Angola-The Old, The New, And The Dead

 

The Old, the New and the Dead

ANGOLA

The recent return of the body of the late president of Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos, to his home from Spain was a fitting prelude to the tensions that have been growing in the country in the run-up to the Aug. 24 elections.

After ruling Angola from 1979 to 2017, dos Santos died in Barcelona where he had been in self-imposed exile after he fled his southern African nation amid public protests over crime and corruption – including allegations that his family was plundering state coffers – the poor economy and other issues, the New York Times reported.

Dos Santos was an authoritarian leader who brooked no political dissent, controlled the economy with an iron fist and operated an extensive state surveillance system to oppress his people, University of Johannesburg anthropologist Claudia Gastrow and Catholic University of Angola researcher Gilson Lázaro wrote in the Conversation.

While he was gone, his handpicked successor, Joao Lourenco, distanced himself from the former president and declared that he would restore the rule of law, Africa Report explained. He fired dos Santos’ daughter from her job as president of the national oil company and removed his son from Angola’s sovereign wealth fund.

Now, as Angolans head to the polls to elect a new president and parliament, they are deciding between Joao Lourenco and his ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, and opposition leader Adalberto Costa Junior of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Incidentally, the two parties waged a 27-year-long civil war against each other that ended in 2002.

The election has become a fight between the new and the old. By distancing himself from dos Santos, Lourenco has attempted to fashion himself as a new kind of leader, but few voters have accepted his transformation, Al Jazeera wrote. That said, as Stratfor noted, the incumbent president is still expected to win.

Junior, meanwhile, has courted the youth vote. Half the country’s population is under the age of 30, according to Africa News. Half of Angolans younger than 25 are also unemployed, added Reuters.

Lourenco has cracked down on civil rights in the days prior to the vote, Amnesty International warned, evoking memories of the bad old days under his predecessor. Police arrested a Voice of America reporter for covering a protest against electoral irregularities, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote. Few are optimistic that the elections will be free and fair, according to the Maverick.

Whoever wins will have a chance to live up to the ideals that ordinary Angolans clearly want in their leaders. Will they? That’s anyone’s guess.

Britain And Colonial Kenya-A Little Sunlight

 

A Little Sunlight

UNITED KINGDOM

A new British documentary exposing the extent to which British colonial masters in Kenya tortured and raped local freedom fighters and then covered it up is making waves in the UK, and is the latest installment in a worldwide effort to seek a reckoning for past injustices by colonial powers.

The documentary, “A Very British Way of Torture,” released this month, features survivors’ testimonies, Kenyan and British historians and records hidden away for over 50 years: All these together offer a more complete picture of how colonial forces in the 1950s used systematic torture to repress Kenyans fighting for independence, the Guardian reported.

One document, buried for more than six decades, meanwhile, illuminates the extent to which the British forces tried to cover it up, knowing their actions were unacceptable.

From 1952 to 1960, Kenyan rebels took part in the Mau Mau Uprising, trying to shake off colonial rule. The British brutally suppressed the movement, with detention camps, torture, rape, forced castration, and other violence.

The Kenyan Human Rights Commission estimates that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed in the crackdown and about 160,000 were detained, the BBC reported.

Afterward, most British governments tried to distance themselves from the violence against the rebels, the newspaper wrote.

During the rebellion, British Police Chief Arthur Young was dispatched to Kenya to investigate the alleged physical and sexual abuses Kenyans faced by colonial forces. He quickly discovered the instances of human rights violations by colonial officers, who were either covering them up or contributing to the violence.

He tried to appeal to the ministry of legal affairs and the attorney general in Kenya but they blocked his attempts to get the perpetrators brought to justice. He resigned in frustration, writing letters to officials, detailing and condemning British forces’ treatment of Kenyans. These missives were rewritten and toned down for the official files while the originals were buried in sealed archives used by British intelligence forces MI5 and MI6 for more than 60 years.

Historians say while many of the abuses were known; the British government settled compensation claims with Kenyans in 2013, but what’s new is the extent to which the British government and the colonial administration tried to cover them up.

“You often hear people say in Britain that it was acceptable by the standards of the time,” Niels Boender, a historian from the University of Warwick, told the Guardian, referring to torture and other abuse. “And I think documents like this really illustrate that, no, people at the time knew this was wrong as well.”

Mali-Au Revoir

 

Au Revoir

MALI

France’s armed forces completed their withdrawal from Mali this week, nine years after the French government sent troops to the West African nation to oust Islamic extremists from power, the Associated Press reported.

The last army unit, part of the so-called Barkhane force, left the country Monday, just six months after French President Emmanuel Macron said he would withdraw troops from Mali amid ongoing disputes with the ruling military junta.

French forces have been active in the West African country since 2013 when they intervened to tackle jihadist insurgents. At the time of Macron’s announcement, there were about 2,400 troops in Mali, part of the 4,300-strong Barkhane forces that are also deployed to other parts of the broader north African Sahel region, including in Chad and Niger.

But the recent pullout came amid tensions following two military coups in Mali in the last two years. Relations further soured over the past year between Mali, its African neighbors and the European Union after the junta allowed Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group to deploy on its territory.

The group has been accused of instigating violence and committing human rights abuses in Africa.

Meanwhile, European leaders said they are also planning to withdraw the EU-led ‘Takuba’ task force from Mali, following France’s pullout.

Still, Macron and other European leaders have repeatedly emphasized that their countries’ military operations in Mali would not mean the residents in the Sahel will be abandoned in their struggle against Islamic militants.

The French leader previously noted that the “heart” of the Barkhane force will be transferred to Niger, to serve in the region bordering Burkina Faso.

Cameroon-The War Dividend

 

The War Dividend

CAMEROON

A few months ago, elite government soldiers in Ndop in the Northwest region of Cameroon detained more than 30 young men on motorcycles who were part of a funeral procession, but whom the soldiers said they believed were separatist fighters.

“The soldiers selected those among us who had dreadlocks,” one rider who was later released told Human Rights Watch (HRW). “For them, this is an indication that you are an amba boy (separatist fighter). They forced us to undress and beat us savagely with an iron hammer and with their belts.”

The soldiers beat them for four hours, he added. Meanwhile, more than half of those young men are still missing. Unfortunately, such stories are the norm in parts of Cameroon these days.

Six years ago, teachers and lawyers began protesting in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions of the Southwest and Northwest, fed up with being marginalized in the Francophone-majority country. But faced with brutal government crackdowns accusing them of “terrorism,” the conflict morphed into a fight for independence.

The violence has led to 6,000 deaths, 765,000 people internally displaced, tens of thousands fleeing the country, the shuttering of schools and businesses and two million people needing aid, the United Nations reported.

It has become, as the Norwegian Refugee Council labeled it, the world’s third-most neglected refugee crisis.

Both sides have committed serious human rights violations and atrocities, Amnesty International says. That includes rape, murder, torture, extrajudicial killings and kidnappings. Activists, the UN, Western and regional countries and the Catholic Church have been trying to mediate between the government and the separatists for years to end the violence. But dozens of peace initiatives have failed.

One roadblock to peace, says HRW, is the lack of consequences for abusers on both sides. “Impunity remains a key driver of the crisis, emboldening abusers, and fueling further harm and violence,” it wrote.

However, a bigger driver of the conflict is profit; this war is good business, wrote the New Humanitarian. And those getting rich – including top government officials – want the war to go on.

This war economy, wrote researcher Morgan Tebei Nwati in the publication Advances in Applied Sociology, involves kidnapping, extortion, arms trafficking and smuggling. Civilians get caught in the middle, often forced to pay either separatist militias or the government to get their kidnapped loved ones released from flimsy or non-existent charges. Gangs with no stake in the fight get involved because it’s lucrative, said Amnesty International. Meanwhile, the separatists “tax” cocoa and other goods for export, produced in regions they control, to make a buck. Cameroon is the world’s fifth largest producer of cocoa.

“This is no longer a struggle for the common man but instead an economic venture,” Alhaji Mohammed Aboubakar, an imam in Buea, Southwest region, told the New Humanitarian.

Meanwhile, the separatists are divided: Some of their leaders are in jail, others are abroad and many are increasingly bent on terrorizing a local population that doesn’t want them in their villages anymore because of indiscriminate killings, looting and rape. Sometimes, they kill each other, the Anglophone Crisis Monitoring Project noted, after the recent death of a leading separatist commander.

In the mostly peaceful Francophone regions, the elite is busy wondering who will follow leader-for-life Paul Biya, 89, Cameroon’s president since 1982. The top contenders for succession have no interest in concessions or peace to the Anglophone regions, because the economy Biya built – and plundered – is too lucrative, reported South Africa’s Daily Maverick.

The newspaper also detailed how the British – along with support from the French, US and Israelis – have helped Biya keep control of the country, in the guise of helping Cameroon fight Boko Haram in the Far North region, a jihadist insurgency that has seen 3,000 killed and displaced 250,000, the Crisis Group said.

Incidentally, the UK’s main focus in Cameroon is training the government’s special forces, the 10,000-strong Rapid Intervention Battalion, elite soldiers that are accused of torture, executing women and children and burning down a village, Amnesty and the BBC reported.

These are also the very same soldiers that swept into Ndop in April and detained theyoung men on motorcycles in the funeral procession.

That is not good news for the family of one of the detainees who remains missing. The uncle of a missing 22-year-old man has visited more than a half-dozen military bases and police stations to find him, but to no avail.

“I am very worried,” he told HRW. “I hope we find him alive.”

He won’t be the last frantic family member of an Anglophone Cameroonian who has disappeared.

That’s because the war dividend is just too lucrative.

Kenya's Coming Presidential Election-"We're Jamming!"

 

We’re Jammin’

KENYA

Everywhere in Kenya these days, people are jamming, on corners, at gas stations, and even on buses. That’s because there’s a presidential election Tuesday and appealing to the youth vote – 40 percent of the electorate – is critical for a win.

But irrespective of the catchy tunes, the mood is anything but frivolous in East Africa’s economic hub. Instead, it’s tense as many worry about looming violence, as occurred in many of the country’s past elections.

This time, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta can’t run for a third term, according to the country’s constitution. But Kenyatta’s influence on Kenya’s presidential election on Aug. 9 reflects his outsized political influence in the East African country. And he’s decided to use it to endorse his former rival, Raila Odinga, over his deputy president, William Ruto, causing a furor among those who normally would have taken anything Kenyatta said as gospel. Ironically, Ruto had helped Kenyatta defeat Odinga in the last two presidential ballots.

Speaking to the BBC, attorney Wahome Gikonyo said that Kenyatta had stabbed Ruto in the back. “Ruto did the donkey work in 2013 and 2017,” Gikonyo said. “Were it not for him Uhuru would not have become president. Is that the way to repay a friend?”

Those sentiments are one reason why Odinga has a slim lead in polls, but is falling short of topping the 50-percent mark he needs to avoid a run-off election.

Kenyatta and Odinga joined forces after the 2018 presidential election when civil unrest erupted over allegations of unfairness over the vote, explained the New York Times. Police cracked down brutally on protesters who called for Kenyatta to step down, killing dozens and injuring scores of others.

Since Kenyatta distanced himself from Ruto, some voters are having second thoughts about the president’s legacy. “Not only is he a scion of the richest and most influential of Kenya’s kleptocratic political families, but the record of his 10 years in power consists largely of an unbroken procession of corruption scandals and graft-ridden projects,” argued Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara in an Al Jazeera opinion piece.

Even Kenyatta admits that corruption is endemic in the country. He has claimed that people steal more than $16 million a day from public funds, according to the Nation, a Kenyan newspaper.

Odinga, whose nickname is “Baba”, or “Father”, has promised to stamp out corruption and institute a universal healthcare program called Babacare as well as other social welfare service improvements. Ruto, meanwhile, refers to himself as a would-be “Hustler-in-Chief” on the campaign trail, repeating how he once sold chickens in the Rift Valley in order to highlight his knack for getting things done, CNN wrote.

Corruption might alter the direction of the vote as the Conversation noted in a piece that drew from many experts in portraying the state of things before the vote. Fears of vote rigging, gender violence, vigilantes and militia groups taking to the streets and targeting members of specific tribes have caused concerns of a repeat of 2018 or even the 2007-2008 crisis when as many as 1,500 people died in post-election violence.

The conditions are ripe for a rocky transition.

Still, despite its recent history of turbulent elections, Kenya stands out for its relative stability in a region where some presidents-for-life pull out all stops to stay in power, the Associated Press noted.

And there lies hope in the millions of Kenyans under 35, whose tribal loyalties are considerably weaker than their elders, analysts say. Over the weekend, for example, young local artists organized a community-wide celebration of ethnic diversity in Nairobi’s diverse Kibera district, one of the world’s largest slums, and a center of election violence in the past.

“We know what happened in previous elections in this country and we as young people cannot go back to where come from,” Esha Mohammed, a director of the National Youth Council, told Al Jazeera. “We cannot allow ourselves to be in that situation (again).”