Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

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

Car bombs rock Nigerian capital

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In a clear sign that the next presidential election in Nigeria will once again not be peaceful, two car bombs were detonated in the midst of a capital event last week with President Goodluck Jonathan, the country’s former vice president who is seeking his own term after assuming the presidency during a succession crisis earlier this year.

President Jonathan, who took over running the country shortly before President Umaru Yar’adua died in May, survived last week’s attack apparently unharmed, and met with ex-rebels the next day to discuss ways of reducing violence. Such an attack is new to the capital, though terrorist and militant strikes are common in the much-abused Niger Delta region. The Economist:

All that was left of two cars packed with explosives was their smouldering chassis after they had been blown up on October 1st near Eagle Square in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, while surrounded by unsuspecting citizens celebrating the 50th anniversary of their country’s independence. At least 12 people died and dozens were injured in this year’s most worrying act of political violence. A well-known rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which is most active in the oil-producing south, claimed responsibility but blamed the government for the deaths, insisting that it had ignored back-channel warnings given 24 hours before the blasts.

The attacks took place close to President Goodluck Jonathan, as he was reviewing a parade a few hundred yards away in front of invited dignitaries. Shortly before the bombings he had declared: “There is certainly much to celebrate: our freedom, our strength, our unity and our resilience.”

 
This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Guinea’s Election Debacle

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June (me, “Promise and Peril in Guinea“):

Cautiously optimistic scenes in the West African nation of Guinea as the population prepares for its first free elections in its history, tomorrow. There are 24 presidential candidates, and so far election observers from around the world say everything looks like it’s in order.

After independence from France two military dictators ruled consecutively from 1958-2008, after which the country faced instability and violence (including a large massacre of civilians) under a new military regime, until Gen. Sekouba Konaté – then Vice President of the new junta – took control of a transitional government, in an agreement sponsored by nearby Burkina Faso this past January. He quickly scheduled democratic elections for the Republic of Guinea, pledging to stay out of them himself, and the army has stood down and plans to remain in its barracks during the election tomorrow.
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So that’s the promise. The peril is, of course, the unfortunate possible outcome after the election. Even if there is no widespread violence or military intervention in the first-round or the runoff in this election, there is still the possibility of future instability, whether by popular discontent with the slow grind of democracy or by some overzealous or power-hungry military officer. Statistically speaking, from what I have read, the failure rate for developing country democracies in their first couple decades remains extremely high. So the odds are against Guinea.
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So, let’s hope for the best, and keep the 10 million people of Guinea in our minds tomorrow. If they pull this off successfully and continue without instability, they could become a seriously strong role model for democratization around the third-world, since the story of the Republic of Guinea is one seen time and again all across Africa and the developing world.

 

In July, the results came in, with the usual basic fraud allegations here and there, but overall the election was deemed a success. The top two candidates then had to go to a runoff election, scheduled for tomorrow (9/19) and that’s where the trouble finally began.

Tuesday (AP/NYT):

Supporters of the leading candidate in this weekend’s historic presidential runoff election called Tuesday for Guinea’s prime minister to step down, as doubts grew about whether the West African nation would go ahead with the vote.

[…] Over the weekend, street fighting between supporters of rival political parties left one person dead and 54 others wounded.

Only days before Sunday’s vote, hundreds of thousands of voting cards have not yet arrived and the trucks needed to transport materials to distant villages are still idling at a warehouse in the capital.

Supporters of front-runner Cellou Dalein Diallo accused Prime Minister Jean-Marie Dore of favoring the underdog candidate and said late Tuesday that Dore should resign or be dismissed from his duties.
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The first round of voting in June was met with excitement, but the multiple delays since then have cast a pall over the runoff. Diallo has accused the government of purposely delaying the vote in order to give the No. 2 finisher Alpha Conde a chance to catch up in the polls.

 
Wednesday (AP/NYT):

Guinea’s interim president said he fears that the ”republic is in danger” due to ethnic and political divisions ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

Gen. Sekouba Konate’s remarks late Wednesday on state TV marked his first address to the nation since violent clashes erupted over the weekend between supporters of rival political parties that are divided on ethnic lines. The general’s comments also come as the country’s electoral commission has said it would not be ready to hold the much-anticipated presidential run-off on Sunday due to missing voting material.

 
Current situation, as of Thursday (Reuters/NYT):

Guinea’s electoral commission failed to meet Thursday to set a date for a presidential election runoff, casting doubt on the country’s bid to return to civilian rule. The commission had on Wednesday postponed the election, which had been scheduled for Sunday. Officials gave no reasons for the postponement of Thursday’s meeting.

 
Argh. So much for the optimism.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

OSCE may send advisers to Kyrgyzstan

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has announced the deployment of a small team of police advisers to Kyrgyzstan, in response to the widespread reports from ethnically Uzbek Kyrgyzstani civilians of police and military abuse by Kyrgyz Kyrgyzstanis over the past few months in southern Kyrgyzstan. From the OSCE press release:

The agreement [with Kyrgyzstan’s government] said the group would comprise 52 [unarmed] police officers with the possibility to send an additional 50 officers at a later stage. The group would be in Kyrgyzstan for four months, with a possibility to extend as needed and agreed.

“The tasks of this mission is first of all advising the Kyrgyz police. The Police Advisory Group will have contact with all parts of the population in southern Kyrgyzstan,” Salber said. “They will be assisting and also monitoring the Kyrgyz police. They will accompany them in their work with the communities there with the objective of strengthening the confidence in this area, in particular between the police and the population.”

 
These monitors would, best case scenario, serve to deter further abuses or acts of genocide against the Uzbek population while they are present. Sadly, it likely won’t be enough… After all, one of the worst atrocities during the Bosnian War happened in front of 400 United Nations peacekeepers inside sanctuary zones, but the rules of engagement, lack of supplies, and ratio of combatants to peacekeepers prevented intervention. But I guess this is better than nothing.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Kyrgyz gov’t rounding up Uzbek community leaders

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Ethnic persecution of Uzbek communities in Kyrgyzstan continues, according to the Times:

Dozens of Uzbek community, religious and political leaders have been arrested recently by the local police and accused of inciting ethnic violence, rights groups say.

They were detained as part of an investigation into the unrest that raged through ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods here last month in which thousands of people, most of them Uzbeks, were thought to have died. The investigation itself, which was authorized by the government of Kyrgyzstan’s interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, has been turned into a campaign of persecution against ethnic Uzbek political and religious leaders, human rights groups say.
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The arrests are based on a section of the Kyrgyz criminal code that bans inciting ethnic hatred, after the ethnic Uzbek leaders accused the police and army of instigating and in some cases participating in the original violence. “We are concerned that most of the arrests seem to be targeted against the Uzbek communities,” said Ole Solvang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who documented what he called unjustified detentions of Uzbeks, in a telephone interview. “The government has to investigate, detain and prosecute all violators, and not just members of one ethnic group.”
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Valentina A. Gritsenko, director of a local human rights group, Justice, confirmed in a telephone interview that several of the Uzbek leaders who made public allegations of police or military complicity in the ethnic violence had been arrested.

Azimzhan Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek and the director of a human rights group in the town of Bazar-Kurgan, was arrested on this charge, according to his lawyer, Nurbek Toktokunov, who said Mr. Askarov had bruises on his back suggesting he had been tortured in custody.

This week, Front Line, a Dublin-based group monitoring mistreatment of human rights workers, said two activists in southern Kyrgyzstan documenting the causes of the violence were interrogated by the police and later approached on a street in Osh by unidentified men and threatened.

 
Various people interviewed agreed with suggestions (that I’ve mentioned previously) that they won’t feel secure as long as they’re at the mercy of the domestic Kyrgyz police and military and would prefer an international security force.

The Kyrgyzstani military and police are dominated by ethnically Kyrgyz members and were involved in the violent attacks against Uzbek civilians in southern Kyrgyzstan — near the border with Uzbekistan — several weeks ago. It’s also unclear how much control they’ve taken over the interim government, but it seems the civilian authorities aren’t in charge to the degree they claim.

An unconvincing counterargument

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Killing a newspaper editor is not a compelling rebuttal to that editor’s allegation of assassinations, in my humble opinion. And the circumstances point clearly to his death being a government-sponsored assassination, too:

A Rwandan journalist who accused the Rwandan government of trying to assassinate a dissident in South Africa was himself killed Thursday night in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Jean-Leonard Rugambage, 34, an editor and reporter for a suspended private tabloid, was shot twice and killed late Thursday night near his home, police officials said. Violent crime is exceedingly rare in Kigali, which is known as one of the safest and most orderly capitals in Africa.
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Mr. Gasasira said that he and Mr. Rugambage had published an article on Thursday linking Rwandan government military and intelligence officers to the recent shooting of Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former high-ranking Rwandan general who recently defected to South Africa. Mr. Nyamwasa was shot and wounded by a lone gunman, who did not steal anything, on the streets of Johannesburg last Saturday.

Umuvugizi’s article claimed that a senior intelligence officer close to President Paul Kagame had telephoned orders to kill Mr. Nyamwasa, and that a former presidential guard was among the four suspects arrested in the past week in connection with the shooting.

 
Gen. Nyamwasa was considered a state enemy, like most people who oppose the current government of Rwanda.

This has been another chapter in my ongoing series of posts on Rwanda’s ruling party’s abuses in the post-Genocide period.

This article originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Kyrgyz troops attack Uzbek civilians

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This morning, acting this time under the official pretext of clearing barricades and restoring government order and control, ethnically Kyrgyz troops from the government of Kyrgyzstan beat two dozen ethnically Uzbek civilians in southern Kyrgyzstan, killing two. NY Times:

Over the weekend, Kyrgyz troops removed the barricades, which residents had built during four days of ethnic violence that started June 10. At dawn on Monday, security forces began a house-to-house sweep of the area, the Uzbek village of Nariman, demanding information about a Kyrgyz police official who was killed there earlier this month.

Witnesses said the troops kicked men and severely beat them with rifle butts during interrogations. One died of a gunshot wound, another died later of his injuries, and 25 were hospitalized, said Telman A. Badalov, a supervising doctor in the local hospital.

Regional officials at first denied that there were any casualties, but at a news conference later in the day, they acknowledged that two residents had been killed and 23 wounded, saying that troops had opened fire because they faced armed resistance and that their actions were justified. A law enforcement official told the Interfax news service that seven men were arrested on suspicion of being “hired snipers.”

But the list of confiscated weapons released by the Osh regional superintendent’s office — two grenades, 40 rifle cartridges and two Molotov cocktails — included no firearms.

 
The attacks today, which many eyewitnesses said were unprovoked and unwarranted, confirmed the fears expressed this weekend that there was a heightened risk for Uzbek civilians and that they could not trust either the government or the military. In the initial wave of violence and killings, eyewitnesses saw and recorded troops assisting rioters and attacking civilians, and so the remaining Uzbek civilians in several cities, towns, and villages tried to barricade their neighborhoods against these incursions, which led to the raid this morning.
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Heightened danger for Uzbek civilians in Kyrgyzstan

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Yesterday:

The Economist this week noted the continuing need for international intervention that doesn’t seem to be coming:

The time for such geopolitical caution is past. The interim government needs and deserves help. Although the bloodletting seemed to be subsiding as The Economist went to press, the misery of the refugees needs to be alleviated. Relief supplies are needed on both sides of the border. The UN’s proposal to set up an “aid corridor” is welcome and urgent. Persuading terrified refugees to go home may require a peacekeeping force, organised either in the region or by the UN. Failure to safeguard the refugees’ return would be to accede in an ethnic cleansing that would set a terrible precedent in Central Asia and beyond. Better to pursue multi-ethnic harmony within Stalin’s hateful legacy than to redraw the map.

 
Furthermore, as I blogged previously, eyewitnesses (one now with video evidence, reported in The Economist this week) in Uzbek neighborhoods saw regular Kyrgyz troops actively assisting the anti-Uzbek mobs in several cities, either clearing their paths with military vehicles or even joining the shooting of civilians. Thus only an outside peacekeeping force will be sufficient to reassure Uzbek civilians that it is safe to return to their homes or to normal activities. None is on the way.

 
Today:

The mayor of this southern city [Osh, where most of the killing occurred] issued an ultimatum that Uzbeks voluntarily dismantle the barricades they have sheltered behind by Sunday night or force would be used to eliminate the barriers, some made with the wreckage of trucks destroyed in the rioting, minibuses and large boulders. The Uzbeks have been holed up in their neighborhoods for days in the wake of the ethnic violence that killed thousands and caused a massive refugee crisis.

“To create zones where the government does not have power, we are never going to allow that,” said the mayor, Melisbek Myrzakmatov.

Uzbek leaders immediately rejected his demand.
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Uzbeks have said the Kyrgyz military took part in the attacks, and they have repeatedly said that they will not get rid of the barricades because they have no confidence that the provisional Kyrgyz government will protect them.

Ethnic Kyrgyz also died in the rioting, but it appears that most of the casualties and damage were in Uzbek neighborhoods.

 
This isn’t going to fix itself. But the world doesn’t care.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.