Beautiful Horizons

Points to Ponder

As some on my side of the political aisle seem very encouraged about what's taking place in Libya and while I certainly have nothing but contempt for Muammar Ghadafi, I have to acknowledge a sense of unease about the whole enterprise.

My chief concern is about the endgame. As Admiral Mullen has acknowledged, all this could still result in Ghadafi remaining in power. Assuming Ghadafi and his minions are defeated/killed/exiled, who is to lead Libya and on what basis? How deep will the intervention be?

Another issues that concerns me is why the focus on Libya and perhaps not the Ivory Coast? In the Ivory Coast, an autocratic leader, Laurent Gbabgo, who had resisted calling for elections for some ten years, lost in the second round of elections to Alassane Ouattara and has steadfastly refused to relinquish power. Gbagbo forces have murdered unarmed women at an opposition rally and last Thursday shelled a public market in an area of Abidjan that is pro-Ouattara, killing twenty-five.

In this conflict, unlike Libya, the endgame is clear: Laurent Gbagbo should be jailed and Alassane Ouattara should be sworn in as president. Again, I hold no brief for Ghadafi. I just can't ignore an uneasy twinge of deja vu.

What More Can I Say?

There is precious little that I can add to Ben Brantley's review of Fela! from six months ago other than to echo it.

I do not believe that I have had a more rewarding experience at a Broadway show in the years I've lived here. Sahr Ngaujah is a revelation; he completely inhabits the character in a role that surely must be one of the most strenuous I have ever seen.

Don't miss it.

Emigration From a Forgotten Country as a Microcosm of Emigration Throughout the World

Normally when I think of Cape Verde, I tend to think of Césaria Évora, the morna singer, the fact that it is one of eight nations with Portuguese as its official language, a certain disc by Horace Silver, a place where planes refuel flying from South Africa to North America and the soul group, Tavares.

While I was aware of the emigrant past of this island nation off the west coast of Africa, this article in Sunday's New York Times brings it back poignantly:

If Cape Verde is the Galapagos of migration, Jorgen Carling, a Norwegian geographer, is its Darwin. A rising star on the academic circuit, Dr. Carling, 32, visited Cape Verde 10 years ago, taught himself Kriole, the local language, and has been returning ever since.

“Cape Verde is a showcase of the contradictions and frictions of global migration,” he said. “It is in a quite dramatic transition — from being so dependent on migration to trying to cope with a world in which borders are closing.”

The tensions he cites abound. Migration reduces poverty. But it increases inequality between migrants and others back home. Migration can express family devotion. It can also strain family bonds.

And while migration may be at record levels, so is the frustration of people who want to migrate but cannot. That is because as migration grows, the desire to experience its economic rewards grows even faster.

“Migration is probably more important to more people than it has ever been,” said Dr. Carling of the International Peace Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Oslo. “But what characterizes the world today is also the feeling of involuntary immobility.”

I recommend that you read the entire article along with the online multimedia features that it came with here, and here . Full disclosure: my biological father (who died when I was five) was an immigrant as is my wife. I tend to believe that anyone willing to work, learn the language and contribute should be welcome. I'm not one of those who supports the notion that this has an adverse impact our culture. Our nation is wildly diverse without the immigrants. Imagine the differences between those who have been living for several generations in the South, the Midwest, New England and the West Coast and you get the idea.

I am troubled by this, however:

More broadly, however, development experts are split on the effects of migration. Remittances feed and shelter the poor, and migrants sometimes return with new business contacts and ideas. But migration can also drain countries of talent and promote dependency, among individuals and governments. No country has climbed out of poverty through migration alone. Despite the economic progress here, the unemployment rate hovers above 20 percent and the fastest-growing industry, tourism, is dominated by low-wage jobs.

While Dr. Carling admires Cape Verde’s ability to invent itself as a nation beyond borders, he also sees problems with the constant emphasis on departures. It can weaken relationships, he said, leave marriages short-lived and promote indifference among students and workers. “The possibility of relying on remittances — and the prospect of going abroad one day — can alienate you from the environment here,” he said.

One aspect of Andrés Manuel López Óbrador's failed campaign for president of Mexico was his recognition of the failure of his nation in not making their country more hospitable to its poorest citizens. While remittances are vital and important, as the article notes, they are not a solution.

I'm very ambivalent about guest worker programs. Germany brought in numerous Turks as guest workers from 1961 to 1973, but largely treated them as a fungible asset rather than human beings. Precious little was done to integrate them and it wasn't until 1999 that those born in Germany automatically received German citizenship. How absurd was this? In the 2002 World Cup, three players from Turkey's starting eleven were born in Germany, but ineligible to become German citizens, whereas Miroslav Klose and his parents were born in Poland, but his paternal grandfather was of German ancestry and Oliver Neuville, born in Switzerland to a German-Swiss father and Italian-Swiss mother and speaks Italian much better than German, had no problem gaining German citizenship.

I worry less about the impact immigration has on the US and far more about the effect it is having on those left behind,

Failing to See the Big Picture

Shortly after I graduated from high school in Germany, I worked for six weeks at the US Army Medical Material Center for Europe (USAMMCE) in Einsiedlerhof, Germany near Kaiserslautern. I repacked orders for medical supplies that had been damaged in shipment, ran a fork lift assembling medical supply orders and did inventory for $1.75 an hour.

One day I happened to notice the location of the numerous shipping areas where orders, once packed, where placed in order to be shipped. I was intrigued with the various names of the US military locations, but the one that struck me the most was Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I had no idea until that moment that the US had military facilities in Ethiopia. Of course, this was July 1974 and two months later the US's friend in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie was overthrown, for, among other reasons, the (literally) imperious nature of his rule and the famine in the Wollo region, which his government trie to cover up and in which some 200,000 people died.

Unfortunately, after Selassie came the truly vile Derg, responsible for countless suffering in Ethiopia and led by the monstrous Mengistu Haile Mariam, currently enjoying the hospitality of another monster, Robert Mugabe. When the Derg was driven out and the present government took power, the level of terror decreased, but the human rights situation is absymal. The government is targeting journalists and human rights defenders with treason trials while largely ignoring a massacre by police that resulted in 193 deaths and the investigation of which led the investigating judge to flee the country for his own safety. They have been accused of suppressing dissent through violent beatings, arresting journalists and shutting down newspapers on "evidence" of "treason" that would laughed out of court in most democracies.

Monday's New York Times has called attention to some of the human rights abuses the Ethiopian military has been accused of in the Ogaden region of the country. Here are a few examples:

Anab, a 40-year-old camel herder who was too frightened, like many others, to give her last name, said soldiers took her to a police station, put her in a cell and twisted her nipples with pliers. She said government security forces routinely rounded up young women under the pretext that they were rebel supporters so they could bring them to jail and rape them.

“Me, I am old,” she said, “but they raped me, too.”

Moualin, a rheumy-eyed elder, said Ethiopian troops stormed his village, Sasabene, in January looking for rebels and burned much of it down. “They hit us in the face with the hardest part of their guns,” he said.

[...]

The violence has been particularly acute against women, villagers said, and many have recently fled.

Asma, 19, who now lives in neighboring Somaliland, said she was stuck in an underground cell for more than six months last year, raped and tortured. “They beat me on the feet and breasts,” she said. She was freed only after her father paid the soldiers ransom, she said, though she did not know how much.

Ambaro, 25, now living in Addis Ababa, said she was gang-raped by five Ethiopian soldiers in January near the town of Fik. She said troops came to her village every night to pluck another young woman.

“I’m in pain now, all over my body,” she said. “ I’m worried that I’ll become crazy because of what happened.”

It's also rapidly becoming a one party state:

In many ways, Ethiopia has a lot going for it these days: new buildings, new roads, low crime and a booming trade in cut flowers and coffee. It is the second most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, behind Nigeria, with 77 million people.

Its leaders, many whom were once rebels themselves, from a neglected patch of northern Ethiopia, are widely known as some of the savviest officials on the continent. They had promised to let some air into a very stultified political system during the national elections of 2005, which were billed as a milestone on the road to democracy.

Instead, they turned into Ethiopia’s version of Tiananmen Square. With the opposition poised to win a record number of seats in Parliament, the government cracked down brutally, opening fire on demonstrators, rounding up tens of thousands of opposition supporters and students and leveling charges of treason and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders, including the man elected mayor of Addis Ababa.

Many opposition members are now in jail or in exile. The rest seem demoralized.

“There are no real steps toward democracy,” said Merera Gudina, vice president of the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces, a leading opposition party. “No real steps toward opening up space, no real steps toward ending repression.”

So, in light of all this, when Von at Obsidian Wings, in his eagerness to jump on the Ethiopia-fighting-jihadists-in-Somalia, can only muster the following criticism of Ethiopia:

Ethiopia's current government does not consist of "teh good guys,"

I can then only assume that he hasn't learned much from our history of supporting some truly wretched regimes in troubled part of the world. The short-sightedness is mind-numbing.

Ousmane Sembene, Rest in Peace

I cannot think of any film director (other than, perhaps Satyajit Ray for India) who defined serious cinema for an entire region than Ousmane Sembene, who was the very embodiment of African cinema. His passing last weekend, rather than a cause for mourning is a cause for a serious revisiting of his best work.

I became acquainted with Sembene's work with hours spent at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Films such as Xala, Black Girl, and Emitai opened my eyes to the perceptions of Africans toward the west and their former colonizers. Ceddo, a film that desperately deserves a rerelease or at least a DVD release, captured the struggle of people facing the onslaught of religious colonizing from both Islam and Christianity. There are few films that say so much in such a short time as Borom Sarret. I was also thrilled to acquaint myself through his films with the sound of Wolof, one of the official languages of Senegal.

Sembene was so much more than a filmmaker. He was a published author, one time dockworker, union organizer and chronicler of life. What a pity that so little of his work is available as DVD's.

Book Recommendation

Several years ago I read Michaela Wrong's excellemt book about Africa's greatest kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. It was an engrossing read that I finished rather quickly and with which I was greatly impressed.

Right now I'm in the midst of her latest book, I Didn't Do It For You, which focuses on the history of Eritrea. I'm nearly done with it and have to say it is probably even more compelling than her first book. Part of this is no doubt because of the paucity of good writing on the subject. After all, the Congo has been very well covered.

Wrong has keen eyes and ears for small details that add to the larger panorama. I had long been looking for a good  and readable book that focused on this region, especially on the Italian colonial era. This definitely filled the bill. Check it out.

Three Books on Africa - Two to Recommend Heartily

Over the past couple of months I read three books on Africa: Aidan Hartley's The Zanzibar Chest, Howard W. French's, A Continent for the Taking : The Tragedy and Hope of Africa andPaul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Capetown.

Of the three I really enjoyed Hartley's book the most. Hartley has a love for Africa that imbues the book with a certain sadness, but a strong sense of admiration for the continent's beauty and its potential. No rosy glasses for Hartley, just the sense that one gets from someone who despite being the descendant of a British colonist feels strongly at one with the land, the culture and the people.

French's book also shares a strong love for Africa and a hot rage at the kleptocrats and criminals that have slurped greedily at the trough. His white-hot rejoinder to Charles Taylor at a press conference is a thing of beauty:

"Isn't it outrageous for someone who has drugged small boys, given them guns and trained them to kill to call this God's war? . . . How dare you call the destruction of your country in this manner and the killing of two hundred thousand people God's war?"

I could have hugged him for that.

Theroux's book, while an absorbing read was a bit dyspeptic to me. Theroux was in Africa in the Peace Corps and has a love for the continent as well, but his rage at the injustice, corruption, kleptocracy and suffering, while tempered periodically with paeans to the continent's beauty, gives me the impression that he must be a very difficult person with whom to travel. One can only stomach so much condescension.

So I recommend Hartley and French heartily. Theroux is worth reading, but be prepared for the bile.

Tunisia

Michael Totten is back from his trip to Tunisia with some great photos. Check it out here.

This is Interesting

This might answer some questions:

Embarrassed officials disclosed Thursday that the United Nations was unknowingly holding an airplane black box shipped here from Africa after the 1994 crash that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and set off the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans.

I'm sure some of the reactionary UN bashers will probably be frothing at the mouth that this is further evidence of the UN's uselessness, but it seems to me that it is only evidence of an individual and not institutional failure. This will be worth following to see if anything further can be gleaned from it.

What's Next: The Tonton Macoutes Working at the TSA?

Courtesy of The Whiskey Bar, comes this depressing news:

In its effort to relieve overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has hired a private security company staffed with former henchmen of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The reliance on apartheid enforcers was highlighted by an attack in Iraq last month that killed one South African security officer and wounded another who worked for the subsidiary of a firm called Erinys International. Both men once served in South African paramilitary units dedicated to the violent repression of apartheid opponents.

François Strydom, who was killed in the January 28 bombing of a hotel in Baghdad, was a former member of the Koevoet, a notoriously brutal counterinsurgency arm of the South African military that operated in Namibia during the neighboring state’s fight for independence in the 1980s. His colleague Deon Gouws, who was injured in the attack, is a former officer of the Vlakplaas, a secret police unit in South Africa.

“It is just a horrible thought that such people are working for the Americans in Iraq,” said Richard Goldstone, a recently retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

The South Africans are also appalled at the CPA's sloppy vetting of the contracting:

South African security companies working outside the country are required by law to register with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee. According to South African lawmaker Raenette Taljaard, however, the committee did not receive an authorization application from Erinys International. “A lot of the South Africans doing mercenary work or working for private military companies were involved in Apartheid-era repression,” she said. “This is a big concern and it is just bad for South Africa’s reputation.” The chairman of the committee said in a statement after the January 28 incident that any violation of the law would be referred to prosecutors for further investigation.

To no one's surprise, the Pentagon and the CPA did not comment on this.