January 25, 2010
"I am a British journalist"
A visiting friend recently left us with a copy of Chris Cleave's bestseller The Other Hand.
I particularly enjoyed the following scene, in which the heroine, a Nigerian refugee, is deported back to Abuja accompanied by her friend, a women's magazine editor.
The military police were waiting for me in a small room, wearing uniforms and gold-framed sunglasses. They could not arrest me because Sarah was with me. She would not leave my side. I am a British journalist, she said. Anything you do to this woman, I will report it. The military police were uncertain, so they called their commander. The commander came, in a camouflage uniform and a red beret, with tribal scars on his cheeks. He looked at my deportation document, and he looked at me and Sarah and Charlie. He stood there for a long time, scratching his belly and nodding ...The military police followed our taxi from the airport. I was very frightened but Sarah gripped my hand. I will not leave you she said. So long as Charlie and I are here, you are safe. The police waited outside our hotel.
If anyone out there is short of a few bob, I would pay good money to watch you try that "I am a British journalist" line in a similar setting.
Posted by aheavens at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2010
Cultures collide in the Ethiopian blogosphere
What happens when cultures collide? One of the best places to find out is the Ethiopian blogosphere, with its writers spread across the Ethiopian Diaspora, from China, through Europe to the United States of America.
Bloggers spent the past few weeks writing posts inspired by the differences between Ethiopia and the far-flung nations which many Ethiopians now call home.
Zewge A. Assefa, the writer behind Negere Ethiopia, was unnerved when he first moved to Norway as a student. At first, he wrote in First impression is not always the lasting one, everyone seemed so quiet and reserved. When he got up the nerve to talk to his fellow students, he had to overcome other cultural barriers:
I do not ... mean to underestimate the difficulty for me as an African and in particular as an Ethiopian to give a proper picture of the place I call home. Many people seem to have a thick background reinforced with terrible images of war, famine and overall poverty...Personally, I do not feel rejected. Neither do I feel fully embraced. I still live with the situation where more often than not, people prefer to sit by people of their color type even when I am sitting alone.
Read the rest on GlobalVoices.
Posted by aheavens at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)
January 9, 2010
Searching for reasons to be cheerful in Sudan
Only the most foolhardy commentator would dare to say anything optimistic about the coming year in Sudan, four months away from highly charged elections and 12 months from an explosive referendum on southern independence.
So here goes — five reasons why Africa’s largest country might just manage to reach January 2011 without a return to catastrophe and bloody civil war, despite the worst predictions of most pundits.
Oil
Often the cause of conflict, oil could end up helping to prevent it in Sudan. The country’s oil industry, as it currently stands, only works when north and south Sudan work together. The south has most of the known oil reserves while the north has all of the infrastructure — from pipelines to refineries to a sea port. Talk of a southern refinery and an alternative pipeline route to the sea via Kenya are currently “pie in the sky”, one diplomat told me.Both sides may choose to fight it out over contested border oilfields after the widely expected “yes” vote for southern independence, thereby disrupting oil flows and scaring off investors. But it would be much more profitable for all concerned to work out a revenue sharing scheme and live side by side as business partners. The south’s government gets up to 98 percent of its revenues from oil sales so would struggle to survive without some kind of deal.
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 8, 2009
Sudan leaders scuffle as time runs out for peace deal
It started with a small scuffle over a confiscated bag of protest banners outside Sudan's parliament. And it ended in confrontations between baton-wielding police and protesters on the dusty streets of Omdurman.
At the finish, once the tear gas and protests leaflets had settled, just one victor emerged - in the propaganda stakes at least - the protesters from a loose alliance between south Sudan's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and mostly northern opposition parties.
The SPLM and opposition groups called Monday's protest to urge north Sudan's dominant National Congress Party (NCP) to push through a raft of reforms they see as essential to elections, now just months away in April.
The Khartoum authorities played their part perfectly, first by banning the rally, then by starting the day detaining two prominent SPLM leaders...
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2009
A slick visit to Darfur's red carpet camps
There was a time when visits to Darfur were uncertain affairs, fraught with danger. These days - as long as you travel with the right people and stick strictly to the right route - they can be as comfortable as a coach trip.
The African Union delegation plane touched down in El Fasher, North Darfur's capital, at 9.35 a.m. on Tuesday. We were on the bus heading back to the airstrip at 4.40 p.m.
In between, the members of the African Union's peace and security council visited the governor's walled-in compound, where ambassadors watched tribal dancing and a PowerPoint presentation (complete with CD-ROM handout).
The next stop was the heavily secured UNAMID peacekeeping headquarters. Next, a razor-wired police station, 200 metres outside a displacement camp, where around 40 residents had been waiting for two hours to talk to the delegates.
Forty-five minutes later, the 18-vehicle convoy of buses, 4×4s and armed escorts drove slowly through Abu Shouk camp. Then there was one final stop at the governor's to eat dinner and admire his collection of gazelle and exotic birds. The AU ambassadors and women in the party received souvenir mats...
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2009
Is an independent south Sudan now inevitable?
So, is it now inevitable that Sudan's oil-producing south will decide to split away from the north as an independent country in a looming secession referendum in 2011?
That was the conclusion of some observers of a bluntly worded exchange of views between two leading lights from the north and the south at a symposium in Khartoum on Tuesday.
Sudan's Muslim north fought a two decade civil war with southerners, most of them Christians and followers of traditional beliefs. The 2005 peace deal that ended that conflict set up a north/south coalition government and promised a referendum on southern secession.
Sudan's foreign minister Deng Alor told journalists at the symposium most of his fellow southerners, embittered by decades of northern oppression and imposed Islamic values, “overwhelmingly” wanted independence. Only a miracle would change their minds, he said, going on to appeal for a “peaceful divorce” should the south choose to split...
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2009
Is Sudan's Darfur crisis getting too much attention?
Activists often say that the world is not paying enough attention to Sudan's Darfur crisis. But could the opposite be true -- that Darfur is actually getting too much attention, from too many organisations, all at the same time?
A rough count shows at least 10 international and local initiatives searching for a solution to the region's festering conflict. Many of them are at least nominally coordinated by the United Nation and the African Union. But with so many parallel programmes in play, the opportunities for duplication, competition and confusion are legion.
Top of the bill on the international stage is the double act between the United Nations and the African Union. Their joint Darfur mediator -- Burkina Faso's low-profile former security minister Djibril Bassole - spends much of his time shuttling between capitals, holding closed-session discussions with rebels, regional powers, Darfuri intellectuals and civilian groups.
The most high-profile initiative is a project launched at the Arab League for peace talks between Sudan's government and rebels hosted in Qatar. Those talks, currently stalled, are hosted “in coordination” with Bassole but their have their own separate identity -- Qatar has made its own statements and has held its own meetings with rebels.
During one crowded fortnight in August, both Libya and the United States held separate meetings with different sets of rebel splinter groups, urging them to reunite ahead of talks, with mixed results...
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2009
A tussle over trousers in Sudan
One moment everything was quiet on the streets outside the Khartoum courtroom where Lubna Hussein was on trial this morning, charged with indecency for wearing trousers.
The next, a three-way fight had exploded between riot police armed with crackling electric batons, women's rights protesters waving banners and posters, and Islamists fuelled with righteous indignation and pious chants.
You couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the opposing forces that have come piling down on Sudan's government since the start of the case - opposing forces that also compete for influence at the heart of the Khartoum regime.
Women's rights campaigners and other activists were the first to get involved after Sudan's public order police barged into a party in the capital in July and found Lubna and 12 other female guests wearing trousers...
Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.
Posted by aheavens at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2009
Sudan story of the day
President Al-Bashir to address huge women mass rally ThursdayKhartoum, March 9 (SUNA) - President of the Republic Field Marshal Omer Al-Bashir is to address at the Council of Ministers Thursday a huge women mass rally, which is organized by the Secretariat General of the Working Women Association in Sudan in rejection of the allegations of the so-called International Criminal Court and to affirm support to the leadership.
Definitely one for the diary.
Posted by aheavens at 3:32 PM | Comments (1)
