A slightly belated happy birthday to South Sudan! As I assess my need for new mapping to accurately reflect the way that Africa is carved up as of Saturday, I’m drawn to thinking about the challenges that the world’s newest country faces. It’s perhaps not the best time to be striking it out alone, though splitting from the abusive partner that the Sudanese government, especially under al-Bashir, represents was, on balance, the right thing to do. (more…)

What is the best outcome for Côte d’Ivoire? For despite the media attention shifting to Libya and Japan, the conflict rumbles on. I’m drawn to ask this question, because, though I would recently have answered, ‘Ouatarra in the Presidential Palace’, I’m beginning to have doubts.
I have no doubt that Gbagbo has done some terrible things in his desire to hold on to power, nor do I doubt that Ouatarra was the legitimate winner of last year’s election. But what gets to me is the nagging feeling that, whoever grasps the Presidency, the holder of that office will be guilty of committing or allowing in his name, despicable crimes against civilians. Does West Africa need another aggressive leader, bolstered by a quasi-personal army? It is not for me, or anyone in Europe to dictate who the leader of a foreign country should be, but I hope our politicians have the guts to deal with Ouatarra as the man he is, and not paint him as an underdog and innocent.

A torrent of revolutions from across North Africa and the Middle East have fallen out of the speaker of my radio over the past few weeks. But while there is plenty of conflict and turmoil just over the Mediterranean, I get the feeling that people are ignoring the ongoing tension in Côte d’Ivoire. Whether this is just a case of the media being unable to focus on more than one thing at once, or something else, I can’t say, but if we compare the potential ramifications of the ‘Arab Spring’ conflict in Libya and elsewhere, with the consequences of the stand-off between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouatarra, where the country could be in danger of returning to civil war, then surely a little more attention is warranted, is it not?

Though declared to be the winner of the much delayed (it was originally scheduled for 2005) 2010 Presidential Election, Ouatarra has, so far, only managed to take full control of the hotel in Abidjan where he is based, guarded by a significant number of UN ‘blue-helmets’, with Gbagbo refusing to hand over the reins. For the international community to do nothing in this case would be intolerable in the defence of democratic principles and the stability of West Africa. The already divided nature of Côte d’Ivoire, with a Muslim north and Christian south, and the fractious support for Gbagbo to remain in power, means that there is too much danger of an escalation of conflict in the country, and a potential return to civil war. Too many senseless acts of violence have already occurred. The question is of what should be done, and who should do it.

Though military intervention has been suggested, and arguments for it have been put forth, I would be concerned that the assessment of the resistance that will meet any foreign force attempting to oust Gbagbo is somewhat lacking.

“The mlitiary option will cause minimum loss of lives because Gbagbo is protected by a ‘rag tag’ band of soldiers. Besides, Ivory Coast does not even have a formidable air force. Neither appeasement nor sanctions is the way to force Gbagbo out of office. Sanctions will only go as far as blocking Gbagbo’s yes men from international travel.”

Tony Bello

In regionally comparative terms, the armed forces of Côte d’Ivoire are probably strong enough to pose a realistic challenge to an external force. The likelihood that a forceful intervention will be carried out, not by UN or EU forces, but by ECOWAS, enhances this problem. The capacity and experience of ECOWAS forces, when compared to those of the UN or the EU, is lesser. To act as the sole international force in an attempt to remove Gbagbo would probably mean a messy conflict, with a great degree of danger to ordinary Ivorians, caught in the middle of the fighting.

To discount military intervention and the option of doing nothing, we are left with sanctions. Though some sanctions have already been put in place, notably on cocoa exports, there is room for a more stringent set of sanctions to be enforced, especially on the part of the European Union. This solution would lessen the violent threat to civilians that military action would bring, and ultimately starve Gbagbo of the resources he needs to hold onto power. Rather than a clamour for battle, the international community (and this term includes directly neighbouring states) should seek to use every method of peaceful sanction, coupled with genuine attempts at mediation. For its part, the EU should move beyond the pointless waffle spouted by its High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton (PDF link), and seek to use its existing significant involvement in the country, and its capacity for meaningful actions, to encourage Gbagbo’s departure from office.

Photo by busy.pochi on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

“The story ends there,” … “I don’t want to hear anyone commenting on them. Nobody is authorised to comment on the gays. You will spoil things.”

President of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika

“The president has demonstrated that he is a caring father, a considerate and tolerant president. We wish him good health in his everyday endeavours as he continues leading the country to
respecting human rights and to economic prosperity,”

Statement from Chimbalanga and Monjeza

Homo Malawi verlaat verloofde voor vrouw [Gay Malawian leaves fiancé for woman]

Headline on NOS Nieuws

How nicely the story of the two gay Malawian men who were sentenced to 14 years hard labour has wrapped itself up. After being pardoned by the “caring father” who is the President, and after turning out to be straight after all, the sensitivities of the national culture need not be offended any longer.

I feel very uncomfortable with the way that this issue is being brushed under the rug. Chimbalanga and Monjeza are only two people, but with absolute certainty, there are thousands more in Malawi, and millions across Africa who are just like them, and who have to face their daily existence being frustrated due to a combination of excessively conservative morality, and imported laws from 19th and 20th century European empires.

Lets hope that next time something like this happens, the outcome will show some actual progress for LGBT rights.

I have mixed feelings towards the announcement by the Malawian President that he is pardoning the two men sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for the most heinous and indecent crime against the society and culture of Malawi, the act of—drumroll please for the sheer audacity of this offence—getting engaged.

Of course, it is a good thing that they’ve been pardoned, but the words of the President afterwards demonstrate the fundamental problem in the promotion of LGBT rights in Africa.

“In all aspects of reasoning, in all aspects of human understanding, these two gay boys were wrong – totally wrong,”

BBC News

“These boys committed a crime against our culture, our religion and our laws, however, as the head of state I hereby pardon them and therefore ask for their immediate release with no conditions,”

Mail & Guardian

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong Malawian newspapers, there is a more reassuring atmosphere presented in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian coverage of the matter, but one thing I can’t help but notice in the reports from the Malawi Daily Times are the many disparaging references to the opinions expressed by aid donors. Would it be too cynical to suggest that the pardon from the President, coinciding as it did with the visit of Ban Ki-Moon, was reluctantly given to safeguard the aid that is said to provide roughly half of the government budget?

Since we have an external action service—basically a diplomatic corps—now, it would seem sensible to ask a particular question: where is Europe? Of course, geographically we’re stuck on the edge of Asia, next to the Middle East, and above Africa, but politically, where are we?

It’s been a funny couple of decades. The first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical unbalancing of the world’s balance of power were a bit like that feeling you get when the lights are suddenly switched on after watching a film in the dark; a brief moment of bewilderment, scaled to international politics and spread over a decade. And then in 2001, we realised where we were and what was happening. People said 9/11 changed everything, it didn’t, but it did let us know that everything was changing.

The old and comfortable wisdom that international politics consisted solely of states and a few of their instruments such as the UN or the EU, with multi-national companies lurking somewhere nearby, vanished; along with it went the notion of a world with two carefully balanced superpowers. Ours is now the age of the ‘non-state actor’ and the stage these particular actors tread on is a multi-polar world.

More concerning for Europe is not the actors or the stage, but the play being performed. The challenges which determine this script are rather large: climate change, energy security, economic crisis, and development of the poorest states.

We used to be able to say that the West would use its globally dominant position to ensure that any moves to deal with these problems would be to our favour in some way. Multi-polarity has done away with this. If we take a poor and corrupt developing state with lashings of oil and other valuable natural resources, and put it in the global marketplace that it funds itself in every day, who is it going to sell its stuff to: a country demanding assurances on human rights and other popular liberal concerns, or a country which will pay the same or more and not ask any awkward questions about the sanctity of ballot boxes at the last election, or the destination of the money being paid? The very same goes for development aid and assistance.

I’m not a pessimist on this; the influence of the EU and the US won’t decline too much, but it will be joined by a competing model of international policy. There is something to like in this competing model: it uses trade in a way which has the capacity to make a lasting difference. Of course the mode of its application by the likes of China is abhorrent to liberal democracies—or at least, it should be. I suppose we have to look on the bright side of things and make the best of the new order of the world. Adapting our overseas aid (by which I mean Europe’s aid in totality) and investment policy to offer more incentives to developing states to swallow the poll of reforms to reduce corruption and further human rights. Focussing on our close neighbours and making sure that we ‘do’ development properly will go a long way to securing a safe position for Europe in the diverse world we now live in.

This post is already a tad too long, so I’ll leave the energy security and climate change problems to some future posts in this theme.

It may be because I’m listening to the BBC World Service’s extremely thorough coverage of it, but there’s an awful lot of a furore about President Obama’s visit to Ghana isn’t there? It’s astonishing how a foreign leader—especially one of such a controversial state—can be so universally popular in so many countries. I can’t help but fear though, that he will be unable to do anything other than disappoint. He is the President of the USA after all, and that is where his final allegiance lies, not in the rest of the world. I’m liking the content of his speech to the Ghanaian parliament though, a refreshing change from what has come before.

Photo credit: worthbak on Flickr.