by Richard Gowan | Aug 24, 2011 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
While I am not a regular reader of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, I know people who are. And they are not happy about this story from the Congo…
Congolese security forces have seized a jeep belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping operation and arrested a UN employee suspected of trying to smuggle over tonne of minerals out of the country, the government said on Monday.
The incident will embarrass the UN force, MONUSCO, which has helped prop up Democratic Republic of Congo’s weak armed forces but is also often accused of not doing enough to protect civilians and has been involved in sexual abuse scandals.
What happened?
Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said the incident took place on Sunday evening at the border crossing in the eastern city of Goma.
“Border police … and other security services … have seized a load consisting of 24 packages of cassiterite (tin ore) each weighing 50kg, on board a MONUSCO jeep,” he said.
A police investigation is under way and two people, including a Congolese U.N. staff member, have been arrested, Mende said.
As the lovely portrait of a lump of cassiterite at the top of this post suggests, trying to move a tonne of the stuff around by jeep might not to be the most subtle plan ever. For good discussions of how to monitor, rather than exploit, the DRC’s extractive industries, look at the papers from CIC collected here.
by Alex Evans | Aug 24, 2011 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOzR3UAyXao[/youtube]
by Richard Gowan | Aug 23, 2011 | Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, Off topic
Readers of academic journal Addiction will have become rampant eurosceptics after perusing a recent article by Rebecca Gordon and Peter Anderson entitled “Science and alcohol policy: a case study of the EU Strategy on Alcohol”. I didn’t know that the EU had a strategy on booze, but the bloc has a habit of launching “strategies” with variable amounts of substance. In this case, the EU Council asked the European Commission to devise a strategy on reducing alcohol-related harm. The Commission published a Communication on the subject in 2006. Is it any good?
Although the Communication acknowledges and supports existing interventions which have high evidence for effectiveness, such as enforcing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits for drivers, it extensively promotes other interventions which have been shown to be ineffective; for example, recommending education and persuasion strategies as a measure across all its five priority areas.
In other words, dear readers, the Commission is boosting policies that don’t work.
Measures to influence price are mentioned only once in relation to sales in drinking venues limiting two-for-one drinks offers. Measures to control physical availability are mentioned infrequently.
It doesn’t really sound like the Commission’s heart was in it…
It also focuses its efforts more on mapping member state actions and coordinating knowledge exchange than on providing concrete recommendations for action or developing Europe-wide policy measures. This may be a compromise between the rights of Member States to develop national policy and legislation and the obligation of the European Union as a collaborative body to protect health.
So this is all about sovereignty and subsidiarity? Not quite…
Furthermore, it has been suggested that the European Union’s roots as a trading block emphasizes collaboration with industry stakeholders and this influences the ability to prioritize health over trade considerations.
Who might these powerful “industry stakeholders” be? I have a faint idea, as I once had a brush with them myself. Late last year, I co-authored a piece in the European Voice with Sushant K. Singh on the EU’s relations with India. We noted that efforts to sign off on an EU-India free trade agreement had been held up by disputes over liquor tariffs, and expressed surprise that a potentially important strategic relationship was being complicated by the price of booze. Soon afterwards, a representative of the European Spirits Organisation wrote a sniffy letter to the European Voice arguing that “that spirits are the EU’s most important agri-food export (worth €5.7 billion in 2009).”
I am told that EU-China relations are similarly complicated by the interventions of the, er, liquid lobbyists in Brussels on liquor tariff issues. I’m all for boosting agri-food exports, of course. But one would think that the EU could at least set aside “trade considerations” when it comes to stopping its citizens drinking themselves to death.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 23, 2011 | Middle East and North Africa, Off topic
The New York Times reports that this sculpture of a golden fist crushing a U.S. jet was one of Colonel Gaddafi’s favorite works of art. What is the point of being a tyrant if you surround yourself with such rubbish?
A further thought on the Gaddafis’ style choices: there has been much excitement about Gaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam marauding around Tripoli after he had reportedly been captured. A number of journalists have noted that he was sporting “a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers.” This has been read as evidence of his willingness to fight on. But this overlooks the fact that Seif notoriously undertook postgraduate study at the LSE. In my experience, a high percentage of LSE students can be found with “a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers” at almost any time, and it is usually a sign that they are going to tell you something complicated about Habermas, not fight to the death.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 22, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
So, it’s all over in Libya. Or is it? I tend to concur with Stephen Walt’s nervous take:
The danger is that we will have another “Mission Accomplished” moment, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, President Obama, and their various pro-intervention advisors give each other a lot of high-fives, utter solemn words about having vindicated the new “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, and then turn to some new set of problems while Libya deteriorates. And as an anonymous “senior American military officer” told the New York Times: “The leaders I’ve talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out.”
What is to be done? I have published a short post over on the ECFR blog, arguing that it’s not clear that the Libyan rebels can restore stability and normality on their own:
Luckily, outside help is forthcoming. The next weeks will see international officials (and no doubt a lot of spooks) hurry to Tripoli with offers of assistance. Months ago, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a Special Adviser on Post-Conflict Planning on Libya to prepare for this moment. The adviser, Ian Martin (who I previously had the privilege of working with on a review of the UN’s political missions) has had time to make detailed preparations. While European governments and EU officials will want to play a part in reconstructing Libya, the UN is best-placed to coordinate the overall international effort.
But the next few weeks may well be chaotic, with regime die-hards and criminal opportunists on the loose, and it will be necessary to ensure that UN and other civilian officials are sufficiently well-protected to do their job properly. It’s unlikely that Libya will turn into another Iraq, but it’s certainly conceivable that someone might try to repeat the attack on the UN’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003 that killed its chief Sergio Viera de Mello.
In this context, the EU could help Libya’s transition to stability by resurrecting a proposal that failed to work out earlier this year. Back in April, the EU Council approved an EU military mission (EUFOR Libya) to help get humanitarian aid into Libya if UN aid officials requested help. As I pointed out in an op-ed in June, the proposal wasn’t very well thought-out, and the mission never got off the ground.
But now the idea’s time may have come. If the EU Council wants to help speed up the Libyan transition, it should declare its willingness to offer one or two of the EU’s Battle Groups to protect and assist UN and other civilian officials for up to three months. This wouldn’t be full-scale peacekeeping, but a narrower job of guarding compounds and convoys and providing secure communications while Libya moves towards stability.
What happens after that? It’s worth checking out this new piece by Daniel Serwer on stabilizing Libya and (with apologies for the immoderate self-advertising) a piece that I wrote with Bruce Jones and Jake Sherman on the same topic back in April. Long-time hawk Max Boot also deserves credit for persistently raising the subject but I find his solution – a big Western operation comparable to that in Kosovo in 1999 – incredible.
