifically Article 8.9 of the PSC Protocol (2002) states that a PSC Member ‘which is party to a conflict under consideration ... shall not participate either in the discussion or the decision making process relating to that conflict or situation.’

AMISOM was seen in Somalia as being a tool of Western interests because of Washington’s support for Ethiopia’s campaign and because of a strong diplomatic push by the Bush administration to get African states to contribute troops to the mission. Many Somalis were outraged that the United States had openly dismissed the UIC’s achievements during 2006 and acted as if the courts were dominated by terrorists, did not condemn abuses committed by Ethiopian troops against Somali civilians, provided intelligence support to Ethiopia during its operations, and engaged in airstrikes on Somali soil.

The African Union’s Lack of Capabilities

The AU’s short record of peacekeeping provided little evidence to suggest that it would be able to find, deploy, manage or pay the 8,000 troops authorized to form AMISOM. Sure enough, the AU struggled to secure promises of just over 60 percent of the authorized troops. In practice, approximately 1,600 Ugandan troops were the sum total of AMISOM until December 2007 when a company of 100 Burundian soldiers arrived. By April 2009 AMISOM had around 4,300 troops from Uganda and Burundi. Nor could the AU pay for its own peacekeeping mission. Instead, it relied on funds from the U.S., UN, the European Union and several other states. Deploying them also proved impossible without Western assistance and when they were deployed they lacked crucial pieces of equipment and materiel (after mid-2008 these needs were partly fulfilled by scavenging assets from the defunct UN Mission in Ethiopia-Eritrea, UNMEE).

These predictable shortfalls confirm the findings of a joint UN-AU panel on peacekeeping (the so-called “Prodi Report”), which concluded that, “It is simply undesirable to expect peacekeeping missions to deploy into uncertain situations without the necessary means. It is a recipe for failure. We are deluding ourselves if we believe that having something on the ground is better than doing nothing. In the absence of the necessary capabilities, such an approach brings a high level of risk, not only of failure but also of raising expectations of the people that cannot be fulfilled. Worse still, it undermines the credibility of peacekeeping and weakens the organisation that is responsible.” (para.16). These are sensible warnings and there is little evidence to suggest that these concerns will disappear any time soon.

The Conflict Environment

Instead of bringing peace and stability to Somalia, the installation of the TFG in Mogadishu brought about a significant deterioration in the security situation and a renewed phase of warfare. In this context, arguably AMISOM’s most fundamental challenge was how to act as a peacekeeping operation when there was no peace to keep.

Although the UIC’s forces were initially routed from Mogadishu in late December 2006, elements soon reorganized and attacked Ethiopian and TFG soldiers as well as AMISOM peacekeepers. The most deadly element was the youth militia al-Shabaab, which by late November 2008 was estimated by the AU to be around 2,000-strong and to operate in cells and units of about 300-400 militias. On 22 February 2009, al-Shabaab coordinated the most deadly single attack on AMISOM, which killed 11 Burundian peacekeepers and injured another 28. On April 16, 2009, the UN Secretary-General noted that insurgent attacks against AMISOM were “becoming more sophisticated, coordinated and lethal.”

The ongoing conflict produced an escalating spiral of violence, not least because Ethiopian, TFG, and later AMISOM forces were often heavy handed in responding to these attacks. The resulting collateral damage among the civilian population produced a huge wave of displacement (in 2007, 400,000 of Mogadishu’s population of approximately 1.3 million fled the city) and generated intense levels of anti-Ethiopian and also anti-American feeling.

For AMISOM, this environment meant two main things. First, it was largely dependent on Ethiopian forces to do the lion’s share of security-related activities. Second, its personnel faced significant restrictions on their ability to operate. Indeed, AMISOM was largely restricted to helping to keep open Mogadishu’s air and sea ports, and helping to protect the TFG’s president and prime minister. These tasks also meant that AMISOM had to guard the Kilometer-4 intersection that linked the airport and the presidential palace. Controlling these sites was also essential for maintaining supplies and a potential escape route.

Unfortunately, AMISOM did not always respond to this environment in an appropriate manner, particularly as the peacekeepers themselves become the target of attacks. Most seriously, its troops engaged in the indiscriminate use of force which left many civilians dead or wounded. It was not until April 2009 that AMISOM explicitly recognized this problem and changed tactics: it would only return fire when its soldiers could visually identify their attackers, and would only use weapons that allowed for discriminate fire.

Finding an Exit

AMISOM’s final challenge is figuring out how to leave. This became particularly important in early 2009 after the Ethiopian withdrawal and the election of the new transitional President, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Within Somalia opinion has been divided: some see AMISOM playing a necessary role in supporting the new TFG and Sheikh Sharif’s outreach efforts, others, including the new Prime Minister, recommended that AMISOM should depart within 120 days.

Within the AU, the weight of opinion was clearly to hand over the mission to the UN; the sooner the better. But in the UN Security Council there were good reasons to be cautious. In November 2007, for instance, Ban Ki-moon had said that deploying UN peacekeepers to Somalia was ‘neither realistic nor viable’. A year later, however, the Bush administration pushed for a UN peacekeeping operation for Somalia. It soon discovered that there was no appetite for such a force among European and African powers. The furthest it got was resolution 1863 (16 January 2009) which expressed the Security Council’s “intent” to establish a UN peacekeeping operation “as a follow-on force to AMISOM, subject to a further decision of the Security Council by June 1, 2009” (para.4). With Barrack Obama’s arrival in the White House, however, the U.S. government began to adopt a more cautious stance.

In his April 16, 2009, report on the modalities of such a transition, Ban Ki-Moon set out four options intended to help achieve the UN’s strategic objective in Somalia. The “high-risk” Option A, envisaged replacing AMISOM with a 22,500 strong UN peacekeeping operation with a Chapter VII mandate. The “pragmatic” Option B was for the UN to devise a support package for AMISOM until the Somali National Security Force could secure Mogadishu on its own. The “prudent” Option C was Option B plus a UN Political Office for Somalia and a UN Support Office for AMISOM within Mogadishu. Option D, “Engagement with no international security presence,” was intended to serve as a contingency plan in case of an AMISOM withdrawal (either intentional or forced).

The Secretary-General has advocated an “incremental” approach, divided into three phases: Phase 1 would entail adopting Option B; during Phase 2, Option C would be practiced; and during Phase 3, it would be appropriate to enact Option A. Option D would remain the contingency plan in case of AMISOM withdrawal. It remains to be seen whether this plan will be adopted and, if so, whether it will work.

Conclusion

It is difficult to conclude that AMISOM has made a large contribution to peace and security in Mogadishu during its 30 months. While its personnel did engage in some humanitarian activities and protection of key infrastructure, these have to be balanced against the popular outrage against instances of indiscriminate force, the loss of over 20 peacekeepers, and the obvious limitations in a hot-conflict of an underequipped deployment of some 4,000 troops. When a greater degree of stability did return to Mogadishu in early 2009 this was not because of AMISOM but rather a combination of the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces and the wider diplomatic activity that resulted in Sheikh Ahmed’s election and his subsequent ability to engage a wide range of parties and enact shari’a law. Violence has flared again in recent weeks, and neither Somalis nor the world’s governments should look to the AU forces to quell it. Whether AMISOM has a future in Mogadishu is thus primarily a question for the new government, the UN Security Council, and the AU to answer. Whether AMISOM should have been deployed at all is a question analysts should debate.
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Paul D. Williams is Associate Professor of International Affairs and Associate Director of the Security Policy Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.

No Simple Narrative in Somalia Drama

Center for Strategic and International Studies

By Michael Weinstein

As the coalition of Western donor powers, the United Nations, the African Union, and regional African states, such as Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda and Burundi, see it, the narrative of Somalia’s contemporary political history pits the country’s new and expanded Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against an armed “insurgency” composed of “spoilers,” “extremists,” or “terrorists” operating under the banner of “radical Islamism.”

Just a cursory reading of that narrative shows that it has nothing to do with an objective political analysis of the most complex and complicated conflict in the world today, but is a piece of propaganda—a good guys vs. bad guys drama straight out of a Hollywood B movie—that would awaken contemptuous amusement were it not for the fact that the parties promoting it appear to believe it themselves and to formulate their policies and strategies in its terms.

It is to be expected, of course, that the coalition’s rhetoric would be tendentious. Its members were the ones who contrived the new TFG or found it in their interests to support it, and, as a consequence, want to believe that it will be able eventually to succeed in governing Somalia, which has been effectively stateless since 1991, and to convince others to share that belief.

Nonetheless, the narrative is a sheer expression of baseless hope that is meant to pass for a plausible projection.

As opposed to the coalition’s simplistic narrative, the political situation in Somalia is so complex, convoluted and fragmented that it is impossible to draw any grounded conclusions about how it will mutate. The myriad interests constituting the country’s power configuration include the divided factions within the TFG, the factions of the armed Islamist opposition, Islamists outside the armed opposition with their own militias, clan families, sub-clans, regional power centers, micro-political interests at the local level, legitimate and criminal business interests, the semi-autonomous sub-state of Puntland, the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, Ethiopia pursuing its own agenda apart from the coalition, and Eritrea seeking to blunt Ethiopia and the coalition. On the ground, some of these factions and interests form alliances with each other and then fall out, interests overlap and cross-cut, and uncertainty and distrust proliferate. Both the weak TFG and the coalition of “stakeholders” are not driving the situation, but are enmeshed in it like all the others.

Attempting to describe accurately the power vectors operative in Somalia, simply at the present moment, would involve writing a long book that would be outdated by events before it came into print. Such a study might discern some underlying patterns, but there is no one who will undertake the thankless task, so one is left with the option of criticizing ideological narratives.

The back story of the new TFG begins with a policy shift in late 2007 by the Western donor powers, which bankroll the transitional institutions, to move from support of the TFG to pressuring it to accept a power-sharing agreement with the conciliatory faction of the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS-D), which is dominated by Islamists and led by the new TFG’s president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad. The shift was made because it had become apparent to the donor powers that an Ethiopian military occupation of Somalia, which was mounted in late 2006 in order to suppress an Islamic revolution in the country, had failed abysmally, as remnants of the Islamic courts regrouped, initiated an insurgency, and became powerful enough to take and hold substantial swathes of territory.

With the primary interest of the donor powers being to block the emergence of Islamist control over south and central Somalia that might eventuate in safe havens for internationalist Islamic revolutionaries, their policy shift represented a concession to the realities on the ground. Whereas they had earlier stood fast against negotiations with the Islamist opposition, they now sought to “isolate” the “extremists” within it by co-opting the conciliatory faction and forcing it on the clan-based TFG.

Through a series of negotiations in Djibouti in the second half of 2008, the donor powers—spearheaded by the U.N.’s special representative to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah—engineered an agreement in which the transitional parliament was doubled in size to 550 members, allowing Sheikh Sharif to bring in 200 of his loyalists as a bloc, insuring that he would be elected to the presidency by the new parliament. As part of the deal, Sheikh Sharif was given an extension of the TFG’s term for two years from August 2009 and had to concede to choosing the members of his bloc according to the TFG’s clan representation system, and to naming a secularist prime minister, Omar Abdisrashid Sharmarke. Sheikh Sharif quickly made sure that Sharmarke named two ARS-D loyalists to run the Internal Security and Interior ministries, and a teacher without military experience to preside over the Defense ministry.

By jamming a predominantly Islamist faction into a clan-based government, the donor-led coalition appears to believe that it has created a “national unity government,” where in fact it has concocted an improbable hybrid that is engineered to fail.

There is no love lost between Sheikh Sharif and the donor powers; he represents their fall-back position and he knows that, so he will strive to continue his power play and try to take control of the TFG’s institutions and build a machine. Yet he has very little leeway—his Islamist base has organized and is pressuring him to alter the TFG’s constitution and institute Shari’a law throughout Somalia, and the coalition is exerting counter-pressure on him to govern “inclusively” and maintain the secular constitution. Meanwhile, the armed Islamist opposition groups, which control most of the southern regions of Somalia and are active in its central regions and its capital Mogadishu, have declared that they do not recognize the new TFG and will continue to oppose it militarily. In their counter-narrative to the coalition’s story, Sheikh Sharif has been bought off by a Washington-led conspiracy against Islam and has become its cat’s paw—another B-movie script with no more and no less plausibility.

Add to the tensions within the TFG, the conflicting pressures on Sheikh Sharif from his base and his “partners,” and the armed opposition’s confrontational stance, Ethiopia’s support for and training of warlord militias from Somalia that are dedicated to taking back their regions from the Islamists and are not loyal to the new TFG, and one begins to understand the complexity of the present power configuration, which will not succumb to any simple narrative.

The account above only scratches the surface, and Sheikh Sharif realizes that. In a revealing interview with IRIN, he said that the TFG is “broke and broken,” and that it was too early to tell whether the donor powers would give him sufficient support to achieve security and offer at least some hope for improvement in the lives of Somalis. The Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous diplomatic source who said that although the donors would support the new TFG, “we are not going to suddenly open a spigot that wasn’t previously opened.”

Somalia is not living in a cowboy movie in which the peace-loving people, led by their valiant sheriffs, face off against the “spoilers,” but encounters a looming and many-sided civil conflict that might descend into civil war. One could waste one’s breath hectoring the donor powers over their lack of resolve, their hypocrisy, and their obsessions with piracy and terrorism that afflict them with tunnel vision and spin them into political fantasy, but they are simply pursuing their own perceived interests at the expense of other actors.

The point is that whether or not they know that, the other actors do and will devise their strategies accordingly.

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Michael Weinstein is a professor with Purdue University’s Department of Political Science.

Former Chief UN Rwanda Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte: “Obama War Crimes Ambassador Complicit in War Crimes Cover-up.”--Does Obama Know? or Care?

Former Chief UN Rwanda Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte: “Obama War Crimes Ambassador Complicit in War Crimes Cover-up.”--Does Obama Know? or Care?
by Prof. Peter Erlinder

In mid-July, the NY Times reported that the Obama administration had selected Stephen Rapp to replace Pierre Prosper, the Bush administration’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes. A former Iowa U.S. Attorney, and Democrat politico, Rapp began his international career at the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001, while Carla Del Ponte was Chief Prosecutor. In Del Ponte’s 2008 memoir, Madam Prosecutor: Confronting Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, translated into English in early 2009, Del Ponte explains how she was removed from her ICTR position in 2003 by U.S. Ambassador Prosper himself, because she refused to cooperate with a U.S.-initiated “cover-up” of war crimes committed by the current Rwandan government during the 1994 “Rwandan Genocide.”

According to Del Ponte, the ICTR Prosecutor had the evidence long before 2003 to prosecute Kagame for “touching-off” the Rwanda Genocide by ordering the assassination of Rwanda’s sitting President Juvenal Habyarimana. Her book also details dozens of massacre sites involving thousands of victims for which the Kagame government and military should be prosecuted. The well-publicized canard, that “the identity of the assassins is unknown” is a bald-faced lie, known to all ICTR senior prosecutors, according to Ms. Del Ponte.

Two years after Del Ponte was removed from office, Rapp became “Chief” of ICTR Prosecutions with access to all of the evidence known to Ms. Del Ponte, and more. During his four years at the ICTR, Rapp also was in a position to prosecute Kagame and members of the current government of Rwanda, but, to this date, not ONE member of Kagame’s military has been prosecuted at the ICTR … and the “cover-up” continues to this day. Unlike, Ms. Del Ponte, Mr. Rapp was rewarded with an appointment as Chief Prosecutor at the U.S.-funded Sierra Leone Tribunal and, now, with a coveted ambassadorship.

Former Chief ICTR Prosecutor Del Ponte Details ICTR “Cover-up”

According to Del Ponte, in May 2003 she was called to Washington D.C. by Prosper (ironically, also a former ICTR prosecutor with knowledge of Kagame’s crimes) who informed her that the U.S. would remove her from her UN post if she carried through with her publicly announced plans to indict Kagame and members of his government and military. According to Del Ponte, when she refused to knuckle-under because “she worked for the UN, not for the U.S,” Prosper told her her ICTR career was over. True to his threat, by October, Del Ponte was replaced by a US-approved ICTR prosecutor, Hassan Abubacar Jallow. Stephen Rapp was elevated to Chief of Prosecution by Jallow two years later.

ICTR Trials: More Evidence of Rwanda Crimes Cover-Up

Del Ponte’s revelations are not the only evidence that a U.S. initiated “ICTR cover-up” is creating impunity for crimes committed by Kagame and his military. Memos from September 10, 1994, in evidence in the ICTR Military-1 Trial, confirm that U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was informed that Kagame’s troops were killing “10,000 civilians a month” in military-style, according to an investigation funded by USAID. And, in early 1997, Chief ICTR Investigative Prosecutor and former Australian Crown Prosecutor Michael Hourigan; former FBI Agent James Lyons; and former UN-Chief of Military Intelligence in Rwanda, Amadou Deme: all reported to Ms. Del Ponte’s predecessor, Louise Arbour, that Kagame should be prosecuted for assassinating the previous president. Arbour scuttled the investigation, suppressed the report and disbanded the investigative team. Shortly thereafter, Arbour was elevated to Canada’s Supreme Court and has recently been chosen to head the International Crisis Group, after an illustrious UN career.

Former ICTR Prosecutor Rapp Complicit in Cover-up

But, even though Arbour suppressed the “Hourigan Report” it must have been known to Ms. Del Ponte, Mr. Rapp and other ICTR prosecutors, because ICTR judges had ordered the ICTR Prosecutor to release the “Hourigan report” which had already been released to a defense team as early as 2000, a year before Rapp began his ICTR work, and two years before Del Ponte was fired by Prosper.

Like Del Ponte, when Rapp became the ICTR Chief of Prosecutions under Jallow in 2005, he had access to all of the information necessary to prosecute Kagame and main figures in his military and government. But to date, not one indictment has been issued against Kagame by the ICTR Prosecutor.

Kagame & Co. Already Indicted in France and Spain

Athough the U.S. has been successful in preventing Kagame’s crew from being indicted at the ICTR, other courts have indicted Kagame and members of his retinue. In late 2007, French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière indicted the assassins of Habyarimana and recommended that Kagame be prosecuted by the ICTR. And, in February 2008, Spanish Judge Fernando Merelles issued a 180-page indictment specifically charging Kagame with Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, including the massacres of more than 300,000 civilians. And Mr. Rapp’s former boss, Mr. Jallow, publicly admitted before the UN Security Council in spring 2008 that Kagame’s military is responsible for the assassination of Rwanda’s Catholic leadership in 1994. But still no ICTR prosecutions.

The Consequences of the ICTR Cover-up of Kagame’s Crimes

The tragic consequence of the failure to prosecute Kagame at the ICTR, from 1994 to-date, is that Kagame was free to invade Congo in 1996 and 1998, and is currently occupying a part of eastern Congo 14-times larger than Rwanda. No less than four UN Security Counsel-commissioned Panel of Experts Report(s) on the Illegal Exploitation of the DR Congo (2001, 2002, 2003 and December 2008) have detailed the massive rape of the Congo’s resources that has brought vast riches to Kagame and his inner circle. Since the first invasion in 1996, Kagame’s Congo invasions have been responsible for more than 5-million deaths, more every few months than the total alleged to have died in Darfur, crimes for which Sudanese President Bashir, a figure disfavored by the U.S., has been indicted by the ICC.

While Rapp was ICTR Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions, Kagame was effectively elected President-for-Life with 95% of the vote, after banning opposition parties and jailing opponents, in “a climate of intimidation” according to EU observers. According to the Economist report on the 10th Anniversary of the “genocide” in 2004:

“[Kagame] tolerates no serious domestic opposition, nor much in the way of free speech. Rwanda today is a thinly-disguised autocracy, where dissidents are usually accused of genocidal tendencies, live in fear, or exile, or both. The regime is a threat to its neighbors.

ICTR Chief of Prosecutions Rapp Personally Withheld Exculpatory Evidence from Defense Counsel and ICTR Judges

As if this wasn’t enough, in February 2009, the ICTR issued its Judgement in the Military-1 case, the main case at the ICTR, in which Mr. Rapp personally appeared for the Prosecution. Although massive violence did occur in Rwanda, the court certainly recognized that blaming only one side WAS a falsehood, when it acquitted all of the “architects of the killing machine” (as Mr. Rapp called the defendants in court) of conspiracy or planning to kill civilians. The highest ranking military-officer was acquitted of all charges.

And, although it is now clear from Ms. Del Ponte’s memoirs that Mr. Rapp had the evidence that would clear the defendants of the assassination charges and that both sides had committed crimes, for which the losing side has been blamed entirely. Simply put, Mr. Rapp and other ICTR prosecutors have: withheld evidence at the ICTR that would be beneficial to the defense; prosecuted defendants for crimes they knew were committed by Kagame and the RPF; and created a system of “judicial impunity” that has permitted Kagame to kill millions in the eastern Congo.

All of which raises the uncomfortable question regarding President Obama’s nomination of Mr. Rapp: Are his advisors ignorant of the public record regarding Rapp’s complicity in an ICTR Cover-up? … or does Obama just not give a damn?

Prof. Peter Erlinder
Wm. Mitchell College of Law
St. Paul, MN 55105

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Lieberman to make first trip to Africa by Israel FM in 20 years

Haaretz
2 September 2009

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will depart Wednesday on a visit to Africa in a bid to boost trade ties and drum up diplomatic support in a continent where pro-Arab sentiment has long been strong.

Lieberman's visit will be the first by an Israeli foreign minister to Africa in 20 years. An Israeli business delegation, along with delegates from the Foreign, Finance and Defense Ministries will accompany him on visits to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana.

'The aim is to reinvigorate our political and economic relations,' said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for Lieberman.

African nations often vote in blocs in United Nations forums where Israel is a frequent target of censure. Israel is trying to enlist support for international pressure on Iran to abandon its disputed nuclear program.

Lieberman last month toured Latin America, another region that had not been high on Israel's diplomatic agenda.

'Israel has been absent for many years from many areas of the world,' Lieberman said, 'After my visit to South America, I was convinced of the importance of these kinds of visits and the contribution they bring in relations between the countries.'

The Foreign Ministry stated that the issue of Iran will be discussed in light of Iran's effort to become a presence in Africa.

Liberman's trip will start in Addis Ababba where he will meet with Ethiopia's president and foreign minister and attend an economic seminar in conjunction with economic ministers from the Ethiopian government.

He will also help inaugurate a joint project between Israel, Ethiopia and the United States, which will strive to support farmers and agriculture in Ethiopia.

Lieberman will then visit Uganda on Thursday where he will meet the president and foreign minister. While in Entebbe, he will participate in a memorial ceremony commemorating Operation Entebbe, a hostage rescue operation in 1967 where 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed.

Namibian Govt, India Sign Diamond, Uranium Deals

The Namibian
1 September 2009
By Jo-MarÉ Duddy

Agreements paving the way for Namibia to share in India's US$30 billion nuclear industry, as well as their world-class diamond polishing sector, were signed between President Hifikepunye Pohamba and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi yesterday.

An agreement on co-operation in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and a memorandum of understanding on geology and mineral resources are the first steps towards selling uranium and diamonds to India.

It also ensures a training institute for diamond processing in Windhoek, Mines and Energy Minister Erkki Nghimtina told The Namibian from India yesterday.

Nghimtina, part of the 43-member presidential delegation, said Namibia can export uranium oxide to India now that the country is no longer subject to the embargo on international nuclear trade.

However, that does not mean that India will receive special favours and be allowed to join the hunt for uranium locally, he said. 'The moratorium on granting exclusive prospecting licences (EPLs) for uranium is something completely different,' Nghimtina said.

Reports in the Indian media suggest differently, though.

According to The Economic Times, 'sources said that discussions on uranium mining and supplies have been ongoing with Namibia for some time now', and the MoU 'will give India the opportunity to tap Namibia's rich mining sector'. 'This includes the chance to get exclusive prospecting rights and the possibility of joint ventures in the sector,' The Economic Times reported yesterday.

India's nuclear market is expected to grow to US$150 billion in the next 30 years. Media reports also suggest that the MoU has secured an additional market for Namibia's rough diamonds, a statement which, according to Nghimtina, 'is not 100 per cent true'.

'India and Namibia are on the verge of signing a MoU that will give India access to Namibia's diamond riches. Such an agreement will give India direct access to diamonds, decreasing its dependency on major producers,' a report on the website of the International Diamond Exchange (Idex) said yesterday morning.

Namibia recently took the unusual step to bypass the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) and sell a significant chunk of Namdeb's stockpile to Diamonds India Limited (DIL) to relieve the local diamond giant's cash flow problem.

The Economic Times referred to the deal, hailing Nghimtina for his 'bold initiative', and said the consortium of 58 leading diamond and jewellery manufacturers 'is in continuous need of rough diamonds for their processing factories, even during recession'.

'Currently, DIL, to fulfil its continuous demand of diamonds, is willing to enter into contracts to purchase rough diamonds on continuous basis and sometime in large quantities,' The Economic Times said, adding that DIL will set up the training institute for diamond processing in Namibia.

The collapse of Namdeb's traditional markets at the end of last year due to the global financial storm has brought the company to its knees. The latest information showed that diamond production from January to June fell by more than 60 per cent compared to the first six months of last year.

The spill-over effect of its financial woes is one of the main reasons that Namibia has hit a recession, analysts said. Although Namdeb's diamonds are sold to the DTC, Government has left a back door open in the Diamond Act of 1999.

Section 58 gives the Mines and Energy Ministry the right to force producers like Namdeb to channel their rough diamonds to local processing plants, while Section 59 allows Government to sell up to ten per cent of a producer's rough diamond directly to the market.

'It's not all about Namdeb,' Nghimtina told The Namibian. There are other diamond mines in the country, like Samicor, that can deal directly with India. Besides diamonds and uranium, defence issues are high on the presidential agenda too.

Pohamba and Manmohan also signed a memorandum of understanding on defence cooperation yesterday.

The Economic Times contacted Namibia's High Commissioner to India, Martin Kapewasha, for more detail on the agreement. He was only willing to confirm that 'defence deals' would be discussed.

India and Namibia furthermore signed a bilateral agreement regarding communication, as well as an MoU related to exemption from visa requirements for diplomatic and official passport holders.

Ethiopian troops move to another Somali town.

Sudan Tribune
1 September 2009

Ethiopian troops have moved toward another town in western part of Somalia after they successfully dislodged the Islamist insurgents from Beledweyne where they entered on Saturday.

Ethiopian army for the first time since January returned to Beledweyn, a town near the Ethiopian border, after the fighters of Al-Shebab group had taken control of some parts the town on August 20.

Hundreds of Ethiopian troops in heavily armoured vehicles left Beledweyne, the capital of western region of Hiraan heading to Bulobarde town in the same region.

The militants had resisted an attack by the government forces last week on Bulobarde. Their attack on Beledweyn was in retaliation for an offensive by pro-government fighters on their strongholds.

Pro-government fighters recently launched a raid against Al-Shabaab, which alongside the more political Hizb Al-Islam control several town in the region since the pullout of the Ethiopian army from western Somalia.

Last June, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Ethiopia could send troops to Somalia if the situation there deteriorates. His statement came after call by Somalia’s speaker on neighboring countries and international community to intervene militarily in Somalia to prop up the UN backed transitional federal government.

The Ethiopian Communications Minister, Bereket Simon at the time, claimed Ethiopia would only intervene militarily in Somali to support the besieged transitional government if it has a clear international mandate.

However, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, claimed his opposition to the intervention of Ethiopian troops in the neighboring Somalia. Such intervention could be 'counterproductive' to the Somali government, he said. Adding he fears that this would increase the popularity of the insurgency.