After four months in the hands of Somali pirates, the Ukrainian ship full of tanks bound for Kenya South Sudan an as yet undetermined location has been released.
And it seems the recent slowdown in hijackings -- buoyed (no pun intended) by international resolve in increasing the fleet of pirate-watchers in the area -- has dampened the market for ransoms. While the pirates are still "counting the haul," the magic number seems to have been somewhere around $3.2 million (presumably in new $100 bills). This is far under their original $20 million asking price, and still substantially less than the $8 million "bargain" that they were holding out for. According to a pirate spokesman, the $3.2 million is just a little "something to cover our expenses" -- presumably, more than a few nights in a swanky hotel (as long as they can make it ashore, that is).
Meanwhile, Somalia roils, even as it enters a putatively "new era" (under a former president, that is, whom the Ethiopians who just left may have just returned happen to not particularly like very much.)
UPDATE: Beth Dickinson points out that, according to Ukraine's Kyiv Post, at least, the tanks are still headed to Kenya. We'll be watching the ports at Mombasa...
(By Mark Leon Goldberg. This item originally appeared in the American Prospect online)
In the coming weeks, Darfur will reach yet another crisis point when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for President Omar al Bashir of Sudan. When this happens, President Bashir has all but promised retaliation -- against United Nations personnel in Sudan, against Darfuris, and against southern Sudanese separatists. This much we know. What is still unclear is how the Obama administration intends to respond.
The insects, thought to be armyworms, are in fact the caterpillars of the moth Achaea catocaloides, says the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Cornering the culprit will allow the government to select the best pesticide to tackle the outbreak - the worst seen in Liberia since 1970.Whereas the dreaded army worms burrow deep into the ground to form their protective cocoons, caterpillars apparently choose a much more pesticide-accessible hiding pupating place: under leaves. The epidemic will still require a concerted regional approach, as villagers' understandable ad hoc attempts thus far -- stamping on and burning the caterpillars -- will, according to the FAO, "not be enough." (image of caterpillar -- not the Achaea catocaloides -- from flickr user Mean and Pinchy, under a Creative Commons license)
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) just posted a video of Angelina Jolie visiting Burmese refugees in India. I'm not sure how recent the video is, but traffic always seems to get a bump when we post these videos. I wonder why?
Any day now, the International Criminal Court will issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Bashir. In preparation, Sudanese Government troops are massing outside of a town in south Darfur.
The only thing standing between 20,000 civilians and the government troops are 196 lightly armed UN/AU peacekeepers.
I know people’s eyes sometimes glaze over when they see some combination of the terms “humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur.” But there is real urgency to what is unfolding. It could easily turn into a blood bath in the coming days--which in turn can call into question the credibility of the entire UN/AU peacekeeping effort in Darfur.
Here’s the backstory: Muhajiriya is a town in south Dafur which is located at a strategic crossroads that connects some of western Sudan’s main thoroughfares. Until Wednesday the town was held by a Darfur rebel group called the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The UN, though, negotiated the withdrawal of JEM forces from the town (which were, in any case, no match against the government forces.) By securing the JEM withdrawal, the UN took away the government’s ostensible reason for sacking the town. The peacekeeping mission, UNAMID, is now trying to negotiate a no-fire zone around Muhajiriya.
There is a ticking time bomb, though. In the coming days, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al Bashir. When this happens, the town--peacekeepers, civilians and all--may come under attack. The Sudanese troops outside of Muhajiriya are essentially holding 20,000 people in the town hostage; if the ICC warrant comes, the hammer will drop.
This is an incredibly tense situation. UN Ambassador Susan Rice had strong words for the Sudanese government yesterday. But advocacy groups like the Enough Project are warning that unless the United States sends Khartoum the clear message that reprisal attacks will not be tolerated, a Srebrenica like situation may unfold.
I agree. 20,000 lives hang in the balance.
[Mistura] explained that the first-time inclusion of a registration process, to lessen fraud, had probably dampened participation, while only 60,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) had voted, despite measures to increase their numbers.There are an estimated 2.7 million displaced persons within Iraq (not to mention more than two million more living as refugees in Syria and Jordan). And while it is assuredly much, much harder to organize voting for people displaced from their homes, it is nonetheless unsettling that only 60,000 -- under 3% -- were able to participate in the process to select a government that should be treating their concerns as paramount on its agenda. (photo of a displaced Iraqi woman, from flickr user jamesdale10, under a Creative Commons license)
It is, of course, hard to get a straightforward report out of Somalia. But if the worst is corroborated, it may amount to this: just two weeks after officially pulling out of the country, Ethiopian troops have re-invaded, bent on attacking the Islamists who seized power in the vacuum precipitated by Ethiopia's original departure. And, to make matters still worse, African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu may or may not have fired randomly into a crowd of civilians, killing somewhere between 16 and 40 -- though at least some, and possibly all, of these were killed by the insurgent roadside bombing that created the chaos.
Ethiopia has denied the claim of its troops' incursion, calling it a "wicked" distraction, and the AU has been even more vehement in its defense, branding the allegation of misconduct, rather superlatively, as "a big stupid naked lie." Even in the "best" case scenario, though, these developments are not good. Either way, an African Union convoy was attacked, and many civilians died. And even if Ethiopia is not preparing a fresh attack into Somalia, it seems pretty clear, from witness testimony and through the nonchalant admission to maintaining high troop levels on this not-exactly-hard-and-fast border, that Ethiopian troops are doing something in Somalia. Whether that is extorting a "tax," readying an assault, or just causing general mayhem, doesn't seem as important as their evident ability to move back and forth across the border, even after their much-anticipated withdrawal. For all the problems raised by the Ethiopian occupation, at least everyone knew that they were there; the current shady situation does not bode well for Somalia's new president, who has pledged to craft a "good relationship" with his country's erstwhile regional rivals.
Spencer Ackerman flags an important-but-buried-on-A11 Washington Post article describing a new Pentagon report which stresses the need for a "whole of government" approach to national security.
"Whole of Government" is bureaucratic speak for including other government agencies in debates on security issues that go beyond the traditional purview of the Department of Defense. And as we've chronicled, Defense Secretary Gates is an unconventional cabinet head in the sense that he has been an outspoken advocate for strengthening the capacity of a "rival" department -- namely, the Department of State -- to take on national security challenges. This includes giving the State Department a seat at the table, but more importantly it means increasing the State Department's budget so it can handle new responsibilities. (The DOD gets about $500 billion from Congress--excluding Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals. The State Department's budget? A paltry $20 billion.) The Defense Department's Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report spells out why we need more balance between civilian and military components of our national security strategy.
Lessons learned in recent operations stress the critical need to further develop deployable civilian expertise for conducting stabilization, reconstruction, and counterinsurgency operations. Today, civil agencies and departments have insufficient resources for carrying out missions associated with transition from violence to lasting stability.
Accordingly, the Department supports establishing a better balance between the civil and military instruments of national power by significantly increasing resources needed for governance, strategic communication, security assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development.People who care about UN Peacekeeping should take note. Part of the mix here is a small State Department office called the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) which trains and equips developing world soldiers for peacekeeping missions. GPOI was created in 2005 following a meeting of the G-8 in which the developed world recognized that a global lack of capacity for peacekeeping was creating severe stresses on the whole UN peacekeeping apparatus. The American contribution to the G-8 proposal was to create GPOI to train and equip about 75,000 peacekeepers by 2010. This is a good start, but what makes me so excited about Gates' evangelism is that smallish, somewhat backwater State Department offices like GPOI may finally get the respect, attention and resources they require.
[img_assist|nid=7634|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=0|height=]Opinio Juris' Duncan Hollis reports some movement in the push to improve the United States' relationship with the International Criminal Court. A task force on the topic issued a press release issued yesterday, and, while it falls short of endorsing U.S. membership on the Court, it does recommend formalizing the ways in which the United States can contribute to and facilitate ICC investigations. Hollis sees thinks this advice will not go unnoticed in the Obama administration.
Although there’s definitely an internationalist tilt in membership, it’s truly bipartisan. They’ve met frequently and sought outside expertise as well...Given the membership and the amount of time the Task Force has spent trying to craft a common position, I suspect its opinions will likely get some serious play at the White House, Foggy Bottom, or even on the Hill.It's difficult to imagine that at least one of the task force's recommendations -- amending the American Service-members' Protection Act, which Congress enacted to quell the (misplaced) fears of the ICC indicting American military personnel abroad -- won't face some intense opposition from select quarters, but the suggestions are eminently reasonable. The United States is already supporting -- at least rhetorically -- the ICC's work in Sudan, so removing obstacles to this informal policy will only make it easier to implement. And there's no reason to suspect that the Obama Administration won't be more open to joining the Rome Statute than its predecessor. (p.s. If we haven't mentioned it before, check out In Situ, the new blog from the Coalition for the International Criminal Court)