Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 10/11/2024
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East.
Sahel and West Africa
Moody’s downgraded Senegal’s credit ratings because “preliminary audit findings from the Ministry of Finance indicate significantly higher past government budget deficits and a markedly higher debt burden than previously published, although the exact scale remains uncertain pending validation by Senegal's Court of Auditors.”
The Malian Armed Forces retrieved the bodies of their fallen comrades from Tinzaouaten, site of a major defeat inflicted upon them by rebels and jihadists in July. Is it the end of a chapter - and of Bamako’s ambitions for pacifying the far north? You can read the Malian Armed Forces’ communiqué here, and a counter-communiqué from the Permanent Strategic Framework rebel coalition here.
A diplomatic row is unfolding between Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire, with the countries accusing each other of efforts at destabilization.
Rebel groups in Niger form a coalition to coordinate opposition to the junta in power.
Does Chadian President Mahamat Déby want to rehabilitate the image of Hissène Habré (d. 2021), dictator for most of the 1980s?
In Nigeria, a familiar - but consequential - tale, as a governor (Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State) clashes with his “Godfather” (Nyesom Wike, ex-Rivers Governor and current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory).
In an appearance on Arise News, commentators Amaka Anku and Muda Yusuf argue that Nigeria needs a “strong state” to promote development and growth.
North Africa
International Criminal Court: “Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC on the Unsealing of Six Arrest Warrants in the Situation in Libya.” An excerpt:
Three of the six suspects were leaders and/or prominent members of the Al Kaniyat militia that controlled Tarhunah from at least 2015 to June 2020, when government forces ousted them from the city. Three other suspects were in the Libyan security sector and were associated with the Al Kaniyat militia at the time of the alleged crimes. Since June 2020, hundreds of bodies have been exhumed from mass graves in and around Tarhunah, allegedly victims of the Al Kaniyat militia.
At RFI, Tunisia correspondent Amira Souilem comments on why Kais Saied won a huge victory but amid low turnout - pointing to factors such as post-revolutionary fatigue, intra-opposition divisions, and Saied’s image for his own supporters as a man of integrity and a bulwark against Islamism.
A six-month suspended prison sentence for Tunisian opposition activist Chaima Issa, as a higher court overturns an earlier one-year sentence handed down by a lower court.
Algeria boycotts French wheat to signal discontent with France’s shift to backing Morocco’s position on the Western Sahara.
King Mohammed VI of Morocco opens a new session of parliament today (October 11).
Moroccan youth seem to increasingly prefer English over French.
Greater Horn of Africa
Matt Herbert and Emadeddin Badi have a new chapter as part of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organization Crime’s series on “Human Smuggling and Trafficking in North Africa and the Sahel.” Their chapter is called “Sudan: Conflict Drives Mass Refugee Movement and Fuels Human Smuggling.”
On October 8, Kenya’s parliament passed “a 281-44 vote in favor of impeachment [of Vice President Rigathi Gachagua], well above the 117 votes constitutionally required. The motion now goes to the parliament’s upper house, which will debate the matter and also hold a vote.
At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Cameron Hudson critically assesses U.S. President Joe Biden’s legacy vis-a-vis Africa, especially in terms of Sudan:
It took nearly a year after the start of the war for Biden to appoint a special envoy to Sudan to try to cobble together a diplomatic response, something that had been done eight times before by three previous administrations when the stakes to the region and the threat to U.S. national security interests were not nearly as high as today.
But even with an envoy in place, Washington has resisted using the leverage it has to bring about an end to the fighting. Despite a sanctions regime in place, none of the leaders of either of the warring sides have been designated for the war crimes and crimes against humanity they continue to commit. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have remained mostly mute on the subject—especially compared to their predecessors. Biden spoke emphatically about stopping the weapons flow that is fueling the war at the UN General Assembly last month, but that plea came more than 15 months after the last time he referenced the conflict publicly, hardly a demonstration of consistent engagement with the world’s largest conflict.
Teklemariam Bekit at the BBC: “Eritrea, Egypt and Somalia Cement ‘Axis Against Ethiopia’.”
A Turkish firm will soon start construction on a $70 million port facility in Hobyo, Somalia.
Mashriq
A slate of commentary appeared to mark the anniversary of the 10/7 attacks and the ensuing genocide by the Israeli government and military against the people of Gaza. Here are some of the most important pieces I’ve seen:
Musab Abu Toha in the New Yorker: “The Gaza We Leave Behind.”
Lina Mounzer at The Markaz Review: “A Year of War Without End.”
Al Jazeera: “Journalists at CNN and the BBC expose the inner workings of their newsrooms, a year into Israel’s war on Gaza.”
Matt Duss in The New Republic: “Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way.”
Mona Harb with a detailed thread - “Urbiciding Dahiya” - on the history and urban geography of Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Privilege Musvanhiri at DW: “Stranded African Migrants in Lebanon Feel Abandoned.”
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi at Sidecar:
[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s modus operandi has been to goad the Islamic Republic into retaliation, allowing him to then paint it as a global pariah and grave threat to ‘Western civilisation’, with Israel all the while continuing its genocidal assault on Gaza. The Israeli state may also be calculating that only under the cover of a full-blown regional conflagration will it be able to complete its ongoing campaign of ethnically cleansing Gaza and to a lesser extent the West Bank. The Iranian leadership is of course fully aware of Israel’s strategy of deflecting pressure to halt the war on Gaza – and now Lebanon – by switching attention to Iran and attempting to lure it into a wider regional war. From the outset, Tehran has also understood that, in the words of Ali Larijani, a former parliamentary speaker and current member of the Expediency Discernment Council, generally seen as a pragmatist, ‘We are not only dealing with Israel. The command-and-control centre is in the hands of the US’.
At the Carnegie Endowment’s Diwan, Michael Young interviews Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey about why they think Saudi-Israeli normalization should not be a pursuit for Washington.
MY: If the ongoing war in Gaza has underlined one thing, it is that previous Arab-Israeli agreements, collectively known as the Abraham Accords, have neither managed to circumvent the Palestinian-Israeli conflict nor have brought Palestinians closer to statehood. Amid clear signs Israel rejects the very idea of a Palestinian state, aren’t such agreements, including a potential Saudi-Israeli deal, just ways of killing the Palestinian cause, meaning they will lack legitimacy in much of the Arab world?
Fred Wehrey: In effect, yes. The Biden administration failed to learn the lessons of the previous accords, which, by design, evaded the tough U.S. policy choices needed to directly address the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Saudi-Israeli normalization push repeated that flawed regionalization template. Administration officials believed that somehow the Saudi deal would be different, insofar as it hoped that the Saudis would bring a fresh proposal to the table and that the prospect of normalization with this Arab heavyweight—and its expected economic and symbolic benefits—would be enough of an incentive to moderate the Israeli position toward Palestinian statehood.
At International Studies Quarterly, Abdullah al-Jabassini has a fascinating new article titled “Tribalocracy: Tribal Wartime Social Order and Its Transformation in Southern Syria.”