Arcadia Foundation

Opposition parties in Ivory Coast staged protests today as the west African country awaited the annoucement of a new government after President Laurent Gbagbo scrapped the previous one. The protests are growing in volatility as a nation awaits a government in flux.

The head of the former rebel New Forces (FN), Guillaume Soro, whom Gbagbo reappointed as prime minister, arrived in the political capital Yamoussoukro for talks with the head of state.

Since Gbagbo caused an outcry Friday by dissolving the government and sacking the head of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), the main question has been whether the opposition will take part in Soro’s new team.

Soro has been consulting with both Gbagbo and the main opposition coalition, the Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), which has demanded the reinstatement of the vote commission if it is to take part in government.

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The following article  by Daniel Erikson, excerpted below from the Inter-American Dialogue is uniquely intriguing. It whittles down an analysis of estranged trading partners Haiti and China to accurately depict how that dysfunctional relationship correlated directly to China’s response following the Haitian earthquake.

After a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, the aftershock reached China in ways that few observers could have anticipated. After all, the link between the world’s most powerful rising economy and one of its most troubled states is tenuous. China and Haiti are worlds apart in almost every conceivable sense: profoundly separated by geography, levels of development, language and culture. Moreover, Beijing and Port-au-Prince are diplomatically estranged, as Haiti remains one of 23 countries that still maintain official relations with Taiwan. Still, the powerful seismic event that has claimed the lives of as many as 150,000 Haitians so far also posed an unexpected challenge for the Chinese leadership, which found itself viscerally drawn into the crisis and its aftermath in ways that tested its newfound diplomatic mettle, and provoked conflicting conceptions about its expanding role on the international stage. Faced with a skeptical audience abroad and a supportive one at home, the Haitian earthquake forced Chinese leaders to navigate the tricky politics of disaster relief.

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President Robert Mugabe today stated that he and his partners in Zimbabwe’s unity government agreed that “sanctions must go“, a day after the European Union extended its restrictions on the country.

“We are in agreement,” Mugabe told reporters after a tourism conference in Harare. “We are all agreed that the sanctions must go.”

Mugabe has long claimed the heavy sanctions imposed from the United States and the EU to be forms of ‘economic terrorism’. Today, his jargon at an all-time low, he strategically sought to include his erstwhile rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and the unity government formed nearly a year ago.

But EU leaders on Tuesday cited a lack of progress in implementing the power-sharing agreement. Their referencing the lack of political re-construction is not unwarranted. It has been very apparent that the ruthless authoritarian will not leave the executive office quietly, nor will he share power. Instead, he will prove to the international community that a shared government is a dysfunctional government.

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During a recent WDR 2011 consultations event, the World Bank interviewed leaders from conflict-affected countries about overcoming conflict, building institutions, confidence building, and the role of the international community.

Watch and listen to what Arcadia Foundation President Betty Bigombe, Chief Peace-Negotiator in Uganda, Biong Deng, Minister of Presidential Affairs in South Sudan, Pierre Buyoya, Former President of Burundi, and Tornolah Varpilah, Minister of Health in Liberia, have to say.

Betty Bigombe, Chief Mediator in Northern Uganda Peace Process from WDR Video on Vimeo.

Transparency and proper governance are unequivocally the recipe for domestic growth in developing nations. Today, Liberia is a step closer to being proof positive of this. Liberia is on track to clear much of its remaining $1.7 billion in foreign debt under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative by the end of this year, an IMF official stated today.

“We are very confident that by the end of the year, Liberia will reach the HIPC completion point, ” said IMF First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky, adding that it could be “much sooner.”

Its truly a monumental moment for Liberia, Africa’s oldest independent republic, still recovering from a 1989-2003 civil war. However, this is all still pending remaining economic and structural reforms.

Lipsky said the government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf had since made strong advances in financial management in the mining and energy sectors that had put it on track for HIPC completion.

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This well documented article from the Economist requires little additional commentary. Suffice to say that Cuba is not the only rouge state, or foreign group, trying to meddle in what with little doubt will be the violent unravelling of a very corrupt and ruinous “revolution”. – RCB

In a small fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela stands a plinth. Unveiled by government officials in 2006, it pays homage to the Cuban guerrillas sent by Fidel Castro in the 1960s to help subvert Venezuela’s then recently restored democracy.

Almost entirely bereft of popular support, the guerrilla campaign flopped. But four decades later, and after a decade of rule by Hugo Chávez, Cuba’s communist regime seems finally to have achieved its goal of invading oil-rich Venezuela—this time without firing a shot.

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Negotiations stall as Mugabe stiffens position and Tsvangirai calls for new elections.

The following is brought to us from Globalpost, written by a Zimbabwean Correspondent who cannot be identified because of Zimbabwe’s press restrictions:

HARARE, Zimbabwe — The prospects of survival for Zimbabwe’s power-sharing government are gloomy as an impasse has been reached in negotiations between President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s rival Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

South African mediators left Harare this week saying no progress had been made in resolving differences between the two parties over how the unwieldly power-sharing government should function.
Tsvangirai declared that the talks were deadlocked and called for new elections to break the impasse.
The negotiations broke down after Mugabe’s Zanu-PF stiffened its position at a meeting of its Soviet-era politburo in January.

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United Against Nuclear Iran, (UANI), an organization of which the Arcadia Foundation is a proud coalition member, yesterday renewed its call for Caterpillar to end its business in Iran. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the U.S. Department of Treasury recently announced that it was taking action to implement existing sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). OFAC designated specifically Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, an engineering arm of the IRGC that is involved in numerous construction projects in Iran.

United Against Nuclear Iran last week called on Caterpillar to cease doing business in Iran. Given the nature of Caterpillar’s construction and engineering work, it is impossible for Caterpillar to have a presence in Iran without doing business with the IRGC. Caterpillar’s subsidiary, Lovat, is a tunnel-boring company that has completed projects in Iran. Many international bodies claim Iran has indeed used tunnels to hide its nuclear facilities. Caterpillar’s equipment is also used in extensively in Iran’s hydrocarbon industry which is controlled by the IRGC.

“As the IRGC consolidates control over broad swaths of the Iranian economy, displacing ordinary Iranian businessmen in favor of a select group of insiders, it is hiding behind companies like Khatam al-Anbiya and its affiliates to maintain vital ties to the outside world,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey. Read Full Paper

China’s leading dissident, Liu Xiaobo, yesterday lost his appeal against his conviction and 11-year sentence for inciting subversion.

Outside the court, US and European diplomats called for the immediate release of the 54-year-old Liu, a writer and one-time professor who was first detained in December 2008 after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China.

US ambassador Jon Huntsman said in a statement after the ruling that Washington was “disappointed” and lamented what he called the “persecution” of citizens expressing their political views.

Liu had been jailed before over the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests.

Last month, four retired Communist Party officials signed an open letter to the government calling for a review of Liu’s case. They suggested his conviction violated some of the principles for which they had fought.

“His harsh sentence is a stark reminder to the Chinese people and the world that there is still no freedom of expression or independent judiciary in China,” says Roseann Rife, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Amnesty International.

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Mali may be the boondocks of backwaters, but foreigners interested in oil, drugs, land, terrorists and souls are clamoring for a piece of it.

Krista Kapralos has published an intriguing article at globalpost on Mali, in many ways stuck in a pre-modern era. This sweltering, desperately poor country appears to be one of the world’s most forgotten places. It’s a landlocked African wild west hemmed in by Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania; a place so slow that a sandy lane passes as a national highway and the boys herding goats beside it wave ecstatically whenever a car passes.

A good part of Mali’s problems come from the lack of investment in the country during French colonial times and corrupt governments after independence. In an era of increasing globalization, Mali, along with most African countries, has clearly been left behind.

However it is in this remote setting that the long arm of globalization has begun to dig its fingers in the sand.

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