Tree Hugging Hoolah

Never mind the regime change

2011-12-29T17:55:00.012Z

There's little more to be said about the efforts expended by successive UK governments in recent years to brown-nose Colonel Gaddafi's military and security apparatus, right up until the moment in February when they suddenly decided it had always been a "brutal regime" that "had to go" (with a sort of twisted jingoism, this ground's been particularly well-covered in the Sunday Telegraph).

A couple of extra vignettes from a belated FOI request, though, confirms in particular the primacy of international arms fairs as occasions for a quick spot of security diplomacy. It seems Libyan and British security officials could hardly bring themselves to meet at all without leafing through a weapons catalogue:

David Cameron's 'Counter Terrorism Advisor for North Africa', Maj Gen Robin Searby (right) visited Tripoli in November 2010 along with a "senior UK Military officer". November 2010 just happens to have been the occasion of the last 'LibDex' arms fair in Tripoli.

(Maj Gen Searby, incidentally, has moved smoothly on from brown-nosing Gaddafi in the name of counter-terrorism and arms sales, to brown-nosing that other noted democrat and human rights enthusiast, President Bouteflika of Algeria).

Libyan Interior Minister, General Abd Al Fattah Younis Al Obeidi (left), met with Foreign Office Minister Gerald Howarth on 19 July 2010, during the Farnborough International Air Show, vis Farnborough Arms Fair.

(Abd Al Fattah, you'll recall, was formerly head of Libya's human-rights-friendly special forces, switched to the rebels in February, and was killed in an inter-necine rebel row in July).

This is in addition to the regular visits of Libyan military missions to the UK (which might be expected to take place under the aegis of arms fairs and weapons sales).

"A visit took place in late July 2010 when five members of the Libyan Air Defence Technical Committee (ADTC) attended the Farnborough International Air Show (FIAS) between 19-21 July at the invitation of the previous Government. The delegation was led by Brigadier General Suliman Ramadan Ahmedah and was combined with a visit to General Dynamics UK in Wales to assess the company’s capability to act as prime integrator for Libya’s Air Defence modernisation programme. Additionally, the ADTC visited RAF Boulmer to see Air Defence Command, Radar and the Search and Rescue Squadron facility."

(Memo to Libyan Air Defence Technical Committee: don't let a foreign country redesign your air defences if there's any chance in the near future they might want to, um, rapidly destroy your air defences).

"A further visit took place 19-24 September 2010 of a four-man delegation from the Libyan Military Engineering Academy. The delegation was led by Brigadier General Ali Mohamed Saeed al Fakri. The visit programme included a number of UK military technical training and academic establishments such as; the armoured training school at Bovington, the Royal Signals school at Blandford, the REME Arms school at Arborfield, the Defence Academy, Cranfield University and the marine engineering school at HMS Sultan. A demonstration of a REME Light Aid Detachment (LAD) ‘in action’ was also provided at in the vicinity of Tidworth garrison."

Needless to say, the UK Ministry of Defence declined to release to me any actual documents or records related to these meetings, or the "wide-ranging "Accord on a Defence Co-operation and Defence Industrial Partnership" that the UK signed with Libya on 29th May 2007 (for anyone hunting this Accord in future through FOI, training aspects were apparently the subject of a separate Memorandum of Understanding signed on 17 February 2009). I particularly enjoyed the rationale for their refusal: that disclosure could "damage our [the UK's] ability to co-operate militarily with Libya in the future". And if we were left in any doubt about the government's firm intention to resume yet another round of cosying up to yet another Libyan regime with arms sales and security training, there's this nice aside to the MOD's description of the UK-Libya Defence Accord:

The aim of the Accord (which technically remains extant) is “to build stable and long-term special relations between the countries as equal partners, proceeding from the principle of mutual respect and confidence”. (Emphasis added)

Cute.

Hedge fund schools

2011-12-27T13:08:00.016Z

So a new UK school term looms, and I’m wondering how the range-rover’d infants of Hammersmith and Camden are enjoying Michael Gove’s dream of state-funded private schools, in which every child in the land may ultimately aspire to have hazelnut yoghurt for lunch and stockbroking studies after Bible-Time.

And yet when I think with comfortable social-democratic outrage about Toby Young’s round, round face, I can’t help also thinking about this phrase, written on a classroom wall in Sheikh Mader primary school in Hargeisa, Somaliland, which I visited last November:

It reads Al-Shitan Al-Ahmar – the Red Devils. Next to it is a Manchester United fantasy football line-up (I especially like the fact that it respectfully includes “Sir Alex Fergusson”, apparently playing in goal).

This graffiti probably says as much about the reach of Man U’s global marketing as it does about the aspirations of the Sheikh Mader students, who dream of fame and fortune under the bright lights of Old Trafford. But those aspirations are nonetheless tangible, powerful, and largely ignored by ‘development practitioners’. What many schoolchildren in Hargeisa want most isn’t ‘development’ in post-war Somaliland: like kids from other dead-end towns and impoverished families from Middlesborough to Kibera, what they want is to get out. Their reasonable if statistically unlikely dream is this: that their golden ticket out of Somaliland is arbitrary excellence in whatever fields are given value and reward for a tiny chosen few in places nicer than the Horn of Africa. Astonishing ball skills, marketable beauty, (less commonly) prodigious intellectual prowess.

Sheikh Mader, like thousands of other schools throughout the Majority World, provides basic education, stern discipline (the headmaster’s cane propped in the corner of his office), and can do little else. Its 1300 students, including around 370 Oromo refugees from neighbouring Ethiopia, seem happy; their English fairly good; their classrooms well-maintained if basic. UNHCR and Save the Children Fund have financed the construction of some of its buildings, but its running costs are funded from Somaliland’s tiny $61m government budget. If gender and economic opportunity allows them to stay in school, the most socially mobile of Sheikh Mader’s students will be basically equipped for small business and administrative work in Somaliland and perhaps elsewhere in East Africa. Absent an unforeseen deus ex machina, they won’t play for Man U, are unlikely to be whisked from Hargeisa to the catwalks of Milan, will never be nuclear physicists or UBS rogue traders.

A good test for political principles is to think about them in extremely resource-scarce environments: places where the consequences of policy are dramatically magnified. What would it mean to have 'free schools' in a place like Hargeisa, educationally selective and freed from the budgetary limitations of Sheikh Mader and schools like it? The likely impacts of capital-intensive free schools on educational opportunity and social mobility in the UK - particularly through restricting the availability of capital funding for state schools in impoverished areas - have been well discussed. But it’s easy to be fundamentalist about equality of educational opportunity when what is at stake is essentially a place at a classier university. In the Majority World, though, academy schools offer a route - albeit for a tiny, selected few - to the Minority World. If you were a clever teenager in East Africa, wouldn’t you want a scholarship to Harvard rather than a province-wide classroom-building programme? And wouldn’t you naturally resent the Harvard-educated donors, funders, ‘development professionals’, policy advisers, who said otherwise? Equally, the social and economic ripples generated by academies are likely to be much greater in places where educational opportunities are desperately scarce: reinforcing or disrupting elite power far more powerfully than anything Toby Young could hope to achieve.

In Somaliland this calculus of opportunity and aspiration isn’t just a thought experiment. About 15km up the road we visit a second school. Abaarso Tech, a co-ed boarding school, was established in 2009 by Jonathan Starr, a former hedge fund manager from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose uncle is a prominent member of the Somaliland diaspora.

The school’s been written about quite a lot recently: partly because Starr
has become a high profile critic of international NGOs. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Starr argued in familiar terms that INGOs are the complacent victims of skewed incentive structures that lead inevitably to inefficiency, waste, corruption, "diseconomies of scale": accountable to donors rather than beneficiaries, and lacking the continual performance assessment of profit-seeking businesses.

Starr’s school is intended as a demonstration project of how to 'do development' differently. As a recent CS Monitor feature headline proclaimed: "Abaarso Tech, run like a business, brings top-notch education to Somalia". Although he wasn’t there when we visited, Starr spends much of his time living and working at his school alongside fourteen American and Canadian staff – recently-graduated Ivy Leaguers, albeit most with no formal teaching qualifications.

When we visit, Abaarso Tech is at about half capacity, with 99 students across two school years. The fiercely dedicated teacher who shows us round explains that they aim initially to stay small. Creaming off the top 50 each year from Somalia’s national Grade 8 examination, the school will have 200-240 students across grades 9 to 12. Students selected for entrance, according to our guide, are accepted irrespective of their ability to pay.

Abaarso Tech’s clearly flourishing students enjoy educational experiences unknown across the rest of Somaliland. We arrive in the late afternoon at the school’s high-walled hilltop compound, its gates flanked by private guards carrying the distinctive pastel-blue Kalashnikovs found throughout Somalia since Siad Barre’s regime. (Abaarso Tech’s teaching staff probably constitutes the highest concentration of Americans in Somalia north of Mogadishu, so this security is unsurprising). Inside, queues of boys and girls (together) are chattering as they line up for science club. Others sit at a bank of a dozen laptops, along with a donated library of second-hand textbooks and novels which the school’s website suggests may be "the largest [library] in Somaliland". The hallways of the school’s frugal main building are plastered with felt-tip posters quoting John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, ready for the student elections that night.

It’s certainly not luxurious, but it’s a far cry from the Oromo refugees and dusty city-centre playground at Sheikh Mader. What isn’t clear, though, is whether Abaarso Tech’s facilities and ambitious curriculum are really generated by a distinctive business model. Starr insists that non-profits should submit themselves to the “ultimate customer-feedback metric of revenue”, and that his organisation has been designed to be run “like a business with the Somali people as both shareholders and customers” . But his school has so far financed itself more or less like any other donation-based charity. Some students pay the full $900 annual fees (around three times Somalilanders’ average annual income, according to best estimates), and a small number of ‘international’ students from the Somali diaspora pay around $5000 a year. And Abaarso Tech has a range of other revenue-raising programmes: weekly adult English classes, for which around 60 people from Hargeisa and elsewhere pay around $300 a term; and a nascent ‘MBA programme’ for Somaliland’s flourishing business community. Ambitious parents can also sign their primary-school-age children up for tutoring by current students. Nonetheless, we’re told, around 85% of the school’s start-up capital and first-year running costs have come from private grants (in money-where-your-mouth-is style, this has reportedly included perhaps half from Starr’s own wealth), plus in-kind donations of books, cheap computers, and the land on which the school is built. Although Starr may publicly critique government and donor funding, a further 10%, we’re told, comes from a UK FCO grant. According to one teacher the school also accepted an indefinite annual grant of $50,000 promised by the Somaliland government from its own budget - reportedly reduced after the 2010 elections to $8000. (It’s difficult to check these figures, since Starr’s organisation, despite its disdain for INGO unaccountability, has as yet published no accounts or annual report, although they did respond helpfully to emailed questions for this blog).

Abaarso's capacity to self-fund may improve. Starr insists in an email that after this initial start-up phase, “we expect to reach operating breakeven in the next year or 2”, based in part on projecting that around 20% of the student body may eventually be drawn from the wealthy Somali diaspora. But at least in its start-up phase, Abaarso Tech has had a conventional ‘non-profit’ procurement structure, drawing on donations, volunteers and gifts-in-kind. Its library books come from the US charity Books for Africa at under $1 a book. The land for the school itself was donated by Abaarso elders. Like many other educational charities, the school relies primarily on young, Western, part-volunteer staff, earning $3000 a year, most recruited as new graduates from North American universities, including through volunteering websites like idealist.org. Neither the staff nor the school as a whole operate as a market-rate business: as Starr says in an email, “I make a sacrifice and the staff makes one too. We make that donation because we get paid in seeing something beautiful occur.”

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. It’s simply that beneath Starr’s self-proclaimed iconoclasm, the start-up phase of his business model looks just like a conventional charity. Abaarso Tech’s financial accountability and sustainability currently don’t seem clearly better - and probably not much worse - than most INGOs.

But the ‘NGO vs. business’ debate is neither the germane nor the interesting question here. What seems genuinely distinctive about Abaarso Tech is not its business model, but its educational philosophy. Its stated goal is straightforward: to skim elite educational achievers from the country’s school system and to prepare them to leave Somaliland for Ivy League universities abroad. If Absaarso Tech seems like an incongruous bubble compared to dusty downtown Hargeisa, it’s supposed to. All classes and activities are conducted in English. All fourteen teachers when we visited were young Western ‘internationals’; we met a young Somaliland woman introduced to us as the sole Somali translator for the entire school – a school whose students’ first language is almost exclusively Somali. Indeed, within the school’s buildings the (residential) pupils are forbidden on pain of punishment (non-corporal, unlike the uncompromising regime at Sheikh Mader) from speaking anything but English.

Abaarso Tech’s assumption is that after attending elite universities abroad, Abaarso’s students will return home, Western-educated and internationally-oriented, to become Somaliland’s future business and political leaders. Like a good hedge fund manager, Starr is spotting a small number of good educational investments early on, and betting on their ability to deliver later in their lives. This is the polar opposite of most educational charities’ aim to provide education to the broadest possible swathe of society: not only to spread economic opportunity but to fulfil a human right to basic education.

Rights aside, the utilitarian question remains: is a wealthy, foreign-educated elite combined with an immensely impoverished, poorly educated population really the ticket to Somaliland’s economic development or political prosperity?

To some degree there is already an answer to this question. Somalia in general - Somaliland included - already has a well-educated, wealthy and internationalised diaspora, spread across Europe and North America, now entering its second generation since the start of civil war in 1991, and frequently drawn upon to parachute senior leadership into the region's shattered governments. The new TFG prime minister, Abdiweli Mohammed Ali, returned to Somalia in 2010 after 24 years studying and teaching economics at US universities. Many of his new cabinet appointees are businessmen and academics from Canada, the UK and the United States. Even the new Mayor of Mogadishu, Mohamed Nur, spent the previous 19 years working for London’s Islington Council. In the strategic port city of Berbera, the capital of the Sahil province 90 miles east of Hargeisa, we meet a twenty-something Somalilander who welcomes us into the office of the provincial governor with a broad Wisconsin drawl. Born in the American mid-west, he arrived weeks earlier as the governor’s senior adviser.

In other words, the migratory fall-out of Somalia’s two decades of civil war has already to some extent built the elite international cadre that Abaarso Tech aims to establish. But even in the few instances when they have been persuaded back ‘home’, it’s not at all clear whether these well-off and well-educated Somalis have indeed been able to deliver peace or economic development in the face of the country’s chronic political and social fractures. By contrast, the miracle that Somaliland’s government wrought out of the chaos of the 1990s – peace in its territory, despite northern Somalia having been the crucible of the early civil war; and sufficient political stability to have seen, in 2010, the only peaceful, democratic change of government in East Africa in over a decade – appears to have been homegrown: achieved through an extraordinary, painstaking sequence of domestic clan-based negotiations during the 1990s.

And indeed some argue that the roots of civil war in northern Somalia lay precisely in the inequalities of educational and professional opportunity that already existed in Somaliland under British rule: an Anglophone elite - mainly from the Isaak clan and educated in British schools - dominated administrative positions in British-occupied Somaliland; were, in retaliation, then excluded by Siad Barre’s discriminatory policies in independent Somalia; and as the progenitors of the SNM rebellion in the early 1980s, have returned to dominance in independent Somaliland’s present-day government, military and economy.

But let’s say we set aside the politics too. To take it back to market fundamentals: what is the opportunity cost of the $1.5 million so far spent on Abaarso Tech’s set-up and initial running costs? $1.5 million is over 50% of the Somaliland government’s entire 2010 education budget (14,633,732,140 shillings). Would this money have been better spent fed through the government budget, spread across Somaliland’s creaking schools and perhaps 5 million school-age children? I don’t have any straightforward answers to that question. (And of course, it’s not a straightforward comparison, since it doesn’t account for foreign donor funding for education in Somaliland that never passes through the Somaliland government’s books). But it highlights the kind of stark choices involved in academy education. Do we funnel scarce resources into creating an educational elite, however meritocratic? And does that elite grow a nation’s wealth and power, or foster tensions in fractured societies?

These are questions that matter as much in Western Europe as in the Horn of Africa. Ask a bright schoolchild at Sheikh Mader primary school, though, and I suspect you’d get an answer that didn’t deal either with politics or utility. They’d say that they deserved the opportunity to escape Somaliland altogether. And I suspect they’d welcome Abaarso Tech’s laptops and science club, or any other route that allowed them to do so.

Opportunity knocks? The view from Abaarso Tech's school gates

Tahrir ammo

2011-11-22T14:23:00.025Z

Apologies, this post is really just a place to dump a load of stuff - following a couple of requests, I thought it might be useful to post somewhere a round-up of arms and ammunition being used against protestors in Tahrir right now.

There seem to be a growing number people in and around the Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt, and are starting to document markings and specifications of what's being used. It won't help stop any violence, but I'm generally in favour of causing a modicum of embarrassment to those governments and companies which continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

There are lots of good ID resources around - for the real afficionado of "less-lethal technologies", you can't beat Mispo (subscription only), which also has a live update stream of identified military/security equipment being used images from around the world.

All the usual caveats, of course, apply below: the provenance of most of these photos can't be definitively verified; and a given country of manufacture doesn't indicate that that country's government supplied the weapons to Egypt. I'll try to update this as more info becomes available.

9x19mm ammunition

9mm Parabellum/Luger ammunition is designed for use by 9mm pistols (either single-shot or semi-automatic), or semi-automatic/automatic sub-machine guns like the MP5-series submachine guns with which some Egyptian security forces were photographed back in February.

These 9mm cartridge cases, from @RiverDryFilm on 19th November:

Right-hand cartridge case is a fired 9x19 round manufactured by Sellier & Bellot (Czech Republic). ~~Not sure if~~ '10' indicates a 2010 manufacture date~~, or a batch number (some S&B ammo doesn't carry a manufacture date marking).~~

Left-hand cartridge case is an unfired round, difficult to see the headstamp markings to determine their manufacture or age. I *think* it has a NATO (cross-in-circle) marking, indicating a NATO country of manufacture, but difficult to tell for sure.

Most significantly, this *appears* to be 'live' ammunition (although we'd need to see the bullet - other end - of the unfired round to check 100% that it wasn't a blank; and to see what kind of live ammo it was).

(Added 23 Nov 2011) Other *possible* live cartridges (not 100% certain)

I've so far seen one picture (undated, from - er - Russia Today) of a larger cartridge case with a 'shoulder' narrowing towards the end (unlike 9x19mm cartridge cases, which are straight in profile). These appear to be around the right size for assault rifles (they *look* a bit like 7.39 short for AKs, but it's basically impossible to tell at this distance). Again, these *don't look like blanks* (which generally have characteristic 'crimped' necks), but it's not possible to tell definitively whether these are 'live' rounds or not without examining the bullets or the cartridges. (There *is* ammunition of this kind produced with plastic or rubber bullets plus metal rifle cartridge cases, but it really isn't at all common; and the rounds of this kind that do exist are more commonly 9mm rather than larger). Even if they *are* some kind of weird rifle-fired 'rubber' bullet (which personally I don't think is likely): at this small calibre, with the inability to 'skip fire' them along the ground rather than direct-fire them, and with the energy that a rifle-sized round can produce, they are arguably likely to be dangerous.

12 gauge shotgun ammunition

These can come in all sorts of varieties, lethal and 'less-than-lethal'. Lead buckshot, rubber buckshot, other impact munitions, irritants, and all sorts of other weird things.

I've seen at least 5 types so far:

quite a lot of pictures of 12 gauge rounds from Fiocchi Munizioni S.P.A. I *think* these ones are actually manufactured in Italy (there is also manufacturing capability at Fiocchi USA, but these tend to be marked 'FIOCCHI 12 USA 12'). Once again, Italy-made doesn't necessarily mean Italy-supplied.

a 12 gauge round with either Arabic or Farsi markings - difficult to make out which. Marked '12' (presumably for 12-gauge calibre) in Eastern Arabic numerals, plus a symbol which *could* be that of Egypt's domestic military production unit, the AOI. But that's just a complete guess.

(added 23 Nov 2011)">Others have western numeral headstamps ('12 12' denoting a 12 gauge round) but Arabic script on the cartridge body, including 'عيار' (shells).

Another variety with a mix of Arabic and Roman script on the cartridge body e.g. pic below from @msheshtawy on 22 Nov) marked 'CRIME' (Roman letters) and what I *think* reads 'خرطوشة' ('cartoosh'/ cartridge),'عيار' (shells), and the numerals for '12' [gauge]. Also reportedly carries the word 'مطاطية ' (made of rubber), so presumably containing rubber buckshot or other rubber impact munitions. Anyone with proper Arabic skills - help greatly appreciated!

US-manufactured Federal Premium shells (below from @RiverDryFilm). Difficult to make out the 'load' markings which would indicate what kind of round it was. Likewise no date marking.

CS gas canisters/grenades

I haven't seen anything yet that isn't standard 'CS' (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) - probably the most common form of 'tear gas' used around the world. There are obviously two main risks from tear gas: in an enclosed space concentrations can cause severe respiratory problems and even death; and the impact from tear gas canisters themselves (which are generally not safe to fire directly at people, rather than 'skip-fired' across the ground) can injure and kill.

(added 23 November 2011)There was a lot of Twitter chatter yesterday (22nd Nov) about palbably stronger tear gas being used in Tahrir Square, and more medical admissions of those affected by it. I still *haven't* seen any evidence that anything other than standard CS (nasty stuff in itself) is being used. Nonetheless people's experience of stronger tear gas seems to have coincided with the appearance of three new types of tear gas canister:

Silver-bodied, entirely unmarked cartridges - appear to be either 37/38/40mm weapon-fired - some short with flat end, some long with metal fins for stabilisation in flight (suggesting design for longer-range use). (Below image from The Egypt Report, 22 Nov.) These were also apparently photographed back in June; and similar ones in Tunisia in February, but with markings '530 CS' (speculating, could be the US '530 CS' Flite-Rite rounds?)

Longer silver-bodied, entirely unmarked cartridges - appear around 200mm long. Difficult to identify at this stage (there are various manufacturers of very long anti-riot rounds, mainly US and Chinese). Further pics of the example below (taken by @mikaminio 23 November), showing the primer, are here and here.

Red/silver 38mm CS cartridges reportedly marked "CART 38MM IRRITANT MK2 LONG RANGE CS". (Below image from @msheshtawy, 22 Nov 2011). Still unidentified definitively - although the markings precisely match those of 38mm CS cartridges advertised by the United Kingdom's Chemring Defence group, which incorporates former UK tear gas manufacturer PW Defence, the colouring is slightly different. Not clear how old (no lot number or manufacturer markings). Again, images of the headstamp/primer (on the base of the cartridge) could help positive identifications; and again, UK manufactured doesn't mean UK supplied.

Also seen:

3430 CS Muzzle Blast 37mm/40mm cartridges - manufactured in the USA, according to clear markings, some in 2001 and some in 2003 (meaning these are well past their 5 year shelflife). these ones reportedly photographed by two different photographers on 20 November. Amnesty also found some in Cairo back in January. The 3430's US manufacturer is Combined ~~Tactical~~ Systems Inc~~, but another manufacturer cannot be ruled out from the pictures from Tahrir~~. The 3430 is a comparatively short-range launcher-fired munition intended for either indoor or outdoor use (specs here)

Federal Laboratories CS rounds (this pic from @mmbilal, 22 Nov). Think this might be a weapon-fired Mk II 560 CS round, but can't be sure from the picture. Definitely US-made, but could be comparatively old: Federal Laboratories are now part of US firm Defense Technology).

Other kinetic impact munitions
There are also a few photos floating around of what appear to be rifle-fired fin-stabilised rounds - too big to be the rubber fin-stabilised rounds from 12 gauge specialty ammo. I've no idea where these are from, or what their properties are - would be good to know more.

Update 22/11/2011 PM: Brazilian and US owners of arms firms

In case anyone fancies any shareholder activism (not that I'm, er, inciting any):

(unfortunately, with the exception of Federal Premium, most of these are owned by private individuals or high-end investment funds, so unless you have a stake in one of these, shareholder activism isn't going to get us very far. We could still have demos though!)

Federal Premium (shotgun shells) is wholly owned by Arlington VA-based US arms giant ATK. ATK is majority-owned by large institutional investors. A top-10 list is here. (Hat-tip @mina_el_Naguib)

Sellier & Bellot (9mm ammunition) is a Czech firm, with two branches - Sellier & Bellot a.s. - the main company - and Sellier & Bellot Trade a.s. for trading operations. The latter has a lot of private investors, but the former was acquired in 2009 by the established Brazilian ammunition manufacturer Companhia Brazileira de Cartuchos (CBC). According to the Czech company registry, CBC owns Sellier & Bellot via a US company, CBC Ammo LLC, registered in the notorious tax haven of Delaware. CBC is itself apparently privately owned.

Combined Systems Inc (tear gas) is majority-owned by New York private equity firm Point Lookout Capital Partners. At least some of its equity is held by the defence investment giant The Carlyle Group (via its Carlyle Mezzanine Partners fund), which debt-financed Point Lookout's acquisition in 2005.

Pedants against guns

2011-09-15T12:10:00.010+01:00

Short Circuit is finally going to get some R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

(Many apologies for 'all arms, all the time' at the moment on this blog. What can I say - it's a good time for guns, apparently).

Don't get me wrong - I don't think arms fairs should be banned. I don't oppose the arms trade per se, and the little buggers have got to do it somewhere. I don't mind them doing it, as long as they don't hurt anyone, and they don't do it in public. Some of my best friends are arms dealers. Etc.

But I do prefer the organisers of arms fairs to understand export control law. If you're going to help people sell guns, read the manual.

The organisers of the gunfest currently occupying a swathe of London's Docklands, the DSEi arms fair, are the perma-cheerful Clarion Events (they also do the Baby Show at Earls' Court. Bless.)

They've produced a lovely passive-aggressive little FAQ for lazy journos headed "DSEI: The Facts". Because Clarion are apparently concerned that

There is a lot of incorrect information, and deliberate misinformation, about DSEi available online.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is on the same Clarion webpage. Here's a selection from Clarion's wide-eyed journey into the evidently puzzling world of UK firearms and export control law:

"Promotion or display of the following items is banned at DSEi:...Portable devices designed for riot protection or self defence using an electric shock (e.g. tasers, electric shock batons and shields, stun guns) – even though these have been deployed by UK police forces"

Um, no. UK police do have Tasers, but the Home Office has absolutely not authorised 'electric shock batons' or 'electric shock shields' to be deployed with the UK police.

"Any contracts signed on UK soil by foreign companies require UK export licenses and are therefore subject to the UK’s strict export regime."

Nope. First of all, they wouldn't need an export licence unless the goods or services were physically leaving the country. Second, they *might* need a trade control licence (different to an export licence, but Clarion Events don't seem to have heard of them), depending on exactly what commercial/contracting activity and goods were involved. A large amount of 'trade arrangement' activity is actually provided with an effective exemption from case-by-case licensing by the Open General Trade in Goods Control Orders. For most kinds of weapons, these exempt from individual licensing the act of arranging deals for arms to be moved from anywhere in the world except Iran, North Korea or Zimbabwe (or from the Taliban, let's not forget) to a list of 32 'friendly' countries; or from these 32 friendlies to anywhere except 45 hyper-dodgy places. That's one of the reasons why London is probably quite a convenient place for arms dealers to come to sign contracts - the UK has lots of open licensing (read: licensing exemption) for arms brokering that many other European countries don't have.

"Q. Which countries have Clarion Events invited to DSEi? A. Clarion Events is not responsible for inviting overseas delegations. They are all invited by the UK Government."

Well yeah. Except that just a little further down the page they also say "Out of courtesy, Clarion invites defence attaches from London based embassies". So Clarion Events *does*, er, invite foreign governments themselves. And unlike the UK Government, Clarion doesn't provide a list of the foreign defence attaches it's invited.

"Q. Didn’t Mark Thomas find illegal equipment on display at DSEi in 2005? A. No. Mark Thomas was invited to attend DSEi 2005 by its owners at the time. What he found was literature about equipment. Nonetheless, this was a breach of DSEi policy, so when the leaflet was discovered the stand in question was closed and the companies involved were reported to HM Revenue and Customs."

Wrong. The equipment in the sales material that Mark Thomas found was classified as 'Restricted' (now 'category A') in UK export control law. Under the Trade in Goods (Control) Order 2003, which had entered into force by 2005, any person in the UK who does "any act calculated to promote the supply or delivery of" such goods is breaking the law. The UK government's own helpful guidance on this law makes it explicitly clear that all advertising or promotion of such equipment, including at trade fairs and even when the equipment is not pysically present, is banned. Although HMRC chose not to press for prosucution, the activity described by Mark Thomas was still unlawful.

"Since then [the Mark Thomas caper] there have been two other DSEi Exhibitions (in 2007 and 2009) and the exhibition is now owned by Clarion Events"

Absolutely. What Clarion neglect to mention is that the 2007 event didn't really do any better than in 2005. As Amnesty International UK notes: "At DSEi in 2007, researchers discovered two companies, BCB International (Cardiff) and Famous Glory Holding (China) promoting banned leg restraints."

And now that the event's happily in Clarion's hands, any progress? Umm:

14 September 2011: Amnesty International has obtained brochures from the Defense and Security International fair (DSEi) currently taking place in London’s Docklands, which appear to clearly show illegal torture equipment advertised. Despite explicit acknowledgments on the DSEi website that the sale of “leg irons, gang chains, shackles and shackle bracelets” are prohibited, the brochures Amnesty has obtained, advertise the products for sale from a company called CTS-Thompson on display at the Beechwood Equipment stall. A double-page spread in the brochure clearly offers oversized leg cuffs, waist chains, lead chains and “the enhanced transport restraint system”, which combines waist chains and cuffs with leg cuffs.

Note to Clarion Events: Try harder. Or at all.

Sousveillance redux

2011-08-31T23:24:00.013+01:00

Image: Burkina Estudio design

How do we – citizens, journalists, researchers - winkle secrets from the state (corporation / criminal network / NGO / armed group)?

In at least two ways, ordinarily:

Make friends: find informants who, by design or chance, have access or experience of your object of desire, be it a business deal, an aircraft landing strip or a committee meeting

Hack the gaze of the state: piggy-back on governments’ own information-gathering systems through official records, registries, freedom of information laws and court cases

Over the past couple of years, though, I’ve found myself excited and impressed by the increasing possibilities of a third way: more democratic, more collegiate, and less indebted to the agendas of individuals or to the power of the state.

Organise your own surveillance programme: networks of private citizens getting together and organizing observation and data-collection to gaze back at the state, the corporation, the organisation.

A pioneering example of this has been watching nuclear weapons. Verifying the condition and location of strategic weapons is a critical component of counter-proliferation regimes, helping to prevent the degeneration of trust that can fuel arms races and worse. Despite nuclear powers’ big words about the value of verification, nuclear weapons treaties (unlike those covering chemical weapons) tend to have comparatively weak verification regimes. And so since the late 1970s, frustrated by the opacity of their governments’ nuclear arsenals, networks of activists and enthusiasts – these days often little old ladies (and gentlemen) living in anodyne places like Colchester and Wichita - have got together on both sides of the Atlantic to undertake continuous “citizen verification” of the UK and US’ nuclear weapons - simply by observing, photographing and recording the movement of trucks and trains carrying nuclear warheads and their accessories around national road and rail networks. Sharing information about a nuclear convoy in real-time through phone trees and email lists, different observers in the network can alert each other, tracking nuke movements right across the country.

The nukewatchers’ efforts are part protest, part verification. But they’re more than symbolic. While they can’t come up with definitive weapons inventories - it's not wonk-grade intelligence - the nukewatchers have been able to provide approximations of deployed warhead numbers; logs of warhead servicing; when and where they’re redeployed; and spikes in transport activity that often indicate the timings of upgrades or decommissioning.

And they were doing it in the 1970s: contrary to a lot of interwebguff, Web 2.0 didn’t invent this kind of socially-networked observation. But declining technology costs and online organising have, I think, made life far easier for these kinds of initiatives. Hobbyist plane spotters, famously, provided the data that exposed the unlawful rendition programme. They had two things in their favour: internet fora to share flight logs and photos, piecing together transnational flight plans that aren’t publicly available at all, or even available in one piece to a single national authority. And rapidly declining technology costs: the plane nerds are no longer just stood at airport fences with pencils and binoculars, but with digital SLR cameras making high-quality photos uploaded instantly onto photo-share sites; cheap UHF radio scanners to listen to the chatter between pilots and control towers; and, since 2004/5, laptop-ready aircraft transponder receivers (I bought one myself down the Edgware Road - for 350 quid I can receive the transponder codes, call signs, altitudes and flight bearings of aircraft 100 miles away. And if there are hundreds of us across the world with transponder receivers, we can get together online, feed in our data, and track aircraft globally, in real time, for free).

We can do the same with ships, using their AIS transponder system, although the networks are less well-developed than those of the plane spotters. I’ve used these data feeds to help identify mid-conflict weapons deliveries to Sudan and the Middle East; and to track the movements of ICC indictees and under-fire newspaper executives.

And similar stories can be told about the amateur astronomers who map the proliferation of secret spy satellites.** Or the amateur ‘bucket brigades’ compiling simple air and water pollution data, from Thailand to Poland, to challenge industrial polluters. In a looser, more unstructured way, the collation and circulation of cameraphone pictures and videoclips taken by demonstrators in news-neglected places like Guinea during the ‘28 septembre’ massacre, and more recently in Yemen and Syria, have in the absence of TV cameras served as insurance against regimes’ attempts to lie about oppression and killings.

The nukewatchers are salutary pioneers precisely because one might imagine that nuclear weapons were one of the hardest targets for radical curtain-twitchers. You’d think that citizen surveillance would have to go after softer targets: council service provision, for instance. But what the nukewatchers realised, early on, is that even the most sensitive of state and corporate arcana are often conducted in full view - often, in fact, right outside their wisteria-covered front doors on the A357 to Basingstoke - if you just know where to look. As the NYT pointed out about the satellite watchers, they realised that just by looking in the right place, carefully compiling data, and sharing it in networks, they could “uncover some of the deepest of the government’s expensive secrets and share them on the Internet”. How glorious is that?

Steve Mann and other privacy activist-artists coined the term ‘sousveillance’ in the early 2000s to describe citizen efforts to gaze back, from below, at the gaze of the state. Mann and his collaborators use devices and routines – body-worn cameras, computer programmes that automatically activate recorders and sensors when citizens interact with bureaucrats and officials – to subvert surveillance, to turn the power of information collection back at the watchers. I think citizen information-collection networks are doing something similar. But Mann’s model of sousveillance is individual, not collective: designed to alter the dynamic of individual encounters with official surveillance, and to protect the user (the state is always penetrating and male etc. - there’s a great picture of a highly conspicuous bra-cam in one of Mann's fake souveillance company brochures). Successful architects of official surveillance recognise that if you’re interested in gathering information, rather than just intimidating or altering the behaviour of the surveilled, only networked surveillance, producing pooled and organised data, is really effective. For every decent lawful intercept system, you need an Echelon database. The same goes for the networked, organised sousveillance I’m talking about here.

Meanwhile the intent to ‘sousvey’ is rather less important than in Mann’s techniques, which are specifically designed to gaze back, to be deployed in ‘surveillance environments’ themselves. The enthusiasts and obsessives involved in networked citizen information-gathering, by contrast, are not always doing it to poke their finger in the state’s all-seeing eye, or even to uncover wrongdoing. Plane spotters and satellite watchers are mostly just interested in planes and satellites, and in mapping and understanding the systems that organise them.

This kind of networked sousveillance is also, I think, fundamentally different to crowd-sourcing, or citizen journalism. They don’t aim to tap into participants’ wisdom or knowledge; nor to turn them into amateur investigators. There are few heroic Erin Brockoviches here. Instead the network as a whole harnesses hundreds of small, repetitive acts of observation, and the empowerment of its participants comes from their collective efforts being so much greater than the sum of its parts. This means that we still need investigators, researchers and journalists to make sense of the fruits of networked sousveillance. The best sousveillance participants are focussed obsessives; investigators have instead to be magpies, picking and assembling from sousveillance networks, informants, and information leaked or prised from the state’s own information gathering. The plane spotters alone, for instance, couldn’t have exposed the infrastructure of unlawful rendition without testimonies from individual detainees to corroborate suspicious flight plans; civil aviation and company records to trace the ownership and provenance of suspicious planes; litigation and freedom of information requests to prove their suppositions about government complicity. But without them really intending it, their humble network of eyes (electronic and real) has furnished a gaze as unblinking and powerful as the most powerful governments. And as collective action, it seems to me that this quiet OCD is often easily as effective as any strike or demonstration.

-----

**Incidentally (although it’s different to the kind of networked souveillance discussed above): if there’s something pleasingly symmetrical about literally gazing back at governments’ eyes in the sky, it’s also becoming economically feasible for non-governmental researchers to acquire 20cm-resolution satellite imagery from commercial satellites - around 200 quid for a 5km-square image, or a bit more if it’s newly commissioned imagery. 20cm isn’t spy-satellite-grade, but it is good enough to allow amateurs, essentially, to spot smuggled tanks, map bombing raids and village burnings, identify new oil exploration, or spot nuclear submarines.

It’s a chocolate mousse with cream on the top

2011-08-31T22:55:00.018+01:00

So: the Viktor Bout trial chunters on, as does the tirelessly priapic news coverage.

I’m studiously avoiding the debates about whether the DEA sting operation created a legitimate basis for Bout’s extradition or trial in the US; whether his own testimony was coerced by DEA agents threatening him with Midnight-Express-style abandonment in a Bangkok jail; whether he really is the ‘Merchant of Death’ or just Death’s DHL Courier.*** These arguments are legally important, but they tend to distract from the genuinely interesting stuff: what the trial is telling us about the business of the network of people around Bout and his collaborators, and thus about the wider business or arms trading and its logistics.

One fortunate consequence of the pre-trial jurisdiction/admissibility row, though, has been that a number of interesting transcripts and evidential annexes have already been filed with the court since May, even before the hearings proper have started. Quite a lot of this hasn’t really been reported at all, even though it’s technically in the public domain. The new docs suggest several new connections in the Bout universe.

In no particular order, six things I thought were interesting:

[Caution: this is probably only of interest to the two arms trade geeks who occasionally read this blog.]

Friendship never ends: there’s a surprise guest appearance from Peter Mirchev of the Bulgarian-based arms brokering firm Kas Engineering. When I first got into small arms trading (research, not practice), Kas were already part of arms trading history: named as having provided (perhaps unwittingly) the Kalashnikovs airdropped over Purulia in the 1995 Peter Bleach case; and as having shipped arms on Togolese end-user certificates between 1996 and 1998, some of which the UN’s Angola Sanctions monitoring mechanism claimed ended up with UNITA in Angola in the late 1990s. Back to Bout: the prosecution claims that a series of emails from 2007, found on Bout’s laptop, detail a prospective $38m arms deal (end-user not mentioned) with Kas Engineering via a Hungarian bank; and a second RFQ for BMP-3 fighting vehicle gun barrels. The DEA goes on to claim that Bout told his testifying co-conspirators that he intended to get Igla MANPAD anti-aircraft missiles for the (fake) FARC buyers from Mirchev in Bulgaria. In the transcript from Bout’s final meeting with the fake-FARC reps in Bangkok, at the point where they’re discussing anti-aircraft missiles, Bout says [in English] “Because I spoke with, er, Peter and I will also go for to see him”.

Of course, even assuming that the prosecution’s evidence is correct, Bout could nonetheless have been blagging about MANPAD availability from Bulgaria. But even the proposition: MANPADs for terrorists? From (EU member state) Bulgaria?? From Kas Engineering??? Really???? The whole thing just feels so…late 1990s. When they were done arms dealing for the day, did Viktor and his Colombians celebrate by going out dancing to Steps and then sitting down to watch the latest Ally McBeal?

That said, I’ve always been struck by the longevity of arms dealers’ careers. Some of the most active UK arms dealers today were flogging guns to the Stasi in the 1970s. (There’s a lovely vignette in the summary testimony of Bout’s alleged co-conspirator, Andrew Smulian, where he describes going with Bout to the UAE arms fair in 1997 to meet both Mirchev and Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, who’s been Izhmash’s cheery Ronald MacDonald figure for years. Getting to shake the ageing General Kalashnikov’s hand at arms fairs used to be as predictable as meeting Sylvester McCoy at a Dr Who convention – a guaranteed part of the ticket price, but not as exciting as getting chatted up by Tom Baker). What’s more interesting is that these guys seem to continue to do business perfectly happily from jurisdictions that have ostensibly cleaned up their export control acts since the wild west days of the 1990s – like the UK or Bulgaria. Perhaps the dealers have cleaned up too. Or maybe they’re just better at getting round the rules.

Our friends still want to do business with dodgy people: The rest of Bout’s alleged recent arms dealing career is also a blast from the past. The prosecution’s Memorandum of Law describes 2007 emails between Smulian and Bout about arms deals allegedly proposed by contacts of Smulian, on behalf of those notorious members of the axis of evil
- Tanzania (“a multifaceted [investment] project…among other things, the provision of military hardware to the Government of Tanzania, construction and development, telecommunications equipment, and minerals and gas exploration….satellite and surveillance equipment, air equipment, helicopter gunships, patrol boats, tanks, and other military-related hardware”)
- and Kenya (“the provision of military-related equipment to a contact in Kenya for the benefit of the Kenyan government”).
Hmm. After millions of dollars in US export control outreach programmes, surely US-friendly East African governments are really supposed to have cleaned up their arms procurement acts by now and not be tendering from people on UN sanctions lists? Of course, there’s no clear evidence they knew that Bout was to be involved. But Smulian’s pedigree (Air Pass etc.) should have been enough to ring alarm bells. Equally, Smulian’s mates might have been bullshitting about their prospects of getting the deals – but they were reportedly good enough for a Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) official to travel to visit Smulian to discuss.

(There are more traditional customers here as well: a Skype-chat between Bout and an unnamed individual discussing a prospective deal for AT-14 Kornet anti-tank missiles to Libya.)
Remember who your friends are: There are further inklings about how the DEA’s undercover agents made themselves convincing to Smulian and, ultimately, Bout. From the memoranda from Bout’s lawyer, it appears that the approach to Smulian was made by an ‘undercover operative’ named Michael Snow, playing the role of an aircraft broker who flogs some mysterious South Americans a Moldovan Antonov-12 and then contacts Smulian and Bout when the South Americans want some more serious hardware. The transcripts featuring Snow during a restaurant meeting in Curacao with the fake FARC contacts are awesome: he seems to be straight out of central casting for a Frederick Forsythe film adaptation, playing a grizzled ‘this is Africa’ aviation veteran who says things like “if it wasn’t for me, he’d be left in fucking Africa to fucking rot…what you say? I’m fucking deaf…oh, merci beaucoup madame…I must show them how to make a proper crème brulee.” (I’m not making this up. In fact, the whole dessert schtick is brilliant: in the middle of talking about arms smuggling to Angola, Snow gets the fake FARC rebel commander “Carlos” to discuss his pudding:
CARLOS: It’s a chocolate mousse with cream on the top.

SNOW: But they never burnt it properly.

CARLOS: No, because they got the ice-cream on the top.

Serious pros. I’m wondering whether Snow was so ludicrously convincing because he actually *was* a grizzled ‘this is Africa’ aviation veteran. I’m not sure who he is, but there was a Captain Mike Snow who flew for the ill-fated Africargo in eastern DRC during the war in the early 2000s. No idea if it’s the same guy. It’s presumably not impossible that someone flying there around that time might have bumped into Bout at that time when Bout was reportedly hanging around in the eastern DRC.
New friends…from Iceland? The prosecution also names a new co-conspirator in the FARC deal: one Jon Gylfason, based in Tanzania, who - according to the prosecution – pitches up to Smulian with the Tanzania proposal and a TPDF contact, travels to Moscow to meet Bout, and continues to act as a messenger between Smulian and Bout during the fake-FARC negotiations. I’ve never heard of Gylfason, although I now have some ideas about who he might be. Sounds lcelandic, which is also tangentially suggested by the fact that Smulian communicates with Bout using an Icelandic root-domain email address (development@xnet.is) which he says was “set up for Jon by his buddy who owns the server”, and which he says deletes the emails after they’re sent.
Good old friends: There’s been much supposition and speculation about Bout’s ability to sit in Moscow all the way through the 2000s and not be bothered – an ostensible immunity often attributed to alleged high-level friends in the Russian government. That government’s subsequent efforts to argue against Bout’s extradition from Thailand have fuelled this geopolitical speculation further. From affidavits filed with the Thai court, reproduced in the US case filings, some of this speculation, at least, seems to be true: there’s one from a Russian Duma member, Serge Ivanov, who says that he met Bout for coffee in Moscow before he went to Thailand; and that after his arrest the Duma issued letters to Thailand and President Medvedev in March and September 2008 requesting Bout’s assistance and release.

Other old friends (or maybe new ones): Finally, two new bit-players not yet identified. When discussing an aircraft from Moldova, Smulian refers to the country as ‘Paul’s place’. And when emailing Bout about a prospective trip to discuss the fake-FARC deal, Smulian proposes that Bout sends ‘A from your side’.

Who’s Paul, and who’s ‘A’? Any thoughts?

(Picture from the dependable Brick Arms. Lego weapons for all occasions)

----
*** I’ve never been convinced that Bout, as some of his mythmakers would have it, was really the biggest arms dealer going in Afghanistan and West Africa, single-handedly keeping the Taliban in business and Charles Taylor up to his Rolex in child soldiers’ blood. Nor am I at all convinced by the arguments from the other side, that Bout just did logistics (including arms) and never dealt arms himself: documentation already presented in the current pre-trial proceedings and by Richard Chichakli in his 2006 civil suit against OFAC, if genuine, strongly suggest that Bout has long been involved in setting up real arms deals.

Good graphs

2011-01-04T20:30:00.011Z

UK national debt has been discussed and written about everywhere, but the message still isn't really getting through. Even in capital letters.

UK PUBLIC DEBT IS NOWHERE NEAR "RECORD" LEVELS.

Which means that the current level of spending cuts are nowhere near "inevitable".

I'm not going to bore the three people who read this blog with a discussion of the merits and demerits of UK spending cuts and tax rises. We know all this. And I'm basically economically illiterate anyway. This is a call-out for a communications strategy.

This much we all know already:

(1) the Coalition government has, somehow, successfully sold the public the idea that the cuts are a natural fact like gravity, rather than a political fact like Margaret Thatcher's hairdo.

(2) They've done this by saying, endlessly, that the national debt is the biggest it's ever been.

(3) Which is technically true: except that any chancellor, at almost any time since 1900, can say that national debt is the largest it's ever been.

See!

(4) This is OK because the size of our economy is, er, almost always the largest ever, and growing continually. So the observation is basically meaningless.

(5) In fact, net national debt AS A PROPORTION OF GDP is lower than at any time between 1920 and 1970; and interest payments on that debt are lower than at any time between 1920 and 2000. This doesn't mean it's not rising worryingly, and needs ultimately to be reduced. And in the boom periods after the 2nd world war when we were building the welfare state and public debt was still massive we had, er, quite a lot of American aid. But it does show graphically that the cuts don't need to be anywhere near as deep or fast as they are: and that this speed and depth isn't sound fiscal policy, but a purely ideological effort to decimate the state etc. etc.

So: how can the British left get the British public past the GCSE-business-studies-level mistake that was the basis for the Chancellor's last budget speech?

I reckon one good start is these *brilliant* graphs courtesy of the *brilliant* (and politically conservative) UK public spending website.

Between now and Mayday I'm going to wear these on my FOREHEAD if necessary.

ps. I know, I know - the bond markets (thanks Jon). Markets schmarkets, that's what I say.

No, Dong

2010-09-13T21:01:00.015+01:00

So. Johnnie Walker-loving mass murderer Kim Jong-il may be dying. Although it's obviously difficult to tell - he was apparently dying from a stroke in 2008. And from fatal pancreatic cancer in 2009. He's such a tease.

The real question, of course, is whether it's actually going to make any difference if the loveable little Nork-knome kicks it? Media coverage of the Democratic People's Republic seems to suffer more acutely than that of any other country from 'dictatoritis': the implausible belief that the intractability of an international crisis is entirely due to the fact that a single uncompromising psychopath has, despite the political handicap of judgement-obscuring mental illness, somehow managed to seize and maintain control of an entire nation. Just displace Kim and his unhinged family, goes this line of argument, and a new dawn rises over Pyongyang. And while we've all learned to love to hate Bashir, Saddam, Uncle Bob, nowhere has international strategy bought into a dictator's own personality myth as completely as in the case of North Korea.

It seems to be North Korea's 'crime as foreign policy' that encourages the Team America theory of Korean IR. The ballistic missile proliferation. The mass currency forgery. The dodgy Ilyushins laden with weapons on their way to Iran. They all make it easier to think of North Korea as a country captured by a single mad criminal family. In fact, states captured by mafias and crime dynasties (rather than wider elites) seem to tend to be weak states with a lot of ungoverned political space (think central Asia), not highly controlled autocracies like North Korea. Why shouldn't we see the Korean situation instead as something much more common: a state with a corrupt but comprehensive government apparatus, a predictably self-interested elite, locked like others into an intractable but familiar strategic deadlock with a militarily competitive neighbour?

Ballistic missile testing is a case in point. When the Norks test a missile, as in 2009, the Security Council does a Chapter VII nut. Quite right too. It's not often remarked, though, that South Korea also likes ballistic missiles. Enough to have a clandestine procurement programme. It's just that no-one talks about it like that, because it's called a 'civilian space programme', and it does ostensibly useful things like launching 'satellites for climate change research' (so that's all right then). Everyone's very sympathetic when South Korean ballistic missile (sorry, satellite launch vehicle) tests blow up. As in June this year, when South Korea's KSLV-1 rocket exploded moments after take-off. How did the BBC report it?

South Korea's first launch of the two-stage KSLV-1, in August last year, failed to place its satellite payload into the proper orbit.

Four months previously, an attempted space launch by North Korea was deemed to have failed when the US reported that both rocket stages had fallen into the Pacific Ocean.

The North's launch was seen as a cover for a long-range missile test, and prompted UN sanctions.

Pyongyang had voiced irritation at the South's rocket development, but most other powers in the region accepted that its attempt was part of a peaceful civilian programme.

But space rockets are, um, ballistic missiles. Few space programmes are purely civilian or commercial. Even if they genuinely have civilian objectives, they're always developing countries' ability to launch warheads too. Is it any wonder that North Korea gets a bit priapic (and vice-versa, of course)?

Interestingly, as everyone was comiserating earlier this year about South Korea's rocket test failure, a little-reported Florida court case opened an interesting window into South Korea's space programme. It's a grubbily instructive little tale.

According to the court papers: Juwhan Yun, a South-Korean-born naturalised US citizen running a New Jersey-registered company called Blue Hill Corporation, was arrested in April 2009. In May 2010 he finally entered a guilty plea, admitting to brokering a series of illegal arms deals - illegal because Blue Hill Corporation was completely unregistered as an arms broker. Yun had apparently acted for the Korean government to procure everything from Nike missile components, Russian Sukhoi-27 fighter jets, and US-made F-5 and F-16 parts, to an 'RD-180 propulsion system', also from Russia. According to correspondence between Yun and a confidential informant quoted in the investigating agent's affidavit, the RD-180 propulsion system was intended for the KSLV-2, the successor rocket to the KSLV-1 'climate change research satellite' launch rocket that failed this year. Yen apparently told the informant's company that Russia had recently refused to sell the RD-180 rocket engines to South Korea.

While insisting he wanted to do 'legitimate business', Yun appears to have been trying to make arrangements for technology transfer to South Korea in spite of the Russian refusal: leveraging the informant's Russian contacts to obtain RD-180 manuals and technical documentation from Russia, and then trying to find a "retired expert/specialist with much experience at the right job" - apparently approaching a scientist at the University of Central Florida's Aerospace Program - to teach the South Koreans how to nativise the RD-180 rocket engines.

In his post-arrest statements Jun stated that he was working for a "subcontractor for the KSLV programme". The company isn't named in the court papers, but we are coyly told that "a check of public source information via the internet verified that the company identified by Yun is listed as a member of the Korea Defense Industry Association and was previously involved in the Altitude and Orbit Control Subsystem and the Propulsion Subsystem development for the Korean KOMPSAT-1 satellite." It doesn't exactly require a super-sleuth to repeat the googling. Which company? Well I wouldn't want to libel anyone, but, um, think of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, rhyming with "Whanwha".

If Yun was telling the truth, then it's nice that South Korea's leading industrialists, and its government, were still doing business with him. Because he has some serious form: here he is in 1989,

just after being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison (and barred permanently from the US arms brokering register) for yet more illegal arms trading. This first time round, Yun had similarly set up shop in the US to buy munitions for South Korea, and ended up acting as an agent for a South Korean trading company while negotiating with a notorious UK arms dealer to buy bombs filled with Sarin nerve gas that Yun told his contacts were for sale to Iran (the deal never went through).

Hmmm. Clandestine ballistic missile procurement? Government-linked arms procurers trying to flog nerve gas to Iran on the side? Which Korea would that be then?

I'm not trying to equate North Korea with South Korea. For instance, the South Korean government doesn't like human rights very much, but it's yet to preside over the starvation of several millions of its citizens.

Nor are South Korea's government, companies or agents unusually dodgy. The point is simply that all governments under military and strategic pressure get involved in this kind of dodgy stuff. The Korean stand-off is a conflict like many others, with aggression, clandestinity and strategic deadlock on both sides. Its resolution, equally, is likely to require political movement on both sides - compromise, not a lucky bout of pancreatic cancer.

The world turn'd upside down

2010-08-11T18:29:00.009+01:00

For various reasons (mainly a new job) I've been thinking a lot about "international development" recently. The development industry's interventions are always socially transformative. Fair enough: whatever you may think about it, social and economic change - "development" - is supposed to be the point. But the direction of social transformation promoted - or permitted - in the Majority World by Western governments and development agencies is often constrained. Constrained either by a liberal self-censorship that prohibits the imperialism of modernisation, and prioritises instead a georgic vision of prosperous, stable, discrete,self-sufficient (and generally rural) communities; or, more straightforwardly, constrained by donors' and developers' conservative tolerance for some social transformations, but not others. With some significant exceptions, Western development donors and agencies are generally in favour of equalising relations between men and women. They're sometimes supportive of formal political democracy (or, more commonly, it's technocratic cousin, 'governance'). And increasingly some agencies promote measures to end unequal power relations experienced by other disempowered groups, such as disabled people.

But one of the last liberal development taboos - even in the Minority World - seems to be to fundamentally challenge power relations between children and adults. And the institution where development practitioners are perhaps at their most self-congratulatory is the key site where children - everywhere - are disempowered and repressed by adults: school. Schools obviously instantiate, inculcate and reproduce unequal power relations of all kinds. And as a result, it's probably fair to say that almost all school eduaction involves widespread and systematic violations of children's human rights. Day in, day out, children at school are denied free expression; are arbitrarily deprived of their liberty and property; have their privacy routinely violated; and are in many cases subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

I'm not suggesting that this is any great hidden scandal. It's a mark of how fundamental the powerlessness of children is in our societies that these deprivations of rights garner almost universal acceptance by adults and children alike. And since wealthy, western societies continue to pretend that they're not happening, you wouldn't expect children's powerlessness to be challenged by our liberal efforts to remake other societies.

Which is why I'm pretty surprised by this: a project to train up Ugandan schoolchildren as education and anti-corruption monitors - to monitor their own teachers. As one of the schoolchildren describes it to ActionAid:

"Every fortnight, we go and see the head teacher and ask him questions. We ask for the receipts for what has been spent and also check the physical amount of things bought. We see whether the head teacher has bought the things or if he has just eaten the money. We would know if the head teacher has eaten the money because we look at the receipts to see if they are forged. We check the displays of releases of money which is required under UPE [Universal Primary Education], and we count the children class by class. If something is wrong, we report this to the head teacher. If the head teacher does not accept what we say, we call the teachers and tell them. We also talk to the [charity involved in running the project]"

Why don't development organisations and donors talk about these kind of projects more? Even if this small inversion of power relations in Ugandan schools didn't detect corruption (it does), it would be worthwhile just for its quiet but astonishingly radical challenge to adult-child power relations. Just picture it - can you imagine British schoolkids being trained to audit the accounts of Academy schools, and to challenge the dodgy spending decisions and bloated salaries of their head teachers and chief executives? Tolstoy, Dewey and Foucault would, I think, have been delighted. And it looks like I'm going to have to eat my words about the U.S. Christian charity jointly responsible for this project - a charity whose child sponsorship scheme in northern Kenya I roundly slagged off elsewhere.

(1) + (2) + (3) + (4) + ...

2010-07-24T17:12:00.020+01:00

I can't think of any more depressing international situation than south/central Somalia. A population trapped between:

(1) unending, rent-seeking clan rivalry

(2) at least two brutal groups of insurgents, one of which regularly amputates teenagers' limbs and stones children to death

(3) a chaotic, Western-backed transitional government in control of just a few blocks of Mogadishu, whose forces have a propensity to sell their weapons to insurgents and recruit child soldiers

(4) an underpowered AU peacekeeping force which admits in its own reports that it indiscriminately shells civilians (arguably because it's too weak and disorganised to do anything else)

How could the international community possibly tinker with this dismal equation to make it any worse? AU chief Jean Ping has a bright idea, which he announced yesterday afternoon:

(5) bolster the AU force in Somalia with a battalion of troops from the armed forces of...Guinea.

The Guinean army? The one which with alarming regularity for over a decade has been opening fire wantonly on its own people? Several units of which attacked peaceful demonstrators just last September, killing 150 people and injuring over a thousand others, and publicly gang-raped over 40 women in the middle of Conakry? A force so factionalised that last December one faction leader shot the president in the head (another military captain who'd seized power in a coup just a year before). A force so remedial that it's currently undergoing near-emergency U.S.-led security sector reform just to prevent another coup or a civil war as Guineans go to the polls in their first ever comparatively free elections. That Guinean army? Still, maybe they'll fit in in Somalia. After all, they've been quite keen on recruiting child soldiers too, at least until their training camps were disbanded after the president's shooting.

There's no denying that the AU force in Somalia (AMISOM) is desperately short of capacity and manpower. That they're effectively used as cannon-fodder by their international backers who don't want to commit troops themselves (but are quite happy to devote tens of millions of dollars and dozens of warships to protect the fraction of their merchant shipping off Somalia's coast which gets attacked by pirates). And, equally, I know that the Guinean army is far from homogenous: that its most factionalised and probably brutalised units, responsible for past and recent atrocities, seem to be concentrated (although not exclusively) in the gaggle of paratrooper and presidential guard units collectively called the beret rouges.

But with SSR just starting, and certainly with no measure yet of its success, it seems insane to think the Guinean army might be ready, even militarily, to play a major role in a peacekeeping operation. My own overwhelming memory of my extremely brief encounter with the Guinean army is a hurried visit to their headquarters at Camp Alpha Yaya in Conakry last November. Dozens of berets rouges and CMIS gendarmes, largely unpaid, sitting around smoking cigarettes in weird, near total silence, most cradling and playing with the long commando knives that they all carried in brown sheathes. The sort of knives that a group of berets rouges were photographed using to casually stab a suspected demonstrator in the suburb of Bomboli on 30 September last year. It's an indictment of AMISOM - and of the lack of serious international commitment to helping Somalia - that these may be the guys tasked vainly with trying to bring security to the streets of Mogadishu.

Cyborg love-rats

2010-06-15T19:27:00.013+01:00

Glamour Magazine. Blows. My. Tiny. Mind.

I was flicking through last month's Glamour on the loo a couple of days ago (too much information?) when I came across this beauty. That's right folks, it's a handy flowchart telling you when you should split up from your partner if he's [sic] been unfaithful.

As you can see, there are only two basic varieties of 'emotional infidelity'. Either you work together, or you don't. Similarly, physical infidelity comes in just two flavours: drunk / not drunk. (Actually, that bit does pretty much cover the many-coloured palette of my sexual experiences, but we'll skip on). If it happened more than once while drunk, he's probably an alcholic.

And so on.

What I love most about this diagram is the kind of business-skirt-Bridget-Jones-too-many-chardonnays life pattern it assumes everyone lives. As in any flowchart, there are at least two different kinds of reduction going on here.

First there's the category reduction in the boxes: reducing a universe of emotional experience - a thousand years of cultural and literary reflection on the subtle, sinuous, tragic and comic ways in which two people's relationship flexes - into ten fifty-word scenarios.

Then there's the causal reduction in the lines between the boxes. In this case, the progress of the 21st-century Western middle-class relationship is explained by alcohol, work and communications technology. These are the three fundamental forces that govern emotional motion in this universe. Meaningless flirtation outside the workplace? Emotional infidelity not mediated by email or text message? Loss of control caused by anything other than substance abuse? None of these things can exist. They're against the laws of physics.

Or maybe I'm reading a tad too much into what is, essentially, Just a Bit of Fun.

But I'm not so sure. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether maybe this flowchart might actually be true. At least for Glamour magazine's core demographic. Or rather, maybe it and its friends have made themselves true. Maybe a decade of Cosmo relationship flowcharts, shackled to the growth of post-industrial capitalism's casualised* white-collar service sectors, has actually made Western urban life like this? Maybe this flowchart actually diagnoses the entirety of our under/overemployed, lower-middle-class, low-seratonin metroliving in ten pastel-coloured boxes? A schematic for emotional-death-by-temping. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it's a work of genius. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

The bigger point is that there's total coherence in Glamour magazine's choice of schematic. The flowchart and its cousins are the emblematic technology of 'management science': the 20th century's ur-science, whose rise both created the business models that keep us permanently overworked yet casualised, rootless and moving from short-term job to short-term job; and which thereby confines our emotional lives to workplace flirtation, inappropriate emails and after-work drinking. It seems only appropriate, then, that those impoverished emotional lives should also be described and directed by flowcharts.

The important thing, of course, is the self-fulfilling cognitive impact of this kind of diagramming. There's nothing wrong with using a diagram to summarise important temporal and causal relationships (although there are diagrams better than flowcharts to do this - they're designed for computer programmes, not the kinds of complex systems better described, in fact, by the allusiveness of formal language). But once you start to use any schematic to explain things, there's a temptation to think that this is how the situation you are trying to explain actually is. That the model is the thing it models. Etc. And then to act that way.

Beyond the ordinary propensity of any sufficiently influential model to make itself true, flowchart capitalism works to make flowchart psychology true. Egged on by the narrow models of management consultants and the OECD, companies and governments seek to reduce labour costs and labour market rigidity. The less job security we have, the more time we need to spend organising our employment arrangements (and organising our lives around our employment arrangements). The more we're forced to do more labour for less money and with fewer people, the more we have to spend our entire lives at work. So, ironically, the less job security and fewer labour rights we have, the more significant the workplace becomes in our social lives. And the more our labour conditions increase the combination of repetitive boredom and stress that we need to assuage with flirty emails and heavy drinking.

In short: deregulation makes us office sluts. As Karl Marx would say.

I'm actually being pretty serious here. The genealogy that gets us from flowcharts to Bridget Jones remains one of the most under-explored narratives of 20th-century history. Philip Mirowski's provocative re-writing of the history of economics (and the history of science) provides, as far as I know, the most detailed account so far. The Ladybird version goes something like this:

1. In the 19th century, thermodynamics begat neoclassical economics. Physicists - and, more significantly, theory-minded engineers, especially ones that were working on steam engines - are the forgotten theorists that produce the doctrines of the new economics, based upon thermodynamic models. Utility is patterned on potential energy, down to its formal mathematics. In other words, the scientific ideas and machines that fuelled industrial capitalism also provided the economic theory that - after the fact - describes and justifies industrial capitalism.

2. In the 1940s and 1950s a new strand of thinking about automata and robots provided the forgotten intellectual origins of post-war mathematical economics: developments in neoclassical price theory, rational expectations theory, theories of institutions, and computational economics. Physical scientists and engineers, working mainly in the United States on operations research, game theory, computers, missile servomechanisms and strategic bombing models, are again the central thinkers. And consequently the model human at the heart of neoclassical microeconomics is not Adam Smith's homo economicus. It's the cyborg.

In Mirowski's account the axial figure of this second phase is mathematician, operations researcher, game theorist and CIA consultant John von Neumann. The eccentric genius of whom his Princeton colleagues said that "he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly".

Then there's the third act to this account, which I think has still to be adequately written. It starts from the fact that the other thing these precocious operations researchers and engineers are doing in the first half of the 20th century, as well as revolutionising neoclassical economics, is creating management science. Moving beyond the factory time-and-motion studies of Ford and Taylor, they're trying to make missiles and machines and factories and businesses work more efficiently, in part by making people more like machines.

Somehow management 'science' - not economics - becomes the master discipline of the late 20th century. The management consultants who make up the discipline's priesthood start fanning out from McKinsey and PA Consulting and Booz Allen, determining not just how manufacturing processes, but soon how whole corporations, cities, armies, government departments and societies, should be organised. By the late 20th century the re-imagining of workers, processes and institutions as industrial machines - and their re-engineering for 'efficiency' - seems to have won out over other candidate 'ur-sciences' (economics, social anthropology). And of course the basic spanners and wrenches of the management practitioners mirror, but in totally bastardised form, the prescriptions of the economics that was also substantially generated by management science's progenitors: identify ineffeciencies or 'synergies'; fire those workers unfortunate enough to be employed in an 'inefficient' position; and ensure that everyone left is working as long and as fast and as cheaply as possible.

And of course, with this parenthood, it was only natural that management science should so enthusiastically embrace the flowchart: the analytical tool first probably formalised (for designing computer programmes, not factory processes or business models) by John von Neumann.

See!

I've been meaning to write a lot more about the global intellectual triumph of 'management' and its bizarre manifestations (to take one small instance, how the management consulting firm Adam Smith International, in conjunction with DFID, are currently restructuring the Sudan People's Liberation Army). And the homogenous picture of neoclassical economics I've badly sketched here is, of course, a total caricature. But this is already way too long. So for now, I'll leave it with this.

NATO have a new strategy for Afghanistan, right? The proposed solution to what is arguably Europe's and the United States' most important foreign policy problem. In December, NBC's Richard Engels got hold of a copy of some declassified bits from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The master document is this - produced, it appears, by noted counter-insurgency specialists, er, PA Consulting.

The Mother of all Flowcharts.

This is how we're bringing peace to Afghanistan. And romance to our tired treadmill lives. And we wonder why we're so fucked.

* In case Per or any other actual economists are reading this: I think I mean increased external numerical flexibility in the labour market. I'd be grateful for correction if there's a more appropriate metric, though.

Retooling Françafrique

2010-05-16T22:54:00.031+01:00

I've never been a big fan of reading the entrails of press releases trying to divine signs of intrigue. But there's been one under-reported corner amid the reams of coverage of the Clotilde Reiss saga this week. The European media's cloak-and-dagger speculation has been all about possible prisoner-swap deals cut by the Elysée to get Reiss out of Tehran: speculation fuelled by the recent shuffle of high-profile Iranian prisoners out of French jails - first Majid Kakavand, the Iranian engineer the US were trying to extradite for alleged illegal procurement of US components for Iran's arms industry; then Ali Vakili Rad, convicted in 1994 for assassinating the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar.

But there's been little in the Anglophone media - and scarcely more Francophone coverage - about France's diplomatic wingmen in the Reiss negotiations. The Elysee's short statement after Reiss' release thanked "Mr Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, Mr Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, and Mr Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, for their active role in securing our compatriot’s release."

It would be fascinating to know what Lula and Assad did to help smooth the wheels. Wade, though, clearly wanted everyone to know how helpful he'd been: the Senegalese presidency put out a press statement on the day of Reiss' release with a detailed narrative of shuttle diplomacy between Paris, Dakar and Tehran since October 2009, which he claims sealed the deal on Reiss' release after last-minute meetings in Tehran on 14-15 May between his son, Karim Wade, his foreign minister, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It's hard to know how much of this is puff from a president under increasing fire from accusations of corruption and nepotism after a decade of power - Senegal's Socialist Party criticised Wade this week for blowing his own diplomatic trumpet "like an elephant in a china shop".

But what's most interesting about Wade's account is the cast of supporting characters on all the late night Air France flights. Wade says that he initiated discussions on the Reiss dossier unilaterally on a trip to Tehran in October 2009, and was initially encouraged by France; but that after a 2 hour meeting in Dakar in November 2009, he was told by Andre Parant, one of Sarkosy's African affairs advisors, that France wanted Senegal to suspend its diplomatic efforts.

Senegalese efforts were revived, Wade claims, in late March, when his son Karim Wade met at the Elysée (not, of course, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay) with Claude Gueant, Sarkozy's chief of staff. From then on, according to Wade's account, Gueant is his point-person as his ministers shuttle back and forth between Tehran, Paris and Dakar.

One way of interpreting this might be to see Senegal's president playing off two factions in Paris: Sarkozy's new foreign policy advisers like Parant, reluctant for Wade to, er, wade in; and older contacts in the Françafrique networks like Gueant (deputy-director of 'arms-to-Angola' Charles Pasqua's cabinet during the 1990s), accustomed to circumventing the Quai d'Orsay to deal straight with France's West African friends in high places.

It's surprising (and widely remarked upon) how these old networks have returned to the Elysée in recent years. When Sarkozy came to power in 2007 much was made of the 'death' of Françafrique, the shadowy post-colonial political-business system which channelled French aid, political support and military muscle to a stable of reliable (if slightly murderous and dictatorial) West and central African leaders, in return for a complex system of double-bribery in which aid and loans trickled back to France as illicit funding for both Gaullist and socialist parties. French influence in Africa was waning, commentators claimed, as the US and new powers like China and Iran offered assistance with fewer strings attached to France's traditional African clients. At the same time, Sarkozy's Blairist new dawn came complete with a Robin-Cook-esque gesture at a new ethical foreign policy: in 2008 Sarkozy's new secretary of state for overseas cooperation, Jean-Marie Bockel, said he wanted to "sign the death certificate of Françafrique." Yet two months later, Bockel was removed from his ministry (allegedly, the New York Times claimed, after he annoyed Gabonese president Omar Bongo, the centre of the Françafrique system since the 1960s, by referring to Gabonese corruption). Meanwhile advisers like Gueant straddle the divide between Sarkozy's young turks (he's been Sarkozy's chief of staff since 2002) and the old Pasqua Africa networks. Most telling is the man who the Senegalese presidency claims accompanied Karim Wade to Tehran in April: "the lawyer Robert Bougi", Bongo's confidant and Jacques Foccart's inheritor as the lynchpin of the Françafrique system. Bougi apparently now also has an advisory role on African affairs at the Elysée.

Françafrique was always as much about stability as corruption: keeping France's reliable friends in power for as long as possible with aid, loans and battalions of French troops stationed at the presidential palaces (Bongo, the lynchpin, was the longest serving non-monarchical head of state in the world, in power for 42 years). So it's interesting that Wade's power play seems at least partly to do with the reported grooming of his son, Karim, to succeed him smoothly as Senegal's next president. The Senegalese press has widely reported that Gueant and Bourgi have been promoting Karim's candidature in Paris. Whether or not that's true, on the other side Andre Parant slipped out to a French regional journalist at the end of April that 'the government' was worried about political unrest in Senegal if Wade undertook a "monarchical succession" (an 'off the record' comment duly published by Republican Lorrain).

So it looks like the reseaux are back, albeit with rivals for Sarkozy's ear. But the Reiss saga shows how fortuitously the old African networks may be serving new purposes for French policy - giving France an oblique diplomatic lever with newly important powers like Iran. Many Francophone West African states - with substantial or majority Mulsim populations and a string of Francophile Muslim presidents at the heart of the old Françafrique networks (Gabon's Bongo, Chad's Deby, Niger's Tanja, Senegal's Wade, Mali's Touré...) - are important in diplomatic configurations not accessible to powers like the UK, US and France - the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, for example, and Tehran's 'two-fingers to the G-20' G-15 group. Iran and some Gulf states are growing investors in West Africa. It's become a bit of a truism that Senegal in particular is Iran's 'bridgehead' in Africa: a major Iranian car factory is due to start exporting from Senegal; they've been promised an oil refinery; and Senegal (along with Zimbabwe, Sudan and Gabon) continues to defend Iran's right to civilian nuclear power and denies that Tehran's making a bomb.

Just when this new polyamoury of France's former colonies is making French columnists faintly wistful for the days of quiet phone calls and cash-stuffed briefcases (and, of course, making the Heritage Foundation priapic with gleeful fear about Shi'a empire-building in West Africa), the cosmopolitan ties of France's old friends in West Africa - tapped into by the oldest of old-school Françafrique operators - suddenly look rather useful. With the French deficit at 7.5%, I wonder how long it can it be before Paris is asking some of its old friends in the Gulf of Guinea to put in a friendly word to a few Gulf State sovereign funds to play nicely? Perhaps there's even a more general point - are former colonial powers, with their culturally-anchored deep networks of oblique international influence, actually peculiarly well-equipped to operate in a new polycentric international order? And is this something that the US lacks?

that they could call you

2010-05-03T19:07:00.021+01:00

I've just finished reading James Meek's excellent novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. His anti-hero, an insufficiently deracinated British journalist (clearly, in part, Meek), moving between Afghan airstrips and Islington dinner parties, describes at one point the "battle for distance", on which the practice of journalism depends. And human rights research. And war.

There was a cult of seeing without knowing and watching without touching. The generic foreign faces on television: you knew them, because you could see them, you could hear the foreign sounds they made. But you had to avoid knowing enough about them to prevent your imagination making them out to be what you wanted them to be. You had to turn away from the knowledge that you could reach them on the phone. That they had phones. That they could call you. The horror of the labour required if these truths were accepted drove people to celebrate the distance and nurture it, to turn their will towards preserving the difference between a here and a there, in a world where there was no there any more, where everyone was already here.

As a nascent (and insufficiently deracinated) professional voyeur of human misery, I'm beginning to have a few of those experiences. Where you're sent 'abroad' and you meet people, real people, who might as well be ghosts, and you store up their stories for research reports and self-aggrandising dinner party anecdotes. And you file each encounter in the compartment in your head which is condescendingly labelled 'source', or even 'victim'. But which is really labelled 'people from that place on the news'.

And then the ghosts materialise on the end of a mobile phone. And occasionally, which is worse, after a while they don't.

There's a second myth which goes along with the myth of distance. The myth that you are powerless to help, because they are so far away. And they are so many. And so you're helping as best you can, because you're helping to tell their story or lobby their government or support their court case or their counselling or their compensation. When of course you are perfectly powerful enough to help directly and concretely, with your airline tickets and bank transfers and phone calls and consular letters. If only you pulled out your finger and did something in time.

There's no trite lesson at the end of this post. Except to glumly remark that our liberal Ummah doesn't stretch anywhere near as far as we would like to think. That our (or my) habit of picking and choosing the acquaintances we maintain at a distance - between the friendly, well-educated, useful ones we want to keep up with on Facebook, and the ones who aren't on Facebook at all - is repellent. And that there must be a way of doing better?

iAtrocity

2010-01-25T01:09:00.001Z

Guinea's opposition parties have worked hard to develop a unified political memory about what happened on the 28th September. Probably one of the reasons they remain within a unified coalition is because they and their supporters share the experience and solidarity of the repression on that day; and it'll be significant to see what happens to the Forces Vives once it comes to election-time.

But interestingly, that shared memory has been formed not just by the opposition parties' statements, or even by people sharing stories and experiences personally, but by a rapidly-circulated body of photographs and video clips of the events at the stadium. The government junta's claims about what happened that day - a 'violent' demonstration, police threatened, crowd members carrying their own firearms who fired on the police, soldiers staying in their barracks and only a small number of people killed after a stampede - were immediately falsified by film clips and photos: of soldiers firing on demonstrators, public rapes and piled-up bodies. Almost all were taken on people's mobile phones, and almost everyone in Conakry has seen them - in a country where relatively few ordinary people have regular access to the internet, or their own email addresses.

People haven't seen the footage on Youtube or Facebook or viral emails - it seems to have been circulated almost entirely on people's mobile phones themselves. The first thing that the first young person I interviewed said was 'Tu as le Bluetooth?'

28 Septembre CD-ROMs and DVDs are also selling in Conakry's markets, and showing in the tiny shack-cinemas throughout the city where people usually go to watch a big European football match, or play on a Playstation for an hour.

I know the impact of social technology is continually over-hyped. And it's obvious that international pressure - particularly from ECOWAS and France - has to a large extent shaped the CNDD's more moderate posture in recent weeks. But I don't think the impact of this corpus of visual imagery can be underplayed in what's subsequently happened in Guinea; the opposition parties growing in strength, and the CNDD having finally to appear, at least, to cede some power. Effectively, cameraphones have ensured that there's simply no way anyone in Guinea can believe that the regime's story about the repression is true, even if those images themselves select another particular version of events. Despite relative popularity immediately after coming to power, the CNDD are now literally unsupported.

The first widely marketed cameraphones appeared in the global North around 2003; and we've just reached the stage where enough people in rich countries have got rid of their first cameraphones for them to be fairly widely available throughout east and west Africa. Visual sousveillance has finally reached even the poorest parts of the global South; and, to some extent, seems to be working to shape remembering and forgetting. And I'm glad that no amount of fresh paint is going to stop that.

More circuses than bread

2010-01-09T23:01:00.000Z

I'm afraid I haven't really found the time or the impetus to write about my brief stay in Conakry in November. That's partly because there's quite a lot about the work I can't really describe here. What struck me most, though, was the forced banality of life in the CNDD's Guinea.

This is the Jardin du 2 Octobre in downtown Conakry. Named after Guinea's independence anniversary, it's presumably supposed to commemorate the achievements of the independent Guinean people. But at the moment in has freshly-painted pictures of Donald Duck and Goofy around its walls. In fact, it's one of two freshly painted buildings in the city. The rest of Guinea's capital - its decrepit hospitals, its parliament building, its stained villas and empty hotels - is crumbling gently into the sea. Even some of the mining companies have sent their foreign staff home, and when we were there a single cargo ship was sitting in the city's port. But in late November, on the eve of the fete of Tabaski - the celebration of the return from the Haj - Conakry's public gardens were grandly opened after extensive refurbishment. On Tabaski itself there were hundreds of people queuing with their children, waiting to play on the park's newly installed children's rides: all laid on by the government, the queues watched over by bored soldiers and the rusty T-55 tank that the regime have stationed at the adjacent crossroads since the December 2008 coup brought the CNDD junta to power.

This was just six weeks after Conakry's security forces killed over 150 people and gang-raped dozens of women during an opposition rally calling for the CNDD to cede power. As Guineans queued with their children to ride on the Mickey Mouse merry-go-rounds, soldiers were still stealing diplomatic cars and driving them into Conakry's suburbs to arrest 'troublemakers'.

(Ironically, the renovation of the Jardin has reportedly been paid for by a Lebanese businessman, close to the CNDD and the predecessor regime, who the opposition 'Forces Vives' claim has recently helped procure military equipment for the junta's newly formed militias. They've produced no concrete evidence for this - but the UN certainly thinks he has form: in 2003 the UN Panel of Experts on Liberia named his company as an intermediary in a series of arms shipments from Iran to Guinea, passed on, they claimed, to the Guinean-backed LURD rebels then engaged in their final brutal assault on Monrovia.)

Just down the road, Guinea's parliament building, the Palais des Peuples, is still empty of parliamentarians since the constitution was suspended in December 2008. Instead, last month it was turned over to the 'Miss Guinee' 2009 contest, another Tabaski treat laid on by the CNDD. The pageant was shown live on state TV (they must have needed something to fill the schedules after the president stopped his daily three-hour chat show). The day before, we saw 'les Miss' in our hotel's restaurant, decked out in ludicrously low-cut ball dresses, having the nervous privilege of being lunched by a dozen red-beret soldiers, including some of the CNDD's inner circle.

Conakry's other freshly-painted building is also named with a date. The Stade du 28 Septembre, the city's main football stadium, commemorates the 1958 referendum in which the Guinean people voted for complete independence from France; and now, of course, is synonymous with the most recent 28th September, when gendarmes and soldiers strafed the stands with Kalashnikovs and carried out gang rapes on the pitch. Just a couple of days after, still littered with empty cartridge cases, the stadium was cleaned from top to bottom, the blood washed away, and the entire stadium complex given a new coat of paint. Nothing to do with getting rid of forensic evidence, of course; an upcoming match with Burkina Faso simply meant that the stadium had to be spruced up...

At both the gardens and the stadium, the fresh paint is obviously part of a larger pretence that nothing's wrong. That attempt has manifestly failed. But I think maybe the partying wasn't a facade, despite almost everyone in Conakry having a friend, relative or acquaintance who had been recently injured or killed by the security forces. Several people we met said that they were glad there was a big Tabaski celebration: Guineans always party before they go back into the streets, they said. A diplomat told us that on the night of 27th September, despite the roadblocks, he'd never seen the clubs in Conakry so full or so frenetic. You always know that the opposition is planning a big demonstration, he said, because the clubs are overflowing the night before.

In a country where every major political demonstration for a decade has been met with indiscriminate, excessive and lethal force from the army's elite commando forces, that seems like gladiator spirit. It also shows the extraordinary political organisation of Guinea's political parties and trade unions. Peaceful demonstrators keep getting massacred because they keep going back into the streets; and that's testimony to the amazing ability of the parties and unions to motivate and mobilise people - through dense networks of friends and families - to go back into the streets.

This might be fun...

2010-01-03T18:35:00.000Z

...although "as soon as the information is ready" sounds a bit like "we've assigned half an intern in the Department for Whogivesatoss to do this, so we'll never have to publish it before the Tories get in. And they'll want to abolish it."

Home Department
Written answers and statements, 15 December 2009

Phil Woolas: In their response to a Report by the Public Administration Select Committee, 'Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall', the Government agreed to publish online, on a quarterly basis, information about ministerial meetings with outside interest groups. Information for the period 1 October to 31 December 2009 will be published by Departments as soon as the information is ready.

(Nicked from here)

People are rectilinear

2009-12-10T21:24:00.000Z

People are aliens.

People are rectilinear.

People are collapsible.

People are crabs.

People are instruments, devices, mechanisms.

People are hieroglyphs.

This is what I learned at Sadlers Wells last month, seeing Ballet Rambert's astonishing Tread Softly.

I don't know anything about dance, and very rarely go to see it. My companions - some of them quite serious dancers - were unimpressed. As a novice, I thought it was a complete revelation.

The revelation was seeing a human body moving all its parts in straight lines. To see how incredibly hard - and odd - it is to move with steady, pneumatic, geometric simplicity.

But what was really revelatory about this rectilinear, entirely alien movement, is that this is also how pop music dancing currently works. I think that's basically the argument of Tread Softly, if dance can have an argument. It overlaid Death and the Maiden with an incredibly proficient, dour MTV dance parody. I realise this sounds awful. In fact, it's oddly beautiful. But its main effect is to startle us into remembering that ever since Michael Jackson's Thriller, almost all mainstream pop music videos have had this kind of military choreography, with enslaved, coordinated ranks of dancing Britney puppets. And along the way, we forgot that the reason the dancers were dancing like that in Thriller was because they were supposed to be, er, zombies.

So now we think it's completely normal for pop singers to move like zombies. Or machines. That it's normal for pop music to turn human bodies into servomotors. And we've been so thoroughly inculcated with this aesthetic that when we see pop music videos, we don't realise how incredibly odd they are.

So what I learned at the ballet was that pop music dancing is one of the last bastions of a properly modernist aesthetic. Basically, because of Michael Jackson, the Vorticists colonised MTV, and we didn't notice.

Who knew?

The international system is an odd place

2009-07-19T00:15:00.000+01:00

Found yesterday on the table of Conference Room 9 in the UN building in New York. We ducked in here for a meeting just as some kind of UN committee had finished. I've no idea what they were discussing - I'd like to imagine some baffled Iranian cleric-diplomat scribbling this down during some earnest human rights discussion; or perhaps the urbane Ambassador of Argentina, languidly speculating on his next cosmopolitan sexual adventure.

In any case, it seemed to sum up my mind-bending week camped out in a UN basement corridor - just another day in one of the strangest organisational forms of life in the world.

More soon.

Squatting the Zeitgeist

2009-06-20T16:42:00.001+01:00

For the sheer scale of its ambition, I'm awestruck and excited by this - an attempt to mount what must be the biggest squat of all time. From my friend Dan in Berlin: beginning this afternoon Berlin social movements will try to take the abandoned Tempelhof Airport, once one of the largest buildings in the world. And not just the terminal buildings: they seem to be trying to occupy its entire compound, including its twin 2km runways (partly built by American engineers to accommodate the US Air Force's C-54 Skymaster cargo aircraft during the Berlin Airlift).

I suspect they probably won't get enough people to succeed, but I really hope they do. Not so much for political reasons: I'm not sure there's particularly powerful justification for taking such a huge space (although I think more manageable squats of under-used land are often good things).

But more because I'm excited by the spectacle. Just imagine what the mad, massed sects of the Berlin underground - the punks, the skaters, the activists, the hippies, the anarchists, the Trots, the ravers, the Fuckparaders - can think up to do with a whole airport.

And partly because of the gorgeous historical justice of democratising a space that is in some respects the origin of the modern 'machine building': the massive architecture of project urbanism that characterises European and American post-war cities, and makes it difficult for real people to live there.

Originally intended for Zeppelins in the 1920s, Tempelhof's terminal buildings were apparently commissioned by Albert Speer - Hitler's architect of the spectacular - as the intended gateway to the Reich's Europe. Norman Foster, who's designed airport terminals at Stansted and Beijing, called Tempelhof "the mother of all modern airports". Tautologous, obviously. There aren't any pre-modern airports. Airports are the archetypal modern non-place: spaces, unique to modernity, that are designed purely for movement and circulation; that lack community, identity, history; that are designed actively to prevent people from actually living there. That's why, I guess, if you sit in Heathrow's Terminal 4 for any period of time you feel like your central nervous system is dying: we're literally not supposed to be there. It's a space designed to make us be somewhere else. Although it's not ostensibly its primary function, lots of other urban architecture works like this too: the narrowed streets (for driving through/(barely) walking on, not for sitting by) and fortress office blocks of most post-war European cities, in fact.

But of course there's something extra going on with airports. They're not just spaces designed to circulate, regulate and exclude humans, but spaces where this is to be done by states. Modern neoclassical airports are both grandiose, empty monuments to states; and intricate machines for states to impose their power by processing people seeking access to their space. Modernity begins with keeping people in and out of places (fields, woods, cities, countries): and although all modern states do this, no regimes have done it as nakedly and rejoicingly as the disciples to modernity who ran Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. And the Nazis' monument to a modernity characterised by state power, human regulation, and ceaseless human circulation...is Tempelhof: the first modern airport, from which all its other hateful airportlet progeny have spawned.

I can't think of anything more joyous than to take it over for "low-cost living places, trailer parks, theatres, intercultural gardens, barbecues, cultural centres, skate parks, adventure playgrounds, museums, agricultural fields". If only we could mobilise the collective anomie, rage and despair of most air travellers, we could take Heathrow next.

Find out how they're doing here.

Nice desks

2009-05-15T16:31:00.000+01:00

I spent much of last night sweating over the fine print of the Government of Southern Sudan's 2009 budget (characteristically, I had to go to three ministries yesterday before I could get hold of a copy of what is an entirely public document. The Ministry of Finance has apparently "run out").

Tedious though it sounds, the budget document is eloquent testimony to many aspects of Southern Sudan's current situation.

Projected 2009 revenue has been halved from 2008 levels: almost entirely a product of GoSS' extreme vulnerability to the plummeting price of oil (an incredible 93% of GoSS' $1.8bn-odd revenues comes from oil).

As in previous years, nearly 30% of all spending goes on the army (and that's not counting off-budget military spending, which is probably considerable). Spending on the SPLA is about the same as spending on education, health and infrastructure combined - in a country with near non-existent road, electricity and water supply networks; where only 16% of schools have permanent buildings; and where the last household survey found that maternal mortality rates were the highest in the world.[1] If the Southern Sudanese were hoping for a peace dividend after the 2005 peace agreement, they're clearly still waiting. Looking at the budget breakdown, this is probably not because of rapacious militarisation, but simply the massive burden of having to support a vast guerrilla army that's yet to be demobilised, and needs to be kept fed if southern Sudan is to avoid yet another civil war: 87% of declared SPLA spending in 2009 - nearly a quarter of the entire national budget - is going on soldiers' salaries (most of which, nonetheless, haven't been paid since mid-January). In fact, 48% of Southern Sudan's entire budget is spent on public or military salaries. In the absence of functioning social protection mechanisms, the entire government is acting as a massive social welfare machine.

The tiny details, though, are also eloquent. Take, for instance, this gem from page 340 (detailing capital spending estimates for the national Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration Commission):

"28.2805: Furniture & General Equipment

1 Executive desk, 1 basic desk (for headquarters): 31,240 [Sudanese Pounds]"

That's about $15,000 for two, er, office desks. Looks like the DDR Commission is getting some nice desks.

***

[1] Granted, this ignores the significant funding to these sectors outside government revenue streams, from what has become, along with the rest of Sudan, probably the largest aid operation in the world.

What feels like work?

2009-05-13T16:48:00.000+01:00

So it's creeping towards the end of the month, and as usual I'm panicking about the report I'm supposed to be writing by the end of it.

Ordinarily when this happens (my working life tends, unfortunately, to constitute a series of lurches from essay crisis to essay crisis), my ex-Catholic moral sensibility whispers constantly in my ear that every minute I'm not spending mind-melded to my steaming laptop is the equivalent of a minute spent idly murdering babies.

But on this occasion, this is supposed to be a 'fieldwork'-based report - and the unruly 'field' hasn't been obediently offering up nuggests of informational gold as regularly as I need it to. So (via Nairobi and Mombasa) I'm back in Juba, desparately trying to cook up some material as the month of May trickles away. Which means speaking to as many people as possible. So now I'm feeling guilty sat at my laptop: I'm wasting precious minutes in the 'field', dammit, and the only time I feel really calm is on my way to another meeting.

So now that 'work' feeling is bumping around uncomfortably down a dirt road on the back of a 14-year-old's motorbike. Which I know is not something I should really be complaining about.

ALSO: I'm thinking of starting a scrapbook on the seductions of modern orientalism. Submissions welcome. My current favourite is a story an NGO trainer here told me about some young Southern Sudanese trainees, enrolled in an aid agency's training programme, who were all told to go away and do an activity for half an hour, and then return to the workshop classroom. Their NGO trainer made sure they all had watches, and knew what time it was when they left. About two hours later, everyone trickled back into the classroom. It turned out that everyone was wearing expensive-looking watches - but with no hands.

I've read enough E.P. Thompson to enjoy this condescending little parable. Best of all, I noticed that the old man who guards the camp/hotel where I'm staying wears a watch - with no hands! So now I'm truly charmed - practically a whole nation languishing seductively in pre-industrial time!

Except that our guard checks the time all the time - on his mobile phone, stupid, along with the latest Chelsea scores. My (faintly disappointed) guess is that those trainees just thought the workshop sucked.

Land Cruiser League Table

2009-04-16T18:46:00.000+01:00

In Juba no-one (white) walks. But I'm in the minority that doesn't have a Land Cruiser – I'm here as a researcher on my own – so I have to get around dodging the hurtling Land Cruisers on foot, or on boda-boda motorbike taxis. (There's apparently an entire ward of Juba General Hospital nicknamed the 'Senke' ward, after the Chinese 'Senke' motorbikes that seem to be the essential accessory of every entrepreneurial Juba teenager).

Over the last week I've developed an objective NGO ranking based on Land Cruiser driver courtesy, which I hope will guide your charity Christmas-card buying. At the risk of multiple libel suits, here it is:

10/10: Mines Advisory Group - impeccably courteous drivers at all times. And with a healthily robust attitude to handling unexploded bombs. And head-quartered in Manchester. Full marks.

7/10: Vétérinaires Sans Frontières - weird charity, slightly weird driving. Particularly poor road positioning, but not often driving fast, so scores higher for general safety.

5/10: UNICEF - very fast, quite erratic, bad at roundabouts (whichever 1930s British colonial civil servant planned the road system in Juba, they loved roundabouts)
3/10: World Food Programme - WFP drivers scare me for all sorts of reasons – they're the logistics road kings, staffed by hard-bitten Kenyan ex-truckers who don't take any shit from anyone. But mainly because they NEED TO GO TO INDICATOR SCHOOL.
0/10: Save the Children UK – arsehole roadhogs. SC-UK vehicles twice bore down on me while I was walking along the road - there are mostly no pavements - honking their horns and then drenching me in mud right before important meetings. Evidently model their driving style and attitude to pedestrians on that of their patron.

Time/Money = Change

2009-04-16T18:14:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last week in and around Juba, the ramshackle capital of southern Sudan. Since 2005, when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed between the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and the northern government in Khartoum, Juba has exploded as an army of NGO workers and East African businessmen of every stripe has arrived to make the town their base for the reconstruction of 'New Sudan'. The town's population has nearly doubled in three years. Juba's (still mainly unpaved) roads are clogged with a perpetual stream of NGO Land Cruisers; and the banks of the Nile are lined with accommodation camps, filled with overweight, Ray-Banned private military contractors and white 20-something 'development advisers' drinking and dancing to the camp sound systems that blare out across the town on Friday nights.

I know I'm a misanthropic bastard, but there's something very unsettling about seeing the development circus camped out here in full force. I've never been anywhere else where the development 'industry' has dominated the life and economy of a place so completely; and where both its logistical mastery at bringing conveniences to those it chooses, and its entrenched racial and social divides, are so blatantly on show. Before I arrived I'd been told many horror stories about the hardships of life in Juba: the $200-a-night swampy tents, the heat, the flies, the endless logistical breakdowns and complications, the boredom. None of these are true, at least not any more: it is very hot, and very expensive, but as an NGO worker with money I can live extremely comfortably. The wireless internet in my shipping container room is faster than anywhere in Kenya. Meanwhile the dozens of people living under sticks and plastic bags directly next to my container, most of whom likely fled to Juba during the civil war, have never had running water; and they're living under self-constructed plastic shelters because the SPLA bulldozed their huts last week to make way for new buildings (evidently that USAID-sponsored town planning project is going really well). But what does that matter when I can can sit under the mango trees by the Nile with my NGO colleagues, drinking Moonberg lager and browsing Facebook? Man, it sure feels good to be developing stuff.

Town Planning, Juba-Style

This snide sketch is, of course, unfair. The sheer resourcefulness of most of the development organisations here (and private business) is extraordinary – that's why I can drink ice-cold beer and watch Sky News. Many of the development workers I've met are likewise resourceful, committed, thoughtful and talented people (albeit almost entirely white, save for the secretarial staff and security guards). And much of their work takes place elsewhere in southern Sudan, in some of the most deprived and challenging conditions in the world.

But none of the development workers I met in Juba seemed really to have thought about the impact of turning a war-ravaged town into a Western NGO playground whose economy is entirely dominated by the organisations supposed to be 'rebuilding the economy'. (There's a nice short film about Juba, Time/Money = Change, which discusses this far better than I can. I've shamelessly stolen its title for this post).

The political truce on which this playground is built is also supremely fragile. More on this later: but sitting in Juba drinking cold beer it's very easy to believe, as southern Sudan's international donors seem to do, that what they are engaged in is post-conflict development. Speaking to officials from the SPLA and the (SPLA-dominated) Government of Southern Sudan, though, it becomes quite clear that southern Sudan isn't at all in a post-conflict situation. It's in a ceasefire phase, which elements within the Government and SPLA evidently regard as a lull: a period of regrouping and re-consolidation of forces, not of peacetime rebuilding.

The SPLA's new (Dyncorp-built) interim headquarters seems emblematic of southern Sudan's current situation. SPLA IGHQ is a grid of smart pre-fab buildings several kilometres out of town, dusty bedding plants standing between pimped-up, tinted-window SPLA Land Cruisers and broken military vehicles. For all the new ministry buildings in town, it's clear that this is the real political centre of the Government. A massive, half-completed statue of John Garang, the SPLA's iconic leader who was killed in a plane crash in 2005, stands in the centre of the compound, its raised arm sticking out of the top of wonky plywood scaffolding. The SPLA's been installed here for at least 18 months now, but in most of the offices I visited it seemed like they'd just moved in. Boxes of paperwork stood between smart new computers without any power, draped with velveteen soft furnishings and SPLA flags. The whole base, meanwhile, is surrounded by ramshackle encampments of soldiers in tents, tukuls and shipping containers. Soldiers with nowhere to go, and nothing to do.

It's very hard, though, not to like the SPLA. This is my first real encounter with a secular liberation movement - most of them were finished by the time I hit my teens, and we were left with impenetrable religious fundamentalism and dried-up European Trotskyism. Nearly four years after the Sudan ceasefire, the spirit of a government formed not from professional politicians, but from the eccentric, under-resourced leaders of a twenty year bush war, is still infectious. There's even something entrancing about the military mythologising on which Southern Sudan's official political culture is based. Everyone has an extraordinary story to tell from the war, and before long you're caught up in it too. I was told about how one year, at the end of months of brutal fighting against heavily armoured Government of Sudan forces, SPLA soldiers were called to attend the SPLM's national convention; how they walked for seventy days across the length of Sudan to attend their party's convention; spent sleepless days and nights debating fine points of constitutional law for the country they were yet to found; then walked thirty days back to take part in the siege of Juba. Like other liberation movements, commanding this vast, illiterate tribal army is a cadre of over-educated political dreamers that you don't encounter in more 'mature' governments. For twenty years they've lived simultaneously in two worlds: the bush bases of southern Sudan; and the universities and conference tables of Europe. One SPLA officer I met talked about leaving the front-line in the 1990s for the cloisters of Queen Elizabeth House at Oxford; and having submitted his Masters' thesis in a balmy Oxford June, flew straight back to Sudan to command an attack against a Government tank column.

For all its flaws - the brutality of its child-soldier-recruiting, landmine-sowing civil war; its tribal fractures; its failure to transform itself from a military organisation into a civilian government - I can entirely understand the magnetism of this movement on which the 'New Sudan' has been precariously founded: the intoxication of the ambition to remake a country with a rag-tag guerilla army fighting an impossible war against an immovable enemy. They country they got from the war though, with its air-conditioned Land Cruiser convoys, mine-infected roads, starving villages and bulldozed tukuls, can't be what they dreamed about.

Don't eat the matumbo

2009-04-04T20:29:00.000+01:00

This is the sympathy-seeking illness post – if my bowel movements or self-obsession bore you, please look away now (although obviously I can't understand why you'd find either anything less than riveting).

Things come in twos and threes. I've been very lucky so far in Kenya – I haven't had the faintest bit of stomach trouble, despite travelling quite a lot, and eating more meat than I've ever eaten in my entire life. Until last week – which also happened to be my last week in Nakuru, trying to get everything finished up work-wise, and to get myself organised to move on to Nairobi.

From Monday to Wednesday I was in Churo in East Pokot, further up the Rift Valley: an astonishingly barren place that seems to have been forgotten by the government, the NGOs, and modernity. My organisation's conflict management interventions here are also worse than useless: like holding a seminar for famine victims. It's a place full of cows, where a cup of milk costs more than in Nairobi (the drought has made the local cows dry up, and transport costs for packaged milk are enormous). It's the only place in Kenya I've seen some children go to school naked (not out of charming traditional practice, because their families can no longer afford clothes during the dry season).

Shamefully, this neglect is at least partly to do with the fact that everybody seems to hate the Pokots – and the community leaders of the Pokots, at least, seem to hate everybody. Hating the Pokots, in fact, seems to be the one thing that unites communities in the Rift Valley. Samburu and Turkana groups, for example, are engaged in intensifying fighting and cattle-rustling against each other, but in several places have been brought together in a kind of grim peace to fight Pokot raiders. More significantly, Pokot politicians are even less important than Samburu and Turkana MPs (themselves junior acolytes to the 'Rift Valley mafia' which, along with Kikuyu-dominated Central Province MPs form the two major power blocs in Kenya's parliament). So Pokot politicians don't get to 'eat' at all when the spoils are carved up in Nairobi.

Anyway, more about East Pokot, the land the do-gooders forgot, later on. This post is all about ME!

The only thing to (actually) eat in Churo on Tuesday was matumbo ya mbuzi – goat intestines, which, quite literally, tasted of shit. I only ate a small amount, with a lot of maize to compensate. And felt absolutely fine for the next two days, and the journey back to Nakuru. And then, at precisely 4.17pm on Thursday afternoon, my digestive system melted.

I just about managed to get home, perched on the back of a boda-boda bicycle taxi (the quickest way to get home, and conveniently affording rapid dismount facilities for tactical chundering on the way). I make it up the four flights of stairs to the flat to find W, the building's security guard, standing outside the door waiting for me, and talking very fast in Kiswahili. Through the bilious haze I think he's saying that my (heavily pregnant) landlady is having a baby (anazaa), and that she needs me to come with him to the hospital. But I can't be sure. W speaks no English, and my Kiswahili is worse. I also don't tend to need much gynaecological vocabulary, day-to-day. I end up rudely ignoring him, and pushing my way through the front door. The flat, uncharacteristically, is empty. My landlady is nowhere to be seen.

This is very bad news. So now I'm on the floor of the bathroom, evacuating, er, dually, and simultaneously grappling with my Kiswahili-English dictionary trying to look up anazaa. As I'm doing this, W returns and starts hammering on the front door again, just as getting to 'Z' in my dictionary to find out that '-zaa' does indeed mean 'give birth'.

Fuck. This is now very bad news.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the words for “I'm being sick”, so am forced to just sit there idiotically shouting siwezi kuja (I can't come) and matumbo, matumbo (stomach, stomach) – which I now realise W the guard may have thought meant I was masturbating in the toilet while confirming my landlady's gravidity.

After about half an hour of hammering and evacuating, I'm ready to make the lunge to the front door. I open it, and W is still there heroically saying Esther anazaa, anazaa, kuja, kuja, asking me to come with him. So now my liquifying bowels are fighting my English 'rise-to-the-occasion' gynaecological chivalry. I want to ask where the fuck Esther's boyfriend is, but can't remember the vocab for 'boyfriend' or 'fuck' either.

What would Hugh Grant do? In the Hugh Grant film version there would be some hilarious schtick with Grant careering round the room flopping his hair about and apologising with his trousers round his ankles. In this version I don't have the energy for flopping or hilarity. There's just me, my bowels, and my useless Kiswahili.

Fortunately, I'm saved with cinematic good timing. Just as I'm about to improvise some kind of nappy/bib/plastic bag arrangement to use in a taxi, up the stairs comes...Esther. It turns out she's been to the hairdressers, which W the guard for some reason mistook as a dash to the obstetrics ward. So I'm released from my doorstep agony to retreat for the bathroom, where I stay for the next 24 hours.

Lesson 1

Englishmen: if you learn one foreign language phrase while travelling abroad, make sure it's “I can't come to the door, I'm shitting myself.” If necessary, tattoo it on a body part you can see while squatting.

Lesson 2

A loo-seat is the only essential accoutrement of civilisation. My Nakuru flat has one of only two real loo-seats I've seen outside of Nairobi. This single piece of technology improved my quality of life last week more than mobile phones, the internet and electrification put together.

How many councillors can you fit in a Land Rover?

2009-04-01T17:58:00.000+01:00

The answer, it turns out, is twelve. Plus one mzungu, ten Samsonite luggage cases, and an AK-47.

(The AK barrel is just visible next to the driver in this picture)

Two weeks ago I was travelling with another staff member around Baragoi in northern Samburu District, south of Lake Turkana. Baragoi's a slightly odd place. On the one hand it's a typical small town in the arid northern grasslands. There's no electrification, guns and goats everywhere, and all the beers are warm and dusty, having been carried five hours on the roof of the bus (below) from Maralal, the nearest large-ish town (and, incidentally, the final, wind-stripped home of Wilfred Thesiger until his death in 1994). On the other hand, you can buy vodka alongside traditional busaa homebrew in almost all of Baragoi's seven or eight bars, and the main street is colloquially called Bosnia Street.

This is because Baragoi was the recruitment hub for the illiterate Samburu warriors plucked from the vast empty ranges of northern Kenya in the early 1990s, rapidly inducted into the Kenyan army, and sent as barely trained UN peacekeepers to patrol the Republic of Serbian Krajina, a self-proclaimed micro-state in eastern Croatia which existed for just four years before it was pummelled back under Croatian authority in 1995. These men came back, rich; bought cows, built bars and cheap lodging houses; and essentially melted back into Samburu society. Globalisation is strong. And weak.

Anyway, back to the Land Rover. Transport is a bit of a problem in northern Kenya. Amazingly, there's a bus which goes to Baragoi from Maralal. It doesn't go very often, but as you can see it's pretty bitching:

This bus bounces and inches its way over a 'road' which is mostly little more than a rocky track through the mountains. We got to sit in the cab. We listened to Lil' Wayne. It was awesome.

The journey back was a bit more complicated. Some local members of Samburu District Council, though, were on their way to Maralal at lunchtime on the day we wanted to leave, and offered to give us a lift. In theory, awesome. They had a Land Rover, and they were leaving right now, they said. Sasa sasa.

That's to say, after a few hours and a few more Tuskers. By 6pm, the driver had decided to go somewhere else, they said. But this was a good thing, they said: it's better to travel at night when it's cooler and the tyres don't puncture so easily.

(And the raiders like to hijack cars).

But the council chairman wants to sleep, they said. OK, so we leave at dawn. 6am. Sasa sasa. On the dot, they said.

That's to say, at 12 noon the next day. And there were now twelve people who they'd promised could go to Maralal. And they all had fancy, bulky, sharp-cornered Samsonite cases to put on top of us in the back. (They're local politicians. They have nice luggage). So only one of the two of us could go to Maralal, they said

Actually, we both went. We just took it in turns to make human-Samsonite-human sandwiches in the back of the Land Rover. I'm still not totally sure why we brought the Kalashnikov. Still, as I know from Manchester, council politics can be rough...

Grenade geekery update

2009-03-16T18:26:00.000Z

I felt my professional [sic] reputation was somewhat at risk if I left that rifle grenade go unidentified. With regular access to the internet, I've checked it now, and am 99.9% certain it was a Yugoslav M60P1 30mm rifle grenade.

So, not very interesting, and could have come from almost anywhere. Still, it does underline the fact that Kenyan forces actually use a fair bit of Eastern European-spec weaponry, at least in terms of their SALW - in contrast to the assertions of a number of 'arms experts', who told the media around the time of the MV Faina "arms to Kenya/Sudan" episode that Kenyan forces didn't use any former Soviet bloc weaponry (and thus that the T-72 tanks, AKM rifles and multiple rocket launchers on the MV Faina were unlikely to be for Kenya). So much for that. Yugoslavia/Serbia's arms industry is, admittedly, something of a bridgehead between NATO-standard and former-Soviet specs and calibres. But I've also seen lots of Kenyan police with AK-47s and AKMs, including both former Soviet types and Type 56-2s.

I really need to get a new job.

In the queue with UNHCR

2009-03-13T23:54:00.000Z

On Wednesday we went to visit a particular District Commissioner to clear some upcoming programme activities. He's the senior government representative in a pretty large area: if you want to do something in his district, then protocol demands that you get his blessing.

There's a lengthy queue of people waiting in the sun outside his office – petitioners ranging from tenant farmers who've been evicted from their land, to local hotel-owners wanting the DC to open their new bar. We join the queue.

We've been waiting about half an hour when a gleaming white UNHCR Land Cruiser pulls up, and four people get out: three ex-pat staff, and a Kenyan member of what NGOs universally refer to as their 'local staff' (why can't they just have 'staff'?) They're three UNHCR Protection Advisers, up from their office in Nairobi's leafy Westlands suburb and 'out in the field' to find out how the local government is providing for IDP's livelihoods. Jolly exciting.

I've heard various stories about the attitudes of international agencies here in Kenya. I'm pretty new to all this, and my experience of the international humanitarian sector is very limited. Maybe these were an unusually insensitive bunch: I've no doubt UNHCR has its fair share of sensitive, talented, community-embedded people, often working in infinitely more challenging circumstances than central Kenya. And I'm the same as them, of course: a white do-gooder, arrogantly joining the queue outside the DC's office. All the same, from an ill-experienced mzungu to some aid industry old hands, I humbly submit four tips for being 'out in the field':

You find a group of people from a local NGO (us) waiting in the queue outside the DC's office. Don't walk up, ignore all the black staff members, introduce yourself to the only white one, hand your card only to him, and look only at him while you're talking. Then don't raise your eyebrows and look surprised when they white guy awkwardly introduces one of the black guys as actually being in charge.

When the DC comes out to meet you and starts talking, don't irritably tell your only black colleague - a fully-fledged programme officer - that she should be taking notes for you.

You have aid funds to disburse. As you well know, the DC wants them for his district. He will therefore suggest that you can jump the queue outside his office.

That doesn't mean that you should jump the queue outside his office.

If you are going to jump the queue, don't grin apologetically at all the people who have been waiting here since early that morning, and sit in the DC's office for the next hour.

Just because you're 'in the field' (actually a pretty big, central town) doesn't mean you have to wear the aid industry field uniform (jeans and floaty Indian tops; or worse, in the case of the 40-something male Senior Protection Adviser, an Eminem T-shirt, a safari hat, and a pair of bright pink jeans). You're here to see a government official – you could pretend you think he's important. Everyone else in the queue, including the guys who've been evicted from their farm, have managed to wear a jacket, and most of them a tie. I can't see any lions and tigers around here. You could at least wear a fucking shirt.

********

Update: : Having taken the piss out of UNHCR's swanky Land Cruiser, on the way back from the DC's office our creaky Nissan Mistral gave up the ghost. Serves us right.

Tit for Tat

2009-03-13T23:44:00.001Z

The big news in Kenya last week started with the supposed Mungiki demonstrations on Thursday: a day of protest called by the activist Oscar Foundation to protest the government's rejection of the recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings, Philip Alston. Alston reported that Kenyan police death squads had deliberately killed hundreds of suspected 'Mungiki' and Sabaot Land Defence Forces last year. Businesses, and especially matatu operators, are very fearful of the Mungiki – the secret Kikuyu militia, with powerful connections to some Kikuyu politicians, which extorts money from them in many parts of central and western Kenya. So whether or not the demonstrations were hijacked by Mungiki, transport across the southern Rift and central Kenya was disrupted for most of the day; matatus refused to operate; fires were lit by demonstrators to stop traffic; and trucks were used by protestors to block roads...

...And ended with the murder of two Oscar Foundation leaders who had supplied evidence to Alston's investigation, shot dead in broad daylight while stuck in traffic in central Nairobi, just half an hour after a government minister had accused their organisation of fundraising for the Mungiki.

It's interesting to see how this has been reported in Europe and Kenya. The two have been described neutrally in the European and North American media as "human rights investigators" or "human rights activists", killed for protesting against EJE's of suspected Mungiki by the Kenyan police. Both daily Kenyan papers and TV news have likewise stressed the impunity of the double murder, and widely reported the resulting international criticism. But the Daily Nation (the slightly more conservative of the two main Kenyan print dailies) described the Oscar Foundation bluntly as "an NGO with links to the Mungiki". And most people I've spoken to are broadly critical of both Philip Alston's report, and of the Oscar Foundation’s support for it. There is enormous fear and hatred of Mungiki and Sabaot Defence Forces amongst many Kenyans(as well as some loyalty amongst communities supposedly 'protected' by them). A common refrain from opposing communities, as in all situations of ethnic conflict (Sri Lanka?) seems to be to ask why the international community was silent while Mungiki were murdering and extorting their way through central Kenya, and Sabaot Defence Force members were killing people in Mount Elgon (although in fact they weren't silent at all).

Is the Oscar Foundation a Mungiki front? So far the government hasn't produced a shred of evidence to support this allegation. What is probably true is that they're not simply the non-partisan human rights organisation they've been portrayed in the Western media. Their leaflets, circulating in Nakuru earlier this week (translation below) were only in Kikuyu language, addressed at mobilising a single ethnic community. They weren't explicitly inciting violence, and their legal advocacy and human rights documentation work seems credible, according to other human rights organisations.

So they're more community rights activists than human rights activists - advocating for a community which already has powerful political patronage. That doesn't make their murder any less appalling, or any less indicative of the near-total impunity of the Kenyan government's security apparatus. But its causes and consequences are about ethnic politics, not simply a Manichean struggle between brutal state repression and the human rights community, as it's being depicted in the European media.
***

OUR GOD, OUR GOD! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US?

People of Njamba Njithi [a youth group], are you just going to sit and watch as we get wiped off? Let’s come together and protest against the government killings led by the illegitimate killer squad Kwekwe and Police Commissioner Ali.

Now we have said “enough is enough!” Michuki and those killers should tell the people in accordance to what he said that "we will only be hearing of burials of our children". This disease is with the other one and now we are tired of seeing orphans and widows.

We now are urging President Kibaki to fire Police Commissioner Ali, Ministers Michuki and Saitoti, Attorney General Wako and all murderers within his government as per the UN Special Rappoteur’s recommendation.

On 5th March 2009, Oscar Foundation, a human rights organization in conjunction with parents and friends of the missing children will demonstrate with the aim of demanding for 6542 bodies of missing people and 1721 that have been killed. The demonstrations will take place throughout the nation. You are urged to come out dressed in black as a sign of mourning.

The meat wars

2009-03-13T22:28:00.000Z

Sunday afternoon, for many middle-class Kenyans, means music, Tusker beer and nyama choma: roast meat (nyama), usually beef or goat, ordered by the half-pound, and served with ugali (maize meal). But usually with more meat (nyama), in often epic quantities. Nyama choma is both national dish and recreational ritual. At the moment (the end of the dry season) meat is fairly cheap, grain at record prices. And while people in the north-east of the country are actually starving, throughout the Rift, choma joints in every town and village are still filled with boozy men gnawing on hunks of burnt cow.

Each choma joint has a glass cabinet at the front to keep the flies out, hung with bloodied carcasses, from which your bit of cow is carved as you order it.

If that doesn't put you off your Sunday barbecue, maybe this should: this carcass may well be a conflict good. It's not as seductive as a blood diamond destined for Amsterdam. And unlike West Africa's diamond wars, it's a conflict driven not so much by the consumption of the resource itself, as by climate, property and livelihood. But Kenya's cattle wars are brutal, transnational and remarkably under-discussed outside East Africa. Perhaps this is because they lack the cinematic international villains of other 'low-level' African insurgencies: Russian arms dealers, multinational mining companies, Islamic dictators. Or perhaps it's simply because they're not conducive to a dramatic political fix - a regime change or a glamorous peace deal. Instead, ending the meat wars probably means systematic changes to Kenya's internal security strategies, and more fundamentally to the political economy of Kenya's land.

Last week I was back in Samburu and East Pokot, travelling with two staff to see more of the areas where they work, and to trial the conflict monitoring tool we've been designing over the last few weeks. These two districts couldn't be more different to the rich soils of Kuresoi where I’ve also been working, and where in early 2008 thousands were forced from their burning farms following Kenya's disputed presidential election. Instead these are empty, semi-arid regions roamed by Samburu, Pokot and Turkana pastoralists who travel hundreds of miles with their cows and goats, through grazing lands blurring into northern Uganda and southern Sudan. This is where much of Kenya's nyama comes from.

Each year as the dry season progresses, reports trickle into regional centres about 'cattle rustling' incidents: a Deputy-Dan epithet which romanticises the real nature of a cattle raid in northern Kenya. Organised groups of dozens of men with guns attack homesteads and herders to take hundreds of cows, sheep and goats, leading them for days to strongholds like the impenetrable Suguta Valley, a furnace-hot region where temperatures can reach 60˚C and pursuing government helicopters, according to the District Commissioner, have been brought down by small arms fire from the raiders.

These raids - undeniably communal – have in the past been regarded as a symptom of tribal traditions and life-patterns. Young unmarried 'warriors' (morans) can't own cattle inherited from their families or that of their wives until they are married. Since systems of rigged endogamy amongst Samburu or Pokot give the best young wives to older men, this may not be until their thirties. Cattle they steal, however, is regarded as theirs. As a result morans, previously organised by groups of wazee (elders), pit themselves against their Pokot, Samburu or Turkana counterparts, simply to build up property denied by their own social structures.

Like all anthropological Just-So stories, this account doesn't really explain the dynamics of the current violence. For a start, it seems that unmarried young men can, in effect, own cattle. J, one of our Samburu fieldworkers, isn't married, but tells me he has a herd of forty cows, effectively held in trust for him by his family and herded by them. It also can't explain why wazees are reporting to local peace committees that morans are now raiding in smaller groups outside their control, and beginning to raid cattle from their own communities as well as from other tribes; nor why the frequency and lethality of cattle raiding appears to be increasing, particularly in Pokot and Turkana in Kenya, and in Equatoria in Sudan. James Bevan, who has undertaken several years of research in this region, claims that "[i]f you add up death and injury tolls, a lot of research institutions would call this a war."

The lethality is at least partly the product of this region having being flooded with small arms since the 1990s. Assault rifles have overflowed into Kenya from warring governments and rebel groups blithely arming communities in southern Sudan, northern Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia: a halo of civil wars and counter-insurgencies that has surrounded this region for nearly 20 years. Even the smallest raid now typically involves gunshot fatalities which might not have occurred with pangas and clubs in the past.

Guns, of course, last a long time, but are useless without fresh bullets. And with a calibre mix of AK-47s, M-16s and G-3s you need - as Tom Waits perceptively sang - just the right bullets. B, from Churo in East Pokot, names a man who visits the nearby village of Amaiya every so often. In a quiet corner on market day he takes orders for bullets for different calibre weapons; B says he then travels several hundred miles westwards into Uganda to obtain them.

This small arms epidemic may also help explain the new pattern of 'freelancing' raiders. Guns dramatically increase the ability of small groups to project power – and of small, armed communities to respond in kind. The Divisional Officer in Churo ascribes this privatisation of raiding, though, more to a kind of 'teenage angst' phenomenon, a fundamental collapse of authority structures. There may be something in this. J, one of the Samburu fieldworkers, is an educated guy in Hushpuppies.* In Maralal he introduced me to his younger brother A, dressed in Samburu beads and skirt, with his hair dyed with red dust, carrying a Samburu sword, and incongruously wearing an old North Face anorak over the top. A is a softly-spoken teenager who, to his brother's despair, has decided to leave school and rejoin the carefree morans, a decision which seems to be as much about rebellion as economic choice (although that too is undoubtedly limited).

It's a facile comparison, but I'm reminded of the boys who hang about with sovereign rings on BMX bikes at the end of my street in Moss Side. But this isn't just a Melanie Philips-style 'Broken Kenya', brought on by the ready availability of hip hop and condoms.** The Divisional Officer says that the ability of communities to regulate morans' activities has been dramatically diminished by a string of recent drought years, which have compelled morans to travel much further and longer to find pasture. They often leave their homes for over a year, he says, forming their own young-male solidarity groups away from the social constraints of family and village, and may not come back. And as the well-armed herders travel further, they rub up more and more against the diminished grazing grounds of other groups. This is in many ways an archetypal climate change conflict, with well-armed, hungry communities caught in the shrivelling grasslands of northern Kenya.

Oddly, though, as we drove I did see grass here in East Pokot and west Samburu. Quite a lot of it. People just can't get at it any more.

On the left of this photo, behind the fence, you can see long, plentiful grass stretching into the distance.

The land on the right – used in common by the communities here – has been stripped bare.

The fence marks the boundary of the Mugie Ranch, a private cattle ranch and game reserve fencing off a 49,000 acre stretch of land straddling Pokot, Laikipia and Samburu districts. Owned by a pair of Californian vinyard owners, most of the land is used for the Ranch's enormous private cattle herd. Another 20,000 acres of grassland is fenced off with electric fences for black rhinos, to be viewed by the wealthy white tourists flown into the ranch by private plane.

In this vast landscape, land access doesn't seem as immediate an issue as in the cramped, lush highlands of central Kenya. But there are still haves and have-nots, and the economic consequences for local communities of enclosing this great grassy tract on their doorsteps is fairly obvious. Herders intruding into the Ranch with their cows and sheep are met, B tells us, with armed police (not private security), alerted by the ranch's own patrols and scrambled there in their police Land Rovers (although on these roads I can't believe they ever get there in time). Yet when villagers in nearby Amaiya, just 10km from the Divisional Officer's station, were caught in-between an outbreak of fighting last week between over three hundred armed Pokot and Samburu herders, police and administration officials said they couldn't go to intervene because they didn't have any fuel for their vehicles...

The Mugie Ranch has an enlightening website which explains their economic model more clearly. The ranch, it explains, also engages in development work: building schools (that’s to say, a (primary) school, for the children of the ranch's employees), and helping local communities by, er, buying up their livestock:

Through buying livestock from the communities, Mugie contributes to the local micro economy. Since the communities no longer have large herds of cattle they have increased their numbers of small stock, sheep and goats, which contribute to over stocking and erosion.

Each family is able to sell one or two sheep a month which contributes to their household budget

It seems to me that in any other circumstances, privatising a previously common resource, thereby making it impossible for your competitors to continue operating, and then buying out their remaining stock, would surely be called something else. Certainly not 'development work'.

(On the other hand the Guardian’s travel section, although it gestures at the unfortunate problem of the people who actually live here, thinks the Mugie Ranch is a model of conservation tourism: "whatever humans think, the wildlife benefits" - ignoring the fact that the ranch's principal if carefully occluded business is making money by growing cows.)

And where does the raided nyama go? Communities mark their livestock with distinctive notches specific to their tribe. If Pokots decide to sell animals they've raided from a Samburu community, cattle brokers in regional markets will likely know that they're buying stolen livestock. It seems, then, that there's a certain amount of blind-eye-turning amongst larger economic players further down the supply chain, although provenance is likely to be blurred, B explains, because stolen cows will be sold in small local markets, possibly to traders from a different community; and then taken to (slightly) larger markets further south in places like Sipili or Nyaharuru, to which major brokers and big Nairobi butcheries will bring their trucks to buy in bulk. In some cases they may even be taken over the border to Uganda, cows flowing back in the opposite direction to the bullets used to raid them.

The government's principal response is a series of police and/or army operations, moving periodically, and with great force, through different districts to forcibly disarm communities and to recover cattle they believe have been stolen. We were in Samburu as one was sweeping through Samburu East (don't worry, Mum, nowhere near us). These operations somewhat stretch the European understanding of policing. In Suguta Marmar we met regular police officers coming from Samburu East, drinking soda at a roadside shop. Poorly trained bobbies on the beat – but dressed in combat fatigues with M-16s and G-3s slung across their shoulders, and Eastern European rifle grenades tucked under their epaulettes.***

These operations are periodic, and Sisyphean. Their result - aside from the rapes and dispossession that one Divisional Officer candidly told me generally results - tends to be that one community is disarmed; and tension is ratcheted up as that community feels the government's picking on them over the others, and in many cases that the police are confiscating their own cows (and thus their entire livelihood) rather than finding ones that have actually been stolen. Then, feeling vulnerable against their still-armed neighbours, communities scramble to acquire more guns.

This rotating injustice seems to have taken on a wider political resonance following recent international indictments of the Kenyan government and its law enforcement. We arrived in the district capital, Maralal town, about an hour after a large demonstration protesting against the ongoing Samburu operation had been broken up by administration police.

As well as calling on the police to return their cows and to "Stop Applying Double Standards" to the Samburu community, the demonstrators carried new banners demanding that "[Major General Hussein] Ali [the head of the Kenyan police] and Hassan Noor [the Provincial Commissioner of the whole Rift Valley] should be prosecuted at the ICC". This is powerful testimony to the desperate appeal of international justice in a community where local judicial mechanisms are completely broken. Last week the report of UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston on extra-judicial killings by the police in western Kenya, several hundred miles away, demanded that Police Chief Ali be prosecuted; and the Kenyan media is full of debates about whether the 'secret envelope' of the Waki Report, listing the suspected high-level organisers of political violence following Kenya's disputed 2007-8 election, should be passed to the ICC. These processes are addressing political violence which has nothing to do with the fighting in Samburu – whose conflicts and human rights abuses generally fall far outside the competence of international courts. Yet we heard people demanding "To the Hague!" in every soda shop and bar-room conversation in Samburu District.

There seems little prospect of repairing trust between government forces and these communities any time soon. We spent the afternoon in Maralal town interviewing witnesses after the demonstration. The police's standard response was to deny any use of force at all, and to add (incongruously) that the crowd itself turned violent. Video of the demonstration taken by a bystander showed no evidence of any violence from the protestors. At Maralal District Hospital we were shown admission records for people admitted following the demonstration: all women, all Samburu - the community against which the current operation is proceeding - although the demonstrators were predominantly men, and a mixture of Samburu, Kisii and Kikuyu residents. A journalist for the Daily Standard, who covered a second demonstration in Maralal several days later, confirmed this apparent pattern of Samburu women being targets of police violence. One girl we interviewed, badly bruised all over and with a fractured arm, said she was beaten by the riot police while walking down a side-street several streets away from the demonstration itself. Her clothing was visibly identifiable as Samburu. She told us she was just 14 years old.

Conversely, (justifiable) suspicion of the police arguably generates spiralling accusations from community members too. We were told by several witnesses, for instance, that the police had fired live ammunition directly into the crowd: not at all implausible given the Kenyan police's past form. But no gunshot wounds had been admitted to the district hospital that day. Video footage we obtained showed the police only firing into the air, and close-up footage of cartridge cases left at the scene showed only blank cartridges, not live rounds.****

And so we're back at the earlier question: who has just the right bullets? At the moment everyone in Samburu seems to have just the right bullets: the Kenyan police, who may sometimes use blanks, but aren't shy to shoot people in the head with live rounds (or military rifle grenades); the Amaiya bullet-peddler with his good friends in Uganda; cattle-raiding morans who can get the right calibre ammunition for their weapons, whether they're SPLA Kalashnikovs, captured (or quietly donated) Kenyan police G-3s, or ancient M-16s from Somalia.

We can try to disrupt this halo of conflicts, local and transnational; its ingrained practices of violence and its spider-web of weapons flows. But those guns and bullets will probably keep flowing until they're not wanted any more. Until police and local administration can provide genuine security for rural Kenyan communities as well as white ranchers; until they can stop humiliating ethnic communities by beating their women; until those communities can find a grassy place for their cattle or an irrigated place to farm; and until those places themselves stop shrinking as the temperature rises. Until then, everyone's next door neighbours are looking increasingly, hungrily dangerous; and their lands and cows looking more and more attractive.

And sitting eating my beef chops on a Sunday afternoon, who am I to argue?
__________________________________________

* That notorious hallmark of civilisation.

**As far as I can see, hip hop is a lot more readily available in Samburu than condoms. Marie Stopes International has a lot to learn from 50 Cent about distribution.

***For the weapons geeks who read this blog: no, unfortunately I couldn't get a photograph; and although I saw that the markings around the fuzes were a long string of numbers and Cyrillic letters, I couldn't read them properly because the police officer got very touchy when I tried to look at them more closely. I'd say they were about 200mm long, maybe 20mm wide, cylindrical (not bulging or tapering) with an olive drab metallic body separated into sections by circular notches along their length, about 10-15mm apart; a copper-coloured fuze; and small, white, plastic-looking fins (four, I think) at the rear. I'd guess they were to fit 7.62mm G-3s, which might also take rifle-fired grenades designed for 7.62x39 calibre weapons? They didn't seem to have adaptor muzzle attachments to fire them, but I think G-3s have a screw-threaded muzzle brake that is already designed to fit rifle grenades? Any ideas?

****Likewise - sorry, weapons geeks: the person who took the footage filmed the cartridges and canisters up close, but sadly didn't look at the cartridge headstamps or capture the markings on the other side of the canisters. The tear gas was French-type (you know the ones), but we obviously couldn't confirm the manufacturer or production date. The filmer promised they'll film them for us next time.

Mangoes update

2009-03-05T20:42:00.000Z

I'm gutted.

Having blithely believed that Nakuru's fruit-sellers are operating some kind of glorious E.P. Thompson-cum-Robert Putnam collaborative moral economy, it turns out that, er, they're not. One of the other fruit-sellers, Theresa, finally told me today that none of them work together, they all compete with each other, and would I like some especially sweet bananas from Kampala these ones are much nicer than Naomi's? When I asked the others, they confirmed this was true. Like everywhere else, selling mangoes is every woman for herself.

So I'm gradually learning the hard way that the first methodological principle of arms trade research (everybody is always lying) should also apply to sociological inquiry (everybody is always already lying). Still, it's a pretty astute hustle, and one that could only emerge in a country besieged by bleeding-heart white do-gooders: rather than undercut your competitor directly, tell the white do-gooder that you're in a cooperative, and hike your prices accordingly.

Cillit Bang

2009-03-01T20:50:00.000Z

I'm afraid this is the obligatory schoolboy "humourous foreign product name" blog post. This is the Kenyan brand of washing powder I've been using while I'm here.

It does indeed make my whites whiter than white. Etc.

Why I am not a real man

2009-03-01T19:24:00.000Z

I spent a peculiar three days this week in and around Nyeri: a verdant corner of the Central Highlands, formerly a white-settler paradise, at the foot of Mount Kenya. It's not like being in Kenya at all. Friesian cows chomp away between thrush-filled hedgerows, growing from rich red soil with the hills and mountains of the Aberdares beyond. Everything except the colour of the soil would make you think you were in Scotland, or Alsace.

Wandering through the dusk taking these pictures made me think harder about the wave of colonial settlement here after the First World War - an agrarian re-population, deliberately generated by Colonial Office development policy and a soldier settlement scheme that brought upper-class officers from the mud of Verdun to this African Shropshire. This was an imperial mode quite unlike the minimal white settlement of colonies like India, and with a colonial aesthetic that was as much georgic as imperious (or, putting it less generously, more baronial than sultanate).*

Nyeri makes me realise that that particular moment of empire - arrogant and dispossessive though it might have been - was far more poignant than the gin-soaked White Mischief into which it ultimately developed in the 1930s (the largest landowner here, Lord Delamere, famously once rode his horse into the dining room of Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel). In 1919, though, this place was where they were going to start again after the panoramic, mechanised carnage of northern Europe, to retreat and build a new tiny world - some of them as idealistic, in their way, as the young independence activists who at that time were also gazing across at Mount Kenya.** Places, of course, are never empty, and utopias always breed violence.

While we're here we've been staying at the major Catholic seminary just outside Nyeri (it's a long story). I don't like Catholic institutions very much, and this one was no exception. The place is a vast tract of productive land filled with sour, politicked old men. Sitting in the refectory eating cold cabbage when we arrive (it's Lent, to make things worse) are a taciturn, pipe-smoking monk in a hoodie reading a John Connolly thriller; a couple of wizened 80-something American missionaries who missed the boat home; and a burly 40-something priest with a smoker's cough who seems to enjoy shouting at a deaf, hunch-backed Indian Jesuit and hitting him with a fly-swat for comic effect.

Typical conversations with priests:

- discussing the disputed candidature of a proposed member of the new Kenyan Electoral Commission, accused of being a wife-beater: "Perhaps the wife is comfortable when she is being beaten. We cannot go into the home like that" (this from a member of a church which has insisted on expanding its purview into the home, the bed and the uterus).

- over breakfast: do I know how many devil worshippers there are in the Kenyan government? Did I know that the matatus are run by Freemasons?

Actually, I came to strangely enjoy the company of these sour old men; mainly because the remarkably self-possessed and joyous young seminarians, from all over Kenya, take no notice of them, and the ageing faculty don't seem to mind that they're the object of continual ridicule. Also, there are glow-in-the-dark crucifixes in every room, which takes Catholic kitch to a whole new level.

One thing I didn't enjoy, though, was my room. I'm no Bear Grylls, but I like to think that I'm fairly resilient about physical hardships. But there's one thing I'm ashamed to say I don't deal well with: the room's actually pretty comfortable for a seminary, but clearly hasn't been swept in a while, and I'm only in there for five minutes on the first night before I realise that it's filled with large, flat, swift-moving spiders. Spiders with smooth, fat, carapace-covered articulated legs, more like crabs than spiders. Like all photographs of spiders, this photo of one on the ceiling makes it look tiny: I swear to God (and I did, volubly, at that point), it was actually about 10cm across.

The minute I got in there I saw a huge one above the toilet, and another above the desk. Smaller ones start crawling from behind the bed and on the ceiling. I squash one that's sitting on the door handle - it oozes pale-green goo over the door - and no sooner have I done that than another one, twice as big, crawls out from within the door frame.

Fortunately, I have a mosquito net, which I eventually hang up, tuck around the bed, and climb in, fully clothed. My skin crawls all night, but this spider-filled chamber seems somehow appropriate in an odd, ossified community nestled in such an incongruous, beautiful setting. In the morning I get up exhausted at half-past six, and wander out into a shining morning, Mount Kenya looming out of the mist behind the church - inside which black-robed seminarians are already sitting, silent, with their eyes closed.

*Richard Drayton would argue that agriculture has always been about dominion.

**It also made me wonder whether there were any explicitly utopian schemes here in the White Highlands? Were there any Rolf Gardiners of Nyeri and the Aberdares?

Ghanaian Kung-Fu update

2009-03-01T19:12:00.000Z

Someone emailed to remind me that black power kung-fu has a distinguished pedigree. In brief: my friend Dan Matlin's ground-breaking article on the writer and organiser Amiri Baraka, leading light of the 1960s Black Arts movement and intellectual inspiration for a raft of Black Power figures, describes the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN), a self-help organisation established by Baraka in New Jersey in 1968. As I understand it, CFUN drew on an idiosyncratic post-colonial mix of Marxist ideology and a collection of bastardised Bantu and Zulu traditions called Kawaida, espoused by a former associate of Malcolm X. True to its black power connections, CFUN had a disciplined martial wing, Black Community Defense and Development, whose boy members received fortnightly training with handguns and rifles, and were instructed in tabura, "a form of African drills", and yangumi..."a form of karate".

So there you go. Although I'm not sure that Baraka - author of such widely performed works as Black Dada Nihilismus and Junkies are Full of (SHHH...) - has ever got as much popular exposure as Africa Magic TV.

Print culture

2009-02-22T11:49:00.000Z

Except perhaps in Nairobi, it seems to be very difficult to buy any books in Kenyan 'bookshops' other than

Christian literature

school textbooks

crappy 'How to Succeed in Business' self-help books

Very occasionally there's the odd second-hand Robert Ludlum thriller, and there are some street vendors who have small, eclectic selections of very old, dirty torn novels which I think were probably donated to some 'charity collection' somewhere in Europe or the US (so far I've found Tuck Everlasting and a 1968 edition of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). But there's clearly no real demand for fiction or serious non-fiction, and no adequate distribution.

This is a major contrast to other Majority World countries like India, which seems to have an incredibly diverse and demotic print culture. On every street corner in Delhi you can buy anything from Mein Kampf to old copies of Subaltern Studies (actually, Mein Kampf seems to be particularly prevalent – maybe India gets sent all the copies confiscated from schoolkids and neo-Nazis in Germany).

The few attempts I've seen to compensate for this here - like this community library in Sipili, funded by Bakewell Rotary Club - are basically rubbish. (I'm sorry if any outraged Derbyshire Rotarians are reading this, but you should know).

Sipili's community library consists of a few shelves with a rag-bag of old charity-shop-style 'collected' books from Europe, basically consisting of dog-eared John Connolly thrillers and 1960s geography GCSE textbooks, rather than any systematic selection of decent books. I assume that the cost of shipping books is also very high. In India the majority of commercially available books are printed by India's massive publishing industry. In Kenya there seems to be fairly little major commercial printing or publishing industry anywhere. Maybe there's a larger publishing industry in other East African countries which distribute books across the region – I'm not sure.

On the demand side, though, I don't think the difference is to do with differential literacy rates: adult literacy is currently running at about 74% in Kenya (compared to around 61% in India), and both the 'How to Bring God into your Life and Grow Your Business' books and the two main newspapers seem to go down a storm everywhere. I genuinely think Kenya has an impoverished literary culture which isn't simply to do with economic poverty – India's the counter-factual. Maybe it's something to do with a hollowed-out middle class? Or a lack of an established pre-colonial print culture (unlike India)?

Any thoughts that are a bit less implicitly racist than these?

Men and women

2009-02-22T11:48:00.001Z

At the 'Masaai Market' in front of the building where I'm staying, there are a row of massively competitive stall-holders (male), all trying to sell the same carvings, postcards and (sometimes) dog-eared copies of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the khaki safari 'trucks' that periodically arrive from safari parks in the southern Rift to disgorge pink tourists for half an hour with the locals. (Don't get me wrong, I'm as pink a tourist as anyone; but I try not to wear paramilitary rancher hats and hiking boots to go to the bank, and you'll be pleased to know I'm yet to use the 'Bear Grylls-endorsed' craghopper trousers I bought in a shameful moment of paranoid weakness in Debenhams last month).

Since everyone's selling the same thing, and I have to pass by them every day, I don't want to buy from any of the stalls (especially as one of them is run by my landlady's boyfriend, so choosing another one could be social death).

Several women also sell bags of mangoes and oranges in the market. When I finally plucked up the courage to speak to them, I learned that although they stand in different places, Josephine, Naomi, Lilian and Dorothy all work together, sharing profits. As a result, I often buy mangoes (more mangoes, in fact, than I, my landlady or her niece can possibly eat. It's becoming a bit awkward).*

Lesson: in a market where everyone knows each other, so favouritism carries a real social cost, collaboration may be a better strategy than competition. Or at least, the marginal cost of profit-sharing over competing may be smaller than the marginal social capital cost of competing over profit-sharing.**

*Obviously the comparison isn't 100% accurate – I am always going to buy mangoes more often than postcards – but I also go a long way outside the market to buy books.

**Would anyone like to correct this cod-economic-speak?

Kenyan business plan I

2009-02-22T11:31:00.000Z

I couldn't post on this blog last weekend because there was a power-cut all day in Nakuru. A chronic lack of capacity in Kenya's power system means that this is a pretty regular (that's to say, frequent but totally irregular) occurrence.* Lists of pre-planned blackouts are published in the ad sections of the Daily Nation, one of Kenya's two main daily newspapers, but often only a day or so in advance, and by the time you buy the paper it may already have started.

Given the ubiquity of mobile phones, I reckon you could make a packet of money by getting these lists early from the power board (as the papers presumably do), and getting people to sign up to receive cheap text messages when there's going to be a power cut in the area in which their phone is currently receiving signals.

If each text came with a Crazy Frog ringtone alert, we'd probably be millionaires. Anyone fancy becoming East Africa's next mobile service entrepreneurs?

*One interesting solution to this is being constructed in the southern Rift near Naivasha, to the south of here – an Israeli-built geothermal plant, Olkaria III, intended to extend Kenya’s existing geothermal power generation there to around 25% of all Kenya’s power needs. It seems like a good project. Although as a World Bank guaranteed project, part-financed by the German government, it seems a shame that the donor funding and the guarantee is being paid to a Cayman-Islands registered holding shell for the Israeli/US company, presumably tax-free.

In an ironic 'guns and butter' twist, heavy equipment for this plant was shipped into Mombasa last year on the same ship carrying an expensive load of weapons from Eastern Europe.

Infrastructure

2009-02-22T11:00:00.000Z

On Saturday I had to leave Sipili early to get back to Nakuru, so couldn't get a lift with my colleagues. Instead, I got my first ever matatus. Like lots of other countries without adequately functioning public transport systems, Kenyan towns are connected by lots of private minibuses that pick up passengers along the way. The matatu, with their sound systems blaring hip-hop and their painted pictures of Jesus and Lil' [sic] Wayne, are a bit of a staple of westerners' blogging about East Africa. So I won't bore you with the description of my journey, except to say that matatus seem a lot calmer and more comfortable than the hysterical descriptions by guidebook writers and travel journalists would suggest. Maybe I just got on some really boring ones. These were my two travelling companions on the front seat for the second leg of the journey. The little girl was called Esmerelda. I'm not sure what the chicken's called.

The matatus, almost all imported second-hand Japanese minibuses, bump along untarmacked roads that were often better in the fifties than they are today; they operate pretty efficiently, but they're necessarily slow. They also replace a decrepit state postal system – for a small fee you can send a letter or package on a matatu, and then call the recipient with the matatu's numberplate, so that they can go and pick up the package at the other end.

Amid this neglected state infrastructure, though, in even the tiniest village there seems to be a stall selling cellphone top-up cards. Apparently sidestepping sclerotic government and donors, mobile phone companies (the biggest being South African – Safaricom, Telkom/Zain – Orange has only recently arrived) have established a dense, well-functioning mobile phone network used by about 35% of the population (a high penetration for a country with Kenya's GDP). From where I'm sitting I can count 26 mobile phone masts. Mobile phone networks are filling gaps in other ways too: terrestrial dial-up internet, and even nominal broadband, crawls at a snail's pace; but mobile broadband internet is available almost all over the country now – 'dongle' modems for your laptop cost about £50, and unlimited broadband internet is then about £15 a month. Out of the reach of most Kenyans, of course, but pretty cheap for middle classes, businesses and organisations. Much more important for most Kenyans is the M-Pesa and similar systems: mobile phone credit systems where, for a small fee, you can send up to 35,000 shillings (about £300) to any other mobile phone, which can be cashed at any of the M-Pesa booths dotted around every tiny town and village. Vastly cheaper and more widespread than, say, Western Union, the state post office is just starting to catch up, developing its own mobile phone credit system for larger sums. In Laikipia I met an immaculately be-suited Safaricom salesman travelling around setting up new M-Pesa distribution points in the countryside. He said he said he thinks that all Kenyan banking itself, except for the super-rich, will soon be done entirely through the mobile phone networks. It's salesman bravado, but I think he may be right.

I know people write endlessly about the miracle of mobile-phone telephony in Africa – Somalia, for instance, hasn't had a functioning government since 1991 but has two relatively widespread mobile phone networks. It is amazing, though, that although I can't get drinkable water (or often any water) out of a tap, in the middle of nowhere in Kenya I can get better, cheaper mobile internet, and send money faster, than I can anywhere in the UK.

Three tales from the Kenyan media

2009-02-22T10:50:00.000Z

(I) 6th February

There's no internet access in Sipili, no paved roads, no public transport, the electricity goes on and off, and water comes from a wind-powered borehole. But in a tiny bar I can watch Man United vs. Everton on satellite TV beamed from South Africa.

Almost no-one shows any interest in Kenyan football, whose major teams, like Harambee, everyone insists are irrevocably corrupt. Instead, almost all the Kenyans I've met so far are fanatical British football fans (mainly Arsenal and Chelsea, a smattering of Man U supporters, and, bizarrely, an enormous national following for Leeds United). The Premiership seems to be followed in forensic detail in all the daily newspapers, and dissected in every bar and pub. Everyone in Sipili has an opinion about Scolari's replacement at Chelsea. Except me.

(II) 10th February

In the bar next door to where I'm staying, they like to show Africa Magic TV channel, which seems to broadcast mainly Ghanaian TV programmes. The evening feature film yesterday was a kind of African kung-fu genre, with Jackie Chan and Shaolin monks replaced by absurdly orientalist African 'warriors' dressed in feathers and Tupac wife-beaters. It's like the RUF meets Benny Hill. Almost every other feature of the original kung-fu genre is replicated: there's impenetrably sub-titled dialogue, the characters run at all times rather than walking, and all the fighting is accompanied by ridiculous 'kazaam' punch sound-effects. It's the US hip-hop vests that all the 'warriors' wear, though, that brings the whole thing queasily close to glorifying some of the more brutal militias of recent West African bloodbaths. Still, I suppose Rambo did that for Vietnam.

When they're not showing African kung-fu, the next best thing seems to be 1980s wildlife documentaries about African mega-fauna. These go down an absolute storm (people especially like it when the wildebeest get away). I find this a little bizarre when we're sat in the middle of Laikipia District, with one of the biggest concentrations of actual elephants, giraffes and other mega-fauna anywhere in East Africa.

(III) 11th February

There's a stall on Sipili's main street that sells mobile phones and old TVs. They've set up some massive speakers which were playing evangelical gospel music all day on Sunday, at full volume. This afternoon,though, it was playing Kenyan parliamentary questions, live on the radio, at full volume. Not even Prime Minister's questions – this seemed to be Ministry of Transport questions. Lots of people were sitting listening intently to it.

Habermas eat your heart out.

On the other hand, in some respects Kenya (like Northern Ireland?) seems to be a place where politics matters a little too much. And if I lived somewhere with no sealed roads and no public transport, I think I'd have an opinion about Ministry of Transport parliamentary questions too.

Law and Order

2009-02-22T10:28:00.000Z

Yet another delayed post, I'm afraid.

So the Saturday before last I travelled up the Rift to Laikipia, the transitional region between Kenya's lush Central Highlands, home before independence to white ranchers and timber barons, and the semi-desert grazing lands of northern Kenya. My organisation has an office in Sipili, a small market town just north of the equator, serving as a the jumping-off point for travelling north to Samburu, Pokot and Turkana. The organisation's (shamefully under-resourced) Samburu and Pokot staff live and work up north, using Sipili as an occasional southern base. Sipili is much better equipped than many places further north, with electricity, packed dirt roads and even hot showers.

This is Sipili's main street. Also an excellent piece of signage for a Board & Lodging place, the Arrivals Lodge, where I didn't stay.

It was cattle market day when I arrived, with the street full of Samburu and Pokot pastoralists, carrying their ceremonial clubs, bringing their goats and cattle to sell. That picturesque bit of pre-packaged timelessness is nicely debunked when I'm introduced to S, a major herder in the area, sitting in his Pokot 'skirt' in a bar working his way through six or seven Tusker beers. Like any economic system, there's higher-ups and lower-downs. S is a round, cheery guy with a slightly hard look in his eye who tells me, not unkindly, that he's a much wealthier man than me, the mzungu. I can well believe this: the end-of-dry-season price of a cow in this area might be the equivalent of two to three hundred pounds, and major herders may have 400 or 500 cows.* Then I'm taken up the hill to a tiny nyama choma joint to eat with the local police chief - this kind of administration contact is really important for the kind of community conflict monitoring system we're hoping to set up. The police chief tells me that last night there was a cattle raid near the neighbouring town in which Mr N was killed and at least 150 cattle stolen (don't worry, Mum, I'm staying in town, they don't raid any cattle there!); and that S is the local 'warlord' (his word) who was probably responsible. I've no idea whether this is true, but certainly this kind of cattle rustling isn't simply a piece of picturesque tribal martialism – it's a well-organised (and comparatively well-armed) communal business, feeding cattle over the border to Sudan and Uganda, and to businessmen who buy the stolen cattle. I want to ask more about it, but the police officers around the table seem rather more concerned about my sexual well-being, and how I'm going to last for several months without my wife “or castration”, which forms the general topic of conversation amongst the assembled company for the next hour.

These kind of weird non-sequiturs have characterised my experience of law and order in Kenya so far – jolting from the social and familial, to cheerfully discussed or delivered force. This is, I suppose, a feature of any country where security forces aren't as rigidly separated from society as they are in the UK, and don't have the kind of reserve from their communities typical of British police forces. A, a female sergeant (and champion G3 rifle marksman) joins us while we're eating, and as she's going on patrol she offers to show me around the local police post. First she introduces me to her daughter, a gorgeous six year old. She carries her daughter into the police post, sits her on the front desk, and then, still chatting sprightly to the kid and me, rams the door open into the cells, slamming it without very much concern against the head of someone sitting on the floor in a dark, piss-smelling corridor beyond. There's no furniture at all, even in the (empty) 'women' and 'children' cells, just fetid, dark concrete rooms. The door from the corridor into into the 'dangerous persons' cell is wedged open, and the cell is stuffed full to standing room with wide-eyed men, some of whom have dirty bandages on their hands and legs. When I ask what these people have been arrested for, A says that they're mainly “thieves and robbers”, and that they can be in the police post cells for weeks “until the investigation is finished” (quite what that kind of investigation consists of isn't really clear). I have no idea what I'm supposed to say.

That evening, at the bar, another local police officer cheerfully discusses their shoot-to-kill policy with me. Propping up the other end of the bar is a Divisional Officer from an administrative division further north, the main government representative in his area. He's only in his mid-twenties, flanked by two Masaai security men, and almost crying into his cups as he tells me how 'primitive' his division is, having come from Nairobi. But there's a more serious context – he's clearly extremely worried about a joint army-police 'operation' currently on-going in his division to disarm pastoralists, many of whom keep ageing AK-47s for security against rustlers, or for rustling. He tells me quite frankly, with the police officer sitting next to him, that the 'operation' will only bring hardship and rape to the communities in his division. Similar forcible disarmament operations near the Tanzanian border have brought similar allegations.

Sipili itself, though, is awesome. Although I spent time that week travelling further north (about which I'll bore you another time – don't worry Mum, not too far north!), killing time in a dusty farming town with the nearest internet point an hour's drive down the road was exactly what I needed after Manchester and Omega. Sipili life is remarkably like The Archers - not a programme I'd previous thought of as having a resonating universality. But Sipili has a stock of characters you'd find any evening on Radio 4: there's Mr M, the stout, bookish former adult education officer who runs the school textbook and stationery shop with his wife (in the Radio 4 version he'd have a Yorkshire accent and be a cricket umpire); T, the school teacher who goes home to his farm each night and writes poetry inspired by Heraclites; S, the 'Matt Crawford' herder king and alleged cattle-rustler. This was my view from the Olivia Motel, where I was staying. I think I need more views like this in my life.

* The famous reluctance of Samburu, Pokot and Turkana pastoralists to sell cattle even in times of real economic hardship, when prices are very high, is often explained as 'irrational' cultural prestige overcoming economic need: considerable wealth may only ever be realised in social rather than economic terms, and 'wealthy' herders may starve rather than sell. Some recent work, though, suggests that this 'irrational' herd maximisation is 'rational' in the very long term, given the difficulties of building up herds for inheritance in such an aleatory, semi-arid environment.

Sorry for the delay

2009-02-17T10:36:00.000Z

So I've totally failed to update this since I arrived in Kenya. I have some excuse, which is that all of last week I was travelling to places where there was largely no internet access. I've also been really lazy. All of which means I've now prepared a tediously massive irruption of blogging for you to pick your way through, if you've the stamina.

I arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday 3rd, and went straight into town to catch the Mololine bus for Nakuru. My blurry impression of Nairobi was of an awesomely segregated geography and infrastructure, only slightly less extreme than Pretoria in South Africa. Although thousands of non-Africans live in and around Nairobi, I only really saw any in the northern neighbourhoods on my way out of Nairobi, and in the Central Business District. The white Kenyan businessman I got sat next to on the plane from London lived in Karen, a plush suburb just a few kilometres to the south of the city. In a cut-glass Home Counties accent he told me he hadn't been into Nairobi for five years, and expressed serious surprise that I was planning to get on a bus, which actually got me a little worried.

I asked how (white) people usually travelled out of Nairobi.

In a Land Cruiser, apparently.

And if I didn't have a Land Cruiser?

Well what on earth would I be doing in Kenya, as a white person, without being whisked out of Kenyatta International Airport and straight to either a safari lodge or an NGO's air-conditioned offices?

This is bollocks, of course – there are plenty of independent foreign travellers in Kenya. And I know Nairobi has a very bad reputation for crime, particularly at night, but when I got to the bus area at about 11 o'clock in the morning I had no hassle at all, in what seemed a very plush bit of town indeed. Mr White Mischief was right, though – I was the only white person on the street, and the bus. I was also by far the least well dressed person amongst the immaculately suited and booted passengers on their way to business meetings in Nakuru and Naivasha.

My first few days were spent in Nakuru, a lakeside town about 2 ½ hours from Nairobi in the southern Rift, where the organisation with which I'm spending some time has its head offices. It's a dusty, jumping, bustly, hustly place, much more chilled out than Nairobi, lined with the gnarled colonial remnants of jacaranda trees, looking out over a pink flamingo-tinged lake. This picture, of the main commercial area and the mosque, er, doesn't really show any of that.

I like it a lot. I find it completely impossible to imagine that Nakuru was the site of some of the most serious violence following the disputed 2007/8 election. You can almost miss the IDP camps in the dusty valleys just outside the town, and the ragged tents still pitched - in protest at a perceived lack of government assistance - outside the District Commissioner's offices in Nakuru itself.*

I'm staying in a fantastic flat on top of the Bank of Kenya building in the centre of town (it's a bank, Mum and Dad, so it's super-safe with 24 hour guards!). On Sunday I was sitting on the building's flat roof along with another of the building's tenants. She described to me how she stood there last January and watched as fires burned in an 180 degree arc around her, and dread-locked Mungiki shock troops bussed in by politicians from Nairobi fought Kalenjin mobs while army helicopters swooped overhead. She said she was relieved when the Mungiki “boys” arrived to “protect” the Kikuyu (like her) – a sentiment she didn't at all seem to find at odds with her description of how when they couldn't find any Kalenjin to fight they started attacking male Luo residents of Nakuru instead and circumcising them with broken bottles in the street. While she says it was terrible, she does so (like other people who personally escaped attack and have described the violence to me) in an entirely dispassionate tone of voice.

The peacebuilding organisation with which I'm working is interesting, and their work is impressively grass-roots. The staff have been tremendously welcoming, and seem to be happy for me to hang around – mainly, I think, because I seem to be keeping them perpetually amused with my broken attempts at speaking Kiswahili (my landlady's niece is teaching me). Before I head down to Nairobi I'm going to be spending some time here, mainly trying to set up a grass-roots conflict early warning/monitoring system in three Rift Valley districts, using the community groups within which the organisation works. The idea is to pilot a regular, simple reporting mechanism into which community leaders, Peace Committees and local administration officials can feed a range of conflict indicators and incidents. The results are supposed to be usable by these community groups, NGOs and possibly local administration to respond to emerging small-scale conflicts. A kind of small-scale, 'sous-veillance' community counterpart to the top-down, regional early-warning/monitoring systems currently operated by IGAD and others. We'll see.

On the 6th we went up to Kuresoi, near Molo – a lush farming region quite unlike most of the Rift Valley, but which has witnessed serious violence every election year since 1997. Unless you're looking you'd miss the burnt-out buildings and IDP camps concealed amongst cool green hillsides. We wind up at Baringo B, a small place where the organisation is organising a district Amani football tournament next month - teams will each be composed of a mix of Kalenjin and non-Kalenjin youths who were literally killing each other last year. (They've said I have to play in goal on one of the teams. I hope, for all sorts of reasons, that they're joking). This is a UNICEF 'tented school' on the hilltop in Baringo B.

I realise that throughout this entire post I've used ethnic descriptors totally uncritically. I came to Kenya unconvinced about the causal strength of tribalism in Kenya's internal conflicts. They must, I thought, really be about land, inequality, power, class. And they are, I think. But I'm beginning to be convinced that tribal identities really are the most important internal categories of many of these conflicts, at least in the southern Rift. Almost everyone I've met in Kenya in the last few weeks, including those actually involved in the 2008 violence, uses tribe first and foremost to describe themselves, and their differences with others. I don't doubt that tribal labels conceal power relations, economic inequality, class divisions – nor that they've been largely constructed by colonial administrators, post-colonial politicians and demagogues. But in my (extremely limited) experience over the past few weeks, tribal differences are by far the most significant way that these conflict's participants themselves describe and explain the conflicts around them. In Baringo B we met with L, who farms there and is building a cultural centre on land donated by his father. He's helping us to organise the tournament, and is the most impressive community activist I've ever met. We stand on what L says is the invisible boundary between Kikuyu and Kalenjin zones, and he shows us where Kikuyu farmers are just beginning to return to their burnt farms in the past few weeks. Around us Irish potatoes and pyrethrum are growing in prodigious quantities in a rich, red earth, and there's a cool breeze blowing. L says, quite credibly, that this very local conflict has much to do with resources, and nothing to do with resource scarcity. This is rich cash-cropping land, with spread-out settlements, on which different groups have competing historical claims. The people who burnt the houses and stole the farms, though, weren't from outside this rich farming belt – they were next-door neighbours themselves, often existing landowners, who either wanted more, or felt they were historically entitled for more, or wanted their neighbours out for other reasons.

On a different note about insiders and outsiders, L also made me realise that key entry points into communities for organisations like ours are not people who've lived here for generations and are wholly 'inside' communities, but 'outsider' community members who have gained some respect and trust within communities. Sometimes this trust actually seems to derive from this half-insider, half-outsider status. Most of the residents of Kuresoi would describe themselves as Kalenjin or Kikuyu. L is a local farmer, but is half-Luo, half-Congolese. This status makes it possible for him to intermediate between us and the local community in which he's nonetheless intimately embedded, and also to intermediate between different parts of that community (Kalenjin and Kikuyu) as a neutral party.**

On our way back to Nakuru we passed near the town of Molo, where a few days previously about 130 people died when a fuel tanker overturned on the road and exploded while local people were crowding round it trying to siphon off the fuel. Unsurprisingly, the explosion site is still presenting new economic opportunities which were being thoroughly milked when we passed by. With a kind of horrible tour-guide impulse, our driver insisted on us getting out and looking around the site, which was still chaos. It was days after the accident, but some body parts still hadn't been moved. A man standing nearby physically dragged us over the road and insisted on showing us a blackened, severed hand whose wedding ring is still on it, perfectly intact. He then asked for a small guide fee. And where the fire had burnt a hole in the fence around the private forest by the road, dozens of men were taking advantage of the general chaos to cut down branches and trees and carry them off to sell, picking their way between the blackened metal and shrivelled messes on the road.

All of which seemed to reinforce the sense of the fuel siphoners' deaths being a grim indictment of serious local scarcity, of a kind that seems very remote from the rich Kuresoi hills just a few dozen kilometres away. But I'm quickly learning that this kind of European bleeding heart-ism just won't cut it. Most Kenyan media, and those Kenyans I've spoken to about it, seem to explain the Molo accident simply as country bumpkin stupidity.

And of course it's true that the desperation which made me feel sick on the Molo road is entirely relative: the southern Rift is, comparatively, a pretty affluent part of East Africa, with nothing like the current, grindingly persistent scarcities of northern Kenya – still less southern Sudan, Somalia or even northern Uganda.

I'm afraid this post has ended up being full of doom, gloom and badly constructed undergraduate essay-age. In fact I'm actually having a great time! More tomorrow on my first trip north, Ghanaian kung-fu, magnanimous police chiefs and Leeds United.

----------

* At least two of these camps, near the Nairobi road, have actually clubbed together to buy the land on which they're located. One of the organisation's programme officers told me that they're now starving, because they no longer qualify for IDP assistance (they're not displaced any more, they're home!), but in the desolate dry valleys in which they've bought the land they can't possibly subsist agriculturally, and are not well placed to engage in commerce or small-scale industry. This taught me some probably obvious lessons about the inadequacy of a particularly arithmetical variety of Kenyan land politics – which is a politically incendiary Kenyan obsession, for otherwise good reasons; and more importantly about the inadequacy of equating residency rights with dignity and self-sufficiency. By writing this into legal and political definitions of displacement, in some cases (as in this one) you're actually worse off when you settle. I guess you probably learn all this in the first week of your International Development master's course, right? I'm afraid I'm groping around all this a bit.

Conversely, the IDP camps in this whole area came under intense criticism from local communities last year because IDPs were receiving food and other material aid from UNHCR, USAID, the Red Cross, Action Aid and others, while the most vulnerable local residents were starving amidst the relief effort, the violence having massively disrupted that year's harvest.

** Actually, Paul Rabinow makes this point much better than I've done in Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Again, I suppose this is social anthropology Class 101? But I didn't do that either, so I'm afraid what you get here is my crashingly obvious sixth-form meanderings about constructed ethnicity.

Air travel is mad

2009-02-04T11:26:00.000Z

(Left) Monday morning, 11am

(Right) Tuesday morning, 11am.

More soon!

Eh?

2009-02-01T16:14:00.001Z

"Tree Hugging Hoolah" is, of course, the description of climate change apocryphally attributed to my intellectual hero and moral compass, Geoff 'Buff' Hoon.

I'm rubbish at online confessional, but will be trying here to post tidbits and photos of my travels, aspiring to as much relaxed, off-the-record candour as the Hoonster himself.