Bleak year ahead for the Congolese: "Stunning speed" vs. Dizzying inertia

At around 8 PM (Kin time), I followed in quick succession--and at
times alternating between three radio dials--the new messages of three
heads of state: 1) Nicolas Sarkozy (France); 2) Denis Sassou Nguesso
(Congo-Brazzaville); and 3) the Raïs (DRC). A captivating exercise in
comparative speech writing...

What was interesting between the three messages was that whereas
Sarkozy gave to French citizens a clear lowdown of the action his
government will undertake in the upcoming year, with precise
benchmarks to be achieved, the two Congolese presidents' messages were
instead circumlocutions crammed with what appeared at first blush as
unrealistic empty promises.

I even caught in Nguesso's message this glaring tautology, "social
solidarity"--as if a social dimension weren't necessarily inherent in
the notion of solidarity!
The Raïs promised that the new year will be a year of "individual
development of citizens." In fact, for viewers (those privileged ones
not deprived of viewing the speech due to permanent blackouts) and
radio listeners (the vast majority of denizens in the dark) the
expression "épanouissement individuel des citoyens" was odd as it
literally translates as "individual blossoming of citizens!" Quite
religious or moral wishful thinking. As it happened, Nguesso, on the
right bank of the Congo River (Brazzaville and Kinshasa are the
closest capitals in the world), also used a French word that is
usually found in the religious register: "espérance" (hope) instead of
"espoir." Though he didn't push the envelope on "religion-ese" as did
the Raïs at the end of his speech: "May God be our road companion all
along this new year."

Well, the Raïs, just like the majority of the Congolese, may
misconstrue God as a magician. But the fact remains that there's no
magician who could pull the trick of having him achieve the
"individual blossoming of citizens" in one year.

Item: earlier on during the day, at a Senate hearing--and I commend
senators and MPs for working on New Year's Eve--the Minister of
Primary and Secondary Education was confronted by senators over the
"achievement" being claimed by the government of "free primary
education for all children!" It did however transpire from the hearing
that the claim of free primary education is at best a pipe-dream or at
worst a practical joke at the expense of Congolese citizen. Many
parents, fleeced by schools, have already given up on educating their
kids--in a country with 96% unemployment rate! As all Congolese
ministers are wont to do, the Minister of Primary and Secondary
Education blamed the dwindling portion earmarked for education in the
budget on Mobutu, the wars, the current world economic crisis, and the
drastic regimen the IMF imposes on the country!... In other words,
there won't be any "individual blossoming" for millions of Congolese
kids anytime soon.

In his new year's message Sarkozy said that inaction isn't an option
for him and his compatriots in a world changing at a "stunning speed."
Then, while the world is spinning at this stunning speed, Congo is
hardly stirring in its dizzying inertia...

Well, it seems that another bleak year is about to start for the
Congolese beset by a government--like all their previous governments
for the last 50 years-- that is their worst nightmare!

***
(Erratum: in the previous post I mistakenly wrote "Swedish" in the
stead of "Danish")

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Zuma goes Zulu on Zapiro... again!

There's no other way in explaining the BIZARRE renewed legal assault
by Zuma against South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro
than by surmising that the South African president has gone Zulu on
Zapiro.

I've previously said that by going after Zapiro, Zuma was on the path
of bringing South Africa down at the level of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. As it
happens, people are now being thrown in jail in Zimbabwe for calling
Mugabe a little troll or a gnome.

But Zuma's (and incidentally Mugabe's) predicament, it now appears to
me, is more fundamental and therefore congruent with the so-called
"traditional" and "authentic" (Mobutu) ideational system whose many
tenets Africans have still to individually and collectively shed
before an elusive "African Renaissance" could possibly dawn on the
continent.

Franz Fanon once theorized--and I'm loosely paraphrasing--that culture
isn't some frozen meal left intact in the fridge that you go and
retrieve at will any time you'd want to. Culture is a dynamic,
ever-changing and flickering practice by a human group at any very
present moment.

Treading along the same vein, Nigerian literary and cultural critic
Abiola Irele once delivered a now-famous lecture aptly entitled "In
Praise of Alienation."

In sum, culture is created or re-create and engineered willy-nilly by
social formations or larger human institutions. Hence a global culture
in which human rights, gender equality, gay and lesbian rights,
democracy, etc, is now being created before our very eyes--though
Claude Lévi-Strauss saw such a global cultural uniformity project as
detrimental to cultural diversity.

In point of fact, South Africa is a progressive modern society that
prides itself on its ethnic and cultural diversity. That's why it
juridically integrates the many customary laws of its ethnic groups.
Zuma can thus lawfully marry any number of wives as polygamy is part
of Zulu cultural heritage whereas his Jewish compatriot Zapiro is
paradoxically prevented by law from doing so.

In Zulu customs, as in many other African traditional cultures, the
chief is a hallowed and aura-radiating individual to whom one owes
obsequious respect and in whose presence one is awestruck. And in our
traditional societies, making fun of the chief is unthinkable and even
punishable by death. I was once told a legend on the lethal protocol
at the court of King Chaka Zulu: if a notable made the unfortunate
mistake of sneezing when the king was speaking, he was strangled on
the spot!

In today's South African society, however, public figures are (and
should be) fair game to cartoonists and late-night-show comedians; and
Zuma, not being the Chaka, might be interrupted with impunity by the
thundering sneeze of one of his cabinet ministers.

Zuma might have conflated two realms in this row with Zapiro: the
modern multi-ethnic and centripetal realm that moors different groups
into one South African nation, on the one hand; and, on the other, the
centrifugal and ethnocentric realm into which individual groups find
their specific identity.

And, as the president of a multi-ethnic state, Zuma ought to firmly
stand with both legs on his country's centripetal realm. This is an
argument made a while back by a South African lawyer about the serial
marriages of Zuma...

The hope is that it'd soon dawn on Zuma that he'd confused two
different genres. Zapiro isn't a Zulu tribesman. And even if Zapiro
were a Zulu, he could still shed his tribal identity and diss the head
of state in his cartoons without violating the constitution and the
law.

This being said, how could a mere cartoon so terribly incense Zuma to
the point of his running the risk of reminding his compatriots of some
of his actions that amount to repeated rapes with aggravated
circumstances of Lady Justice (like having parole granted on grounds
of serious illness to a healthy millionaire friend of his who also
happens to be his one-time creditor)? That's the kind of bafflement I
recently heard Zapiro express in an interview with the BBC...

Well, we've also watched on TV frenzied people foaming at the mouth
and engaging in the ritual burning of the Swedish flag and attempting
to exact unspecified reparations from the Swedish state for the
unspeakable crime of drawing prophets committed by one or two of
Swedish cartoonist nationals. In the US, we saw Reverend Al Sharpton
gathering a mob for a demonstration against a New York tabloid that
depicted Obama's stimulus plan as undecipherable signs smeared on
paper by a chimp! (And without mixing genres, an ayatollah--just like
a marshal in a Western movie keen on capturing a dangerous outlaw--had
issued a death fatwa against a writer, with money to be collected by
the free-lance bounty hunter who'd drop the felon!)

But having said from the outset that Zuma has gone native on Zapiro, a
bizarre move by an incumbent head of state, there's only one place
where I can find a beginning of an explanation: anthropology, the
field of study of the "apparently irrational behaviour," as quipped
British anthropologist Alfred Gell, citing the ethnographic baffling
quandary of "my brother is a green parrot."

Gell gave this definition of anthropology while developing his
"anthropological theory of art" (see his "Art and Agency").

Gell discovered that "art objects" (which he calls "indexes"), in
indigenous societies, have no bearing on the way these objects are
understood in Western institutionalized settings and circles (museums,
academia, art collectors and aficionados, as well as the general
public).

In indigenous settings, indexes are things around which social
relations are mobilized. These indexes, in an animistic way, are even
"extensions of persons" and have social agency.

"This agency," says Gell, "can be agonistic or defensive as well as
beneficial."

These indexes have dynamic relations between themselves, between them
and people, or between people through their proxy. (Well, this is an
extremely reductionist take on Gell's complex theory.)

It seems to me that to Zuma Zapiro's cartoon has turned into an
"agonist" index, with the nastiness of a Haitian voodoo doll. Hence
his "apparently irrational behavior" in this matter.

Ultimately, the millions of rands in damages being sought by Zuma
would never ward off the nefarious juju Zapiro's cartoon has become
for him.

In Zuma's worldview, breaking the spell of the wicked cartoon can only
be done according to the following script:

Mwalimu Saleh, a medicineman from Tanzania, is flown to South Afica to
cure the ailing soul of Zuma. He's brought in his luggage the most
potent body parts harvested on murdered albinos (genitals, anuses, and
hearts). He stews these body parts. When the stew is ready, he tells
Zuma: "You'll eat this stew four Fridays in a row. This powerful
medicine will right your listing soul knocked off balance by the
soul-eater Zapiro. Focus on Zapiro while you eat: you'll be nibbling
at his soul till you slowly and painfully turn the loathsome
cartoonist into a golem!"

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Côte d'Ivoire against the background of Honduras: "Honduras Down the Memory Hole" (Alyssa Figueroa)

I repost this June 2010 FAIR article to illustrate the hypocrisy,
double speak and double standards of all those decrying today the
flaunting of democracy by Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire.
Alex Engwete
***

FAIR: Honduras Down the Memory Hole

U.S. media ignore the aftermath of dubious elections they praised

By Alyssa Figueroa

A year after a military coup removed democratically elected President
Manuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans are still living under a
repressive government—but the U.S. is pushing Latin American countries
to join it in normalizing relations with the regionally ostracized
nation.

Reporting from a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS),
the New York Times (6/8/10) dutifully relayed Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton's assertion that "we saw the free and fair election of
President [Porfirio] Lobo,'' noting on the other hand that "several
foreign ministers inveighed against Mr. Lobo's government, which they
said had violated human rights." The Times left it up to readers to
guess who might have been right. The Washington Post (6/8/10) reported
that this debate is simply an indication of "how difficult it is to
bridge regional divisions."

Such coverage is no surprise, given the media's enthusiastic response
to Lobo's election in January. After the June 28, 2009, coup, the U.S.
and many Latin American countries said they would refuse to recognize
the elections in November if Zelaya wasn't restored to office to
finish out his term (Washington Post, 9/4/09). Given that the
elections would be held under the auspices of a coup regime, the UN,
the OAS, the EU and the Carter Center didn't send observers (Real News
Network, 4/08/10).

Before the election was held, however, the U.S. backed off this
position—a reversal cheered in the U.S. press. Washington Post
columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos (11/27/09) declared that Obama was
"alone, and right, on Honduras," because the election "will come off
favorably enough." A Post editorial (11/28/09) agreed, arguing that
Hondurans were eager for the election because they "have little taste
for Mr. Zelaya, who embraced the leftist populism of Hugo Chavez."
(See FAIR Action Alert, 9/24/09.) Yet an August 2009 poll by the
Honduran polling company COIMER & OP found that 52 percent supported
Zelaya's return to presidency, while 33 percent opposed it. In the
same poll, those who expressed an opinion came out 3-to-1 against the
coup (Narcosphere, 10/7/09).

The election went on, with many publications (e.g., Washington Post,
L.A. Times, both 11/30/09) deeming it "peaceful," while at the same
time reporting that 500 protesters were targeted with tear gas. There
was little coverage of the beatings and arrests leading up to the
election, or of the nearly 5,000 soldiers dispersed throughout the
country to enforce a state of emergency (Guardian, 11/28/09).

The New York Times, which a few weeks before the election (11/7/09)
held that "an election run by the coup plotters won't be credible to
Hondurans—and it shouldn't be to anyone else," afterwards wrote
(12/5/09), "there is wide agreement that last week's presidential
election in Honduras …was clean and fair."

Most outlets declared that voter turnout was near 60 percent, taking
the word of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The Miami Herald (12/1/09)
argued that this supposed turnout meant that "the interim government,
which has the support of virtually all the major factions of Honduran
society…can now claim that it presided over a fair and credible
election." The Wall Street Journal (11/29/10) called the elections "a
win for all people who yearn for liberty."

The Tribunal's announcement, however, contradicted its own turnout
data—which at the time hovered at 49.2 percent—as well as those of the
only independent Honduran organization to do exit polling, which put
the figure at 47.6 percent (Real News Network, 12/8/09), 7 percentage
points lower than the last presidential election (Washington Post,
12/1/10). There were also "an unusually high number of null and blank
ballots—about 6 percent" WashingtonPost.com, 11/30/09).

After helping legitimize Lobo's presidency, U.S. media ignored the
aftermath. Amnesty International (6/28/10) recently "accused the
Honduran authorities of failing to address serious human rights
violations that followed the coup." The Committee of the Families of
the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (2/28/10) reported 310 human
rights violations just 30 days into Lobo's presidency. At least nine
journalists have been killed (AP, 6/15/10), making Honduras the
world's most dangerous country for journalists in the first quarter of
2010 (Reporters Without Borders, 6/16/10). Nobody has been arrested
for these murders.

According to the New York Times (6/6/10), the dismissal of four
lower-court judges in May who were critical of the coup was only an
illustration of the "country's political divide"—one that the Times
and its media brethren seem happy to put behind them.

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CNDP joins the Raïs' AMP & Kamerhe's Season in Hell

1. CNDP joins AMP

Kin was flabbergasted by the recent signing of an agreement at the
headquarters of AMP on Avenue des Huileries in Lingwala Commune
between CNDP, the former rebel movement once led by renegade general
Laurent Nkunda, and the Raïs' Alliance of Presidential Majority. An
unanticipated earth-shattering move by CNDP which thus joins the Raïs'
cartel of 50-odd political parties--with the Tutsi movement proudly
hoisting its flag amidst the other flags flying in front of the AMP
headquarters.

Radio-Trottoir pundits make a real hoo-ha about this "unholy alliance"
with a movement once backed by Rwanda and which had wreaked havoc to
vast swaths of North-Kivu Province. They anticipate a resentment by
the peoples of eastern Congo, where the memory of massacres and rapes
perpetrated by CNDP troops is still vivid, and speculate that this
alliance could cost votes to the AMP in the upcoming 2011 general
elections. Some wicked tongues read this development with the skewed
template of Honoré Ngbanda, the Paris-basis Congolese diaspora radical
opposition leader: the Raïs is a Rwandan and a Kagame plant who has at
last unmasked himself!
Critics also point out that the chief of CNDP military wing Gen
Jean-Bosco Ntaganda ( a "fugitive" who has an ICC arrest warrant
hanging over his head) and his men are adamantly refusing to be
individually moved by DRC defense authorities from the territory where
they are entrenched with their command structure intact.

Asked specifically about the oddity of a party qua
army-within-the-army in a recent radio interview, André Alain Atundu,
an AMP stalwart and a one-time Mobutu's chief spy, said--in the
gobbledygook of Mobutuists that has since become the speak of the
presidential majority's politicos' talking points--that there lies
precisely the very "paradox of action dynamics" characterized by a
"time-lag between a resolution or an idea and its implementation." All
Atundu meant to say was that in the end CNDP would see the light and
come around. Pressed on the issue of making peace and an alliance with
CNDP "without justice" for its many victims in the Kivus, Atundu came
up with a novel postulate of social contract à la Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. "The most important thing in a society isn't justice,"
Atundu said. "It's solidarity. Solidarity trumps justice!"

It's solidarity, stupid! A new slogan for brushing aside impunity. Brilliant!...

Opposition politicians angrily accuse AMP of turning into a hoarding
beast of political parties--bereft of political ideas but fueled by
the single-minded goal encapsulated in the slogan: "re-election of the
Raïs in the first round." The new tunnel-vision banner of the
country...

2. Vital Kamerhe's Season in Hell

This past Thursday, in a live televised event, Vital Kamerhe came out
swinging a vicious Louisville at the head of the Raïs.

During a two-hour-long event at the unveiling of his party--the Union
pour la Nation Congolaise (UNC)-- he reiterated what he said the
previous week in an interview with "Congo Média Channel" (CMC) TV
station: his break with the Raïs' PPRD party he co-founded for losing
sight of its fundamental objectives.

In a speech laced with Biblical references, Kamerhe then launched an
all-out with no holds barred attack on the Raïs's rule: lack of
vision, rampant corruption, the population's squalid impoverishment in
a country rich in resources, a "parallel government" that actually
runs the DRC (a concept reminiscent of Jason Stearns' hypothesis of
"concentric circles of power" around Kabila), etc. And, he vowed, if
designated by his own party and if asked by the "people of God" (the
Congolese), to run for president next year.

The unveiling of Kamerhe's party was a star-studded affair with, in
the packed audience, heavyweight opposition figures and outspoken
critics of the Raïs, among whom were: Azarias Ruberwa of RCD and his
sidekick RCD Senator Maître Moïse Nyarugabo; the leader of the Bakongo
separatist cargo cult of Bundu-dia-Kongo and independent MP Ne Nsemi;
the President of MLC parliamentary group François Mwamba; MLC MP
Thomas Luhaka, a strident scourge of the Raïs; top-level
representatives of UDPS-Limete wing (Tshisekedi) and UDPS-Rigini
(dissidents from Tshisekedi wing); and pro- and anti-AMP
journalists--as well as Kamerhe inseparable "accomplice in political
crime" of lese-majesty, the savvy Kudura Kasongo, owner of CMC TV
station and estranged spokesman of the Raïs. For Kamerhe's ambition is
also to see the opposition united--not with the purpose of him
becoming its leader but in order to mount a coordinated assault on the
Raïs come the elections of next year.

In keeping with this objective, Kamerhe revealed that he'd visited
Jean-Pierre Bemba (as well as Thomas Lubanga) who is an ICC prison
inmate at The Hague. According to Kamerhe, he told Bemba to keep his
chin up as he'd end up being released and will definitely "return home
to strengthen democracy!"

Kamerhe vowed to embark the very next day (last Friday) on a political
blitzkrieg in his stronghold of eastern DRC to make his pitch in stomp
speeches in Kisangani, Goma, Bukavu, and Kindu.

As it turned out last weekend, Kamerhe was making that vow without
reckoning with the "act of God" constituted by the zealotry of AMP
stalwarts who happen to be at the helm of the 4 eastern provinces and
their supporters.

MP Thomas Luhaka once quipped in an interview with belgian Francophone
TV channel RTBF that democracy stops at the exit gate of the Palais du
Peuple--the Parliament building in the Lingwala Commune. And Kamerhe
experienced first-hand this conventional wisdom imparted by MP
Luhaka...

In Kisangani, Kamerhe was roughed up by AMP supporters and his
banner-totting supporters were prevented by cops from welcoming him at
Bangboka International Airport; in Goma, authorities deployed troops
and riot cops to scatter his supporters who were then attacked by AMP
militants, and his rally was banned; in his hometown of Bukavu,
Kamerhe was denied permission to hold a rally at the Place de
l'Indépendance; and he didn't even bother to stop in Kindu where the
governor of the Maniema Province, who had riot cops deployed in the
wee hours of morning, blasted him in the syncretic speak similar to
Kamerhe's own Bible-speak: "Power and authority stem from God! It's
written in The Holy Bible and in The Holy Koran. There's no way I'll
let this Monsieur come on my turf and defile the Raïs!"

This outburst so much outraged RCD Senator Moïse Nyarugabo that he
made the round of radio and TV political programs to denounce the
terrible "Ouattara-ization" of Kamerhe and the dangerous
"Gbagbo-ization" of the Raïs--using the Ivorian debacle as a
cautionary tale.

AMP politicos, on the other hand, downplayed the strong-armed tactics
used to derail Kamerhe's eastern blitz on "local politics by local
politicians" and their overzealous support of the Raïs.

In any event, Vital Kamerhe cut short his tour and flew back to
Kinshasa on Sunday--a wounded dog with his tail between his hind legs!

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Football War: Sorehead TP Mazembe fans "japanize" Chinese in Lubumbashi...

Yesterday evening, Congolese were glued to generator-powered TV sets
(rolling blackouts demand them!) of ngandas (sidewalk bars) to watch
the final of FIFA Club World Cup 2010 in Abu Dhabi between Inter Milan
and TP Mazembe of Lubumbashi (3-nil).

Though a historic first for an African team and therefore a matter of
national pride no matter the outcome of the match, Congolese fans
proved to be sore losers.

At the nganda in the Matonge neighborhood where I was watching the
match, the audience, mistaking the Japanese refereeing the match for a
Chinese, blamed the referee for being partial to Inter Milan and
started hurling abuse at him--and at all the Chinese!

In Lubumbashi where TP Mazembe hails from, this accidental
"japanization" of Chinese turned violent last night, as AFP reports:

«Congolese police have fired over the heads of residents in the city
of Lubumbashi after local football club TP Mazembe lost the final of
the Club World Cup to Italian giants Inter Milan in Abu Dhabi.

Mazembe were hoping to become the first African winners of the event
but Inter, the European champions, proved too strong as they cantered
to a 3-0 victory in Abu Dhabi.

The loss sparked sporadic looting in Lubumbashi as disappointed fans
took out their anger on Chinese-run stores, an AFP correspondent
reported.

Some fans who watched the game on television in the capital city of
Katanga smashed windows and began looting Chinese-owned mobile
telephone premises but police intervened and restored order and nobody
was reported injured.

During the game, some fans had criticised several decisions by the
Japanese referee and, mistaking the official's nationality, had
chanted 'Chinese go home.'

China has a substantial commercial presence in Lubumbashi and Katanga,
with Chinese firms involved in copper mining in the region.»

These football riots accompanied by looting are quite common in the
DRC where strangely West African businesses had on more than one
occasion taken the brunt of Kinois fans' anger for a loss suffered by
a Congolese team in the neighboring capital of Brazzaville! But TP
Mazembe players and fans are even more mercurial soreheads than the
rest of the Congolese football "nation." For instance, four players of
TP Mazembe--including the team skipper, striker Trésor Mputu--are
still banned for one year by FIFA for assaulting a referee in the
middle of a match in Kigali (Rwanda) last August.

The "japanization" of Chinese is indeed an interesting instance of
what I'd call "cross-ethnic misperception," for lack of the
appropriate term. In the US, some expert witnesses have even started
questioning the validity of identification by eyewitnesses of alleged
crime perpetrators belonging to different ethnic groups than their
own! In New York City (if my recollection is correct), a few years
back, African-American gang members attacked a group of young Japanese
tourists, mistaking them for members of a rival Korean-American gang
they had a beef with. And yet Americans live in a multiracial country.
Though the Chinese have been around since Mobutu's years, Congolese
are still hard put to tell them from Japanese or Koreans...

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Memo to Gbagbo: "Go into exile to South Africa by Sunday or else!"

It now seems that during his failed mediation between Alassane
Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan, former RSA president Thabo
Mbeki offered exile with impunity in South Africa to Gbagbo, who
turned it down and instead came up with a crazy plan of his own: an
amicable Kenyan-style arrangement, with Ouattara as Vice-president!

According to Mbeki's scenario, Gbagbo could thus be joining deposed
Haitian president Aristide in South Africa. Let's remember here that
Haitians, who were recently disenfranchised in rigged elections
monitored by the UN and the international community, still
unavailingly want Aristide--the most popular politician of Haiti--to
go back home and to take over the reins of government.

The Haitian debacle should give one pause amid the international din
for sacrosanct democracy in Côte d'Ivoire. In the ongoing universal
clamor against Gbagbo, the international community has succeeded in
putting out of the mind of global denizens the other electoral debacle
over which it presided in Afghanistan where Hamid Karzai stole both
the presidency and the legislature under its nose--and arguably with
its encouragement...

Two days ago, Kenyan PM Odinga joined the posse of Gbagbo's tormentors
by calling for military intervention in Côte d'Ivoire. Well, Odinga
should have first called in international military intervention in his
own country where the usurper Mwai Kibaki, who brazenly stole the
election, is still in power. One is indeed at a loss to understand why
ICC Prosecutor didn't include Kibaki on his list of suspects, for
without the fraudster Kibaki electoral violence would never have
happened in Kenya.

This week, the hat-donning Nigerian president-by-default Goodluck
Jonathan, acting on behalf of the regional organization ECOWAS, told
Gbagbo to step down or face financial starvation (ECOWAS is set to
give access to Ouattara into the accounts of Côte d'Ivoire at the
bloc's bank) or, worse, military action--though this latter option was
undoubtedly only implicit in the message.

Let's also recall here that Nigeria isn't a model of democratic and
transparent election and process. The presidential election that put
in power the ticket Ya'ardua-Jonathan was marred with violence and
accusations of fraud. And for months Jonathan and the ruling party
bamboozled the Nigerian nation about the medical condition of a
terminally-ill head of state. A masquerade denounced by Nobel Prize
winner Wole Soyinka and other Nigerian pro-transparency activists.

Btw, I quit taking ECOWAS seriously ever since it was (and is still)
intervening on behalf of the deposed Niger's president Mamadou Tandja,
who, though democratically elected, was fast climbing the autocratic
learning curve. Without the patriotic intervention by coup d'etat by
the military of Niger, Tandja, who was living the delusion of being
his country's Allah-sent enlightened despot, could have subverted the
Nigérien constitution to have himself elected again and again and
again and over again--until kingdom come!

Earlier in the chronicle of the Ivorian debacle, there was also the
joke of Burkinabè president Blaise Compraoré intervening on behalf of
democracy--while he was being reelected with 80-odd percent to the
presidency he'd ascended in 1987 after murdering his own companion and
friend, Thomas Sankara--an assassination masterminded by French
intelligence operatives. There's now talk of amending the Burkinabè
constitution in order to allow Compraoré to run for president ad
infinitum--thus making him president for life of Burkina Faso...

When Ali Bongo stole the election in Gabon (where the Electoral
Commission is run by the government), French president Nicolas Sarkozy
was among the first heads of state to congratulate him--thus
delegitimizing the call by Gabonese opposition to scrap that sham
election.

That's why when Sarkozy now screams blue murder and threatens
"Gbago-and-his-wife-who-have-their-fates-in-their-hands" with targeted
sanctions if they don't get out of town by Sunday, it all smacks of
the diktats of "Françafrique"--the French neocolonial rule with the
proxy of African leaders who could best be described by a paraphrase
of Franz Fanon's famous pun: "black skin, French mask"--that shackled
Francophone Africa for such a long time, even mocking the whole
continent in the eyes of the world by allowing the Ubuesque coronation
of Emperor Bokassa!...

No one would convince me that the outcry over Ggagbo is all about
democracy. If it were so, Rwanda would be facing stiff sanctions
today. As well as other anti-democracy culprits throughout the world
(consider the coup-issued so-called democratic regime in Honduras)...
Btw, Sarkozy once offered everlasting peace to the Congolese people in
these fairy-tale terms: share your natural resources with Rwandans and
you'll live in ever blissful peace thereafter...

There are therefore demonstrably double standards in the way the
international community approaches democracy and the Ivorian case.
There's a strong probability that at the end of the day Gbagbo would
yield to the international pressure and abide by the selective "law"
(Ban ki-Moon) of democracy, and go to live a grim nostalgic life in
Johannesburg, thereby abandoning the southerners under the yoke of
northerners. For the world can't fathom that Gbagbo isn't acting on
his own behalf or on behalf his wife and his extended family: Côte
d'Ivoire is a de facto halved country that should be permanently
split!

Whatever happens in Côte d'Ivoire, other African states need to draw
invaluable lessons from Gbagbo's experience.

The lessons--or the one Lesson--to be drawn are the following.
Whenever faced with internal strife, follow the Kagame model: be tough
and stubborn; don't ever allow UN peacekeepers within your territory
(or if they happen to be already in-country, kick them out pronto!)
and show utter contempt for the international community; don't ever
negotiate with rebels; don't allow credible back-stabbing opposition
leaders-- in fact, throw them in jail on trumped-up multiple charges
of terrorism or, more expediently, behead them in the back streets or
track them down in their exile and assassinate them; create a police
state where citizens would be living in an open prison (Rousseau =
"One could also live in peace in jail"); and, last and not least,
build a formidable military machine... Afterwards, sit back and enjoy
the universal admiration for your despotic regime!

***

(ERRATUM: In the previous post I mistakenly said that Abidjan is the
capital city of Côte d'Ivoire. Abidjan was downgraded to economic
capital by Houphouët-Boigny who turned Yamoussoukro into the country's
capital.)

Read More

Odds and ends: Massacre in Abidjan and French Minister Christine Lagarde on Julian Assange

1. Côte d'Ivoire: Instrumentalization of civilians

Once again, African civilians are paying a heavy price for their
politicians' malpractice and turpitudes--this time around, in Abidjan,
Côte d'Ivoire (photo above).

Yesterday, northern politicians Alassane Draman Ouattara (recognized
by the international community as the president-elect) and his
PM-designate Guillaume Soro sent their "unarmed" supporters in the
streets to attempt and seize the buildings of the national television
station and of key ministries still being held by the "illegitimate"
regime of southern politicians led by Laurent Gbagbo who has total
military control of the south of the country.

The death toll was quite staggering: 30 dead demonstrators and bystanders.

And northern politicians were urging their supporters for yet renewed
attempts at takeover of the state-controlled television station and
ministries today! Fortunately, according to news reports, northern
demonstrators couldn't spill in the streets as the capital city is
sealed off by security forces...

The scheme of northern leaders is quite simple, as their spokesman
revealed last evening: with a mounting death toll of civilians in the
streets of Abidjan, the UN Security Council would be forced to change
the mandate of UN peacekeepers to allow them to attack the Ivorian
army in order to effect a violent regime change! A macabre
calculation...

Firing at unarmed civilians is no doubt a horrendous state crime, but
instrumentalizing them and using them as cannon fodder or human shield
are likewise criminal acts. While Ouattara and Soro are sending people
to the slaughter, they are themselves holed up in the luxurious
precinct of Hôtel du Golfe under the protection of a 900-strong
heavily armed UN peacekeeping contingent and armed rebel militiamen of
northern Force Nouvelles (some of whom were seen by witnesses firing
at Ivorian security forces from the crowd of demonstrators--btw, the
very presence of armed Forces Nouvelles militiamen in Abidjan speaks
volumes about UN-brokered peace deals). How cowardly...

2. French Minister of Economy Christine Lagarde on Julian Assange

Asked in a TV interview with Canal+ to choose between Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, French Minister
of Economy Christine Lagarde said yesterday:

"That's difficult because they are really interesting characters, both
are determined to support freedom of expression which is in my view
one of the fundamental liberties.

I'm not cautioning everything he's done, but I think that at the core
of his action there is freedom of expression with its consequences
[succédanés] and its drawbacks."

Lagarde's position is at odds with the stances taken by 1) her own
boss, PM François Fillon, who said that WikiLeaks at the minimum
broke the law for "theft" and for "receiving and concealing stolen
goods," and 2) Éric Besson, Minister of e-Economy [Économie
digitale]--whose portfolio I misidentified in a previous post as
Industry--who is still exploring legal ways of barring French servers
from hosting WikiLeaks. In fact, Besson's position has just become
tenuous as the powerful media group "Libération" has decided to host a
mirror site of WikiLeaks.

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The still festering meme in Richard Nixon's Racist Tapes

Richard Nixon: crook, liar, criminal, coup mastermind, and, in his
previous (and latter-day incarnations), a comeback kid. Hence the now
classic Checkers Speech. Hence his post-Watergate disgrace
foreign-policy essays and his posthumous apotheosis of the pageant of
his funeral attended by the exclusive club of all living former
presidents as well as the then president in office--with CNN and other
major networks wasting patriotic liturgical air-time on an unpatriotic
deposed president. Nixon's way of showing both of his middle fingers
to his lifelong political enemies--the "eastern seaboard liberal
elite" embodied by the Kennedy family.

Nixon imparted his racial theory to his White House coterie of
aides--one of whom, Dr Henry Kissinger, happened to be a self-hating
Jew!

Nixon's foundational racial theory, like all great theories, is
beautiful in its laconic formulation: "I've just recognized that, you
know, all people have certain traits" (Feb. 13, 1973).

Nixon expounded didactically the empirical data on those "certain
traits" he'd meticulously garnered over the years on close
observations of the various specimens of the human species and from
which he'd inferred his essentialist theory.

Here's a non-exhaustive sample:

1) ON THE IRISH:

"The Jews have certain traits. The Irish have certain - for example,
the Irish can't drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish
is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I've known gets mean when he
drinks. Particularly the real Irish" (Feb. 13, 1973).

2) ON THE ITALIAN:

"The Italians, of course, those people don't have their heads screwed
on tight. They are wonderful people, but..." (Same date).

3) ON JEWS:

"The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious
personality" (Same date).

(March 1, 1973, moments after receiving at the White House Israeli PM
Golda Meir, who was pressuring the US on the issue of emigration of
USSR Jewish citizens, an uncanny conversation ensues between
self-hating Jew Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon:)

HENRY KISSINGER:"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not
an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas
chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a
humanitarian concern."

RICHARD NIXON:"I know. We can't blow up the world because of it."

(Same date, to personal secretary Rose Mary Woods, on the state dinner
dubbed by him a "Jewish dinner" for PM Golda Meir, NIXON:)

"I don't want any Jew at that dinner who didn't support us in that
campaign. Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us."

(Same conversation, while crossing out from the dinner list
Jewish-American personalities pressing Ms. Woods to attend the "Jewish
dinner," NIXON:)

"What it is, is it's the insecurity. It's the latent insecurity. Most
Jewish people are insecure. And that's why they have to prove things."

(On his reluctance to grant amnesty to Vietnam War conscientious
objectors exiled in Canada and Sweden, NIXON:)

"I didn't notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of
those lists; I don't know how the hell they avoid it... If you look at
the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately
Jewish. The deserters" (Feb. 13, 1973).

4) ON BLACKS:

(To Ms. Woods, on the same date of the "Jewish dinner," NIXON:)

"[Secretary of State] Bill Rogers has got - to his credit it's a
decent feeling - but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing
because he's been in New York...He says well, 'They are coming along,
and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end
because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.' So
forth and so on.

My own view is I think he's right if you're talking in terms of 500
years...I think it's wrong if you're talking in terms of 50 years.
What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just,
that's the only thing that's going to do it, Rose."

***

Make no mistake; this isn't the long-dead folklore and laughable urban
myth galore. This is a virulent "meme" and it is still festering
today.

Consider what "one of the world's most prominent scientists" and "a
Nobel Prize winner for his role in unraveling the DNA," DR JAMES
WATSON, who some 3 years ago looked around and saw a perspective
"inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" [as]:

"all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence
is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really...People
who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

In other words, Nixon and Dr Watson aren't just blabbermouths spewing
once in a blue moon insensitive oddities they might live to regret and
to apologize for the next day. The minds of both Nixon and Dr Watson
are instead inhabited by the same parasitic viral meme--a dangerous
and growing entity that is pretty much alive and kicking and
contaminating thousands of other minds out there.

A year ago President Jimmy Carter saw this malignant meme rearing its
ugly head in the minds of tea-partiers and birthers brandishing
Photoshopped face-painted Obama in Masai penis sheath or waving signs
advising "Obama-go-back-home-to-Kenya"... No one took Carter
seriously. Even Obama distanced himself from Carter's perspicuous
diagnosis!

There are similar memes of the same genus: sexism, anti-gay
bias--including the gesticulations of Senator John McCain latching on
to "don't ask-don't tell" as if the very life and future of a nation
depended on it, and unwittingly by the same token reminding people of
his previous frantic gesticulations and verbal ejaculations against
the doom that would lay waste on America if a Dr Martin Luther King's
Day was ever implemented!

One could almost pity these meme-contaminated people as we do
alcoholics: their minds are simply diseased!

The only problem is that, being totally unaware of their disease and
holding positions of power, they step onto the public stage where they
use their bully pulpits to spread wide and far the virus!...

I have in mind here all the meme-stricken minds that continue to
dispense publicly with impunity their symptomatic meme-induced
"psycho-talk" (Ed Schultz) in crazed fits of possessed freaks: Glenn
Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, and zany tea-partiers
and birthers...

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WikiLeaks finds a permanent mirror site on French daily "Libération"

Libération, a Paris-based center-left daily close to the French
Socialist Party, has just decided to host a mirror site of WikiLeaks.
(I translate below the full editorial penned by Laurent Joffrin,
director of Libération, to justify the move.)

This is in defiance of the move by Industry Minister Éric Besson who,
two weeks ago, announced that he was exploring juridical ways of
banning the hosting of WikiLeaks on French sites and servers.

A possible legal battle could be taking shape between Libération, a
media powerhouse, and Besson, a controversial and stubborn socialist
turncoat who had presided over Sakorzy's much-decried and now
abolished Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.

Here's my translation of Laurent Joffrin's editorial::

Why "Libé" hosts WikiLeaks

To attack WikiLeaks illegally, as do a number of states, is a menace
that all free newspapers should denounce.

By LAURENT JOFFRIN, Director of "Libération"

Libération, anarchist of the Net? By hosting the site of WikiLeaks,
hounded on a worldwide scale, are we conforming to the ideology of
absolute transparency in which Michel Foucault saw a form of insidious
of totalitarianism? In no way. Democratic states have the right to
keep secrets and to act, in legal forms, in the shelter of recognized
laws of confidentiality.

But the organs of information, on the Net or elsewhere are not and
shouldn't be the extensions of states. They have as function to inform
the citizen and strive, in doing so, to understand what happens behind
the scenes of organizations--public or private.

In a radical form, this is that which does WikiLeaks, which made sure,
it needs to be emphasized, to latch on to respected medias of the
world press in order to make public informations it had obtained. The
attacks carried out against these useful tormentors have as of this
day no legal basis.

And for a very good reason: in a democracy, the right of information
overrides the logic of the powers that be; to illegally attack
WikiLeaks, is, all things considered, to set up a virtual Guantánamo.
A menace all free newspapers must denounce.

Read More

Kin on tenterhooks

If you believe politicos appearing on TV these days, Kin is on
tenterhooks. And though Radio-Trottoir, with its permanent cynicism
towards the political class whose members it deems as irredeemable
thieving thickos, is playing things down, some political jitters are
nonetheless palpable in the Congolese capital.

The headline is of course the return on Wednesday, December 8, of
ÉTIENNE TSHISEKEDI aka LIDER MAXIMO aka TSHITSHI, the veteran leader
of the "Pavlovian" radical opposition. First slated for Sunday,
December 5, Tshitshi's return was finally postponed to Wednesday. The
postponement was necessary as on that Sunday Kin was astir with the
triumphant high mass celebrated by Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo
Pasinya--recently returned from Rome where he was created cardinal by
Pope Benedict XVI--at the packed Stade des Martyrs, with, in
attendance, the Raïs, the cabinet, the MPs and senators as well as the
First Lady of neighboring Congo-Brazzaville--a DRC citizen--who was
representing her husband).

At the Vatican, Congolese diaspora radical opposition activists (many
of whom belong to European section of Tshitshi's UDPS) attempted to
physically bar from the solemn service the official Congolese
delegation led by AMP stalwarts and Kinshasa-born Évariste Boshap,
Speaker of the National Assembly, and MP Yves Kisombe, a defector from
MLC. Vatican protocol, with the muscled backing of the Swiss Guards,
had to intervene to make way for the shaken delegates. (About two
years ago, Yves Kisombe was mugged by the same diaspora activists in
London.). No wonder Cardinal Monsengwo in his homily at the Stade des
Martyrs thanked with uncharacteristic effusiveness the Raïs
(undoubtedly seething with anger at the slighting of his delegation at
the Vatican) for his financial assistance for the feast and the dinner
at the Vatican.

The return of Tshitshi did nevertheless coincide with the Raïs'
(disappointing for many) State of the Nation address before the joint
chambers of Parliament reunited in Congress.

That's why there was so much anticipation at what Tshitshi would have
to say at his residence where hundreds of the thousands that welcomed
him at N'Djili Airport had congregated.

Tshitshi--who was absent from the country for 3 long years for medical
treatment, first in South Africa, then in Belgium--appeared frail and
the old geezer he's become: he just turned 78. Slumped in a chair,
wearing a cap and oddly thick sunglasses in the night that has fallen
over the city, a mike held in front of his face (is he that weak he
can't even hold a mike?), Tshitshi managed to blurt out a somewhat
rambling short speech.

Tshitshi complained about the soaring commodity prices in Kinshasa
markets, announced the UDPS' congress opening Saturday (yesterday) and
his candidacy for president for the presidential election next year
before urging his supporters to "go home and spread the news!"

Tshitshi is arguably a case study of a powerful politico who
needlessly squanders political capital.

His first damning mistake was to sideline his party in the 2006
general elections, claiming that they would be rigged as they were
nothing more than a machination orchestrated by the international
community to legitimize the incumbent president! This kind of
conspiracy theory mindset is what made MP Yves Kisombe, in a recent
interview, rightly qualify Tshitshi's political discourse as "archaic"
and "wacky" [désaxé], and therefore unappealing to mainstream voters.
UDPS willingly forfeiting its rightful place in the political arena
had quite unforeseen damaging consequences. It doesn't have one single
MP or senator in Parliament, and has thus the irrelevance of what is
called here the "non-institutional opposition." Moreover, it won't
consequently have a representative in the Commission Électorale
Nationale Indépendante (CENI) that is about to permanently replace the
transitional CEI. According to the law voted in the National Assembly,
the majority has to line up 4 candidates and the "institutional
opposition" 3 candidates--who would then be approved or rejected by
MPs' votes. The institutional opposition has already lined up its
members, none of whom is from the UDPS.

Tshitshi's call to his supporters (called "combatants") "to go home
and spread the news" shows another "archaic" communication MO gravely
lacking in strategic thinking. With all the funds UDPS has, the party,
unlike all the other political organizations, doesn't own a TV or
radio station that could help spread its message nationwide. In
contrast, MLC's Jean-Pierre Bemba owns two TV and radio stations (CKTV
and CCTV) that continue to unflinchingly support him during his
ongoing ordeal at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

More damning still is the split within UDPS over Tshitshi's slapdash
move of turning his party into a family affair by promoting as his
political heir his unqualified son Félix Tshisekedi.

Beside Tshitshi and his rocky return in the Congolese capital, former
Speaker VITAL KAMERHE rears his head once more by announcing on Friday
that he's resigning from the National Assembly and setting up his own
political party--the Union Nationale Pour la Nation Congolaise
(UNPNC)!

Kamerhe made his thundering break with the Raïs' party, the PPRD, in a
televised interview on the TV station "Congo Média Channel" (CMC)
belonging to Kudura Kasongo, the erstwhile spokesperson of the Raïs.

He revisited his demise from the speakership and his break with the
Raïs over the joint anti-FDLR Rwandan-Congolese military operations.
He said he didn't see how Rwandan and Congolese troops could possibly
wipe out the FDLR in the limited operational time-frame given, while
Rwandan troops couldn't even come close to achieving that objective
during the 5-year Rwandan military occupation of the very same
territory where the FDLR are entrenched.

Bold as brass, Kamerhe didn't rule out a run in the presidential
election of next year! Well, this would prove to have been more easily
said than done. The presidential majority AMP is a formidable
nationwide cartel of 50-odd parties, whereas Kamerhe could only
slightly encroach on the Raïs' constituency in his (Kamerhe's) home
province of South-Kivu.

But Kamerhe is a talented charismatic campaigner who could be
"carbuncular" to the Raïs' AMP if he were to enter into a coalition
with Tshitshi. And, as it turns out, he was among the stalwarts
featured Saturday evening on TV being ushered in on the podium at the
opening of the UDPS Congress for solemn handshakes with the
widely-grinning Lider Maximo.

An appearance that was certainly duly noted and frowned upon by the
presidential majority. Renewed vicious negative personal attacks are
therefore to be expected against Kamerhe and Kudura Kasongo in the
AMP-controlled medias, over their "political harlotry."

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Starbucks Blues: No country for coffee lovers

Please do us a favor...Go to the nearest Starbucks, pick any coffee in
the panoply of coffees being offered, order one of the cup sizes
expressed in fake Italian, and send vibes of existential compassion to
us Kin coffee-loving denizens criminally deprived of that daily
elemental pleasure.

And don't you ever forget to drop something into the tip cup for those
Starbucks heroes clad in green or black aprons. There was a red sign
at the now defunct "Ed's Bar" in Boston that read: "Tipping isn't a
city in China." You remember that...

In Cambridge, Massachusetts--an islet of madness surrounded by the
sanity of Boston; a madness that got the city the dubious
qualification of the "People's Republic of Cambridge"--I used to
"diss" Starbucks in favor of our 2 local "1369" coffee shops, as did
other Cantabridgians.

Well, being now in a city without coffee shops, I've outgrown that
ill-advised anti-corporate romanticism. I wish Starbucks were as
ubiquitous here as in American cityscapes.

Kin is simply hell on earth for those of us for whom a morning coffee
is an experience akin to satori--a shame for this country that once
was a byword for robusta and arabica coffees.

Well, they nonetheless sell here a very bad made-in-Kinshasa coffee
called "Carioca" in 25-g plastic packets that has neither aroma nor
taste to speak of. I still have to find out whether this coffee is
home-grown or imported and just packaged in Kin.

But fortunately now and again a relative who lives in Bukavu would
come to Kin on business trips and bring me one or two 250-gm packets
of Burundian "pure arabica coffee" with "sealed-in aroma" produced by
a company called OCIBU (see snapshot of the packet above).

This past Sunday, my Bukavu relative brought me one paltry OCIBU
coffee packet, which gives my mornings these days some semblance of
normality. But, alas, for how long?...

In the early afternoon of Wednesday, the Raïs read his State of the
Nation address in a soporific drone for more than 2 long hours. Not a
balance sheet of realizations but a petition in bankruptcy as it was
yet another recitation of promises. The Raïs didn't once mention
coffee among the crops he wanted to see their production resume--as he
did for cotton in Gemena.

Well, coffee and palm oil (another erstwhile major export of the
Congo) ought to have prominently figured on the list of the Raïs.
What's more, it's my contention that cities without coffee shops are
travesties of cities...
(Bookstores and cinemas have also vanished here, a far cry from the
urban standards of Nairobi where I used to buy books and enjoy movies
at the cinema of the open mall of the Village Market a short drive
from where I used to stay on Kitisuru Road.)

And as I sullenly look at my dwindling OCIBU arabica coffee packet
this morning, I measure the extent of this country's economic and
urban collapse. One American social scientist spoke of the frightening
"villagization of Kinshasa." That truth has only recently sunk in...
This is an unfriendly city for the urban "flâneur" (stroller)--what
with open sewers, brooks choked by shitty refuse and plastic bags and
bottles as well as layers upon layers of plastic bags...

Frustrated and in a Starbucks-blues mode, I drink up the last drop of
the third cup of my morning Burundian coffee in the city-village of
Kin...

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WikiLeaks (the "Dictatorship of Transparency") vs. The Planetarchy

The imperial chronicle of the Planetarchy. The First 100 Years or The
American Century (concept of futurist George Friedman).

Planetarch's Log...

The Empire strikes back at Julian Assange: trumped-up double rapes,
extradition to the US, life sentence without the possibility of parole
or more expendiently the American signature of Crime and Punishment:
Death Penalty (trumped-up charge of "terrorism": guilty as charged by
Sarah Palin)...
History tells us about the incredible reach of the Roman Empire (my
favorite books used to be the massive volumes of Gibbon's "Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire"): once you were deemed an enemy of the
Republic, the geographical world suddenly contracted under your
feet--you couldn't find shelter or peace anywhere in the "civilized"
territories nor even in some "uncivilized" outskirts, however remote
and peripheral they happened to be relative to Rome--as the Empire
could still "strike back" at will, any time, anywhere...

And the reach of the American Planetarchy is a zillion times more
formidable than that of the Roman Empire and its nuisance capacity
infinite--what with from benign political and economic pressures on
foreign governments and organizations, to the drones that could blow
to smithereens entire communities... In that sense, the world has
shrunk to a tiny global village for Julian Assange...

But the Roman Empire didn't have the elastic territory of cyberspace
and thousands of dedicated cyber-guerrillas to reckon with: "PayBack
Operation." A planetary video game: bring six-packs, boys, and let's
enjoy the game!...

Rogue States--this paradox: the very states (or, in this case, the
Planetarchy and its powerful European satellites) that qualify others
as "rogue" are the planet's most rogue states.

These entities make up their own rules as they go along. They are
above morals as they are the ones who set up states' moral standards.
There is no "moral equivalence" with the rest of the world's nations.
Hence, China behaves "with no morals" in his penetration of Africa
(dixit Ambassador Johnny Carson, WikiLeaks cables)!

China behaves with no morals in Africa? What is lost in the diplomatic
translation here is the fact that Ambassador Carson, who utters this
silly remark (there are no countries with morals), is African-American
and a descendant of enslaved abducted Africans. Slavery, an immoral
system of political economy...

When it was morally convenient and economically sustainable for these
powerful rogue states to set up slavery, colonization or racial
discrimination as systems of government and political economy, these
states readily erected those systems of governance as norms.

And when it was politically expedient in the name of "national
security interests" to go around the world murdering expendable
"commies" of the likes of Patrice Lumumba and propping up in their
stead "compliant allies" of the ilk of Mobutu, they did so without so
much as a second thought or any consideration for the devastating
long-term consequences such ill-advised choices could have for
millions of innocent people. One could demonstrate, for example, that
the assassination of Lumumba for instance was the first in a series of
events that lead directly and logically to the 5 million victims of
Africa's World War and the current endemic of rapes in eastern
Congo...

And when it suits the Planetarchy to go after a patron saint of the
First Amendment like Julian Assange, heavy artillery is brought out to
fire from the hip.

Julian Assange's materials are important in that they show
contemporaneous diplomatic choices being made. At the same time, they
show that those making those choices are big-time incompetent morons
wearing thick blinders! Hence the US embarrassment--all the more
stinging as it only took one low-level employee to have access to
millions of sensitive documents and to leak them! One sees the point
of the Aussie Foreign Minister: don't blame the beholder, blame the
person that moons! (Translated into Swahili proverb. This whole
WikiLeaks debacle shows the limits and the incompetence of the
Planetarchy incapable of securing the secrets it spawns).

I mean, who are the insensitive dupes, nitwits and assorted suckers
who wrote these lame WikiLeaks cables? Ambassador Johnny Carson among
others?

Decades before the diplomatic gossips released by WikiLeaks there were
other more damning cables powerfully narrated by Madeleine G. Kalb in
her stunning book titled "Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa--From
Eisenhower to Kennedy." A rereading of that book is in order today
against the backdrop of the WikiLeaks cables.

The obnoxious content of the WikiLeaks cables shows that state roguery
continues unabated...

There's also the issue of TRANSPARENCY as a yardstick of good
governance. It is the shibboleth repeated to weak governments of
Africa who in turn rehash it to donors in a unison singsong--an
article of faith of the global religion and the prerequisite of the
sacrament of development monies.

But powerful states don't actually care about transparency. That's why
they are the biggest manufacturers of secrets (and lies). That's why
they have massive listening posts. That's why they do control the
world with strong-arm "immoral" methods... That's why classification
has gone haywire. That's why they classify gossipy tidbits by moronic
diplomats. Just for the heck of it!... And because they can.

And that's why Julian Assange is their enemy number one as he
undauntingly turned the projectors of transparency in the wrong
direction.

Élisabeth Roudinesco, a French historian, in an article published by
"Libération," has accused Julian Assange of being a conspiracy theory
buff committed to the DICTATORSHIP OF TRANSPARENCY. (Gorbachev used to
decry the "dictatorship of transparency" of glasnot and perestroika;
look where Russia is today)... A terrible system where denizens would
be apprised of all state secrets. A dictatorship worse than the
dictatorship of the proletariat...

Well, Élisabeth Roudinesco need not worry. Julian Assange's
dictatorship of transparency is unfortunately doomed to be
short-lived. The Planetarchy and its satellites aren't going to get
caught with their pants down again. And transparency will be confined
to its natural precinct: the backwater of developing countries...

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A US anti-terrorism training module for DRC spies in Kin

A source at the Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR), the DRC spy
agency, tells me that high- and mid-level security agents went through
a one-day anti-terrorism training module this past Friday, December 3,
in the plush Binza neighborhood of Kin.

The training module was given by American agents, though my source
couldn't tell which American agency was involved. The agent who gave
the PowerPoint presentation was one Julie.

The module topic was WMD identification and detection. The source
tells me that a suitcase detector device was given to the Congolese
by their American counterparts. My source also adds that the device is
worth $3,000--but I suspect that such a detector would cost ten times
more. (Is this a detector of dirty bomb or of radioactive materials,
Congo having vast quantities of uranium?)
Parts of Julie's PowerPoint presentation comprised gory pictures of
terrorist acts worldwide and statistical data evincing the fact that
though US interests and citizens are primarily targeted by terrorists,
the bulk of terror victims are however non-US citizens. Therefore,
anti-terrorism shouldn't be viewed as an American obsession but as
everyone's rational concern. This is no doubt a way of raising a sense
of local ownership of US anti-terrorism drive.

There seems to be a resumption of collaboration between Congolese and
US intelligence communities, which has cooled off since the waning
days of the Mobutu regime, with more and more high-level Congolese
intelligence officials going to the US on short training and
conference missions. And last week training would be a most welcome
trickling down of training to operatives on the ground.

During the Cold War, Kin was one of the hubs of US intelligence
activities in Africa. There was a huge NSA listening post a short
distance past N'Djili Airport, whose disused grid of
antennas is still visible from the road and still interdicted to the
public.

One hopes that this renewed intelligence cooperation with the US would
at least help: 1) in improving security at N'Djili Airport, highly
vulnerable due to its proverbial laxity and corruption; and 2) in
refocusing ANR, lately accused by opposition MPs of reverting to its
political police practices under Mobutu, on its proper intelligence
and counterintelligence purview.

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Erratum Redux

Well, this is the challenge one faces when writing a post on
BlackBerry Memo Pad, then copying and pasting it on the field of an
outgoing email as an automatic self-posting post.

The word "Erratum" was thus cut off in the previous post.

Apologies.

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ratum (Debray's quote in previous post not an "aphorism") and Festive Sunday in Kin

1) I mistakenly characterized Régis Debray's quote in the previous
quote as an aphorism, though I correctly defined the latter: "a terse
formulation of a sentiment."

Heraclitus, the master aphorist of all times, had coined some stinging
aphorisms--like this one: "Bigotry is the sacred disease."

***

2) Festive Sunday at the Martyrs' Stadium in Kinshasa

The first mass celebrated by the newly created Cardinal Laurent
Mosengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa is under way in the densely-packed Stade
des Martyrs of Kinshasa.

The Raïs, the Prime Minister, and many other political authorities are
in attendance.

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Côte d'Ivoire: A "State of Barbarism" or just "Illiberal Democracy"?

"Civilization might be defined as a slow effort destined to reduce the
costs of succession wherever possible, and the state of barbarism as
one in which the passing of the torch is effected amid bloodshed or
through a simple relation of forces" (Régis Debray).

***

With the exception of a handful of countries, in Sub-Saharan Africa,
contentions, violence and bloodletting always mar the electoral
process. It's a law of political "physics," as predictable as the
freezing of water at 0 degree centigrade.

One has still to see the dawn of the day when an African politico
who's lost a bid make a phone call to a rival and congratulate him
(or her) for a "hard-fought campaign," the oft repeated formula on
election nights in the US.

There are routine accusations of fraud and rigging, even when
impartial international observers vouch for the transparency of polls
(DRC in 2006, or, more recently, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire)

At times, frauds and more or less insidious "confiscation of power" do
occur that obtain laughable landslides (Burkina Faso, Rwanda). Or
outright bloody inter-ethnic strife (Kenya). And the nullification of
electoral outcomes is also attempted when polls go counter the
anticipation of the powers that be (Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire).

Where democratic alternation seems to take hold, sooner or later the
"new" leaders transmogrify into banana-republic autocrats clinging to
power even by the skin of their teeth (Senegal). And vestigial
opposition leaders transform their political parties into family-run
organizations, complete with monarchical successions (UDPS party in
the DRC).

There are "political leaders" but no "political sensibilities" as one
would encounter them in modern democracies (left, center and right of
the political spectrum) but in their stead you have tribal or regional
or, as witnessed in the DRC during the 2006 elections, linguistic
affinities (or cleavages) and allegiances.

In other words: clientelism, patrimonialism (or a tribe's hope of
sharing the loot of the plundered state) or just sheer "tribal-ness"
as the closed horizon of electoral platforms and expectations.

Small wonder then that politics is a dangerous game in Africa. The
powers that be would certainly kill and maim their political
opponents-- the "Others" or the "Sorcerers" as the soukous singer
Franco Luambo once treated anti-Mobutu politicos in a campaign song
titled "Candidat na biso Mobutu" (Our candidate is Mobutu). Angry and
vicious mobs of the opposition kill too--in the name of the tribal
party. Monetary or tribal gains and interests are pegged into slots
that modern democracies usually allot to patriotism and political
partisanship.

Instead of being staffed by independent experts, national electoral
commissions are dangerous dens where political (or tribal) appointees
squabble and question the motives of their colleagues every step of
the way.

While the "state of law" prevails in modern states, a chronic "state
of barbarism" afflicts Africa. But make no mistake: though African
regimes function as if they were staffed by outlaws, scofflaws, and
cutthroats, they use proficient and meticulous legalese to usurp power
or visit judicial atrocities upon political opponents (Côte d'Ivoire,
Rwanda).

More often than not, African elections are funded by the international
community. That's maybe why Africans don't respect the democratic
electoral process. They don't feel the pinch of the prohibitive "costs
of succession" (Debray). In the DRC, despite millions of dollars
invested in the electoral process and the sacrifice of men and women
working in the peacekeeping force(some of them coming from as far as
Pakistan, India or Guatemala), Congolese opposition parties had the
gall to call the first democratic elections to be held since
independence a "farce" orchestrated by the international community to
keep the incumbent at the helm of the state. In Rwanda donors' monies
are simply "embezzled" with total impunity for the incumbent's
reelection.

This international funding of elections and peacekeeping operations in
turn make short shrift of the much trumpeted sovereignty of African
states...

It seems that the only option the UN has in its intervention toolkit
when confronted anywhere with an internal armed conflict is "dialogue"
at all costs--and this form of intervention is often necessary given
the heavy civilian "collateral damage" that inaction might cause.
Africa therefore becomes the only place on earth where armed rebels
are recycled into the legitimate established national armies (DRC,
Côte d'Ivoire).

And this UN dialogue fixation transforms parts of some countries into
very dangerous inhabitable non-state territories: eastern DRC; or the
"Mason-Dixon Line" of sorts splitting Côte d'Ivoire in half: the south
of the country vs the rebel-held part in the north where armed rebels
who still control that side of the country's territory actually
terrorized pro-Ggagbo voters and observers at polling stations.

Has the UN ever suggested to Colombia and Peru to integrate into their
national armies and political class the FARC or the Sentero Luminoso
rebels and their leaders? Has the UN ever pressed China to integrate
the Dalai Lama and the millions of dollar disenfranchised Tibetans
into its political game? Côte d'Ivoire is in Africa, after all, where
anything goes...

We are now witnessing in Côte d'Ivoire the surreal situation where the
head of the UN peacekeeping mission single-handedly assumes the right
to "certify" electoral results, thereby contradicting and
de-legitimizing not only the earlier finding of the Constitutional
Council--which is supposed to be the final authority in these
matters--but the whole Ivorian state as well (arguably a situation
worse than power vacuum).

Then again, as Marshall Sahlins had it, "usurpation itself is the
principle of legitimacy." In Côte d'Ivoire, we have at this moment two
ongoing competing usurpations (and legitimacies): by Laurent Gbagbo
and by the UN (or the coterie of superpowers constituting the Security
Council within the UN--a highly undemocratic club). And only time
would tell whichever of both legitimacies would prevail.

At the same time, foreign countries (like the US, France, etc) take
upon themselves to congratulate and anoint one of the candidates in a
contested election. As one Ivoirian official remarked, this could have
amounted to an African government declaring Al Gore or George Bush the
winner in 2000!

The international community is setting up in Côte d'Ivoire a
dangerous precedent that might further undermine the legitimacy of
African states, a situation where political legitimacy would stem not
from within but from without--the "government in exile" being the
extreme consequence of this kind of reasoning.

Are Congolese supposed to take seriously the US outrage at the
situation in Côte d'Ivoire when they still remember that the first
democratically elected Prime Minister of independent Congo was hounded
and assassinated by the US and its Cold War allies as Mobutu was being
propped up by them? Realpolitik amnesia?

Fifty years after their nominal independence, African countries are
therefore pathetically weak and continue to wallow in a state of
barbarity with apparently no end in sight.

Let's change gear and talk about China which I mentioned above...

Am I going to take Debray's aphorism at face value and claim that
China lives in a "state of barbarism" just because succession is done
"through a simple relation of forces" within the Communist Party?

In point of fact, Debray's aphorism is just what an aphorism is, "a
terse formulation of a sentiment." An undemonstrative quip.

To explain the African (or Ivorian) electoral oddity, where every 4 or
5 years there's ritual bloodletting over elections, I'd rather rely on
the well-documented thesis of Fareed Zakaria in "The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal democracy at Home and Abroad": You don't first
build democracies, then expect economic growth and sustainable
institutions to follow suit. It's the other way around. In fact, it
was under the "illiberal" regime of President Houphouët Boigny that
Côte d'Ivoire saw a steady economic growth unparalleled in the region.

After independence, African elites, propped up by narrow Western
interests, wasted precious time instead of building their countries'
economies. Democracy is a luxury "residents of the republic" can
afford only when they've forgotten the lexicon, reflexes, and behavior
of basic needs.

The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped that Africa always
apes Europe (or the West) too little too late. African democratic
fever is definitely one of those nonsensical imitations Godard had in
mind.

Maybe what Africa needs right now is to see the emergence of more
leaders of the likes of Kagame and Museveni, then worry about
political democracy afterwards... though this would be music in the
ears of aphorists and essentialists: "See? Africans are barbarians who
aren't yet ready for democracy!"

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