18 January 2010
Senegal and Haiti
By Gwynne Dyer
Is it megalomania or just a political stunt? Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade may not even know the answer himself, but his offer to let quake-stricken Haitians resettle in his West African country certainly qualifies as the most flamboyant response to the tragedy in Haiti.
“The repeated calamities that befall Haiti prompt me to propose a radical solution: to take measures to create, somewhere in Africa, the conditions for Haitians to return,” the 83-year-old Senegalese president said on Saturday. “They did not choose to go to that island. It is our duty to recognise their right to come back to the land of their ancestors.”
Well, some of their ancestors, anyway. The slave populations of all the Caribbean islands were deliberately drawn from different parts of the west African coast, so that they would speak a variety of languages and find it harder to rebel. But the vocabulary of Haitian Creole suggests that there were many Wolof-speakers (the most widely used indigenous language in Senegal) among the slaves of Haiti.
Educated Haitians also speak French, of course, as do educated Senegalese, so it’s not as though Turkey or Sri Lanka were to offer a new home to Haitians. But it is nevertheless mighty peculiar: just where does Abdoulaye Wade propose to put them all?
He does sound serious about his offer, and he says that large numbers would be welcome. His spokesman, Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye, explained that “The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region.”
Now, it’s true that 90 percent of Haitians would leap at the chance to leave their country, the poorest in all the Americas, but the destination they have in mind is Miami or Montreal. Senegal is one of the best-run and most democratic countries of Africa (though both qualities have been badly damaged during the ten-year rule of Abdoulaye Wade), but it does not feature prominently on Haitian wish-lists.
It is also true that most Senegalese feel that their country is quite full enough without a large influx of Haitians. There are fourteen million people in Senegal, and the population is still growing fast. There are ten million people in Haiti, and its population is growing fast too. Moving a million Haitians to Senegal would relieve the intolerable pressure on Haiti’s badly degraded land for less than a decade – and it would cause chaos in Senegal.
“If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” said the president’s spokesman, adding that it would be in a fertile part of the country rather than in its parched deserts. But there is no fertile region of Senegal that is not already fully populated by people whose families have lived there for many generations. Where is the president planning to put them?
So yes, it is a stunt, not a real offer, and what gives the game away is the fact that Senegal is offering “voluntary repatriation” to Haitians, not assisted passage. They are welcome to come to Senegal if they can find the money for the airline tickets – but how many Haitians can do that?
Abdoulaye Wade is big on stunts and dramatic gestures. His last one, now nearing completion, is an enormous bronze statue overlooking the capital, Dakar, that is higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour. It is called the African Renaissance Monument, but it is being built by North Koreans. It actually looks like one of those Socialist Realist groupings of statuary, all windswept hair and eyes fixed confidently on the future, that littered the old Soviet Union. Only bigger.
Maybe he should build one overlooking Port-au-Prince too. It would be about as much use to Haitians as his offer of new homes for them in Senegal. Abdoulaye Wade is showing more and more signs of the “Big Man” syndrome that has wrecked so many African countries that once had quite functional governments. From Sudan to Zimbabwe and from Sierra Leone to Somalia, we have watched them fall into tyranny and chaos. Senegal may be next.
And what of Haiti? As hard as you might look for signs of hope amid the ruins, you will not find any. The earthquake is a dramatic interlude of natural disaster in a long history of tragedy whose sources were mostly human. What has devastated Haiti is politics, much of it imposed from outside by foreign governments: the French in the 19th century, the United States in the 20th and 21st. No honest and competent Haitian government has ever survived more than a couple of years.
The denuded land, the runaway population growth, the unskilled and illiterate population, the universal corruption: all these are due to failures of policy, not to some fundamental flaw in the character of Haitian people. But by now there have been generations of despair and neglect, and it is getting harder and harder to see how Haitians might turn it all around. No wonder most of them want to leave. But most of them never will.
_________________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 10 and 11. (“Abdoulaye…next”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
29 December 2009
2009 Year-Ender
By Gwynne Dyer
The year 2009 was most notable for the three bad things that didn’t happen. Firstly, the financial melt-down of late 2008 did not plunge us all into a 1930s-style depression, although there were plenty of pundits predicting that less than a year ago.
As Stephen Schwarzman, head of the private equity company Blackstone Group, said last March: “Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little more than a year and a half.” But all he was really saying was that a very specific kind of financial bubble has burst. All the land and houses are still there, and so are most of the factories and jobs.
There has certainly been a deep recession in the developed countries, and the current slow recovery may be a false dawn: a “double-dip” recession is still entirely possible. Moreover, the vast amounts of money spent by Western governments to save the banks has left them with a staggering burden of debt. But the worst has been avoided, and in the developing countries there was scarcely even a recession.
The second predicted disaster that did not come to pass was a killer global pandemic like the 1918 strain of influenza. Something of that order is probably still lying in wait for us down the road, but the swine flu turned out to be much less lethal than was initially feared. Considerable credit should go to those who made a vaccine available much faster than was thought possible, but basically we just got lucky.
And the third bad thing that didn’t happen? The same bad thing that hasn’t happened every year since 2001. There was no mass loss of life (by which I mean more than a thousand people murdered in a single incident) due to terrorist action in any Western country.
Even a relatively large death toll like that should not be a reason for any government to go berserk and start invading foreign countries. A thousand people is a lot to lose, but it really isn’t the end of the world. A thousand people die of natural and accidental causes in the United States (to pick a country not entirely at random) about every three hours. Terrorism is different, of course, but a rational and measured response is still required.
You know very well that it would be neither rational nor measured. Although an over-reaction is precisely what the terrorists are seeking to provoke, domestic political realities in the target country still make it likely that the response would be hugely stupid and violent. So we go from year to year waiting for the terrorists to succeed again on the scale of 9/11, knowing that Western countries will go crazy again if they do. But it didn’t happen in 2009.
What did finally happen at the beginning of 2009 was the long-overdue departure of the Bush administration. Almost everybody outside the United States, and many people within it, were profoundly relieved by that, but it imposed a huge burden of expectation on the shoulders of his successor as president, Barack Obama.
It has been a difficult first year for Obama, who presumably expected to have both his healthcare reforms and a climate change bill through Congress by now. His problems with Afghanistan, however, are largely of his own making.
Calling Afghanistan the “good war” (in contrast to Iraq) during the election campaign was a useful tactic to deflect accusations that he was too peace-loving, but now he’s stuck with it. He has already ordered a doubling of US troop numbers in Afghanistan, and he is now on a very slippery slope. This war is unwinnable, and it could destroy him politically.
In the meantime, Obama does small but useful things that do not require Congressional assent, like cancelling the Bush plan to put a missile defence system into eastern Europe. Or at least that do not need Congressional assent in advance, like a new and better Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia (although that is still being negotiated). He even tried to launch a new Middle East peace initiative, although that was doomed from the start.
The Middle East, with only a tenth of the world’s people, continued to generate more than its fair share of the news. The Israeli punishment attacks on the Gaza Strip that began on 27 December, 2008 continued through most of January, leaving over 1,300 Palestinians dead. More than half of them, according to all estimates except the Israeli military’s own, were civilians. Israeli fatalities from all causes, including friendly fire, were thirteen.
The Israeli election in February delivered Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader who had buried the Oslo accords in the late 1990s, back into the prime minister’s office, and any remaining hope for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal evaporated. Netanyahu is politically dependent on right-wing Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, and would be most unlikely to compromise on their demands even if he were personally so inclined (which he is not).
So the twenty-five-year dream of a “two-state” solution gradually fades, and the prospect of a third intifada grows. It didn’t happen this year, and it probably won’t happen next year either. But the Israeli military occupation has entered its fifth decade, and another generation of Palestinians is growing up so full of rage that they will confront Israeli power despite the obvious fact that they cannot win.
At the other end of the Middle East, Iran was hardly ever out of the news in 2009. The old question of whether or not it is seeking nuclear weapons stayed high on the international agenda, but it was overtaken by the new question of whether the present leadership could stay in power. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s implausibly high level of voter support in the June election ignited protests that have shaken the regime’s hold on power.
If it is a revolution, it’s a very slow-motion one: the protesters are not out on the streets every day, or even every month. Most of them do not even want to overthrow the Islamic system; just to reform it. But they keep coming out, most recently just this week, and they are not deterred by mass arrests and systematic rape of detainees, nor by Revolutionary Guards shooting to kill in the streets.
This is the way that the Shah was overthrown: by slow degrees, over a period of many months. It may not end the same way this time, but it looks like the same pattern – and the best thing everybody else can do is not to meddle. Iranian protesters do not need foreign support, and they certainly do not need foreign trade sanctions to be applied right now, because that makes them look like foreigners’ puppets.
In Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emerged as a genuine strongman, centralising power in his own office, staffed by his own party and clan. In Afghanistan another American nominee, President Hamid Karzai, embarrassed his patrons by rigging his re-election last August too blatantly, but they had to accept him in the end. And in Fantasyland-on-the-Gulf, aka Dubai, they could not make interest payments on some $50 billion in loans until Abu Dhabi bailed them out.
Europe had a quieter year (as it generally does). Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany swept back into a second term in September with a “dream coalition” that freed her from having to compromise with the left. France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people’s patterns of energy use. The tax is seventeen euros (US$24) per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had a miserable year, being accused (probably correctly) of consorting with minors and with high-class prostitutes, sued for divorce by his wife, and struck in the face by a model of Milan cathedral. More seriously, an Italian court struck down the umpteenth law he had pushed through parliament to allow him to escape prosecution for corruption. But he would win another election today. Italian voters are very tolerant, or something.
At one extremity of Europe, Northern Ireland was threatened with a slide back into chronic violence, as radical Catholic groups who reject the IRA’s commitment to power-sharing tried to lure the Protestants and the British army back into the fight by committing random acts of terrorism. At the continent’s other extremity, the Georgian government was found guilty of starting last year’s war with Russia by an investigating commission of the European Union
The EU as a whole finally ratified the Treaty of Lisbon, which streamlines the operation of the organisation to cope with a membership that has now expanded to 27 countries. It took eight years, two Irish referendums (they got the answer wrong the first time), and some face-saving concessions to the Czech president to get it through. The EU, it would appear, is still not ready for prime time.
The principal political events in Asia were the Indian election in May, which gave the ruling Congress Party a resounding vote of confidence, and the August election in Japan, which brought the opposition Democratic party to power after 52 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. But there was almost no connection between these two elections in anybody’s mind: Asia is still little more than a geographical expression.
Elsewhere in Asia, the most important military events were the Sri Lankan government’s decisive victory over the Tamil Tiger insurgency in May, which brought a 26-year civil war to an end, and the North Korean nuclear weapons test in the same month. The North Korean regime was mainly using the test as a way to blackmail the major powers into guaranteeing its future, and those powers are playing along as usual. They have no choice.
Thailand is caught up in a deepening struggle between the poor majority and the old royalist anti-democratic elites, incarnated in the recurrent street clashes between the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts. In Burma, pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, though still under house arrest, has supported efforts by the United States to open up channels of communication with the military junta. A military mutiny was successfully put down in Bangladesh in February.
In Pakistan in December, an amnesty for corruption charges that had protected hundreds of politicians including Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari was overruled by the Supreme Court, and the country was plunged into fresh political turmoil. The Maldives held a full cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear to dramatise the threat posed to the low-lying island country by rising sea levels. The Nepalese cabinet, not to be outdone, held a meeting on the slopes of Mount Everest to dramatise the threat posed to the country by melting glaciers.
China’s emergence as a world player continued, with attention focussed in particular on its expanding investments in Africa. The ex-imperial powers saw this as neo-imperialism, but the ex-colonies themselves mostly took a different view. They understood that China was trying to secure long-term supplies of food, fuel and minerals for a future in which it believed that all those commodities would be scarcer, but at least the Chinese paid well and didn’t subject their suppliers to hypocritical lectures on human rights.
A blow-by-blow list of all the things that went wrong in Africa in 2009 is depressing: a military massacre in Guinea, a coup in Madagascar, blood-drenched anarchy in Somalia, mini-wars between the police and extreme religious sects in northern Nigeria, and much more in the same vein. But it feels less hopeless if you recall that most of Africa’s 52 countries are at peace – and that African economies have been growing at an average of five percent a year since 2000, compared to only one percent in the previous decades since independence.
Much the same observation applies, in a minor key, to Latin America. What little news makes it out of the continent tends to be bad: the brutal war between the state and the drug cartels in Mexico, the alleged threat of war between Venezuela and Colombia, the messy sort-of-coup in Honduras, and so on. But most of the region is at peace, more or less democratic, and even making progress economically. Which may explain why it exports so little news.
Finally, Copenhagen. The vast, 192-country conference on climate change in December was a total failure in terms of its declared objectives. There is no new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord. Even modest Kyoto-style national targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions were omitted from the vague declaration that was cobbled together by the two biggest emitters, the United States and China, on the last day. Neither are there any deadlines for further action.
“The Chinese hate numbers,” as one participant put it – and the United States was quite happy to let China get the blame for killing a deal that Washington couldn’t have delivered on either. The problem is that nobody really knows where we go from here, and time is running short. If there is one thing that 2009 is remembered for, it may be for the historic failure at Copenhagen.
____________________________________
This article is 2200 words. It’s written in modular form, for the most part, and you’re free to cut it wherever you want. If you need to write something to bridge the gap where you cut, just do it. Experience has taught me that people’s news priorities in different parts of the world are so different that it makes no sense for me to try to do the job.
11 December 2009
The West African Curse
By Gwynne Dyer
There have been political horrors in other parts of Africa, like the genocidal former regime in Rwanda, the current regime in Zimbabwe, or any Congolese regime you care to name. But the worst regimes in Africa seem to arise along the stretch of tropical coastline between Ghana and Senegal.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast have all lived through nightmarish civil wars after long-ruling dictators died or were killed and junior officers seized power. Gambia has been ruled for the past fifteen years by a former army lieutenant who now imports witch doctors from Guinea to hunt down the witches who he believes are trying to kill him. And now Guinea has fallen into the hands of the junior officers.
It’s the classic pattern. For fifty years after independence, from 1958 to 2008, Guinea was ruled by just two “big men”: Sekou Toure for 26 years and then Lansana Conte for another 24. They and their cronies stole all the money, of course, while over 90 percent of the mineral-rich country’s 10 million people continued to live on less than a dollar a day. But at least they lived in a relatively safe and orderly poverty.
Then Lansana Conte died late last year – and within hours a group of young officers broke into the main television station to announce that they were taking over the country. Their leader was an army captain called Moussa “Dadis” Camara, who promised to hold free and fair elections by 2010. He also promised that he would not to run for the presidency himself.
Sensible promises, because before 2008 nobody except his own family and his junior officer friends had ever heard of “Dadis” (as he calls himself). He has no experience or qualifications relevant to running a government. But a presidential palace is a nicer place to live in than a barracks, and the pay and perks are much better, too. The experience kind of grows on you, and eventually you ask yourself: why leave?
If a general had taken power after Lansana Conte’s death, he might have kept a promise to hand power over to a democratically elected civilian president, for generals already have comfortable houses, limos and lots of stolen money. However, generals usually don’t have direct command of troops.
That’s why it’s so often the junior officers who seize power in Africa: they have the troops, and they are not much constrained by traditional ideas of military discipline. They seize power because it’s the only way to change their own lives for the better – and they generally start to quarrel among themselves after a while, because they have already broken all the traditional bonds of hierarchy and discipline.
Guinea has now moved on to the next stage of the process. “Dadis” began talking about running for president himself last August. “I have been taken hostage by the people, a part of the people, with some saying that President Dadis cannot be a candidate and others saying President Dadis has to be a candidate,” he told Radio France Internationale in an interview. In a burst of frankness, he added that if he did not stand for election, another military officer would take over the country.
At that stage, Dadis probably had still had the backing of the other young officers. They were doing very nicely too. Why would they complain so long as the supply of girls, drink and drugs kept flowing? But then the civilians got involved.
Various political groups that had opposed Lansana Conte for years now saw democracy being stolen from them again. They held a rally in Conakry’s sports stadium in late September to protest against Dadis’s presidential plans. Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakite, another member of the military junta and the head of the presidential guard, was sent to deal with them.
He did so by massacring them. His soldiers slaughtered 157 people and raped dozens of women inside the stadium. Twenty women were kidnapped and videotaped for several days while they were being raped and tortured. It is possible that “Toumba” exceeded his instructions. The reaction certainly exceeded his expectations.
The junta denied it all, but the evidence was overwhelming. The African Union, the United States, the European Union, and the West African economic group Ecowas all imposed sanctions on the junta, with Ecowas president Mohamed Ibn Chambas saying bluntly that Guinea’s military rulers were using state power “to repress the population….If the military junta has its way it will impose yet another dictatorship on them”
The United Nations sent a mission to investigate the massacre, raising the possibility that the International Criminal Court might bring charges against junta members for crimes against humanity. So Dadis apparently concluded that it was time to throw Toumba to the wolves.
On 4 December, Dadis went to the barracks where Toumba’s troops are based in Conakry. It was not a wise move, because Toumba shot him in the head and went on the run. Dadis was flown to Morocco for emergency surgery, and the remaining junta members chose “General” Sekouba Konate to act as front man in his absence.
If things run true to form, the final step in this tragedy will be for Toumba to start an insurgency in the interior, plunging the country into a long and horrible civil war of the kind that has ruined several of its neighbours. This part of Africa seems cursed.
____________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 12. (“If a general…discipline”; and “The junta…them”).
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
17 November 2009
Sex and Violence in Africa
By Gwynne Dyer
It was ostensibly about obscenity, but it was really about corruption and censorship – and in the end, justice prevailed. On Monday a Zambian court found journalist Chansa Kabwela not guilty of “distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals.” What obscene material? She had sent photographs of a woman giving birth in a hospital parking lot during a nurses’ strike to senior government officials.
President Rupiah Banda called a press conference and declared the photographs “pornographic.” Soon after, Kabwela was arrested on obscenity charges. She faced a five-year jail sentence if she were found guilty – but Banda’s real motive was probably the fact that the paper Kabwela works for, the Post, constantly accuses him of corruption.
The Post is probably right. Banda succeeded Levy Mwanawasa, a president of unquestioned integrity, after the latter died of a stroke last year. But unlike Mwanawasa, he has failed to pursue the previous president, Frederick Chiluba, a monumentally corrupt man who has been ordered by a British court to repay Zambia $55 million that he had stolen.
Banda has not tried to collect the $55 million from Chiluba, and has stopped any further action against him in Zambia’s courts. An unsympathetic observer might wonder if some of Chiluba’s stolen millions have bought Banda’s complicity. The Post wonders that out loud, so Banda went after its news editor, Chansa Kabwela.
The pictures Kabwela sent out were not pornographic. Rather, they were horrific: images of a woman in the midst of a breech birth, the baby’s legs dangling out between her own while its head was still inside her. It all happened in a hospital parking lot (she had already been turned away from two clinics), but nobody would help her because of the strike, and the baby suffocated.
Her appalled and furious relatives brought pictures of the scene to the Post. Kabwela did not publish them because they were so upsetting, but she sent copies to senior officials together with a letter urging them to intervene and settle the strike. That’s when Banda declared the images pornographic and had her arrested.
The courts are still independent in Zambia, and in the end Kabwela was found not guilty – but many of the witnesses were genuinely more shocked by photographs of a woman naked from the waist down than by the horror of what was actually happening. As one witness said: “We are all Zambians here. We all know this is not allowed in our culture.”
The word you’re looking for is “prudish,” and it applies to a lot of African popular culture. Never mind what’s actually happening. We don’t want to hear about it, and we certainly don’t want to see it. The Zambian elite has been devastated by HIV/Aids – the higher the social class, the worse the death rate – and yet nobody wants to talk about sex, let alone about the links between sex, power and violence.
Go a thousand kilometres (miles) south to South Africa, and the gulf between appearances and reality is even wider. Last June the country’s Medical Research Council published a study about rape and HIV which reported that 28 percent of South African men admitted to having raped a woman or a girl. (A further 3 percent said that they had raped a man or boy.)
Almost half the rapists said they had raped more than one person, and three-quarters of them said they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20. They didn’t use condoms, and they were twice as likely to be HIV-positive than non-rapists. This is a national calamity that is killing more people than a middle-sized war, and causing a huge amount of pain and grief. Yet few South Africans are even willing to talk about it.
Many Africans will be feeling very defensive at this point, but a lot of this reminds me of where I grew up. There was an amazing amount of low-level violence around – you saw it literally every day – and there was also a huge amount of sexual predation. In the boys’ school I went to, the male teachers molested the boarders on an industrial scale, although day-boys like me were fairly safe. And none of it was ever admitted or discussed in public.
Now I live in a culture where we are no longer prudes. Everything is out in the open, including trivialised, commercialised sex on a hundred channels. Around half of all marriages end in divorce, but gays, once persecuted and forced to hide, can also get married if they want to. You can still mugged in the street, but the level of casual violence – usually men beating up on women or kids – is sharply down. I bet that the real figures for rape are down a lot too.
I like the transformed culture I live in now a lot better – and it occurs to me that what we are seeing in Africa now may be as transitional as what I grew up with in Newfoundland. In which case the moral and cultural changes that socially conservative Africans see as a descent into darkness may actually be a move towards the light.
__________________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3 and 4. (“The Post…Kabwela”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.