By Jonathan Power The new, vicious, fighting in the Congo is the fourth round of warfare since independence in 1960. No other country has seen so many “blue berets”- UN peacekeeping troops- in its short history. The Belgian colonialists may have exploited it and transferred massive amounts of its wealth back to Belgium but […]
By Jonathan Power February 20, 2018 It’s been an odd couple of months for southern Africa. No one predicted last year that in almost the same breath the long-serving dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and the super-corrupt president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, would be soon overthrown – and non-violently to boot. In […]
Burundi’s ongoing political instability highlights the stark divide between global conflict prevention rhetoric and practice. By Priyal Singh for ISS TODAY. First published by ISS Today • Since Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced that he would run for a third term in early 2015, political instability across the country has tested the limits of […]
By Juan Cole January 15, 2018 – Informed Comment In 1957 Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta went to Ghana in connection with its independence from Britain. The British had grabbed the fabled West African Gold Coast in the nineteenth century in order to profit from its gold and other resources (after having profited […]
By Jonathan Power January 2nd 2018. It was late 2003, the Liberian war was winding down after taking the lives of 250,000 civilians, spawning a small army of deadly child soldiers, and I was sitting at lunch in Monrovia inside the president’s palatial office and residence with the American ambassador on my right and […]
By Jan Oberg Lund, Sweden, November 9, 2015 • The big – not great – powers of the world have embassies everywhere, plenty of intelligence services, special forces on the ground and satellites in space. They can even hit and kill individuals they don’t like. They can intervene here and there and everywhere – […]
By Muse Jeeh • The new president of Somaliland, Muse Bihi Abdi will be inaugurated as fifth president on 13 December, after his victory of a tight contest with the country’s two opposition candidates but ultimately a legitimate election when his main challenger, Abdurrahman Irro conceded a defeat and calls for national unity. The election […]
Via africanindy.com December 15, 2017 • The Burundi president, whose re-election in 2015 triggered a political and economic crisis, said on national television yesterday that the country was sovereign and that changing its constitution was part of its sovereignty. He warned all those who wanted to challenge the constitutional changes that they would face […]
