the liberia question

The few American Africa-watchers who hadn't already left their posts for the 4th of July holiday on Friday were all abuzz over the news that Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had apparently been banned from holding public office for thirty years by the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC organization was tasked with exposing crimes committed during the country's 2+ decades of on-again, off-again civil war. Johnson Sirleaf, who supported Charles Taylor against Samuel Doe in the 1980's, and then the LURD against Taylor in the 1990's, was apparently therefore considered to have committed war crimes because of her support for Taylor. Not expressing regret over those actions was apparently enough to land her on the list of politicians banned from holding future office in Liberia.

Or that's how it was initially. Since the report's release last Tuesday (and the firestorm of criticism that followed), the TRC retracted its report. What will happen next seems by all accounts to be completely unclear.

What does all this mean? As Chris Blattman points out, for one thing, it serves as a good lesson for Westerners that there are very few angels or demons in politics everywhere, including African countries. (As he also notes, how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would purport to enforce the ban is far from clear.) It is almost always more complicated than it seems.

Glenna Gordon at Scarlett Lion has a great piece that explains what happened and why in much greater detail. Can any readers with Liberia expertise enlighten us further?

hey, baby

Unfortunately, this is the best quality audio I could find for this song. Happy 4th, everybody.

outstanding

From The Guardian via Chris Blattman, possibly the best Africa policy blunder ever:

"It probably seemed a good idea at the time. But Russia's attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz."

really helpful

Here's a great list of resources on the rape crisis in the Congo, including this one on locally-driven responses to the situation. Thanks to Michael Kleinman over at Humanitarian Relief for compiling it.

this & that

• My friend Melissa is running an institute called the Global Feminist Theologies Project in Kenya at the moment. The project involves feminist theologians and theology students from Kenya and the U.S. They are defying every stereotype out there about Christianity in Africa and the role of women in African societies. Check out their blog here.
• Bet Kibaki & Odinga didn't plan for this: here's evidence that the experience of political violence makes women sex workers more likely to engage in high-risk behavior. And higher risk behavior will likely translate to an increase in the HIV seropositive rate down the line. (HT: Chris Blattman)
  
• My friend Jonny has some really interesting thoughts on the Israeli settlements issue. He argues that they should not be an obstacle to negotiations.
• Here's an interesting reflection on measuring state failure from someone who clearly doesn't know much about academic definitions of state failure. He makes a good point, however, in noting that North Korea shouldn't be ranked on a "state failure" metric. The problem in North Korea is that the state is too strong. I prefer to stick with the "Are they still bottling Coca-Cola and beer?" metric. It's parsimonious and generally accurate.
  
• Les sapeurs put on a fashion show in Joburg.
  

what to do in the congo

The 49th anniversary of Congo's independence passed largely without incident, unless of course you consider the deaths of the 1200 men, women, and children who died yesterday (as 1200 people do every day) to be an "incident." We still don't know where Nkunda is (beyond that he's certainly living in luxury somewhere in Rwanda), nor do we know whether the Rwandans will ever admit that they have no intentions of returning him to the Congo or sending him to the Hague to face prosecution for his crimes.

Rape in the Congo is back in the news. A focus group survey of 236 women and girls in IDP camps in the Kivus revealed that almost 50% of them either had been raped or had a close friend or relative who had been raped. (The fact that they are in IDP camps certainly skews the results a bit, but the truth is that the insecurity in the camps and that in the countryside isn't terribly different.) We also have even more depressing news about rapes that occurred during an attempted prison break in Goma. And Eve Ensler is pitching a fit in the WaPo about the world not paying attention to UN Security Council Resolution 1820 with respect to Congolese women.

Bless her heart. Ensler seems to be under the impression that Security Council resolutions are normally worth more than the paper on which they're printed. Resolution 1820 specifically calls for the UN and its member states to respond to the use of rape as a weapon of war. A year after its passage, the rape crisis in the DRC is still as bad as ever. What's Ensler's solution?

"Resolution 1820 must be enforced with seriousness by the Security Council and the secretary general. Arrests need to be made immediately of known rapists and war criminals at the highest levels. The United Nations must stop supporting military actions, because they are doomed in Congo. And the root economic causes of the war need to be addressed with the leaders of countries in Africa's Great Lakes region who commit violence to reap benefits from Congo's minerals, as well as their Western corporate partners. They, too, are liable for these atrocities."

All of these things sound good on the surface. But none of them will solve the problem. That's because the root of the rape crisis isn't an economic problem, nor is it a crisis of leadership. And it has very little to do with what the UN is or isn't doing. The basic problem in the eastern Congo is a crisis of governance and the failure of any government or rebel force to take full control of territory. All of the warring parties (and the peacekeeping force) are too weak to do so. Therefore the territory languishes in a semi-anarchic state, with some areas under the firm control of local authorities and others under none.

The unfortunate truth is much harder to digest. Rape happens in the eastern Congo because it can. It turns out that when all mechanisms of social control break down and there are no consequences beyond a guilty consciece, young men with weapons and the promise of impunity will behave like animals. Cutting the supply chains to the coltan mines or convincing American consumers to stop buying iPhones will not change this fact. Nor will arresting and convicting people like Bosco Ntaganda, who certainly deserves it. There will always be another Nkunda, another Ntaganda to take their places. Nor will the enforcement of vaguely worded UN resolutions.

The only way to end the crisis in the DR Congo - and to allow its women and girls to live in peace and health - is to settle the governance problem once and for all. As we discuss regularly on this blog, doing so is an almost impossible task. But here are a few steps that would be more realistic and might even be more likely to lead to lasting change:

• I actually agree with Ensler that MONUC should stop "supporting" the FARDC's missions. In reality, MONUC does most of the work on these operations anyway, but legitimating the band of uniformed war criminals that is the DRC's national army typically causes massive civilian suffering. Forget all this nonsense about capacity-building. The FARDC has more than proved that it is incapable of being a functional army that protects civilians. Until a real force of professional soldiers can be trained by experts and paid by the states, they shouldn't have a functioning role.
  
• Instead, the UN should commit to making MONUC as large as it needs to be to secure the territory on its own, or another peacekeeping organization should partner with MONUC to do the same. That means finding, at a bare minimum, 100,000 well-trained and equipped troops. (The odds of that actually happening are slim to none. But I am convinced that nothing else will work in the short to medium run.)
  
• MONUC's forces should have a mandate to independently hunt down and destroy destabilizing rebel movements. They should also actively provide policing services in cities and towns that are not able to do so independently. (Is it neo-colonial to suggest this? Probably. But the FARDC is a disaster. Does anyone have a better idea that would actually work?)
  
• The FARDC should be trained, professionalized, and purged of war criminals. Efforts should be made to recruit outstanding high school and university graduates who otherwise face chronic unemployment into the ranks to provide real leadership. Anti-rape education must become a critical - and repeated - part of the training process.
  
• The methods of paying FARDC soldiers should be radically changed. The international community already donates money to pay soldiers' salaries, but soldiers in the field rarely receive their pay. This is because Kinshasa insists that all funds come through Kinshasa first. The only reason Kinshasa does so is to allow everyone in the leadership chain to have the chance to skim a little off the top. Those disbursing the funds should stop pretending that Kinshasa is a credible partner and directly transfer the money for soldiers to the provincial capitals, where a team of non-Congolese African military experts should be responsible for distributing salaries directly to soldiers posted in each province.
• If this all works (and that's a huge "if"), at some point it should become possible to begin joint operations between MONUC and the FARDC that will actually serve the public interest, with the goal of handing over military control to the FARDC at some point in the future.
  
• Meanwhile, the root causes of the conflict - land disputes and citizenship rights - need to be sorted out. This means getting the courts functioning and creating an enforcement mechanism for implementing court decisions about land claims. It also means guaranteeing the citizenship rights of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, which should involve a massive public education campaign. This won't solve all of the problems, but it would be a start.
  
• In the provision of public goods other than security, the international community needs to work with local organizations who are already providing efficient, quality services rather than pretending that government institutions are the best entities with which to cooperate. Most government health and education institutions are already being run by third parties (in particular, churches and mosques). International donors should work with these communities to implement positive, locally conceived solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
• Local solutions, proposed by community leaders and the victims of violence, should be privileged in conversations about what needs to be done on almost every issue. Goodness knows the army of international experts (myself included) who pontificate on the DRC have proven that we don't know how to solve the country's problems. Let's give people who might a chance, and let's take their suggestions seriously for once.
  

By no means will any of these suggestions solve the crisis in the eastern Congo. But recognizing that the situation there is fundamentally a problem of the breakdown of government and governance helps us to think about far more realistic solutions that might have a chance of working.

happy independence day

Today marks 49 years of independence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's too depressing to think about how few of those years were free from civil war, dictatorial regimes, and/or economic collapse. Suffice it to say that the hopes of le 30 Juin have never been fully realized, and it's not likely to get much better any time soon.

Security and governance (or, more specifically, the lack thereof) are the central problems in the Congo these days. Each is dependent on the other and no one can figure out how to make either happen. Attempts to reform the FARDC (Congo's national army) are pretty much a disaster. (As I've written several times before, it should've been blatantly obvious from the beginning that giving uniforms to war criminals would end badly.) The government can't establish territorial control or create/strengthen institutions without basic security, but the army can't create a secure situation without basic insitutions of governance and civilian control overseeing its actions. The understaffed and underfunded MONUC peacekeeping operation - which needs about eight times as many troops as it has - cannot secure the entire territory all at once in order to give the government time to figure it all out.

Nowhere is this dilemma more apparent than in the disasterous Kimia II operation currently being conducted by the FARDC and MONUC in South Kivu. (Of course, we have to pretend that the FARDC only needs "support" from MONUC to carry out a major operation when in reality nothing would happen without MONUC's helicopters and trained personnel.) By all accounts, the mission is an absolute disaster. As human rights groups warned before it even began, civilians are bearing the brunt of the fighting between government forces and the FDLR Hutu militia. Both sides are responsible for massive human rights violations, particularly around Minova, a small town on the shore of Lake Kivu in the far northern reaches of South Kivu.

The worst part? It's far from clear that the operation is doing much of anything to knock out the FDLR rebels it's directed against. That's not surprising; few of these operations really have much of an effect. It's too easy for the rebels to disappear into the forests, and the FARDC is too lacking in discipline to accomplish anything.

That makes this independence day far from happy for the people of the eastern Congo.

a big misstep

I spent the whole weekend trying to figure out who thought it would be a good idea to send several million dollars' worth of small arms to the transitional government in Somalia. At first I thought I was just having nightmares as an effect of jet lag, but then an alert reader sent me the transcript of the State Department's briefing and it turns out to be true. The United States government has supplied something less than $10 million worth of "small arms and limited munitions" to the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia.

Since small arms are a tiny bit of a problem in Somalia, which is not at all controlled by the official government, there's a UN embargo on sending arms to the region. Apparently the U.S. government was able to obtain a waiver for these particular weapons. The reason? The TFG will be using the weapons to combat the radical Islamist group al Shabaab, which controls most of Mogadishu and the south. Al Shabaab is viewed by the U.S. as a close ally of al Qaeda, so the idea is that sending in weapons to a government that controls a few blocks of Mogadishu will help to combat the threat of radical Islamists in the Horn of Africa, thereby protecting our allies in Kenya and maybe even addressing the piracy problem.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. There's just no other way of putting it. Except to say that whoever approved this plan clearly has no concept of what the flood of small arms in the Horn of Africa has done to innocent civilians, not only in Somalia, but throughout the region. Every time we have sent weapons into Somalia, those weapons have been used to harm civilians, not only in Somalia, but also in Ethiopia, Eritrea, northern Uganda, southern Sudan, and the eastern Congo. In the markets in the eastern DR Congo, you can buy American, Israeli, and Soviet-made weapons that came into the continent via the Horn in the mid-1970's when the US and USSR were busy switching allegiances about as often as the wind changed. Somalia is saturated with small arms (many of which are brand-spanking new thanks to the profits the Puntland pirates are bringing in). Sending in more, even to the so-called "good guys," will only result in more civilian suffering.

The decision also reflects a clear misunderstanding of the TFG's capabilities. The TFG is a government in name only. Of all the markers of modern statehood that allow a government to claim legitimacy, the TFG has only one: international recognition. On every other marker - territorial control, capacity to manage the economy, ability to coin money, run a judicial system, defend borders, police the streets - the TFG fails the test. They don't even have a functioning website. And we want to give these guys weapons? For use by their so-called army?

Despite the fact that competence and critical reasoning skills have returned to the White House at last, this decision reveals an ugly fact about U.S. foreign policy towards Africa: regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats control the administration, the United States is really bad at Africa policy. The Clinton people - many of whom have returned to key positions in the Obama administration - were terrible in their dealings with Africa. Not only did they let Rwanda languish (and then actively prevent anyone else from intervening in what was clearly a genocide, their lame excuses notwithstanding), but people like Susan Rice (now U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) managed to almost singlehandedly destroy our relationship with the French over African matters by steamrolling through the haphazardly conceived and poorly funded African Crisis Response Initiative program. They bungled HIV/AIDS policy, cowering to the drug companies until Clinton left office and letting millions of Africans die without hope.

Bush's people didn't do much better, except on HIV/AIDS, where a sensible policy on ARV's saved millions of lives. (That they caused countless new infections with their policy on condoms may negate the effects of PEPFAR's success down the line.) But on security issues, the Bush administration didn't understand African states any better than its predecessors. In the aftermath of 9/11, the administration's Africa-watchers became very concerned that Somalia would become a base for al Qaeda or al Qaeda-aligned groups. In fact, it's not clear that the Islamists showed up in Somalia until they learned it was a good idea from the statements of the Bush administration and others.

One hopes that Clinton's Africanists learned from their mistakes, but the decision to send arms into Somalia suggests that the Obama administration's Africa policy will largely consist of business as usual. What is the normal modus operandi for U.S. Africa policy? I'd suggest three common characteristics:

1. A tendency to reduce conflict, policy disagreements, or territorial disputes to a "good guys vs. bad guys" mentality. Problem is, in many situations (see Darfur, most of the Congolese government), the so-called "good" guys have blood on their hands as well. In Somalia, it would behoove U.S. policymakers to remember that everyone has an agenda and that in that region, weapons marked for use against one group are always used against other groups by their owners.
   
2. An insistence on pretending that the authorities in the capital city are in control of the country's territory and/or governing institutions, which usually leads to a refusal to deal with the people who are actually in control. This is a classic problem first identified in Robert H. Jackson's work on state legitimacy. Jackson pointed out that foreign governments usually ignore reality on the ground and instead confer legitimacy on whoever controls the presidential palace or government headquarters in an African state's capital city. It should be obvious why this is a problem. The Western-backed TFG is among the least legitimate institutions in Somalia, partly because they lack capacity (which this weapons plan is designed to correct) and partly because they are backed by the West. Pretending that they have real control - or that they have the consent of enough of Somalia's interest groups to establish real control at some future point - helps no one.
   
3. The insistence that we must do something to help. Clearly, the situation in Somalia is terrible. There's a high degree of human suffering and the rise of al Shabaab is a threat to the national interest of the United States. But American policymakers have failed in this situation to recognize that doing something - especially in an open fashion - is not always a good idea. U.S. recognition is in many ways the kiss of death for Somali politicians. Once the TFG and its leaders got U.S. recognition, they lost legitimacy in the eyes of many Somalis and became even more of a target for the Islamists. Sending weapons to the government only makes them seem more like U.S. puppets in the eyes of most Somalis.
   

A friend who works at the State Department argued with me about this over the weekend. "Who should we support?" he said, the argument being that the United States can't support Islamists or non-state actors who actually control territory. But that's a logical fallacy, because it assumes support in the form of weapons provision is a necessary step. Sometimes doing something is much more harmful than doing nothing at all. The decision to send weapons to Somalia's TFG clearly fails the Love Actually test and it will almost certainly result in more civilian casualties. It will almost certainly not result in the establishment of actual control over Mogadishu or Somalia by the TFG.

Next up on the list of ineffable mysteries: who decided it was a good idea for Eliot Spitzer to commentate on Supreme Court decisions on MSNBC? Will someone be hiring Mark Sanford as a backcountry hiking expert next?

this & that: jet-lagged edition

I'll post something substantive soon.

• A South African man asks forgiveness from the woman he raped.
  
• Twitter creator never intended for it to be useful (The Onion)
• Nothing says, "I worship the Prince of Peace" like packing heat for church.
• Glenna Gordon (aka Scarlett Lion) has a fantastic interview with the first openly HIV+ man in Liberia.
• Here's a fascinating piece on an innovative child survival program in Tanzania. The goal is not to put the children whose mothers died in childbirth up for adoption, but rather to see them safely and healthily through infancy, then to return them to their extended families and villages for care. They are cared for at the orphanage by a teenage relative who learns how to look after a child. This is the right way to do development - it involves communities, is headed by someone with long-term experience in the region and a knowledge of the local culture, and - most importantly - is sustainable.
  
• Piracy affects Tuvalu. This is a heartbreaking story.

this time I mean it

I am done with you, American Airlines. Done.

Just as soon as I get my bag back.