Some troubles along African borders

The Nation of Islam, which once was the religious organisation of charismatic African American leader Malcolm X, has hosted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir at a conference in Detroit. Bashir identified his government as 'Africans' despite the fact that government agents in Darfur have been involved in a war seen as Arab versus African, with the government firmly on the Arab side. For an alternative Islamic view of the conflict, an American Muslim blogger has published an excellent analysis from the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA). The government agents, accurately described by the MANA as a "paramilitary proxy", are known as the 'Janjaweed', and they are acting illegally. Many villages have been destroyed, locals have been killed and refugees have gone over the border into Chad.

Sudanese president Bashir rejected the deployment of a UN force in Darfur. The Sudanese government has recently been involved in a civil war in the South, and is guilty of human rights violations in the Nuba mountains region. There is also a significant Islamist movement in northern Sudan. As can be seen from the map, Sudan is another African state with very straight lines as its borders. This is because the borders were created by somebody with a ruler in Europe, as a result of what is known as the Scramble for Africa. Sudan is Africa's largest state, and is bigger than western Europe.

The border with Chad over which so many refugees have moved is just one example of how the international system of states fails to capture the reality on the ground. Many people in the region have cross-border tribal identities. This is the situation in many states - one example of the inadequacy of state boundaries is the breakup of the entity of Yugoslavia. Also, on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Banyamulenge tribe are the Congolese equivalent of the Rwandan Tutsi tribe, and the Banyarwandans are a Congolese Hutu tribe. These tribes in this Great Lakes region were divided by the creation of the current international borders. Rwanda appears to be tiny on the map in comparison to the massive DRC. Again, the DRC is larger than western Europe, which gives an idea of the scale of these problems.

There is a severe and ongoing humanitarian crisis in this region. According to the US State Department, Rwandan infant mortality rates are very high. This UN report cites the high numbers of people without food, clean water, and adequate sanitation in the eastern Katanga province of the DRC, and the failures of the international community to provide assistance. The lives of these people are marked by a high degree of vulnerability. This can be seen as a crisis of development. The region is also home to a range of wildlife, including many of the great apes. These apes are actually hunted by the hungry population. But as usual, these stories and lives fail to receive much international focus. They're not really tied into the transnational networks and structures of globalisation, I guess you could say...

The Islamists - our new friends?

If you are taking the Political Islam course or generally interested in our southern and south-eastern neighbours then you might find the latest issue of the CEPS* European Neighbourhood Watch useful. It contains an interesting editorial on a developing dialogue between Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa on the one hand and European policy oriented NGOs and think tanks on the other. A number of things are interesting about this, notably the way the dialogue bypasses the governments of Europe and the Middle East, both of whom have decided that the only good Islamist is a severely repressed Islamist. But it is also interesting in its frankness about the fundamental existential questions that divide the European outlook from the Islamist one. The newsletter also contains a piece by Dr. Saad el-Deen al-Katany, the parliamentary leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in which he sets forth the need for dialogue between Islamists and the West.

If you are not interested in political Islam or the Middle East, the newsletter also reprints an interview with President Lukashenko of Belarus, one of world's great scary leaders.

You can download the newsletter here: CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch

*Centre for European Policy Studies