To the editors of the BBC,

Your appalling “Muslim Brotherhood expands westward” by Magdi Abdelhadi  seems entirely based on two writers who have no academic qualifications or credibility and one of whom has a long history of extreme right-wing religious bigotry.  The premise, pushed by Steven Emerson and several extreme right organizations like the Committee for the Present Danger and David Horowitz’s “Front Page” (the creator of “Islamo-Fascist Week”, who regularly republishes Emerson’s work), is that the Muslim Brotherhood has underground organizations plotting terror throughout the west.  It would be laughable if it were not so pernicious.

Perhaps your writer might Google Steven Emerson’s name before you base an entire story on his fantastic and hateful views.

Some examples:

“controversial terrorism expert Steve Emerson-who has been accused of sloppy journalism and with having a pervasive anti-Arab bias-and behind the scenes was remaking himself into a self-styled authority on terrorism” (Salon.com, January 19, 2002).

Emerson was the prime mover behind the extreme-right “documentary” “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” which extreme-right groups produced to be distributed during the 2008 US presidential campaign.  It argued that Islam “is threatening, with all the means at its disposal, to bow Western civilization under the yoke of its values.”

Isabel Macdonald noted of Emerson in 2008 that:

“his research has been repudiated many times over. This is an “expert” who initially blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Middle Eastern terrorists, and who is now going around claiming that the Bush State Department is collaborating with extremists.”

From the Minnesota Independent:

Emerson has a long history of getting into hot water over his anti-Muslim rhetoric. In the 1998 nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, Emerson fed reporters with an informant who said Pakistan was set to strike India with a nuclear weapon. The media eventually found the informant to be unreliable – but not until international media had used Emerson’s source and intensified an international crisis.

In 1990, he was accused of plagiarism in his writings about Pan Am 103.

He sued a Florida paper after it published reports that he was supplying reporters with documents he said were from the FBI. The Florida Weekly Planet reported that the documents were frauds and Emerson sued. When he couldn’t substantiate his claims, he withdrew the lawsuit.

Emerson once claimed that an extremist Muslim group put out a hit on him and that the FBI offered to put him in a witness protection program. The FBI denied that claim.

Emerson told Fox News “80% of the mosques in the United States are controlled by the Wahhabists. That’s the reality. No one wants to admit it. They’re the ones that attract terrorists.”

In March of 1995, Emerson told The Jewish Monthly, “nearly all of the Islamic organizations in the United States that define themselves as religiously or culturally Muslim in character have, today, been totally captured or dominated by radical fundamentalist elements…”

In 1998 Emerson falsely wrote that in the 1960s one of his critics, California journalist Reese Erlich, ‘was charged with conspiracy to carry out violence in support of the Black Panthers.’ Emerson apologized and paid Erlich $3,000,” (Washington Post, November 14, 2001).

Emerson had concluded  before September 11th, that “the U.S. has become occupied fundamentalist territory” (Jerusalem Post, 8/8/97)

Emerson is quoted by The Palm Springs (California) Desert Sun Newspaper as saying that “Islam’s ‘leadership and organizational superstructure’ threaten Western values” and that (radical) Muslims “want to conquer the United States. They want to conquer Europe.”

The Wall Street Journal stated in 1993, “Mr. Emerson’s prime role is to whitewash Israeli governments and revile their critics.”

Emerson appears regularly with Pamela Geller, the woman who is organizing the anti-Mosque protests in NY right now, along with another of Emerson’s regular collaborators, Robert Spencer.  Spencer, author of the “Jihadwatch” blog who regularly equates all Muslims with terrorists, and their religion is “a cult”.  With inspiration from groups like the English Defense League and Dutch neo-fascist Geert Wilders, Spencer and Geller run the group “Stop the Islamization of America”. Emerson regularly contributes to their work.  Emerson has claimed that the Imam of the Islamic Community Center proposed for lower Manhattan Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and former GW Bush era US government advisor, is a “radical extremist cleric who cloaks himself in sheep’s clothing.”

One could go on.

What possible research could your reporter have done to afford this — controversial at best — writer the forum of an entire article showcasing his crackpot theories, which include the belief that every major Muslim-American organization are involved in terrorism though a secret ‘US Muslim Brotherhood” group?

How could someone identified as your “Middle East Editor” be so startlingly ignorant of the background of their sources?

I expect a reply,

T Miles, NY, NY

For a little background on Emerson see:

• http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1443
• http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Emerson_Steven
• http://www.cairchicago.org/2007/03/31/steven-emersons-disturbing-track-record/
• http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/05/steve-emerson-wowser/
• http://www.cairchicago.org/2009/05/05/career-hatemonger-steven-emerson-enraged-by-cair-chicago%E2%80%99s-positive-social-engagement/
• http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/42070
• http://smearcasting.com/smear_emerson.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isabel-macdonald/the-anti-muslim-smear-mac_b_133695.html
• http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/ground_zero_mosque_imam_bush_partner_for_peace.php

Related articles by Zemanta

• CounterPunch Wire: Steve Emerson Eats Crow (counterpunch.org)
• Jon Stewart Takes on the anti-Muslim Discourse in the Media | loonwatch.com (loonwatch.com)
• Expanding west (bbc.co.uk)
• Making Islamophobia Mainstream (fair.org)
• Douglas Farah’s Delusional Delight | loonwatch.com (webcache.googleusercontent.com)
• Experts in Terror | The Nation (thenation.com)
• Washington Post Neutral on Anti-Muslim Bigots Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller | loonwatch.com (loonwatch.com)

Sometimes you just need to hear that not everyone has lost their minds.

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.

Related articles

• Why FIFA Is To Blame For Missed Wins For USA, Germany (bleacherreport.com)
• Maurice Edu goal should have counted against Slovenia (video) (ballhype.com)
• U.S. rallies for amazing 2-2 draw with Slovenia (worldcup.si.com)
• USMNT 2, Slovenia 2 — postgame thoughts and reaction (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Did Referee Rob US of World Cup Win? (cbsnews.com)
• US Suffers From Law of the Wrestling Ring (nytimes.com)
• What was the call that ruled out Edu’s goal? No one’s saying. (g.sports.yahoo.com)
• US furious over disallowed goal (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Phantom goal isn’t only reason US left with a draw (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• USA vs. Slovenia 2010 FIFA World Cup: Officiating Costs USA a Victory (bleacherreport.com)

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.”

• A Short History of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)
  • “Upside Down World Cup”: Raj Patel on How South Africa Has Cracked Down on the Poor and the Shack Dwellers’ Movement Ahead of the World Cup
  • The First Poor People’s World Cup on African Soil from the website of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign
  • South Africa: World Cup for All – (Durban Social Forum)
  • SOUTH AFRICA: Poor people’s movement draws government wrath (IRIN News)
• Riot police move in as World Cup pay protests spread (The Guardian)
• Thousands protest against World Cup spending (Mail & Guardian Online)
• World Cup in South Africa: Six red cards for FIFA (Links International Journal)
• South Africa’s World Cup is a disgrace (radical africa)
• South Africa’s World Cup fest not worth the coming hangover by Patrick Bond (ZCommunications)
• Back the people of South Africa, not the football teams (newstatesman.com)
• Raj Patel: Off-Side at the World Cup (huffingtonpost.com)

Other Related articles

• The World Has Embraced Johannesburg, Influx of Tourists “Simply Amazing” (bleacherreport.com)
• Thousands protest against FIFA, World Cup excess (g.sports.yahoo.com)
• Blatter hails African effort (skysports.com)
• What will South Africa look forward to after soccer spotlight dims? (mysanantonio.com)
• Nelson Mandela’s World Cup overshadowed by death of great-granddaughter in crash (telegraph.co.uk)
• Vuvuzelas Silenced As Bafana Boys Blow It (news.sky.com)
• Home cooked (theglobeandmail.com)
• South Africa could pay penalty for unions’ Cup action (reuters.com)
• Security guards strike at World Cup matches in South Africa (cnn.com)
• ESPNsoccernet: Soccer Defeat compared to Soweto uprising (m.espn.go.com)

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

• Save the Children: Blog from Aid project in Niger
• Oxfam: 2010 West Africa Food Crisis
• Make a one time donation to Oxfam

Related  news articles

• Les touaregs victimes de la sécheresse… et du gouvernement? (France 24, 21/05/2010)
• Témoignages sur la crise alimentaire les zones de Kidal et Ménaka (L’Observateur, 17/05/2010)
• ReliefWeb » Document » Bulletin hebdomadaire de morbidité, de mortalité et de surveillance nutritionelle au Niger – Semaine epidémiologique no 19: du 10 au 16 mai 2010
• ReliefWeb » Document » ENQUETE SUR LA SECURITE ALIMENTAIRE DES MENAGES AU NIGER (avril 2010): RESUME EXECUTIF (mai 2010)
• ReliefWeb » Document » SAHEL ET AFRIQUE DE L’OUEST Perspectives sur la sécurité alimentaire, Avril à Septembre 2010
• Chad hunger overshadowed by Niger food crisis – UN (af.reuters.com)
• Niger junta to provide free food to one million (af.reuters.com)
• Hunger in Niger (undispatch.com)
• CORRECTED-UPDATE 1-U.N. aid agencies sound alarm on Niger food (af.reuters.com)
• Farmers, Aid Groups Call Attention To Drought, Food Shortages In West Africa (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Famine in Niger (one.org)
• Niger facing famine, millions at risk — president (af.reuters.com)
• Famine Persists in Niger, but Denial Seems in the Past (nytimes.com)
• Hunger in Niger (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• ANALYSIS-Niger junta’s hunger alarm is break with past (af.reuters.com)

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.

Related News Links

• Niger leaders ‘must have degrees’ (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Hunger in Niger (undispatch.com)
• Niger junta to provide free food to one million (af.reuters.com)
• Famine in Niger (one.org)
• CORRECTED-UPDATE 1-U.N. aid agencies sound alarm on Niger food (af.reuters.com)
• Famine Persists in Niger, but Denial Seems in the Past (nytimes.com)
• Niger and China (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• Niger facing famine, millions at risk — president (af.reuters.com)
• Niger calls for $123 million in food aid (af.reuters.com)
• ANALYSIS-Niger junta’s hunger alarm is break with past (af.reuters.com)

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.

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Niger’s junta sets election plans (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Niger junta should leave within a year–commission (af.reuters.com)
• Niger opposition calls for quick elections (cbc.ca)
• Niger: 11 Months to Transition (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• UPDATE 1-Niger junta should leave within a year -commission (af.reuters.com)

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)

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.

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.

• ENVIRONMENT-NIGER: French State-Owned Company “Poisoning” Poor. By Julio Godoy (IPS). 12 April 2010

Related articles

• FACTBOX-Foreign investment in Niger (af.reuters.com)
• Niger: Tuareg Backlash Against China (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• China says Niger oil, mining deals unaffected by coup (af.reuters.com)
• Uranium major Niger must review contracts -groups (af.reuters.com)