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.

• Current preferred time waster: tommymiles on Twitter

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.”

Related articles

• Award-winning historian Orlando Figes: I posted anonymous reviews on Amazon (telegraph.co.uk)
• Figes’ furies (timesonline.typepad.com)
• Stop the Presses! Historian Says He, Not His Wife, Is Savage Online Critic (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes (guardian.co.uk)
• The professor, his wife, and the secret, savage book reviews on Amazon (guardian.co.uk)
• The shame of Orlando Figes | Robert Service (guardian.co.uk)
• Orlando Figes admits trashing rivals (guardian.co.uk)
• Letters: Ten days that shook the world of Russian history (guardian.co.uk)
• Orlando Figes: Historian admits to writing anonymous reviews on Amazon (telegraph.co.uk)

I recently saw an appeal from US high school students, raising funds for anti-malarial bed nets to be delivered to the DRC. “When people find out they can donate $10 to save a life,” (more…)

This one image sums up the — still — late Omar Bongo Ondimba better than any words could. If you want to see where the postcolonials learned their tricks, look to their models. Omar Bongo (née Albert-Bernard Bongo) was French through and through, like Mitterrand with a sense of style, or like a shorter Félix Houphouët-Boigny with more oil and a better car.

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• Africa’s Becoming more Despotic and Nepotistic (africaunchained.blogspot.com)
• Libreville Journal: Underneath Palatial Skin, Corruption Rules Gabon (nytimes.com)
• Gabon to recount ‘rigged’ poll (news.bbc.co.uk)

Adding to the “everything the press tells you is a lie” file, here a a couple of articles of the (literally) criminal attacks on civilians in Gaza. First, despite the byline, this article on the “siege on Gaza” was written by Sara Roy before the recent Israeli bombing campaign, and right dates the siege from November 5, when the government of Israel cut off the last remaining food going into the tiny Palestinian territory.  Note: if you put a wall around a city, destroy the little farmland on its outskirts, and ban all trade in and out for 30 years, people become rather dependent on food aid.

By the way, that image to the left is a World Food Program map of Food insecurity in the Gaza Strip (2004).  The wee yellow bit — showing relative food security — was where there had been an Israeli settlement.  Things look much worse today.

If you put people behind walls, cut off their access to the outside world and then cut off their food for two months, I can’t think of a word other than genocide to describe the situation.  Now I can see folks who are perhaps rightly attached to Israel as a haven in the face of 2000 years of oppression and genocide blowing a gasket.  But I just said what everyone will be saying in the history books.  It’s well past time you realize that you’re not doing the Jewish people any favors by supporting a government and military that murders civilians and steals their land.  (And no, appeals to G_d don’t count.  Otherwise I’d be paying rent to the Mohawks, and I’d start a religion which promised me Aruba.  That’s not how adults get along)

Lotsa good people in Tel Aviv understand this (see reports on the anti-war demos there this week) so why otherwise good people in Brooklyn have trouble with it is beyond me.

Further, the governments of Israel has maintained a two pronged policy since 1947: establish facts on the ground by occupying land and make sure there is no Palestinian opposition.

The first is done with settlements and walls and “Military zones” and “national parks” and “buffer zones” and the occasional, random killing of people (see Hebron last month).  The second is done by making sure there is no Palestinian leadership that anyone would want to share a cubical with.  First, the Israelis did this by deporting people.  Second, they used to say “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.  They’re Arabs making up a national identity because they hate Jews” I remember having government representatives tell me this with a straight face in the 1980s. They also used to say that “Arabs, because they are not as culturally advanced as Westerners, have no sense of national identity, but those in the Territories are being used as fodder by the King of Jordan to expand his territory.”  Why don’t they say this anymore? Because they got some new information and admitted an honest mistake? Or because the government and settlers don’t actually believe ANYTHING they tell the press or even the Israeli center left.  They KNOW this is a game of biding time, and they’d tell you Palestinians have gills and therefore are only occupying any dry land at all out of spite if they thought you would buy it.

But part of this process of ensuring that “there is no partner for peace” in more germane here.  The Israeli government funded (the then tiny, and even then evil) Hamas in the late 1970s and 1980s to really stick it to the PLO who were starting to look more acceptable when they stopped shooting athletes and hijacking airliners.  At the same time, the Israeli government had a policy of rounding up and expelling non-violent secular activists.  There was a whole Ghandian passive resistance group in the West Bank in the 1970s.  What happened to them?  Likud had them rounded up and deported, while releasing the founder of Hamas after serving one year of a life sentence for murder. Even Ehud Olmert was quoted in the Jerusalem Post last year saying: “Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin and gave him the opportunity to blossom”.

So what is going on now is no “crisis” from the government of Israel’s point of view. Headlines in the US press like “Israel seeks to change rules of the game with Gaza assault” are profoundly ignorant.  This is standard operation procedure.  And until the US and the rest of the world tells Israel that their support is dependent upon the Israeli government immediately accepting the pre 1967 borders (no exceptions), this will go on and on and on and on.

• Reuters/Global Voices Blog roundup from Palestine: “In Gaza it’s 9/11 every hour, every minute, everywhere”
• If Gaza falls . . . Sara Roy (London Review of Books)
• “Hamas is a creation of Mossad (English translation)“   , L’Humanité (Summer 2002).; French original version: “Hamas, le produit du Mossad”, L’Humanité (December 14, 2001).
• The Tel Aviv Anti-War Demonstration.  Adam Keller,  The Other Israel, December-2008–January-2009 issue
• Not their war: Israeli media coverage of the Gaza onslaught has largely ignored the protests by peace activists.
  Chris Dalby. guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 December 2008
• Olmert, Netanyahu clash over Hamas and Golan Heights. SHEERA CLAIRE FRENKEL. Jerusalem Post, Feb 13, 2007
• Situation Map-Gaza Crisis. 31 Dec 2008. Source: UNOSAT

That the western press is unanimous in it’s explanation of the crash and burn which is 2000′s Zimbabwe should give you pause.

Mahmood Mamdani, Africanist and Anthropologist at Columbia, and author of 1996′s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (which I recommend), thinks we don’t know enough to explain Zimbabwe so easily. If we did, we’d see this isn’t about a dying dictatorship, its about a dying dictatorship being resuscitated by riding the first crashing waves of an economic storm brewing since the end of colonialism in Southern Africa. I think he’s right.

What follows is essentially a potted political history of post Rhodesian War Zimbabwe in which farmers without land are the blind thrashing giant on center stage. The characters you may know from news reports are on the sidelines here: prodding, beating back, or doing battle with this desperate, suffering mass. No one is really fighting for him, but when foes are pushed in his way, things get well and truly broken.

Or else this is a guide on how not to recover from colonialism. Former British Minister Claire Short is quoted in this piece saying since her family was Irish, the government she represented in the 1990s no longer had any responsibility to continue to fund fixing the land mess they made in colonial southern Africa. “We were the colonized, not the colonizers” could be the cry of every carrier of Liberal Guilt when they actually have to open their wallet.

Short recap: at independence large farmers (mostly white) owned all the decent land, as the colonialists took it and shuffled Africans off to bush (the Shona) and industry or mines (the Ndebele), and a few of each to cities. The British guaranteed peace by agreeing to fund slow land transfers, but because there was no compulsion to sell, nothing ever happened. Mugabe and Zanu-PF maintained single party rule the same way the colonialists did: played to their ethnic base (rural Shona), and to their true believers they gave praise rather than help (the war veterans, never given land or jobs got medals). In the 1990s Structural Adjustment crushed what favors Zanu-PF could give and drought started starving people clinging onto the desert reservations assigned by the colonialists. Business leaders, rural and urban poor, Industrial trade unions, all began to demand something, finally, to live on. The British pulled the funding for land purchases. The international community demanded greater austerity, in line with their economic dogma. When the rural poor started taking land, Zanu-PF did what it always did: it kicked them out and gave the land back to the rich. But the west now EXPECTED rather than rewarded this, and Mugabe came up with a gamble: let people keep the land they take. Recent scholarship is challenging the picture of forced redistribution from above, and it looks like the initiative was from below, with Zanu running to catch up. With something to give, Mugabe could finally not just placate his political enemies but crush them. The reaction of the West in trying to depose Mugabe have locked Zanu and the West in a death grip, and its everyone else who’s dying.

But the worst part may be yet to come. If the colonial powers and the world’s rich won’t fix the land mess they’ve created in southern Africa, South Africa and its neighbors could be next.

Mamdani sums up:

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members – Botswana and Zambia – to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro- Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism – the land question – remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Mahmood Mamdani: Lessons of Zimbabwe. LRB, 4 December 2008

Neal Ascherson (of whom I’m unexplainably always somewhat wary) has a thoughtful — and thought provoking for those of us trapped in the US rah-rah news bubble — essay on Abkhazia in the London Review of Books. In the capitol of what the we reflexively (even on the left) call a “Georgian breakaway region” during the August Russian–Georgian War, Ascherson makes a case from a subtly Abkhaz perspective. This is something we are not allowed to see often, and while both sides nationalist propaganda should be named and shamed, the description this article gives of Abkhaz and Georgia as trapped in a great powers game and at the sharp edge of national mythology, rings very true.

The fangs of this trap are Georgia’s claims to ‘sovereign territorial integrity’, the flat refusal to accept the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia which is so eagerly endorsed by European governments and by the United States. But after the disaster of last August (the latest of at least three Georgian efforts to reassert this ‘integrity’ by armed force), three things should have become obvious. The first is that ‘reunification’ cannot possibly succeed in mere military terms. The second is that such attempts achieve precisely what they are supposed to prevent: they actually reduce the independence of Georgia, by increasing Russia’s capacity to threaten and blackmail the Georgian government. The third is that by encouraging Georgia to stick to impossible frontier claims, the West – America, above all – is ensuring that Georgia will remain its helpless client, unable to defuse its own confrontation with Russia and thus ever more reliant on American military, economic and diplomatic patronage.

Plus, we get an example of the word “farouche” used in a sentence. The cats in my backyard are farouche. Wild, a little fierce, a little skittish, a bit ignorant (or even dense), very unpolished, but with an undeniable charm. Especially Steve.

Neal Ascherson: A Chance to Join the World. LRB, 4 December 2008

Written interviews from the 1960s with the WWI German army doctor who saved Hitler’s life, reveal he really did lose a ball at the Somme, due to a wound.  The doctor, Johan Jambor,  recalled ” They called him the ‘Screamer’. He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help’.”

The Telegraph (blech) goes on to remind us of the 1940s ditty: “Hitler has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall.”, and it’s common — now conclusively incorrect — variant:

“Göring has only got one ball, Hitler’s [are] so very small, Himmler’s so very similar, And Goebbels has no balls at all.”