Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIf we all weren't so busy hating someone else, personally or politically, we would probably all be more a lot more productive, especially as regards the universal extension of modern benefits having to do with agriculture, education, health, and global prosperity.
Instead, it seems half the world wants to get rid of the other half. However, which is the half that wants to do that, you tell me.
Here, reprinted with permission, is an entire e-circular from the International Crisis Group to promote the release of Kenya in Crisis, a primer on the apparent sources of the Kenyan conflict and its character.
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INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP - NEW REPORT
Kenya in Crisis
Nairobi/Brussels, 21 February 2008: If Kofi Annan’s mediation of Kenya’s still explosive crisis is to succeed, he must not let the parties postpone the tough details of a power-sharing agreement, and he needs continued strong international support.
Kenya in Crisis*, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the situation since the contested presidential election results of December 2007 led to the deaths of over 1,000 people and the displacement of some 300,000 others in waves of violence with a serious ethnic character.
African Union-sponsored negotiations between Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU), led by the former UN Secretary-General, have already made progress. The sides are giving some ground and discussing a transitional arrangement. This could lead to legal and constitutional reforms and a truth, justice and reconciliation commission to assist in healing wounds. But a sustainable settlement must address the particulars of power sharing and economic policies, with targets and timetables, in order to convince the drivers of violence to disarm.
“The mediation cannot afford to delay discussion of the details”, says Gareth Evans, President of Crisis Group. “This is Kenya’s worst political crisis since independence, and unless people see practical results from these talks soon, mass violence could re-erupt”.
Three complementary sets of issues must be addressed at the same time as finalisation of a detailed power-sharing agreement:
- The first are the legal and constitutional reforms needed during the transition period, including a complete overhaul of the electoral framework.
- The second are the economic policies to be implemented during the transition.
- The third are the concrete details of the process to end the violence and to deal with the humanitarian crisis, including the institutional framework and timelines.
Continued international pressure is critical to achieving these objectives. The conditioning of multilateral and bilateral financial help for a negotiated settlement should be reinforced by actual targeted sanctions against spoilers, including a general travel ban and asset freeze against those who support and organise violence or otherwise block the political process. The prospect of making individuals pariahs can be used to encourage concessions in the negotiations and good faith implementation of an agreement.
“The crisis in Kenya reaches far beyond that country”, says Donald Steinberg, Crisis Group Deputy President. “Kenya is the platform for relief operations in Somalia and Sudan, a regional entrepot for trade and investment, and a key anchor for long-term stabilisation of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. The quicker a solution to the crisis is found, the better the prospects will be for the entire region”.
Kimberly Abbott (Washington) +1 202 785 1601
To contact Crisis Group media please click here
*Read the full Crisis Group briefing on our website: http://www.crisisgroup.org
The International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation covering some 60 crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
From the executive summary of the report itself:
"Serious obstacles remain, however. Armed groups are still mobilising on both sides. ODM, which won a clear parliamentary plurality in December, has put on hold its calls for mass action and is using the talks to restore prestige it lost internationally in the violence. It is under pressure from its core constituencies, however, to demand nothing less than the presidency, and its supporters could easily renew violent confrontations if Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) coalition remains inflexible."
Whether a few borders south in Zimbabwe or in neighboring Somalia or far north in Gaza, the ability to undermine faith in democratic process has some to do with the inability of any democratic incumbent (or until recently proto-democratic encumbent like Pervez Musharraf) to distribute certain resources as well as opportunity throughout the body politic.
Conditions as perceived where one works or lives may provide plenty of fuel for resentment and suspicion, leaving it to the ambitious politician to organize that discomfort, should he so wish, into camp terms: MY people suffer--YOUR people are the cause of it.
In contemplation of the Kibera Slum, an obscenity most unnatural, I have perhaps with more humor than warranted suggested massive "new town" planning, locating, and then relocation, a thing seriously possible where cooperation across the market campus is possible.
Of course, reversion to feudalism negates that possibility.
Instead of a society producing, say, 40 New Towns of around 20,000 communicating and mobile citizens able to tap the primary wells of income and fill related secondary roles, it instead divides across family and tribal lines, its resources go to the defense of both, it's ability to produce surplus goods for foreign exchange and to attract trade, especially tourism, becomes compromised.
Except for newbie war journalists (and perhaps the odd international policy wonk), no vacationer wants to set out for a war zone.
"The ODM and PNU do not control the local violence," says the report.
What so shocked the world about Kenya (as there is little left of shock value in any news coming out of, say, Somalia or Sudan) was the sudden appearance or imposition of machete wielding mob violence in what had been perceived as a democratic and reasonably modernized, stable, and peaceful country.
That's "Country" with a capital "C".
Not a regime.
Not a junta.
Not an authoritarian something or other.
Still, as suggested here, people suffer in silence only so long.
The degradation and humiliation inherent in being forced into crime by desparation or forced to suffer the same, and usually from the similar peerage, lends itself to political argument, including the argument of a firebrand.
Here's the nut: if that argument were about distributive justice--i.e., getting a fair share of the pie and a fair shake in government--it would be in the interest of poor and wealthy alike to produce programs that reduce disparity in class and ease financial desparation across the land.
Not that anyone's all that straightforward about that process: that's why we (in the U.S., at least) have political "pork" and government-enforced minority business set asides and certain goals in institutional recruitment and such. Nonetheless, whether above board or less given to scrutiny, the broad effort to distribute wealth, forced by law or encouraged through philanthropy, has its effect. There's no profit in riot where employment, food, health care, shelter, and, not the least important thing, hope and possibility remain ever present in virtually all hearts.
By comparison, the politics of retribution or retributive justice, work much differently.
For one thing, mobs know anger before they know justice.
Next: the relatives of the injured, maimed, and dead know the irresistable obligation that comes out of the question of whether to seek revenge.
Whatever the true underlying issues or problems may be, doing away with an irksome presence makes a much easier mission than producing any kind of across-the-board good.
The angry electorate of Zimbabwe, perfectly understandable in its own once upon a time, has just about achieved its end: the eradication of the white farmer from the land. Bully good for it, but in the process it has transformed the "breadbasket of South Africa" into an agricultural, economic, and human tragedy of unspeakable depth.
The "wovits" (meaning "War Vets") about which Robert Godwin has written so eloquently [2] are out in their fields (for the time being and for all intents) scrabbling with hand tools for succor and starving despite the now back breaking effort with a minimum of knowledge and means.
Odd how that history has worked.
At least Kenya's middle class well knows where it does not wish to go.
Unlike Ian Smith's would-be (or was) divided Rhodesia 28 years ago, it has some powerful tools at hand, including a government half way home as a still potent and stable instutitional entity. Add to that the Internet; well-educated native and immigrated personalities intent on delivering an improved system to the country; and, one may hope, the combined efforts of a world focused on violent conflict and coming up to speed fast on its antecedents and, in realtime, better answers for reducing its presence in all but the most stubborn of anarchies.
I hope Kenyans will get into the courts what needs airing in them; that their security forces will work vigorously to suppress brigandage and unauthorized armed division; and that Raila Odinga and Mwai Kibaki will either go through hell together agreeing on how to live together, or, if they fail, go to hell together while still enabling Kenya to become an englightened state and to repair so much damage motivated by, and this beyond all else, sheer wanton neglect of its own and long festering sores.
1. Kenya in Crisis. Africa Report No. 137. International Crisis Group, February 21, 2008.
2. Godwin, Peter. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2007, First U.S. Edition; first published: Picador Africa, 2006.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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