Violent clashes in Burundi as the president clings to power

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After Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his long-anticipated plans to seek a third term as president in violation of the post-civil war constitution’s term limits, deadly protests erupted this weekend. They have escalated rapidly after initial fatalities:

Gunfire was heard and streets were barricaded in parts of the capital, Bujumbura, in the third day of protests, witnesses told the BBC. Police are blocking about students in the second city, Gitega, from joining the demonstrations, residents said.

The protests are the biggest in Burundi since the civil war ended in 2005. The army and police have been deployed to quell the protests, which have been described by government officials as an insurrection.
[…]
BBC Burundi analyst Prime Ndikumagenge says the phone lines of private radio stations have been cut, a decision apparently taken by the authorities to prevent news of protests from spreading.

 
This may be the contagion some observers speculated might unfold after the uprising in Burkina Faso last October, when President Blaise Compaoré tried to extend his presidency in a similar fashion.

Flag of Burundi

Flag of Burundi

Burundi’s Army has been accused repeatedly of conducting extrajudicial mass executions of “rebels” and political opponents. Already, thousands of people have fled political persecution to neighboring countries in just a matter of months. Burundi also has a very low median age — half the population is younger than 17, according to the CIA World Factbook — and the President has essentially created child death squads by arming teenage members of his political party’s “youth wing.”

Burundi, which has the same colonially-fostered Hutu/Tutsi split as neighboring Rwanda, experienced a 12-year civil war beginning shortly before the Rwandan Genocide and continuing until 2005, despite repeated attempts to share power. The presidents of both countries were killed in a surface-to-air missile strike on their plane in 1994, in the incident which was widely seen as the trigger signal to initiate the genocide in Rwanda. However, the war in Burundi was already in progress at that point. Hundreds of thousands died before the 2005 peace deal.

It is interesting, however, to note that so far the armed forces have continued to respond to orders from President Nkurunziza. He is Hutu, and the armed forces are a mix of ex-rebel Hutus and the Tutsi regular troops from before the peace deal. In South Sudan, a merger of various ex-rebels from competing ethnic groups, which had been secured around the same time as the Burundi deal, basically broke down completely in December 2013 as certain factions obeyed the president and others the former vice-president, who had been sacked.

Young Yemen

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Yemen has the lowest median age of any country in the Middle East/North Africa region.

The median age in Yemen is 18.6 years, according to the CIA World Factbook. This means that, as of last year, almost half of the 26 million people of Yemen were under 18 years of age. Yemen’s median age is 19 years below the U.S. median age and 23.3 years below that of the EU.

Flag of Yemen

Flag of Yemen

Yemen’s economy is small and under-developed. The country has depended for many years on dwindling oil reserves and was unable to provide enough educational opportunities or legitimate jobs for its young people. In addition, Yemen’s government has been weak for quite some time.

As a result, the country has not been in a position to pursue suitable policies to address and mitigate the challenges associated with this stark demographic reality.

Now that a full-blown civil war has unfolded in Yemen and almost a dozen countries are currently participating in military operations in the country, it has become next to impossible to tackle the issue of the youth bulge in any meaningful fashion.

Even before this recent turn of events, Yemeni children were at serious risk of enslavement and abduction for human trafficking, not just in Yemen itself, but also in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Oman. Girls are kidnapped and forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia’s hospitality and entertainment industry.

Young boys are also at risk of being forced into domestic servitude or prostitution. They bear the additional risk of being forced to fight in Yemen’s national army, clan militias and terrorist groups that operate in the country.

This piece was adapted from a Globalist Quiz I researched and wrote.

The ironclad unkeepable promises of the UK elections

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UK party leaders making firm promises about coalition arrangements (or rejected arrangements) that they mathematically can’t possibly keep are one way voters lose all trust in their public officials. I get that they’re trying to discourage splinter/protest voting by taking a hard line without wiggle room before the election, but the math just isn’t there to be saying stuff like this, and at a certain point it’s just pure misrepresentation of reality.

Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders in the past couple weeks have been painting themselves into a corner on coalition promises, wherein they’ll either force a 2nd election or have to dynamite the corner to escape the foolish pre-election promises.

If the Labour Party will not make any kind of deal with the SNP (which is their latest position) and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats won’t either, how exactly is anyone supposed to form a government? Excluding the fairly astronomically unlikely possibility of a Conservative-Labour grand coalition, no two parties (or even three!) will have enough seats for a majority without involving the SNP. Everyone will be 20-50 seats short.

Projected number of seats to each party and combinations of various parties via The Guardian.

Projected number of seats to each party and combinations of various parties via The Guardian. Click to enlarge.

Are you going to throw this over to Northern Ireland to pick the PM? (Is that really better than letting Scotland do it?) Are you going to force new elections? What’s the realistic game-plan here?

US-backed Syrian rebels make great al Qaeda partners

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Background

– In November 2014, the CIA-trained and armed Harakat Hazm fighters in Syria got into a confrontation with Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in the Syrian Civil War, and basically fled the battlefield, abandoning their U.S.-supplied anti-tank weapons to the extremists.
– By late December 2014, Nusra Front had taken effective control of all major insurgent operations not aligned with ISIS. All “moderate” and “pro-Western” forces essentially joined forces with Syrian al Qaeda or were cut loose from the action.

Latest Development

McClatchy: “U.S.-backed rebels team with Islamists to capture Syrian city”

Rebels, including members of U.S.-backed groups and al Qaida’s Nusra Front, captured the strategic town of Jisr al Shughur in northwest Syria on Saturday, the second major setback for the government of President Bashar Assad in Idlib province in a month.
[…]
The latest rebel victory came surprisingly quickly, apparently aided by U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles. Islamist groups announced the battle only Wednesday.
[…]
Videos posted on social media showed that U.S.-supplied TOW missiles played a critical role, destroying dozens of government tanks and vehicles. The opposition run Masar News Network reported that rebel forces captured dozens of regime troops as well as three tanks and three other armored vehicles.
[…]
The U.S. in recent months has severed relationships with some moderate rebel groups that had surrendered weapons to Nusra.

Video posted on social media Saturday showed fighters from two major groups that still receive U.S. support, Division 13 and the Sukur al Ghab Brigades, participating in the fighting, including firing TOWs.

 

Bill’s Inner Monologue

“Teamwork!” he cried, sarcastically, as he thought about how great it is to be a taxpaying adult in the U.S. and to have the ‘opportunity’ to covertly fund heavy arms for extremist groups in Southwest Asia, just like his parents got to do in the 1980s. “These are definitely not policy actions that will ripple back negatively later in my lifetime,” he added, cynically predicting the opposite of his words.

Maybe we can finally drop the pretenses that there’s a serious, non-extremist, independent opposition force of any military significance in Syria…

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

What exactly is Chris Christie’s view on contract law?

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A NJ.com headline caught my eye: “‘Contract’ isn’t a magic word in N.J. pension legal battle, lawyers argue”

A claim by public worker unions that they have a right to full pension funding challenges the core of New Jersey’s constitutional structure, attorneys for the state said in a brief filed Friday.

 
I find odd the silence from Republicans (and everyone else?) as Gov. Chris Christie’s attorneys appear to challenge the fundamental supremacy of the rule of contract law that holds together much of Anglo-American jurisprudence and property law.

I mean, I guess there’s a valid question about whether or not the state can make and be bound by contracts in violation of the constitution, but I’m not really sure the contract in question is in violation of the constitution.

To my untrained eyes at least, they’re making some pretty bizarre constitutional arguments (mostly centered on state balanced-budget requirements and the like) to prove that contention.

In principle, it sounds similar to the arguments being raised (on the issue of constitutional tax caps) by moderate tax reform advocates, about not binding future legislators by decisions of current legislators/voters — except that in Colorado’s case, they’re challenging the validity of certain state constitutional provisions (which took away the legislature’s effective authority to raise taxes at all) under the U.S. Constitution, rather than (as New Jersey is doing) trying to void contracts because they conflict with stringent state constitutional requirements.

Moreover, even if the New Jersey contracts are indeed unconstitutional, issuing bad-faith contracts is a pretty big problem as far as governing strategies go…and also tends to undermine the strength of contract law in the country.

I don’t have much else to add on this topic at the moment, but I’m flagging it now in case it develops into a bigger story later.

“Polarization”

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It never ceases to amaze me how many current analyses of “polarization” between the parties in Congress skip over the multiple waves of party-switchers and solid-partisan district flips in the Solid South (and to a less noticeable extent the northeast in the opposite direction) from the late 1960s into the late 1990s.

Instead, the story is framed along the lines of “Oh my, where did this polarization come from? It just magically appeared! Why don’t they work together like they used to!”

Well, it was pretty easy to work across party lines when the Segregationist Pro-Corporate-Welfare Anti-Communist Democrats could vote together with the Ultra-Conservative Anti-Regulation Anti-Communist Republicans, while the liberal Democrats voted with the progressive Republicans.

Chart 2 at this link shows a pretty clear peak in party overlap on votes between the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the formal 1968 launch of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy in Nixon’s first successful presidential campaign, which started to break and convert the Solid South from the Democrats to the Republicans.

DemocraticSolidSouth_1876-1964

In other words, before then, there was a phase where large sections of each party’s members of Congress actually probably belonged in the opposite party but were grouped for historical and geographical reasons (usually Civil War related) in the “wrong” party…and then that phase came to a crashing halt when Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Republican Richard Nixon explicitly appealed to the angry southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join him. Voters and their Congressmen began switching in droves. As the Goldwater-Reagan wing gained control of the Republican Party from 1964 to 1980, in part on the strength of this reactionary influx in the Deep South, they in turn purged the moderate and liberal Republicans who represented the northern Lakes and New England states in the Senate and the northern cities in the House.

To explain shifts in voting behavior in Congress over the past 50 years, we need some way of visualizing ideological grouping distributions, not just separation of party affiliations, which in the past were often arbitrarily based in historic-geographic allegiances until more recently. (There are also geographic allegiances now, but it’s a very different kind.) It’s pretty hard to talk about “polarization” without acknowledging that the ideologies didn’t line up well with the party labels for quite a while in American history.

After all, cousins Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt more or less supported similar agendas as president, despite being from different parties, and they were each both warmly supported and deeply opposed by rival factions within their own parties. Conversely, progressive Governor Thomas E. Dewey and hardline conservative Senator Robert A. Taft both theoretically represented the Republican Party at the same time period but had almost polar opposite ideologies and issue positions.

There are no longer cross-party conservative coalitions and cross-party progressive coalitions in Congress. They have sorted almost entirely into their respective parties. Technically, that by definition means there’s “more” polarization in Congress, but only in a superficial sense. A more serious analysis would have to take into account whether moderate, conservative, and liberal members are voting less frequently together — or at least in combinations of two of the three — than they used to do, regardless of party label.

The bigger thing to worry about is not so much whether the parties have sorted themselves ideologically but how that development changes the role of rules and procedural hurdles in each chamber of Congress (and between chambers). If it’s now harder or easier for one particular ideological coalition to gain control of all power points in Congress by being in one party, instead of two, that changes what kind of proposed legislation makes it through to law.

In particular, I think it’s far more likely now that there will be no ideological overlap between the majority leadership and minority leadership — the people controlling the levers and valves on legislation — because the odds are more in favor of a liberal Democratic leadership facing off against a conservative Republican leadership, instead of liberals controlling both parties at the same time or conservatives controlling both parties at the same time, which was often a feature of mid-20th century Congress.