Notes from the Field

Fighting the Last War

2012-02-01T03:34:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend just under a week with Alvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia and architect of arguably the most dramatic turn-around in the history of the drug war. This month, I have a magazine piece out in the Washington Monthly profiling President Uribe--and looking at what lessons from Colombia's experience are being applied to Mexico. I argue that, because Mexico and Colombia are so fundamentally different, the Uribe model won't necessarily work in Mexico. In fact, the reasons it won't are the same reasons that the strategy is starting to falter in Colombia as well... here's a sample:

Colombia’s incredible turnaround and the strategy credited with bringing it about have become not only a rare success story in the drug war, but also its most formidable brand and export. The governments of Mexico and several other Central American countries that have been plunged into violent confrontation with drug gangs have tried assiduously to replicate their South American peer’s strategy. ...

There are two problems, however. The first is that none of these places, despite years of effort, has yet seen the kind of transformation that Uribe brought about in Colombia. In fact, so far, the momentum runs in the opposite direction. The case of Mexico is particularly striking; roughly 50,000 lives have been lost since the country’s experiment with a Colombian-style militarized drug war began in 2006. ...

The second problem is that, in Colombia itself, Uribe’s strategy has reached a point of sharply diminishing returns. Having largely defeated what was, at bottom, a sweeping leftist insurgency against the state, and having decapitated a relatively cohesive paramilitary force, Colombia now faces a hydra-headed, apolitical, essentially criminal set of groups vying for turf and control over what’s left of the drug trade. None of these groups is as powerful as its precursors, but nor do they seem to be susceptible to the same strategic countermeasures. And violence is starting to drift upward....

The idea that sheer military might and political will can beat back the narcotics trade is a powerful one. Uribe’s ideas and tactics have spread to every corner of the globe marred by the drug trade and nearly every institution that is fighting organized crime. Which means that if those ideas are misguided—or, perhaps more dangerously, misunderstood— then so too is nearly every fight in the drug war.

Read the whole piece in the Washington Monthly.

Book release: The Southern Tiger

2012-01-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

Announcing the release of a book that I co-edited with Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine! Please have a read -- I hope you'll find it an inspiring story of how dictatorship can be defeated through democracy -- a topic of great importance these days across regions...

The Southern Tiger
Chile's Fight for a Peaceful and Democratic Future

Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos provides a fascinating glimpse inside his country's meteoric rise on the world stage
"A leader in the underground resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet and his Dirty War, Ricardo Lagos burst onto the national stage in 1988 when he gave a speech denouncing the dictator, the first of its kind. Revolution soon followed, as Chileans took to the streets to oust a criminal despot and pave the way for democracy. In The Southern Tiger, Lagos chronicles Chile's journey from terror and repression to a thriving open society, and from crushing poverty to one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America. His thrilling stories of surviving Chile's political prisons, standing up to President George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, and rebuilding Chile's education system demonstrate why President Obama recently called Chile 'a model for the region and the world.' As citizens across the globe rise up to demand more from their governments, The Southern Tiger is an inspiring story of political and economic rebirth in the wake of fear."

A cold war in Burundi

2011-12-22T08:01:00.001-05:00

I've just returned from Burundi--a country that (as I've quickly learned) most editors, let alone readers, couldn't point to on the map. Not that I totally fault them. As I also realized--and as is key to understanding Burundi--its geopolitical significance is almost zero.

Interestingly, I'm starting to wonder if this isn't a mixed blessing--to be totally forgotten. Over the last decade, some pretty exciting things have happened in Burundi, and I can't help wondering if they would have been impossible if Burundi was, say, in the Middle East. A civil war swept through this country in the 1990s. But after a peace treaty in 2000, the international community was able to use slow-and-steady pressure to encourage the government to reform and respect human rights. Unlike say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo next door, there weren't a million cooks in the kitchen. There were just a few, and they were mostly on the same page about how to move Burundi forward. Out of the international spotlight, and with a bit more wiggle room, Burundi has started to be reborn.

But all is not well in Burundi these days--and in this case, a little more international attention could do. In recent months, a cold war has begun between the country's government and its opposition. Bodies have started turning up murdered; young men are going missing. The press say they are under pressure to be quiet; the human rights activists get hauled before court and chastised anytime they speak up too much.

A few of the stories I've written about all this are collected here. I'll be updating these coming days. In the meantime, Burundi's here on the map -->

Nervously Watching the DRC Elections from Burundi

2011-12-09T20:00:00.000-05:00

Lake Tanganyika--just across the water from DR Congo.

(Burundi) Just across the river from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Friday evening was calm—the end of a sunny day in a string of rainy ones. Except for one thing: as the result of DRC’s election are announced, there is an acute understanding that what happens there may have a dramatic impact on whether this tiny country of just over 8 million continues down a path toward long-sought peace—or whether insecurity creeps back into daily life.

For the last decade, Burundi has fought hard to consolidate the peace that finally ended a civil war that began back in 1993 with a mass slaughter that foreshadowed the Rwandan genocide next door. In 2000, the country’s main rebel groups signed the Arusha accords that integrated their forces into one army and brought fighting leaders into civilian life. The country held elections in 2005 and again in 2010; on Thursday, the UN head of mission to Burundi told the Security Council that incredible progress toward peace had been made.
And yet there are signs here that the calm of recent years is starting to slip. Over the past several months, the political opposition appears to have moved underground—where they were during a decade of civil war.

Former rebels may be behind a string of attacks on civilians perpetrated by what the government has dubbed “armed bandits.” Meanwhile, civil society organizations say that 300 members of the opposition have been assassinated in the last half-year; they suspect the government. “Fragile” is analysts’ favorite word to describe the mood.

This is where Congo fits in. Over the past two decades, insurrections in Burundi, Rwanda, and the DRC have intermingled, worked together, and become intrinsically linked. The Eastern Congo remains perhaps the single easiest place for nascent rebellions to grow: It is largely lawless, flush with arms, and booming from a war economy built on minerals, guns, and even daily goods like sugar and coffee. If the DRC is itself destabilized, the power dynamics across the region will shift as new players scramble to fill lucrative holes. And if anyone here in Burundi was inclined to head back to the battlefields, they would almost certainly organize in Congo.

“Everyone talks about Rwanda and Congo, and no one ever talks about Burundi,” notes Kris Berwout, coordinator of a network of 46 European NGOs working in Burundi. “It’s the orphan of the region. But all the local situations in those three countries are so interlinked, that it’s very difficult to find solutions for one country if it’s not part of regional search [for peace.]”

As nightfall arrives in Congo, it won’t only be the Congolese who are kept up worrying. Just a stone’s throw away, there’s also much at stake.

In case you missed Tunisia's elections...

2011-10-31T10:05:00.001-04:00

I'm freshly back from Tunisia, where I had the honor/pleasure of reporting on the first democratic elections of the Arab Spring. I've just updated a page with all my coverage from an eventful few weeks; a few more dispatches also still forthcoming so stay tuned!

Tunisia's Elections: The Euphoria, the Aspirations, the Fears

Voters in the Jbel Lahmar, Tunis

Now what?

2011-10-24T12:16:00.003-04:00

It's been clear from the beginning of this campaign that the next stage of Tunisia's political tranformation will come in the form of coalition building--consolidating the multiple small parties and getting a workable majority to lead. Here's what we've learned so far about what that will look like...

One note: the piece for The Atlantic was filed Sunday; we now know quite a bit more...

Unlikely kingmaker emerges in Tunisia's election
www.csmonitor.com
Tunisia's election appears to be giving a strong vote to the moderate Islamist party Ennahda. But the much smaller and secular Ettakatol party may determine who forms the majority in the constituent assembly.

Can Tunisia's New Democracy Bridge the Islamist-Secular Divide?
www.theatlantic.com
However Tunisia's political parties fare in the country's first real election, their biggest challenge -- and the one that could determine the fate of Tunisia's democratic experiment -- will not be winning votes but learning how to cooperate with one another

2011-10-24T12:01:00.001-04:00

Election day in Tunisia yesterday couldn't have been more humbling to watch. It was the kind of day that reminds you how luck you are for something you have always taken for granted: your vote. I don't think there's a single person who observed the election who will ever miss the chance to cast a ballot again. My two takes from the day:

Tunisia election: Smiles, pride as historic day goes smoothly
www.csmonitor.com
Tunisians turned out in droves to vote in the Arab Spring's first democratic election today. Early indications were that voting went smoothly throughout most of the country.

In Revolutionary Tunisia's First Real Election, One Issue Trumps All: Jobs
www.theatlantic.com
Parties and voters, both unfamiliar with the new system that begins today with an election, are struggling to find and agree on solutions to the worsening economy

Historic Elections in Tunisia. So why have so many youth lost interest?

2011-10-21T14:08:00.002-04:00

I'm completely humbled and thrilled to be in Tunisia for the upcoming elections for a Constituent Assembly. An amazing piece of the country's--and the region's--history. I've got my first piece today in the Christian Science Monitor. Votes are on Sunday so stay tuned.

By Elizabeth Dickinson, Contributor
Tunis, Tunisia

From their six-month-old office just north of central Tunis, members of the Ennahda party, officially illegal until last March, are scurrying about with cellphones glued to their ears. Men and women in suits enter and exit through the front door at rapid pace and adrenaline permeates the lobby and waiting rooms.

The moderate Islamist party has less than a week to convince Tunisians to vote for its candidates when they head to the polls in the country's first vote since a revolution toppled former President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14. Across this country of 10 million, the urgency of reaching out to voters is palpable. More than 1,400 candidates are running for a mere 218 seats in a constituent assembly that will draft a new constitution and shape its much-anticipated transition to democracy. More than 60 parties are fielding candidates, in addition to a plethora of independents.

Yet much of the activity in political offices these days isn't so much about convincing the electorate to vote for a particular candidate as it is to simply ensure that Tunisians show up to the polls on Oct. 23. Turnout will be the key to winning influence in Tunisia's future, and early indicators suggest that it may be far lower than expected.

The curious case of Kenya in Somalia

2011-10-17T17:14:00.000-04:00

For U.N. Dispatch...

It was probably only a matter of time. After years of consternation about the crisis unfolding on its northern border, yesterday Kenyan troops at last made their move and entered Somalia, chasing down the militants who allegedly kidnapped aid workers in a refugee camp earlier this week. For months, the situation along the border had been escalating; renewed fighting and an ongoing famine pushed Somali refugees in ever greater numbers over the border into the world’s largest refugee camp.

Meanwhile, Islamist militant group al Shabaab was pushing the international border, crossing intermittently. When aid groups threatened to pull out of northern Kenya, leaving a fragile humanitarian situation in the hands of the Kenyan authorities alone, it was apparently too much to sit idly by. Frustrated by the inability of international forces, including the African Union-United Nations joint peacekeeping operation in southern Somalia, to control the situation, Kenyans took matters into their own hands, unleashing both troops and air power on the militant controlled areas of neighboring Somalia.

But if it’s clear why Kenya needed to undertake this intervention — certainly justifiable out of self defense — it’s not clear at all why they wanted to. In recent years, militant groups in Somalia have thrived off of the local vs. foreigner narrative — a story that pits Somalis against the plethora of foreign occupiers who have come in and out of their country over the last century. It’s a true story in many ways; Britain, Italy, the Soviet Union, the United States, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Burundi have all had troops there in the not-so-distant history. Now Kenya has added itself to that list — one that comes with ominous complications. Last year, al Shabaab proclaimed that it would be targeting Uganda and Burundi in retaliation for their participation in a peacekeeping mission in the country. Today, the militants made the same promise to target Nairobi.

This raises the question: was it a trap? Al Shabaab has recently been down (if not yet out.) Recruitment was falling, morale was dropping, and the reason for the fight was dissipating. Since Ethiopian troops who had invaded in late 2006 pulled out of the country in 2009, the anti-foreigner story has been a harder one to sell. If al Shabaab can find a new enemy (Kenya) and a new place to strike (potentially Nairobi), they stand to score a PR coup.

It raises one more question too: How this will affect the Somalis living in Kenya, who have already been under the tight scrutiny of authorities there. As the pressure of the refugee situation grows, and fears of al Shabaab worsen, it could seriously strain an already fracturing relationship between Kenyans and the growing Somali diaspora community.

Entering Somalia yesterday was a risk — and it was also a one way street for Kenya. It has always been intimately close to the conflict as a neighbor; now it’s involved.

Bombshell Report Describes How Shell Fueled Armed Conflict in Nigeria

2011-10-06T09:12:00.000-04:00

When I moved on from Nigeria a few years ago, the Niger Delta was the story that I was saddest to leave behind. A report released this week by a coalition of NGOs in the region does some amazing work on the issue--my congratulations for the many months (maybe years) of good work that led to this. Here's what I wrote about it for U.N. Dispatch:

Over the past decade, Shell Oil Company’s Nigeria operation has been complicit in human rights abuses, caused inexorable environmental harm, injected cash and resources into an armed militia groups, and fueled the communal tensions that are tearing the region apart.

This is not news–but a report released this week by a consortium of NGOs and led by Platform, a British based non-profit–laid out the names, numbers, and details of the misconduct in a way that has transformed the conventional wisdom into unavoidable fact. Platform’s report, “Counting the Costs,” recounts the examples of specific communities within the Niger Delta where Shell’s presence and involvement has exacerbated–and even created–conflict.

Over the last 50 years of oil exploration, the Niger Delta region has yielded some $600 billion in revenues. Even long before the long oil boom began, Shell has been an integral part of this story; the company began its work in Nigeria in 1937. In the years since, Shell has always led the growing pack of multinationals operating in Africa’s most populous country–not least in the extent of its misconduct.

“Counting the Costs” lays out several ways in which Shell has become a part of the Niger Delta conflict:

1) Cash contracts to armed groups: Shell’s strategy for pacifying militant groups in the region can be simply summed up: buy them off. Over the last decade, the company has offered cash contracts–in the form of either “community development” or “security” grants–to armed groups in exchange for their directing their violence away from Shell facilities. Young men are employed on a temporary basis either to ‘guard’ Shell facilities–which basically means they promise not to attack them. “Shell and other companies have made huge payments to a wide range of groups in order to buy compliance and stave off hostility,” the report explains.

It’s hard to know where to begin describing the backwards incentives that this creates. Since it’s often the most violent groups who catch Shell’s eye for a payout, the company’s tactics have incentivized the militarization of the region’s youth population (who, by the way, have little chance of coming across any other jobs.) Some 9,000 youth are temporarily employed at any time, the report estimates.

As soon as temporary contracts “expire,” armed youth often turn their weapons back against the company in a means to coerce them to renew the security contract payments. The moment the payments from Shell stop, the violence starts. In one particularly striking incident, youth whose contracts were revoked sabotaged a pipeline and released an oil spill one-forth the size of the Gulf of Mexico incident. Production of 300,000 barrels per day was taken offline; the security contracts were almost immediately re-instated.

These cash contracts also create deadly rivalries between armed groups and between impoverished communities, whose youth are eager to win contracts. Because the deadlier groups are often the victors of the security funding, the cycle of violence escalates. And with each injection of cash into these armed militias, their power over the local communities–and their monopoly of violence–only grows.

2) Corrupted community relations: To facilitate these contracts and other community relations, Shell has created a network of local representatives that are intended to mediate between villages and the oil company. Unfortunately, many of these local representatives are implicated in granting contracts corruptly, encouraging militants to sabotage pipelines in order to win more Shell security funding, and being complicit in oil bunkering (a process through which oil is drained from pipelines and sold on the black market.)

In all of this, none of the actual disputes with communities are solved. Land conflicts, in particular, are left hanging. Countless acres of farmlands, taken over by pipelines or oil spills, have essentially been confiscated this way, with little or no mechanism for redress by the local communities.

3) Complicity with undisciplined conduct of Nigerian security forces: In recent years as the security situation in the Delta has deteriorated, Shell has increasingly relied upon a Joint Task Force of Nigerian military and police to maintain security. Shell has offered both logistical and military support to the operations and paid for the Nigerian military to guard its operations. These same armed forces, however, have been implicated in extra-judicial killings, local-level corruption, and overly aggressive tactics that are used against unarmed civilians. (This isn’t unique to the military and police in the Delta–it’s a country-wide problem.)

Shell also relies on contractors, which the report claims are unaccountable and undisciplined as well. Here too, there are perverse incentives for violence: consultants might garner higher payments if they are operating in hazardous security situations, a fact that may encourage some to stoke inter-communal tensions.

This report wasn’t about oil spills–though that is certainly a huge piece of the Shell legacy too. Earlier this summer, a U.N. Environment Program report implicated widely multinationals in the environmental damage spotting the region–a stark contrast to a Shell claim that 90 percent of oil spills are caused by militants and local communities. Today, so many spills have devastated the region, many of them left virtually uncleaned for decades, that the water in the Delta carries a thick sheen of oil and farmlands won’t grow crops anymore. The cost of cleaning up those spills is estimated at $500 billion.

Shell has often relied on a common explanation for its embroilment with local conflict in the Delta: it is just an outside player, trying to do business, and not at fault for the environment in which it operates. It is, the story goes, a victim of local conditions that it cannot control. This report compellingly argues the opposite: “While Shell tries to separate itself from the ‘external environment’ in Nigeria, there is clear evidence that Shell has played an active role in various conflicts.”

If there’s one piece of good news from the half-century of oil-fueled violence in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, it might be that it has spawned some of the best, brightest, and most passionate human rights work in the region. I know many of these organizations personally, and I wasn’t surprised–though I’m always impressed–when they released some of their best work yet this week. Perhaps this time it will finally prove to compelling a truth for Shell, the Nigerian government, and consumers of Nigerian oil–that’s the United States–to ignore.

An epidemic of gun violence heads south

2011-10-04T10:10:00.001-04:00

For U.N. Dispatch....

As the drug trade—and the organized crime it spawns—spread through Latin America, the region is facing an epidemic of gun violence, according to new U.N. data. Speaking at a conference on the subject in Lima, Peru, Camilo Duplat of the Regional Center for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean announced that there are 80 million firearms currently in the hands of civilians across Latin America.

The countries with the worst record on gun deaths per capita were Honduras and El Salvador, with rates of 77 and 62 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. It’s no coincidence that these two countries—particularly Honduras—are the latest countries to see their state institutions overwhelmed by the narcotics trade. Though traffickers had worked in the country for years, organizations such as Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel consolidated their hold in the security vacuum that followed the ousting of former President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The interim years have seen a slew of officials try—and fail—to tackle the problem. The latest to go, Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, resigned on September 10. The country’s murder rate is brushing 10 times the global average. And similar stories echo across the fragile Caribbean. Guatemala, for example, has been overwhelmed by another Mexican cartel, the Zetas.
When it comes to ownership of a weapon, Venezuela stands out: 10 percent of the population is estimated to own a firearm. Here, criminal activity may be more to blame than drugs. In August, the International Crisis Group released a report detailing how the country has “become a centre of organized crime.” The report continues:
“Different groups, including Colombian guerrillas, paramilitaries and their successors, have been joined by mafia gangs from Mexico and elsewhere. They benefit from widespread corruption and complicity on the part of security forces, seemingly tolerated in the highest spheres of the government.”
Interestingly, the two countries most notorious for their drug violence, Colombia and Mexico, perform relatively better, according to the U.N. data. Mexico’s rate of gun violence is 25 deaths per 100,000 people; Colombia’s is 37. Though in Mexico in particular, here is good reason to believe that violence is on the rise. Independent tallies of casualties from the country’s war on drugs count more than 50,000 deaths in the last half-decade.

What numbers like this foreshadow may be a new stage of the narcotics trade in the region—one that is more fragmented, decentralized, and in many cases, violent. The once powerful cartels of Colombia today face hard competition from Mexican organizations—which are themselves splintering and fracturing, forming alliances with smaller groups, and expanding their reach. The more groups, and the more guns, the more violence.

Featured on EByline.com: How to Become A Freelance Foreign Correspondent

2011-09-01T14:17:00.000-04:00

Honored to be profile today on a great new site for freelancers and editors to meet, EByline.com:

Being a foreign correspondent is one of the most romanticized jobs in the journalism world. The thought of breaking news in far off countries and meeting fascinating other cultures is nearly irresistible to journalists who seek adventure. Ebyline freelancer Beth Dickinson is one of these adventure seekers, she is a foreign correspondent stationed in the Middle East. She has trekked the globe to cover stories in Africa and Latin America, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and The New Republic (and many more). She is regularly a guest on NPR affiliate stations, the BBC, ABC News, France24, Sirius XM radio, and Washington’s WTOP. We recently caught up with Beth to hear some stories about working overseas and to get some advice for other freelance journalists who want to break in to foreign correspondent work.

Keep reading here...

Huge Rise in the Number of African Born Immigrants in the United States

2011-09-01T14:09:00.001-04:00

Will a larger Africa-born diaspora mean better U.S.-Africa foreign policy? (here's hoping...)

We’ve known for some time that the numbers of African-born immigrants coming to the United States are on the rise. But new data published by the Migration Policy Institute offers an incredible new look at the shape of the new communities across America. Over the last 30 years, the African born population has grown from just 200,000 people to 1.5 million. And while Africans still make up just 3.9 percent of the total foreign-born population, that share is growing fast. In 2010, for example, nearly 10 percent of new green card recipients were born in Africa.

For African foreign policy watchers, there’s good reason to be very excited about this news.
Africa has long been the forgotten continent in Washington—last on the list to receive resources and policymakers’ attention. Geopolitics has had much to do with that. But so too did the constituency here at home in the United States. There simply weren’t very many voluntary migrants from Africa to the United States until the 1980s.

But go to any public event on Africa in Washington these days and you’ll see how times are changing. Regardless of the venue or the speaker, members of the diaspora are watching and holding the speakers and policymakers accountable. They are asking tough questions and demanding that their home countries be taken seriously. When the Kenyan Vice President came through town last year, he spent about half of his time speaking at the New America Foundation responding to the concerns of the incredibly organized diaspora organization in attendance.

It’s not just that there are more African-born immigrants in the United States, either, the new research reveals. Compared to native-born Americans, African immigrants are more likely to hold higher degrees. They’re more likely than the foreign-born population overall to speak English. And they live in urban areas—including nearly a quarter who live in the New York and Washington D.C. metro areas. In other words, they are educated, organized, and right next to the centers of power.

Will this new constituency result in better Africa policy? Perhaps. One thing that’s certainly clear is that policymakers are having to listen up and take advice from the diaspora community. These days, there are many trained eyes watching.

First observations on the U.N. blast in Abuja, Nigeria

2011-08-26T09:19:00.001-04:00

Really sad day. A take on U.N. Dispatch:

The terrible news that a bomb exploded in the U.N. compound in Abuja, Nigeria today sent my mind racing back three years, when I used to visit the building often. It’s not yet clear who is responsible for the bombing, or what their motives were. But as we’re waiting, it might be helpful to know a bit about what the U.N. compound was like, who had offices there, and what on earth someone could have been targeting.

First the aesthetics: Abuja, as a city, looks a bit like a metropolis in the Arabian Gulf (or, say, Miami.) It’s spread out, the buildings are big and surrounded by parking lots and gates. You need a car to go anywhere. Even by that measure, the U.N. compound was separated from the other buildings in town — about a 20 minute drive from the center of the city, and about a five minute drive from the U.S. Embassy. If the bomb went off at the U.N. compound, then that was the target; there’s no chance it could have been intended for another building as there are none nearby. That’s clearly why Nigeria’s minister of state for foreign affairs told BBC that this constituted an “act of international terrorism” — against the international community.

The U.N. compound itself was a circular building, with a large parking lot stretching out in front of it. (It would have been fairly easy for someone to drive up to the building without a security check.) Before entering the compound, you passed through a security point at the front entrance. Once inside, there were about four or five floors, with offices from different agencies scattered about. The construction was spacious and there weren’t a terribly large number of security guards. If I had entered to see UNICEF, I could have easily gone into another office without anyone minding.

As more details emerge, some key questions in my mind will include: Which wing of the building (and hence, which agencies) were targeted and how many people carried out the attack. The former might give some clues as to the point that this attack was trying to make. The latter might give clues about the perpetrators’ sophistication and level of infiltration.

This is a sad day for Nigeria, and for anyone who watches Nigeria. This may well be the moment that we look back on to mark the beginning of Nigeria’s days as a terrorist haven. Most commentators are assuming (rather reasonably) that the Northern Islamist militant group Boko Haram may be implicated. If that’s the case, this attack represents a big shift in targets — from almost exclusively government ones to international organizations. It also marks a logistical shift. Up to this point, targets have been local and methods rudimentary. This clearly ups the ante.

Going Facebook!

2011-08-20T09:10:00.000-04:00

Revamping my web presence, and what do you know, turns out everybody's got a Facebook page! Follow me for the latest dispatches and news!

Elizabeth Dickinson
Elizabeth Dickinson is a journalist. She has served as assistant managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine in Washington D.C. and Nigeria correspondent for The Economist, reporting from five continents. In addition, her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, IRIN News, AllAfrica.com, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, The National, and the Mail and Guardian. She is regularly a guest on NPR affiliate stations, the BBC, ABC News, France24, Sirius XM radio, and Washington's WTOP. ...

Gold Rush

2011-08-09T18:14:00.000-04:00

File under the unexpected ripple effects of the rating downgrade...

Gold Rush
With markets in a panic and investors fleeing to gold, Colombia's armed groups are making out like bandits.
By Elizabeth Dickinson

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia — Over the last three years of economic turmoil, markets have been predictable in one respect: When bad news hits, gold prices skyrocket. So when stock markets around the world plummeted on Monday, Aug. 8, reacting to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and one rating agency's downgrade of the United States, gold futures hit a record high. By the close of business Monday, they had surged to a record $1,782.50 an ounce, up 4.3 percent -- almost as much as the S&P 500 stock index was down.

Some 2,500 miles away from Wall Street, the gold boom has fueled a different kind of crisis: a crisis of opportunity. From 2006 to 2010, Colombia -- Latin America's largest gold producer since 1937 -- more than tripled its production to 59 tons per year. Next year, it intends to double the amount mined in 2009, attracting investment from top international firms such as AngloGold Ashanti and Cambridge Mineral Resources. But multinationals aren't the only ones getting in on the action: Leftist rebels, drug cartels, and regular old criminals are also edging for a piece of the multibillion-dollar annual trade. As commodity prices have gone up and up, and as drug trafficking has gotten more difficult, gold has become the new cocaine.

Finally, some good financial news!

2011-08-08T16:43:00.001-04:00

If you're feeling down and out re: S&P, I've got a blog post for you! (Latest on U.N. Dispatch)

BOGOTA, Colombia—Some 2,500 miles from the panic that is hitting the New York Stock Exchange today, there is an odd sense of optimism pervading economic circles. Welcome to Latin America, home to what may well be the world’s most buoyant—and in many ways most promising—Great Recession recovery. Across the region, economies are growing at an impressive clip, foreign direct investment is rising, interest rates and inflation are stable, and business is booming. As a region, Latin America is expected to post GDP growth rates this year of between 4 and 5 percent in 2011. (By comparison, the United States is hovering around 1 percent growth.) This map of GDP growth rates offers a nice visualization of just how impressive the region’s growth is.

But here’s some even better news on an otherwise dismal financial day: If investors do start to turn away from U.S. stocks and bonds, they might come here—and help fuel the Latin American decade that stands to lift millions from poverty. The World Bank already estimates that all of those who were pushed into poverty during the 2008 crash will surmount it thanks to current growth rates. If growth, investment, and the boom continue apace, those numbers will almost certainly rise.

A War Without Corpses

2011-08-01T17:08:00.001-04:00

All indicators show that Colombia's security is better than ever before. But polls show that many Colombians believe that things are actually getting worse. How can we reconcile the contradiction? In Colombia, organized crime has found a way to fight without showing up on the official radar. My dispatch for The Atlantic from Buenaventura...

A War Without Corpses
By Elizabeth Dickinson
Aug 1 2011, 7:00 AM ET

In Colombia's most violent city, crime statistics get better even as the situation gets worse

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia—When you walk down the streets of Colombia's largest port city—just four years ago the most violent urban area in the country—you need not worry much about crime. Taxi drivers leave their doors unlocked and their windows down, not fearing carjacking or theft. Women walk with their purses carelessly thrown behind their shoulders, out of sight. Hotel doors get by with only shoddy doorknob locks. There is an air of safety in the seaside park, where families enjoy humid evenings scattered between cotton candy venders and live comedians. The only apparent conflict to be found is between neighboring coastal bars, blasting competing beats of Colombian rap for their patrons.

By all outward appearances, Buenaventura has been rehabilitated from its darkest hour, when it was essentially an urban combat zone. Since 2007, when the city claimed the country's highest murder rate, homicides have come down more than six-fold. Then, the primary cause of death here was gun violence. Now, residents say that street confrontations are rare.

Yet behind the calm that seems to reign, Buenaventura is still at war. This city and the neighboring towns and countryside on the Pacific coast have become a new epicenter of Colombia's four-decades-long conflict. And here in the city's countless neighborhoods, armed groups are still fighting block by block for control. "If you ask the authorities, they will tell you [the city] is better -- that the homicide rates are way down," says Victor Hugo Vidal, a leader of the local chapter of the Process of Black Communities in Colombia, which monitors community security. "But for us [living here], during the last 10 years, there has been no change."

That contradiction--between the statistics and the perception of safety on the ground--puts Buenaventura at the center of a national debate ongoing in Colombia today about whether security is getting worse again, after a decade of improvement. Citizens across the country have raised concerns about a rise in crime and armed gangs. But the government believes that the country's security on the whole continues to improve; and indeed, many criminal indicators support that case. On May 14, for example, President Juan Manuel Santos cited Buenaventura as a city where homicide rates had been spectacularly lowered.

But in Buenaventura, something terrible is happening that might explain why, even though the statistics look good, life on the ground is awful. What's changed in this small coastal town is one thing: "the modality of the violence," says Vidal. Aware of the government's push to lower homicide rates, armed groups here have turned their fight into an invisible war. "Where they used to assassinate, now they disappear," Vidal continues. According to PCN's count, at least 378 people have gone missing in the last four years--probably taken to the sea and killed. Those presumed deaths won't show up in the official numbers, allowing both the authorities and the criminal gangs to claim victory in the latest stage of this dark war.

FARC 2.0?

2011-07-26T19:51:00.003-04:00

In recent months, leftist rebels in Colombia have made a splash with blockbuster attacks that line the front pages. Are they back from their presumed near-death, or is something else going on? My latest for FP:

Rumble in the Jungle
In Colombia, FARC operations are on the rise as the guerrilla movement changes strategy and returns to its insurgent roots.
By Elizabeth Dickinson

TAMESIS, Colombia – Didier Alvarez shakes his head with fear as he speaks. Over the last decade, he has seen Salgar, his small town in Colombia's northwest Antioquia province, transformed. In the early 2000s, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and rival paramilitary units roamed the area, fighting for territory, massacring civilians, and extracting rents from the local economy. By 2008, the armed groups were gone; the FARC was chased into the jungle by the Colombian military and the paramilitaries demobilized. "Things started to calm down," he remembers.
"But we are falling back into crisis," Alvarez continues. "The [FARC] guerrillas and other armed groups are back, destroying our towns, assassinating leaders." Two towns were attacked near his own in the last two months. As the head of the community's local council, Alvarez is terrified. He's not the only one; 74 percent of Colombians believe that security is getting worse, according to a June Gallup poll.

Three years ago, the outgoing government of President Álvaro Uribe declared "the end of the end" of the FARC. The group was in its death throes, and this decades-long conflict was coming to an end, Uribe said, thanks to eight years of intensive military operations. But while few seem to be paying attention, this resilient rebel force, which the International Crisis Group estimates has between 8,000 and 10,000 members, has made a comeback -- and not only in places like Salgar. In the first six months of 2011, the militant group undertook some 1,115 "military actions," including everything from armed combat to kidnappings to land mining. That's an increase of 10 percent from the same period last year. In fact, FARC operations have increased every year since 2005.

So is the FARC making a comeback? Not exactly -- but it has changed its strategy...

How do you pay for a busy refugee year? Cuts, cuts, cuts.

2011-07-19T10:14:00.001-04:00

Latest for U.N. Dispatch!

Bogota, Colombia – 2011 has had no shortage of refugee crises: political conflict in the Ivory Coast sent hundreds of thousands fleeing, repression in Syria continues to push hundreds into neighboring Turkey, a drought in the Horn of Africa is sending record numbers of Somali refugees into Kenya and Ethiopia, and Libyans have been consistently pouring into Tunisia for months now.

Incredibly, the cash-strapped international community has mobilized to accommodate all these new migrations. But in a year when European countries, the United States, and other traditional donors are looking for ways to balance their budgets, how exactly is the United Nations paying for it? In part by cutting resources in protracted crisis zones.

One of those places is here in Colombia, where more than 3.6 million of the country’s 45 million people are still displaced from the country’s decades-long conflict. Many of these people haven’t gone home in years or even decades. Still others have been displaced more than once. And it’s not over. In the first three months of 2011, more than 8,000 people were displaced — more than all of last year.

A broken justice system leaves prisoners in limbo

2011-07-17T21:09:00.001-04:00

The heartbreaking story from the other side of Mexico's conflict -- in prison. For U.N. Dispatch...

The last time that Antonio Almanza’s son Ricardo came home, he didn’t have this tremor in his face, the first signs of Parkinson’s disease sneaking into his words. His wife, Laura Cerriteño, hadn’t yet been diagnosed with breast cancer. Antonio hadn’t lost his job with the local government—where he had worked for almost three decades. He hadn’t sold his home, tried to drive a taxi to earn a wage, or asked his wife to sell tacos on the street—all to pay his son’s legal bills. And if he hadn’t told me he had Parkinson’s, it would be hard to tell if the shaking was the mere trauma of reliving the last nine years. When he says in a quiet voice, jaw hesitating, “I have lost everything,” he is not exaggerating.

On August 13, 2002, Mario Ricardo Antonio Alamanza Cerriteño was apprehended by police in his home state of Tlaxcala along with five other people, several of whom Ricardo had never seen before. Their supposed crime was undertaking two kidnaps for ransom in January 2001. But none of the arrested that day — neither Ricardo nor the others — were told why they were being taken away. Then, within hours of arriving, they were forced to confess under torture and presented to the world in a press conference celebrating supposed justice done.

If Almanza’s story was unique, it would be a tragedy. The fact that it may be closer to the average standard of justice is unimaginable. While there are conflicting statistics about just how rarely procedures are followed, recent estimates by Mexico’s Center for Economic Instruction and Research (CIDE) have found that as many as 93 percent of arrested persons in Mexico never see a warrant and 80 percent never had the chance to speak with a judge. Another prison survey conducted by the regional research group FLACSO found that 70 percent of statements were taken without a lawyer present. Nearly three quarters never even have the chance to make a phone call from prison, and an equal proportion of defendants never have a lawyer.

How Liberia Still Suffers from the Cote D’Ivoire Conflict

2011-07-14T11:25:00.000-04:00

An update this morning on the Cote d'Ivoire refugee crisis for U.N. Dispatch:

Last December, when refugees started pouring into Liberia from the Ivory Coast, the government and international officials in Monrovia grew increasingly alarmed. This post-conflict country, one of the world’s poorest by almost any measure, was already struggling to provide for border communities, where most families enjoyed just one meal a day. With each of the 150,000 Ivorian refugees who trickled and then flooded in, the strain grew. To this day, UNICEF reports a steady stream of new arrivals from the Ivory Coast.

It’s hard to understate how rough this has been for Liberia. There are some 215 Liberian villages that are currently hosting refugees, often without the means to do so. In the first weeks of the conflict, local families fed the displaced with their own resources and food stocks. Now, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees is providing assistance to both the refugee and local populations. But it’s indicative of just what a stress this refugee influx is that almost five times as many Liberians are malnourished as Ivorian refugees.

Now it’s crunch time to make sure that the difficult situation doesn’t get any harder. It’s rainy season in West Africa, which means that roads are increasingly difficult to access. Food, medical, and other daily supplies arrive more slowly and they’re distributed with even more difficulty. Inconveniently, as the logistics get more complicated, the needs also grow. As a July 8 situation report from UNICEF explains, “Continuous rain is also increasing the need for clothes, blankets and mosquito nets which are required urgently for immediate distribution to children and women.”

Mexico Supreme Court opens a door to victims of state violence

2011-07-13T19:05:00.000-04:00

Human rights advocates in Mexico today are celebrating a big win: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that members of the armed forces who are implicated in abuses during their duty will have to face trial in civilian (not military) courts. That might seem a detail in any other context, but in the ongoing conflict, it’s increasingly believed that the armed forces are implicated in at least some of the deadly violence sweeping this country. Now, victims’ families can take their cases to court.

One of the most troubling aspects of this conflict, as I wrote yesterday in The Atlantic, is that the victims and the perpetrators are often anonymous. Homicides are rarely investigated seriously, nor are kidnappings or disappearances. But many victims’ families, including several I spoke with personally, had gathered their own evidence to support the idea that their loved ones were killed or kidnapped by the military or police. The country’s Human Rights Commission, for example, has noted some 5,000 pending complaints against members of the armed forces lodged since 2006.

Yet during the last five years of this conflict -- as well as in previous period of political violence in Mexico’s history -- crimes committed by members of the military were tried in the privacy of military tribunals, where human rights advocates argue that offenders were either judged too leniently or were simply never taken to trial at all. Victims’ families had no power to push a case forward; the decision to launch proceedings depended entirely on the armed forces.

When I met with numerous human rights groups in the country last month, they all named ending military jurisdiction as one of their major demand of the government. “We have to eliminate the extensive use of military justice,” argued Silvano Cantú, researchers at the Mexican Center for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights.

In fact, human rights groups have been pushing for this literally for decades – since 1974 to be exact, when an activist named Rosendo Radilla Pacheco disappeared at the hands of the military. The disappearance was one of countless more like it that took place during the country’s guerra sucia. Radilla’s family has worked ever since to demand justice—and also ensure that this case became a precedent for accountability within the Mexican armed forces. In 2009, when the case came before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the justices ruled that the Mexican state should undertake a full investigation and prosecution, provide compensation to the family, and amend its military code to ensure that future abuses were dealt with effectively.

The ruling on Tuesday comes from that same case, which made its way up to the Supreme Court. Justices voted unanimously that, “in situations involving the violation of the human rights of civilians, under no circumstances may a process be undertaken under military jurisdiction.”

For victims’ families, that opens a new door to finding justice for their losses.

Tombs of the Unknown: Mexico's Mysterious Deaths

2011-07-13T13:54:00.001-04:00

Don't understand the drug war in Mexico? You're not alone. Thanks to a lack of investigations, we simply don't know who is dying, who is killing, and why things have gotten so bad. My latest for The Atlantic:

Tombs of the Unknown: Mexico's Mysterious Deaths
In a war where less than one in 20 crimes is investigated, the conflict's most fundamental questions -- who is doing the killing? whom is being killed? why? -- remain unanswered

MEXICO CITY, Mexico -- On any given day in Mexico, tens of people will die in the violent conflict between government forces and criminal cartels. Some of them will be decapitated, others left with graphic messages on their corpses. Bodies will hang from bridges or turn up in mass graves. Still other casualties will be exacted on the streets in gun battle. As best anyone can count, between 35,000 and 40,000 people have died in Mexico over the last five years. And nearly all of those deaths have been violent. They're also becoming more common: The number of deaths in the conflict increased by 60 percent between 2009 and 2010.

The death toll is shocking, but the story gets worse from here. No one knows much about who these tens of thousands of people were -- whether the dead were criminals, soldiers, policemen, or just plain civilians. Nor is it clear why they are being killed; the vast majority of deaths are never investigated. Mass graves are dug up with back hoes rather than archaeological brushes. Decapitated corpses are attributed to the cartels, often without evidence, and quickly buried. All of this means that no one knows exactly why Mexico, which has been home to drug cartels for decades, has suddenly descended into brutal war. No one knows how many people are dying, or why. And no one knows why it is getting worse.

Kidnap Capital

2011-07-05T20:14:00.003-04:00

An alarming survey released at the end of June found that Mexico's kidnapping rates have skyrocketed. Here's my look at what's behind this epidemic of snatching for Foreign Policy:

Kidnap Capital
Why Mexico's snatching epidemic is worse than anything we've seen before.

MEXICO CITY — On a quiet November day nearly two years ago, Luis Ángel León Rodriguez called his mother, Araceli, to tell her he would be leaving town for a while. The 24-year-old federal police officer was being sent on a mission to Michoacán, one of Mexico's hottest states for organized crime. He would earn a bit more money in the danger zone, he explained. His mother implored him not to go; Luis Ángel brushed off her fears.

The last call Araceli received from her son came two days later, on Nov. 16, 2009, as Luis Ángel, five other officers, and a civilian mechanic were leaving Mexico City for the front lines. Luis Ángel told his mother he loved her and not to worry. "It was as if he knew we were going to be separated for a while," she told me. Araceli hasn't heard from her son -- or any of his companions -- since.

Recently, a research institute here announced that Mexico suffers from the second-highest kidnapping rate of any country in the world -- three times higher than Colombia's during its darkest period of drug violence and second only to Venezuela. For mothers like Araceli, the result was no surprise; but beyond the stark headline of the country's ranking, the study provides some insight into the skyrocketing rates of violence that have accompanied President Felipe Calderón's war on drugs, and the security forces' impotence -- or worse, complicity -- which has allowed the violence to escalate. Calderón has, under pressure from Araceli and other victims' families and advocacy groups, made efforts to reform his government's approach. But taking the country to a place where Luis Ángel’s story is an outlier will require changes across the board in Mexico: not simply a stronger hand in the war on drugs, but a much closer look at how that war is being fought.

Southern California Public Radio Interview: Mexico's persistent drug cartels

2011-07-05T18:26:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of joining Madeleine Brand on SCPR in California to discuss the ongoing conflict in Mexico. Have a listen!

An inside look at U.N. Women's first year

2011-07-05T15:31:00.000-04:00

A look into Michelle Bachelet's leadership of the first U.N. agency meant for women's issues. From The Huffington Post:

An Inside Look at UN Women's First Year

By Elizabeth Dickinson

TOTOTA, Liberia--It's mid-day in early March and about a hundred women and girls are squeezed into a round "peace hut" in the Liberian village of Totota with the head of the new U.N. Agency, U.N. Women, looking on. Michelle Bachelet's face draws a look of compassion and concern as the ceremonies begin. A woman, perhaps twenty-something with a child in her arms, begins explaining with graphic hand gestures how her husband beat her; she had bruises and could barely walk afterwards. Her husband looks at the ground until it's his turn to reply. He agrees that he beat her, just not as bad as she says. The female judge moderating the process reprimands him and beseeches peace in the household.

When Bachelet took her first overseas trip in March, she likely surprised many by choosing Liberia, a tiny war-torn country on the West African coast. By many nominal measures, Liberia is an awful place to be a woman. Mothers have a 1 in 20 chance of dying in childbirth during their lifetimes, only about half of females attend secondary school, and about half of rural women marry when they're still technically children. But in one area in particular, Liberia is breaking record books: post-conflict justice, particularly for women, through mechanisms like the Totota peace hut. "I believe that women are very important agents of change, agents of development, agents of peace," Bachelet told me during that trip in March.

Five months later, U.N. Women is releasing its first annual look at the state of females worldwide. And it focuses on exactly that: peace and justice, a sector that underlies many of the areas in which women lag behind -- from property rights, to political participation, to economic opportunity, the report argues. Good laws have to be in place to protect women's rights. But perhaps even more crucially, a strong judicial system has to be able to act when those rights are denied, misappropriated, or trampled. In other words, the courts -- as the enforcers of rights and equality -- are vital to strengthening the position of women in the world.

As U.N. Women's first report, the 169-page document isn't just an annual report. It's also a glimpse into how Bachelet's philosophy about the agency should work: On the key institutions and structures without which everything else falls apart. The judicial system and the rule of law are things that Bachelet knows -- from firsthand experience as Chile's defense minister, and later president -- are key to building just societies. "I have a very deep commitment with justice, and of course women's rights is a matter of justice for me," she told me in March. "We have to do all we could to give them the possibilities and rights that they deserve."

The drug war -- why not to fight fire with fire

2011-07-05T11:14:00.001-04:00

I have a brief column out today from Monocle magazine taking stock of public opinion on the drug war:

Why Not to Fight Fire With Fire
By Elizabeth Dickinson

Five years after the President Felipe Calderon deployed 50,000 soldiers to confront Mexico’s drug cartels, the country is divided about how well the fight is going. To half the country, the president included, there are clear signs of success: countless drug kingpins have been apprehended and the security forces are stronger than ever. To the other half of this country of 107 million, the war on drugs has only worsened insecurity, increased impunity, and weakened the state. And now, after years of public support for the battle, it’s unclear whether Mexican voters will continue to support the drug war.

What changed over the last half decade was both the extent and the brutality of the violence sweeping across Mexico. Some 40,000 people have perished in the fighting, and more than 5,000 are missing. But what’s more alarming are the trend lines: the death toll has increased every year since 2006, with 2010 alone seeing more than 15,000 victims. One out of every six Mexicans personally knows someone who has died. And all the while, the number of municipalities affected by the violence has risen fourfold. Whereas insecurity was once concentrated along drug routes, today it is the overwhelming norm.

How Thirteen Buses, One Mystical Poet, and Thousands of Protesters Ended Mexico’s Silence on the Drug War

2011-07-01T00:20:00.000-04:00

My latest from Mexico, on The New Republic:

How Thirteen Buses, One Mystical Poet, and Thousands of Protesters Ended Mexico’s Silence on the Drug War
By Elizabeth Dickinson

Mexico City—Roberto Galván lifts his hand from his hip with gravitas, his eyes softening as he removes his square, bifocal glasses. His skin is blotched underneath the lenses, grey patches decorating the space between the wrinkles. His face is tired, his voice full of sorrow. “Should I tell you about my case?” he asks me. He leans forward and takes a deep breath.

In January, Galván’s son disappeared. The 34-year-old, who lived in Monterrey, had taken a brief holiday in General Terán, a tiny town just nearby. One day, while Roberto was sitting in the central plaza, perhaps taking in the warm air and sun after weeks of rain, several armed men began to surround the square. As his father would later learn, these men took young Roberto away. Galván has not heard from his son since.

When he disappeared, Galván Jr. became one of the more than 5,000 people who Mexico’s human rights commission, a non-partisan government body, say have met a similar fate in the country over the six-year assault President Felipe Calderón’s government has waged against the country’s drug cartels. Taken away by criminal gangs looking to induce fear, narco-traffickers seeking new recruits, or rogue security forces with other motives, these people have simply vanished. And disappearances are just one of the many tragedies that have clouded Mexico’s narco wars: Every day, pictures of corpses are plastered on newspaper front pages. Official figures estimate that some 40,000 souls have perished since 2006, and most analysts believe that this figure is a minimum, based only on the deaths that have been reported by the police and in the media. According to the government, most of these people were criminals.

For months, Galván, who insists that his son was never involved in any criminal activity, has been speaking to everyone he can think of about his case—neighbors, policemen, politicians. In early June, however, something changed: Suddenly, he wasn’t alone in speaking about his loss. For the first time, wider Mexican society started having a conversation about how the country—which has the world’s eleventh largest economy and one of the richest political histories in Latin America—has deteriorated into brutality. And it was all thanks to protests, led by a movement dubbed “the Caravan for Peace,” that thousands of people have joined. Many of them, like Galván, are family members of the drug war’s victims.

Continue reading here...

Migrants are way better off (legally) in Mexico

2011-06-27T11:55:00.000-04:00

This morning's news that some 60 migrants were kidnapped in Oaxaca is a terrible reminder that Mexico's ongoing insecurity often claims its toll among the most vulnerable in society here. No one is more vulnerable than the thousands of migrants who try each year to pass from Mexico's southern border with Central America up to the United States by land. To criminal gangs and organized cartels alike, migrants are the perfect victims: often in the hands of coyotes, usually without resources or means.

If you stopped there, you would probably conclude that Mexico is a pretty terrible place to be an undocumented migrant. But it's worth remembering something that almost the entire English press missed: In May, a new Mexican immigration law came into effect that offers vast protection to migrants, and hopes to improve the desperate human rights situation in which they had previously lived.

The new law states that undocumented immigration is not a criminal offense; it forbids the use of federal police in the apprehension of migrants, and lifts sanctions on employers who employ migrants. It also offers some protection for those who assist migrants along their way -- including, for example, a network of church-run safe houses that stretch across the length of Mexico. Finally, and perhaps most important for the long-term, it offers steps toward reforming the law enforcement structure when it comes to migration, since some members of the security forces had long been accused of colluding with coyotes or gangs that extract rents from the migrants.

Of course, laws only matter when they're implemented, and that will be the tricky part -- particularly when it comes to improving the human rights and general security of those making the journey north. Legally, however, it's now much better to be an undocumented migrant in Mexico than the United States -- by a long shot.

Would legalization be enough to kill of the drug violence?

2011-06-22T20:55:00.000-04:00

I have an article in Foreign Policy this evening written from here in Mexico about just how complex and troubling the violence in Mexico has gotten. There's alarming evidence that the cartels that once discreetly trafficked drugs through this country are becoming territorial overlords, of a character similar to the mafias in places like Italy.

What does this mean for how we stop them? It means that it will take more than cutting off the drug market, more than cracking down with the Mexican military... it will take a community approach to security that is, at the moment, very much missing.

Please try to look beyond the spectacular title to the nuance here: the point isn't that legalization wouldn't help put an end to organized crime and violence here. The point is that it won't be enough. And it's not likely for a long time to come -- so Mexico (and the United States!) need to start thinking hard about other options. 40,000 people have died already. How many more?

Legalizing Drugs Won't Stop Mexico's Brutal Cartels
By Elizabeth Dickinson

MEXICO CITY — When the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) releases its annual status report on the narcotics trade later this month, it will almost certainly show a decrease in the volume of cocaine traveling through Mexico into the United States. Last year's report did too -- a 40 percent drop in seizures between 2006 and 2008. Worldwide, the cocaine market today is worth about half as much as it was just 15 years ago -- $88 billion compared with $165 billion in 1995.

This would be excellent news -- if it weren't for some alarming trends going in the other direction. As the cocaine trade through Mexico has fallen dramatically, the violence here has risen remarkably. Whereas 2006 saw just over 2,000 deaths attributed to drug violence, in 2010 there were an estimated 11,000 such killings, according to data from Stratfor and local press accounts. Ciudad Juárez, a border city of approximately 2 million at the center of the ongoing violence, has seen a particularly sharp spike. In 2001, there were just 16 murders for every 100,000 Ciudad Juárez residents. In 2010, that number reached 93 -- an increase of nearly sixfold -- according to the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights.

In other words, the war on drugs may be taking its toll on the narcotics trade, but it hasn't done anything to end the violence -- a stubborn fact that runs counter to an emerging consensus about the drug war. Across Latin America, intellectuals, scholars, and even policymakers are increasingly arguing that there is just one thing that can bring an end to the narco-troubles: the decriminalization of the drug trade in the United States. Legalize and regulate use, proponents argue, and prices would drop and the illicit trade would disappear overnight. Cartels would be starved of their piece of the global illicit drug pie, which the UNODC has estimated at some $320 billion per year.

But would legalization really work? With each day that passes, it looks like it wouldn't be enough, for one overarching reason: The cartels are becoming less like traffickers and more like mafias. Their currency is no longer just cocaine, methamphetamines, or heroin, though they earn revenue from each of these products. As they have grown in size and ambition, like so many big multinational corporations, they have diversified. The cartels are now active in all types of illicit markets, not just drugs.

Continue reading here...

Conflict still burns in Cote d'Ivoire

2011-06-22T14:47:00.000-04:00

My latest for U.N. Dispatch --

The last few days have been full of bad news from Ivory Coast. On June 6, an independent inquiry appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council noted that a number of atrocities had been committed during the previous half year of turmoil, some of them likely war crimes. Worse, months after the political crisis in the Ivory Coast came to an end, the violence continues in pockets of the country, according to new testimonies collected by Medecins Sans Frontiers and statements by officials at the United Nations mission in Cote d’Ivoire. ....

Continue reading here...

It's not easy hosting refugees

2011-06-21T16:58:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, Liberia's Daily Observer printed what probably seems like a rather frivolous story: Women along the border with Cote d'Ivoire were concerned that their husbands would fall victim to the temptation of the countless single Ivorian women entering the country as refugees:

The attractiveness of scores of single Ivorian refugee women roaming the streets of Gbarnga is causing intense fear among Liberian wives.

Resident married women are becoming especially concerned about protecting their homes and maintaining their husbands.

... a rather ‘worried’ married woman by the presence of these Ivorian girls screamed that, “We will not sit down here and see these women destroy our homes. We will ensure that our husbands would not fall in the hands of these hungry refugee women.”

“If the situation demands that we employ the use of ‘juju’ to secure our marriages, we will. No woman is willing to be victimized in such manner,” another Liberian wife flared up.

According to the study some married men are threatening to divorce their wives because of what they (married men) referred to them as jealous women, while some have secured rental rooms for their refugee concubines.

A soap opera scenario, to be sure. But it's also a nice window into some of the tensions that often cloud relationships between displaced and their host communities.

Refugees started streaming into Liberia earlier this year, during the several months that Cote d'Ivoire was divided between two presidents, both of whom claimed they had won a November election. Violence against every political affiliation sent half a million Ivorians fleeing their homes, over 100,000 of them to Liberia. For weeks, these new arrivals either stayed at the border or were welcomed into Liberian homes. It's hard to overstate what a material burden that was for many Liberian families, many of whom were already eating just one meal a day. Although camps have since been built, a number of Ivorians remain with host families in the community. Now almost half a year later, it's no small wonder that their presence is starting to ware on already strained circumstances.

This is also a good reminder of the anti-refugee stigmas that often follow the displaced, not just in Liberia but elsewhere. When I traveled to Liberia earlier this year, for example, I heard from officials at UNICEF about a perception that Ivorian refugees might be carrying HIV/AIDS. Tensions can also crop up if refugees are provided health or other services that host communities are not -- or vice versa. In this case, clearly the concerns are of a personal nature -- and an attempt to protect family resources and structures from outside tampering.

Some food for a thought this week, just as the U.N. High Commission for Refugees released a report on the state of the world's displaced -- of which there are 43.7 million today, the majority living in the developing world. It's really not easy either being or hosting refugees...

(h/t @ourmaninafrica)

Children in Mexico's drug wars?

2011-06-20T13:30:00.000-04:00

Very excited to contribute to UN Dispatch, an excellent site of which I've long been a reader. Here's a post dispatched from here in Mexico...

Mexico City, Mexico: Pick up the papers in Mexico these days and you’re likely to see something particularly alarming: among the daily toll of deaths and arrests in the country’s war on organized crime are an increasing number of children. Earlier this week, Mexican police pulled six combatants (two of them girls) under the age of 19 out of a firefight with the Zetas, one of the country’s largest organized crime cartels. In all, some 3,664 minors have been arrested in anti-crime operations since 2006.

The spectacular stories beg hard questions. Parts of Mexico are unmistakably at war, and what we know about conflict — particularly messy conflicts — is that somewhere along the chain children are always affected. On one side of the spectrum they are victims, caught up in the fighting themselves or witnesses to it. Or perhaps they are just prohibited from going out to play — or going to school. To the other extreme is the kind of child soldiering that plagues civil wars worldwide.

Mexico is seeing some degree of all of these troubles — so how bad is it?

Keep reading here...!

Postcards from Hell

2011-06-20T12:05:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again -- for Foreign Policy magazine's Failed States Index. Check out our beautiful (and hopefully enthralling) overview of life in the world's most troubled nations... Postcards from Hell.

Nigeria's first suicide bomber?

2011-06-17T01:26:00.002-04:00

At 10:55 a.m. this morning, smoke billowed out of the parking lot of Nigeria's police headquarters in downtown Abuja. A bomb went off seconds earlier, lighting cars on fire and killing dozens. The building sits on one of the main roads near the presidential palace, just on the way to one of nicest areas in the capital city, Asokoro. If the bomb proves intention, which seems likely given everything we've learned so far, this was a suicide bomber -- the first in Nigeria.

The now-infamous Islamist group Boko Haram is the likely culprit. Local media 234Next is reporting that the group issued a statement in Hausa, the language spoken in Nigeria's north, claiming that its operatives have just returned from Somalia. The group also sent a warning letter to a newspaper in their home city of Maidugari calling for citizens in Abuja to "restrict their movements." Throughout the last several months, bomb attacks in the north of the country have grown more prevalent. And neither is this the first one in the capital city; a particularly nasty one went off last October on the country's 50th anniversary of independence.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

This chicken is dope!

2011-06-15T20:26:00.000-04:00

When several Mexican politicians undertook drug tests earlier this week -- an act meant to show solidarity with the anti-doping campaign and a nod to general government transparency -- everyone was wondering if they'd eaten chicken or beef beforehand. When they all came out clean, you might assume they were vegetarian -- if you believe the Mexican Football Association.

Last last week, five Mexican soccer players tested positive for the illegal substances, and they blamed their diet. The Secretary General of the Federation explain, "We believe it was the food [that the players] at on the 18th, 19th, and 20th, of May, in which they ate chicken or beef that must have been contaminated" with hormones. Admittedly, he continued, this was a bit hard to prove... "We are working to verify this assumption; I say assumption because it is difficult [to imagine] that five players from different clubs would be positive thanks to the nature of [their meat]."

So... "Is the chicken to blame?" asked one local blog. Um, no, responded the national agricultural union. "We never gave our chickens any of the mentioned substances."

In any case, thank goodness, joke the radio stations, that those politicians avoided the chicken.

Vacationing in the drug war

2011-06-15T19:57:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, we took the delightful drive from Mexico City down to the Southern port city of Acapulco, once the favorite tourist destination of John Wayne and his 1950s groupies -- and countless Americans who followed his lead. But these days, I was surprised by how sparse the tourists seemed to be. Our hotel had only a handful of occupants; we largely had the pool and the restaurant to ourselves. Other venues were also sparsely populated -- everything from the beaches to the bars. When we asked the waiters and taxi drivers if it wasn't rather empty and they all looked back with a rather grim "yes..."

The mood in Acapulco -- which is in the state of Guerrero, one of the most affected by drug violence in the country's center -- got me wondering: How much of a toll is the conflict taking on tourism? After plowing through some stats and talking to the folks in Acapulco, the news isn't good. It's not only the drug war, though at least in Acapulco that seems to be a fair bit of it. The combination of insecurity, the international recession, and the swine-flu hangover have been no good for the tourist scene. That's terrible news for the economy -- but also for the chances that Mexico can provide lucrative alternatives to working in organized crime.

Let's start with some stats. Below is a graph of the number of international visitors coming to Mexico between 2000 and 2010, which I made using data from the government's Tourism Secretariat. Each starred data point represents a new year. I've marked out the beginning of the assault on the drug cartels, as well as the beginning of the international financial crisis and the swine flu epidemic. Blue dots are all international visitors; the red dots are only the visitors who stay overnight.

Interestingly, while the total number of visitors has fallen, the number of overnight tourists doesn't seem to have changed much. Think of it this way: roughly the same number of internationals are still going to Cancun for spring break (for example); but the number crossing over the land border to Tijuana for the day is way down.

Here's a graph that zooms in on the tourism sector since 2006, when the current administration came into office. You see a clear decline -- including in the last year, even as swine flu has faded from memory and Mexico has recovered (more or less) from the financial crisis.

Looking at the impact this might have on the economy, I graphed spending by international visitors over the same period, from 2000 to 2010. Recent years have indeed seen a fairly significant decline, though spending in 2010 was still roughly at 2006 levels (having risen in 2007 and 2008).

There's other evidence too that the tourism sector is suffering. President Felipe Calderon has admitted as much. And perhaps even more tellingly, Mexico has also amped up its spending on tourism promotion in the United States, becoming one of the countries with the largest lobbying budget in Washington -- a huge portion of which goes to tourism promotion.

It's a bit harder to tell if domestic tourism is suffering similarly, though anecdotal evidence suggests it is. And the stakes of that decline are huge: According to the Mexican government's most recent estimates, more than 80 percent of tourist spending comes from domestic travel.

All this probably doesn't sound terribly surprising, but here's the bottom line: If tourism continues to decline, it will deal a major blow -- not just to the Mexican economy but to the country's battle with organized crime.
In the first sense, cities such as Acapulco live on tourism. And so does the country: Recent estimates say that the sector makes up just under one-tenth of GDP. But the impact is actually far bigger; tourist spending represents about 15 percent of all national consumption. Plus, almost 1.7 million people were estimated to earn their living in a tourism-related sector (This data is a bit old, but it gives at least a sense of the stakes.)

What this means for the fight against organized crime is that one of the most powerful alternatives to working with cartels may be fast disappearing -- or at least becoming far less attractive. Adding to the trouble, several of the top tourist destination sites -- Acapulco, Tijuana, and Monterrey, for example -- are also among the most insecure. Without an economy -- which at this point is dependent at least in part on tourism -- that may be quite hard to change.

Why don't we like brand Mexico anymore?

2011-06-08T12:14:00.000-04:00

In a world of perpetual international exchange, countries are brands, just like Coke and Pepsi. Hear the word Sweden and you think of equality, prosperity, and social protections -- probably a good bet to do business. Hear the name Congo on the other hand, and you're likely to take your money the other way. As you might imagine, for countries that are struggling with their image, the going can get tough: Investors are reluctant and tourists run away.

But it's equally tough going to try and get your reputation back in order. Without international investment and some positive business plays, it's hard to grow -- a necessary component for one's country brand. It's a nasty circle. As Simon Anholt, a country branding expert, once told me, "Countries ring me up and say, We have a crap image; can you fix it?' And I say, Well, is it because you have a crap country?' They're shocked, but it's true."

Today, Mexico is in the aforementioned bind (though no one is accusing it of being a crap country -- far from it.) As Shannon O'Neil of CFR points out on her blog today, some of the reason is the increasingly unfavorable comparison being made between Mexico and Brazil:

The conventional U.S. wisdom today is that Mexico is a problem, and Brazil is an opportunity. The reality is that while Mexico faces serious challenges, the United States shouldn’t count it out. And, while Brazil does present real promise, there are serious issues it has yet to take on.

The difference? O'Neil argues that it's news coverage. Her full post is worth a read.

But this gets back to the chicken and egg question about country brands. Is the news coverage of Mexico bad because it's drawing on the conventional wisdom of a country in crisis? Or is that news coverage actually creating the notion of a country in crisis?

One way to answer this question might be to have a look at the local media here in Mexico to see if it is quite as hysterical as American news coverage. I think the answer is that they aren't -- particularly if you take discussion of ongoing conflict in the context of all the rest of the news. Business news, for example, is far more upbeat.

So what's up with the foreign press? Here's the dig: The area where Mexico is the weakest is also the area that touches closest to home for the majority of everyday readers in the United States: security. It's not fair, but I would argue that's why Mexico's reputation in the U.S. is what it is.

Telephones in a time of narcotrafficking

2011-06-07T19:00:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, when I tried to buy a cellphone, I stumbled upon my first taste of the increased security infrastructure that the administration of President Felipe Caderón has put into place over the last several years. In many of the countries I've worked, including everywhere I've visited in Africa, getting a phone number is about as easy as walking. Step off the airplane and one of the first things you'll see is a group of young cellphone venders, clambering for your attention. About $10 later, you have a sim card and a local phone number. That accessibility has been one of the keys to access in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are literally no barriers to entry. Until last year, getting a cellphone in Mexico was similar.

But in 2010, that changed with the signing of a law to create the Registro Nacional de Usuarios de Telefonía Móvil (RENAUT) -- a catalog that linked every phone number to a national ID number. The goal? To assist in the "prevention, investigation, and persecution of crimes such as kidnapping and extortion," which often rely on cell phones for their execution. Link every number to a name and there's a clear path to track criminal activity. So serious was the government about making this a priority that it threatened last year to disconnect some 30 million users who hadn't registered. The deadline was later lifted, but you still need a national ID number to get a phone today.

Predictably, reactions to the law were mixed when it came into effect in 2010. Many who had been victims of mobile phone crimes or extortion were pleased at the new measure; others worried about surrendering their data to the government. More than a few, in protest, registered under names such as President Calderón himself or Carlos Slim, whose firms control the vast majority of the cellphone market here.

Now 12 months later, has it worked? My very unscientific investigation indicates that it is quite easy to get a cellphone registered to someone other than oneself; many venders are happy to register under their own names for a small fee. Still, the vast majority of cell phones are now registered to someone -- which would offer at least a first step into an investigation of alleged misuse or fraud.

Update: Readers tell me that Nigeria is also now registering cell phones -- another interesting story to watch.

Bienvenido, Mexico City

2011-06-07T15:20:00.000-04:00

As I write these words, I'm seated at a chic (but cheap) organic restaurant in Mexico City, complete with wifi and a collection of yoga videos and organic salads for sale. It's the kind of place you might be more likely to expect to see in the East Village than on the streets of a city usually infamous for its air pollution, bad traffic, and monotonous urban sprawl. And to be sure, there's some truth to those things. But there's also much more. There's a Mexico that is breaking expectations, rising to confront the very real challenges that do exist. In fact, there's most of Mexico that resists the characterizations of this place as a state on the brink.

In the short few weeks that I'll be in Mexico, this is what I'm hoping to write about: the surprises and the contradictions, and the story behind the story that we usually read. I'm here on vacation in part, but as any journalist knows, once you've traveled as a reporter, there's really no going back. You can't help yourself from asking questions, making calls, and writing. Without any illusions that one can pop in an understand a place in a matter of weeks -- or really, years -- I'll be asking questions and trying to at least capture some of the ongoing conversations on the ground.

Ver Mexico city en un mapa ampliado

I'm always impressed when I think about how little we in the United States seem to read, think, and understand about our neighbor to the south. Mexico is our second largest trading partner and home to one of the world's largest emerging economies. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both hosted their counterparts from Mexico at state dinners in the White House. Yet aside from the events themselves, Mexico goes largely un-noticed in American foreign policy discussions. I think I can count on one hand the number of newspapers in the United States with permanent correspondents here.

I also know that there is some truth to the whispered "Latin American curse" in Washington -- the idea that there is so little interest in the region that even mentioning it shuts down all conversation. I also know journalists love to lament the death of foreign news, but Mexico is in many ways not foreign at all. Its troubles will become our troubles; its growth and development can only benefit the United States.

So here I am for the next few weeks to humbly do my penance for past inattention and think about Mexico. Thanks for the read.

Short blogging hiatus

2011-05-26T12:20:00.000-04:00

I'll be MIA for the next couple weeks for a trip to visit family and a move overseas. Back early June!

Three-child limit in Nigeria?

2011-05-25T11:15:00.000-04:00

Among the more frightening numbers in the most recent U.N. population projections is the prospect of Nigeria -- already sub-Saharan Africa's most populous country of 150 million -- ballooning to an incredible 756 million people. Most everyone agrees that this would be, in a word, bad. Already, the majority of the country's citizens live on just a few dollars a day; public services are stretched to capacity and often non-existent outside the cities. There is little chance that any country anywhere could keep up with a growth of five-fold over just a century, let alone this one.

What's to be done? Jeff Sachs, Columbia University economist and an advisor to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon offered one controversial suggestion in an interview with the AFP while in Nigeria this week: working toward a goal of a three-child limit. Alex Thurston at Sahel Blog asks if this is a good, or even feasible idea. Well here's my take: Imposing some sort of three child limit wouldn't work, would create enormous perverse incentives, and would probably discriminate against impoverished and rural families.

Let's break it down. First, imposing a legal restriction on child bearing in a place where access to contraceptives is far from guaranteed just wouldn't work. Even if those contraceptives were supplied, and assuming that all cultural barriers could be surmounted in a timely manner, the rule of law in Nigeria has a very selective hand. Impoverished families, the ones who have the least access to education and least understanding of the legal code, are often the only ones who feel the hand of the law; they can't pay any cops or judges to get them off the hook.

A second concern about framing matters this way is the incentives it would create. If women were prohibited from having more than three children, it doesn't mean that they might not get pregnant more than that. But it would likely mean an increase in unsafe abortions, already a huge problem in the country. Abortion is illegal in Nigeria, except when the woman's health is at risk. So women often look elsewhere -- to doctors whose offices aren't up to standard, or even to practitioners with little medical training. One survey has estimated that unsafe abortions kill as many as 20,000 Nigerian women a year.

This is a classic case of looking at the symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Why is fertility so high in Nigeria? Because there is no access to contraceptives, because women's healthcare is practically non-existent, because women often have no choice about when and whether to have sex, and because child mortality is so high that it's not uncommon for kids to die before they ever reach the age of five. Focus on the healthcare and the structural issues -- and start providing a lot more free contraceptives and a lot of public health education -- and the population issue just might resolve itself.

Things I learned at FP

2011-05-20T17:06:00.003-04:00

As some may know, this is my last day at Foreign Policy. After three great years here, I'm heading back to the field to report from the Middle East. But before I go, it's worth sharing a few of the things that I've learned from being here at FP and seeing how the news is made "behind the curtains."

The world is not a boring place. In case there was any doubt in your mind, we have a lot of fun at FP. Yes, we are serious too; yes, the world is a fraught with countless complex and mind-boggling conflicts and phenomena. But there's always a way to talk about them that isn't mind-bogglingly hard to follow. And usually, when you look for the new insights that reject that over-talked conventional wisdoms, you end up finding the most important angles.

Look for weak signals. Our former editor in chief Moises Naím taught us all something very important about how to read the world: behind the lines. Think of all the major news events of the last several years -- for example the Arab Spring or the financial crisis. Long before these words had any meaning, their origins were boiling up below the surface. It was a rare observer who could put the pieces together and anticipate the trend. It's what the best reporters and analysts should strive for.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

The HIV/AIDS gamechanger

2011-05-16T19:03:00.002-04:00

During its short but painful existence in humans, HIV/AIDS has thwarted efforts at prevention. Vaccines have proven elusive; changing human behaviors that spread the disease is never as easy as we'd like. HIV in particular is wrapped in a complicated web of women's rights, sexual mores, and a fraught debate over family planning. Which is precisely why a new study, released by the U.S. National Institute of Health on Thursday, could change everything. Treating HIV patients with anti-retrovirals early into their infection, the study found, can prevent up to 96 percent of HIV transmission. That's as high as anyone could ever hope to get with a vaccine.

Ninety-six percent efficacy would be a headline no matter what the debate. But in the context of the HIV/AIDS debate, this is monumental because it unites two often-opposed ideologies about how best to respond to the disease: treatment or prevention. The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS, known as PEPFAR, favored the former, extending anti-retroviral access to 2.5 million people who didn't have it before. When the Barack Obama administration came into office, they wanted to emphasize prevention at least as much or more. As I wrote last summer, that tweak in policy started an advocacy war.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

The end of talking in Libya

2011-05-16T19:02:00.000-04:00

Not for the first time this morning, the International Criminal Court (ICC) changed the political calculations in an ongoing conflict. When Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo announced that he will request warrants for the arrest of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and a brother, Al-Sanousi, he sent a clear message to anyone who might have been tempted otherwise: No negotiations with the alleged war criminals. For Qaddafi this was no big change; governments of the Western and Arab worlds have already made it clear there's no solution to this crisis that sees the Libyan leader still in power. But there was still some latent hope that Saif al-Islam could -- maybe -- work out a transition. Now it's official: Saif is out. Actually, there pretty much no one left to negotiate with.

Interestingly, however, the United Nations has been doing exactly that -- negotiating with the Libyan government to ensure humanitarian access to the besieged city of Misrata. Earlier this month, the U.N. aid chief, Valerie Amos, called for a ceasefire across the board, including NATO strikes, to let that agreement be honored.
Humanitarians have always had to walk that tricky line -- between getting the access they need to work and appeasing the aggressors. The ICC's announcement will certainly complicate that already fraught task. True, the Qaddafi regime hadn't shown many signs of actually honoring humanitarian pledges; after the agreement a few weeks ago, the military shelled Misrata pretty much non-stop. Yet if there was any budge room, it's gone now.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

How can we explain the rape epidemic in Congo?

2011-05-13T15:26:00.004-04:00

For the last decade and a half, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spawned unfathomable statistics. First, we learned that more people had died in conflict there than in all of World War II -- a devastating number in a country that most people couldn't locate on a map. Today's news that between 1.69 and 1.8 million women there will be raped in their lifetimes -- the equivalent of 410,000 a year and 48 every hour -- feels even more viscerally upsetting. You can't help feeling outraged when you read the numbers, published today in the American Journal of Public Health. How can we stand for this -- why isn't more being done?
But the more alarming question, perhaps, isn't why we aren't doing something about this; it's the fact that many people have tried, and failed. Despite democratic elections, a U.N. peacekeeping mission, millions of dollars of aid, and women's groups on the ground that have fought back with undaunted courage, these latest figures suggest that the epidemic of rape is getting worse, not better. Something isn't working. Why is sexual violence so persistent?

Continue reading on Foreign Policy...

The little things in Nigeria

2011-05-13T00:47:00.000-04:00

Blast from the past -- a bit of personal narrative I stumbled upon this evening...

There is a way of speaking in Nigeria that opens up the soul. There is a bluntness about “broken” English that doesn’t exist in the ‘proper’ language. Commands come off gentle “Komot fo road!” even when their translations would be rough “Get off the road!” The face and the hands get involved, and both parties are enraptured. You can’t but concoct your next sentence before your interlocutor has finished his own. When learning most foreign languages there is a pause… but the pause would kill everything. Unless it were punctuated by sucking of the teeth, or sliding of the guttural to make a sharp squeeze.

Words are added everyday. When the president was hoping to amend the constitution and win a third term in office, he created a word for his intrepid guise. In Warri, a city in the Delta and the heart of broken English, you could miss that the phrases were ever rooted in English—and why not?

Once you fall into broken, it runs in your blood. You see things and react with your sharp “kaieye!” snapping your fingers forward like you want to flick a penny from your index and middle fingers. When a truck blocks the road, “na wow-o…” with a shake of the head and quick inward gasp that sucks in just enough saliva to make a suction of disgust. When you greet your people, it is smiles and “well done-o!” Yes-o, dem dey try.

...

Read the rest here...

Middle Class Africa

2011-05-06T15:28:00.001-04:00

It used to be that when economists used to talk at Sub-Saharan Africa, their conversations would always turn to one country, South Africa. A decade ago, it was the wealthiest, it had the strongest institutions, it had the most developed stock market. But what it really boiled down to was this: South Africa had what no other Sub-Saharan African country could claim to -- a powerful middle class.
How things have changed. A new report released by the African Development bank today estimates that more than a third of the continent's population -- 313 million people -- are now middle class. Wake up investors: "Africa’s emerging middle class comprises roughly the size of the middle class in India or China."

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

Ivory Coast: A ragtag army falls apart

2011-04-27T15:33:00.001-04:00

When Alassane Ouattara finally took over the presidency in the Ivory Coast earlier this month, he did so with the help of a rag tag group of militiamen. There were the formal rebels from the country's brief civil war, known as the Forces Nouvelles. There were local men who picked up alongside the other regular fighters. And then there were the more pernicious militias, such as the so-called "Invisible Commandos" in Abidjan, who hitched their wagon to Ouattara's because -- for at least a moment -- their objectives aligned. What all these groups had in common was their desire to at last unseat an intrasigent outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo who had refused to step down for four months after a lost election.

Today, Gbagbo is gone. He's being held in detention in the north of the country while he faces a criminal investigation. That's good news by most accounts; at last, Ivory Coast has just one president. But it also means that the glue holding together Ouattara-loyal forces has also lost its stick.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

Remembering Tim Hetherington

2011-04-20T15:39:00.002-04:00

Before I ever met Tim Hetherington, the renowned photojournalist and filmmaker who died today in Misrata, Libya, he had already offered to help me. It was June 30, 2006, and I was on my way to Liberia, a country just settling back into a degree of normalcy and peace after decades of on-off civil war. I was an intern in Dakar, working for the New York Times West Africa bureau chief, Lydia Polgreen, who had put me in touch with Tim as a helpful contact on the ground. But I wanted to take a one-week trip to Monrovia to write a story about military reform. I wrote to Tim a few days earlier, and he quickly replied. "Beth, I can get you a driver. Let me know what time you'll arrive and he'll be there," he offered in an email. "Are you coming in with a photographer...perhaps we can do this [project] together if it suits you?"

Over the next week, Tim became a mentor and a friend. I tried to hide my age from his noticing -- attempting to look and act as professional as I could, but I'm sure he knew right away that I was barely 20-something. But without making me feel anything less than his peer, he never forgot to check in during that week I was in Monrovia. He was concerned for my safety, without being patronizing at all. He didn't have any stake in my story; it certainly wasn't going to make the pages of the Times. But he still helped out at every turn. That was Tim. He didn't have to care. He just did.

Continue reading at Foreign Policy...

Nigerian elections: The good, the bad, and the ugly

2011-04-18T15:41:00.002-04:00

Let's start with the good news. After more than a decade of violent, fraudulent polls, Africa's most-populous country held a presidential election yesterday that was largely peaceful, fair, and calm. For anyone who remembers the 2007 presidential vote, the pleasantness of this surprise can't be understated. Then, thugs bought votes, snatched polling boxes, and rigged the counting. This time, violence was limited and observers were impressed. Incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan was annouced the winner this afternoon (evening time in Nigeria). But in other contests, for example parliamentary seats, his ruling People's Democratic Party lost ground -- a welcome signal that its political monopoly may be opening up, ever so slightly, to competition.

Then there's the bad news: The results helped reveal just how fractured Nigeria's regions have become. As soon as word spread that Jonathan -- a southerner -- had won, rioting broke out in the North of the country, where voters largely favored his opponent, a former military leader, the northerner, Muhammadu Buhari.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy...

Reform School

2011-04-12T16:13:00.002-04:00

Gbagbo arrested in Ivory Coast

2011-04-11T15:44:00.003-04:00

Forces of president-elect Alassane Ouattara arrested outoing President Laurent Gbagbo at his residence in Abidjan on Monday, after an assault on the compound that involved French and U.N. troops. Reuters reported that 30 tanks made their way from the French military base toward the neighborhood where Gbagbo resides. The battle that followed has finally put an end to a four-month long crisis over who was running the Ivory Coast.

Well, at least the immediate crisis. The hard part -- getting this country back to normality -- still awaits.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy...

Nightmare in Abidjan

2011-04-07T16:21:00.000-04:00

A photo essay history of the crisis in the Ivory Coast on Foreign Policy ...

ICC to investigate crimes in Ivory Coast

2011-04-06T15:46:00.002-04:00

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, issued a statement today indicating that his team may request the authorization to open a full-fledged investigation into atrocities committed in recent months in the Ivory Coast. The statement urged the U.N. Security council to "expedite" the process so that he "can proceed faster with an investigation and start to prepare a request for an arrest warrant for those most responsible for crimes in Ivory Coast."

Clearly, there are crimes to investigate. After reports that as many as 1,000 were killed in the Western town of Duékoué over the weekend, today another massacre site is reported to have been found. Holding outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo's military to account for shelling a market and disappearing political opponents is unquestionably a good thing, right?

Yes -- but it also opens up a lot of very difficult questions about how this political crisis is going to end.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy...

End Game in Abidjan

2011-04-05T15:47:00.003-04:00

When French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe announced that outgoing Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo was in negotiations to surrender, he hailed the resolution of the crisis as a success by the international community. "Today, France can be proud to have participated in the defense and expression of democracy in the Ivory Coast," he said, proclaiming the last four months of international engagement a wild success.

But at the end of a very long day, following massacres in the West of the country and a days-long siege on Abidjan, it's hard to see how anyone can be proud of how this has unfolded. A contested election degenerated into a four-month electoral stand-off that has left at least 1,500 people dead, has caused about 200,000 refugees over the borders, and displaced another several hundred thousand within the Ivory Coast.

This is not a shining example of how to negotiate a solution to conflict. It's a case in which everything went very, very wrong. And it's a visceral example of how one, very stubborn man, can ruin a nation.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

"He only wanted a better Bahrain"

2011-04-05T14:50:00.002-04:00

At 3 .a.m on March 30, policemen entered the home of blogger Mohammed Al-Maskati, who had been covering recent events in Bahrain by Twitter (@emoodz) and video. The men were wearing masks, and didnt show ID; they didn't say where -- or for how long -- they were detaining al-Maskati. Six days later, no one knows where he is.

I contacted one of al-Maskati's family members -- whose name we cannot use to protect the person's safety -- to ask a bit more about what happened. Below follows an account based on our conversation.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

Ivory Coast: Massacre in the West, Siege in the East

2011-04-04T15:51:00.002-04:00

War has returned to the Ivory Coast in the shape of massacres, mercenaries, a besieged capital, and a humanitarian nightmare. Over the last week, a political deadlock that was by all accounts frozen has become a heated contest on the battlefield. Make no mistake: This was the worst-case scenario mapped out for the Ivory Coast back in November when this crisis began.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the city of Duékoué, a key town in the West of the country close to the Liberian border. Forces loyal to the president elect, Alassane Ouattara, took the city last week. But over the weekend it became clear that the fighting took an incredible toll. The International Committee of the Red Cross announced last Friday that an estimated 800 had died; then Caritas put the number at 1,000. Reporting from Duékoué, the BBC's Andrew Harding-- the only English-speaking reporter there as far as I can tell -- writes that he counted 20 corpses in just one city block, children among them. Ouattara's forces, who put the figure much lower, claim that the killings were the result of community militias fighting one another in the wake of power changing hands. The administration blamed the U.N. peacekeepers for being absent and allowing the mess to unfold.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

The fog of war in Abidjan

2011-04-01T15:53:00.001-04:00

The sound of heavy gunfire is thick in the air in Abidjan this morning; the situation is opaque. Correspondents on the ground for french radio RFI admit on air that they simply can't confirm much about what's going on amid the chaos. The streets are chillingly empty save for combattants. Rumors circulate about where the fighting is, where it's going, and who's in charge.

But what's clear is that the end game between political rivals Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara, both of whom claim to have won last November's presidential election (Ouattara actually did), is every bit as bloody and brutal as feared. After months of talking, this question is being answers with guns.

And to be clear: that's guns on all sides.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy ...

Ivory Coast ex-rebel forces close in on capital

2011-03-30T15:57:00.002-04:00

Wires are reporting this morning that the ex-rebel forces who back president-elect Alassane Ouattara in the Ivory Coast are close to recapturing the country's capital, Yamoussoukro, from outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo this morning -- a win that would pave the way for the forces' march to Abidjan, just 143 kilometers away.

The good news is that military pressure seems to have made its point upon Gbagbo, who offered a ceasefire and urged mediation today. That marks the first time in the four month long crisis that Gbagbo has shown any interest in negotiations.

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Why does James Inhofe support Ivory Coast's Gbagbo?

2011-03-30T15:55:00.001-04:00

As the situation in the Ivory Coast rapidly deteriorates, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla. - R) has written to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for new elections in the Ivory Coast, a signal of support for outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo who has refused to step down from office after losing an internationally certified presidential ballot in November.

Inhofe's position starkly contradicts the administration's policy on the Ivory Coast, where Gbagbo has been widely accused of targeting civilians and opposition supporters during the four month stand-off. U.S., European, U.N., and African Union policy has called for the outgoing president to step down immediately. Today, the U.N. Security Council slapped tough sanctions on his regime, adding to existing American, European, and African sanctions already in place.

So how did an Oklahoma senator come to support a man that most see as an obstacle to peace in the Ivory Coast?

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Does the Obama Doctrine apply to the Ivory Coast?

2011-03-29T15:58:00.003-04:00

Not 30 minutes after Barack Obama had finished speaking last night, the pundits on CNN, the Tweetosphere, and the blogosphere, were abuzz with talk of a new "Obama doctrine" defined by the notion that the United States -- unlike some countries in the world -- cannot sit back and watch mass slaughters unfold. Most pulled out this paragraph of the address as a rough definition:

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and -– more profoundly -– our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

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All the Colonel's Kings

2011-03-25T16:23:00.000-04:00

A photo essay on Foreign Policy: How Qaddafi bought friends and influence on the African continent

Just a day after an international coalition began bombing targets in Libya, an African Union (AU) delegation tried to fly to Tripoli to mediate between Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi and rebel opposition leaders. The group, which included five African heads of state, said that both the Libyan leader and his opponents were ready to negotiate. But the plane never landed. On March 17, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that imposed a no fly zone over the country, now enforced by the United States, France, and Britain. The AU's attempt to bring an African solution to an African problem was cut short.

Qaddafi certainly is an African problem. During the four decades that he has governed Libya, Qaddafi has entrenched himself as a dominant political force across the continent. Many an aspiring politician has sought his support; many a rebel movement has turned to him for weapons and training. African heads of state have gone to great pains to maintain good relations with the colonel knowing that to do otherwise might mean Qaddafi's next protégé rebel movement could crop up in their country. Which is why, even as the rest of the world has written off Qaddafi as a maniacal loon, the Libyan leader still has friends in Africa.

In the Ivory Coast, rebel forces boost recruitment

2011-03-21T16:01:00.001-04:00

For the last several months, the Ivory Coast has been crawling back to civil war. Now, both sides are actively bulking up their forces in what looks like an alarming calculation that this country's crisis will get worse before it gets better. The Ivory Coast has been divided between a rebel-controlled north and a government-controlled south for the last decade. The fragile detante that restored peace in 2005 is shattering. Thousands upon thousands are fleeing the capital today in fear of exactly that.

In the southern city and capital of Abidjan, "thousands" of youth have joined the army, heeding a call from outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo, the man who lost November's presidential election. The drive has been led by Gbagbo's notoriously militant youth minister, Blé Goudé, who is under U.N. sanctions for violating the country's peace agreement and impeding the U.N. peacekeeping missionin the country. He told Reuters, "Our country is under attack, so we're organising ourselves to re-establish order ... The legal way to do it is to put them in the regular army."

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The other African war we were supposed to stop

2011-03-18T16:05:00.002-04:00

Believe me, I know: You have no bandwidth for the Ivory Coast today. But that may be exactly why the situation in this West African country -- far from the geopolitics of Libya and the human tragedy of Japan -- is going south so quickly. It looks increasingly like outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo has made a calculation that the world just doesn't have enough free hands to stop him if he pushes the country back into war.

Once upon a time, the world was supposed to intervene -- militarily if necessary -- to ensure democratic transition and prevent conflict in the Ivory Coast. These days, the momentum is gone. And in fact, the closer this country comes to civil war, the less interested anyone is at getting involved. I get it; geopolitically, the Ivory Coast doesn't hold a candle to the Middle East. But how about all of West Africa -- all of which is threatened by the current conflict?

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Nigerian politician offered to create trust fund with stolen wealth

2011-03-12T16:07:00.001-05:00

In the summer of 2007, a "U.S. businessman and reputed lobbyist" approached American diplomats in Nigeria with a message from James Ibori, a Nigerian state governor. Ibori, the source said, wanted to "make a deal," according to a diplomatic cable released to the Nigerian newspaper Next on March 11: He'd create a foundation with a percentage of his probably ill-gotten wealth if foreign authorities promised not to prosecute him:

former Delta State Governor Ibori would like to establish a development trust fund for Nigeria, endowed with 20 to 50 percent of funds he "acquired" over the years, in return for promises by foreign governments not to prosecute him. This contact estimated Ibori's "acquired" earnings at some three billion U.S. dollars. As part of Ibori's proposal, an international board of directors would oversee trust fund spending, with five persons selected by the international community, including the United States and United Kingdom, and the remaining four chosen by Nigeria. The Ibori-proposed trust fund would support development projects for electricity generation, potable water supply, and police reform. Ibori would also undertake to convince other former governors currently under investigation to follow suit, and return billions of dollars in stolen money in exchange for agreements not to prosecute them.

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West Africa Lurches Toward War

2011-03-11T16:16:00.003-05:00

Latest from FP!

MONROVIA, Liberia — Along a muddy border between the Ivory Coast and Liberia, Ivorian refugees pack into a small wooden boat that resembles a giant, square fruit crate. The raft fills quickly and just as quickly departs directly across the river, where a Liberian immigration officer waits to direct them on the opposite bank. The new arrivals carry nothing but the clothes they are wearing and any small plastic bags they can manage. Once on the Liberian side, they are herded into long lines and processing queues. Many will sleep outside; some will take shelter with ethnic kin, in local villages, who are themselves often struggling to survive.

Armed conflict from the Ivory Coast is spilling over its fluid western border with Liberia. And the result is the worst humanitarian crisis that West Africa has faced since 2003, when the wars ravishing Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast finally wound down.

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When Women's Day Is a Thing of the Past

2011-03-08T16:25:00.001-05:00

An interview with Michelle Bachelet on Foreign Policy ...

In West Africa, fears that Ivory Coast's conflict could spread

2011-03-08T16:11:00.001-05:00

MONROVIA, Liberia — Less than an hour's flight away from the Ivory's Coast's capital of Abidjan, fears are growing that what started as a national Ivorian crisis could quickly infect the entire West African region.

Since outgoing Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo first refused to step down from office late last year, tension has consistently ratcheted up, and violence between Gbagbo and his political rival, election winner Alassane Ouattara, has only grown. In just a matter of days, the number of refugees leaving the Ivory Coast for Liberia has quadrupled from 20,000 to 80,000, and fighting -- once far in the interior of the country -- has reached the border.

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Back to civil war in the Ivory Coast?

2011-02-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

For the last six years, Ivory Coast's government-controlled south and rebel-controlled north have held together thanks to a fragile cease-fire. Everyone's greatest fear since the cease-fire was signed was that it would break -- that the tiniest escalation could bring the country back into the brutal civil war it endured between the two sides throughout the first half of the decade.

Early Thursday morning, the cease-fire broke in Ivory Coast's interior. The government forces and the rebel forces -- known as the Forces Nouvelles -- started shooting. And they haven't really stopped since then. This morning, the Forces Nouvelles seized a government- controlled town.

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Libya's refuee crisis

2011-02-23T11:51:00.003-05:00

As a measure of how bad violence has gotten inside Libya, look to the borders, where tens of thousands have already fled -- and a further 300,000 might be on their way. "It is a biblical exodus," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told Reuters today. Speaking on BBC News World Service this morning, a representative from the International Red Cross said that his organization was preparing capacity along the border with Tunisia for as many as 10,000 new refugee arrivals today.

This isn't just Libyan nationals; the country is home to 1.5 million immigrants, the International Organization for Migration estimates, many from sub-Saharan Africa. Libya even played host to some 8,000 refugees from places such as Somalia, Eritrea, and Chad. Now, the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, says it has "no access" to that population. And those populations may indeed be in danger; tweets this morning from Libya indicate that African immigrants in Libya are afraid to leave their homes, for fear of being mistaken for mercenaries.

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The shattered myth of a moderate Qaddafi heir

2011-02-21T11:54:00.001-05:00

As violence grows in Libya, an urban myth -- one that has been passed around diplomatic circles for the last half decade -- has been effectively shattered: that Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, is the moderate, Western, reform-oriented heir that London, Paris, and Washington have been waiting for.

By now, you'll have seen Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, the second oldest son of the Libyan leader, on air defending the brutal decades-long rule of his father. In a speech that had echoes of his dad's long and rambling incoherence, Saif blaimed the ongoing protests on everyone from criminals to Islamists. He promised that Qaddafi would fight to the last protestor. And he was unapologetic about a death toll that he seems to have massively under-stated; he claimed that just 14 have died, while Human Rights Watch puts the number at over 200. For those who have long lauded Saif, and secretly hoped that he would succeed his father, this speech was a wake up call.

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Waiting out a strongman in the Ivory Coast

2011-02-16T11:56:00.000-05:00

It's been over two months now that the Ivory Coast has had two presidents -- one elected, according to internationally certified results, and one who just refuses to step down. In that time, neither shuttle diplomacy, nor international scorn, nor an amped up U.N. presence, nor sanctions, nor anything else has worked to dislodge the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. And so this perilous ritual has becoming a game: Who can outlast the other. Will the world lose resolve first, or will Gbagbo's sanctioned administration run out of money?

For the moment, the latter hope -- that Gbagbo's coffers will run dry -- is about as good as it gets in terms of a solution to the problem. Now sanctioned by the European Union, the United States, the African Union, and the regional West-African economic group ECOWAS, Gbagbo is running out of options. The West African Central Bank, which was leaking him money, was purged of the the Gbagbo supporters. Alassane Ouattara, the election winner,thas pushed for an export ban on cocoa, the country's largest agricultural product. Instead of leaving through the ports of Abidjan, the product gets exported through Ghana, avoiding a tariff that would have gone to Gbagbo. Two private banks pulled out of the country this week, and it's now unclear if Gbagbo will have the money to pay his army and civil servants. Until now, the government bureacracy has been supportive of his staying in power -- in part at least because those checks were still coming. If he does go bankrupt, public opinion could shift and his supporters could dump him.

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Africa reacts to the fall of Mubarak

2011-02-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

Just seconds after Hosni Mubarak resigned, African commentators started tweeting. "After #egypt Is the rest of #africa listening and watching? Support the protestors in #gabon #sudan #libya #algeria #cameroon #uganda ...." wrote Emeka Okafor, author of the Timbuktu Chronicles blog. Ferial Haffajee, editor of South Africa's City Press newspaper remembered the last time she'd seen something so moving: When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison exactly 21 years ago today. Then, she promptly asked, "So, if Mubarak's gone, why not Gbagbo and Mugabe too?"

Egypt is an African country, too. And while the protests have rocked the Arab world, unsettling autocrats from Algiers to Riyadh, it has equally shaken the ground under Africa's strongmen. Other tweeters report that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is censoring the news of Egypt's protests. In Gabon, protesters took to the streets bearing banners that read, "In Tunisia, Ben Ali is gone. In Gabon, we've still got Ali Ben," (Ali Ben being a reference to president Ali Bongo Ondimba, son of the former strongman Ali Bongo). As protests broke out in Algiers today, the headlines read, "Waiting for the revolution in Algeria."

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Southern Sudan's dangerous divides

2011-02-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, as many as 140 people were killed in clashes in Southern Sudan, pitting the army against a break-off rebel faction. The deaths raise the ominous scepter of conflict in a region that has tried hard for unity in recent weeks, as it voted in a referendum to secede from greater Sudan. Now, as Southern Sudan becomes an independent state, it's worth remembering that north-south violence isn't the only type to fear.

Southern Sudan is of course no stranger to fighting. During years of north-south civil war, rebellions were built, splintered, personallized, and canibalized. Alliances between groups and tribes were constructed and were shattered. And the wounds the decorate the Sudanese body politic will take years to heal. Although the regional president, Salva Kiir, has done what he can to bring opponents and would-be troublemakers into the fold, he hasn't always succeeded. As FP contributor Maggie Fick reports today for the AP, the rebel leader in today's clashes was once invited to join the government.

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Sudan's Bashir vows to accept an independent south

2011-02-07T12:01:00.000-05:00

It's been a good day for Southern Sudan: An incredible 98.83 percent of Southern Sudanese voters opted for secession last month, according to official results released today. But almost as incredible, Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir proclaimed that he was ready for (and even welcomed) and the secession of the country's southern half. "Today we received these results and we accept and welcome these results because they represent the will of the Southern people," he said on state television.

Why all the conciliatory talk? After all, this is the same Bashir who many analysts feared would cancel the referendum -- or reject its results -- pushing the country back to the brink of civil war. What gives?

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Meanwhile in Sudan...

2011-02-04T12:02:00.002-05:00

Sudan's busy capital of Khartoum is one of the many cities where the waves of Tunisia and Egypt have hit home in recent days, sparking parallel protests against the government. And just as security forces were detaining and harassing foreign journalists in Cairo today, the government of Sudan was doing the same. Twelve journalists were among the 16 people arrested in Khartoum today, all members of the opposition communist party. It's all part of a broader crackdown that has been ongoing for a week, since protestors took to the streets on January 30.

Sudan's protests haven't been nearly as large as those in Egypt, Yemen, or Tunisia so far. Still, there are an incredible -- and even growing -- number of similarities between the political situation there and in Tunisia and Egypt. Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been in power for more than two decades. His ruling party isn't fond of opposition; the recent elections were boycotted by opposition groups who claimed that they were set up to be unfair. Sudan is marred by similarly high rates of youth unemployment, and the economy is generally concentrated in the hands of a small elite. A security service limits freedom of expression and the press.

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Ivory Coast: A problem of genocide?

2011-01-21T12:04:00.000-05:00

Across the board, the rhetoric on the Ivory Coast is escalating. The West African economic community, ECOWAS, says it is set to intervene militarily to unseat should-be-outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo. African Union mediator and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga left Abidjan without making progress earlier this week, saying that mediation was failing. On Jan. 19, the United Nations' Security Council unanimously approved boosting the number of peacekeepers in the country up by 2,000. And on the same day, U.N. officials expressed concern about possible "genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Cote d'Ivoire."

Wait, so if all this is to be believed, are West Africa and the United Nations about to intervene militarily to prevent a genocide?

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Baby Doc arrested. But will he be tried for all his crimes?

2011-01-18T12:06:00.000-05:00

In the span of a mere 48 hours, Haiti's former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier has returned to the troubled island from exile in Paris and been arrested in Port au Prince. France24 reported this afternoon that he had been indicted for theft, corruption, and misallocation of funds. But those would be just a few of many crimes Duvalier is accused of committing during his 15 years in office, from 1971 to 1986.

"If he is going to be put on trial, he should be put on trial [for] all the human rights violations," Javier Zuñiga, special advisor to Amnesty International, told me by phone. "I think it will be travesty of justice if [he is tried for] only corruption, and not the extensive torture and disappearances."

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In Nigeria's presidential primary, signs of a regional split

2011-01-14T12:08:00.000-05:00

In the wee hours of the morning on Friday, Nigeria's ruling People's Democratic Party decided on their candidate for the spring presidential election -- the accidental incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, who took over when his former boss died in office last spring. The markets were pleased, and almost no one was particularly surprised. Jonathan is now a shoo-in favorite to win the presidency for another term. If only it were so simple.

Many a pundit has rehashed the point of contention going into yesterday's primary: The party's gentleman's agreement to rotate the office between north and south every eight years should have shoehorned a northerner into the candidacy this year -- but Jonathan is from the south. So not surprisingly, Jonathan was up against a popular northern politician for the nomination, a former vice president, Atiku Abubakar. That Jonathan won is no small testament to the political lobbying he has done in recent weeks (but also likely to the fact that the man in power controls the party machinery). The numbers look pretty convincing -- 2,736 delegates voted for Jonathan while just 807 voted for Abubakar.

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What's the next move in the Ivory Coast?

2011-01-12T12:10:00.005-05:00

Over the course of the last month, the international community has thrown everything it's got at the Ivory Coast's refusing-to-leave-office president, Laurent Gbagbo. They've tried sanctions. They've sent envoys. They've vowed to increase the number of U.N. peacekeepers. And they've cut off all funds to the Gbagbo camp. Barack Obama offered Gbagbo a dignified exit with amnesty in the United States. Even the idea of a unity government was floated, in which the widely recognized winner of the presidential election, Alassane Ouattara, would join Gbagbo in a cabinet. Nothing has worked; and despite weeks of standoff, little has changed.

But the worse news is that the world is fast running out of plays to run.

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Oxfam to Bill Clinton: You're Failing Haiti

2011-01-06T12:12:00.000-05:00

A year after an earthquake shook the small island-nation of Haiti, a mere 5 percent of the rubble has been cleared. Not even half of the donor money pledged has arrived. The government has failed to show leadership, and international NGOs are not helping -- circumventing the Haitian authorities to write their own rules. Perhaps most biting, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has so far "failed" to deliver its mandate for reconstruction, plagued instead by "contradictory policies and priorities."

These are the findings of a new report released today by the British-based charity Oxfam International. It's a damning read out on the last year of reconstruction -- or as the paper makes clear, lack thereof. While the emergency response is lauded for saving millions of people with vital supplies, services, and shelters, "neither the Haitian state nor the international community is making significant progress in reconstruction."

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The cast against a unity government in Cote d'Ivoire

2010-12-06T12:13:00.002-05:00

It's all the rage. Got a contested election in a fragile African country? Send in the elderly statesmen, make the warring parties sit down, and force them both into an uncomfortable but face-saving unity government. It happened in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe now shares power with the real vote-winner, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. It happened in Kenya, where incumbant President Mwai Kibaki was force-married with Prime Minister and rival Raila Odinga. And now, it's in danger of happening again in Cote d'Ivoire.

The mayhem in Cote d'Ivoire is serious. The country's presidential election was delayed repeatedly since 2005. When it finally took place, the results were delayed until international pressure came sufficiently to bear. The opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara is believed to have won and has been endorsed by international observers. But both he and the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo have now held swearing-in ceremonies.

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Follow Elizabeth's archived FP blog

2010-12-02T12:13:00.000-05:00

To continue reading archives of Elizabeth's blog at Foreign Policy's Passport, click here!