Columnist article

at the time of the independence movement. It is true that Africa over the last decade and a half has been through a period of great turmoil. But, according to the just published annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, that monitors world trends in violence, Africa along with Europe, is now the most peaceful continent in the world, with only one significant tribal or interstate conflict last year, and this. (That is with over 1000 battle-related deaths.) Are we still transfixed and extrapolating from the mad late 80’s and early 90’s when countries as diverse as Yugoslavia, Zaire, Somalia and Indonesia seemed to tearing themselves apart with ethnic strife? The then U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was heard to say “Where will it end? Will it end with 5,000 countries?” It was a gross misjudgment. Two thirds of all the campaigns of ethnic protest and rebellion...

LONDON – That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe is closed. So why is the Black Star on this side still open, and even extending its drinking hours? Once the Warsaw Pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Let the European Union take the strain, by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, whilst America has led its quest for influence by application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war”. As Mark Leonard, the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform wrote in his clever, little book of three years ago, “the contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush...

LONDON – Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi Peninsular. All of them disputed territories but only one, the last named, a sizable oil-rich wedge of land lying between Nigeria and Cameroon, has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason, apart from, in the latest situation, hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian side, partly because America has encouraged this. Six years ago Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with neighboring Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsular, long ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defense, who pushed for a military solution, and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo, public opinion was nationalistic, but he held his course and did so even when the court ruled in Cameroon«s favor....

July 22, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Whoever wins the American presidency in November will come up hard against what former president Dwight Eisenhower described as the “military-industrial complex”. After the military build up of the Bush Administration, which now makes the U.S. armed forces greater in size than all the other militaries of the world added together, the vested interests in the military-industrial complex have never been so formidable. After years of stupendous growth of everything from tanks, to rockets, to aircraft and ships the providers of such do not want to see the upward rise of their business stymied by a new president. They have their ways and their means of influencing any president. A president that tries to cut them down will find himself under a sophisticated public assault from members of Congress with large defence industries in their constituencies, a sizeable section of the press that...

July 4, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Manioc, cassava, yucca, Ever ‘eard of it? Don’t be shy to say you haven’t. Rice, wheat and soya grab today’s headlines. Conferences are called, politicians opine. There is a general panic about one more major source of inflation. Food shortages have hit the urban areas of the Third World and in some countries provoked food riots. Developing countries “defend” their domestic market with export tariffs on grains. Maybe the solution is not in our stars, our esoteric debates or conference resolutions, but right there – under tropical and subtropical soils. Cassava – to use its most popular name is a half-discovered crop, a woody scrub on the surface, a tuber, six times larger than the potato, beneath. In Nigeria, where it grows in profusion, it is tolerant of drought, adaptable to poor soils and can be stored in the ground. Moreover, it is...

LONDON – Governments have their head in the sand about immigration – and this is as true for the U.S. as it is for Western Europe, the Middle East or South Africa. The riots and horrible street murders in South Africa vividly portray what happens when a country pits a foreign sub-proletariat against a resident proletariat, especially at a time when the economic pie doesn’t seem to be expanding fast enough. The main trouble is that modern capitalist-inclined governments rather like it – immigration keeps down wages. (I’m not talking about the immigration of professionals – and how governments like to mislead the public by often conflating the two!) It provides an underclass who live on the margins of established society. They may not pay income taxes, (although they pay VAT and every other kind of consumer tax) but this is made up for by their willingness to do dirty jobs, night...

LONDON – Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association. U.S. presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”. And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington’s treatise, “The Clash of Civilizations”, the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM”, he wrote. Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling on Catholic principles)....

LONDON – Even Jimmy Carter, who single handedly (without much Jewish appreciation) has done more to make Israel secure than any other living person, can’t change the march of demographics. Within the boundaries of the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories there are 5.4 million Jews and 4.6 million Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate is almost three times that of the Israeli Jews. If anything the Jewish population is starting to fall as an increasing number of Jews decide that Israel has no future for them and in significant numbers emigrate. The far seeing Richard Nixon, when asked by Patrick Buchanan and his wife, how he saw the future of Israel, turned down his thumb “like a Roman emperor at the gladiators’ arena”. Perhaps we are witnessing the death of Israel by a thousand cuts, the attrition of conflict and the attrition of population. Maybe after all the rabbis...

LONDON – First it was Mitt Romney who wrote in Foreign Affairs that “radical Islam’s threat is just as real as that posed before by the Nazis and the Soviet Union”. And now, last week, it was John McCain saying the U.S. needed a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”. To realize what poisonous nonsense this is you only have to turn back a page to the time of the Palestinian liberation movement, whose daring terrorism at the Munich Olympics and constant plane hijackings kept the world as jittery as it is now with Al Qaeda. The IRA managed, together with its Protestant opposite numbers, to hold hostage to violence a whole province of the United Kingdom, beside murdering the queen’s uncle and nearly succeeding in murdering the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. These were very disturbing events, and if the terrorists...

LONDON – Just how emancipated are we white westerners? What is the acid test? – Electing a black man as president of the U.S., or smiling weakly at the doctor who we have just been told is going to perform a complex surgical manoeuvre on our heart and who turns out to be a big hulking black man? I suspect many of us may be ready for the first, but not so sure about the second. It doesn’t seem that long ago that flying to India I walked up to the cockpit to see if it really was brown men flying that great big 747. These days I fly all over Africa with all black crews and only worry when I’m in Nigeria, not because the pilots are black but because the airline industry imposed no safety standards until recently. Nevertheless, the fact that Barack Obama is now the frontrunner...

LONDON – After the surge are we losing the fight? – the fight for democracy that is. For fifteen years I have watched, fascinated, curious, and exulted, as the New York-based organization, Freedom House, has chronicled each year the rise and spread of democracy. Even when the Cold War was still our principal preoccupation democracy and freedom were on the up. At the onset of World War 2 there were but five fully fledged electoral democracies in the world. By the time the Berlin Wall came down they were heading for nearly 100. Today it is 121 out of 193 sovereign countries. 64% of the world’s population live in countries that are either “free” or partly “free”. If we take out China only 18% of the world’s people live in countries that are “not free”, ruled by a dictator with the press and the courts under his thumb. But then...

LONDON – Why in the end do we perennial American critics (I purposely don’t say anti-Americans) so respect America? At times it has been hard to – when its electorate re-elected George W. Bush or, going back, when it allowed the defeat of George McGovern with his “Come Home America”. It is because America has a soul. Its religious beliefs may get wonky, whether it be the Mormon cult of Mick Romney or the anti Darwinism of the Huckabee southerners. But Americans are more sincere than most of us. They do want to do what is right. Indeed they read avidly more “how to” books than the rest of us put together. It is just a pity that so few of them don’t read more deeply, either history or literature and that their leaders can be as often as shallow as the masses they lead. (But, of course, you can...