Possible coup attempt in progress in Lesotho

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Lesotho is a constitutional monarchy surrounded by South Africa, with some prior history of military involvement in its politics. The Prime Minister has fled across the border into South Africa, saying that a military coup is under way.

But it’s unclear what’s actually going on here, because the Prime Minister suspended parliament back in June to avoid a no-confidence vote against his unstable coalition government. And today the military allegedly may have just been trying to take him involuntarily to the king (I assume to insist that parliament be recalled into session and a new government be formed under a different prime minister). The military also claims they were merely acting today to disarm the country’s police force, which they accuse of providing weapons to the prime minister’s party supporters.

According to the BBC:

The army is understood to have acted after the prime minister attempted to remove its chief, Lt Gen Kennedy Tlai Kamoli.

The army said the general was still charge, saying the military “supports the democratically elected government of the day,” Reuters news agency reported.

A spokesman, Maj Ntlele Ntoi, denied staging a coup, saying: “There is nothing like that, the situation has returned to normalcy… the military has returned to their barracks.”

Earlier, troops were seen on the streets of Maseru and there were reports of gunfire.

Radio stations were taken off air and phone lines were cut, although later reports suggested they were working again.

 
Eyewitness account by Basildon Peta, publisher of the Lesotho Times, quoted by the BBC:

This whole thing started around 03:00. There were gunshots since early morning. The city is currently calm. People are playing it safe within their homes, but there is basically a media blackout.

To all intents and purposes it is a military coup with the aim of ousting the prime minister. There can be no other reason of soldiers behaving the way they have been behaving other than to seize power.

So far we have no reports of killings. It would be correct to call it a bloodless coup attempt. But I am not going to stick around. The chances are the situation may deteriorate. One does not know what is going to happen.

 
South Africa’s government, which has long had a very influential role in Lesotho’s politics, has said it is monitoring the situation closely and would oppose any unconstitutional change in power there.

The former British protectorate of less than 2 million people is very poor and still has a subsistence-oriented agricultural economy. The government is the largest employer in the country, according to the CIA World Factbook. The military has strongly resisted government plans to reduce its size to a more reasonable level for a country whose outside defenses are actually now maintained by another country (South Africa).

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

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

Update, August 31 2014: There has been an attempted assassination against Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao, who was Prime Minister Tom Thabane’s choice to replace Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli as head of the armed forces. The latter is accused of leading the attempted coup this weekend.

Low-ranking soldiers contacted by AFP said it was unclear who was now giving their orders. They remain confined to barracks.

Prime Minister Thabane remains in South Africa. His political rival, Deputy Prime Minister Mothejoa Metsing, has also now departed Lesotho for Pretoria, at the invitation of the South African government, to try to sort out the situation. This appears to leave Public Service Minister Motloheloa Phooko, from the third rival party in the coalition government, as the acting chief executive, assuming the civilian leadership is still in power, despite the coup attempt.

Confirmed: Ron Paul’s 2012 team bribed a state senator

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After a guilty plea this week, we now have confirmation that Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign bribed an elected official $73,000.

A former Iowa state senator pleaded guilty Wednesday to receiving and concealing payments in exchange for switching his support from one presidential candidate to another in the 2012 election, the Justice Department said.

The former lawmaker, Kent Sorenson, resigned from the Iowa Senate last year after an investigation found that he probably violated ethics rules by taking money from presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sorenson, 42, of Milo, Iowa, had been the state chairman for the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, but then switched his support to former Representative Ron Paul of Texas just days before the state’s caucus.

In a statement filed with his plea agreement, Mr. Sorensen admitted that he agreed to switch his allegiance in exchange for $73,000 in payments.

 
Please tell me more about Congressman Paul’s integrity and principles and blah blah blah. Though I suppose that buying elected officials is very free-market and all that.

The fallout began Friday night, as a Paul family insider, Jesse Benton, was forced to resign as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign manager in Kentucky.

Benton has worked in high-ranking positions in Rand Paul’s first Senate bid in 2010 and Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, and he has married into the family, as well. It’s not known whether Benton himself knew about the bribe, but there would be a lot of questions either way, and so he had to go. If he’s cleared, I’m guessing he’ll be back for Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign team, which he had already been slated to join before this scandal broke.

Unsecured guns still magically don’t count as child endangerment

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There was an important post on TIME by Aaron Gouveia about the disparate handling of two cases involving 9-year-old girls who were put in potentially unsafe situations by their parents in the past few months. The more recent of the two cases was the now infamous situation where a 9-year-old girl at an Arizona gun range was handed an Uzi submachine gun — notoriously hard-to-control — and promptly lost her grip while firing and killed the instructor. The latter was a case where a working mother let her child play unattended in a nearby playground with other kids this summer after the girl’s laptop was stolen and she had nothing to do all day while mom was working.

Many other commentators have expended a lot of internet ink pointing out the absurd overreaction of law enforcement and the other parents who narc’d on the mom, particularly given that there was actually an extremely low risk of anything terrible happening and just a generation or so ago 9-year-old kids were wandering all over their communities without any adult supervision at all and no cell phones. The mother in this case has been severely and disproportionately punished, as we’ll see in a moment.

There is one angle not really covered by Gouveia which is that the mother and child in the playground case were Black (unlike the family in the other case), and there is a long history in the United States of forcing Black mothers to work extremely long hours for poor compensation while shaming and even criminalizing how they are compelled to raise their kids under those circumstances.

Nevertheless, Gouveia summarizes the two cases well in his article and raises the other crucial contrast in how the cases were handled with regard to a kid on a playground surrounded by other kids and parents versus a child executing a man by accident. And that’s the gun angle:

Instead of a loaded weapon, Harrell armed her daughter with a phone, and sent her to a playground with lots of other kids and adults. The only shooting that took place was the cool water from a splash pad and some hoops on the basketball courts. There were even volunteers who came by the playground with free snacks. While perhaps not ideal since Harrell was at work, she sent her daughter to a family-friendly place with an environment geared toward fun and summertime frivolity. The same kind of place I routinely rode my bike to at the age of nine.

Yet Harrell is the one arrested. Who lost her job. Who spent 17 days in jail, temporarily lost custody of her daughter, and faces 10 years in prison.

Harrell’s detractors claim someone could’ve kidnapped her daughter at the playground, which is true. But while there is a low risk of child abduction at a public playground in broad daylight, it pales in comparison to the risks involved with letting a 9-year-old fire a machine gun. So please stop referencing the 2nd amendment, because I’m certain our Founding Fathers weren’t contemplating the benefits of letting children fire hundreds of rounds per minute when they drafted the right to bear arms.

 
As usual, guns in the United States get special treatment*, especially when “accidents” happen in public or in the home, again and again and again.

So, in addition to the important context of criminalization of Black Motherhood, these contrasting situations (and their handling) speak to the wider problem of how local law enforcement and prosecutors handle gun-related accidents involving children (most of which involve a child’s death or serious injury, rather than that of the adult instructor).

7,500 children a year are admitted to U.S. hospitals with gunshot wounds, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Of those, 500 die each year. Many others are pronounced dead on scene. Yet, authorities routinely refuse to file child endangerment charges against parents when children accidentally shoot each other or themselves with unsecured firearms. Take a look at this set of clippings by David Waldman of the dozens and dozens of children under 14 who died through accidental shootings in 2013, and note how the cases were resolved. It’s most often deemed an “accident” and the case is closed without charges against anyone, including the adults. Which is insane.
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August 27, 2014 – Arsenal For Democracy 97

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AFD-logo-470

Topics: Big Idea – How to regulate the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world; US, ISIS, and Syria; Interview with freelance writer and Ferguson protest eyewitness Jamie Nesbitt Golden. People: Bill, Persephone. Produced: August 24, 2014.

Discussion Points:

– Big Idea: Are “sharing economy” services like Uber and Airbnb helping people avoid important safety regulations and local taxes?
– What would be the consequences if the U.S. intervenes militarily against ISIS inside Syria?
– How much focus should be on Ferguson versus the wider problem nationwide?

Part 1 – Sharing Economy:
Part 1 – Sharing Economy – AFD 97
Part 2 – US, ISIS, Syria:
Part 2 – US, ISIS, Syria – AFD 97
Part 3 – Jamie Nesbitt Golden:
Part 3 – Jamie Nesbitt Golden on Ferguson – AFD 97

To get one file for the whole episode, we recommend using one of the subscribe links at the bottom of the post.

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Yazidis tell of betrayal (and rescue) by Arab friends

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The New York Time has a story on some accounts by Iraqi Yazidi Kurds of being betrayed to ISIS — and its fanatical agenda of killing all non-Sunnis — by close friends.

But his friend’s assurances did not sit right with Mr. Habash. That night, he gathered his family and fled. Soon afterward, he said, he found out that Mr. Mare had joined the militants and was helping them hunt down Yazidi families.

 
Your friends say “everything will be ok” and next thing you know they’re trying to kill you. It reads quite a bit like a small-scale Iraqi version of the Rwandan Interahamwe, the semi-impromptu and mass-hysteria-driven Hutu militia in 1994 that hacked Tutsi friends and family to death by the hundreds of thousands during the genocide.

The Times’ anecdotes are consistent with reporting by AFP a couple weeks ago:

“The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes — they were all our neighbours. But they joined the IS, took heavy weapons from them, and informed on who was Yazidi and who was not. Our neighbours made the IS takeover possible,” the distraught white-bearded Hassan said.

Speaking to AFP in a transit camp run by the local Kurdish authorities for the displaced, Haidar said his childhood friend was among those who joined the IS. “I was shocked. The IS brainwashed him, and he started informing on who was Yazidi,” he said. “I would have been executed immediately had they found me.”

 
I guess this kind of happens everywhere when things go sideways into an ethnic slaughter.

Fortunately, as the Times also reported, there were also some bright spots in the crisis, as there also are in most such situations:

Though Mohsin Habash’s family suffered because of one Arab neighbor, he pointed out that they were saved with the help of another: a longtime friend who led a convoy of Yazidi refugees to safety at great risk.

The convoy drove through the night, passing ISIS-controlled territories undetected. Mohsin Habash believes it was because his friend knew the Arab areas better than any of the Yazidis.

Hours later, they reached Syria. From there, Mohsin Habash’s friend introduced them to another Arab man who took the group the rest of the way to the border with Kurdistan. “He saved us,” Mr. Habash said.

 
Even in the darkest moments, like when massive ethnic or sectarian cleansing is being attempted, some people still give us hope for humanity. (You can read some more examples from other cases here.)

Syria: Fight the inertia of “no good options” policymaking

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The United States is flailing rapidly toward an ill-conceived military intervention in Syria against ISIS, as I predicted last week, apparently under the inertia of the cop-out analysis known as “there are no good options.” This troubling declaration is a common hand-wave used in Washington to justify stumbling into catastrophic decisions without much of a rational or clear-headed decision-making process, before or after it happens, to silence public criticism.

I really dislike the whole “there are no good options” school of foreign policy punditry and officialdom, because even when there are a lot of bad options and no good ones, that doesn’t mean you should immediately pull the lever on the more horrendous end of the spectrum.

And a spectrum of bad ideas is exactly what we’re looking at here. Doing nothing in Syria continues to be on the less bad end of the spectrum, as I explained at length in last week’s analysis (and in many prior posts). Simply put: Airstrikes in Syria opens a door we are not prepared to walk through, but if this starts, we may well be dragged. Any direct U.S. military intervention in Syria should be avoided, to prevent that.

Additionally, as I examined in a recap of the Wall Street Journal’s investigation of the Assad-ISIS relationship, the Syrian regime has carefully positioned ISIS (and itself) over the course of a year such that the United States may be forced to align with Bashar al-Assad, if it intervenes, at the cost global humiliation and anger of many allies and the Washington Beltway. Already, even just with the start of unauthorized U.S. surveillance flights over Syria, the trolling has begun.

Syria on Monday signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against ISIS. But it warned the White House that it needed to coordinate airstrikes with the Assad government or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.”

 
Let’s look, too, at an article, by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, entitled “The Problem With Bombing ISIS.” I have a lot of problems with this article’s framing, but the core premise is correct, in my opinion. A crucial deciding factor of when to intervene in a situation needs to be who fills the vacuum after a U.S. military intervention (if successful!) and whether they are better than the dislodged power, for the people ostensibly being helped:

From Somalia to Kosovo to Libya, the problem with America’s humanitarian interventions has never been ascertaining the nastiness of the people we’re fighting against. It’s been ascertaining the efficacy and decency of the people we’re fighting for. That’s a particular challenge in the case of ISIS in Syria.

 
In Syria, that’s either going to be Assad or other jihadists in al Qaeda’s Nusra Front or in the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (if they somehow bounce back from the brink of defeat): Read more