Lesotho military appears to fracture after coup attempt

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Map of Lesotho's location in southern Africa. (CIA World Factbook)

Map of Lesotho’s location in southern Africa.

In the aftermath of the August 30th attempted coup d’état by a disgruntled general (see our background report), Lesotho is now bracing for a conflict among units of the small, southern African country’s armed forces.

Eyewitness News of South Africa reports that Lesotho’s General Kamoli — fired from the head of the military just before he attempted to seize power — has taken off with stolen weapons and supporters:

Former Lesotho military commander Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli has reportedly seized army weapons in preparation for a possible stand-off.

He is accused of destabilising the mountainous country last week after he apparently plotted a coup and has refused to step down as the commander of the Lesotho Defence Force.

Reports from Lesotho are that Kamoli has seized an unknown number of weapons from state armouries in order to prepare for offensive and defensive operations.

Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao says Kamoli has refused to vacate military offices after he was sacked by Prime Minister Tom Thabane.

 
Eyewitness News also reported that 150 government officials are still in hiding in case the pro-coup forces regain the upper hand. Prime Minister Thabane, however, did return from his temporary refuge South Africa with South African police protection. Negotiations, brokered by South African leaders, continued in an effort to resolve the political crisis peacefully. Thabane had angered members of the military and political opponents for suspending parliament earlier this year and refusing to re-convene it.

An AFP report suggested that the political talks are going poorly. Thabane is still uninterested in bringing parliament back into session, and those military commanders who have remained loyal to his authority are now saying they will be imminently launching operations against Kamoli, the rogue general who has fled into the mountains. They are only waiting now to see if outside armed forces will be assisting.

As part of last week’s agreement Zuma has deployed South African police to protect Thabane and some of his key allies, but Lesotho’s leaders are calling for a more robust force to hunt renegade general Kamoli.

Lesotho’s army commander Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao told AFP on Sunday that military action was now the only option against Kamoli.

“Negotiations have failed as far as we are concerned. At this point in time I think we are left with no option but military operations.”

The army chief was frank about the difficulties he would face in taking on Kamoli, who has taken to the mountains with a seized cache of weapons including artillery, mortars and small arms.

However, “it would definitely be very helpful” to get military support from the Southern African Development Community, a 15-nation regional bloc.

“I have asked the relevant body in SADC to consider coming to our assistance,” Mahao said.

 
This new development eerily begins to mirror the situation in nearby, much larger Mozambique, where political disputes between various leaders and political parties had devolved over the past year into low-level insurrection against government forces, after opposition members re-took up arms and disappeared into the rural mountains to harass the government. A ceasefire deal there was reached recently ahead of elections and some of the people hiding in the mountains returned to the capital.

Foreign human rights investigators arrested by Qatar government

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Not a great couple weeks for Qatar, in their quest to present a good face to the Western world via soft power campaigns. The latest development was that two British human/labor rights investigators, representing a Norwegian organization, disappeared suddenly on assignment in Qatar. Al Jazeera America, the US arm of the Qatari royal family’s media empire, reported that the government had confirmed yesterday that it had arrested them. They are still in detention but have now been afforded access to representatives from the British embassy.

In the first official comments made by the emirate in regards to the missing men, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said the pair were “being interrogated for having violated the provisions of the laws of the state of Qatar,” the Qatar News Agency reported.

The announcement follows calls on Qatar from rights groups including Amnesty International to reveal the whereabouts and ensure the safety of the two men, named as Krishna Upadhyaya and Ghimire Gundev.

Researcher Upadhyaya, 52, and Photographer Gundev, 36, work for the Norway-based Global Network for Rights and Development (GNRD).

Both went missing on Aug. 31 as they were preparing to leave Qatar. GNRD had suggested that Qatari security services were behind their disappearance and has called for both men’s release.

On Sunday, the Qatari Foreign Ministry said that all actions taken against the men are “consistent with the principles of human rights” outlined in the laws of Qatar, and that British Embassy officials have visited them to check on their situation.

 
Qatar, slated to host the 2022 World Cup, has been plagued with serious and credible allegations of migrant worker abuse and enslavement generally, as well as specifically with relation to World Cup construction activities. Other British investigators delivered a damning report at the start of 2014 alleging that 4,000 enslaved workers were projected to die during World Cup preparation between now and 2022. The overall foreign worker population in Qatar is more than six times the size of the ruling Qatari population, at about 1.65 million to 250,000. The foreign population has grown very sharply in the past few years so the numbers are a bit hard to track. The ruling family and local citizens are extremely wealthy.

But the other recent development has been on the topic of Qatar’s increasingly hard to ignore state sponsorship of terrorism across the globe. It’s by no means new — involving a mix of official government money and “fundraising” by local and foreign Gulf-area plutocrats, all flowing into active conflict zones — but the condemnation is starting to intensify as Qatar continues to funnel donations, weapons, and ransom payments to extreme groups so destabilizing and threatening that virtually every other country in the area has opposed or abandoned them publicly, despite their own past histories with terror sponsorship. The cozy relationship that allows for easy “negotiation” with terrorist organizations holding kidnapped Western citizens is rapidly becoming more of a reputation liability than a strategic asset. Even Qatar’s support for somewhat more moderate organizations has been criticized heavily because it has become out of step with the agenda of the other regional powers.

(The New York Times today also attributed the rising criticism and attention in Western media to the fact that Qatar’s regional rivals have been hiring U.S. consulting firms in Washington to feed stories to journalists on the subject. But one also suspects that the sheer clash of Qatar’s soft power pretensions and modernizing aims with its terrorism ties and slave labor is a pretty tempting target for journalists anyway.)

For the latest discussion of 2018 Russian and 2022 Qatari World Cup controversies and potential consequences, listen to my radio segment with Nate on last week’s Arsenal For Democracy – Episode 98 Part 2:
Part 2 – Russian and Qatari World Cups – AFD 98

For our prior discussion of the problems surrounding the Qatar World Cup, listen to my radio segment with Nate on Arsenal For Democracy – Episode 87 Part 2 – FIFA/World Cup:
Part 2 – FIFA World Cup – AFD 87

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Flag of Qatar.

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Assad versus the ISIS administrators: The next stage of Syria’s war

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I’ve been arguing for several months now that the durability of ISIS over the long-run is going to be a lot less about ability to rapidly take over territory with mobile light infantry than about ability to hold the territory they already have. Beheadings, massacres, and general intimidation can keep people docile for a while, but in the end every territorial administration — whether a state or a non-recognized/non-state actor — has to balance that with substantial provision of basic services, governmental functions, and food access. Otherwise people just get hungry enough and angry enough to overthrow you no matter how many gunmen you have on payroll.

Fluid terrorist organizations that move easily between physical locations and do not attempt to run a state can basically do whatever they want and be as vicious as they want. But organizations that set themselves up in a defined physical space (a territory) and attempt to take over or establish a new state (or pseudo-state) quickly find that the administration capacity question is what makes or breaks their ability to remain in control.

Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and al-Shabab in southern Somalia, have all proven that they can gain a ton of local support by providing government functions effectively and providing food and services to their constituent populations effectively (particularly when compared to the alternative vacuum). They are so good at the “welfare” part of the welfare state that they can take actions that directly or indirectly cause harm to their populations and they will still remain highly popular within their territories. For example, as I examined previously, al-Shabab has spent millions of dollars since 2011 on serious, long-term agro-infrastructure development in southern Somalia to reduce famine risk and create and independent local food production capacity that breaks the cycle of dependence on food imports.

ISIS has declared itself to be “The Islamic State” and has carved out an entirely new administrative district, Forat Province, based on the Arabic name for the Euphrates River, which spans part of eastern Syria and western Iraq. They have clearly established themselves in the territorial-control model of terrorist organizations.

Contrary to much of the breathless media reporting focusing on their rapid traversing of desert highways, the expansion of ISIS is far from unstoppable or perfectly stable. Already they have reached the point where they have disrupted local administrative functions so heavily that they need to slow down and resume bureaucratic operations to keep everything spinning smoothly enough for people to remain accepting of their rule in the places they’ve already captured.

In particular, the core of the ISIS sphere of control poses a lot of challenges for the organization. A lot of local community leaders in eastern Syria are economic mercenaries, exploiting the civil war’s chaos, with only the thinnest of allegiances to ISIS, who will turn on them without a moment’s notice if a better opportunity comes along that ISIS can’t outmatch.

According to reporting from Reuters, however, ISIS has actually been making some disturbingly long strides in eastern Syria in terms of rebooting the administrative activities after their initial wave of terror: Read more

Further indications that the “Syrian opposition” leaders are a joke

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The New York Times this weekend published a “human interest”-type story on Ghassan Hitto — a longtime U.S. resident, Texas executive, and almost lifelong Syrian Kurd exile — who briefly became the first interim “prime minister” of the exiled pseudo-government of the Syrian opposition in Istanbul, Turkey.

My main takeaway from this article is that this story further supports the notion that not only is the Syrian opposition’s civil “leadership” (from the Syrian National Coalition to the “Syrian Interim Government” once headed by Ghassan Hitto) pretty much a complete joke with almost no experience in governmental functions, but it also has virtually no connection to events on the ground.

Whether the myriad rebel groups opposing the Assad regime were winning or losing the war, it made no difference to the so-called leaders drawn practically from everywhere but Syria. And they were so disconnected to the fighters that they never had any ability to influence them in the other direction either. They are — and have been from the start — utterly unrepresentative and irrelevant, yet have been more or less treated as the legitimate government-in-waiting by many (anti-Assad) government officials around the world.

It would almost be funny that this man, who had left Syria decades three earlier as a teen and still wasn’t back, at one point called himself “the prime minister of Syria,” if it weren’t so pathetic. Here are some excerpts from the Times profile:

Mr. Hitto, most recently the director of operations for a Texas-based telecommunications company, became interim prime minister of the Syrian opposition coalition a few days later. What was supposed to have been a two-week trip had evolved into something far more complicated.

Mr. Hitto, who had spent most of his life in the United States, had taken on the task of forming an alternative government to that of President Bashar al-Assad.
[…]
When people involved in the opposition government floated him as a candidate for prime minister, he was skeptical, he said. He had never before held public office. And the alternative government, based in Turkey and filled with expatriates, was still struggling to gain legitimacy.
[…]
His son Obaida was similarly reluctant to leave Syria, even though his father said that on the inside, he would become an immediate target for Mr. Assad’s men.

He questioned why his father wanted to work with the opposition coalition, voicing an oft-heard criticism among fighters and activists.

“I was in Syria where people were coming under shelling and didn’t have anything to eat,” Obaida recalled over Skype. “And there was the opposition coalition; people outside in hotels, smoking cigarettes.”

Though Mr. Hitto ultimately won over his son, who relocated to Istanbul to attend meetings with his father, the perception of the expatriate coalition as a collection of dilettantes and dreamers was one of the many obstacles he faced as he took office.

Back in Dallas, Mr. Hitto was known as a pragmatic community taskmaster, the man you put in charge to make sure the soccer field or mosque gets built. He had a history of activism, whether fighting for the legal rights of Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, or establishing a group in Texas to help Syrians in need.

But persuading the disparate members of his pseudo-government to agree on anything — while trying to win over rebel leaders who were skeptical of his background in the United States — proved to be impossible. He resigned after less than four months.

 
It brings to mind the bizarre coalition of embittered, one-upping, tough-talking Iraqi exiles (some of whom were hand-picked by the CIA a decade before) with almost no constituencies or followers left on the ground in Iraq, who managed to convince the (willingly hoodwinked) Bush-Cheney Administration in 2002 — against U.S. intelligence advisories — that Iraqis would uniformly welcome American troops as “liberators” and that assembling a new government would be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

It’s amazing how often the governments of the world rush to proclaim some, essentially, randos with good sales pitches as the once and future kings of the countries whose governments they wish to change. The idea that leaders should have some sort of backing or base of support domestically seems like an alien concept to many.

In the case of Syria, this is just more evidence that there’s no point in the United States trying to support the “opposition” anymore, whether against Assad or against ISIS, because there isn’t one. And by more and more accounts from reporters, there probably never was a real one to begin with.

the-thick-of-it-lemon-squeezy
the-thick-of-it-lemon-difficult

5 crazy facts from Uganda’s parliamentary debt farce

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uganda-flagA new Al Jazeera article takes us inside the Ugandan MP debt crisis that is rapidly devolving into farce. Essentially, the elected members of Uganda’s parliament are massively paid by peer standards but somehow are also, almost across the board, massively in debt.

Interviewees vaguely cited failed business investments as if that were a common affliction of the world’s elected officials. Others cited a need to spend personal money to buy votes to be re-elected to keep the money coming. At this point, the MPs believe the only solutions are a huge pay raise (from taxpayers) or bailout (from anyone willing to buy their support).

Here are the 5 craziest things I learned from the eye-popping piece:

  1. Uganda’s members of parliament, who are part of Uganda’s nearly three-decade-old quasi-democracy, were given a huge bribe pay raise to remove presidential term limits in 2005. They now claim President Museveni — Africa’s 5th-longest-serving leader — is intentionally blocking further pay raises. Why? Supposedly, so he’ll have leverage for future bribery incentivizing along the same lines.
  2. Despite how much money they made already, Uganda’s MPs are making new innovations in greed, spending sprees, and legalized theft of public resources. Debt aside, they now legally earn $7,680/month in a country where the average annual income is $510 and per capita GDP is $558. In 2011, many of them voted themselves $8,000 extra in one-time grants to “supervise government projects.”
  3. The parliament, as an institution, literally started lending money to its own members to help them out. Eventually the non-elected staff cut the MPs off from this source of cash because other creditors were then hounding the parliament to pay off debts or collect loans back.
  4. A Chinese bank actually tried to buy off the whole parliament by purchasing up the debts (probably in exchange for political support later) and giving better repayment terms to the MPs. These members of parliament were so greedy and unwilling to face reality they basically tried to accept this openly corrupt (and unpatriotic?) proposal. They blame the president again for stopping this brilliant plan.
  5. Uganda still has debtors’ prisons! This is where some MPs have already started getting hauled off to, when they fail to make good on their debts, like some sort of Dickensian version of House of Cards.

One suspects that these MPs, who are the same ones voting through radical anti-gay legislation handed to them by American evangelical activists, are not exactly the brightest lights in Ugandan society. But I suppose that comes with the territory when real governance power is removed from the parliament and transferred to an autocratic executive who has ruled for 28 years. Tends to discourage better candidates from seeking office.

The unbearable wifeness of being Mrs McDonnell

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Bob-McDonnell-by-Gage_SkidmoreAh, Bob McDonnell, the once and former future Vice President of These United States. Now a retired Governor of Virginia and (as of today) 11-times-over Federal convict. His wife was also convicted soundly on similar charges.

You may recall past highlights from his corruption trial proceedings included refusing to take an amazing plea deal that would have spared his wife altogether from joining him in 14-indictment hell:

The Feds were even willing to offer an extremely generous — perhaps overly so — deal to former Gov. McDonnell that would have protected his wife entirely, even though she seems to have orchestrated much of the corruption and solicitations. All he had to do was plead guilty to one felony count and serve time (probably very little considering who he is). Yet he said no.

 
And so down she went with him. But, we were told, it was all part of a cunning plan! This marriage needed to look so awful (for the jury) that refusing to spare her the investigation was just the final step.

Ah Bobby McDonnell, your masterful and foolproof “my wife is so horrible and I hate her and she was only taking bribes because she was in love with the briber” defense strategy worked like … whatever the opposite of “a charm” is. Just how low did you go in an effort to slime her for your own failed exculpation? Let us consult the New York Times:

Mr. McDonnell, who carried his wife over the threshold of the Executive Mansion the day of his inauguration, portrayed her in his testimony as a harridan whose yelling left him “spiritually and mentally exhausted,” and who was so cold that after he sent her an email pleading to save their marriage, she did not reply.

 
BOBBY. FOR SHAME. You made the New York Times editors break out the word “harridan.” They probably nearly asphyxiated from the dust of opening their expanded-volume dictionary just to find that word which could so perfectly summarize your cold-hearted view of your longtime wife and the mother of your five children.

BOBBY, I HAD TO LOOK THAT WORD UP JUST TO READ ABOUT YOUR DEFENSE. That is how mean you were to your wife.

And how, pray tell, did you brace yourself for your multitudinous convictions, good sir?

Leaving the courthouse at midday Tuesday once the jury began deliberations, Mr. McDonnell said the past 18 months had been tough on his family, but he said he drew strength from his 38 years of marriage and the five children he shared with his wife. “I think we’re stronger than we’ve ever been.”

 
And the shackles of their love will only grow in strength, no doubt, while they are both shackled in respective Federal prisons. Being apart from an unloving, backstabbing, corrupt spouse can only make the heart grow fonder. That’s in Proverbs.

Is Kansas about to vote out a Republican Senator AND Governor?

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It’s been an unexpectedly competitive cycle in Kansas politics this year. Today’s news is that the Democratic Senate nominee Chad Taylor has dropped out of a three-way race with an independent against a Republican incumbent. (Oddly, this also happened in the Alaska Governor’s race earlier this week.)

The decision, from what I can parse from the candidate statement and recent polling, was motivated by the realization that the independent candidate, moderate and apparently reasonable ex-Democrat Greg Orman, might actually have a pretty good shot — in a two-way race — at beating incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts in November, even though he was in third in a three-way race. (It’s still jaw-dropping, too, that Sen. Roberts is so unpopular he almost lost his GOP primary to a deeply unethical doctor who had posted patient X-rays of fatal gunshot victims to his Facebook account repeatedly with joking captions.)

The decision for Taylor to drop out seemed to have been done in consultation with (or perhaps even pressure from) Kansas Democratic Party leaders. A PPP poll last month found Orman leading Roberts in a one-on-one race, and in a good position to hold that lead into Election Day as the undecideds come down on one side of the fence or the other.

It’s unclear which party Orman would caucus with if elected, since he’s picking up a lot of Republican endorsements in the state on his pro-business, economics-oriented platform — seems like he’s targeting disaffected moderate Kansas Republicans of the old Eisenhower mold — but there’s also a number of arguably left-leaning positions in his platform too, though that again might just be sane Republicanism that is now what passes for left-leaning. He’s been careful to stake out a position much closer to the pragmatic center than Roberts, certainly. I suspect that, as with Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, Orman would feel a lot more comfortable being conservative in the diverse Democratic caucus than trying to conform his pragmatism to the rigid lockstep extremism that has characterized the Republican caucus in recent years. Either way, I’m sure many Kansas Democrats feel it would be better to have Orman elected than have Sen. Roberts squeak into a fourth term in a 3-way race.

At minimum and regardless of outcome, this development might help Democrats nationally, by suddenly making a Republican Senator credibly more vulnerable and diverting crucial Republican resources out of other swing Senate seats where Republicans were trying to pick up a half dozen seats from Democrats to retake the majority this November.

Closer to home, in Kansas itself, creating a second competitive statewide race in Kansas could further help boost left and moderate voter turnout against the now-near-universally-loathed Governor Sam Brownback.
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