Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Africa

  • Despite Calls to Cut Aid, American Influence in Egypt Limited

    Last month, Kentucky’s libertarian senator, Rand Paul, introduced a motion to suspend American aid to Egypt, proposing to divert the money to domestic infrastructure programs. A longtime opponent of foreign aid in general, Paul, a Republican, pushed the resolution at a time of immense political turmoil in the Arab country. Just three weeks earlier, the Egyptian army had unseated Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to the relief of millions of Egyptians who opposed his Muslim Brotherhood’s rule.

    The amendment failed. Just twelve other senators supported it. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Bob Corker of Tennessee, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, all of whom are influential members in the Senate when it comes to foreign policy and national-security issues, were among those voting it down.

    However, after a particularly bloody week in which hundreds of Morsi’s supporters were killed by Egyptian security forces while removing demonstrations from the streets of Cairo, those four senators apparently had a change of heart.

    In contrast to their positions two weeks ago, they now believe suspending $1.5 billion in annual American assistance to the Egyptian government is an appropriate response to the bloodshed. (more…)

  • Egypt Army’s Crackdown Puts Pressure on Obama to Sever Ties

    American president Barack Obama’s Egypt policy is severely tested as the Arab nation’s military forcefully disbands tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters who were protesting last month’s removal of President Mohamed Morsi from office.

    As is usual during a time of confrontation, the exact death toll is unknown. The Egyptian Health Ministry originally counted 278 people dead as a result of the police dispersal of the mass demonstrations but reports now speculate up to five hundred casualties, most them civilians but also policemen.

    What is certain is that the military’s decision to move into the protest camps in full force — tear gas, live ammunition, bulldozers and helicopters were used — will make reconciliation between Egypt’s Islamist and secular factions all the more difficult. (more…)

  • Egypt’s Interim Leaders, Muslim Brotherhood Refuse to Budge

    It has been five weeks since the Egyptian army, encouraged by millions of protesters demanding an end to Muslim Brotherhood rule, overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and detained him on charges of harming Egypt’s national security. Morsi, holed up somewhere in a prison on the outskirts of Cairo, has not been seen in public or heard from since he was taken into custody in early July, to the derision of his family and his many followers.

    Despite the former president being held by the authorities without access to the outside world, tens of thousands of his supporters remain on the streets in northeast Cairo, chanting for his reinstatement and denouncing what they consider a coup by Egypt’s military leaders. (more…)

  • American Policy in Tatters as Egypt’s Morsi is Charged

    If the United States needed a reason to suspend economic and military assistance to the Egyptian military after Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow, the past week has given officials in Washington DC a menu to choose from.

    The major question in the American capital has been what to call the Egyptian army’s intervention early this month when it detained Morsi, the elected president, and installed a transitional government headed by the country’s former chief justice. Senators like Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin insist it was a coup. But under American law, the military would then have to suspend assistance to Egypt’s armed forces for interfering in the political process and overrunning an elected leader.

    Concerned that a slowdown or sudden suspension of military aid would endanger national security at a critical time in Egypt’s evolution, the Obama Administration decided to ignore those in Congress who were pushing for such a cut in aid. One of the reasons is that millions of Egyptians who took to the streets to demand Morsi’s resignation after a year of increasingly authoritarian and divisive rule from his Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian army, according to this view, only reacted to the will of the people for a fresh start and a new round of elections.

    Yet it only took a few hours after that decision was made to thrust Egypt back into the foreign policy spotlight. On Friday, millions heeded the call of the nation’s chief general, Abdul Fatah Sisi, to publicly and vocally demonstrate their support for the army’s actions — and by extension, oppose the millions of Morsi demonstrators who want him to be reinstated. (more…)

  • Violent Protests Cloud Egyptian Army’s Takeover

    The political crisis in Egypt resulting from last week’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi took a violent turn on Monday when Muslim Brotherhood supporters that had amassed near the Republican Guard’s headquarters in Cairo, where Morsi is believed to be held, were sprayed with live ammunition from the Egyptian army. Fifty demonstrators were estimated to have been killed. Hundreds more were wounded.

    Morsi’s party denounced the incident as a “massacre” and urged its followers to remain in the streets to protest his removal from office. (more…)

  • Morsi’s Downfall Forces Islamists to Rethink Strategy

    President Mohamed Morsi’s removal from office this week jeopardizes his Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt. But the army’s political intervention might have an impact beyond the country.

    The Brotherhood’s experience in Egypt forces likeminded political groups across the Middle East to assess the value of obtaining their goals through a democratic process over means of armed aggression. Abiding by the democratic process got the Brotherhood ejected from the system while the Afghan Taliban’s commitment to armed resistance got them a seat at the negotiating table. (more…)

  • Egypt Crisis Draws America’s Attention to Middle East Once Again

    With over 23 Egyptians reported dead in clashes between supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi and Egypt’s powerful military ready to impose a solution to the crisis later on Wednesday, American foreign policy is once again in the throes of a dilemma.

    President Barack Obama, who has taken a pragmatic approach to the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the last two years, is faced with another political crisis in the Arab world that could escalate into further violence among Egypt’s many factions.

    When news broke that the Egyptian army would impose its own solution if Morsi was unable to appease the demands of his opponents, American officials quickly rushed to the phones to confer with their Egyptian counterparts. The White House released a short readout of a conversation between Presidents Obama and Morsi that took place late on Monday. While it was short on details, the message clearly exhibited American alarm that further conflict could result without a compromise that Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s secular parties and millions of protesters could live with.

    Egypt has been through mass protests before. Millions of Egyptians poured into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in January and February 2011, culminating in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the man who had ruled Egypt with an iron fist for thirty years. Those demonstrations, however, were not entirely peaceful. At least eight hundred protesters were killed. Thousands more were imprisoned by a police apparatus that has largely stayed intact under Morsi’s administration.

    A similar scenario is unfolding today but it is occurring in an Egyptian body politic that is far more polarized than it was two years ago, when Mubarak was the target for Christians, moderate Islamists, Salafists and seculars alike. (more…)

  • Sub-Saharan Africa to See Prosperity At Last?

    Africa tends to provoke imagines of civil war, despots and starving children in the West. Are these images still applicable, if they ever were, to such a vast continent?

    While Europe is still dealing with the effects of a sovereign debt crisis and China is trying to to keep its economy under control, Africa has grown at an annual rate of 4.8 percent over the last five years, a period that included the trauma of the global financial crisis. That means it has outperformed other developing regions — like Latin America, for example, at 3.3 percent. Five of the ten fastest growing economies in the world last year were African — Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Niger and Sierra Leone.

    So do the images that we are used to seeing on our television screens still represent the whole of Africa? In many ways, yes, they are and likely will for some time. A religious war looms in Nigeria, South Africa is struggling with internal strife, Somalia, once the poster child of state failure, while making gains, is still not functioning. In North Africa, countries from Egypt to Libya are coping with the aftermaths of “Arab Spring” uprisings that destabilized and toppled governments. (more…)

  • Libyan Degaddafication Law’s Scope Raises Concern

    After months of anticipation and weeks of jubilant protests in the capital, Libyan lawmakers enacted a political isolation law last week that prohibits officials who served the previous regime from reentering public service.

    To the revolutionaries who fought against dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces for eight months during Libya’s civil war, as well for the activists who spent decades in exile before the uprising erupted in February 2011, the law is final proof that their long and sometimes bloody work was worthwhile.

    Thousands of Libyans celebrated in the streets of Tripoli once news of the law’s passing spread, some honking their horns joyfully at its strict prohibition on all of Gaddafi’s former henchmen.

    Having won 80 percent support in the legislature, the law’s enactment, more than two years after Libyans took up arms against Gaddafi, was an indication that the North African country still has to rid itself of all vestiges of the old order but is simultaneously committed to building a political system from scratch after four decades of authoritarian rule.

    That the task is difficult was plain ahead of the vote when democracy observers warned that the law could be used to sideline political opponents. Although designed to root out Gaddafi loyalists from positions of power, the text of the isolation law is sufficiently broad to theoretically kick out anymore who held any important position while Gaddafi was in power. (more…)

  • Egypt’s Opposition Tactics: Mayhem, Canal City Strikes

    The past month has seen the emergence of two very different approaches to street protests in Egypt.

    On the one hand, the use of violence as a means of protest has gained renewed vigor. Port Said erupted into clashes at the end of January after death sentences were issued to 21 people for their role in the deadly football riots the year before. And a new, violent and mysterious protest group called the Black Bloc has emerged in the last few weeks whose predilection for street fighting and aggressive tactics has become well known.

    On the other hand, however, resistance to President Mohamed Morsi’s government is evolving in other ways. Recently in Port Said, although violence has continued, there has also been a marked shift toward organized strikes and civil disobedience. (more…)

  • In Cairo, a Free Market Experiment Underway

    Near the middle of Tahrir Square a sign nestled among the tents proclaims to pedestrians that they stand in “The Free Republic of Tahrir.” While protesters seek political reform, Tahrir’s entrepreneurs have continued to evolve with Egypt’s political situation and continue to meet the needs of new customers.

    As the struggle between Egypt’s die hard protesters and Egypt’s new, Muslim Brotherhood dominated government has become bitter, vendors have continued to operate on the square through various protests, clashes and occupations since January 25, 2011. Tahrir Square has both become a center for protests and a bold free-market experiment in a country where many industries are still dominated by military interests or socialist institutions or socialist institutions created after Egypt’s 1952 revolution. (more…)

  • Central Africa, Barometer of Multipolarity

    There are a number of phenomena which currently define African politics and must be understood before commenting on the geopolitical evolution of today’s central Africa.

    One is that of “extraversion.” Jean-François Bayart, a French professor in African politics, coined the phrase to describe the endemic and domestic subversion of the state apparatus in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Inherited from the Europeans, the African state system is not adapted to the reality on the ground. Moreover, it exists within artificial borders. Therefore local elites quickly pervert the functions of the state with clientelistic behaviors and policies so as to protect first and foremost the interests of their respective clan, tribe, ethnic or religious group. Government agencies fall under the aegis of a specific group with the chief purpose of redistributing tax revenues among the most important political stakeholders in a certain territory. Liberal democratic values such as term of office, rule of law and public service rest in the minds of a few liberal and educated elites who rarely happen to lead a specific political faction. The direct consequence is an invariable degradation of democracy as well as a race for power. Ubiquitous corruption and civil strife follow. (more…)

  • Hollande Doctrine? France Leads from Behind in Mali

    Paris’ gunships struck Islamist targets in the northern Malian town of Kona on Friday in support of a combined ground intervention by African troops from the Economic Community of West African States. French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian reported that during the operation, the French military suffered one casualty.

    On the works for months, the intervention mandated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2085 is meant to put an end to the swift takeover of northern Mali that Tuareg and Islamist groups undertook, in the process causing the political collapse of the central government through a military coup.

    Instability in the Sahel has heightened since last year’s collapse of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime in Libya during a popular uprising that was supported by NATO air and naval forces. The “Arab Spring” in Libya caused a considerable power vacuum which brought political disunity along that country’s Mediterranean coast, loss of control over southern Libya and significant advanced weaponry in the hands of smugglers who have been able to export it to such conflict areas as Gaza and Syria. (more…)

  • Clashes Between Morsi’s Opponents, Supporters Kill Five

    It was a depressing grim day in Egypt on Wednesday. The country was back to witnessing bloody clashes on a scale not seen since last year’s uprisings that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

    State television and other media outlets report the death of five protesters and hundreds wounded after battles with Muslim Brotherhood militiamen in the streets of the capital.

    Supporters of Mubarak’s successor Mohamed Morsi’s, who had staged a demonstration outside the presidential palace in Cairo, clashed with protesters who accuse the Islamist leader of a power grab. Morsi shielded himself from judicial prosecution in a constitutional decree late last month. (more…)

  • United States Rush to Counter Libyan Terrorist Threat

    Since the fatal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the Obama Administration has lived under a dark cloud. The White House is facing pressure from opposition Republican who are clamoring for an explanation on how security could be so poor during the incident and why government officials were so slow to describe the assault an act of terror.

    Republicans have called on President Barack Obama to apologize and acknowledge that he is ultimately responsible. Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has been bolder than many of his colleagues in demanding the resignation of Susan Rice as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. Her earlier comments on what precipitated the attack, King says, were “misinforming.”

    In the aftermath of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Rice insisted that the unrest was sparked by agitations over an anti-Islam film. It has since become evident that no protests were actually staged in the city and that the assault on the American presence there was premeditated. (more…)