Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 6/21/2024
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East.
Last week’s links here.
Sahel and West Africa
Mauritania’s presidential election is approaching on June 29. See Deutsche Welle (Fr) on the seven candidates (including President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, as well as 2019 runner-up, anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, and Hamadi Ould Sid' El Moctar of Tewassoul, a Muslim Brotherhood-esque party).
The New Humanitarian puts questions from Burkinabè community leaders to Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland.
Al Jazeera: “As Big Pharma Exits Nigeria, Asthma Patients Face Spiralling Costs.” Note that the article attributes the exit of a major firm, GlaxoSmithKline, to President Bola Tinubu’s removal of the country’s controversial fuel subsidy. The article is not fair enough, in my view, to the bad economic situation Tinubu inherited - the article makes it sound as though galloping inflation is solely Tinubu’s fault. But I do think it’s refreshing to see the fuel subsidy removal - which is often presented by World Bank types and other neoliberals as sort of “tough medicine” for Nigeria’s economy - as having some really devastating knock-on effects.
Clingendael has published what scans to me as a somewhat alarmist report about cross-border jihadism in Benin and northwest Nigeria, which got an even more alarmist write-up in the Associated Press. I have no doubt there are cross-border jihadists in that zone. But northwestern Nigeria is already in bad shape, security-wise...it doesn’t take al-Qaida or JNIM to make things bad. And for the entire time I’ve been following the Sahel and West Africa, analysts and governments have been warning about a zone of contiguous jihadist activity from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and the reality always ends up being more complex. The AP report in particular recycles that trope of a bridge between Sahelian and Nigerian jihadism while presenting this concern as brand new. Note that the jihadist group “Ansaru” was long held to be al-Qaida’s bridge into Nigeria, and note too that the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (now the Islamic State Sahel Province) was at one time under the direct administrative authority of the Islamic State West Africa Province (both of these issues go unmentioned in the AP report) - so what is really new about the possibility of Sahel-Nigeria links?
North Africa
Isabelle Werenfehls: “Of Friends and Foes: Israel and Iran in the Maghreb.” An excerpt:
Rabat is sticking to its normalisation with Israel and rejection of Iran. Algiers is seeking to position itself as a voice for global justice in the international arena, while the Tunisian president styles himself as one of the Arab World’s most steadfast proponents of the “liberation” of Palestine.
Morocco’s increasing reliance on the expertise of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), whose personnel and equipment will be deployed on Moroccan coasts, could affect its credibility and sovereignty in managing migration and controlling its borders, possibly jeopardizing its position as an intermediary between countries of origin and destination.
Conversely, mounting migration flows present valuable opportunities for Morocco to leverage its role in managing migration between Europe and Africa. By doing so, Morocco can protect its geopolitical interests and maximize the benefits of its economic partnership with the EU, particularly improving the terms of free trade and fisheries agreements.
How is Algeria fighting forest fires (Fr)?
Greater Horn of Africa
Islamic Relief reflects on why cycles of hunger persist in Somalia:
While some progress has been made over the last few years, many aid agencies and development actors in Somalia remain stuck in the emergency aid phase due to chronic underfunding of long-term development programmes and the inflexibility of funding ear-marked for emergency relief. Between 2011 and 2018, an approximate of $6.8 billion (£5.5 million) has been spent on emergency aid in Somalia, with marginal improvements on the overall situation. Failure to invest in meaningful interventions, such as development of agricultural infrastructure, water management, and climate-resilient technologies, results in a cycle of suffering in which funding is channelled largely into chronic emergency programmes which are unable to address root causes. This not only undermines the effectiveness of the programmes, but also places a drain on limited resources. One of the examples of this in Somalia is the reluctance to invest in fixing data gaps by building comprehensive databases in IDP camps that would allow for better needs assessment and constitute the first block in shifting from the emergency phase to rebuilding.
The World Food Program: “Spiking Hunger and Prices: Sudan’s Neighbours Grapple with a Refugee Crisis.”
The Rapid Support Forces capture El-Fula, “one of only two army bases in strategically located West Kordofan, with a power station,” from the Sudanese Armed Forces.
Mashriq
Iran’s presidential elections are approaching on June 28. The economy looms large.
Mary Turfah in The Baffler on Israeli soldiers sharing images of Palestinian suffering:
While many viewers might find this content disturbing, they are not the target audience. In Israel, where a majority opposes a ceasefire and supports starving Gaza, this content is, on the whole, incredibly well-received. It offers the folks back home an image of fortified dominance, the illusion of control. In March 2024, the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz detailed, in a report titled, “We’re Not Only Here to Fuck Hamas,” how battlefield imagery has flooded online dating profiles in Israel. Beyond its sexual currency, this content, like the torture of Palestinians aired on mainstream Israeli television, functions as entertainment. Telegram channels sharing graphic images of dead or dying Palestinians—and foreign aid workers—have amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The image of the shrunken corpse of a nine-year-old Palestinian boy with cerebral palsy, starved to death by Israel, appeared on one feed as part of a movie poster that included the boy’s severely cachectic face alongside a picture of E.T. in his bicycle basket, riding into the night sky. The film would be called, “A.H.M.E.T.” The boy’s actual name was Yazan; his mother called him Yazouna.
Milad Haghani on climate change, heat exhaustion, and the hajj.
The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, which is administered by the World Bank, has a new report entitled “Lessons from Disaster Governance: Port of Beirut Explosion Reform Recovery and Reconstruction Framework.”