Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Things to think about as Sri Lanka votes

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Early presidential elections in Sri Lanka — between the incumbent (increasingly dictatorial) president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his former Health Minister, Maithripala Sirisena — have unexpectedly become a nail-biter race.

Some of the Western coverage has focused on the frivolous and bizarre. (For example, the New York Times’s “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of His Skills”.) Some has focused on the president’s troubling alliance with extremist Buddhist/Sinhalese nationalism.

But most importantly, there are reflections on President Rajapaksa’s appalling war crimes during his decisive but extremely violent conclusion to Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war:

By the first few months of 2009, with the [Tamil] Tigers in hopeless retreat, the government declared a series of what they called “no fire zones”, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather “for their own safety”.

Government forces then relentlessly shelled these zones and, as a later UN report concluded, systematically denied them food and humanitarian supplies. The UN estimates that there were “as many as 40,000 civilian deaths in a matter of weeks, most as a result of government shelling. There was also a World Bank estimate that 100,000 civilians were missing after the war.

 
It takes a special kind of monster to urge civilians into safe zones and then direct military to shell those zones.

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

You can’t invade your way to women’s rights

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U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in November 2001. (US Marine Corps Photo)

We’ve had compelling, public evidence for at least five full years that the minuscule progress achieved for Afghan women just after the invasion had already been rolled back to essentially square one by about 2008.

Nevertheless, over the past five years, Afghan women have been rhetorically — usually not even visually or in person — trotted out as props to justify a continued (failed) U.S. presence. Even now, women are cited as the only reason the U.S. invasion and occupation was a justifiable success, despite the fact that this is itself a blatant lie.

Here’s an article on the pseudo-feminism of the American war effort, by Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Pakistan’s “Dawn” newspaper.

Boko Haram routs multi-national force, seizes Nigerian base

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Just days after Cameroon had to scramble planes to repulse as many as a thousand Boko Haram fighters who had overrun the Achigachia military base and five border villages in Cameroon, Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance:

A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday. Residents of Baga, who fled by boat to neighbouring Chad, said many people had been killed and the town set ablaze.

Baga, scene of a Nigerian army massacre in 2013, was the last town in the Borno North area [one of three Senate districts in the state] under government control. It hosted the base of the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF), made up of troops from Nigeria, Chad and Niger.
[…]
Residents who fled to Chad said they had woken to heavy gunfire as militants stormed Baga early on Saturday, attacking from all directions. They said they had decided to flee when they saw the multi-national troops running away.
[…]
In April 2013, at least 37 people were killed and 2,275 homes destroyed in Baga by troops hunting Boko Haram fighters who had attacked a patrol, Human Rights Watch reported.

 
Cooperation between the armed forces of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and other nearby countries has been extremely limited and there has not been much trust. This new failure, involving one of the few points of direct integration, is likely to reinforce that tension among the anti-Boko Haram alliance members. That in turn will make it harder to prevent Boko Haram from easily moving back and forth across national borders to stage attacks on the alliance.

Still image (via AFP) from the Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

NGO caught experimenting on Ebola patients in Sierra Leone

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The Al Jazeera headline above is misleading and would be way scarier if corrected: It’s not an “Ebola drug” being tested on Africans, it’s a completely unrelated drug (a heart medication) that some Italian NGO decided unilaterally also works against Ebola, even though it doesn’t and there’s no evidence to support that claim. British medics are saying that they think the use of this drug is actually killing more patients with Ebola, and the British government demanded that the Italians stop using it. It was also not approved for use by the local government.

As the Liberian author of the Al Jazeera piece says, abuses like this are exactly why locals don’t trust “Western medicine” in the first place. From the colonial era to — as she discusses — Tuskegee and Guatemala, or even to the more recent fake CIA vaccination program in Pakistan, there are simply a lot of good reasons for the poor and vulnerable populations of the world to fear medical “assistance” from Western governments and doctors. This disgusting abuse in Sierra Leone is only likely to worsen that fear, even as local medical facilities and staff have been completely overwhelmed and outsiders have become necessary to halt the outbreak.

Moreover, the author notes that Ebola has been around since 1975, so “urgency” is hardly a valid excuse to throw all the ethical rules of drug testing out the window.

Credit: Wikimedia

Credit: Wikimedia

Hope and concern over new East African gasfield discoveries

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Tanzania Daily News, December 30, 2014, “Tanzania, Mozambique Top Africa’s Oil, Gas Table“:

Africa’s energy industry could boom in the coming years, with Mozambique and Tanzania set to emerge as new frontiers if they can attract enough badly needed investment, a report said recently.

Six of the top 10 global discoveries in 2013 were made in Africa, with more than 500 companies now exploring across to the continent, according to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Large gas finds in Mozambique and Tanzania would make the world “take note of east Africa as an emerging player in the global industry,” said the report’s advisory leader, Chris Bredenhann.

The boom has brought investment opportunities, despite the lingering challenges of corruption, lack of infrastructure and regulation.

Transactions worth some $1 billion occurred every 17 days in Africa’s oil and sector last year, the report said. Still, the continent faces fierce competition for vital investment from other parts of the world, the PWC report cautioned.

 
As noted above, public theft of revenues remains a huge challenge if ordinary Africans are to receive any benefits from this expansion of the resource extraction industry — rather than simply being exploited once again. Moreover, it is always critical to avoid becoming economically and societally dependent on the export revenues of a single natural resource.

However, there are other challenges too. Gideon George, several days earlier in the Tanzania Daily News, had already published a piece warning Tanzanians not to get their hopes up for (or prematurely fear the effects of) big revenues and investments flooding the country, quite yet, because of the economics involved:

Reports from the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) show that gas deposits have now reached 50.4 trillion cubic feet (tcf), increasing anxiety among the population which now thinks Tanzania is on the way to becoming another ‘Dubai’.

Experts term this as ‘extremely high expectations of super earnings’ and no wonder the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was so adamant that it set its eyes on the 26 PSAs that have been signed between the Government through the TPDC and the exploration companies.

Ask anyone on the prospects and the answer would be trillions of dollars in super earnings. However, according to oil and gas experts, the expected high earnings could remain a dream because of a number of factors including more gas discoveries being made elsewhere around the globe which could lower prices due to stiff competition.

These include discoveries in other countries of the region such as Mozambique which has proven reserves of gas amounting to 150 million tcf, discoveries from other continents discoveries from unconventional sources such as shale gas. Shale gas in the United States is rapidly increasing as an available source of natural gas.
[…]
“Discovering gas deposits is one thing and extracting them and selling them is quite another. You can have large deposits if cannot you to extract the gas or get markets to sell the gas the dream of super earnings would easily evaporate,” said a Denis Maringo Founding Director of the Oil, Natural Gas & Environmental Alliance (ONGEA), adding that “there is no need to be over ambitious.”

The view has been strengthened by a Dar es Salaam University Don, Dr. Alex Hepelwa who has asked Tanzania to tow a precautionary line over expected gas earnings, emphasizing the need to develop a strong internal market through increased use of gas for domestic and industrial purposes.

 
Simply put, the more unconventional fields discovered and opened around the world, the lower the wholesale oil and gas prices will fall due to competition, and some of the more difficult reserves (both technically and governmentally) to develop will continue to remain just out of reach.

As always, establishing transparent governance and enforcing the rule of law are prerequisites to any country or region receiving durable and useful foreign direct investment and benefiting from the arrival of new industries. They cannot come later. Such measures attract stable partnerships with good-faith actors and help ensure that the local population is not being played. They also promote sounder and broader-based long-term investment of national natural resource wealth into human development for the whole population.

Tunisia’s Rachid Ghannouchi on Islamic democracy

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Qantara.de, a Germany-based publication promoting Western-Islamic dialogue, yesterday published an interview by Daniel Bax and Tsafrir Cohen (translated by Katy Derbyshire) with Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s mainstream Islamist party, Ennahda. That party, which initially led the country’s transition government after the December 2010 revolution, recently lost the first regular legislative and parliamentary elections, and it is now the largest opposition party in the Assembly.

Below are some excerpts from the interview that I found particularly interesting.

On the new constitution (background) and on Islamic democrats:

…we’re very proud of this constitution. We not only supported it; we also helped develop it. I don’t regard it as a secular constitution, but as one that unites Islam, democracy and modernity. We don’t see any conflict between moderate secularism and moderate Islam. There are Christian democratic parties in many European countries, such as Germany; elsewhere, there are democratic parties with Buddhist or Hindu backgrounds. Why should there not be Islamic democratic parties?

 
On the right to non-belief and secularism in an Islamic society:

…Islam guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, and that this applies in both directions: for adopting and rejecting the faith.

 
On the internal diversity and divisions of Islam (background):

There have always been different schools of thought throughout the history of Islam. But for 14 centuries of Islamic history, Islamic societies have always been pluralist and accepted people who followed other religions or none at all, and guaranteed this freedom and diversity. This acceptance of diversity is not something we had to import from the West either. When we look at Western countries, acceptance of diversity only evolved there after the Renaissance. Before that, there were religious wars that lasted for decades.

 
On universal rights:

Q: The French Revolution is regarded as the birth of enlightenment, democracy and human rights. What’s your position on these values?

Ghannouchi: The Tunisian constitution is founded on two pillars: the principles of Islam and the principles of modern society and human rights, which are a product of the Enlightenment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [in 1948] was drawn up by people of many different cultural origins.

Q: There is also an “Islamic Declaration of Human Rights”, which was drawn up in 1990 by several Muslim states and which deviates from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a number of points, for instance on equal rights for women and men or rights for minorities. What do you think of it?

Ghannouchi: It represents an attempt to combine the principles of Islam with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But for me, there’s no contradiction between human rights and Islamic values. We accept that in our constitution, and that’s also part of the foundations of my thinking.

 
He also addressed the country’s severe terrorism recruitment problem, but he mainly attributed that to the decades of misery under repressive rule, which only began to end four years ago.

Flag-of-Tunisia

A world free of land mines?

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From an Al Jazeera English report from Mozambique:

Progress in Mozambique and elsewhere indicates that a world without landmines could be achieved by 2025 […] 40 countries are expected to become mine-free within the next five years

 
https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/550305419630227457

Additional excerpt:

Meanwhile, with its snout on the ground, a dog is wiggling through the grass. When it comes to de-mining, dogs are indeed man’s best friend. Using their keen sense of smell to sniff out explosives in the ground, dogs are about 30 times faster than human de-miners, according to Alan Johnson, head of operations at Handicap International’s Mozambique operation.

Johnson said he has never seen a dog hurt in the de-mining process. “They smell everything long before the point they would step on it,” he noted, adding dogs’ weight distribution makes them less likely to trigger the mines.