Latest Episode:
“AFD 64 – The Role of Finance”
Posted: Tues, 19 November 2013
Bill asks what role the financial services sector should have in the U.S. economy. Sarah talks with Bill about Oklahoma’s abortion restrictions which the Supreme Court blocked. Then Bill assesses the UN Congo mission.
Additional:
I wrote this item in The Globalist after recording the finance segment, to expand upon a point I briefly passed over in the show.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Tough to assess, but there’s a big reason to be skeptical of the progress they can make. The math.
With the stepped-up and increasingly militarized United Nations peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, launched earlier this year, there are now 19,000 UN troops on the ground. That still only works out to per capita coverage of about 47 square miles per soldier. For comparison, the U.S. alone brought 148,000 troops in 2003 to invade Iraq, a nation less than one fifth the size of the DRC. It’s unclear how many troops the DRC government has under its command at any given point, but on the low end they only have 144k troops, most of which aren’t particularly useful or competent at securing the peace.
A while back I posted the story of the experiences of the Soviet cosmonauts who were in space as the Soviet Union was breaking up.
While that was a pretty extreme situation, I just came across this article from 1997 about Soviet military units deployed in the non-Russian republics of the USSR (the “Near Abroad”) as it was breaking up. What were they supposed to do: withdraw immediately — hold in place? It was a logistical and political nightmare.
In many cases, ethnically Russian Soviet troops suddenly found themselves under Russian national command hundreds if not thousands of miles outside of the new country they were serving. Some units immediately started marching and driving back toward Russia, overland, abandoning in place any equipment they couldn’t take with them. Other units found themselves completely cut off and trapped in deployment locations as long-dormant ethno-religious and political conflicts broke out around them.
Read more
18 years later, Dutch UN Peacekeepers who served at Srebenica have been found liable by the Dutch Supreme Court for having ordered refugee men and boys out of the sanctuary of their base and into the waiting ranks of the Serb paramilitaries outside who then massacred them. Although their non-Dutch UN commanders gave the orders, the Court found they should not have followed the orders and that the Dutch government and commanders back home could have and should have intervened. The liability finding means the Netherlands will have to pay reparations to victim families in Bosnia. Meanwhile, in a just irony, the paramilitary commander who led the massacres is on trial now in the Hague (also in the Netherlands).
Latest Episode:
“AFD Ep 54 – Financial Crimes and Peacekeeping”
Posted: Tues, 27 August 2013
Bill and Persephone discuss the Justice Department’s prosecution of financial crimes from the 2008 crisis — which makes Bill frustrated — and then examine the UN peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Watch This Space: United Nations Congo peacekeepers have declared that they will begin disarming rebel groups in one region by force in 48 hours. This is a significant development because UN peacekeeping forces have previously been forced to watch violence without acting and the Congo mandate includes the first experiment authorizing actual armed enforcement actions. If they carry out this threat, it’s a game-changer for the United Nations.
The situation in southern Kyrgyzstan is growing rapidly worse, as what seems to be systematic ethnic purges against Uzbeks began today (NY Times):
Rioting spread across the south of this strategically important Central Asian nation on Sunday as the authorities failed to contain mobs that appeared to be increasingly engaging in targeted ethnic violence.
The official death toll from four days of clashes neared 100 people, though the unrest seemed so widespread that the figure is likely to go far higher. Reports from the region said bands of ethnic Kyrgyz were seeking out Uzbeks, setting fire to their homes and killing them.
Thousands of Uzbeks have fled to the nearby border with Uzbekistan, and the authorities were said to have lost control of Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city.
[…]
“The situation in the Osh region has spun out of control,” Kyrgyzstan’s acting president, Roza Otunbayeva, said Saturday. “Attempts to establish a dialogue have failed, and fighting and rampages are continuing. We need outside forces to quell confrontation.”
[…]
“It was raining ash the whole afternoon, big pieces of black and white ash,” said Andrea Berg, a Human Rights Watch employee holed up her apartment in the city. “The city is just burning. It’s totally out of control.”
The rioters at one point commandeered two armored personnel carriers from troops stationed in the city, said Timur Sharshenaliyev, a spokesman for the government there. Soldiers were able to take only one back.
The provisional government passed a decree giving the police and soldiers permission to open fire on rioters to prevent attacks on civilians and government buildings, according to a statement on the government’s Web site.
Russia is moving slowly on a request for peacekeeping troops and plans to take up the matter before the Collective Security Treaty Organization this week. For more on that and for more background, you can read my post from last night: “Kyrgyzstan requests Russian peacekeepers.”
The New York Times has pointed out that in 1990, acts of reciprocal genocide in the same region were only halted by Soviet troops rolling in, but that was when Kyrgyzstan was still part of the USSR, which made such an intervention much easier. Even then, hundreds died before the troops arrived.
This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.
