I just wanted to draw attention to this blog, by a guy who’s spent his career covering Africa and, in my estimation, has some really insightful things to say about what’s happening there, and about how it’s being covered here. Meet Alex Belida.
Archive for the ‘African News’ Category
More news about Africa, from a guy who knows it well
In African News on November 18, 2008 at 1:44 pmMemo to the NYT: Not every war in Africa is a genocide
In African News on November 15, 2008 at 11:58 amEarlier this week, the New York Times published an editorial that sketches the violence in Congo this way: It has its roots in Rwanda; it has a renegade rebel commander who wants a lot of power; it has 17,000 peacekeepers on the ground (though, PS NYT, only roughly 6,000 are in eastern DRC). And therefore the logical, emotive conclusion of the editorial is:
This completely misses the point. In fact, the Rwandan genocide frame has made establishing peace more difficult in Congo than it might otherwise be. It saddles the already difficult politics with extra layers of complication, not the least of which is developing a game plan from the psychological position of guilt. But more to the point, it seems to me outsiders can do less in Congo now than they could have in Rwanda in 1994. That was clear: We could’ve stopped the genocide. This is not genocide, and how to end it is not as clear.
I’m all for looking to history for guidance in dealing with today’s problems, but only if we’re asking of history the right questions. Rwanda and Congo are only rhetorically parallel; peace is going to take the courage and tenacity, on the part of the Congolese and the international community, to imagine a shared political future and a stable political and social infrastructure. And we won’t find that by looking anywhere but to the people of Congo, fighters and civilians, themselves.
So, wait, what exactly is going on in Congo?
In African News on November 14, 2008 at 10:33 amI have a lot of thoughts on this, but I’m not there at the moment, alas. Here’s a piece by a colleague of mine, Scott Baldauf, the Christian Science Monitor’s staff writer based in Africa, that analyzes some of the political questions at the center of the recent wave of violence.
More soon.
And then, there’s Rwanda and France…
In African News on November 12, 2008 at 12:38 pmFrom today’s New Times, Rwanda’s English-language daily: the Rwandan government is going to indict French officials named in the Mucyo Report, an investigation of the French role in the genocide. The report does not give a flattering picture of France (though my French is too bad to understand the whole 300 pages or so). But then, neither have honest historians. There’s a subset of French historians eager to peddle revisionist histories–I take this on the good authority of Gerard Prunier, a historian of the region, but I don’t know the ins and outs of it.
In any case, there will soon be warrants in both hemispheres. Which is no small thing. Much has been made recently of Rwanda’s decision to educate students in English; as a rebuke of France, it is said, it marks a turning away from post-colonial power structures. These warrants would take that even further, and put the power of the international justice system in the hands of a country that, like so many African countries, is usually the object of, and not an agent in, the system.
Which is to say, things are going to get really interesting.
Rwanda and Germany face off
In African News on November 11, 2008 at 10:51 amGermany yesterday arrested a top Rwandan government official, and Rwanda is outraged. Rose Kabuye, a member of Parliament, was arrested while traveling through Frankfurt. But it’s not the Germans who want her; it’s the French, who two years ago indicted 9 advisers to Paul Kagame for conspiring to shoot down the plane of Rwanda’s previous president. That plane went down on the night of April 6, 1994; the genocide began only hours after. So to Kagame, that looks like accusing his closest circle of starting the genocide. (Here’s a 2006 BBC report on those French warrants.)
The Spaniards followed suit earlier this year, widening the circle to about 40 people. Since then, Kagame’s government has protested the “manipulation” of international justice mechanisms. He himself landed in Germany last night–not to deal with the Kabuye case, but to take up an invitation to talk business with private sector firms and to deliver a speech. (As a sitting head of state, he can’t be named in the warrants.)
Rwanda’s government said earlier this year that it would release a report before 2009 that details what it believes happened the night of the 1994 plane crash. That report will surely refute, at least in part, the French and Spanish judges’ claims. It will also go one step further to canonizing an official history of the genocide, a topic whose historiography is already rife with controversy. But that’s for another time…
Here’s a local report, from Uganda’s Daily Monitor, about the Kabuye case.
And here’s the latest wire story.
