Rebels claim they are going to "withdraw troops" from humanitarian corridors, just after they -- and government forces -- broke a recently agreed ceasefire.
On the UN side, attack helicopters are ready to go, and the mission may potentially acquire about 3,000 new troops, according to a draft Security Council resolution to be voted on this week. The problem, of course, is that Member States will have to step up to contribute these troops, which will then likely take months to deploy. An fast-deploying European force not seeming to be in the works, the best we can hope for right now is for countries to offer their troops to the UN force as expeditiously as possible.
UPDATE: Refugees International's Erin Weir, writing from on the ground in eastern Congo, is frustrated that "the member states represented on the UN Security Council have persisted in doing absolutely nothing." She agrees that a delayed addition of troops is not going to be enough and that, after so much dithering, "time is not a luxury that the world can afford" in Congo.
On the eve of World Toilet Day (Nov. 19), TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why we shouldn't take our toilets for granted:
Toilets are a privilege that nearly half the world lacks. At least 2.6 billion people around the planet have no access to a toilet -- and that doesn't just mean that they don't have a nice, heated indoor bathroom. It means they have nothing -- not a public toilet, not an outhouse, not even a bucket. They defecate in public, contaminating food and drinking water, and the disease toll due to unsanitized human waste is staggering. ... But despite the horrific fate of the toiletless masses across much of South America, Africa and Asia, sanitation has never been high on the world's development agenda. NGOs and governments focus on making sure the poor have access to enough clean drinking water, but comparatively little funding goes into sanitation, even though the two are sometimes inextricable: Untreated sewage often ends up poisoning the available clean water in developing nations.
In addition to a Japanese cargo ship, they have seized possibly their biggest prize since the Ukrainian ship full of tanks -- a Saudi oil tanker transporting over a quarter of the country's daily oil production.
Elizabeth Dickinson points out that the most recent hijackings took place "under the watch" of dozens of international warships dispatched to protect shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. This is true, but patrolling the waters off Somalia is not as exactly the same as standing guard over a bank vault; the ships' "watch" would have to extend for quite a few nautical miles to be able to capture every incident of piracy.
Opinio Juris' Kenneth Anderson suggests that incoming Obama administration use the case of piracy "to demonstrate its approach to use of force, multilateralism, and international law." He envisions a rather muscular -- and cunning -- response.
I had a conversation with a US Navy officer, not a lawyer, but someone with operational duties, who suggested that the best military course of action would be to equip some number of civilian vessels as decoys - heavily armed and carrying marines. The best thing, he said, would be for Somali pirates to attack, and then be aggressively counterattacked, in a battle, not the serving of an arrest warrant - sink their vessel and kill as many pirates as possible. It would send a message to pirates that they could not know which apparently civilian vessels might instead instead counterattack.To "kill as many pirates as possible" seems a little wanton, but I do agree with Anderson that the outbreak of piracy presents an opportunity for the United States to recommit to international accords like the law of the sea, and possibly even the ICC. Clearly, it will take some sort of aggressive response -- coupled with peaceful efforts on Somalia's mainland, of course -- to deter pirates from further increasing their lucrative banditry. Across the continent, Nigerian militants are already starting to emulate the Somali swashbucklers. UPDATE: The pirates attacking the tanker were indeed quite a few nautical miles off the coast. And if it had held a certain type of natural gas, it could have had the potential of causing "50 Hiroshimas." Gulp.
The scoop, straight from PerezHilton:
Blonde beauty Charlize Theron was just named a United Nations messenger of peace this past Friday. Theron's special focus will be on ending violence against women. The messengers of peace consist of mainly 10 celebrities from films, music, sports and literature, who are responsible for promoting United Nations activities and goals through the media. And it seems Theron cares about many causes, such as her involvement and effort to place mobile health clinics all over rural areas of South Africa, where access to health care is limited. As for Theron's latest role as messenger of peace, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of the actress, "You have used your voice, compassion and special relationship with the public to create a better world."Let's hope that references to Theron can now start with descriptor "UN Messenger of Peace" rather than "blonde beauty." (image from flickr user som sol'n forlat under a Creative Commons license)
In this week's edition of UN Plaza (taped before I left for Ethiopia) I interview the filmaker Karim Chrobog about his new film War Child, which chronicles the incredible life of Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier turned global hip-hop star.
I'll be posting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia this week where I will be covering a meeting of the Africa Commission. What is the Africa Commission, you ask?
In April this year, the Danish government created the Africa Commission as a way to promote economic growth, youth employment and economic development in Africa. The Commissioners include a number of heads of state, UN officials, development experts and other leaders in the field. The meeting is on Thursday and is concurrent with a meeting of African youth leaders, also sponsored by the Danes.
The Danish government was kind enough to give me a travel grant to cover the conference. As they say in Dansk, "Tak!"
Even before I leave, a few words of praise for the Danes. Printed front and center of the e-ticket sent to me by the Danish government is a tabulation of the amount of emitted CO2 for which I'm responsible by way of flying from Washington to Addis. For those keeping score, my footprint equals 2,446 Kg of CO2, round-trip. (Of course, I could have found this out myself by clicking over to the International Civil Aviation Organization's nifty Carbon Emissions Flight Calculator. But I digress.) It was heartening to see my carbon footprint so prominently displayed on a government-issued plane ticket.
Next stop: Addis!
The blogosphere is abuzz with speculations on who will attain which cabinet posts. Rather than engage in any uniformed speculation myself, let me point readers to Spencer Ackerman's excellent profile of Susan Rice. Rice was a member of President Clinton's National Security Council and served in the State Department. She's known in foreign policy circles as a forward thinking pragmatist. She was a close adviser to President-elect Obama during the campaign and will likely assume an important foreign policy making role in the new administration.
Former Sen. Tim Wirth, the Clinton administration's undersecretary of state for global affairs from 1993 to 1997, said Rice saw connectivity in the world's problems, instead of viewing them through the traditional prism of individual state power. "She was one of the few people to live in the foreign-policy world who understood global issues, transnational issues like human rights, climate change and terrorism," said Wirth, who worked with Rice when she was at the NSC and who now heads the United Nations Foundation. "The foreign-policy community is largely about political relationships. That's what drives the [typical] foreign-policy world. But the new one is transnational problems, problems that don't have passports."Read the whole thing!
The World Food Program feeds over 80 million people in 80 countries worldwide. You can help.
Greater trouble nears in Somalia...
Islamist militias in Somalia on Thursday continued their steady and surprisingly uncontested march toward the capital, Mogadishu, capturing a small town on the outskirts of the city.I would describe this as a pincer movement -- Islamist militants from the interior, pirates from the coast -- but Somalia is naturally far more complicated than that. The connection between the Islamists and the pirates is only loose at best, as are even the ties binding the various rebel groups. Furthermore, as the difficulties faced by Somalia's unstable, Ethiopian-backed "transitional" government suggest, controlling Mogadishu is anything but tantamount to running the country. And while some residents in the paths of the Shabab militants have fled, others are evidently pleased at their arrival. And what are those pirates up to these days? Still plundering, unfortunately -- but probably a bit more warily, now that the British Royal Navy has made its famed presence felt. UPDATE: Michael Kleinman says: "One of the main issues is that the Islamists - and in particular the Shabab - now control much of the coast, putting them in a position to disrupt WFP, ICRC and NGO food shipments through the port at Marka."