At 4:00 am tomorrow (or five hours from now) I’ll get up and begin a winding journey that will land me in South Africa Thursday afternoon. I’ll be there for three weeks, will be traveling extensively for two conferences, some research, travel and holiday, and reportage. I may be out of touch for a bit, but will be updating the blog all along the way as internet access allows.
[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]
At H-SAfrica, the scholarly listserv on southern Africa, editor Peter Limb notes that there appears to be traction on the part of regional leaders becoming more vocal in their criticism of Robert Mugabe and his regime:
There certainly are signs of stronger views from Africa leaders:
In Kenya, PM Raila Odinga says the run-off is a sham and called for Mugabe to stand down.
Paul Kagame attacked Mugabe: “For me the question that it raises is why do you even call for elections?” Mr Kagame said.
ANC President-General Jacob Zuma says: “I think we’ll be lucky if we have a
free election,”; would it be fair: “I don’t think so.”As John Leaver notes, the problem is more than Mugabe: namely, the military.
One wonders if this criticism will accelerate leading up to the runoff and if it will result in action in the very likely event that Mugabe simply seizes the election.
To his credit, Jacob Zuma has positioned himself brilliantly on the Zimbabwe question. While acknowledging Thabo Mbeki as rightful head of state and thus mediator, Zuma wants to see a Pan-African delegation step in and settle the crisis north of the Limpopo. Zuma’s clear goal is to see Robert Mugabe’s reign of power come to an end.
In order to rationalize and expand upon the Foreign Policy Association’s coverage of Africa, the FPA has started a new blog with roots extending from the South Africa Blog. The Africa Blog will cover both continentwide issues as well as regional and country concerns. I will be the senior editor/blogger at the Africa blog while continuing my work here at the South Africa Blog.
The change will allow this blog to emphasize South African issues more specifically while still giving both the FPA and me a voice on larger African affairs. The biggest change will likely come in the fact that within the next few days I will shift coverage of Zimbabwe to the Africa blog. I hope that you will read and engage with both blogs.
Not everyone shares the general belief that president Bush deserves some credit for his Africa policies. Josh Kurlantznick is decidedly unimpressed with the President’s approach toward Africa, as he shows in this piece at The New Republic. Here is a sample:
Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the Bush administration has backed whatever African leader claims to be battling militant Islam. For example, the White House has developed a close relationship with Ethiopia’s thuggish leader Meles Zenawi, supposedly an ally in the war on terror and a partner in battling militancy in neighboring Somalia. The administration has provided military aid to Ethiopia with virtually no conditions on the assistance. It has also offered advisers to support Ethiopia’s invasion of neighboring Somalia, an invasion which only led to more chaos in that benighted nation. Meanwhile, in recent years Zenawi’s government has overseen a massive crackdown on opposition activists and a brutal offensive in the country’s Ogaden region; in 2005, after disputed elections, the Ethiopian government arrested over 30,000 of its own people.
As in Ethiopia, so too across the continent. In building a string of counterterrorism allies, the White House has strengthened its links with some of Africa’s most brutal regimes, from Algeria to Chad.
For me, again, the case for Bush’s Africa policy is a relative one. From an absolute standpoint, this administration’s policies toward Africa have been fairly marginal. But from a historical perspective, Bush’s engagement still warrants some praise. I would like to see a foreign policy toward Africa that takes into consideration African needs and interests and in which Africans are partners, in the truest sense of the term, rather than appendages. But relative both to other administrations and to president Bush’s policies elsewhere, his approach to Africa warrants, if not praise, at least some recognition.
My apologies for the light posting this week. I’ve been down and out with a nasty case of the flu for the last few days. Things will pick back up as I recover from my current zombie status.
In the meantime, you should read this piece on President Bush’s trip to Africa by the Foreign Policy Association’s Robert Nolan. His views in some ways dovetail with mine, though his assessments are perhaps ultimately more charitable than are mine, as I contend that the bar has been set so low with regard to American foreign policy toward Africa that Bush’s mixed record seems perhaps better than it is. Still, it is nice to know that I am not the only person giving the President some respect on this issue, however tepid and begrudging (in my case, at least).
Is there hope for an abatement of political violence in Kenya’s ongoing crisis? Despite more deaths in clashes between protesters and police, allegations of banditry, and fears of ethnic cleansing, guarded optimism may be in order as international appeals coupled with Kofi Annan’a active intervention appears to have led to an agreement between President Mwai Kibaki, whose dubious victory in a highly contested election fueled the current nightmare, and the opposition and its leader Raila Odinga. (The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful background primer on Kenyan politics.)
But the emphasis should be on “guarded.” Leaders who allow violence to be unleashed oftentimes find that their ability to marshal that violence becomes limited if nonexistent. Anarchy as a method of control, so popular among Big Men, has a way of spiralling out of control. Once convinced that one group of people is an enemy and violence is the only course of redress, even the most ardent followers will be tough to convince that violence should cease if the alleged enemy is still among them. Demogoguery, cult of personality, the unleashing of terror (and not the hackneyed “tribalism” that some are so quick to attribute when things go awry in Africa) — these things tend to get away from those who choose to use them as means and methods.
It appears that some observers are finally beginning to counteract the shallow, facile narrative that overtook the analysis of the events in Kenya over the last couple of weeks. Caroline Elkins’ piece in The Washington Post this past weekend provided a model of how a historical analysis of the current events in Kenya ought to be framed. If Elkins rightly sees the colonial past as a major contributor to Kenya’s current political woes, IRIN shows how the economy equally plays a role. In their report for Bloomberg Paul Richardson and Antony Sguazzin explain the ways inwhich a multiplicity of factors contribute to Kenya’s destabilization, of which ethnicity is only one. Stephanie Hanson has also provided a useful asessment for the Council on Foreign Relations.
At The Mail & Guardian Jean-Jacques Cornish has a feature in which he provides an overview of Africa’s 2007. I may as well also remind you of my own South Africa: Year in Review feature for the Foreign Policy Association and this blog.
The Europe-Africa summit has come and gone. Robert Mugabe was the most visible figure at the summit, and he made his share of noise, prattling on about most of the same things about that which he prattles whenever he has cameras on him and with his acquiescent media lapdogs at home lauding him as a hero. At least one European leader, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, condemned Mugabe for his bullying, thuggish, destructive leadership but most of the rest of the attendees could not be bothered, just as they could not be bothered to do anything significant with regard to Darfur, trade, China’s role in Africa, crises in places such as Somalia, or much of anything else. For all of the optimistic talk heading into the conference, division and disappointment were the coin of the realm in Lisbon, where little concrete progress was made.