Link Banana

I recently heard — I wish I remembered where — Bill Clinton make the point that a moratorium on the use of the word “Africa” would likely make people see the continent as a little less bleak. While there are still big problems in places like Somolia, Chad, Sudan, and the DRC, there are a number of good and improving governments and economies.

The Ibrahim Index, a quantification of a sub-Saharan government’s quality, highlights the differences. While the aforementioned contries have the lowest scores, places you rarely hear about — Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Namibia — are relatively well run. (South Africa’s pretty good too, but we constantly hear about it.)

(via Passport)

I haven’t been following too closely, but I found both of these pieces on the (recommended) indictment of the Sudanese president to be useful:

• John Boonstra clarifies a few points — like that Bashir hasn’t yet been “indicted” — that don’t come across clearly in most reporting of the story.
• Richard Goldstone considers whether this will help or hinder the prospects for peace.

Foreign Policy’s annual figures about the risk of states disintegrating is out. I must say I’m surprised by the rather good scores of Chile and Mauritius.

(via The Economist)

Mark Helprin says that that’s the solution to the crisis in Darfur.

Which would the regime in Sudan prefer? To be annihilated, or to discontinue its campaign of mass murder in Darfur? Given Sudan’s record, very few nations would be willing to come to its aid with other than a pro forma whimper, and given the geography and the air and naval balance, no nation could. Though many a repressive dictatorship would protest, and Sudan’s patron, China, might determine to speed up the formation of the blue-water navy it is already building, little else would change except for the better.

Also of note, a damning rebuttal from Mark Goldberg.

In case you’d forgotten the mess of Darfur, this photo’s likely to snap you to attention.

(via UN Dispatch)

Perhaps mistakenly, I shrugged off Nicholas Kritstof’s first attempt to convince the world that the Sudanese government is ready to restart hostilities in the south of their country. (For those who are wondering, Darfur is in the west, and their had been a long war in the south that ended a few years ago.) After a second column on the same idea, I figured it at least beared mentioning.

Since late November, there have been repeated clashes in the Abyei area between South Sudan’s armed forces and a large tribe of Arab nomads, the Misseriya, which is armed and backed by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Mr. Paguot said that several hundred people had been killed in these clashes, and that some of the gunmen were government soldiers who had taken off their uniforms to masquerade as tribal fighters.

On Feb. 7, gunmen from the Misseriya shot up and looted a bus arriving in Abyei and began blockading the road that leads into the town from the north. That has cut off supplies, so shops in the town market are running out of fuel and food, and prices are rising.

Not only has there been increased rebel activity in Chad, says The Economist, but it may be coming from a different situation nearby.

The violence this weekend in Chad’s capital on the western edge of the country—and also in smaller towns farther east—is really a symptom of a conflict spreading from Darfur which has already caused instability in neighbouring Central African Republic and in the east of Chad. The timing of this particular outbreak of hostilities may be explained by efforts to install a European Union peacekeeping force in Chad in an effort to contain the conflict in Darfur. The force of 3,700 soldiers EU troops, plus a few hundred UN policemen, was ready to deploy but has been prevented from doing so by the latest fighting. Rebels—and their backers in Sudan—may have decided to act before the Europeans at last got their boots on the ground.

In light my last post, finding “Independence Daze” in the New York Times Magazine feels oddly repetitive and serendipitous. In any case, George Bass raises some interesting and vexing questions about when and how an area should be allowed to become a new country. The implications, he argues, go far beyond Kosovo.

A group can properly ask for international recognition when it is being oppressed so harshly that self-rule becomes the best method to save lives and liberties. As Allen Buchanan, a Duke University philosopher, has argued, the right to secede is a “remedial right only” — a way of rectifying a wrong. This rule should be taken together with the late John Rawls’s reminder that there is no right to secede when secession entails subjugating another people. Rawls thus denied a Southern right to split off from the United States in 1861, since that course of action perpetuated slavery. These two guidelines would help insulate international political debate from the endless claims and counterclaims of nationalist rhetoric.