McClatchy blog: Somewhere in Africa

August 12, 2009

Camcorders for Congo: Not the worst U.S. initiative for Africa

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to war-ravaged eastern Congo yesterday was unprecedented for a top American official, heartening to activists and -- by Clinton's own reckoning -- extremely emotional. Yet the blogosphere is seizing on one detail of her $17 million plan to fight Congo's shocking epidemic of rape. See if you can guess which item in this New York Times recap has some Congo-watchers pulling out their hair:

[Clinton] announced that the American government would train doctors, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence, send American military engineers to help build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack down on rapists.

Yes, Camcorders-for-Congo has some detractors.

Texas in Africa wonders how U.S. officials who surveyed the human and emotional carnage of Congo decided that rape victims needed to be videotaped: "Many of them need to tell their stories, although I doubt most want to do so on YouTube."

More to the point, perhaps Wronging Rights points out the terrible irony that the camcorders may contain coltan, which is one of the minerals that the Enough Project says is at the heart of the Congo conflict. Clinton herself pointed out the direct connection between these "conflict minerals" and the violence that's believed to have killed millions over the past decade.

I understand the outrage, but I can't say that I share it. Rape already carries a crippling stigma in Congo, as in the rest of the world, and one of the reasons doctors and aid workers find it so difficult to fight is that people are afraid to come forward. Some are even laughed at. No amount of money can kill that stigma, but maybe information, deployed responsibly, can.

We know how empowering a simple technology like the cell phone can be. I'm no medical expert, but I can imagine how cameras, in the right hands, could help. Doctors would have visual records of certain cases. Victims might slowly come to feel that speaking out about their injuries isn't a shameful thing. Sure, electricity is in short supply in Congo but I don't imagine that victims will be taking the cameras home to their villages to gather dust, nor do I expect that the responsible people who care for these folks would videotape people without their permission. And let's be honest: in the scheme of $17 million, cameras really aren't a big deal.

Besides, on a day where one Somali website is reporting that U.S.-bought weapons may be ending up in the hands of Islamist insurgents (I haven't been able to confirm this, and at least one reliable intelligence source believes it could be Islamist propaganda) Camcorders for Congo hardly seems like a candidate for Worst American Idea for Africa.

Posted at 07:34 AM in Congo, Diplomacy, Somalia, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

August 04, 2009

Amb. David Shinn: 'Africa is becoming more important'

As Secretary of State Clinton begins her seven-nation African safari, the continent is enjoying a brief moment in the Washington sun. There was President Obama's much watched speech in Ghana last month. Last week saw a key Senate hearing on Sudan and Darfur. Over the next 11 days Clinton will cover some of the key issues facing Africa, including expanding trade and economic growth, and the stubborn, deadly crises in Somalia, Congo and Zimbabwe.

David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, has a 37-year diplomatic career spanning seven African nations. Africa might never be the topmost foreign policy priority of any American president, Shinn says. But he adds, "After four years of the Obama administration I believe that Africa will have been given more attention than has been the case with any previous American administration."

Here are excerpts of my interview with Shinn on the eve of Clinton's visit, which begins today in Kenya:

What’s the main message the Obama administration and Clinton are trying to send with this trip?

The main purpose is to underscore, following the President’s visit to Ghana earlier in July that the Obama administration is interested in strengthening relations with sub-Saharan Africa. A continuing subtext will be, as the President said before the Ghanaian Parliament, that Africa’s future is up to Africans. The administration is placing more responsibility on Africans themselves for resolving their problems and improving economic development. Having said that, I believe the Secretary’s visit will produce some “good cop” rhetoric to offset the “tough cop” remarks of the President.

Some activists have criticized the Obama administration for not making Africa a top priority, citing a lack of engagement on Somalia, Congo and other trouble spots. Are those criticisms founded? Will Clinton’s tour address those concerns?

First, we need a reality check. Africa has never been a top priority of any American administration. After four years of the Obama administration I believe that Africa will have been given more attention than has been the case with any previous American administration. But it will still not reach a top foreign policy priority. Europe, Asia and Latin America are all economically more important. Europe has close cultural and historical ties. Latin America is geographically closer. Even the Middle East and South Asia are strategically more important. It is necessary to keep Africa in perspective.

Africa is becoming more important. About 20 percent of America’s imported oil comes from the African continent. Is it any surprise that Secretary Clinton is visiting Nigeria and Angola, two major oil exporters to the United States? Some twelve percent of the American population has African origins and the father of the American President was, of course, a Kenyan. There may be an added focus on this connection between the United States and Africa.

I would argue that the Obama administration, which has only been in office for six months, has been exceedingly active in two of Africa’s major conflicts—Sudan and Somalia. I have not seen much activity on the Congo, but believe this will soon change. Finally, by definition activists criticize. If they didn’t, they would no longer be activists.

What’s the significance of Clinton’s meeting with Somali President Sheik Sharif Ahmed? Won’t it merely underline Sharif’s ties to the West, which his opponents already criticize?

The most vocal opponents of President Ahmed are the extremist al-Shabaab and a few allied organizations. The United States and most of the rest of the world has no interest in catering to their concerns. The United Nations, African Union, Arab League, Organization of Islamic Congress and virtually the entire international community support the Somali Transitional Federal Government led by President Ahmed. I don’t believe there is any apprehension about alienating his extremist opponents. You can expect that Secretary Clinton will strongly support President Ahmed.

Do you anticipate any major headlines coming out of the trip?

I have the impression that the Obama administration wants to change the approach to food security in Africa. Candidate Obama talked about a “green revolution” in Africa during the presidential campaign. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture will accompany the Secretary of State to Kenya. There could be a major initiative announced on food security and support for African agriculture.

On a bilateral level, there may be a resuscitation of the binational commission with South Africa. This existed during the presidency of Bill Clinton but disappeared under President Bush. I suspect either a binational commission or something similar will be revived....

What is one country that you think Clinton should visit, but isn’t?

There are actually three candidates, but First Lady Hillary Clinton visited two of them—Senegal and Tanzania—in 1997....That leaves one major omission in my view—Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa and a close ally of the United States. Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Ethiopia in 2007, this would be a good occasion to underscore the importance the United States attaches to Ethiopian civil society, human rights and a good electoral process in 2010. In addition, Secretary Clinton could express appreciation to Ethiopia for support on regional conflicts and countering extremism.

Photo credit: William Atkins/GWU. 2009

Posted at 12:57 AM in Congo, Diplomacy, Kenya, Obama, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, U.S. Policy, Zimbabwe | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

June 23, 2009

Somali journalists flee. Again

Yet more journalists are fleeing deadly, targeted attacks against them by the militias of Somalia. Among the latest to reach the safety of Nairobi was Radio Shabelle journalist Ahmednor Mohamed, who also worked for the past several months as McClatchy's stringer in Mogadishu. Armed men came to Ahmednor's house following the assassination earlier this month of his former boss, Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe, the onetime head of Shabelle and now the fifth Somali journalist to be killed this year. Ahmednor, a 29-year-old father of two, feared for his life.

He was McClatchy's fourth stringer in the capital in the past three years, and now we'll be needing a fifth.

Our first stringer, Mahad Elmi, was among two journalists assassinated within hours of one another on a terrible day in August 2007. A second stringer fled to Tanzania. A third, Ahmed Ali, escaped an asssassination attempt in a busy marketplace in December 2007. I'm pleased to say that the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi granted Ahmed a visa this year to reunite with his wife, who is an American citizen, and young baby. They are living happily in the Midwest.

There is no doubt that Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world right now to be a journalist. So it's both tragic and unsurprising that, as government officials describe a state of emergency in the country, reporters are fleeing in huge numbers. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 15 journalists from various news outlets are suspending their work out of fear for their safety.

Ahmednor tells me that only one English-speaking journalist is left among the major media outlets in Mogadishu, making it that much harder for on-the-ground news to reach reporters based in Nairobi. Many of my colleagues and I have come to rely on Somali journalists in Nairobi to work the phones to report on what's happening in Mogadishu.

Ahmednor, who's worked as a reporter for nearly a decade, told me that Islamist extremists with designs on toppling the government had ordered Somali journalists to refer to them as "mujahedeen," a term that means "holy warrior." (Some of these same people now plan to punish four suspected thieves by cutting off an arm and a leg from each one, a grotesque perversion of Islamic law.) To maintain their objectivity, the journalists refused. It's the right thing to do, but it cost Hirabe his life -- and may cost the lives of other brave Somalis who are just trying to their job in the midst of chaos.

By the way, Ahmednor's flight from Somalia to Kenya might not have been comfortable -- he had to sit in the back of a truck with dozens of other refugees for several hours -- but it was entirely predictable. Three days after he phoned to tell me he was fleeing, he was in Nairobi. Technically, this is illegal, because Kenya has closed the border with Somalia. Kenya says this is to keep Islamist extremists from coming in, but what it's really done is made it harder and more dangerous for legitimate refugees like Ahmednor to flee safely.

No matter. Their truck driver avoided the main road through eastern Kenya and drove through trees and thickets, bribing a few police officers along the way. The passage cost about $140. It's as regular as Kenya Airways.

Posted at 07:57 AM in Humanitarian, Reporting & Travel, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

June 02, 2009

The war zone pen pal

The longtime Chicago Tribune correspondent, Paul Salopek, has written a poignant piece in the Atlantic about a character that journalists in the developing world will instantly recognize -- the war zone pen pal.

It's someone you met once, in a bad place like Somalia or Congo, with whom you shared a moment in a refugee camp or behind the blast walls of your hotel. This person keeps your business card in his wallet, a wrinkled link to the outside world. Every so often, when you're on some other assignment or having a drink in a Nairobi bar, his name pops up in your email or as a missed call on your cell phone, often with a grim update on life in his faraway hellhole (like these from Djibouti and Somalia).

Paul's war zone pen pal is Abdi, a 24-year-old schoolteacher in Somalia, who writes him often with news about the latest fighting in Mogadishu or frustration at the Western media's fixation on pirates. He describes how they became friends:

I met him two years ago in Mogadishu, when it was still remotely possible for Western reporters to visit that shell-blasted corpse of a city without being kidnapped by radical Al Shabab insurgents or assorted clan mafias. (Things have gone downhill since.) Back then, he appeared at my safe house uninvited, startling my rent-a-guards, who supposed that my presence was a secret.

He wanted to complain about the indignities of survival in a country that hasn’t had a functional government since 1991—virtually his entire young life. He proceeded to do so in slangy English, learned, in part, from black-market DVDs of Hollywood action films. “It sucks to be here, man,” he told me with great feeling. I liked him immensely.

The piece is one of the last things to come out of the Chicago Tribune's bureau in Johannesburg, which the paper has closed due to massive budget cuts at the Tribune Co. The number of journalists who cover Africa is shrinking rapidly, which means voices like Abdi's will be heard less and less. Paul is off to write a book about Mexico and Abdi, I am sure, will continue to write about Somalia for his audience of one.

Posted at 04:45 AM in Life in Africa, Reporting & Travel, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

May 26, 2009

Overheard in Nairobi

Some observations from a weekend of sun, beer and barbecue in Nairobi, where, despite it not being Memorial Day, a break in the autumn rains made it feel like a holiday.

* You know you've been in Kenya too long when someone at a party begins a story with, "So I flew down to Bunia [Congo] one time to buy some rough diamonds..." and no one bats an eye.

* A colleague from a very prestigious Western newspaper is planning a trip to eastern Congo. He pitched his editors and the reply came back instantly: You didn't include a cost estimate. These days it seems that even the best papers can't decide whether a story is worth doing without first knowing how much it's going to cost to do it.

* I'm all for pirate humor but this joke is just dumb. A mock website is hawking cruises between Kenya and Djibouti where passengers are encouraged to fire on pirates. "Most cruises offer a mini-bar," goes the website for "Somali Cruises." "We offer a mounted mini-gun." Ho ho ho.

* When a public official under scrutiny refuses to return a reporter's phone calls or says he or she won't answer questions, we often write that he or she "couldn't be reached for comment" or "declined to comment" and leave it at that. Kenyan newspapers, fortunately, are a lot more interesting.

From today's Standard on the latest this-would-be-shocking-if-it-weren't-Kenya scandal involving Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta's inability to explain a $140 million budget discrepancy:

Finance PS [permanent secretary] Joseph Kinyua would not be drawn to speak about it.

"Oh no, I’m not talking to you...No! No! No" Kinyua said when The Standard reached him on the telephone.

Posted at 05:50 AM in Congo, Kenya, Life in Africa, Pirates, Reporting & Travel, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

May 19, 2009

Probing Somalia analysis -- from South Park

Last month, the devilish geniuses behind the Comedy Central animated series "South Park" devoted a half-hour episode to Somali pirates. I'm not the first to point this out, but it took me a couple of weeks to procure a bootleg copy. The full episode, "Fatbeard," will be available on the show's website later this week, and it's worth watching. There's more levelheaded analysis of the situation in Somalia in these 22 ridiculous, expletive-laden cartoon minutes than you'll find on any cable news program.

Cartman (above, with eye patch) decides to go off to Somalia with a "pirate club" in search of headline-inspired riches. They unwittingly get turned into ransom bait, but use that to hijack (what else?) a French ship and their stereotypically French crew. The kids come back expecting a pirate heroes' welcome, grog and all, but their ragtag comrades are too bored and addled-looking to care. The kids try to whip the pirates into shape with the help of, naturally, a rousing musical number.

The writers did their homework. The cartoon pirates speak flawless Somali, so the producers must have hired expats to voice them. Mogadishu looks right, an urban junkyard of crisscrossing telephone wire and sad-looking palm trees. All the tools of the pirate trade are accounted for: AK-47s, ammunition belts, an aging fishing boat strapped to a "Yamoha" motor. (Others have pointed out minor errata -- the show bases the pirates in Mogadishu, not Puntland as they really are, and the 5,000-euro ransom for the kids probably lowballs real-life pirates by a couple of decimal places.)

Best of all, the episode captures dead-on the desperation of the pirates. These aren't a romantic bunch. The lawlessness of Somalia isn't something to aspire to. The military might used to wipe out pirates seems almost grotesquely overblown.

In this scene, a pirate named Guleed spells it out for the kids:

It all harks back to another classic sitcom -- and it's starting to feel weird that such good insight on Somalia is coming from TV -- but in the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, "I don't wanna be a pirate!"

Posted at 04:00 AM in Pirates, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2009

Not all Somalias are created equal

The money-changing market in Hargeisa, Somaliland

When I've gone to Somalia, the first question I've had to grapple with, as a foreigner and therefore ransom bait, is how many armed bodyguards to hire.

Not so in Somaliland. The first serious question asked of me after I landed recently came from the helpful young clerk at the cell phone company.

"Do you want to get Internet on your phone?" he asked.

Somaliland was almost a pleasure to work in -- not as hot and pirate-infested as Puntland, not as likely to be fatal as Mogadishu. Walking through the main market there, I didn't get that heavy pulse-pounding you usually feel in Somalia, like someone could be after you or the car in front of you could explode. And yet Somaliland is still, technically, Somalia.

The regional government has been trying to get African and Western countries to recognize its independence, but so far in vain. While this irks experts and aid workers, African countries are still trying to maintain the rhetoric of a unified Somalia -- and the U.S. and other Western countries aren't going to take the lead in recognizing Somaliland.

This is unfortunate. Somaliland has earned the right to decide its own fate by doing an admirable job governing itself, creating relatively robust economic and political systems in the midst of chaos. This hasn't exactly sat well with the extremists in the south, who staged coordinated suicide bombings in the capital, Hargeisa, last October -- the most shocking violence here since the civil war of the early 1990s.

The government swiftly instituted security measures, and now buildings frequented by foreigners and top officials are barricaded and most expatriates don't venture outside after dark.

The economy is stable but sluggish, which is what you get when foreign banks aren't free to open branches, and officials insist they need access to direct foreign investment to decouple it from the rest of Somalia. Shipments are regularly delayed because the main port, Berbera, still registers for insurance companies as part of Somalia. When I was there, the main cell phone company, Telesom, had run out of SIM cards.

But, they assured me, they could put Internet on my phone. I sat in the airy second-story customer service center, surrounded by a whirring bank of computers, while the guy worked on my phone. He fiddled with it for 10 minutes before I realized he had no idea what he was doing. When I walked over he was staring at the keypad blankly.

"Have you ever programmed one of these before?" I asked.

"No," he said finally, and handed the phone back apologetically. So the BlackBerry has yet to reach Somaliland. But it will.

Posted at 06:20 AM in Reporting & Travel, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

May 04, 2009

Refugee resettlement is serious business

I'm spending a few days in the refugee camps of Dadaab, Kenya, which now have the distinction of being the world's largest refugee settlement, home to some 200,000 271,000 people, most of them having fled from Somalia. On my last trip to Dadaab, in 2006, I'd met some bright young Kenyan aid workers, many of whom walked around the main guesthouse wearing giveaway aid-agency t-shirts bearing unintentionally hilarious messages. True to form, this week I ate lunch with a tall, broad-shouldered Kenyan man whose shirt read on the back, in big letters, "Breastfeeding is the best option."

One day I sat in on some interviews with long-time refugees -- most had arrived in the early 1990s, fleeing the start of Somalia's civil war -- who were hoping to be resettled in the West. (The U.S., for example, takes in about 70,000 refugees every year under the official Refugee Resettlement Program.) With the situation in Somalia continuing to deteriorate, these people have been waiting for such an opportunity for years, and they took it extremely seriously.

One woman arrived on time for her interview despite being nine months pregnant and what doctors might call "about to explode." She sat through about 15 minutes of her interview before the American caseworker realized that the woman was sweating profusely and taking short, panting breaths. "It's OK," the Somali woman said through the interpreter. "I just felt this pain two minutes ago and it went away."

It took a few more moments of questioning before the caseworker determined that, in addition to the contractions coming two minutes apart, the woman's water had broken earlier that morning.

That was the end of the interview. The caseworker called for a car to take the woman to the refugee hospital. It took several minutes to arrive, and in the meantime we watched as the woman lay with her two other children in the shade of a small tree, looking to be in pain. I couldn't believe she'd made it through the bus ride to the interview, let alone the interview itself. But she believed that if she tried to reschedule her interview, her long awaited chance to escape the refugee camps might be lost.

In the end, the caseworkers convinced her that delivering her baby on time was more critical, and that the interview could be postponed. In a few days, after the child is born, the woman will come back to resume her interview -- and her newborn baby will be added to the case file.

Posted at 03:31 AM in Humanitarian, Kenya, Reporting & Travel, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

April 19, 2009

Eye patches, walking of planks, parrots and other things that have nothing to do with Somalia

So now that the dramatic pirate story has been resolved -- except for who plays Richard Phillips in the movie -- what happens to Somalia?

Last week was extraordinary on a few levels. There was the heroism of the Alabama crew. There was the nail-biting Navy assault that saved Phillips, the first U.S. military action against pirates on the high seas in two centuries. There was the spectacle of dozens of reporters converging on the same story (at the height of the frenzy one news organization hired a helicopter and motorboat, the kind of spending move that reminds you why the news industry is in crisis). And there was the more surprising spectacle of seeing Somalia at the top of the news agenda around the world, if just for a moment.

It remains to be seen whether all this attention on the Alabama translates into serious, long-term attention to solving the fundamental problems of Somalia. My guess is: unlikely.

Americans love a good hero story. It doesn't get any better than pirates on the high seas and troops swooping in to rescue a hard-bitten seafarer with a heart of gold. What no one likes -- or likes to read about -- is a complicated story with virtually no good guys, lots of pretty bad guys and probably an equal number of guys who you don't know all that well but really hope aren't bad because you've just sunk a lot of money into them. That, in a nutshell, is what the world has with Somalia today.

Somalia's current stab at a government says it wants to end the political failures that breed anarchic activities like piracy. For a start, they're asking for more money to develop their military. This is not a promising opening move. Their current army isn't really an army, in the sense that they don't have guns or uniforms or regular salaries or -- absent the African Union peacekeeping force -- any real territory to control. In Puntland, the semiautonomous and increasingly estranged where the pirates are based, the Somali military is as foreign a force as the U.S. Navy, and a lot less well equipped.

For now, the military scare tactics will continue to be the job, for good and ill, of foreign forces offshore. This is not a long-term solution but it's not a totally bad thing either. For one, it should remind other nations that they have a stake in what happens on the ground in Somalia. Now is the time to support the transitional government of the untested but decent Sheik Sharif Ahmed, the most promising president in years, rather than renege on funding pledges or, in the case of African Union nations, peacekeeping commitments.

There's an important non-military component to this: countries should also help Somalia go after the networks that fund the pirates, who are being bankrolled by Somalis living in Europe, North America and the Middle East, and whose funds are sloshing around the hawallah system worldwide. Somalia says it has intel on some of these groups. If they're willing to share that with friendly governments it would be a show of seriousness.

Sure, there's a lot of spectacle and silliness when you think of pirates. I did more public radio interviews last week than I've ever done on one story, and on two occasions my segment opened with the rousing chorus: "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!" I suppose it's a waste of time trying to fight the popular perception. But more people know where Somalia is than they did last week, and that's a start.

As for casting "Alabama Down" (the Nairobi press corps' consensus working title for the movie) I would go with Russell Crowe as the tough, uncompromising Phillips -- or, if the studio insists on an American, George Clooney in the "Syriana" beard.

Posted at 12:03 PM in Pirates, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

April 09, 2009

A little pirate humor

There's nothing funny about the hostage situation off the coast of Somalia, where the captain of the U.S. cargo ship that was hijacked yesterday is still being held by four pirates. But this time you have to believe the pirates had no idea what they were getting into. Could the first known case of a hijacked crew fighting back finally scare these crazy buccaneers into reining in their operations?

One energy consultancy thinks so. This is a tongue-in-cheek note that the firm sent out to clients today, passed on from a friend:

Somali pirate update – Downgrade from Accumulate to Sell. Meaningfully lower estimates of 2009/2010 earnings and change in business model/execution prompts re-rating. We loved oil tanker strategy (capture valuable cargo, demand ransom, get paid). Recent four man effort to seize container ship is questionable (pirate manual says this is 6-10 man job). Abandoning ship in lifeboat with ship captain as only booty/hostage seems downright foolish. Avoid.

Posted at 06:57 PM in Pirates, Somalia | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

ABOUT THIS BLOG

Somewhere in Africa was written by McClatchy correspondent Shashank Bengali, who covered sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2009. He's now based in Washington, D.C., as a national correspondent.

Read Shashank's stories at news.mcclatchy.com or send him a story idea.