Isangqa

Gangster's Paradise

When the apartheid system collapsed 10 years ago, South Africa's Transvaal province -- home to both Johannesburg and Pretoria -- was renamed Gauteng. License plates soon reflected the change; "GP," they now read, next to a coat-of-arms. At the same time, Jo'burg was fast becoming the murder capital of the world, with a violent crime rate four times that of Colombia's. Remember that old Coolio song? The "GP" soon came to stand for "Gangster's Paradise."

National Geographic has a piece on the City of Gold in its new issue, with some beautiful work from photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski, who called it the "most dangerous, difficult shoot of a lifetime."

I worked in Jo'burg in 2002, shooting similar stuff, and I couldn't agree more. I came to love the place, but then again, I'm from Detroit.

'World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis'?

Um, shouldn't someone be paying attention to this?

"Fighting in western Sudan has intensified in recent weeks, with Arab militia systematically attacking villages and raping women, a senior UN official said today .

Mukesh Kapila, the UN resident coordinator for Sudan, said attacks by the militia on tribes of African origin in Darfur region were 'close to the definition of ethnic cleansing'.

'In my view this is the world's greatest humanitarian crisis and possibly the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophe,' Kapila said. 'There has been systematic burning of villages and displacement of the population. There are reports of women being raped, other men and women disappearing.'

In one reported attack by the militia on February 27, more than 100 women were raped in Tawilaa, a village in North Darfur, he said, adding that his information was coming from international and Sudanese aid workers in the region."

Looks like the Christian missionaries are on the right side of history on this one.

The Man in the Cage

State Security trials in Egypt are something to see: flanked by machine-gun toting soldiers, lawyers argue their cases while the accused watches the proceedings from an iron-barred cage. It's a fitting illustration of the way in which the government generally handles these cases: brutally, and with a minimum of concern for how things might look to the outside world, which in any event rarely seems to care. Sometimes the defendants are terrorists, but often the accused are human rights advocates or other opponents of the government.

Occasionally, a defendant draws the sympathy of the West. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a civil society leader who was arrested in 2000 and finally released last year following considerable international pressure, was lucky enough to have an American wife and a high public profile. In a similar vein, Ashraf Ibrahim, on trial for organizing anti-war protests in Cairo last spring, was just acquitted this week. As Matthew Craft writes in LA Weekly, Ibrahim's trial was notable more for what it didn't mean than for what it did.

In fact, the proceedings would have been familiar to anyone who knows a bit about the country. Egypt, of course, is a police state -- albeit a very sloppy one -- and dissent of any kind is often punished harshly. When I first visited back in the 1990s, it was the height of the state's war against Ga'maa Islamiya, a terrorist organization that later became one of Al Qaeda's main feeder groups. At the time, the Islamists were murdering tourists in front of their hotels, and President Hosni Mubarak's security services hit back ruthlessly. Opponents -- violent or peaceful, it didn't matter -- were murdered, hundreds were tossed in jail and thousands were tortured (you don't want to spend any time in Lazoghly Square, where interrogations take place).

In the end, Mubarak won his war -- or at least bought himself some more time. Which is why he has been such a valuable American ally. Stability, it seems, is worth about $2 billion a year in aid. Occasionally, the US calls on Mubarak to clean up his corrupt and thuggish regime, but he has always managed to make a few cosmetic changes and continue on with business as usual. This sort of behavior probably never bothered the policymakers in Washington much, either: as with other US allies (Uzbekistan, say), Mubarak wasn't required to do much of anything so long as he kept the lid on. He's done just that for more than 20 years now -- no easy task given Egypt's troubles. Along the way, he has learned how to walk the tightrope between chaos and control, how to crack down on dissent while murmuring of reform. Craft writes:

"People who have worked with Mubarak, the former commander of the Air Force, tell me his first concern is security -- whatever it takes to keep the country stable," he writes. "Faced with an obstacle, Mubarak makes enough short-term moves to 'muddle through.'"

Some viewed Ibrahim's trial as a bellwether of sorts. Would an acquittal mean that Mubarak is steering the state toward that Middle Eastern "reform" President Bush so loves to talk about? As Craft notes, the acquittal is good news, but it's probably best not to read too much into it. it's just the latest step in Mubarak's carefully choreographed dance. The accused himselfdidn't place much stock in the verdict, either:

"'Today's verdict means nothing,' anti-war activist Ashraf Ibrahim said from behind the caged dock.

...

'I've already been detained for almost a year, without charges or a crime. What kind of law is that?' Ibrahim told Al-Ahram Weekly."

Syria in Sight?
What's going on in Syria? Only the spooks could say for sure. In the last week, Syrian security forces arrested a US diplomat at a "football riot" (which might more aptly be described as an uprising) in an obscure town near the Iraq border. No one's saying exactly how that US diplomat came to be so far from Damascus. Later, Kurdish protests spread to the capital, and Washington announced sanctions against Bashar Al Assad's regime.

Coincidence? Not likely. Syria, of course, is understandably anxious about the US occupation just across the border, and the White House hasn't been afraid to shake its fist at Assad. Then there's this from Haaretz's Yossi Melman, describing a US team that arrived from Iraq yesterday:

"According to the sources, two U.S. helicopters arrived Sunday from Iraq to the city of Qamishli on the Turkish border, where the riots began.

The sources believe that the American delegation has warned the Syrian government that if the riots continue, the situation could get out of control and the Syrians will find it difficult to restrain the Kurdish militias in northern Iraq, who want to come to the aid of the Kurds in Syria."

Sounds like a threat to me. Are we witnessing the beginning of a US-sponsored destabilization campaign in Syria? Robert Dreyfuss thinks so. "What's happening in Syria has all the hallmarks of a classic, 1950s-era, Cold War-style CIA coup d'etat scheme," he writes in his Iraq blog on Tom Paine.com.

One Year On ...

Today's Times gives us a mea culpa (kind of) from Michael Ignatieff, one of the most prominent liberal supporters of the Iraq war.

"So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences. An administration that cared more genuinely about human rights would have understood that you can't have human rights without order and that you can't have order once victory is won if planning for an invasion is divorced from planning for an occupation. The administration failed to grasp that from the first moment an American tank column took a town, there had to be military police and civilian administrators following behind to guard museums, hospitals, water-pumping stations and electricity generators and to stop looting, revenge killings and crime. Securing order would have meant putting 250,000 troops into the invasion as opposed to 130,000. It would have meant immediately retaining and retraining the Iraqi Army and police, instead of disbanding them. The administration, which never tires of telling us that hope is not a plan, had only hope for a plan in Iraq."

I say "kind of" because Ignatieff hasn't really changed his tune. While admitting that almost nothing the White House told us about Iraq was true, he insists the war was worth it because it freed Iraq from Saddam Hussein -- even if Iraqi human rights barely registered on the Bush administration's actual agenda.

Okay, fair enough. But Ignatieff then admonishes US leaders not to walk away from the mess they've created.

"Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice."

Frankly, there's not much chance of that happening. Iraq is just too valuable. We're not going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what happens after June 30. US officials have done plenty to confirm this, too. Just a few examples off the top of my head: There's former Iraq viceroy Jay Garner's perhaps too-candid admission of America's long-term basing intentions (as reported by Jim Lobe):

"'One of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights with [the Iraqi authorities],' he said. 'And I think we'll have basing rights in the north and basing rights in the south ... we'd want to keep at least a brigade. Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East,' Garner said."

There's this, too: Last week, the Pentagon gained almost total control over some $18 billion in Iraq reconstruction money. As the AP's Jim Krane reported, the rebuilding of Iraq will grind on for the next four years under the control not of the State Department, or USAID, or the Iraqi Governing Council, but of the Pentagon.

The Dogs of War, Redux

While the mercenary -- excuse me, private contractor -- business may be booming in Iraq, in Africa it's getting harder and harder for a gun-for-hire to make a living.

Witness the recent doings in Zimbabwe, where a group of former members of South Africa's apartheid-era security forces sits in jail, accused of plotting to overthrow the government of the tiny West African state of Equatorial Guinea. The coup-in-the-making came to light when the mercenaries' cargo plane landed in Harare earlier this week, rousing the suspicions of Zimbabwean authorities. Though the details are still in dispute, the team's version -- that it was contracted to guard mines in the Congo -- is looking increasingly flimsy. Instead, it seems that the suspected mercenaries were planning a coup in Equatorial Guinea, and had stopped in Harare to pick up weapons.

There's more to the story: Back in the '70s and '80s, many of these men fought for the apartheid regime against its black-ruled neighbors. The U.S. and Britain, of course, backed the white government in its "anti-Communist" (read: "anti-black") struggle. It's no surprise, then, that the group's ringleaders have connections to both American and British intelligence agencies. In a (subscription-only) piece for South Africa's Mail and Guardian, Sam Sole and Stefaans Brummer offer this sketch of the operation's architect, Simon Mann:

Mann was one of the founders of Sandline
International, a London-based private military company
that worked closely with Executive Outcomes, the
company formed in 1989 by former apartheid special
forces operatives.

Executive Outcomes and later Sandline played a key
role in major private military interventions, first in
Angola in support of the MPLA government against Jonas
Savimbi's Unita rebels and later in Sierra Leone, in
the latter case allegedly with the tacit support of
the British security services.

Mann's background made him the perfect intermediary
for the negotiation and conduct of private operations
in support of British military, diplomatic or
commercial interests. A member of a prominent British
brewing family, he attended Eton before joining the
Scots Guards and later the elite Special Air Service.
After leaving the SAS Mann specialised in computer
security systems.

Mann's alleged co-conspirator, Nic du Toit, the article continues, has a similar resume. Du Toit, however, worked for a CIA-connected South African military company.

But why Equatorial Guinea? Well, its "president," Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is no prize, but the accused coup plotters probably weren't motivated by humanitarian
concerns. Rather, as this piece in the Johannesburg Star makes clear, the answer is simple: oil.

Equatorial Guinea and its immediate neighbouring
island state of Sao Tome and Principe have become ripe
for coups since oil was recently discovered in their
waters. That has made them big prizes for greedy
politicians and those who help them to acquire power.
Sao Tome experienced a coup in 2003, which was
reversed by African Union intervention.

It's hard to say what all this intrigue means, but here's one possibility: the days of the Great White Mercenary are on the wane in Africa. Indeed, as South Africa's Business Day reported, it was South African intelligence -- Messrs. Mann and du Toit's former compatriots -- that warned Equatorial Guinea of the plot.

(originally posted at Mother Jones.com, 3/12/04)

Update: Murkier and murkier ... Patrick Smith of Africa Confidential reports that the money behind the plot comes from a British businessman looking to get in on Equitorial Guinea's oil concessions.

The Little Court That Could

In the 1980s, South Africa's apartheid regime and the World Bank cooked up a scheme to build a string of huge dams in tiny, dirt-poor Lesotho, a mountain kingdom that sits entirely within South Africa's borders. The idea behind the Lesotho Highlands Water Project was to funnel water -- the only resource Lesotho has -- to its powerful neighbor's increasingly thirsty cities. Two of the dams are finished now, South Africa is getting its water, and Lesotho is getting some much-needed cash. (This came at a price, of course: I discussed the human impacts in a piece for Mother Jones in 2002.)

Corruption, of course, seems to go hand-in-hand with massive development schemes. Lesotho's was no exception. The project was awash in allegations of kickbacks, fraud, and waste.

Lesotho's courts, though, are actually serious about punishing the crooks -- whether they're local or international. Already, the project's former chief executive has been prosecuted and thrown in jail, and three of the multinationals that built the dams -- the Canada-based Acres International, the German Lahmeyer, and, just recently, the French Schneider Electric (formerly Spie Batignolles), one of the industry's biggest -- have been tried and convicted. Impreglio, an Italian engineering giant, is next up in the dock.

Lesotho's prosecutors haven't gotten a lot of help in their efforts. The trials have proceeded in fits and starts, periodically shutting down because the court ran out of money. The World Bank wasn't terribly supportive at first (though I believe they've come around a bit after seeing the writing on the wall).

But the trials go on. It seems remarkable to me that the court has come this far, and is willing to go after the multinationals like this -- especially in a country as troubled as Lesotho.