The latest conflict in Mali’s troubled history is coming to a breakpoint, or at least some kind of a turning point. While in the north of the country the Tuareg rebels continue their recently accelerated fighting against the Islamists of MUJAO, AQMI and the new-found Malian Ansar al-Sharia, in New York the United Nations’ Security Council is still weighing the details and options of an ECOWAS led military intervention.
CategoryConflict
There is undoubtedly a need for a political solution to the ongoing Congo crisis, which recently reached new depths with the fall of Goma. Yet viable solutions to intricate, multi-layered conflict dynamics are difficult to reach when one party, in this case the Congolese Government, is brought to its knees following humiliating military defeats. The probability of a sustainable compromise that will reduce violence in the Kivus is difficult to envisage in the face of an insurgency led by skilled military entrepreneurs, with crucial military and diplomatic backing from neighbouring countries. Certainly, the M23 has advanced some legitimate claims that are shared by both the Tutsi minority they claim to represent and wider layers of the population tired of the Kabila’s Government’s inept governance. However, it is unlikely that its leaders, given their current military advantage, will accept any deal which does not reward their ambitions. In sum, the rebel take-over of Goma has decreased the possibility to break with a vicious cycle in which insurgent violence is time and again politically rewarded. Continue reading
As this researcher packed his things and returned to Monrovia the prospects in Ivory Coast require one more look. While I still regard Ble Goude’s victorious prophecy that I discussed in my previous post false in the sense that toppling Ouattara’s government will prove impossible, there is yet still a possibility that the same prophecy will be fulfilled: if victory is sought in an impossible situation the trick to succeed is to redefine victory. After all, is this not what everybody does? (For one fine contemporary example witness the downgrading of ambition of the US-led ISAF-coalition in Afghanistan) Continue reading
As this researcher packed his things and returned to Monrovia the prospects in Ivory Coast require one more look. While I still regard Ble Goude’s victorious prophecy that I discussed in my previous post false in the sense that toppling Ouattara’s government will prove impossible, there is yet still a possibility that the same prophecy will be fulfilled: if victory is sought in an impossible situation the trick to succeed is to redefine victory. After all, is this not what everybody does? (For one fine contemporary example witness the downgrading of ambition of the US-led ISAF-coalition in Afghanistan) Continue reading
In recent months, we have seen renewed large-scale fighting and a new wave of displaced in the Kivu provinces of eastern DRC. The current upheaval started in April, when an important faction of the former CNDP rebel group, who had integrated into the Congolese military (FARDC) in 2009, deserted and launched a new rebellion in North Kivu. This group took the name of “M23” after the peace accord between the CNDP and the DR Government signed on March 23 2009. In various offensives over the last months, the M23 have occupied substantial parts of Rutshuru territory, revealing once more the operational weaknesses of the military from which they defected. Continue reading
In recent months, we have seen renewed large-scale fighting and a new wave of displaced in the Kivu provinces of eastern DRC. The current upheaval started in April, when an important faction of the former CNDP rebel group, who had integrated into the Congolese military (FARDC) in 2009, deserted and launched a new rebellion in North Kivu. This group took the name of “M23” after the peace accord between the CNDP and the DR Government signed on March 23 2009. In various offensives over the last months, the M23 have occupied substantial parts of Rutshuru territory, revealing once more the operational weaknesses of the military from which they defected. Continue reading
“We will be victorious” is a famous statement made by the former Ivorian Youth Minister Charles Ble Goude before the elections in Ivory Coast in 2011. This statement soon became iconic when the group Les Galliets adopted it as an intro to its militaristic and anti-imperialistic pro-Gbagbo electoral song called C’est Mais.
As we now know with hindsight, Gbagbo was not victorious in the elections, and equally failed to cling to power in their aftermath. While Gbagbo is awaiting the beginning of his trial at Hague, Ble Goude himself is sought after following cross-border raids to Ivory Coast. Nevertheless, the song remains as popular as ever among the supporters of the former president, many of whom currently reside in the refugee camps and their environs in the Grand Gedeh county of the neighboring Liberia. Continue reading
Richard Mallett has reviewed our book African Conflicts and Informal Power (Zed books 2012).
http://africanarguments.org/2012/07/13/big-men-african-conflicts-and-informal-power-a-review-by-richard-mallett-odi/
“As a final observation, African Conflicts and Informal Power is perhaps above all else a testament to the strength and value of well executed…, in-depth qualitative research in expanding and refining our understanding of the drivers, nature and consequences of war. Whether the approach be ethnography or political sociology, this volume demonstrates why robust qualitative inquiry is so indispensable when it comes to deciphering conflict and discovering what is really there.”
In a wealthy suburb of Nairobi there is a nightclub called Casablanca. It is owned by an Italian (probably part of what is called the Malindi mob), decorated in Arabic style and has a crowd of western businessmen, aid workers, some wealthy locals and high class prostitutes. In a corner, puffing on their water pipes, drinking an occasional beer, there is a crowd of young Somali men, some working for the current government in Somalia, some doing lucrative business in the war thorn country and others supporting the radical Islamist rebel group al Shabaab. They visit the place quite frequently and they feel at home they say, because the combination of crowd and environment resembles the countries where they grew up in Europe, North America or Australasia. There is a huge fellow who used to be a real talent in ice hockey until the day that he could no longer stand the fact that Somalia was going from bad to worse and he simply threw away his national passport and went back to a Somalia that he only knew from tales from relatives and through the catastrophic images in media. Naturally, due to his comprehensible size, he has since been hired as body guard to politicians and other strongmen in Mogadishu and elsewhere in the country. Currently he is looking for a new job and in the mean time hanging out with likeminded friends at Casablanca. Likeminded; yet some of them support the, in the West (but also in Kenya), much feared al Shabaab. Continue reading
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