In January, a Somali national working for the UN's World Food Program, Ibrahim Hussein Duale, was shot and killed. Murdering aid workers is, unfortunately, not uncommon in Somalia; what would be more unusual is for the perpetrator to be brought to justice. And even more unusual would be if the party dispensing justice were itself an extremist militant group with a history of killing UN aid workers. Yet...
An Islamic court in southern Somalia on Tuesday sentenced a man who had killed a United Nations aid worker to pay the victim’s family 100 female camels as compensation. The defendant pleaded guilty to the murder of a senior World Food Program official. The trial took place in a region that is under the control of the Shabab, a hard-line Islamist group, and its allies.
I suppose it's also unusual that payment in 100 female camels is the method of meting out justice, but that is no small sum. And this is a group that routinely kills UN aid workers that we're talking about.
(image from flickr user Somali Nomad under a Creative Commons license)
Via the excellent Spencer Ackerman, pretty big news that President Obama will tap Peter W Galbraith as a deputy in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). For the uninitiated, Galbraith is a diplomatic heavy weight. As a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer in the 1980s he uncovered Saddam Hussein's genocide of the Kurds, and for that emerges as a hero in Samatha Power's A Problem From Hell: American in the Age of Genocide. He is also known as a trouble-shooter. When Yugoslavia dissolved in the 1990s, President Clinton appointed him as the first United States ambassador to Croatia.
The point is, he is a star in the diplomatic world. And now President Obama has seen fit to send that expertise in support of a United Nations mission. The obvious deduction here is that the much heralded Afghanistan/Pakistan policy review, due very soon, will spell out an important role for the United Nations in the region.
Via Enough Said, the United States has finally appointed a Special Envoy to Sudan, something that Obama had hinted would be a priority of his early presidency. The Envoy, whose name had remained curiously un-leaked as late as yesterday afternoon, will be Scott Gration, a former Air Force General and high-ranking member of Obama's national security team during the campaign. This accomplishes two goals for Obama: naming a Special Envoy, and finding a job for Scott Gration.
This is no give-a-supporter-an-ambassadorship-to-Ireland position, though (no offense to Ireland, of course, or, begrudgingly, to the Steelers). This post will be an extremely challenging one, forcing Gration to navigate between politics and humanitarianism, hawkishness and diplomacy, and between a country with a vocal domestic constituency to pressure Sudan and one with hardened leaders willing to literally starve their own population to death.
It is interesting that Obama tapped a military official to do this job, rather than a career diplomat, as was Gration's predecessor, Rich Williamson. This is not to say that Gration won't necessarily bring a diplomatic verve to the gig, only that he also must be looking at Darfur through a military/national security lens, as well. And as a testament of how important Sudan is to American foreign policy, not only in a moral sense, but in a fundamentally interest-based one, this is an appreciable development.
Here's Gration's speech before the Democratic National Convention last August, and here's an interesting snippet from a New Yorker article on American foreign policy, written last October by Nicholas Lemann:
"We’ve screwed up,” [Gration] told me. “We don’t really fix these things.” He mentioned the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the Israel-Palestine dispute, and the tension between Russia and Georgia. “What I’d hope we learn from that is: ‘Yep, we’ve got to fix the basic issues here.’ ” He went on, “What doesn’t work, in Gration’s mind, is forcing a solution. Create an environment, give people the opportunity to air their differences, and see if they can come together. We don’t tell them what the solution is, but we do have an obligation—let’s get people in here, find out the needs, see if you can come up with a plan. Don’t try to freeze conflicts! [emphasis mine]"
Somehow, I don't think he has to worry about Sudan's conflicts freezing any time soon.
(image of Gration, November 2007, from flickr user Barack Obama under a Creative Commons license)
In Somalia, four UN staffers were abducted by armed gunmen. In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tiger rebels have pressed UN workers and their family members (including a 16-year-old girl) into forced military service. The former is unfortunately still run-of-the-mill for lawless Somalia, despite the hopeful prospects of the country's new government. The latter is another sign of disrespect for UN blue in Sri Lanka, as well as of the Tigers' increasing desperation, as they are forced into an ever dwindling territory by the Sri Lankan military (itself also a culprit of unconscionable human rights violations).
These incidents are particularly salient reminders, but the danger of working as a UN staff member in unstable parts of the world -- that is to say, most of the places where the UN works -- is a constant fact of life for these brave individuals. From doing nothing other than helping their host country's nationals, UN staffers (the vast majority of whom, it bears reminding, are themselves citizens of the country in which they work) can be targeted by disruptive elements simply for what they represent (the "international community") and for the attention that attacking them will almost certainly raise. What such spoilers don't seem to realize is that this attention will inevitably backfire on their cause, exposing them as truly uninterested in the fate of their country, which they purport to be fighting for, but which UN workers are only working to improve.
UPDATE: Hostages in Somalia released.
(image of UN World Food Program workers in Somalia)
No, UN Dispatch has not been mugged (Brian's previous adventures notwithstanding). This particularly blunt advice came from a Somali woman at an all-day Somalia conference I attended here in Washington yesterday and is not nearly as craven, aggressive, and ungrateful -- at least in the case of Somalia -- as it may sound. Her point was simply that Somalia is certainly in need of foreign investment and assistance, but that international meddling in its domestic politics -- ahem, ahem, United States policy of the past 18 years -- is tremendously counterproductive, particularly now, when Somalia is finally showing some signs for optimism.
Her comments drew applause (and chuckles, of course), and were pretty much echoed by most of the experts and the Somalis in the audience. A Somalia-based NGO leader attested that a major problem for the international community's take on Somalia was its seeming "sense of ownership" of the country's problems. Longtime Horn of Africa scholar Ken Menkhaus affirmed this view, reminding that, while Somalia's state-building processes may not look like those that the World Bank and UN Development Program would typically prescribe, they still represent a possible avenue for a peaceful and stable state. “Foisting solutions" on Somalia, he added, will not accelerate -- and will likely only retard – the progress along this path.
In this light, there is little need for panic over a headline -- "Somali cabinet backs Sharia plan" -- that might instinctively inspire fear, or at least discomfort, in many U.S. lawmakers. To try to control Somalia's internal political maneuverings, just as its new government is getting off the ground, would be more detrimental, to both Somali and U.S. interests, than Sharia law possibly could be. In fact, this move, conducted without interference, will likely undercut support for extremists, something that heavy-handed foreign intervention (yes, including deploying UN peacekeepers) would almost certainly just inflame.
And on the "give us money" side, there's certainly a right way to infuse capital and a wrong (i.e. potentially hugely destabilizing) way. A right way would be to build on the substantial resources, both human and material, that Somalia, with its large coastline and war-weary but earnest population, could take advantage of. But, as a State Department representative gravely warned at the conference yesterday, the influx of literally millions of dollars of untraceable American dollar bills (hint: look for the shiny new Benjamins) from pirates' ransom decidedly falls into the potentially hugely destabilizing category.
UPDATE: Presumably most Somali-Americans who agree with this sentiment are going to go and do something like this.
Speaking of War Child, I see the BBC has an interview with Somali-born rapper K'Naan. Included in this song, "Somalia," is his perspective on the media's "commotion" over the piracy off Somalia's coast.
Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels, pushed by the Sri Lankan military into a tiny enclave awash with civilians, have indicated their willingness to accept a ceasefire with the government. Only, they just sent two airplanes careening into government buildings in the capital, Colombo, and don't seem too ready to fulfill one of the crucial requirements of a ceasefire:
But the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rejected calls to lay down arms and surrender, saying keeping their weapons is necessary to ensure survival for the ethnic minority Tamil people in the Indian Ocean island nation.
This rationale seems to repeat the Tigers' long-stated raison d'etre, so it's probably premature to foresee the group disbanding or even ceasing attacks without some new diplomatic development. Unfortunately, in a situation that has attracted pitifully scant attention compared to the similar actions taken by the Israeli government in Gaza, the Sri Lankan government seems set on a military solution. It's reprehensible for the Tigers to effectively be holding civilians in their small redoubt hostage, but it is equally reckless for the Sri Lankan military to continue a full-scale assault without adequate concern for the lives of innocent Tamils.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released a report (pdf) today showing that civilian casualties there are up by 40% over this time last year. The majority of these deaths are the result of the Taliban's campaign to intimidate civilian populations, but some are the result of errant U.S airstrikes.
via the