Tag Archives: civil war

Algeria, Egypt

Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy

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elsisi

Among the groups that wield real power in Egypt, democracy turns out to be not so incredibly popular.Algeria_Flag_Iconegypt_flag_new

No matter what U.S. secretary of state John Kerry says and no matter what Egypt’s army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi (pictured above) believes, the military effort to push Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, from office was hardly a lesson in preserving democracy.  Militaries in healthy democracies, Middle Eastern or otherwise, do not respond to public protests by ousting elected governments.

But Morsi, by pushing through a new constitution without ample debate last December and attempting to assume near-dictatorial powers in order to do so, and more recently trying to stack the ranks of Egypt’s regional governments with rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood members, showed that he also lacked enthusiasm for civic participation.

What’s happening in Egypt today is starting to resemble a revolutionary moment less and less.  Instead, it looks more like the same cat-and-mouse game that the powerful Egyptian military (and the ever-lurking, so-called ‘deep state’), with ties to the United States and a knack for secular realpolitik, has been playing with the today-confrontational, tomorrow-conciliatory Muslim Brotherhood for decades.

In short, Egypt 2013 looks a lot like Egypt 2003. Or 1993. Or even 1973.  The Muslim Brotherhood and the countervailing political-military structure have been repeating the same game year after year, decade after decade.

That’s good news for those who are worrying that Egypt looks a lot like Algeria 1991 instead.

The Egypt-Algeria analogy looms ominously today, so it’s worth considering the similarities in some detail.  After nearly three decades of rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN, جبهة التحرير الوطني), the guerrilla-group-turned-ruling-party that once liberated Algeria from the French during the bloody war of independence in the 1950s and the early 1960s, Algerians had grown unruly over their country’s progress.  On the back of popular protests against Algeria’s government in 1989 over poor economic conditions, officials instituted local elections in 1990.  The surprise winner of those elections was the Islamic Salvation Front, a hastily constructed coalition of disparate Islamic elements.

When the Algerian government held national elections in December 1991 to elect a new parliament, the Islamic Salvation Front performed even better, winning 188 out of 231 seats in the first round of the election.  The Algerian military promptly canceled the second round of the elections and retroactively canceled the first round, to the relief of the ruling elite that comprised the Algerian pouvoir.  The decision also relieved diplomats in Paris and, especially, Washington, where policymakers on the cusp of winning the Cold War did not envision that the new pax Americana should involve landslide victories throughout the Muslim world for Islamic fundamentalists who had no real passion for democracy.  As Edward Djerejian scoffed at the time, a victory for the Islamists might amount to ‘one man, one vote, one time.’

The military quickly ousted Algeria’s 13-year ruler Chadli Bendjedid for good measure, then banned the Islamic Salvation Front and instituted military rule.

Sound familiar?

The comparison is particularly worrisome because Algeria’s Islamists fought back with full force and the country descended into a bloody civil war.  Although the military subdued what had become an Islamist guerrilla force by the end of the 1990s, strongman Abdelaziz Bouteflika took power in 1999, he remains in power (if not in great health) today, and Algeria has been a semi-authoritarian state ever since.  So much for Algeria’s short-lived foray into democracy.

But if there is reason to believe that Egypt is merely falling back into long-established familiar patterns between the military and the Islamists, which have tussled for years without escalating their differences into a full-fledged civil war, and that bodes well for Egypt’s short-term and medium-term stability.

Sure, the faces and the names have changed.  Hosni Mubarak’s sclerotic three-decade reign is firmly in the past, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi was forced into retirement, Omar Suleiman died, and Ahmed Shafiq lost the June 2012 presidential runoff to Morsi.  But a new coterie of secular and military power-brokers, like El-Sisi and newly enthroned vice president Mohamed ElBaradei have risen in their stead and maybe one day, nationalist neo-Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi and Ambien-variety Muslim democrats like Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh.  Egypt’s priority now is to keep either side from any radical lurches.  But as long as El-Sisi doesn’t launch a wholesale slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood protesters, it seems unlikely that Egypt could unravel into the kind of civil war that plagued Algeria for a decade.

The bad news is that doesn’t bode well for Egypt’s experiment in democracy over the past two years.   Continue reading Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy →

Lebanon

Mikati’s resignation need not set off immediate alarms about Lebanon’s future

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In Lebanon, elections are both much less and much more than what we typically think of as elections. Lebanon

Given that the country’s constitution mandates that the prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim, the president a Maronite Christian and the speaker of the national assembly a Shi’a Muslim, it’s not a surprise that parliamentary elections are a carefully stage-managed process of allocating seats to Lebanon’s national assembly (مجلس النواب) to ensure half of the seats (64) go to Muslims and another half (64) go to Christians — specific allocations guarantee a set number of seats for each of Lebanon’s 22 confessionals.

So the resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister Najib Mikati (pictured above) on Friday should be seen as a prologue to the electoral choreography, given that new elections are due in June when the current parliamentary terms ends.  Lebanon’s president Michel Suleiman has accepted Mikati’s resignation, but asked Mikati to stay on as a caretaker prime minister until a new prime minister can be announced.

It should not necessarily be seen as a warning sign that Lebanon is invariably descending into chaos or that it is doomed to be drawn into Syria’s civil war, notwithstanding the latest clashes in Tripoli, which seem to have quieted since the weekend.

Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city on its northern coast near the Syrian border, is especially geared toward tension, with its own Sunni majority and Alawite minority mirroring the demographic dynamic in Syria.  But despite some high-profile kidnappings in the Bekaa Valley last August, and flare-ups from time to time in Tripoli, Lebanon has done a reasonable job in avoiding the same fate as Syria.

That’s in no small part due to the resolve of many (though not all) of Lebanon’s political elite to keep Lebanon from returning to the era of civil war that devastated the country in the late 1970s and 1980s, though as the Syrian civil war approaches its two-year anniversary, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Lebanese leaders to remain neutral in the conflict.  That became especially true after a car bomb blast in Beirut last October killed Lebanon’s top intelligence official, Wissam al-Hassan, a longtime Hariri ally — his assassination is widely believed to have been engineered by Syrian — or even Hezbollah (حزب الله‎) — forces.  Hezbollah is also widely believed of actively supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime with military force inside Syria, because Assad (together with Iran’s regime) are the two major lines of political and monetary support for Hezbollah.  If Assad falls in Syria, Hezbollah will no longer be able to look to Damascus for patronage.

So while Mikati’s resignation need not mean an irreparable retreat for Lebanon, it nonetheless portends a difficult few months ahead — the key stumbling block is agreeing to an election law in advance of elections or, at minimum, the agreement for an electoral supervision body to oversee the planned June 9 poll.  Another solution might include the extension of a national unity government with a minor delay of the elections.

The next step lies with Suleiman, who could call a ‘national dialogue’ among all of Lebanon’s political leaders in hopes of achieving at least a caretaker government to see through the implementation of a law that will clear the path for new elections.   Continue reading Mikati’s resignation need not set off immediate alarms about Lebanon’s future →

Iraq, United States

Remembering the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led Iraq invasion

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iraq cartoon

Retired U.S. colonel Ted Spain lists 10 mistakes that the United States made in its Iraq invasion in March 2003 in a succinct and insightful piece in Foreign Policy today.USflagiraq flag icon

Virtually all of them — from the intelligence failures to the inability or incapacity to provide for post-invasion law and order to the flippant attitude of the U.S. to building diplomatic ties in advance of the invasion — have to do with inadequate pre-war planning.

It reminded me of a cartoon that a friend rediscovered from The New Yorker over the weekend (pictured above), a poignant commentary on just how much hubris American policymakers, chief among them the Pentagon strategists under the leadership of U.S. Donald Rumsfeld, displayed in March 2003 before the Iraqi invasion.

It’s unclear today that the United States or the Middle East is more secure for having removed Saddam Hussein from power.  Lawrence B. Lindsey, at the time head of U.S. president George W. Bush’s national economic counsel, was essentially sacked for suggesting that the war might cost up to $200 billion.  It ended up costing $800 billion, nearly 4,500 U.S. troop deaths, 32,000 wounded and today, the U.S. military doesn’t even have so much as a small outpost in Baghdad since the absolute withdrawal of U.S. forces in December 2011.

Furthermore, the horrific prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib cost the United States whatever moral legitimacy it still had left a year after the invasion, which morphed from a quest to rid the country of phantom weapons of mass destruction into an aimless occupation to develop a democratic Iraq into a darker, counterinsurgency effort to stop a painful sectarian civil war.

And that’s even if you believe that the faulty intelligence that led U.S. political leaders to believe that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction (it wasn’t — Saddam was posturing in large part to posture vis-a-vis Iran) was merely gross negligence and not outright manipulation and fraud.

Saddam was certainly no angel — and with the civil war in neighboring Syria reaching nearly a two-year anniversary under strongman Bashar al-Assad, the two countries provide quite a damning indictment for the Ba’ath Party (حزب البعث العربي الاشتراكي) in the two countries where it has been the dominant party in the last half of the 20th century.

But it’s certainly clear that Iraq is no better off for having suffered through the invasion and its aftermath.  Iraq today is, mercifully, a long way from the sectarian violence that marred in the civil war from 2005 to 2008 but today, clear strains exist among the Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish Iraqis.

Millions of Iraqi citizens were either displaced in the sectarian violence or fled the country entirely, and an estimated 120,000 Iraqi citizens were killed in the fighting. 

maliki

Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki (نوري المالكي) (pictured above), who leads a Shi’ite coalition in the Iraqi parliament, is hardly a secular democratic leader, and protests have increasingly opposed his government in recent months — despite a 50% increase in Iraqi oil production since taking power in 2006, Sunnis in Baghdad now stridently oppose the al-Maliki government.  The Iraqi parliament passed a law earlier this year limiting the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and Iraq’s prime minister and president to just two terms in office — that means al-Maliki will not govern Iraq after expected parliamentary elections in March 2014.

Those elections, by the way, will occur just months before another war-torn country in which the United States still has troops, Afghanistan, is set to select a successor to the term-limited president Hamid Karzai (حامد کرزی) after 12 years in office.

Iraq ranked in 2012 as the ninth-worst failed state in The Fund for Peace’s failed state index.  It’s perceived as the world’s 18th most corrupt country in 2012 according to Transparency International.  Though it’s made many gains in the past five years, it still ranks as just 131 out of 186 in the United Nations Human Development Report for 2013.

Above all, it bears repeating:

An estimated 120,000 Iraqi citizens died. 

You can’t place the blame for all of those deaths directly on the U.S. military or the Bush administration or Donald Rumsfeld.  But it’s indisputable that the invasion that the United States launched 10 years ago this week led to the unraveling of Iraqi civil society that unleashed the violence that led to those deaths.

If there’s one overweening lesson that the next generation of American security experts take away from the Iraqi war, whatever strides or obstacles that Iraq faces in the decades ahead, it’s that inadequate planning can doom even the most flawless initial invasion into a decade of painful, costly and terror-filled destabilization.

Thanks to Timothy Stewart-Winter for the cartoon by Robert Mankoff, which ran in The New Yorker in 2003.

Sierra Leone

Final Sierra Leone election results confirm Koroma’s reelection, APC parliamentary win

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The results of Sierra Leone’s November 18 presidential election were finalized late last week — and president Ernest Bai Koroma, the candidate of the ruling All People’s Congress (APC), first elected in the last election (very narrowly) in 2007, was reelected by a robust margin.  Koroma has already been re-inaugurated, in fact, despite protests of fraud from the opposition.

Koroma won 58.7% of the vote against Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), who won just 37.4%.  Bio, who participated in a coup in 1996 before helping to reestablish a more democratic government in the midst of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, briefly served as Sierra Leone’s president in the aftermath of the 1996 coup.  Koroma needed to win 55% of the vote outright in order to avoid a runoff, although no additional candidate, aside from Bio, won a significant share of the vote.

Koroma’s APC also appears to have won a majority of the seats in Sierra Leone’s 124-member unicameral parliament — today’s preliminary results showed the APC with 67 seats (an increase on the 59 seats it held after the 2007 election) to just 42 seats for the SLPP.

Ultimately, Koroma’s APC won its base in the north, the heartland of the Temne ethnic group, while Bio won in the SLPP’s southern base, where the Mende ethnic group predominates.  The lopsided victory owes somewhat to Koroma’s victory in Kono district.  In the map above, Koroma won the northern districts (shown in black), and Bio won the southern districts (shown in grey).

Kono, the east-central district that borders Guinea directly to its east (it’s the southeastern most district that Koroma won, shown in black above), is the most diamond-rich area of Sierra Leone, the source of those infamous ‘blood diamonds’ that so plagued the country during its civil war.  It’s also one of the most diverse districts of Sierra Leone, in terms of both ethnic groups and religions (around 73% of Sierra Leone and are Muslim, though the country has a strong Christian minority), making it somewhat of a ‘swing’ district as well.

Corruption remains a problem in Sierra Leone, but Koroma — and his predecessor, the SLPP’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah — has worked to rebuild Sierra Leone’s democratic, legal and economic institutions since 2002 when the civil war ended.  In particular, Koroma’s administration has introduced free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under age 5, and it has rebuilt roads and hydroelectric capacity.

Sunday’s election was the third since the end of the civil war, and although Koroma will likely benefit from robust GDP growth in Sierra Leone (6% in 2011, for example), he’ll face the challenge of a country still mired more in poverty than flush with mineral wealth.  Nonetheless, Koroma will turn to several foreign development issues, including the awarding of contracts for mining and for offshore oil exploration.

Although international observers have praised the elections as largely peaceful, fair and free, Bio and the SLPP have accused the APC of committing fraud in the election:

“The process was fraudulent and the results do not reflect the will of Sierra Leoneans,” [Bio] said.

“The party has raised concerns about electoral irregularities including faked and unstamped reconciliation and results forms, pre-marked ballot papers, ballot stuffing and overvoting in Kono (diamond-rich east), the western area and the northern province.

Nigeria, Sierra Leone

Obasanjo’s endorsement in Sierra Leone: will it help or hurt?

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Nigeria is the regional anchor of West Africa, with a rapidly growing population of 164 million people and easily West Africa’s largest economy — an economy set to overtake South Africa’s economy by 2020. 

So when former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo made an endorsement in the contested presidential race in Sierra Leone, a country of just around five million people, people took notice.

Obasanjo endorsed Sierra Leone’s incumbent president, Ernest Bai Koroma (pictured above, right, with Obasanjo, left), last week.  So what does that mean for Sierra Leone’s elections to be held this Sunday, November 17?

Probably not much.

As Andrew Novak has recently written for Suffragio, Koroma, the candidate of the All People’s Congress (APC), remains a slight favorite against his chief opponent, Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).  The SLPP was formed in 1951 and dominated Sierra Leonean politics immediately before, during and after Sierra Leone’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1961.  The APC, formed in 1960, dominated an increasingly autocratic and corrupt Sierra Leonean government through the early 1990s, when Sierra Leone descended into one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars.  The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group backed by Liberian strongman Charles Taylor plunged Sierra Leone into a chaotic war that featured the use of child soldiers and other horrific war crimes, mostly fought over control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines in Kono.

The SLPP’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah won power in 1996 during the height of the fighting and despite Kabbah’s inability to govern, he won reelection overwhelming in 2002, the same year that Sierra Leone’s civil war ended.  The SLPP lost power in 2007 — Kabbah’s vice president Solomon Berewa lost to Koroma, and despite some tensions, Kabbah peacefully transferred power to Koroma.  The SLPP’s current candidate, Bio, led a coup in 1996 and actually served as Sierra Leone’s president for a short while that year before his government called the elections that Kabbah ultimately won.

Historically, the Temne ethnic group, based in the north, has supported the APC and, indeed, Koroma is Sierra Leone’s first Tenme president.  In contrast, the Mende ethnic group in the south has traditionally supported the SLPP.

It seems more likely that Obasanjo is less interested in swaying Sierra Leonean voters than in ingratiating himself with the president of a country that has recently discovered new offshore petroleum deposits and remains one of the largest diamond-mining countries in the world, although proceeds from diamond mining were long used to fuel lavish personal spending from the 1960s and the 1990s and control of Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth fueled so much of the country’s civil war that Sierra Leone is often said to have suffered from a ‘diamond curse.’  So new discoveries of oil in Sierra Leone have been welcomed, but cautiously so.

Although Obasanjo has been out of office since 2007, he still plays an outsized role in African politics, both at home in Nigeria and abroad, including as a peacekeeping envoy for the United Nations to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Continue reading Obasanjo’s endorsement in Sierra Leone: will it help or hurt? →

Ghana, Sierra Leone

New ruling parties face strong challenges in Ghana and Sierra Leone

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Guest post by Andrew Novak.

Following the upset wins by the All People’s Congress (APC) in Sierra Leone in 2007 and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Ghana in 2008, both countries experienced tense but peaceful transitions of power from the ruling party to the opposition, two successes in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous electoral violence in Kenya and Zimbabwe.  In the midst of a worldwide economic recession, voters in both West African countries will return to the polls — in Sierra Leone on November 17 and Ghana on December 7 — to determine whether the new ruling parties deserve a second term.  With emboldened challengers, both contests are likely to again be close.

In the 2007 Sierra Leonean general election, the APC’s Ernest Bai Koroma (pictured above) narrowly defeated Solomon Berewa of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), then vice-president of Sierra Leone under the term-limited president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.  With overwhelming support from the north of the country and a strong showing in Freetown, the capital, Koroma was elected in a runoff as the first president from the Temne ethnic group, one of the two main ethnic groups in the country.  This year, he will face another strong challenge from Julius Maada Bio, a former military ruler of the country.  As head of state, Bio organized the elections that resulted in the peaceful transfer of power to Kabbah in March 1996, before the country’s descent into civil war. Continue reading New ruling parties face strong challenges in Ghana and Sierra Leone →