Africa News blog

from Global News Journal:

UN tells Mbeki he got it wrong on Ivory Coast

• UN peacekeeper in Ivory Coast in April 2011. REUTERS/Thierry Gouegnon

This week U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, defended the United Nations' record on Ivory Coast.  In a highly unusual public rebuttal, Nambiar told former South African President and African Union mediator for the Ivory Coast conflict, Thabo Mbeki, that it was he -- not the international community -- who got it wrong in the world's top cocoa producer.

In April, Ivory Coast's long-time President Laurent Gbagbo was ousted from power by forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara, who won the second round of a U.N.-certified election in November 2010, with the aid of French and U.N. troops. According to Mbeki -- who has also attempted to mediate in conflicts in Sudan and Zimbabwe -- there never should have been an election last fall in the country that was once the economic powerhouse of West Africa.

Mbeki wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy magazine at the end of April: "The objective reality is that the Ivorian presidential elections should not have been held when they were held. It was perfectly foreseeable that they would further entrench the very conflict it was suggested they would end."

Ivory Coast was split in two by the 2002-3 civil war and the failure to disarm the northern rebels meant the country held an election last year with two rival armies in place, leading to a new outbreak of hostilities when Gbagbo rejected the internationally-accepted election results.

The solution to the conflict, Mbeki wrote, was not to insist that Ouattara take office as president, as the United Nations, France and others did at the time, but a political solution that would have satisfied everybody in the francophone nation. "The African Union understood that a lasting solution of the Ivorian crisis necessitated a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ivorian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity."

The United Nations took nearly four months to come up with a public response to Mbeki. It finally appeared this week in an article in Foreign Policy by Nambiar entitled "Dear President Mbeki: The United Nations Helped Save the Ivory Coast." In his rebuttal, Nambiar vehemently rejects the idea that that the world should have pushed Ouattara to negotiate a power-sharing deal with election-loser Gbagbo.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t

Darfur’s joint U.N.-African Union peacekeepers face a dilemma in Darfur which could shape the future of the world’s largest U.N.-funded force.

After violence left five people dead in the highly volatile Kalma Camp, six refugees sought sanctuary in the UNAMID force’s police base there. They are thought to be rebel sympathisers and the government accuses them of instigating the camp clashes, demanding that UNAMID hand them over.

Kalma, just outside Darfur’s largest town Nyala, has long been a problem for the Khartoum government, whose offices in the camp were burned down by angry refugees. Rebel supporters in the camp have obtained arms and there have been clashes with government police in the area.

Now if the six are responsible for the violence, which was between refugees who support rebel leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur and those who took part in peace talks which Nur rejects, then it is Sudan’s right to try them in a court of law.

However the government is headed by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for presiding over genocide and war crimes against these same Darfuris, which is why they are in the refugee camps in the first place.

Repeated reports during the seven-year conflict of the torture of Darfuri detainees give a pretty good indication that they are unlikely to get a fair trial if UNAMID hands them over.

So what to do?

Why is the world ignoring Somalia?

I’m blogging from the African Union’s annual summit in Addis Ababa and can see the Somali delegation from where I’m sitting. They’re mingling right now, cups of coffee and croissants in hand, pressing the flesh and smiling and joking with leaders and ministers from all over the continent and beyond. Delegates are responding warmly to the men who represent a government hemmed into only a few streets of the capital Mogadishu as they fight an increasingly vicious Islamist rebellion.

But you get the sense the other delegates are responding so warmly to compensate for something: The fact that the Somalis are here looking for help and nobody is really willing to stick their neck out and give it to them.

Somalia’s strife — as well as the conflicts in Sudan and DR Congo — have dominated the agenda at these summits for years now. But there’s something different about this year. The African delegates seem confused – really genuinely confused – about why the international community is dragging its heels.

When Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero — a guest at the summit – stood up on the opening day he made some of the most dramatic remarks any world leader has made on the Horn of Africa country.

“If we do not support the transitional government more, Somalia could become a place that could destroy humanity,” he said. “The proper response is a strong response from the international community, led by the U.N. Somalia is suffering.”

Strong stuff, but Zapatero didn’t offer any real help. African leaders will have taken heart, though, from the fact that he seemed to be pushing the UN to send in peacekeepers — something the African Union, with its beleaguered force of 5,000 under constant attack in Mogadishu, has been crying out for.

 After Zapatero, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon took the podium.

A slick visit to Darfur’s red carpet camps

There was a time when visits to Darfur were uncertain affairs, fraught with danger. These days — as long as you travel with the right people and stick strictly to the right route — they can be as comfortable as a coach trip.

The African Union delegation plane touched down in El Fasher, North Darfur’s capital, at 9.35 a.m. on Tuesday. We were on the bus heading back to the airstrip at 4.40 p.m.

In between, the members of the African Union’s peace and security council visited the governor’s walled-in compound, where ambassadors watched tribal dancing and a PowerPoint presentation (complete with CD-ROM handout).

The next stop was the heavily secured UNAMID peacekeeping headquarters. Next, a razor-wired police station, 200 metres outside a displacement camp, where around 40 residents had been waiting for two hours to talk to the delegates.

Forty-five minutes later, the 18-vehicle convoy of buses, 4x4s and armed escorts drove slowly through Abu Shouk camp. Then there was one final stop at the governor’s to eat dinner and admire his collection of gazelle and exotic birds. The AU ambassadors and women in the party received souvenir mats.

Darfur has got used to hosting visitors in the six years since it became one of the world’s best known conflict zones.

North Darfur’s governor Osman Kebir told Tuesday’s trip he had welcomed about 800 delegations since July 2006 which would make about one a day, without adjustment for understandable overstatement.

Congo: Step forward or back to the past?

Rwanda sent hundreds of its soldiers into eastern Congo on Tuesday in what the neighbours have described as a joint operation against Hutu rebels who have been at the heart of 15 years of conflict. Details are still somewhat sketchy, with Rwanda saying its soldiers are under Congolese command but Kinshasa saying Kigali’s men have come as observers.

Evidence on the ground suggests something more serious. United Nations peacekeepers and diplomats have said up to 2,000 Rwandan soldiers crossed into Congo. A Reuters reporter saw hundreds of heavily armed troops wearing Rwandan flag patches moving into Congo north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. The world’s largest U.N. peacekeeping mission is, for now, being kept out of the loop.

Foreign soldiers in Congo are nothing new. Rwanda first invaded in 1996. A 1998-2003 war in Congo sucked in six neighbouring armies. But after years of diplomacy and billions of dollars spent on peacekeeping and Congo’s 2006 elections, analysts are frantically trying to work out what is going on.

The current joint operation stems from an agreement signed in December between Rwanda and Congo to cooperate more closely after weeks of heavy fighting in North Kivu province. Although the fighting was officially between Congolese government forces and Tutsi rebels, most analysts saw it as an escalation of a proxy war between Rwanda and Congo that has continued despite 2003 peace deals.

U.N. experts have accused Rwanda of supporting the Tutsi CNDP rebels, formed in 2004 out of previous Rwandan-backed movements that fought against the government in Kinshasa. As on many occasions in the past, Congo was, in turn, accused of arming and using Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels to boost the effectiveness of its fragile and chaotic army.

The fighting underlined the weakness of President Joseph Kabila’s army, which looted and raped civilians as they fled the CNDP. But it also refocused attention on the Hutu rebels, many of whom crossed into Congo when they were routed after taking part in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and have long since been used by both Rwandan and Congolese Tutsi forces as justification for military operations in the mineral-rich east.

Rwanda and Congo have frequently agreed to resolve the FDLR problem. With talk of normalising relations, does Tuesday’s intervention by the Rwandan army mark the first concrete step in new a new relationship between the two countries?

Which way will Somalia go?

The withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia has left a nation beset by conflict for nearly two decades at a crossroads.

Ethiopia invaded to oust Islamists from the capital, but insurgents still control much of southern Somalia and more hardline groups that worry Washington have flourished during the two-year intervention.

The United Nations is unlikely to send peacekeepers to replace the Ethiopians. Africa is struggling to send more troops to help the 3,500 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi protecting key sites in the capital.

Some analysts say sending an international force would be counterproductive anyway as it would simply replace the Ethiopians as the hated foreign invader and maintain support for the most militant insurgents.

But without more African peacekeepers deploying soon, it seems unlikely the small and largely ineffectual existing force will remain with a weak mandate to face attacks from insurgents.

While a power vacuum may result in even more violence, some Western diplomats in the region hope it will spur the feuding Islamist opposition groups to settle their differences and work towards forming a broad-based, inclusive government.

They also hope the departure of the Ethiopians will deflate the insurgency and marginalise hardline groups imposing a strict version of Islamic law traditionally shunned by many Somalis.

from Global News Journal:

What should the world do about Somalia?

Islamist militants imposing a strict form of Islamic law are knocking on the doors of Somalia's capital, the country's president fears his government could collapse -- and now pirates have seized a super-tanker laden with crude oil heading to the United States from Saudi Arabia.

Chaos, conflict and humanitarian crises in Somalia are hardly new. It's a poor, dry nation where a million people live as refugees and 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Islamist-led insurgency of the last two years. A fledgling peace process looks fragile. Any hopes an international peacekeeping force will soon come to the rescue of a country that has become the epitome of anarchic violence are optimistic, at best.

But besides causing instability in the Horn of Africa, the turmoil onshore is spilling into the busy waters of the Gulf of Aden. The European Union and NATO have beefed up patrols of this key trade route linking Asia to Europe via the Suez Canal as more and more ships fall prey to piracy. Attacks off the coast of east Africa also threaten vital food aid deliveries to Somalia.

As insurance premiums for ships rocket and carriers start taking the long route from Asia to Europe around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid attack, the cost of manufactured goods and commodities such as oil is likely to rise -- all at a time of global economic uncertainty and looming recession in major industrialised countries.

What hope for Somalia?

Fighting in Mogadishu. Kidnaps of foreign aid workers. Hijacks by pirates. Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The news from Somalia seems to be relentlessly negative, writes Reuters Somalia correspondent Guled Mohamed. So it has been for the best part of 17 years since warlords overran the country in 1991 to usher in the modern period of chaos in this part of the Horn of Africa.

African Union peacekeepers have been unable to stem the violence; peace initiatives come and go with little impact; and the 14th attempt to restore central government is struggling as the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government finds itself up against a resilient insurgent movement including former members of the Islamic Courts Union that briefly held Mogadishu for six months in 2006.

However, tales of hope, entrepreneurship and solidarity abound among Somalia’s 9 million people.

How do you think Somalis can move forward? Can the diaspora wield its economic power to help? Has Ethiopia’s military intervention helped or hindered? Do the Islamic Courts represent the people as their fighters say? How can the world help, or should it just stay out and let Somalis sort things out themselves?

Have your say …