Eric Witte July 11th, 2008

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that on Monday, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will seek Darfur-related charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The United Nations is grappling with how the Sudanese regime might react, including by possibly targeting peacekeepers or cutting off their supplies. Likewise, humanitarian aid organizations worry about their access to people in need being cut off.

These are serious concerns, as is the major question examined in today’s New York Times about how the charges (there is no formal “indictment” at the ICC) could affect the tenuous north-south peace and what remains of the peace process in Darfur.

In different contexts, this is the same question that surrounded the indictments of Serbian and Liberian presidents Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1999 and Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2003, respectively. A major after-effect of those indictments was to make the rule of Milosevic and Taylor no longer tenable, and diminished their ability to string along negotiators ad infinitum as suited their power interests. Thus, Milosevic was no longer able to wine and dine Richard Holbrooke and maintain his position as the perceived go-to guy for stability in the Balkans. Likewise, the absurd merry-go-round of broken peace and cease-fire arrangements - interspersed by additional negotiations when Taylor felt pressure to regroup and re-arm - came to an abrupt end in Liberia following the unsealing of his war crimes indictment. In Serbia, this meant that Serbs saw their futures tied to that of a pariah. This helped to motivate the civic uprising that overthrew Milosevic after he tried to steal another round of elections in October 2000. In Liberia, it led to international demands that Taylor leave power and the country as an essential component of any peace deal.

The Milosevic and Taylor indictments also led to increased media and high-level political attention for the crises in Serbia and Liberia. In the New York Times piece linked above, Sudan expert Alex de Waal worries that “[Bashir] is prone to irrational outbursts and could respond in a very aggressive way.” That’s quite possible, and greater instability in the short term is a real danger.  But de Waal himself has a smart post up at the Africa Policy Forum blog, arguing that Sudan requires diplomatic attention at a higher order of magnitude. Charges against Bashir could not only create accountability for atrocities in Darfur, but bring increased political resources to bear on the Sudanese crises.  This could lead the international community beyond tactical crisis management, and into the realm of strategic thinking backed by requisite resources to forge a more durable peace.

• Uncategorized
• Comments(0)

Eric Witte June 18th, 2008

Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliamentary observer mission in Zimbabwe has told the BBC that his team will not approve of Zimbabwe’s second-round presidential vote next week if the government does not rein-in rampant election-related violence.

“Mr Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliamentary observers, said it was the government’s responsibility to stop the violence which erupted after the first round.

‘It’s very difficult to me to judge the degree of the violence in terms of whether it’s decreased or it has escalated,’ Mr Khumalo told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

‘But what is disturbing is that in a situation such as an election atmosphere… violence is one thing that you don’t want to see happening, because it has the capacity of spoiling an election.’”

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says that 66 of its supporters have been killed and around 25,000 displaced. MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti was arrested last week. Robert Mugabe’s government has indicated that it will bring treason charges against Biti, with the possibility of the death penalty.

Amid the bleak news from Zimbabwe, at least election observers are paying more attention (how could they not) to the conditions in which the elections are being held. Too many observer missions in the past have ended up blessing elections held in an environment of intimidation when voting and counting on election day has turned out to be relatively fair. The Liberian presidential elections of 1997 offered a clear example of this. Charles Taylor overtly threatened to plunge the country back into war unless he won. His election slogan was “He killed my ma, he killed my pa. I’ll vote for him.” International observers, eager to declare Liberia a success, called the elections free and fair. The situation in Zimbabwe is at a nadir. Some election observers, at least, recognize this.

• Uncategorized
• Comments(0)

Eric Witte March 19th, 2008

The BBC reports today that a new diamond processing plant is opening in Botswana, creating 3,000 jobs. Rough diamonds will no longer simply be shipped abroad to be cut, polished, marketed and sold. The welcome development is a reminder that efforts to regulate the international diamond trade must square the needs of places like Botswana with those of places where diamonds have brought nothing but ruin and despair.

“Blood diamonds” from other parts of Africa (and other continents), including Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have fuelled conflict and spurred atrocities. Ongoing evidence in the war-crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor before the Special Court for Sierra Leone has featured fascinating and grisly details of how this worked in West Africa during the 1990s.* Diamond expert Ian Smillie of Partnership Africa Canada, the first prosecution witness called against Taylor, explained to the court in January that where geology is such that diamonds are spread far and wide by river systems (alluvial diamonds), basically anyone can become a diamond miner. Particularly in a country as desperately poor as Sierra Leone, this means that so-called “artisinal miners” are always tempted to flock to the diamond-rich areas of eastern Sierra Leone, shovels and sieves in hand. Smillie testified [PDF] that an authority wishing to keep the masses at bay has two options: employ a large security force, or conduct a reign of terror to scare them away. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), backed by Taylor, pursued the latter option. Rape, mutilation and murder were means to control the diamond areas, and over the course of the war the diamond trade through Liberia became an increasingly important lifeline for the RUF.

Such open access to diamonds also makes accounting for the stones very difficult, and even after the war, Sierra Leone has been plagued by corruption in the diamond sector. While a small elite has prospered and there has been some incremental improvement in exportation of diamonds through official channels, most Sierra Leoneans have seen little or no benefit from the diamond trade in the past six years of peace.

By contrast, where geology is such that diamond reserves lie deep in the ground, heavy mining equipment is required to access the stones. There are no artisinal miners, and thus no rationale for terror. Centralized mining allows for much greater control of the stones, and accountability. This is the kind of diamond mining that takes place in such places as Botswana and South Africa.

Botswana, the world’s leading diamond producer, is among the best-governed countries in Africa.  Successive democratic governments have managed to harness the country’s diamond resources to spur development and formation of a sizeable middle class. This record has been sullied by recent efforts to kick indigenous San peoples (”Bushmen”) off of their traditional lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which some allege is a prelude to expanded diamond mining there. Despite this serious blemish on Botswana’s record, the broad pattern of responsible use of diamond wealth holds.

Efforts to regulate the international diamond trade through the Kimberley Process are burdened by the complication that it is difficult to tell with certainty where diamonds come from, so that conflict and non-conflict diamonds are easily co-mingled in such trading centers as London, Antwerp and Tel-Aviv. As Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada stressed in a joint November 2007 note [PDF] to a plenary meeting of the Kimberley Process, gaps in the Kimberley Process and lax enforcement have allowed illicit trading to continue, and there is much more that member countries can do to implement proper controls.

While geology may seem to dictate that the people of Botswana and Sierra Leone have divergent interests when it comes to the diamond trade, reliable controls are in the interests of both. A truly functional Kimberley Process can ensure that growing consciousness of the “blood diamond” problem does not diminish the market for the lifeblood of Botswana’s economy, while helping to establish the accountability necessary for Sierra Leone to put its natural resources to work for its people.

*Full disclosure: I’m a former employee of the SCSL, and have since worked as an occasional consultant for the Open Society Justice Initiative on the charlestaylortrial.org website.

• Uncategorized
• Comments(0)