African leaders to meet in effort to vanquish Boko Haram

A coalition of African nations will meet Wednesday to coordinate efforts against Boko Haram. The Islamist insurgency is active in four different countries, with regional leaders vowing to crush the militants.

Deutsche Welle, 5 April 2015

Leaders of central and west African nations will meet for talks next week to examine the region's campaign to defeat the terrorist group Boko Haram.

The April 8 talks will be the first such meeting since Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari won the election, taking over from his rival and predecessor Goodluck Jonathan.

Buhari, a former military leader, has promised to wipe away the "terror" the Islamist militants have spread across the country. Some credit his victory at the Nigerian polls to outgoing Jonathan's failure to tackle the extremists.

"I assure you that Boko Haram will soon know the strength of our collective will," Buhari said last week.

The meeting will take place in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea. The West African bloc of nations ECOWAS will join their central African counterparts of ECCAS to address the "mounting and increasingly bloody attacks by the fundamentalists against Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad."

Experts from both groups have already met in Cameroon to lay the diplomatic groundwork for the summit, according to ECOWAS. The goal of the summit is the creation of a more concrete plan to "eradicate" the jihadist group, including the coordination of military strategy.

The inadequate sharing of intelligence between the affected nations has been a major stumbling block in the bid to crush the terrorist's campaign.

Boko Haram's trail of violence throughout northeastern Nigeria has left more than 15,000 dead since their insurgency began in 2009. United Nations human rights chief Zeid Raad al Hussein made an appeal last week for stronger international support for the nations battling the menace of Boko Haram, decrying the "despicable and wanton carnage" of the group, accusing them of murdering the women they take as "wives."

es/rc (AFP, LUSA)

Equatorial Guinea blocks regional open-border deal

Google – AFP, 9 November 2013

People work on a highway bridge in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea

on July 13, 2008 (AFP/File, Patrick Fort)

Libreville — Oil-rich Equatorial Guinea said on Saturday it would block an agreement between central African countries to allow people from the region to circulate freely, due to fears it would be flooded with immigrants.

"Having analysed and discussed the document... the government of Equatorial Guinea has decided not to apply it, given there are a series of stages with requirements and conditions the states must previously meet and comply with to reach the intended free movement," it said in a statement.

After years of negotiation, the Economic Community of Central African States, or ECCAS (Gabon, Congo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea), had agreed to allow people and goods to circulate freely within their borders, dispensing with visas and establishing a common biometric passport.

Gabon had blocked the deal for years as it too is a big oil producer in the region and already attracts a high number of migrants with its comparatively high salaries.

Following recent negotiations however, the deal was due to come into force in January 2014, but now Equatorial Guinea has thrown this into doubt.

Equatorial Guinea is the third largest exporter of oil in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and Angola, which generates around 95 percent of its income.

Many of its 700,000 inhabitants still live in poverty however, and the small central west African nation has been under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema's iron-fisted rule for 34 years.

The 71-year-old Obiang came to power in the former Spanish colony after toppling his brutally despotic uncle in a coup in 1979 and having him shot.

He is Africa's longest-serving leader and overwhelmingly won elections earlier this year in polls that were denounced as a sham by the opposition.

Africa is becoming more peaceful, despite the war in Mali

The continent is stereotyped as being violent and increasingly unstable, but a closer look suggests that conflict is declining

guardian.co.uk, Scott Straus for African Arguments, part of the Guardian Africa Network, Wednesday 30 January 2013

UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Reuters

Recent events in Mali, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan seem to confirm one of the most durable stereotypes of Africa, namely that the continent is unstable and uniquely prone to nasty political violence.

Writing in Foreign Policy two years ago, New York Times east Africa correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Gettleman espoused this view. He painted a dismal picture of pointless wars waged by brutes and criminals "spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic."

Gettleman is right that warfare and political violence are changing on the continent, but he is wrong to portray that change as one of brutal violence increasing out of control.

In fact, as I show in a recent piece in African Affairs, looked at since the end of the cold war, wars are not becoming more frequent in sub-Saharan Africa. To the contrary: according to the Uppsala Armed Conflict Data Program, the pre-eminent tracker of warfare worldwide, wars in the 2000s are substantially down from their peak in the early 1990s. Even if one counts an uptick during the past two years, there were about one-third fewer wars in sub-Saharan Africa in the period compared to the early-to-mid 1990s.

Another prevailing view is that sub-Saharan Africa is the most war-endemic region. Not so, especially if one looks at the continent's history since 1960. Wars in sub-Saharan Africa (compared to other world regions) are not longer or more frequent on a wars-per-country basis. Those distinctions effectively go to Asia, where between wars in India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, among others, wars are more frequent and longer lasting.

The pattern holds true for extreme cases of mass killing, like Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in the mid-2000s. Such events are on the decline in Africa; viewed across time, Africa is also not the regional leader of such events on a per-country basis.

My point is not to engage in crude regionalism, but rather to suggest that what often transpires as common sense about sub-Saharan Africa is wrong.

The bigger point is that we may be witnessing significant shifts in the nature of political violence on the continent. Wars are on the decline since the 1990s, but the character of warfare is also changing. Today there are fewer big wars fought for state control in which insurgents maintain substantial control of territory and put up well-structured armies to fight their counterparts in the state – Mali not withstanding. Such wars were modal into the 1990s. From southern Africa in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and even Zimbabwe to the long wars in the Horn in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan to the Great Lakes wars in Rwanda and Uganda, the typical armed conflict in Africa involved two major, territory-holding armies fighting each other for state control.

Today's wars typically are smaller. They most often involve small insurgencies of factionalised rebels on the peripheries of states. Today's wars also play out differently. They exhibit cross-border dimensions, and rather than drawing funding from big external states they depend on illicit trade, banditry, and international terrorist networks.

Typical of today's wars are the rebels in Casamance, in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, various armed groups in Darfur, and the Lord's Resistance Army. The latter typifies an emerging trend of trans-national insurgents. The LRA moves across multiple states in the Great Lakes region. Northern Mali is another case in point – prior to seizing control of the north, the Islamists moved across multiple countries in the Sahel. Once they gained territorial control in 2012, they attracted fighters from Nigeria and across North Africa. Moreover, these are not non-ideological wars, as Gettleman claims. The jihadis in Mali and Somalia, the separatists in Casamance, and the rebels in Darfur are certainly fighting for a cause.

To be sure, no one in his or her right mind could claim that warfare or political violence has ended in Africa. Many countries in the region have features that political scientists believe make countries vulnerable to armed conflict: weak states, high dependence on natural resources, and horizontal inequalities. Of the recent armed conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Chad, and eastern Congo, one obvious commonality is the lack of effective state control. Rebels survive in remote regions where state authority is tenuous. The fact of weak states in these and other countries will not end any time soon.

Moreover, other forms of violence deserve greater scrutiny. Consider, for example, electoral violence. As African states have turned to multiparty elections, so too has the risk of violence during those electoral campaigns increased. Electoral violence on the scale of Kenya in 2007 and 2008, Côte d'Ivoire in 2010, or Zimbabwe in 2008 is not the norm, but in many locations there is often some form of violence between incumbent and opposition forces. Yet we know substantially less about patterns and causes of electoral violence.

Consider too violence over vital resources, such as land, water, and pasture. Trends are harder to detect, but one new data collection effort from the University of Texas shows an increase in such violence events since the early 1990s. With climate change, rapidly growing urbanisation, and other changes that increase the pressure on vital but often scarce resources, we can expect more violence of the type recently seen in northern Kenya. Yet again, we know much less about this form of violence.

What explains the recent decline in warfare across Africa? I don't know for certain, but would point to geo-political changes since the end of the cold war.

First, the end of the cold war meant that the opportunities for rebels to receive substantial weaponry and training from big external states declined. To be sure, states across Africa still meddle in the affairs of their neighbors, but insurgent funding from neighbouring states is usually enough to be a nuisance to, but not actually overthrow, existing governments.

Second, the rise of multi-party politics has sapped the anti-government funding, energy, and talent away from the bush and into the domestic political arena.

Third, China is a rising external force in sub-Saharan Africa. China's goals are mainly economic, but their foreign relations follow a principle of non-interference. To my knowledge, China supports states, not insurgencies.

Finally, conflict reduction mechanisms, in particular international peacekeeping and regional diplomacy, have substantially increased on the continent. Peacekeeping is more prevalent and especially more robust than in the 1990s. Regional bodies such as the African Union, Eccowas, Eccas, IGAD, and SADC are quite active in most conflict situations. They have exhibited greater resolves in conflicts as diverse as Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Madagascar.

The four posited mechanisms are hypotheses, each of which deserves greater scrutiny and empirical testing. But taken together, they suggest plausible ways in which the incentives of insurgents and even state leaders to fight have been altered in recent years. They give reason to expect that while war is clearly not over in sub-Saharan Africa, we should continue to observe a decline in its frequency and intensity in coming decades.

Scott Straus is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin

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"The End of History"- Nov 20, 2010 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll)

“…  Africa

Let me tell you where else it's happening that you are unaware - that which is the beginning of the unity of the African states. Soon the continent will have what they never had before, and when that continent is healed and there is no AIDS and no major disease, they're going to want what you have. They're going to want houses and schools and an economy that works without corruption. They will be done with small-minded leaders who kill their populations for power in what has been called for generations "The History of Africa." Soon it will be the end of history in Africa, and a new continent will emerge.

Be aware that the strength may not come from the expected areas, for new leadership is brewing. There is so much land there and the population is so ready there, it will be one of the strongest economies on the planet within two generations plus 20 years. And it's going to happen because of a unifying idea put together by a few. These are the potentials of the planet, and the end of history as you know it.

In approximately 70 years, there will be a black man who leads this African continent into affluence and peace. He won't be a president, but rather a planner and a revolutionary economic thinker. He, and a strong woman with him, will implement the plan continent-wide. They will unite. This is the potential and this is the plan. Africa will arise out the ashes of centuries of disease and despair and create a viable economic force with workers who can create good products for the day. You think China is economically strong? China must do what it does, hobbled by the secrecy and bias of the old ways of its own history. As large as it is, it will have to eventually compete with Africa, a land of free thinkers and fast change. China will have a major competitor, one that doesn't have any cultural barriers to the advancement of the free Human spirit. …”

Rebels agree to talks in Central African Republic

Deutsche Welle, 29 december 2012

Government and rebel factions in the Central African Republic have agreed on unconditional talks aimed at forging a truce. Neighboring countries have meanwhile said they will dispatch troops to intervene.

The agreement to sit down at the table came without pre-conditions, the deputy secretary general of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Guy-Pierre Garcia, said on Friday.

"No one asked for conditions," said Garcia, adding that talks in the Gabon capital Libreville would take place "without delay,” although a date has yet to be named.

The government of President Francois Bozize is under threat after an insurgency began on December 10.

The president, who has been in power for almost 10 years, on Thursday pleaded for military help from both the US and former colonial power France, amid fears that rebels would move in on the capital, Bangui.

The Seleka coalition of rebel groups, fighting in the northwestern part of the country, has largely been kept in check by government troops in recent years, with some help from foreign governments.

ECCAS on Friday said it would deploy a contingent of soldiers to the country, although the number of soldiers to be sent was not immediately clarified.

France - which intervened on behalf of the government using airstrikes in 2006 - already has forces present in the country. However, Paris has said they would protect French interests rather than those of Bozize. Security was reinforced at the French Embassy on Friday after protesters threw rocks at the building.

rc/ccp (AFP, dpa, Reuters)

The president of the Central African Republic, François Bozizé (r)

 said he was also ready to attend peace talks organised by

regional leaders. Photograph: Sia Kambou/AFP/Getty Images

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