Diplomat Michel Kafando named interim Burkina Faso president

Michel Kafando, a longtime high-level Burkinabé diplomat, has been picked as the “consensus” interim president of Burkina Faso by the selection committee. The 72-year-old will fill the role of Acting President, appointing a prime minister to lead a 25-member cabinet, until the regularly scheduled November 2015 elections are held. He is expected to take office Friday, November 21, exactly three weeks after President Compaoré’s resignation.

From the France24 news report:

“The committee has just designated me to guide temporarily the destiny of our country. This is more than an honour. It’s a true mission which I will take with the utmost seriousness,” Kafando told journalists after his appointment.

Kafando served as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2011. Previously he was Burkina Faso’s foreign affairs minister […]

A committee of 23 officials chose him over other top candidates […] His candidacy was proposed by the army.

 
I’m a little troubled that the Army’s nominee — who was also a 13-year Compaoré appointee as UN ambassador — was chosen as interim president by the selection committee.

Additionally, a French-language news report by Burkina24 suggested that the entire “short list” of five names had been submitted to the selection committee by the military, contrary to Sunday’s reports that a number of interest groups would be submitting candidates. Perhaps the military narrowed that list down to something more manageable, but it would constitute interference all the same. According to the Burkina24 report, the religious and traditional groups did not make any nominations (indeed the Roman Catholic Church repudiated the nomination of Archbishop Paul Ouédraogo to the short list).

Of the remaining three, the selection committee also passed over two news media publishers and a widely-mentioned frontrunner, Joséphine Ouédraogo, a cabinet minister in the revolutionary Sankara government of 1983-1987. The latter was the final runner-up against Kafando, according to Burkina24.

Former Ambassador Kafando has the unusual credential of being a high-ranking appointee under at least three governments, theoretically at odds with each other. In 1981 and 1982, he served as Upper Volta’s Ambassador to the United Nations (pre-name change), as an appointee of the Colonel Zerbo military government of 1980-1982. (Zerbo, in addition to various criminal actions and anti-leftist policies, supposedly later became a Compaoré adviser following the latter’s 1987 coup that displaced the leftist Sankara government, which initially was very anti-Zerbo.) From September 1982 to August 1983, and as the only continuing member from the previous administration, Kafando served as Foreign Minister in the short-lived military government of Major Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo that had overthrown Zerbo. That government was overthrown in turn by Captain Sankara in August 1983. Kafando then appears to have left government for over a decade, spending at least part of the late 1980s in France obtaining his PhD at Paris-Sorbonne University, before returning to the UN posting in 1998 under Compaoré.

Perhaps this eclectic resume of administrations served under actually demonstrates an ability to work easily with a range of competing factions. Certainly, he is relatively well known by the international community due to these diplomatic postings (including to the UN Security Council), which is probably a plus for an impoverished country reliant on foreign assistance and involved in various security agreements.

Oped | U.S. Double Standards: ISIS and Murders in Mexico

An excerpt from my new op-ed in The Globalist on the US non-response to the Mexican cartels compared with the response to ISIS:

Or is Mexico “one of us” – a fellow North American civilization of suit-wearing businessmen and politicians who are good Christians? Whereas, perhaps ISIS is an “orientalist” archetypal threat led by people who “dress funny” and claim to be Muslims, who were supposed to be the big cultural threat to “the West” before “the West” tore itself apart over Martin Luther’s ideas?

 
Particularly relevant today in light of the President feeling compelled again to speak on an ISIS beheading despite the hundreds of such incidents passing without comment just across our border.

Free Syrian Arms

A gem from a Washington Post report on CIA plans to scale up their existing “secret” project to vet, train, and arm a faction of vaguely pro-American Syrian rebels in the so-called (and largely ambivalent on America) “Free Syrian Army”:

The latest setbacks came this month, when CIA-backed factions were routed by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s primary affiliate in Syria. Fighters with militias including Harakat Hazm — one of the biggest recipients of U.S. arms — fled positions in towns across northern Syria, with many leaving their weapons to be scooped up by al-Nusra. […] The weapons distributed have been mostly light arms, although Harakat Hazm was among a select group of units to be given U.S.-made TOW antitank missiles.

 
Cool, cool, cool. Such amazing results for Harakat Hazm (Hazzm Movement) bodes well for the even slower, still-under-development Pentagon program to train rebel fighters.

They sound about as effective and reliable as the Iraqi Army and almost as much of an accidental U.S. arms conduit to Nusra Front as the Iraqi Army was to ISIS in Mosul. Hazzm must be the inept military counterpart to the spectacular incompetence and ridiculousness of the supposed “civilian leadership” of “the Syrian opposition.”

Another funny story: Nusra Front — which the Free Syrian Army, the purported parent organization to Hazzm, has repeatedly hailed as a valued ally in the fight against Bashar al-Assad — reportedly just signed a military cooperation pact with ISIS after a year of animosity and infighting. Battlefield cooperation has already begun. (Edit on November 19, 2014: Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi argues that there is very little credible evidence of a serious agreement between Nusra Front and ISIS.)

You may also remember Nusra Front for their greatest hits including the kidnap and ransom of dozens of United Nations peacekeepers captured from Golan Heights. I’m super glad we probably just accidentally gave them anti-tank weapons. I’m sure they’ll find some nice tanks to use them on, and, to be fair, we probably wouldn’t have gotten much use out of them ourselves.

Flag of the CIA-backed Hazzm Movement in Syria. (Credit: MrPenguin20 - Wikimedia)

Flag of the CIA-backed Hazzm Movement in Syria. (Credit: MrPenguin20 – Wikimedia)

Burkina Faso Army preps to hand back control to civilians

In continuing the rapid implementation of the ECOWAS-sponsored transition plan, the military government in Burkina Faso (which took power just 15 days ago) today gave civilian groups a one day deadline to narrow down their proposed interim leaders to a consensus choice, who will govern until November 2015 elections. Here are some key highlights from the BBC report:

Burkina Faso’s military ruler has told activist groups they have until Sunday afternoon to provide a list of candidates for interim national leader.

Lt Col Isaac Zida agreed [to] a transition plan with civilian political groups on Thursday, but no leader was named. The groups have agreed to submit a list of candidates to a 23-member council, which will then select a single leader.

In a communique on Saturday, Col Zida said civilian groups had until noon on Sunday to provide a list of candidates to serve as interim president. He also said the constitution was back in force in order to “allow the start of the establishment of a civilian transition”.

Under the charter agreed on Thursday, the interim president will be chosen by a special college composed of religious, military, political, civil and traditional leaders.

 
Let’s take another look at that constitutional power vacuum situation that led to the temporary — and thankfully apparently short-lived — military takeover after President Compaoré‘s resignation. Since many Western media sources were being a bit lazy about reporting the details accurately, I spent a number of hours immediately following the coup carefully parsing the constitution along with 2012, 2013, and early 2014 news articles from the country. My conclusion: Due to an ongoing political dispute well before the current crisis, Burkina Faso doesn’t actually have a Senate set up to fill the role of Senate President, even thought that position is designated without alternative in the 2012 Constitution as the Acting President if the Faso presidency becomes vacant.

In other words, there was no way any transition would have been constitutional, even if the Army had not suspended the constitution and assumed control. So, the “restoration” of the constitution today by the military doesn’t really fix that fundamental, unavoidable problem that led to their takeover in the first place.

However, here’s some good news: The uncreated Senate was supposed to have been composed of indirectly-elected representatives of the local municipalities (etc), worker groups, industry groups, religious groups, and (some) customary/traditional authorities (I think most were disbanded in the 1980s by Sankara). Thus, the plan announced Saturday essentially “restores” the Constitution to the extent actually possible and seems to try to emulate its spirit as closely as possible to fill the remaining gaps where it’s simply not feasible to follow the letter. For example, the acting civilian president will be chosen — by a 23 member council of representatives from the aforementioned interest groups — from a list submitted by those same groups and the 40 odd political parties in the country (or a lot of them anyway). That’s basically as close as humanly possibly to a duly-composed (in spirit) pseudo-Senate choosing a leader to fill the role of Acting President in lieu of a Senate President who never existed. Moreover, the military government has not attempted to rewrite, amend, or promulgate a new constitution.

If this plan holds up, this may prove to be one of the most efficient and minimally invasive military interventions in the democratic system of a country in recent memory. The real test, of course, will continue through the transitional civilian leadership period and into new elections (and presumably a less arcane and broken constitution eventually). But this is still a huge step, and a lesson to other would-be military interventionists both in Burkina Faso and abroad.

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Saving Grace: Father Bernard Kinvi of Central African Republic

The story of a Catholic priest, Father Bernard Kinvi, who protected Muslim civilians in Central African Republic from extremist Christian militias during the country’s reciprocal genocide, from late 2013 into early 2014, in its ongoing conflict:

At one point, 1,500 Muslims were living under the protection of a man whose only sources of power were his faith and the black cassock with a large red cross on the chest that he wears as a member of the Camillian order.
[…]
From mid-January to April, Kinvi barely slept, terrified that if he closed his eyes the militia would fulfill their threats to murder all the Muslims in the mission. But bit-by-bit, lorry load by lorry load, the priest started to get the Muslims out of the area and over the border into Cameroon.

 
In contrast, French “peacekeepers” literally stood and watched Muslims being hacked to death in front of them by Christian extremists. Actual rescue missions, as in Rwanda in 1994, had to be staged by African peacekeepers.

Ten years from now, everyone is going to be asking why the world did nothing there. And there will be no good explanations or excuses.
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Worth the Weight? The ISIS currency is nearly here.

Speaking of ISIS state-building, the pseudo-state is rolling out a new hard currency:

In an announcement on Thursday heralding a liberation from the “satanic usury-based global economic system,” the Islamic State said it would begin minting gold, silver and copper coins, in likenesses similar to the days of the seventh-century caliphs. The coins will have standardized weights and values, the announcement said, and they will be the legal tender of the lands controlled by the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

 
There’s plenty of back and forth debate by economists, in the Times article quoted above, on whether this is purely a propaganda move that can’t really avoid the pressures of the “global economic system” or is actually a savvy investment (which also avoids the “satanic usury” of the non-Islamic banking system that is forbidden under strict Sharia law). My instinct says it won’t matter much either way, since their “state” — as a territorial, governing entity — isn’t going to last very long.

I’m wondering what they’re planning to name it. I bet it will be called a “dīnār” because that was the name of the Umayyad caliphate’s gold coins (and actually remains the currency name for a lot of majority-Arab states, including Iraq), but that name, drawn from the Byzantine “dinarius,” seems awfully western to me for the Mesopotamian enemies of the Global West.

695 CE Umayyad dinar coin at the British Museum. (Wikimedia: "Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik: 'Caliphal Image solidus' or Standing Caliph solidus struck from 74-77 AH. Based on Byzantine numismatic traditions.")

695 CE Umayyad dinar coin at the British Museum. (Wikimedia: “Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik: ‘Caliphal Image solidus’ or Standing Caliph solidus struck from 74-77 AH. Based on Byzantine numismatic traditions.”)

Islamic State Service Provider

As I’ve said before several times — I really think think the make-or-break factor for would-be or quasi state actor organizations like ISIS is their ability to provide and sustain vital, basic-level government services and employment to their subject populations. Conversely, their opponents would have to find a way to disrupt the supporting physical infrastructure, the bureaucrats administrating the system, and the low-level employees implementing the policies each day.

The New York Times ran an article Thursday on how U.S. airstrikes have affected all three, but my main takeaway was more documentation of the brass-tacks approach of ISIS (once they stop mass-murdering people, of course):

It was not that the militants were popular in Raqqa [the “Islamic State” “capital”], according to nearly a dozen residents, who spoke in interviews in the city or across the border in Turkey. Rather, the Islamic State had become an indispensable service provider.
[…]
Reflecting how civilian life in the area has become intertwined with the militants — who paid salaries, ran schools and directed traffic — 10 civilians were killed in a coalition airstrike on Sunday that hit one of the oil facilities run by the Islamic State, where many people had found work.

Acceptance of the Islamic State in northern Syria contrasts sharply with Iraq, where the group’s ascendance has been more contested and its response more brutal. Many Iraqis clamor for a return of the government, despite its unpopularity, especially in Sunni regions.

 
This extends and expands the point I made in early September (when the US intervention was limited to the occupied Iraqi zones, rather than the economic heart of ISIS), when I cited a Reuters report on ISIS bakeries, hydroelectric power plants, and telecoms in their so-called “Forat Province” administrative area. From Reuters:

According to one fighter, a former Assad employee is now in charge of mills and distributing flour to bakeries in Raqqa. Employees at the Raqqa dam, which provides the city with electricity and water, have remained in their posts.
[…]
They have been helped by experts who have come from countries including in North Africa and Europe. The man Baghdadi appointed to run and develop Raqqa’s telecoms, for instance, is a Tunisian with a PhD in the subject who left Tunisia to join the group and serve “the state”.

 
Sure they can’t keep the lights on for more than six hours a day, and sure they’ve stupidly sent all their beat cops from Raqqa to Kobani in large convoys to be deployed in clusters that are easy targets for the United States Air Force. But they really were building a new state out of the civil war’s rubble before the Syrian and American planes finally showed up to put a stop to it. That’s not particularly laudable in their case per se, but it’s worth observing.

Recognized states across the region should take note: Ensuring day to day services reach the public is a tool of a universal language and creed, which fosters legitimacy and support … and even good will if the providers aren’t too murderous.

For most people, from one day to the next, it’s all about the quality and effectiveness of governance at the smallest and most local level. Everything is else is just world politics.

 

Theoretical maximum sphere of ISIS control as of September 4 2014, via Wikimedia, 3 weeks before US airstrikes began in Syria. Keep in mind that control was and is tenuous in outlying desert village areas and limited to major thoroughfares/cities in many areas. There is debate over how to map this reality more accurately.

Theoretical maximum sphere of ISIS control as of September 4 2014, via Wikimedia 3 weeks before US airstrikes began in Syria. Keep in mind that control was and is tenuous in outlying desert village areas and limited to major thoroughfares/cities in many areas. There has been considerable debate over how to map the situation more accurately.