Topic: Africa in Crisis- The Merged Superthread

[cupper]

Forgive my ignorance, but are guerrillas bad or good?

Maybe redefine the word.

Furry ones Good.


Ones carrying guns Bad!


(and yes I know they are spelled differently)

[57Chevy]

Kony proclaims himself the “spokesperson” of God.

Kony is on the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list

 
Josephn Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army: a primer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/obama-deploys-combat-forces-to-fight-lords-resistance-army-in-central-africa/2011/10/14/gIQAYB8KkL_blog.html

video at link (Warning there are graphic images in the movie.)

[Jim Seggie]

Kony is on the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list

 
[

Lets hope someone Specially Designates a Hellfire or 7.62 NATO into his specially designated a$$.

[CDN Aviator]

R2P : Responsibility To Project ?

[57Chevy]

Specially Designated Global Terrorists list

Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) is a now discarded designation under US terrorism and terrorist funding sanctions regulations.

The designation has been superseded by the similar Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.

Specially Designated Nationals List
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specially_Designated_Nationals_(SDN)#Specially_Designated_Nationals_List


of which he is #11018 specially designated national a$$
Instant OFAC searches at link

[recceguy]

Furry ones Good.


Ones carrying guns Bad!


(and yes I know they are spelled differently)

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-WSM0xTyE

[cupper]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-WSM0xTyE

 

Like I said, the ones with guns, BAD. But funny!

[Thucydides]

This is the unintended (?) consequence of the R2P idea; penny packets of troops sent on a potentially hopeless mission for no obvious reason involving the nationa interest:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/why-is-obama-sending-troops-against-the-lords-resistance-army/246748/

Why Is Obama Sending Troops Against the Lord's Resistance Army?
OCT 14 2011, 5:23 PM ET 134
The pseudo-Christian terror cult has enslaved 66,000 children in its 20-year campaign across several countries in Central Africa, but it poses no threat to the U.S. or its interests
 
When the Lord's Resistance Army showed up in the Central African Republican village of Obo in 2008, everyone who refused to join them was killed. One of the men they scooped up, Daba Emmanuel, would spend the next year as one of the LRA's slave-soldiers. Indoctrinated, abused, and eventually forced to perform raids like the one against Obo, he survived to tell journalist Graeme Wood his story. "We killed the old immediately, and kept the young for work," Emmanuel said.

Recalling one raid on a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he told Wood that his small LRA faction began by gathering all the villagers together. "We put them into the church and closed the doors," Emmanuel remembered. They'd been ordered to steal supplies and find new children to make into slaves. "We entered only to choose some small girls and boys. The rest we burnt." They killed anyone who tried to escape with machetes, logs, or stones -- new recruits like Emmanuel were not trusted with rifles. As with similar groups, it's children who make the most loyal soldiers -- once their home has been destroyed, their language forgotten, and their religion replaced with a cult-like worship of LRA leader Joseph Kony, betrayal or escape is much less likely.

Part insurgency and part cult, the Lord's Resistance Army has waged a 20-year campaign of terror across Uganda, where it originally formed in opposition to the government there, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Sudan. It raids villages, massacres for no other purpose than bloodlust, enslaves child soldiers and child sex slaves, drugs its captives to make them more violent, all in an apparently endless mission that has destroyed countless villages and killed thousands of civilians, transforming one of the world's least governed spaces into one of its most dangerous.

A 2009 U.S. law authorizing financial support to Uganda against the LRA cites studies finding the LRA had abducted 66,000 children and displaced two million civilians. Last year, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth -- no hawk -- called on Obama to use U.S. military force against the Lord's Resistance Army. Roth cited the group's overwhelming humanitarian toll, its small size, and (unlike, for example, the Taliban) its extreme unpopularity among the populations it terrorizes.

The U.S. already supplies intelligence and a few million dollars to the Ugandan government in its totally failed quest to stop the LRA and to capture Joseph Kony, who is under indictment for war crimes from the International Criminal Court. On Friday, President Obama announced he would be sending approximately 100 U.S. combat troops to "act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA. Our forces will provide information, advice, and assistance to select partner nation forces." Special forces will be among them. The troops will not fire unless fired upon, but they will be able to provide much-need intelligence and organizational support to the Ugandan forces; they will also provide an important check on Uganda's troops, who might be tempted toward less-than-legal behavior as they crash around Central Africa.

Kony may be barking mad -- he performs bizarre rituals and claims to fight for "the Ten Commandments" -- but he has survived for two decades, outnumbered and outmatched by every metric, on little more than his ideology and his wits. "Kony is a brilliant tactician & knows the terrain better than anybody. He surrounds himself with scouts who have what amounts to an early warning system, which is how he's eluded capture for so long," Morehouse College assistant professor and Central Africa expert Laura Seay warned on twitter. "Kony also operates in some of the least-governed areas of the world's weakest states. Many of these places have no roads, infrastructure. All of this adds up for a potential mess for US troops, who don't know the terrain & can't count on host government troops to be helpful or even to fight. This will not be easy for only 100 US forces to carry out, especially given language barriers." Seay also points out that Kony uses children as human shield -- and as much of his fighting force -- making any direct action ethically and morally difficult.

Obama's decision to send 100 troops is a microscopically small deployment compared to the broader U.S. military diaspora: hundreds of thousands of troops in dozens of countries. The list of countries with around 100 or more U.S. troops might surprise you: Colombia, Thailand, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and Djibouti, to name a few. That list would probably be a lot longer if it included special forces deployment. Last year, Marc Ambinder reported that Obama had approved special forces bases and operations across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. But those operations, large and small, target terrorist groups and rogue states that threaten the U.S. -- something the Lord's Resistance Army could not possibly do.

If this if the humanitarian mission that the Obama administration says it is, and if it achieves the humanitarian goals it is setting out to achieve, it would be harder to find a more suitable target than the Lord's Resistance Army. Since World War Two, the U.S. has often presented its military, overwhelmingly the most powerful on Earth, as a force for good and global stability. In execution, it has been a force for furthering U.S., not global, interests -- just like every other national military. Some U.S. military actions, such as the intervention in Libya or the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, were sold as efforts for global peace, and that was probably part of the motivation, but they were also designed to promote American interests: to remove threats and replace them with friendly faces.

It's difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord's Resistance Army's campaign of violence. The group could go on killing and enslaving for decades -- as they well might -- and the American way of life would continue chugging along. It's possible that there's some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can't obviously see. Maybe, for example, Uganda is offering the U.S. more help with peacekeeping and counterterrorism in East Africa, where the U.S. does have concrete interests, in exchange for the troops. But it certainly looks like a primarily or purely humanitarian military mission, if a very small one. The Obama administration is hoping that these 100 troops will succeed where past U.S. assistance against the LRA -- intelligence, satellite images, fuel, and millions of dollars -- has failed. Maybe they will and maybe they won't. But this seems to suggest a small but important shift in how, where, and why the U.S. uses applies military force.

[milnews.ca]

Just an FYI - if you want to keep track of the LRA in Uganda, there appears to be a web page devoted to sharing that kind of information:
http://www.lracrisistracker.com/#updates

[milnews.ca]

More on Operation Crocodile (Canada's contribution to the U.N.'s Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or MONUSCO in French) here

The senior Canadian soldier serving in the restive Democratic Republic of Congo says it's unclear whether the worst of the post-election violence in the country has passed.

But Col. Rick Fawcett said it is clear that Canada has a role to play in helping the Central Africa country develop.

Fawcett, 51, is head of a contingent of nine Canadian soldiers serving with a decade-old, United Nations peacekeeping force in the Central African country.

UN troops were instrumental in readying the country for its second-ever presidential and legislative elections in November.

But Fawcett, who led the preparations, said the country itself wasn't logistically prepared for the challenge.

The Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, with few roads, railways or other infrastructure available to move election materials from town to town.

"The panic we went through through the whole month of November just was unbelievable, what we had to do to make this happen," Fawcett said in a telephone interview from Kinshasa.

"History will determine if it happened good enough." ....

The Canadian Press, 3 Jan 12

[milnews.ca]

With all the push from ceasefire.ca and Steve Staples for Canada to become a "peacekeeper" and not as offensive a forces, we now see this:

Earlier this month, civil conflict in South Sudan between the Murle and Nuer tribes resulted in the deaths of hundreds or possibly thousands of Murle people. A UN source said the number might be as high as 1,000, while a local Murle official estimated the number of deaths to be as high as 3,000 (Jeffrey Gettleman, “Born in Unity, South Sudan Is Torn Again,” New York Times, 12 January 2012).

A UN peacekeeping mission, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), is present to assist the government of the country, which achieved independence from Sudan in July 2011, in establishing peace and stability. However, as the New York Times reported, the peacekeepers seem to have been of little benefit to the civilians targeted in the recent violence ....

Gee, maybe if the forces in question were able to and allowed to shoot back if the bad guys aren't following the rules, the civilians may have had better protection?  Oh, wait, would that be in line with being a "peacekeeper"? 

 

[milnews.ca]

Longish, but worthwhile read, especially by those keen on "blue helmetting" Canada into Africa in largish numbers - this summary from an eclectic reading aggregator site is good:

Why so many small wars in Africa? Because barriers to insurrection have fallen very low. No more colonial powers or superpowers to intervene. Anyone with a satphone can get publicity. If you need troops, just drug some children

[Thucydides]

This video has gone viral (I drove across Ontario today and every radio station from London to Pet had something to say about it), but as the article shows, this is another example of "feel good" activism, and probably a way to make lots of money to boot ($30 for a "kit"?). Back in the 1920's and 30's, people would actually go out and fight for their causes, like the International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War, or Normane Bethune, who went to China to support the Chinese Communist movement. I doubt these people will dirty their hands by going to Africa to do something themselves (but if they can whip enough people into a frenzy to push governments to send people like *us* over there...):

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/solving-war-crimes-with-wristbands-the-arrogance-of-kony-2012/254193/

Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of 'Kony 2012'
By Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub

Mar 8 2012, 11:38 AM ET 106
A viral video by a controversial group claims to fix Central African violence with awareness, but such misguided campaigns can do more harm than good.
taubcronin p.jpg

Members of Invisible Children pose with soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army near the Congo-Sudan border in 2008 / Courtesy Glenna Gordon

Have you heard? Joseph Kony, brutal warlord and International Criminal Court indictee, is going to be famous like George Clooney. The reason is Kony 2012, a 30 minute film by the advocacy organization Invisible Children, which has gone viral in the 72 hours since its release, garnering over 38.6 million views on Youtube and Vimeo. It has been retweeted by everyone from Justin Bieber to Oprah, and shared on Facebook by seemingly everyone under the age of 25.

The video opens with a perplexing sequence of home movies. A happy couple film their baby's delivery by Caesarean, and he grows into a healthy, smiling toddler. Then the scene cuts to Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony in Central Africa, violently preying upon poor villagers. Now we discover the reason for the five minutes we just spent with this bubbly blond child in Los Angeles. He serves as a contrast for the crying children of northern Uganda, who have been victimized by Kony. (Never mind the fact that the LRA left Uganda years ago.)
MORE ON THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY
LRA1.jpg   The Bizarre and Horrifying Story of the LRA
LRA2b.jpg   The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012
LRA3.jpg   A Mission That Requires More Than Guns
LRA4.jpg   Obama's War on the LRA

The movie swirls us through a quickie history of the LRA, a rebel group that terrorized vulnerable civilian populations in northern Uganda for nearly twenty years before moving into the borderlands of South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic. It's (justifiably) heavy on the vilification of Kony, but light on any account of the complex political dynamics that sparked the conflict or have contributed to the LRA's longevity. Instead, we are given a facile explanation for Kony's decades-long reign of terror: Not enough Americans care.

Invisible Children has turned the myopic worldview of the adolescent -- "if I don't know about it, then it doesn't exist, but if I care about it, then it is the most important thing in the world" -- into a foreign policy prescription. The "invisible children" of the group's name were the children of northern Uganda forcibly recruited by the LRA. In the group's narrative, these children were "invisible" until American students took notice of them.

Awareness of their plight achieved, child soldiers are now visible to the naked American eye. And in fact, several months ago, President Obama sent 100 military advisors to Uganda to assist in the effort to track down Kony. But according to Invisible Children, these troops may be recalled unless the college students of America raise yet more awareness. The new video instructs its audience to put up posters, slap on stickers, and court celebrities' favor until Kony is "as famous as George Clooney." At that moment, sufficient awareness will have been achieved, and Kony will be magically shipped off to the International Criminal Court to await trial.

This awareness-based approach to atrocity strikes many people as worthwhile. As Samantha Power laid out in brutal detail in her book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the United States has repeatedly failed to intervene to stop genocide and crimes against humanity because of our leaders' belief that public opinion would not support such a decision. In theory, awareness campaigns should remedy that problem. In reality, they have not -and may have even exacerbated it.

The problem is that these campaigns mobilize generalized concern -- a demand to do something. That isn't enough to counterbalance the costs of interventions, because Americans' heartlessness or apathy was never the biggest problem. Taking tough action against groups, like the LRA, that are willing to commit mass atrocities will inevitably turn messy. Soldiers will be killed, sometimes horribly. (Think Somalia.) Military advice and training to the local forces attempting to suppress atrocities can have terrible unforeseen consequences. Consider the hundreds of victims of the LRA's 2008 "Christmas Massacre," their murderous response to a failed, U.S.-supported attack by Ugandan and Congolese government forces. International Criminal Court investigations often prompt their targets to step up attacks on civilians and aid workers, in an attempt to gain leverage with the court. (Both Kony and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir have tried that method.) 

The t-shirts, posters, and wristbands of awareness campaigns like Invisible Children's do not mention that death and failure often lie along the road to permanent solutions, nor that the simplest "solutions" are often the worst. (In fairness, you try fitting that on a bracelet.) Instead, they shift the goal from complicated and messy efforts at political resolution to something more palatable and less controversial: ever more awareness.

By making it an end in and of itself, awareness stands in for, and maybe even displaces, specific solutions to these very complicated problems. Campaigns that focus on bracelets and social media absorb resources that could go toward more effective advocacy, and take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more effective advocacy. How do we go from raising awareness about LRA violence to actually stopping it? What's the mechanism of transforming YouTube page views into a mediated political settlement? For all the excitement around awareness as an end in itself, one could be forgiven for forming the impression that there might be a "Stop Atrocity" button blanketed in dust in the basement of the White House, awaiting the moment when the tide of awareness reaches the Oval Office.   

If only there were. Because Americans are, by and large, pretty aware. In addition to the millions who have now watched Kony 2012, organizations like the Enough Project, Amnesty International, and STAND mobilize countless more. A Google News search of 2011 archives produces thousands of articles about child soldiers in Africa, rape in the Eastern DRC, and ongoing violence in Darfur.

Treating awareness as a goal in and of itself risks compassion fatigue -- most people only have so much time and energy to devote to far-away causes -- and ultimately squanders political momentum that could be used to push for effective solutions. Actually stopping atrocities would require sustained effort, as well as significant dedication of time and resources that the U.S. is, at the moment, ill-prepared and unwilling to allocate. It would also require a decision on whether we are willing to risk American lives in places where we have no obvious political or economic interests, and just how much money it is appropriate to spend on humanitarian crises overseas when 3 out of 10 children in our nation's capital live at or below the poverty line. The genuine difficulty of those questions can't be eased by sharing a YouTube video or putting up posters.

Invisible Children has been the target of intense scrutiny from the international development and NGO community for spending less than one third of the funds they raise on actual programs to help LRA-affected populations. (Mia Farrow was unimpressed.) The $1,859,617 that Invisible Children spent in 2011 on travel and filmmaking last year seems high for an organization whose total expenses were $8,894,630 (which includes the cost to make all those bracelets and posters).

However, we're less concerned with the budgetary issues than with the general philosophical approach of this type of advocacy. Perhaps worst of all are the unexplored assumptions underpinning the awareness argument, which reduce people in conflict situations to two broad categories: mass-murderers like Joseph Kony and passive victims so helpless that they must wait around to be saved by a bunch of American college students with stickers. No Ugandans or other Africans are shown offering policy suggestions in the film, and it is implied that local governments were ineffective in combating the LRA simply because they didn't have enough American assistance.

None of us who actually work with populations affected by mass atrocity believe this to be a truthful or helpful representation. Even under horrific circumstances, people are endlessly resourceful, and local actors understand their needs better than outsiders. It's good that Americans want to help, but ignoring the role and authority of local leaders and activists isn't just insulting and arrogant, it neglects the people who are the most likely to come up with a solution to the conflict.

The LRA is a problem worth solving, but how to do so is a complicated question with no easy answers. Americans are right to care but we need to stop kidding ourselves that spending $30 plus shipping and handling for a Kony 2012 action kit makes us part of the solution to anything.

[E.R. Campbell]

Without comment:


Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/index.html

[57Chevy]

I think that the whole Kony ordeal is one BIG SCAM. (Send no money now)

Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

Kony 2012 flops in Uganda
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/15/kony-2012-flops-in-uganda/

Kony 2012 may have received more than 73 million hits on YouTube since its release on the internet on March 5. But in Uganda it is a flop. Top Ugandan officials denounce the video — created to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the leader of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army operating in central Africa — as false. Kony's LRA, they say, has not operated in Uganda for years.

article continues at link.

[milnews.ca]

Meanwhile, new folks in charge of Mali....

On March 21, 2012 a group of Army mutineers appeared on Mali's national television station to declare that they had ended President Amadou Toumani Toure's regime, and put in place the ‘National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of State'' (CNRDR). The spokesman for the CNRDR has also alluded to the army's dissatisfaction with the Toure administration's handing of its fight against Tuareg rebels in northern Mali.

France has already declared an end to security cooperation with Mali, the African Union has issued a statement condemning the actions of CNRDR and it is still unclear where President Toure resides or how much control he retains ....

Jamestown.org Terrorism Analysis, 22 Mar 12

More on what Canadians have been up to in Mali in the past here.

[Jim Seggie]

Meanwhile, new folks in charge of Mali....Jamestown.org Terrorism Analysis, 22 Mar 12

More on what Canadians have been up to in Mali in the past here.

The CBC reporter questioned the MND on this very topic this morning.

[GAP]

smack dab in the middle of nowhere............

[Brad Sallows]

Isn't it past time for the NDP to demand a 6-month feel-good intervention to get some more snapshots of Canadian service members in blue hats for the Party's office walls?

[milnews.ca]

Buried in the middle of this Backgrounder on the PM's visit to Japan (also attached in case link doesn't work) - emphasis mine:

To further advance Canada’s defence relations with Japan, while in Tokyo on March 25, Prime Minister Harper:

• Committed to pursue negotiations towards a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement.
• Committed to continued joint peace operations capacity building in Africa, based on the successful cross-dispatch of Canadian and Japanese trainers to Tanzania in February, 2012.

[Pieman]

KONY 2012 EVERYONE!!!.....Wait,.....where did everyone go?

[Jim Seggie]

KONY 2012 EVERYONE!!!.....Wait,.....where did everyone go?

Excuse me but Ellen is on. Turn it down would ya?

[tomahawk6]

The Army Chief of Staff has announced that a brigade from the 10th Mountain Division will be tasked to AFRICOM next year.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2012/05/ap-ray-odierno-says-combat-brigade-heading-africa-051612/

Odierno: Brigade heading to Africa next year
 By Lolita C. Baldor - The Associated Press
 Posted : Wednesday May 16, 2012 16:50:26 EDT

WASHINGTON — Army leaders say a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon’s Africa Command next year in a pilot program that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide U.S. commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.

This pilot program sends troops to an area that has become a greater priority for the Obama administration since it includes several nations where terrorist groups are an increasing threat to the U.S. and the region.

Odierno says a brigade from the 10th Mountain Division will take on the new task.