TFF Associates & Themes Blog

Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category

By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

“They can choose to focus on the worst in others, criticizing, building on paranoia and worst case analysis, “security”. Or choose to focus on the best, with cooperation as dominant mode, conflict as recessive. They can cooperate for mutual and equal benefit like in good trade, exploring each others’ comparative political-cultural advantages. They can do it.”

Read this unusual global analysis here.

By Richard Falk

Richard Falk

When Nehru was taking a train on his return to India after studying abroad he read of the Japanese victory over Russia in the 1904-05 Russo Japanese War. At that moment he had an epiphany, realizing the hitherto unthinkable, that the British Empire was vulnerable to Indian nationalism. An earlier understanding of the colonial reality by native peoples generally subscribed to the postulates of hard power primacy making it futile or worse to challenge a colonial master, although throughout history there were always pockets of resistance.

This soft power attribute of colonial hard power by way of intimidation and a façade of invincibility is what made colonialism efficient and profitable for so long at the great expense of colonized peoples.

A traditional colonial occupation assumes that the foreign domineering presence, while oppressive and exploitative, refrains from ethnic cleansing or genocide in relation to the indigenous population.

When settler versions of colonialism emerged in relation to the Western Hemisphere and regions occupied by traditional peoples that were without either population density or some kind of industrial capability, the occupier managed to achieve enduring control Read the rest of this entry »

By Jan Oberg

Jan Oberg

No matter what you may think of Putin and Russia this is simply not the way international politics should be conducted, particularly not at the personal level. If it wasn’t an offence to children, one would aptly characterise it as childish behaviour.

Western leaders ignored a brilliant opportunity to meet face-to-face with Vladimir Putin and move forward towards mutual understanding instead of signalling that they want a new Cold War.

Western leaders tell us that Russia is a ”threat to the world”. That obviously serves other purposes because you don’t bully someone you genuinely fear.

The G20 Brisbane should be remembered for its show of Western leaders’ personal display of weakness and conflict illiteracy.

Pummelled Putin punching bag

CNN reports that, during the meeting, Putin took ”pummelling” and was treated as a ”punching bag” by Western leaders from he set foot on Australian soil where his Australian host had sent a deputy minister of defence to receive him.

The Guardian reports that the Russian president approached Canadian Prime Minister Harper with his hand outstretched. Harper reluctantly shook it, then said “Well I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.” ”Bold words” – media called it.

Footage shows Putin sitting alone at a lunch table – like a naughty school boy put in the corner as by his teachers.

President Obama said that we are ”opposing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine which is a threat to the world as we saw in the appalling shoot down in the MH-17”. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

Three Israeli teenagers murdered on Palestinian soil. One Palestinian boy burnt to death whilst alive in an apparent retaliation. Over the years of conflict thousands of children have been killed although many more on the Palestinian side than the Israeli.

According to the Old Testament’s Book of Numbers, Moses, when leading the trek to the “Promised Land”, once ordered all the women and children in one hostile tribe in their way, the Midianites, to be killed. Moses is as an important figure to Muslim theologians as he is to Jewish yet I’ve never come across the writings of a major theologian in either religion loudly condemning this mass murder.

The killing of the innocents in the “Promised Land” goes on three thousand years later. Last year eight Palestinian children (six boys and two girls) were killed and 1,265 were injured in the occupied Palestinian territories either by Israeli settlers by Israeli security forces. No Israeli children were killed in 2013.

Four Palestinian boys were killed by Israeli security forces in the Al Jalazun, Jenin and Ayda refugee camps. Incursions into the camps increased by 60 per cent compared with 2012. The 1,235 children injured in the West Bank (155 under the age of 12) are more than double the number injured in 2012 (552). 49 children were injured directly by Israeli settlers. Eight Israeli children were injured in Israeli settlements by Palestinians. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jan Oberg

Lund, Sweden, July 1, 2014

This PressInfo is about place you’ve probably never visited nor know a lot about: Somaliland.

TFF today publishes the report from a mission there in May 2014 – to the capital Hargeisa, the harbour town of Berbera and to Burao.

With the report in photos and texts we seek to alert you to this indeed unique and interesting country.

Somaliland declared itself an independent state out of Somalia in 1991 and is still not recognised by a single government in the world.

But against all odds Somaliland has made considerable progress.

It isn’t easy to develop when you are marginal to the aid and investment sources, have no foreign embassies and can’t be a member of inter-national organisations. Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

Time to take stock. The shot in Sarajevo 100 years ago inspires narratives of 19-year old Gavrilo Princip killing the successor to the throne of an empire and his pregnant wife as the event unleashing mutual mass murder (INYT, FAZ 28-29 June 2014). Not the empire annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina on October 6, 1908 (Art. 25 of the 1878 Berlin Congress of “great powers”).

Maybe the inhabitants did not like it?

Moral of that stock-taking: watch out for terrorism, not for empires and occupation-colonialism; and protect leaders, not people.

ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, alternatively translated as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) comes up. TIME 30 June: The End of Iraq. Maybe Iraq – that highly artificial English colonial entity encasing Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds–never started?

Like its French colonial neighbor Syria – adding Alawite Arabs, Christians, Jews and others? Ever heard about Sykes-Picot and their czarist Russian allies?

Can such crimes just pass, with no counter-forces?

Watch out, a key point about ISIS – now comprising a major part of IS – is as a bridge over the English-French colonial divide, in favor of a Sunni Arab caliphate. Like it or not, these are very strong forces from the past in the daylight of the present. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

Black Africa long went deeply down. Now it is rushing headlong up. But “up” brings problems of its own. A country’s policy makers have to work as hard in successful, speedy, times as they did when they moved painfully from the first rung of the ladder to the second and third.

Take today’s news – according to the Financial Times, Kenya, one of the poster boys of the African revival, is now financially strong enough to make its debut on the sovereign bond market in a deal worth $2 billion. But it has become entangled in a decade-old corruption scandal that cost Kenya $770 million. The government has decided to take on the responsibility for paying off the $770 million in order to get the $2 billion (and future bond market loans).

In Mozambique last week Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the planned issuing this year of a total of $11 billion worth of sovereign bonds around Africa could overload economies with too much debt. (This is up from $6 billion a year ago and $1 billion in 2000.) Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

Oil provides 70 % of booming Nigeria’s government revenues and without that, since tax collection is so poor, Nigeria would be a country without much in the way of education, health facilities, infrastructure building and urban renewal.

People talk suggestively about a corrupt elite creaming off oil money. Although true it is only the cream. The milk itself goes to the state, hence the government’s preoccupation with oil theft which is now on an enormous scale, organised by corrupt businessmen, officials and politicians. (Before that it was the insurgency in the Niger delta where youthful, well-armed, guerrillas sabotaged the pipelines for well over a decade until a peace agreement (a buy out) was negotiated by the underestimated president, Umar Yar A’dua, President Goodluck Jonathan’s predecessor who died on the job.)

The proportion of the economy that oil makes up is now found to be much less than thought. Nigeria has just revised its national income figures. (The International Monetary Fund supports this.) It has handsomely overtaken South Africa to become the continent’s largest economy. The economy of Lagos is one and a half times the whole of Kenya’s. Nigeria has become the 16th largest economy in the world. Some say within ten years it could be in the top five. However, the statistical revision shows that the share of the oil and gas industry in the economy is not 32% but 14%. Nigeria has diversified much more than was ever guessed at. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

South Africans of all races know how to behave at election time- responsible as voters and honest in their voting procedures. This is part of the legacy of Nelson Mandela who, as his funeral last year made clear, was the most honoured and respected leader in the world.

The country that has tripled its income in the years since the end of apartheid has achieved a lot more, much of it totally unexpected by white opinion. The Financial Times recently wrote, “What was in 1994 a divided country and a broken polity is now an unrecognisable, modern, investment-grade economy”.

Inflation has been tamed and support for the poor has been expanded with weekly cash grants to 16 million people. Every year 1 million people join the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mira Fey

Book Review

Lee Ann Fujii,
Killing neighbors: Webs of violence in Rwanda
Cornell University Press 2011

Previous research on driving forces of the genocide

Questions of intimate mass violence in ethnic killings are especially puzzling for researchers investigating political violence. Various approaches examine reasons for popular participation in the relatively recent genocide in Rwanda which exhibited especially brutal killings of acquaintances such as neighbors by regular villagers.

Some of these approaches link ethnic violence with structural violence by looking at cultural and historical particularities that allegedly led to distinct ethnic identities and a society divided along ethnic lines that can be equated with class divisions (Mamdani, 2001). Others focus on the role of the state and the hierarchical organization of Rwandan society as facilitating conditions for mass participation in the genocide (Prunier, 1995).

According to Straus who conducted one of the most extensive field studies in post-genocidal Rwanda, these perspectives portrayed the genocide as “a state-organized, planned extermination campaign that served elite interests and drew on constructed ethnic categories” (2004, 86), thereby shifting the analytical focus on macro-level examinations and elite actions away from the original puzzle of popular participation. Consequently, Straus’ own research focuses on local-level dynamics of the Rwandan genocide. Read the rest of this entry »