Filed under Blog, Footy by T. Miles on 18 June 2010 at 3:15 pm
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…by complaining about the officiating.
Two hours after the US Match: Koman Coulibaly still on en.wikipedia.org's "List of bank robbers and robberies"
Also see Koman Coulibaly’s Wikipedia Page Defaced Within Minutes of US Draw
Poor Koman Coulibaly. He had a tough match, and as much as I love Mali and Malian football, that was a goal he whistled off. I do find it interesting that he’s an anti-corruption investigator, and likely the most honest and unflamboyant fella you’ll ever meet. So there’s really no justification for accusing the man of corruption over this, as Eric Wynalda apparently did, from the front lines of his California living room.
But what an appalling call.
Filed under ..., Afrique by T. Miles on 17 June 2010 at 4:29 pm
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One of the many menacing street parties of South Africa, from soccerphile.com. Chilling.
As I’ll be spending most of this month tied to a TV or radio, I’ve so far noted one shocking fact: The South African World Cup is not riven by crime, corruption, shoddy workmanship, or terrorism. In fact, things are going swimmingly, the stadiums operations and infrastructure are beautiful, and the only deaths among the 450,000 visitors have been from road accident and falling off a mountain while admiring the scenery.
There’s more realistic complaints about the football itself, especially after the South African side’s almost suicidally poor performances (not to mention a drought of goals, dashed expectations for most African sides, and disastrous English, Spanish, and French performances). But even if rose gardens have not been delivered on the field or in terms of secondary development, so much of the press run up was so negative — even years of rumors that FIFA would move the cup at the last moment — that it may come as a shock how happy foreign fans are with what they’ve found in South Africa.
One report quotes a puzzled German fan. Puzzled because, despite the foreign press hysterics, he can go to a local bar and discover “I’m the only white guy in the room but I feel very safe.”.
South African sports reporter Peter Davies has a wonderful piece entitled An Open letter to our Foreign Media friends, marveling at the gloom of foreign media outlets who quake in terror of “machete-wielding gangs roaming the suburbs in search of tattooed, overweight Dagenham dole-queuers to ransack and leave gurgling on the pavement.” But surprise! There’s no fear in walking the streets provided you don’t hang a wad of cash out your back pocket. There are also a surprising shortage of wild animal attacks and collapsing stadia. “For instance, you will find precious few rhinos loitering on street corners, we don’t know a guy in Cairo named Dave just because we live in Johannesburg, and our stadiums are magnificent, world-class works of art.”
Andrew Harding, the BBC’s Africa correspondent, writes about tourists having “had some preconceptions overturned” as England fans descended on Phokeng. While local worried about hooligans (there were none), visitors realized they may have been misled about the dangers of “black Africa”. “We stayed at Sun City, said a couple from Leeds, sitting at [a black African run] bar. We were worried about the crime. But now we just wish we’d come and stayed here.”
Football, eh?
That said…
There are real complaints about South Africa — suffering from gross inequality and rampant poverty — throwing this much money at a World Cup party. I do agree. But that’s all of capitalism, not just football. And it’s not like they were really going to spend this money on poor folks. At best this can be an opportunity to cross borders in solidarity, to share these struggles, both in Africa and abroad. But I for one love sport, and the joy it brings. While those who look after the rich alone will always screw the poor, football can be our weapon as well as ours. Here are some links to the Poor People’s Movement and The Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa, and social struggles around the World Cup, including the brilliant “Poor People’s Alternative World Cup.”
Other Related articles
Filed under Afrique, Blog by T. Miles on 4 June 2010 at 4:03 pm
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It’s beautiful in New York, and the world if full of things to argue about. Here are three important issues I’ll have to get back to you on.
While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I have been trying to maintain my sanity with light reading, and sunny days on the back patio. This largely precludes the production of good (or even mediocre) writing. Further political catastrophes and World Cup drama could completely rule it out.
Despite that, there are several things which should appear here soon, plus a reading recommendation. Advice for further reading and different perspectives is always very welcome.
First, I’m working on a close reading of the latest US / West African drug arrests, this time focused on Liberia. Not to sound too paranoid, but these things never seem to hang together well when examined closely, and I’ve come to believe over the last few years that there is a commonality of interests between several right wing think tanks, a clutch of journalists and “terrorism experts”, UN Anti-Drug authorities, foreign governments, military, and local governments which play up the need for military and legal spectacle at the expense of actual work on development or ending corruption. While there is likely some real criminality going on in this case, I’m prepared to argue that this Liberian sting of aspiring West African drug runners serves more to allow these interests to further very specific political agendas.
Next, there are updates on the Nigerien political transition, with a new electoral law that has generated some controversy, while we wait for several party political and constitutional shoes to drop in Niamey (party leadership, coalitions, charges against Tandja supporters, not to mention and entirely new Constitution of the Seventh Republic that has to be written and voted on by the end of the year).
Most important to me, I’ve finally thoroughly read Dutch historian Baz Lecocq’s 2002 dissertation, “That Desert is Our Country’: Tuareg rebellions and Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Mali (1946-1996).“ As it is available online, I had read later chapters when I’d seen it cited some time ago. But having stormed through from the start, I must say that it is the best thing written on the Malian Tuareg in English (easily) and arguably better than anything in French (to be fair, I’m thinking only of articles I’ve read by Georg Klute, the Bernuses, Claudot-Hawad, and Bourgeot. I haven’t read Pierre Boilley’s “Touaregs Kel Adagh”, let alone Georg Klute’s ”Die Rebellionen der Tuareg in Mali und Niger”, which I’ve only ever seen in German). With very few changes it could be produced as a very valuable book.
Lecocq’s basic premise – which he candidly admits was not the one he began with – is that French colonialism and the process of independence heightened a pre-existing “racial” prejudice between northern and southern communities in what is today Mali, even when outsiders might be unable to easily distinguish between these groups. Independence, as well as French and upper class Tuareg resistance to the form this independence, only deepened these divisions, reinforcing mistrust on all sides, keeping these communities at daggers drawn. This has played out through profound reordering in the structures and meanings of the notoriously complex and shifting Tuareg social/political order on one side. On the other, the brutality and hamfistedness of southern politicians and military has often exacerbated conflict, frustrating Malian society. Nine of ten Malian live in the south, and these communities, having paid dearly to create the imperfect economic development and political liberties they now enjoy, have little sympathy with Tuareg demands.
If you’re anglophone and interested in French colonialism in the Sahara, Mali’s first decades of independence, the current “Tuareg problem”, or even the more general history of cultural conflict along the interface of the Sahel, there’s tremendous value in this work. Admittedly, Lecocq really focuses on the history of “free” clans of Tuareg in (what is now) Kidal Region’s Adagh des Ifoughas, who make up only a portion of the population of even this limited area. But their politics and culture are central to the 1963, 1990, and 2006/7 rebellions, and all north south relations in Mali. Without understanding this, I’ve always found the causes of fighting there hard to understand, even in relation to the Nigerien Tuareg rebellions, which seem much more enmeshed in Niger’s politics and culture.
Bibliographic References for Sunny Days
Filed under ..., Blog by T. Miles on 27 May 2010 at 7:23 pm
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A herd, starved to death, in North Mali. These animals represent many years of saved wealth and future investment for Malian pastoralists.
Hopefully by now everyone knows that parts of West Africa, especially pockets of Chad and Niger, are struggling with the worst food shortages since 2005. Alex Thurston reports that international humanitarian agencies, as well as increasingly concerned governments, are now worried that this crisis is more generalized than first reported (last September), striking areas of Mauritania and Mali.
In Mali, there is a crisis in the north (mostly Kidal Region) right now, with press reports of huge numbers of animals lost to the mostly pastoralist residents. As in Niger, prices for forage have skyrocketed, prices for animals have plummeted, so that recent reports have talked of Malians trading female goats – the future of their herds – for a single bag of rice in Algerian border markets. Malian press reports talk of traveling through rural Kidal last week, counting corpse after corpse of starved livestock, the very source of pastoralist livelihoods. Those that can have moved south, increasing the pressure on pasture and farm land, surely also risking more communal tension. Kidal Region is already rife with armed unemployed men, competing smuggling rings, and simmering tribal vendettas. The overflow from this must add sparks to the already smoldering Tombuctu and Gao Regions, not to mention the areas south of the Niger where pastoralists head during the dry season. The tragic destruction of Gao market, north Mali’s largest commercial center, by fire last week has got to be a final nail in the coffin for some people, even if the rains have now started there.
The April-June 2010 food security conditions across West Africa, according to FEWS net.
There are also reports that Bamako is hoarding food aid, sending only the old supplies stashed at Mopti north and keeping the rest in the south, where the crops were good last year. True or not, people report it as such in Kidal. On the other side, some southerners accuse Kidal politicians of profiting from the misery of their own people. Other reports again, more neutral, document intense efforts on all sides, facing nearly insurmountable shortages and logistic impossibilities.
So things in Mali, if they receive the international focus or not, are as bad as in areas of Niger.
In Niger many more farming communities were stricken by the start-stop rains of June 2009, and the pockets of Tillaberi, Tahoua, and Maradi Regions (mostly) have long reverted to crisis mode. Men are on extended “exode”, the dry season trips abroad for wage labor. Other communities have picked up en masse, fleeing to towns, other regions, or even to Hausa northern Nigeria, where some have trade or family contacts. Others still remain, depleting the last of their food stocks, and somehow making it on less and less each day.
"We are experiencing, like all the countries in the Sahel, a food crisis due to the poor harvest and the locust attacks of 2004," Mr Tandja said in 2005. "The people of Niger look well-fed, as you can see."
It’s important to differentiate between drought and famine (one may cause the other, or may not), and recognize that some places like parts of central Niger have suffered chronic seasonal malnutrition since the 1990s, and recurring drought caused famines since 1968. The causes are debated, and while climate change no doubt is happening, one should not discount the structural changes we have seen over the last 30 years. The IMF’s austerity policies which did such obvious damage to urban West Africa in the 1980s, and triggered much of the 1990-2 democratization wave thereafter, also had pernicious effects on rural areas. The “free trade” treaties of the 1990s — as Bill Clinton recently admitted in the case of Haitian farming — drove world commodity market forces into even the most protected rural communities. Subsidized western industrial agriculture can produce food and cash crops cheaper than most smallholders in the Sahel, but can also cause basic food prices to swing wildly on the back of market speculation, as we saw in 2008. As Marx famously said, in the face of commodification, structures, forms of productions, and traditions have no recourse. “All that is solid melts into air…”, and much of the rural economic structure of the developing worlds has so disintegrated in the last decades. Some areas might survive, sending farmers flooding into urban export driven production. For whatever reasons, Niger, like Haiti, never saw enough of this to absorb the mass of small farming which supports %80 of its people. They continue to literally scratch a living out of dusty millet fields, with less and less ability to turn to either community or markets when things go wrong.
FEWS net's projected food security situation (July-September 2010), Niger. We expect a normal harvest to come in September.
Some pastoralists in North Mali and Niger never really recovered from the loss of herds in the early 1970s. They starved in 1984 because of this, and (arguably) supported armed struggle in the 1990s in part because of this. [It's more complicated that this, with longstanding communities of grievance, and militants trained abroad, but the 72-74 drought can't be discounted]. These are as much political and economic/structural problems as environmental, and they need to be treated once this hungry season passes in September.
In Niger, as grim as this is, some things have improved. Then President Tandja (and current opposition leader Hama Amadou, as well as some “progressive” westerners, for the record) purposefully denied the food shortages and deaths in 2005 were “famine”. They were seeing severe seasonal malnutrition in limited areas, and most children were dying of malnutrition related disease rather than starvation. This is how people die in famines, but the “f” word has political connotations which were painful, and so it is better to try and trivialize the suffering of the rural poor, apparently. I hope there is a special ring of hell for such people. We are not hearing that this time, in part thanks to the Nigerien Junta. Salou Djibo can play on an oft repeated trope in Niger (1974 being the model) of military rule justified by food emergencies mishandled by corrupt civilians. I would hope those in Niamey recognizing this as famine would do the same if they had been in power last year. I also hope they target the structural causes that allow this to happen, after they face the monumentally complicated distribution of food aid.
Aid Agencies (links to give, and learn more)
Filed under Blog, Niger by T. Miles on 25 May 2010 at 4:14 pm
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- From 2005: “Drought has turned farmland into useless dirt…” Image via Wikipedia
An unsigned editorial from Le Pays (Ouagadougou): A quite good reflection on the educational and other restrictions coming for future governments in Niger, but tying the famine. The papers in Niamey have little mention of the small farmers and herders Tahoua, Tillaberi, Diffa, and the north, who are long out of food and fleeing their homes. It’s evidence both that patches of famine sit beside areas which had passable crops last year, and that Nigerien politics is often quite distant from the realities of most Nigeriens. The Burkinabe writer ascribes blame for the chronic malnutrition of Niger’s citizens to both past policies and horrible governance (which is only partly the case), while leaving us with the distinctly uncomfortable vision of Niamey debating constitutional clauses while elsewhere in Niger people are dying.
Filed under Blog, Niger by Tommy Miles on 13 May 2010 at 4:46 pm
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The VOA today quotes PNDS-Tarayya spokesperson Iro Sani, saying that “it has been tried once (before) and it didn’t get result(s) satisfying to the people of Niger.”
He likely refers to the the 1999 CRN Junta’s ”Fourm sur la gestion économique et financiere”, led by current junta heavyweights Col. Hima (Pele) Hamadou and Gendarme Col. Lawel Chékou Koré. Their late 1999 findings were little more than perfunctory, forcing some former regime officials to repay cash. In fact, from 1974 and 1996 coups, to Tadja’s “Mains propre” campaigns against his political enemies of 2003/2007/2009, corruption prosecutions have been symbolic and purely focused on mid level Nigeriens, never the huge neocolonial funders of the dirty system. [2007's Hama Amadou ouster as PM and later prosecution was an outlier in this, and its ripples may have doomed Tandja, fatally splitting his political machine.]
Areva and China are right to be nonplussed, as opposition leaders (who really only want payback on higher ranking foes) are skeptical. We’ll see a show but little more.
Also: The court case over who is the “real” MNSD-Nassara (the former ruling party) is winding up. The party is split between Seyni Oumarou and its Tandja appointed leadership, or the former golden boy and 2007-2009 ousted leadership under Hama Amadou. Past rulings — even under the transitory 6th republic of Tandja — favored Amadou. This would be fatal to the Tandja faction, while a loss by Hama means he would run under his new MODEN party banner, which regathers his mostly western (Tillaberi/Niamey) power base.
- Général de Corps d’Armée Ali Saibou c. 1990. He was the last man to wear that rank. Image via Wikipedia
And Also:Junta leader / President of the CSRD/ Chef d’Escadron (“Major” in the anglo-saxon system) Djibo Salou got himself named “Général de Corps d’Armée”. While most of this junta’s actions have been studiously based upon the 1999 CRN junta, that government’s leader Daouda Malam Wanké remained Chef d’Escadron until civilain rule was re-established. In fact, the last time there even was a “Général de Corps d’Armée” was 1991, when Ali Saibou was overthrown, the only man to hold that rank in Niger’s history. This continues an interesting resuscitation of the Saibou regime, often portrayed as a failed reform government and place holder between the absolute rule of Seyni Kountché and the democratic revolution of 1991. Salou sought out the long retired Saibou for a public benediction upon the new coup shortly after taking power, and has appointed a large number of officials who had served under Saibou’s short lived single party Second Republic.
I would argue this has much to do with the broad popularity which the Kountché regime is hazily remembered today, at variance with the sometimes brutality of the time, which was also conflated with the uranium fueled vast economic expansion of the late 1970s.
But the accention to a frankly ridiculous title by CSRD President Djibo Salou raises questions about the previously humble and apolitical nature of his transition. We can only hope this says little about the recently agreed upon timetable of a return to civilian rule by the one year anniversary of the 18 February coup.
Filed under Blog, NYC by Tommy Miles on 30 April 2010 at 9:55 am
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"STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A delegation of Liberian cabinet members will convene a town hall meeting on strategies for reducing poverty in the West African nation whose infrastructure remains decimated by war. The forum is Saturday at 3 p.m. in Christ…
Filed under Blog, History by T. Miles on 26 April 2010 at 12:37 pm
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The Guardian had provided blow by blow coverage of the recent hatefest between two British historians of Russia, Orlando Figes and Robert Service. Figes, once touted as the “angry young man” for historians, is more accurately the spoiled brat. A real McCarthyite ax-grinder, who augments his live hatred of dead dictatorships with a holier-than thou “narrative history” creed. This is the 1980s-90s movement of British writers who refused to get their PhDs and were able to write things non-specialists could read, extrapolating their abilities to some new academic movement, heavily laced with Thatcherist posing and making stuff up so the plot’s better. They’re oppressed, apparently.
To sum up, Figes is both a hack and an ass, but he appears on TV frequently, and his fellow academics hate him for that more than anything.
Skip to last month when more traditionalist (but no less conservative, uninspired, presidential-biography writing) historian of Russia Robert Service was “sickened” to discover rude reviews of his work on Amazon! Imagine. Through a series of clever deductions (one of the Amazon screen names was “Orlando_Birkbeck”, Birkbeck being the college where Figes teaches) it was discovered that the rival bad boy was writing said reviews, as well as abuse aimed at other “rivals”. Along with orgasmically positive reviews of his own work. As if that weren’t bad enough, Figes threatened to sic the notoriously harsh British libel laws of Service for complaining. Presented with more evidence, Figes admitted “my wife did it without my knowledge.” Having graciously thrown his life partner under a bus, Professor Figes was later forced to admit that he himself was the malicious “reviewer” (can you call people who write screeds on Amazon reviewers? Perhaps Orlando can pad his resume a bit more).
As entertaining as all this is, it’s the post-partum letters page in the Guardian that’s the real hoot. Amid calls for Figes to be fired, are gems of British wit, such as:
“I really felt for Robert Service (Comment, 24 April) after reading about the turmoil caused to him and his family by someone calling his book crap. News stories of poverty, war and starvation often overshadow the intense difficulties faced by academic historians. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding how he stoically continued to eat sea bass and go jogging while his wife went to yoga during that terrible fortnight to be truly inspirational.”
And Dr Glyn Powell sums up right-thinking opinion: “In all the furore no one appears to have noticed the elephant in the room; Robert Service’s work is, in fact, awful.”
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 22 April 2010 at 3:22 pm
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The French press is reporting that a French tourist and an Algerian guide were kidnapped by armed men today in northern Niger, near the well at In-Abangaret. Also spelled Inabangaret, it’s a stopping place on the Azzouagh plain’s Tahoua/Assamakka/Tamanrasset road. This puts it relatively near the attack of several months ago on the Tahoua/Tillia road, and within reach of the band that carried out the attack on a Tillaberi army post last month. They were traced as far as the hills of west of Tin-Essako in Mali’s northern Gao Region. While In-Abangaret doesn’t come up in the news much, it is an important seasonal gathering point for some Tuareg communities (there is a “In-Abangaret Cross” in the famed Tuareg armorial tradition), as well as being in the midst a Berabiche transhumance zone. A hand grenade attack on Algerian truckers there in 1997 caused concern, with former members of one of the Arab rebel factions blamed for running a protection racket against long haul transport.
Update 2010-04-23: There are now several press accounts of this incident, mostly pointing to speculation by unnamed Nigerien military officials, most of whom point to Malian based AQIM/bandits. The military say they will “close the border” with Mali, which is good for a chuckle. Either army would be lucky to identify the imaginary line which runs through a thousand km of desert, let alone “close” it somehow.
The AFP picked up a report that blames a group around one “Taleb Abdoulkrim”, reputedly an associate of the AQIM group of Abu Yaya Amane, himself an offshoot of Abu Zeid’s AQIM faction. Honestly, the internal workings of these groups are beyond my ken. I suggest turning to more informed sources.
One interesting factoid, Abdoulkrim is reported to have led a mosque in the tiny border town of Inhallil (a.k.a. In Hallil / Hallil / Aïn Hallil) in Mali, best known as one of two transit points into Algeria where thousands of migrants from across West Africa find themselves in a sort of purgatory, unable to cross to Bordj Badji Mokhtar in Algeria, or (more interesting in this case) dumped there by Algerian authorities.
Regardless of source, the Nigeriens seem confident these men came from Mali, but depending on reports, the actual site of the kidnapping is getting farther from both Algeria and Mali. Reuters puts the attack between In-Abangaret and Teguidda-n-Tessoumt, the salt panning settlement connected to Ingal, and closer to Agadez than Tahoua. This is also near Azelik, where the Chinese owned Société des Mines d’Azelik S.A. (SOMINA) is facing local opposition. It would also put the kidnap on the RN 11 road (really a sand piste, but a international route none the less), not on a lonelier offshoot between In-Abangaret and Tahoua, which is closer the Malian border and a place AQIM bandits have attacked previously.
I would not discount the intensifying food and livestock crisis in pastoralist northern Mali and Niger in this. It is really the much larger story going on now in this area. A European in Kidal (or even Agadez) must start to look like a walking Dollar sign to a local who is rapidly loosing their livestock to starvation, and searching for a way to feed his family. Regardless, this is big business now, and there’s no way to know if the actual kidnappers are professional smugglers, Algerian jihadists, or unemployed former rebels looking for a meal.
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 20 April 2010 at 7:33 pm
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Philomène Kaboré and her husband Sergio Cicala have given interviews regarding their captivity: she having been released some time ago, and he Friday the 16th. They were taken in Mauritania, near the border with Mali, on…
Filed under Blog, Niger by Tommy Miles on 12 April 2010 at 11:05 am
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Greenpeace’s November 2009 report on radioactivity levels in the streets of Arlit and its suburb Akokan has been repeatedly denied by French nuclear company AREVA, the operator of the two nearby mines, but Greenpeace, as well as local residents, activists, and the international press, has continued to press the issue. These two mines (one underground, one open pit) provide almost half Niger’s exports by value, and their “success” is the basis for the some 150 mining contracts sold by the Tandja regime, mostly to new Canadian and Chinese companies. Locals have long complained of the pollution from the Somair and Cominak mines. Franco Nigerien group CRIIRAD, having carried out pollution studies there since 2003, found radioactivity levels 100 times background in 2007. Construction of roads and buildings was done using radioactive mine tailings, while mine dust blows across the region from Somair pit. With the entire Talak plain west of the Aïr Massif now being sold for mining, the northern seasonal pasture lands upon which pastoralism depends will soon disappear or become polluted beyond use. This has long been known, and it is good to see renewed press attention.
Filed under Blog by Tommy Miles on 10 April 2010 at 1:37 pm
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BBC reports: "Air force head Ibraima Papa Camara and former navy chief Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto have been named "drug kingpins". "
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 9 April 2010 at 10:48 am
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"Intelligence Online" reports that the French internal security agency, the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) carried out the negotiation with the AQIM for the release of French hostage Pierre Camatte, and sent Bernard…
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 5 April 2010 at 3:35 pm
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Issikta blog republishes an urgent appeal from the mayors of Adielhoc and Tinzawaten communes in Kidal Region, northeast Mali. In a land where seasonally migrating animal herds are the economic foundation, there are reports of %40 of herds starving for…
Filed under Blog, Niger by Tommy Miles on 2 April 2010 at 12:15 pm
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Following court complaints lodged by lawyers for the 17 Tandja Ministers and loyalists Friday morning, Junta Interior Minister Ousmane Cissé has climbed down, stating that 14 of them "will be released" "for the sake of social peace." Tandja…
Filed under Blog, Niger by Tommy Miles on 31 March 2010 at 1:03 pm
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Former rebel leader Rhissa Ag Boula, along with former commander Kindo Zada, were arrested today on unknown charges, and are reported to be in the Niamey civil prison. Rhissa Ag Boula is one of the most prominent, if divisive, Tuareg leaders, becoming a…
Filed under Blog, Niger by Tommy Miles on 29 March 2010 at 8:33 pm
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The arrests I noted earlier continued Monday, with at least 13 figures being held at the Gendarmerie, including top leaders who rallied to Tandja's 6th Republic in 2009: former PM and MNSD party leader Seini Oumarou, Mohamed Ben Omar and Moktar Kassoum…
Filed under Blog by Tommy Miles on 29 March 2010 at 10:33 am
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Reuters reports "a dozen" former ministers were arrested " in suspected plot " on Monday (the 29th). They include Lamine Zeine (finance), Garba Lompo (justice), and Lamido Oumarou (mines), all of whom were detained after the coup when financial crimes were…
Filed under Artsy Fartsy, Blog by Tommy Miles on 22 March 2010 at 1:25 pm
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The latest edition of the “Worldservice blog” features tracks by Salif Keita & Les Ambassadeurs du Motel, from the first years after he left the Rail Band. I never knew there were such hard feelings.
He quotes Salif Keita:
“With the Rail Band I learned nothing, we only played what we heard. Les Ambassadeurs were more experienced: we weren’t playing modernised folklore. Les Elephants Noirs were intellectuals. Arriving at the group I signed an apprenticeship contract to study music. We really played all kinds of music. We were like a real family, I really felt more at ease with Les Ambassadeurs. We rehearsed and studied the songs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and played them the same evening.”
As always, the Dutch DJ behind “WrldServ” provides background you’ll find few other places, as well as rare tracks, and in this case, rarer video. Check it out.
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 17 March 2010 at 10:11 pm
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Jeune Afrique reports sightings of the AQIM men who attacked the Nigerien army post at Tiloa, in the far north of Tillaberi last week. Apparently the Army knew there was a chance of attack somewhere in the area, having asked for reinforcements two days…
Filed under Blog, Mali by Tommy Miles on 16 March 2010 at 3:27 pm
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It has been 6 days since (on 10 March) the a variety of formal and informal unions of Malian inter-city truck drivers went on strike, shutting down the transport of people and goods. While Bamako/Koulikoro and points northwest are served by rail from Dakar…
As I noted on the 10th of March, the CSRD junta in Niger has replaced all the civilian Region Governors with military men to administer local affairs during the transition. We now have the full list, and while I for one hate to see any military governing, a careful look at the men (all men) coming and going in Niger's Regions gives us an opportunity to examine what's going on behind the scenes, and what it augurs for the future.
More ...
Nigeriens were - are - undoubtedly pleased that the army stepped in to end a newly installed dictatorship. But criticisms of this so called "good coup" are beginning to appear even amongst its strongest supporters. With many months of transitional rule ahead, these whispers give us some idea of the problems the junta will soon face. 
One doesn't see much film, let alone color film, of colonial era African football. So you can imagine my delight when I stumbled across clips of a French colonial propaganda newsreel featuring the my favorite African club side wining a colonial cup final from 1956. 
The new military Junta in Niger has released their first real vision of their promised return to democracy. Niger's expectations, a redux of recent history, are being played to by the soldiers.
After a day of confusion, President Tandja and his supporters are under arrest by the military. I have maintained the live updates from the 18th, and added an in depth analysis of the new CSRD junta.
"Poets are feared by those in power that use violence, who are prosperous at the expense of the collective suffering." - Adamou Idé 
a dinosaur comic about about potable water conservation in sub-Saharan Africa?
The US government will make much of the arrests of three Malians who they say were part of a West African criminal network, devoted to drug smuggling and Osama Bin Laden. So far all we have is hype and what looks like the entrapment of low level criminals. 
The December 18th anniversary of the Nigerien Republic begins a series of dates which may bring the political crisis to a boil, just as mediators think they've made a breakthrough.
A brief look, if one is possible, at the simmering crisis in the northeast Central African Republic. As commentators try to come to grips with this often ignored nation, here is some recommended reading for Anglophones interested in the République centrafricaine.
Niger's rulers would have expected this to be wrapped up by now, with the previous legal deadline for a new president to pass on the 22nd with a shrug. But fears (or hopes) remain that some of those most loyal to the project are looking to abandon their President
Join the second march on the UN by Guineans and their allies in New York City, Thursday December 8th. If you can't make it, there are ways to get involved, so please do!
"If you watch it frame by frame you can pinpoint the exact moment his heart rips in half..."
Anti-fascist activist Ivan "Bonecrusher" Khutorskoy was murdered in Moscow this Monday. 
As the "Abuja I" talks begin with ECOWAS, President Tandja of Niger is increasingly backed into a political and financial corner. Will his "6th Republic" be sacrificed as a way out?
The local elections are odd enough. But "Claude Levi-Strauss" is the 4th most popular search on Yahoo? Right between "Dancing With The Stars" and "H1N1 Symptoms". 
I know all the debates about voting not changing anything, and while I tend to agree, I'm not asking you to overthrow capitalism with a vote. It won't do that. But it is a splendid soapbox.... So Vote Reverend Billy for NYC Mayor, Greg Pason for NJ Governor, and Debbie Rose for City Council. 
Popular sound systems blend traditional sounds with DJ beats, and keep people across Bamako on their feet. But will Mali's capitol ban the "Balani Show" dance parties?
A recent seizure of US arms in Nigeria highlights the profit and loss of small arms supplied to West Africa.
Blood on the streets of Conakry is a price the Junta is willing to pay for power.