Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

• home
• diary
• writings
• sounds
• snippets
• reading table
• on photography
• public speaking
• photos

A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

Buy from Amazon

Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

In the months before his death in 1993 at the age of 88 (or, as widely rumored, as old as 100) and after 33 years in power, the president of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, fondly repeated a formula he had once announced publicly to the nation.

“A king of the Baoulé has no right to know the identity of his successor,” he is reported to have said.

Mr. Houphouët-Boigny may have belonged to royal lineage, but critics said he seemed to be forgetting that the Baoulé were only one of Ivory Coast’s 50 or so ethnic groups, and that he was the president of a would-be modern country. Few were fooled about the old leader’s real intention to rule as president for life, come what may in his aftermath. And the aftermath in Ivory Coast has indeed been grim.

West Africa’s most prosperous country has been ripped apart by a civil war whose roots trace directly back to the contested circumstances of his succession, and the old regime has been replaced by a predatory authoritarianism under new leaders determined to hang on at all costs.

If discouraging African plotlines like these were limited to Ivory Coast, few would dwell on these circumstances nearly two decades later.

Unfortunately, the muddled and forestalled succession story of Ivory Coast has become a prevalent narrative across much of the continent, symptomatic of what political analysts increasingly regard as a kind of African disease.

With increasing frequency, leaders are scheming to modify the rules governing the transfer of power with the aim of hanging on as long as possible, and in an increasingly common twist, Africa’s presidents are positioning their children to assume the reins of power after their demise.

The latest African country to be visited by this leadership crisis is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation by a big margin, and one of the world’s 10 largest oil exporters. Nigeria walked a tightrope for the last six months as its elected president, Umaru Yar’Adua, who finally died last week, disappeared from public view, while being treated for a number of serious ailments. During most of that time, he was hospitalized in Saudi Arabia and silent, save for a few words weakly uttered into the microphones of the BBC, in a bid to quell rumors that he had died or was comatose.

Ostensibly aimed at reassuring the public, Mr. Yar’Adua’s whispered mini-interview did nothing of the sort. By that point, Nigerians and foreign diplomats alike were worried about the maneuverings not of the president but of his handlers, who seemed mostly determined to prevent the constitutional transfer of power to the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, who persevered for several months as an acting head of state, but one with sharply limited powers, and a cabinet, bureaucracy and possibly even security forces reluctant to accept his leadership.

These were vulnerable times for Nigeria. What was most dangerous about this stretch was not the mere fact of a power vacuum, though. As with Ivory Coast, forestalled and unresolved successions often invite ethnic polarization and heightened competition along other identity lines, from geographic to religious to linguistic.

The Nigerian presidency has recently rotated between northerners (who are predominantly Muslim) and southerners (who are often Christian). In this instance, in Nigeria, that meant northern elites grumbling about the loss of their “turn” at the presidency with the disappearance before the end of his term of Mr. Yar’Adua, a northerner, and his replacement by Mr. Jonathan, a southerner.

Nigerians have, of course, been down this road before. Their civil conflict, the Biafran War, fought between 1967 and 1970, is one of the worst episodes of violent identity politics in post-independence Africa.

“The pathology here is the failure of elites to transfer their loyalty from their precolonial identities to the postcolonial state,” said Makau W. Mutua, the dean of the University at Buffalo Law School. “Instead of a tool for governance, the office of the president becomes a tool for domination, in which the resources of the nation are husbanded for the benefit of a family, a clan or an ethnic group.”

Although war is the most spectacularly costly consequence of fudged presidential transitions in Africa, it is far from alone in stunting the continent’s development. More common than civil war, and yet quietly devastating, due to its atrophy of the state, sycophancy and corruption, is the effective presidency-for-life.

Although few have openly proclaimed it since the days of Idi Amin in Uganda, it has become the virtual quest of so many African heads of state that it ranks today as a near standard.

Between 2005 and 2009, the presidents of three African countries, Togo, Guinea and Gabon, died in office, after a cumulative 104 years in power; two of these leaders, Omar Bongo of Gabon (42 years) and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (38 years), were succeeded by their sons. Political analysts say that similar scenarios could unfold in countries as diverse as Egypt, Libya, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso, where long-ruling African leaders appear to be grooming their children to follow them.

“What we’re seeing is what happens in places where the only way to get rich or to stay rich is through political power,” said Patrick Keenan, a scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. “This is not about resource wealth alone, but wealth in general. The people in these regimes hang on for dear life.”

Click to read more

Posted at 12:00 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Columbia Journalism Review

Review — May / June 2010

By Howard W. French

My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times | By Gerald M. Boyd | Lawrence Hill Books | 402 pages, $26.95

The entire arc of Gerald Boyd’s remarkable life is contained in the first few pages of his posthumous memoir, My Times in Black and White. In the opening paragraphs, he sketches out his duties as second-in-command in the newsroom—a job that had once seemed unimaginable for “a little black boy from the streets of poor St. Louis.” We are still in the prologue when Boyd is summoned to the fourteenth-floor suite of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, one afternoon in June 2003.

By this point, only one dream remained for the fifty-two-year-old Boyd: to ascend to the post of executive editor. This would be the final, defining triumph in the classic life of an American striver. Instead, he was abruptly dismissed as managing editor, and cut loose by the institution that had defined his life, The New York Times.

The Jayson Blair scandal had exploded earlier that spring, and Sulzberger was desperate to shield the Times from further damage. Unfortunately, two separate feeding frenzies had already been set in motion. One involved the schadenfreude of industry competitors, who were delighted to see America’s greatest newspaper being brought low by a reporter who plagiarized and made things up. The other fueled a head-hunting expedition within the company itself, whose goal was to bring down a hard-driving (and now widely hated) executive editor—and along with him, his deputy, a black man who had dared to dream about reaching the very top.

As recounted by Boyd, the scene in Sulzberger’s office is brief, yet it packs an electric tension. In sum, the publisher did little explaining. Boyd, like his boss, Howell Raines, had to go. At the time, the dismissed man was unable to muster even a single question.

In retrospect, Boyd (who died prematurely of cancer in 2006) imputes his downfall to a crude act of racial association. Both he and Blair, the troubled young reporter at the heart of the plagiarism scandal, were black: if Blair were guilty, then Boyd must have been guilty of something, too.

Many people will be drawn to this book for its implicit promise of behind-the-scenes gossip about the Times. Their curiosity is understandable—although the paper is an institution committed to openness, transparency, and accountability in public life, its own internal workings can be often as difficult to parse as, say, procurement at the Pentagon.

Many others, of course, will consider this story old news—to the relief, one suspects, of various higher-ups at the paper. Boyd himself gained clarity on many things during his final, ruminative years. But perspective about the lasting importance of the Jayson Blair affair was not one of them. He seemed to imagine that historians would long remember the scandal that brought him down.

They will not. The industry has undergone such radical transformations since then, between the rise of the Internet and the gradual, agonizing death of the old newspaper business model, that the details of this episode already feel like ancient history.

This observation takes little away from Boyd’s book, which strongly deserves to be read. My Times in Black and White manages the rare feat of pulling off at least three distinctive narratives without any of them feeling forced or contrived.

The first of these is an affecting up-from-poverty story of the sort that used to be common in American letters. Boyd traces his family from places like Itta Bena, Mississippi, where they were Delta cotton farmers, to inner-city St. Louis, where the author wore painstakingly patched clothing and played with toys from the Salvation Army.

Boyd’s trajectory was lifted by Upward Bound, a forgotten element of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. While he was still a teenager, Boyd was placed in an integrated summer program on a college campus, where he became the layout editor of the program’s newspaper.

“I had always liked writing, but I had never experienced the high that came from having my words in a newspaper,” he recalls. “I could be angry or didactic or whimsical and light-hearted. And I could hide behind my byline, engaging and enraging readers as I saw fit. . . . I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

Click to read more

Posted at 11:20 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The National

A new biography of Barack Obama, The Bridge, takes its cue from his youthful struggle with identity but, Howard W French writes, race is far from the whole story.

Just who is Barack Obama?

Fifteen months into his presidency, we may have acquired an intuitive sense of the answer to this question, and yet Obama remains elusive, like a fidgety subject posing for a daguerreotype. He nods and bobs forward and back, in and out of focus, never altogether fixed.

By now we have all been sufficiently exposed to the Obama act to suspect real method. The recent passage of major healthcare reform presents one case in point: early in his term, Obama placed healthcare at the centre of his domestic agenda, and yet he long seemed content to avoid defining his own parameters for the reform, or even, for that matter, establishing a bottom line.

Along the way, compromise with irredentist Republicans was treated as an almost sacred virtue – maddeningly so for Obama supporters, who began to suspect that he was weak, or worse, fired by insipid conciliatory instincts. Until, at the 11th hour, the president revealed a hitherto unseen mailed fist, and the bill was pushed through Congress without a single supporting vote from an opposition that had been marginalised by its very refusal to negotiate.

The key to this unusual style, if one is to be found, would seem to exist in Obama’s own life story, uncommonly rich in crossed genes and mixed signals. This story has now received its third major retelling, in the form of a massive new biography by the New Yorker editor David Remnick. The first version, of course, was Obama’s own extraordinary memoir, Dreams from my Father; the second was a more collective affair, composed of thousands of articles about candidate Obama that obsessively excavated his mixed racial background.

It is a story that begins with the shadowy figure of Obama’s father, a familiar-seeming character of the African independence era. Barack Obama Sr came to the United States in 1959 in pursuit of a first-rate education, and his clear hope was to use this gift as a springboard to leadership of his own newly born nation. There is breathtaking ambition here, to be sure, though the arrogance is leavened in part by something like altruism: the desire to modernise his country and to help realise the potential of Africa.

But as a member of Kenya’s emerging elite – or, more pointedly, as one of what the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah called the “been-to generation” who spent quality time in the West – he experienced a kind of schizophrenia as he struggled to reconcile new and old world views.

The senior Obama would leave an unfulfilled legacy in both places: his American record is that of a selfish husband and abandoning father, and when the prodigal son returns to Kenya, he discovers that far from preparing him to become a transformative national hero, his exposure to the broader world has somehow ruined him for his own country, where he’ll never quite fit in. He had earned fancy degrees and lost the African art of palaver; no longer could he bring himself to listen or persuade, preferring to bluntly speak his mind instead.

The tragic beauty in this story is that the Obama we know, the abandoned son, seems to have studied his father’s example intently. There is a similar ambition, and even arrogance, and yet the son manages a reverse trajectory, realising his extravagant goals through mastery of his tongue, through sublimation and restraint.

From his mother Barack Obama would seem to have inherited many of the traits that made this possible: a serene faith in things working out, equipoise and bedrock idealism. Her roots may be less exotic to most Americans than his father’s, but hers is a story with its own deep and abiding mystery: of corn-fed Kansans (her parents) who married young and in secret and quickly grew restless, moving all about the country as they reared their only child. Having dreamed of a boy, they named her Stanley Ann.

As Ann was graduating from high school, in Seattle, the family made a final move – to Hawaii, then a still truly remote American outpost in the Pacific. The family wanderlust impacted her lastingly. Amid the generalised conformity of the Eisenhower era, while her high school peers amused themselves with sock hops and Elvis records, she developed a taste for jazz, for progressive politics, and for challenging books on sociology and cultural anthropology.

As her intellectual curiosity blossomed, its focus turned increasingly overseas, toward the developing world, in particular, which in the occurrence meant toward darker skinned peoples, to whom she would seem to have had precious little exposure as a girl.

In spite of this, with time it is she, not Barack Sr, who will prove easily the more adaptive of the two parents, the most comfortable in her skin, the best at assimilation. Years later, while doing field research, she would appear more at home in the villages of rural Indonesia than urban Indonesians; it was she who tutored her young son on the moral power of Martin Luther King’s oratory and the brilliance of the black gospel giant Mahalia Jackson.

At the University of Hawaii, Ann met and was promptly swept off her feet by the significantly older, self-prepossessed intellectual newly arrived from Kenya. One strains to imagine their story unfolding in Moline or Omaha, or to be fair, in anything but the most cosmopolitan of American cities of the day. And even then it would have been an unusual coupling. But the backdrop turns out to have been special.

“Since the 1920s,” as Remnick writes, Hawaii had been celebrated “as a kind of racial Eden”, where no group, including whites, was numerous enough to become an oppressive majority.

Shoulder rubbing, and more, between natives, whites, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and even a tiny dash of African-Americans, usually brought to the mid-Pacific by the United States Armed Forces, was typically relaxed. So much so that when Paul Robeson visited Hawaii in 1948 on a concert tour, Remnick quotes him telling reporters: “It would be a tremendous impact on the United States if Hawaii is admitted as a state. Americans wouldn’t believe the racial harmony that exists here. It could speed democracy in the United States.”

I know more than a little of this world myself, having brought my own heterogeneous family here – a West African wife and me, her pale-skinned African-American husband – between assignments on her continent and in East Asia, and watching my nappy-headed sons settle in with few of the strained racial vibes I had known growing up or working on the mainland.

Click to read more

Posted at 9:47 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Atlantic

DO CHINA’S GRAND DESIGNS PROMISE THE TRANSFORMATION,AT LAST, OF A STAR-CROSSED CONTINENT? OR MERELY ITS EXPLOITATION? THE AUTHOR TRAVELS DEEP INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA, SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS.

By Howard W. French
PHOTOGRAPHY BY THE AUTHOR

A PORTER HELPED ME with my bags as I made my way, sweating, into the train station in Dar es Salaam. In addition to my normal complement of luggage, I had brought a carton full of provisions, including several gallons of water, for a trip of uncertain duration. With the carton perched on his head, the porter led me through the vast, densely packed concourse and into the waiting salon.

There, a clock sat high on the wall, its hands frozen since who knows when. Around the perimeter of the room, above the upholstered benches, the faded yellow walls bore what looked like a generation’s worth of oily stains, laid down in layers in the shape of heads and shoulders by people leaning back, like me, bludgeoned by the thick afternoon heat and waiting for the call to board.

I was about to embark on one of the world’s great train rides, a journey from this muggy Indian Ocean port city, the commercial capital of Tanzania, to the edge of the Zambian Copper Belt, deep in the heart of southern Africa. The official who’d sold me my ticket had seemed puzzled when I asked when the train would arrive at its final destination, and he refused to guess; in recent years, the 1,156-mile trip has been known to take anywhere from its originally scheduled two days to an entire week.

Click to see web slideshow

The railroad—known as the Tazara line—was built by China in the early 1970s, at a cost of nearly $500 million, an extraordinary expenditure in the thick of the Cultural Revolution, and a symbol of Beijing’s determination to hold its own with Washington and Moscow in an era when Cold War competition over Africa raged fierce. At the time of its construction, it was the third-largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in Africa, after the Aswan Dam in Egypt and the Volta Dam in Ghana.

Today the Tazara is a talisman of faded hopes and failed economic schemes, an old and unreliable railway with too few working locomotives. Only briefly a thriving commercial artery, it has been diminished by its own decay and by the roads and air routes that have sprung up around it. Maintenance costs have saddled Tanzania and Zambia with debts reportedly as high as $700 million in total, and the line now has only about 300 of the 2,000 wagons it needs to function normally, according to Zambian news reports.

Yet the railway traces a path through a region where hopes have risen again, rekindled by a new sort of development also driven by China—and on an unprecedented scale. All across the continent, Chinese companies are signing deals that dwarf the old railroad project. The most heavily reported involve oil production; since the turn of the millennium, Chinese companies have muscled in on lucrative oil markets in places like Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, and Sudan. But oil is neither the largest nor the fastest-growing part of the story. Chinese firms are striking giant mining deals in places like Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and building what is being touted as the world’s largest iron mine in Gabon. They are prospecting for land on which to build huge agribusinesses. And to get these minerals and crops to market, they are building major new ports and thousands of miles of highway.

In most of Africa’s capital cities and commercial centers, it’s hard to miss China’s new presence and influence. In Dar, one morning before my train trip, I made my way to the roof of my hotel for a bird’s-eye view of the city below. A British construction foreman, there to oversee the hotel’s expansion, pointed out the V-shaped port that the British navy had seized after a brief battle with the Germans early in the First World War. From there, the British-built portion of the city extended primly inland, along a handful of long avenues. For the most part, downtown Dar was built long ago, and its low-slung concrete buildings, long exposed to the moisture of the tropics, have taken on a musty shade of gray.

“Do you see all the tall buildings coming up over there?” the foreman asked, a hint of envy in his voice as his arm described an arc along the waterfront that shimmered in the distance. “That’s the new Dar es Salaam, and most of it is Chinese-built.”

I counted nearly a dozen large cranes looming over construction sites along the beachfront Msasani Peninsula, a sprawl of resorts and restaurants catering mostly to Western tourists. Near them, sheltered coyly behind high walls, lie upscale brothels worked by Chinese prostitutes. In the foreground, to the northwest, sits Kariakoo, a crowded slum where Chinese merchants flog refrigerators, air conditioners, mobile phones, and other cheap gadgets from narrow storefronts. To the south lies Tanzania’s new, state-of-the-art, 60,000-seat national sports stadium, funded by China and opened in February 2009 by President Hu Jintao.

“Statistics are hard to come by, but China is probably the biggest single investor in Africa,” said Martyn Davies, the director of the China Africa Network at the University of Pretoria. “They are the biggest builders of infrastructure. They are the biggest lenders to Africa, and China-Africa trade has just pushed past $100 billion annually.”

Davies calls the Chinese boom “a phenomenal success story for Africa,” and sees it continuing indefinitely. “Africa is the source of at least one-third of the world’s commodities”—commodities China will need, as its manufacturing economy continues to grow—“and once you’ve understood that, you understand China’s determination to build roads, ports, and railroads all over Africa.”

Davies is not alone in his enthusiasm. “No country has made as big an impact on the political, economic and social fabric of Africa as China has since the turn of the millennium,” writes Dambisa Moyo, a London-based economist, in her influential book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo, a 40-year-old Zambian who has worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and as a consultant for the World Bank, believes that foreign aid is a curse that has crippled and corrupted Africa—and that China offers a way out of the mess the West has made.

“Between 1970 and 1998,” she writes, “when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to a staggering 66 percent.” Subsidized lending, she says, encourages African governments to make sloppy, wasteful decisions. It breeds corruption, by allowing politicians to siphon off poorly monitored funds. And it forestalls national development, which she says begins with the building of a taxation system and the attraction of foreign commercial capital. In Moyo’s view, even the West’s “obsession with democracy” has been harmful. In poor countries, she writes, “democratic regimes find it difficult to push through economically beneficial legislation amid rival parties and jockeying interests.” Sustainable democracy, she feels, is possible only after a strong middle class has emerged.

In its recent approach to Africa, China could not be more different from the West. It has focused on trade and commercially justified investment, rather than aid grants and heavily subsidized loans. It has declined to tell African governments how they should run their countries, or to make its investments contingent on government reform. And it has moved quickly and decisively, especially in comparison to many Western aid establishments. Moyo’s attitude toward the boom in Chinese business in Africa is amply revealed by the name of a chapter in her book: “The Chinese Are Our Friends.” Perhaps what Africa needs, she notes, is a reliable commercial partner, not a high-minded scold. And perhaps Africa should take its lessons from a country that has recently pulled itself out of poverty, not countries that have been rich for generations.

“I would say this is a transformational moment for Africa,” Moyo told me from London last spring. “I see the explosive development of infrastructure. I see people producing more food and having more jobs … And besides, I don’t see how otherwise you are going to get a civil society, except by building up a middle class.”

Even taking the recent global downturn into account, this has been a hopeful time for a historically downtrodden continent. Per capita income for sub-Saharan Africa nearly doubled between 1997 and 2008, driven up by a long boom in commodities, by a decrease in the prevalence of war, and by steady improvements in governance. And while the downturn has brought commodity prices low for the time being, there is a growing sense that the world’s poorest continent has become a likely stage for globalization’s next act. To many, China—cash-rich, resource-hungry, and unfickle in its ardor—now seems the most likely agent for this change.

But of course, Africa has had hopeful moments before, notably in the early 1960s, at the start of the independence era, when many governments opted for large, state-owned economic schemes that quickly foundered, and again in the 1970s, another era of booming commodity prices, when rampant corruption, heavy debt, and armed conflict doomed any hopes of economic takeoff.

China’s burgeoning partnership with Africa raises several momentous questions: Is a hands-off approach to governmental affairs the right one? Can Chinese money and ambition succeed where Western engagement has manifestly failed? Or will China become the latest in a series of colonial and neocolonial powers in Africa, destined like the others to leave its own legacy of bitterness and disappointment? I was heading south on the Tazara—through the past and into the future, to the sites of some of China’s most ambitious efforts on the continent—to try to get some early sense of how the whole grand project was proceeding.

Click to read the entire article

Posted at 2:13 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Foreign Policy

Amid the haste and confusion that has followed January’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, outside experts have suggested a wide range of solutions for getting the country back up and running. Battle lines are already forming over how reconstruction should be led, who should lead it, and what the priorities should be. Countless proposals have been floated, even as daily life in the disaster zone churns on.

What most fixes have in common is the assumption that Haiti can’t do the job itself, even given the funds. A recovery project of this magnitude requires a large number of talented and capable leaders. And Haiti, many fear, has too few. Look no further than the Haitian government’s early response to the crisis, in which the president, René Préval, was largely invisible, and the deficit in local capacity becomes painfully clear.

Yet most proposed Haiti recovery plans risk entrenching the very hollowing out that made the earthquake so deadly. Foreign governments, international organizations, and NGOs have tried to rebuild Haiti before. To be sure, some of their plans were ill-conceived, but many have left with a shrug and the discouraged understanding that Haiti won’t change until the country’s institutions do. What is most remarkable about the amnesia this time is the failure from both the international community and Haiti to seize on what might be the country’s single most valuable asset: its large, competent, and highly motivated diaspora. Unlike many failed states, Haiti does, in fact, have much of the expertise and talent it needs to start changing the country’s trajectory for the better. Those people just happen to be living abroad.

How did Haiti’s domestic capacity become so terribly depleted? Dictatorship and misrule have driven away talent for generations, but the international community bears some share of the blame. In times of past crisis, foreigners — armed with their vastly superior financial and technical means — have swooped in to impose their own remedies. They often hold minimal consultation with locals, preferring to hash out details on the op-ed pages of papers (and websites!) in countries thousands of miles away.

For these visitors, Haiti’s chronic political disarray is often seen as an obstacle rather than something that needs rebuilding. Poor institutions, internationals complain, are a holdup in discussions; the treacherous local bureaucracy pre-empts rapid solutions. As a result of this, together with the perceived shortage of local expertise and professional talent, foreign donors have increasingly bypassed the Haitian government altogether, channeling their aid through a huge proliferation of NGOs, both effective and not.

This has had the insidious effect of drawing already scarce talent and funds away from the government. Twenty years ago, when I first covered Haiti, foreign NGOs vied to hire Haitian local talent. Nowadays, Haitians themselves operate thousands of NGOs, seeing them as the only way of gaining support from abroad. “The donors have steadily contributed to the emasculation of the Haitian state,” says Robert Fatton, a University of Virginia professor of government.

Click to read more

Posted at 8:06 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The National

The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
Deborah Brautigam
Oxford University Press
Dh112

For the better part of a decade, China’s profile has risen with extraordinary speed in Africa, with its trade, investment and aid primed to transform the world’s poorest continent on a scale that some say is unrivalled since most African nations declared their independence in the early 1960s. Chinese companies have left few corners of the continent untouched, breaking ground on dams and highways, railways and ports, hospitals and universities, new stadiums and airports.

This is not altruism at work. The Chinese are drawn to Africa for the same reason that powerful foreigners have come since the start of the European slave trade in the early 16th century: resource extraction. Alongside their big infrastructure projects in countries like Nigeria, Angola, Gabon and Congo, Chinese have muscled their way into lucrative markets for oil, iron ore, copper and cobalt, and many other commodities.

China’s successes have produced one of the most unbecoming spectacles in the recent history of international relations: cascading howls of moral outrage in the West over Beijing’s “economic conquest” of Africa. The bill of particulars in this indictment is long, but the common thread is a sense of western superiority about China’s record on issues ranging from democracy and human rights to the environment, transparency and corruption.

The West’s tone of high dudgeon leaves little room for irony – yet if ever there was a situation filled with irony, the West’s new-found scruples toward Africa would seem to fit the bill.

China, for its part, has responded to western indignation mostly with its own clumsy propaganda. But in Africa, at least, the Chinese don’t have to work hard to outshine the West – for reasons that Europeans and Americans now seem eager to forget.

To begin with, the scars inflicted by the West in Africa are legion. Not only do they still loom in living memory, many of them remain open and unhealed. When Guinea’s first leader, Sékou Touré, opted for independence from Paris in 1958, for example, France immediately cut off financial aid, withdrew its technicians from the country and carted away whatever it could to cripple the new African government. This included administrative records, telephones, typewriters, air-conditioners and, it is said, even copper wiring.

For a long time after this humiliation, Guinea mouldered in isolation and autarky and it has never really recovered from this false start as a nation. France may have granted the rest of its African colonies independence two years later, but it held them in a smothering paternalistic embrace that would gradually turn extraordinarily corrupt.

The point here is not to pick on France. The West’s record of awfulness in Africa is generalised. At the same time Paris was kicking the Guineans, Belgium was proclaiming its ambition to indefinitely hold onto Congo, a mineral-rich colony larger than all of Western Europe. In 1960, when the Congolese demanded and won independence, they inherited a country with only three African managers in its entire civil service. The new country began life with no military officers, a mere 30 university graduates and a single lawyer.

As if that were not challenge enough, from the start, Belgium conspired with the United States to undermine and quickly overthrow and assassinate Congo’s first leader, the democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, replacing him Mobutu Sese Seko, a dictator who ran a regime of ruinous corruption for three decades.

One could go on and on in this vein, up to the present day, like the blind eye turned to some of the worst despotism in the world today in Equatorial Guinea, because of a similar thirst for its petroleum. Suffice to say that in most places, the Western record is appalling.

There are, however, more immediate reasons why the Chinese need no fancy public relations. The implicit signal they are sending to the continent is one of the most refreshing messages that Africans have received from any quarter in decades.

For China, Africa does not conjure the gut responses that have become common in the West of a dreary burden or a guilty memory. On the contrary, Chinese interest, from eager investment to booming trade, fairly exclaims “we see you not as some hopeless or repugnant cesspool, but as a huge and largely open frontier of opportunity.”

For China’s cash-rich and nimbly opportunistic corporate sector, in particular, what Africa represents can be summed up quite neatly: the future.

Deborah Brautigam, the author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, understands all of this far better than most who have written on this subject. Her richly detailed book has many technical merits, but its greatest strength may in fact be her understanding of this psychological dynamic.

There is a central African proverb that says: “The hand that gives is the hand that commands.” China has come to pay cash on the barrel, eschewing most of the belittling rituals and hollow generosity of the aid game. Brautigam mounts a stout defence of this kind of growing engagement with Africa; so stout and systematic, in fact, that one can imagine many of its arguments being made by Chinese themselves.

But one would be wrong to hastily dismiss the author for what some will perceive as Chinese sympathies in this matter. The universe of third-party experts who are deeply familiar with both China and Africa is vanishingly small, and Brautigam is easily one of the best qualified members of this select tribe. Her observations about China and the continent come hard-earned. Some of the book’s best material draws on her experiences early in her academic career as a young researcher travelling in places like rural Sierra Leone in the early 1980s.

Her involvement with China coincidentally dates to the same period, when she travelled there as one of the first generation of foreign students after the country opened up to the outside world following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

One of the main achievements of The Dragon’s Gift is shattering the many myths and misperceptions that have fuelled the almost-Victorian western depiction of a weak and defenceless Africa, seduced and ravaged by the Chinese interloper. And in this, the media, which are careless with their facts and quick to accentuate the negative, emerge as an ever-ready foil.

For starters, the Chinese haven’t just arrived in Africa. Beijing has been conscious of the continent as an important source of both political support and natural resources since it began mounting assistance projects there in the 1960s. Though much poorer then, China was already taking a long view of its prospects in Africa, forging relationships that have endured through investments large and small.

China makes no pretence that its aid to Africa is selfless or altruistic, and for Brautigam, this is exactly how things ought to be – especially for a country that still has hundreds of millions of its own poor. According to Brautigam, the roots of China’s African strategy lay in the country’s experience with Japan during the early years of China’s opening and reform era in the 1980s, when Japan allowed a capital-poor China to finance its imports of badly needed modern industrial equipment with oil and other natural resources, rather than cash.

Emulating Japan, China has gone on to broadly apply this pattern in Africa, where in countries like Angola and Congo it has engineered huge and controversial resource for infrastructure deals.

Brautigam handily disproves, however, the commonplace assertion that China concentrates its energies disproportionately on the continent’s mineral storehouses, with findings that show Chinese aid and investment are present nearly everywhere in Africa. What is even more interesting is the way that she illustrates how tightly the two are bound together.

A central motif in the recent Western panic over China’s supposed takeover of Africa is the booming Chinese aid to the continent. By 2006, when China organised a grand summit, hosting leaders from all over the continent, it announced it would commit $20 billion over three years to support Chinese exports and business in Africa. By comparison, the World Bank’s commitments over the same period amounted to $17 billion. Headline writers everywhere rushed to the conclusion that China was outstripping the West as a source of aid.

Exhibiting a care for detail rare to this topic, Brautigam explains that the bulk of China’s development assistance in Africa has not taken the form of foreign aid: most often it is lending from the country’s Export-Import Bank and other official entities, for which Beijing expects a profitable return, even if a slim one.

China’s true aid, which is still relatively modest, is typically given as part of a package not just to obtain minerals, as the stereotype would have it, but to leverage open African economies to Chinese exports, to Chinese industry, and even, increasingly, to Chinese migration.

The shrillest notes of the alarmists – that China is pillaging the continent and undermining good government by showering no-strings packages on resource-rich countries while propping up their pariah regimes – merit much of the scorn the author accords them. It is equally clear there is upside potential to China’s massive push. Africa, for one, is desperately in need of infrastructure, and China is suddenly building more of it than anyone else. What is more, China is helping to integrate the continent into the global economy with a vigour that surpasses anything that Western-driven aid or extractive enclave industries like oil have managed to do before.

There remain, nonetheless, many reasons for concern. Resource-based investments that go straight through the president’s office in undemocratic countries rarely turn out well, and China has had nothing to say about democracy, and too little about transparency and accountability.

Where Brautigam sees a strong potential upside in a kind of trickle down industrialisation, through which China casts off undesired factories to Africa, because they are too polluting or not hi-tech enough, others warn of the makings of new environmental disasters and industrial dead-ends.

Where some may applaud the access to new capital from China, others worry reasonably that Beijing’s export financing amounts to a seductive new mercantilism that will dump cheap manufactures into African markets, dooming indigenous industry.

To its great credit, The Dragon’s Gift takes a well-informed look at much of this scepticism before the author delivers, time and again, her reassuring best guess that the Chinese impact will be, as the book’s name implies, a net positive.

Brautigam is at her best by far, though, with Chinese sources, Chinese explanations, and in the end, Chinese rationales, and it strikes this reader as odd that someone so acutely aware of the skewed presentations of the Western press could have come up substantially short on considered African voices and analysis.

The world is already long accustomed to the West knowing what’s best for Africa. Here, we are told why China’s approach is good for the continent. One still awaits, indeed yearns for a critical missing piece of this picture: how Africans see themselves fitting into our shifting global puzzle.

Howard W French, who covered both Africa and China for the New York Times, is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:30 PM · Comments (0)

Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. Penguin, 2009.

Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

By Howard French

During his first trip to China recently, Barack Obama was excoriated by pundits for his meekness on a host of issues, from Tibet to exchange rates to human rights. Newspaper commentary in the United States went on endlessly about the curtailment of American influence in an age where a fast-rising China has become this country’s main creditor. The event that supposedly crystallized all of this was the American-style town hall meeting the president had planned, but which the Chinese government appeared to control. In the end, Obama was limited to a stilted forum with an audience of carefully screened and coached students, and a previously negotiated national television audience was denied him.Jacques cover

It’s an open secret that many in the publishing industry see book subtitles as vehicles for shameless hype, pushing their claims to the limit in order to juice reader interest. During the week of Obama’s East Asian sojourn, though, the subtitle of Martin Jacques’ new offering, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order, may have suddenly seemed like it wasn’t such a stretch. At the very least, the appearance of a book like this from a major publisher like Penguin Press is a telling measure of a profound and ongoing shift in perceptions about the staying power of American — and, more broadly, Western — might and vigor, in the face of the challenge of a fast-rising China.

On this subject, a recent Pew survey highlighted the gap between perception and reality, showing that 44% of the American public already believes that China is the world’s leading economic power. Just 27% named the United States.

This, then, surely is a great time for a book to take a hard look at the relative decline of American power along with the stirring rise of China, followed by a host of other emerging global actors, and come to some informed and well-reasoned conclusions. Most see this story as fundamentally based in economic history, but on this subject, and indeed on economics in general, Jacques has little of interest to say. China will probably continue to grow quickly for another 20 years (186), the author asserts, placing much stock in the hazy art of economic projection, whether quoting the track records of previous takeoffs, from those of Britain, the U.S., and the so-called Asian Tigers, to the now famous work of Goldman Sachs. By 2050, its forecast anticipates the United States ranking a close second behind China, followed at some distance by India (3).

Almost defiantly, though, Jacques proclaims this is not a book about China’s “economic wow factor”(415). Make no mistake, the growth is important. Among other feats, China doubled its economy between 1977 and 1987 (159), and its GDP went from twice the size of Russia’s to more than six times larger between 1990 and 2003 (161). But this analyst is impressed by other things and wants us to share in his awe.

Principal among these features are: the length of China’s history; a population as large as the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan and Australia combined; a land mass that Jacques repeatedly describes as “continental”; and, most of all, the extraordinary potency and cohesiveness of its culture.

Indeed, culture gradually becomes the main story here. China is not so much a nation on the move, but a single-minded civilization bent on regaining its natural place in the scheme of things as number one, the author insists, with grating frequency, and the West is woefully ill-prepared for the challenge.

Conclusions like this, paired with such a sensationalist title, might suggest an alarmist tract in the old “yellow peril” tradition, but the reality is almost the opposite. Jacques, a former editor of Marxism Today, all but cheers the West’s comeuppance. I, for one, found a Chinese friend’s response to the title more compelling. Noticing the book on my desk, her one-word comeback was, “Really?”

I mouthed this same question with dismaying frequency as I read When China Rules the World, and serious doubts about Jacques’ reliability as a guide mounted.

For such a timely subject, this is unfortunate. One is especially dismayed because the book is not bereft of interesting ideas. Among them, the author challenges common, deeply held notions of Western exceptionalism, beginning with the idea that modernity itself is the exclusive preserve of Europe and its American offshoot. “Europe was the birthplace of modernity,” he writes. “As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies left a huge and indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other; they appeared synonymous” (21). Apart, however, from “an accident of birth it had, and has, no special connection to that continent and its civilization.”

Problematically for a book that is nominally about the future, it is here, and not with his frequently credulous predictions about the coming world order, that the author is most compelling.

In his book’s early passages, Jacques takes pains to show that the West’s dominance is a relatively recent development in world history, and by implication probably a transitory one, too. But for a handful of ancient Chinese inventions — things like paper, gunpowder and the compass — the story of the past in the popular mind is one of long-uninterrupted Western superiority in science, in technology, and more broadly in the process we nowadays fancy as “development.”

However, drawing on a variety of recent economic and historical scholarship, notably that of Kaoru Sugihara and Kenneth Pomeranz, Jacques makes a claim of parity between East and West before Europe and the United States pulled far ahead in late 19th century. “The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them,” he writes. “In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious” (25).

While our conventional narratives would have it that the West’s advantage lay in byproducts of the Enlightenment, things like reason and law and the scientific method, the factors that Jacques emphasizes are much less flattering. Around 1800, the fortunes of East Asia and Western Europe began to diverge sharply, after Britain discovered large and easily accessible deposits of coal, relieving the dependence on wood and helping drive the technological innovations that would propel the Industrial Revolution. More crucial still was the conquest of the New World, opening up a continental expanse of “new” land, to be worked in large measure by African slave labor. “Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did.”

China also had large coal deposits in its northwest, but they were remote from the main population centers, and most importantly, far removed from the emerging textile industries and canal networks of the lower Yangzi Valley. It “also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World” (27).

With few notable exceptions, the ideas that Jacques develops to get us from this world of the recent past to the future of the book’s title are considerably less compelling. This is the case, in part, because of the author’s failure to get beyond China’s own official cant. The book often reads like a compilation of ideas gleaned by the water cooler at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the state’s official think tank.

“Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 percent between 1950 and 1980, more than quadrupling the country’s GDP and more than doubling its per capita GDP,” Jacques writes at one point. “This compares favorably with India, which only managed to increase its GDP by less than three times during the same period and its per capital GDP by around 50 percent. China’s social performance was even more impressive” (99).

This might seem like a straightforward recitation of fact, but there is far more going on here. Jacques frequently makes sweeping and shallow statements about East Asian cultures, and especially about Confucian societies. But rather than compare growth figures with these putative Chinese peers — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — he has cherry-picked India to bolster his claims.

In the same passage, he goes on to invoke the United Nation’s Human Development Index to hammer home the point that China did well under Mao. What to make, then, of a death toll of 30 million during the Great Leap Forward, millions killed and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and the countless other victims of less famous campaigns that almost continuously punctuated Mao’s rule? With Jacques’ bland treatment of this material, we are not far from Beijing’s own bloodless official reckoning that Mao was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad.

Part of Jacques’ problem is that no matter how prodigious his readings (the footnotes run for 70 pages), the author comes across as a relative latecomer to his subject, and this lack of grounding results in any number of embarrassments. For example, contrary to the prevailing historical record, he asserts that the Communists, and not Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, “played the key role in the resistance to the Japanese” (94).

Click to read more

Posted at 12:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Review (Abu Dhabi)

Reading a series of new books about the desperate excesses of today’s quest for crude, Howard W French finds progress and prosperity alongside misery and exploitation, as the threat of the end draws near.

January 21. 2010

In 1998, with the international oil business in the midst of one of its recurrent doldrums – prices had slumped to $10 a barrel, a 50-year low – executives at the company then still known as British Petroleum braced for a test supremely laden with significance for the company, and, as it would turn out, for the industry, too.

It was a $100 million gamble – for that was the cost of a test bore in Block 778, under 7,625 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The potential payoff was a staggering $50 billion over the next 10 years.

For months beforehand, ships dragging seismic equipment had crisscrossed the waters of the Gulf, firing bursts of sound into the seabed. And it was the harvesting of that echo data, recorded millisecond by millisecond, that had led the engineers to their precise quarry, a 12-inch hole they would drill through four miles of rock.

By reputation, this was the most complex geological area on the planet for oil prospectors. One of them likened recording sound through the thick salt formations that lay under the seabed to “photographing through frosted glass.” And yet the prospectors working out of BP’s Houston campus were not daunted: the oil business had been furiously reinventing itself to meet such challenges.

Looking for oil was no longer a game for old-timers. The seismic data that was once stored on miles of magnetic tape could now fit on an iPod, and the majors competed ferociously for the most talented young mathematicians and geophysicists.

On July 4, 1998, the company’s drill sensors reported oil. David Rainey, BP’s head of exploration, exclaimed: “Our sandbox has just got bigger.” But the immense size of his triumph would soon become clear: a billion barrels of oil – enough to boost the revived company into competition with Exxon and Shell, and set off a scramble toward ever more risky deepwater gambles that the majors have pursued around the Atlantic rim ever since.

By 2004, BP had commissioned the construction of the world’s largest oil platform, a 59,500-ton behemoth called the “Thunder Horse” – which they towed from South Korea to the warm Gulf waters off Louisiana – to tap an invisible gusher of crude. There, it would shunt the well’s output into a network of 25,000 miles of pipeline that traverse the ocean floor from Texas to Florida to fuel America’s cars and heat its homes.

This tale of technological triumph, breathlessly recounted in Tom Bower’s new book The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century, still retains an elegiac quality. Indeed, if not exactly an epitaph, the deepwater adventures of companies like BP and its traditional competitors, which Bower chronicles in great detail, hang in one’s thoughts like a chronicle of a death foretold.

Ingenuity is one way to describe the search for crude in deeper and deeper waters; another, equally apt, might be desperation. Once all-mighty, the large Western oil companies now control well under 10 per cent of the world’s known crude.

“Big oil never wanted to be here,” read the telling first line of a recent Wall Street Journal feature about the successful efforts of Chevron in very deep waters not far from BP’s big find.

“Chevron came here, an hour-long helicopter ride south of New Orleans, because so many of the places it would rather be – big, easily tapped oilfields close to shore – have become off-limits. Western oil companies have been kicked out of much of the Middle East in recent decades, had assets seized in Venezuela and seen much of the US roped off because of environmental regulations,” the article read. “Their access in Iran is limited by sanctions, in Russia by curbs on foreign investment, in Iraq by violence.”

We associate few products with the swings and cycles that we all but take for granted with oil. The rise and fall of prices, and the expansion and contraction of the economies that drive them, consume our quotidian attentions. But such vicissitudes are not the half of oil’s cyclical saga, and in many ways they are the least interesting part of the tale.

To really grapple with the history of this industry is to plunge into the rich essence of the story of mankind’s last century, give or take a few years. All of the elements are there, from the final sprint of what, only recently, one might have imagined to be the semi-permanent ascendancy of the West to the resurrection of China and the rise of a host of other new or rehabilitated powers.

In this time, we have gone from widely accepted notions of progress as an irreversible march of material wealth and abundance to an increasingly common acceptance that the heedless consumption that underpins our notions of satisfaction and self-worth has become a mortal environmental menace.

By the same token, that confidence in inexhaustible material abundance has faded, first into an only slightly less quaint belief that science can force the horizons of scarcity into perpetual retreat, and more recently to a gathering acknowledgement of all sorts of limits.

Haunting every one of these plot lines is a spectre that suffuses The Squeeze and two other new books, by the journalists Peter Maass and Michael Peel, about all manner of ravages and excesses committed in the quest for petroleum. It is the still vague and yet certain ghost of “peak oil”.

Western historians have long fixated on the great ideological struggles, hot and cold, of the last century. For many, this competition, and the putative triumph of democracy, is the greatest story of our times.

But the century-long arc of oil’s rise and eventual decline reveals a story whose significance is even greater than the political dispute that defined the Cold War. It is a story in which the West played a starring role, but to whose importance it has remained largely blind: the end of colonial subjugation, and the rise of the “the rest.”

Western hegemony during the colonial era, which began in the 17th century and ended in the wake of the Second World War, created “one of the great asymmetries of world history,” as the historian Niall Ferguson has written.

That asymmetry, as the journalist and analyst Martin Jacques notes in his new book, When China Rules the World, was no accident, for Europe “forcibly sought to prevent – by a combination of economic and military means – Asia from taking the same route”. Decolonisation, Jacques writes, was “arguably … the most important event of the 20th century, creating the conditions for the majority of the world’s population to become the dominant players of the 21st century”.

This is best illustrated, no doubt, by the example of China, which with 20 per cent of the world’s population may serve as a surrogate or indicator, if a leading-edge one, for the non-white populations of the planet as a whole.

China, as everyone knows, is on the march economically, followed by India’s billion-plus, and by people elsewhere in Asia, in Latin America and – although less widely acknowledged – in Africa, too, and the surge of production, consumption and new wealth among these recently-enfranchised populations will condition what’s left of oil’s long, wild ride down to the last drop.

Growth like this is projected to drive a one per cent annual rise in oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), whose forecasts have been criticised in many quarters for being too conservative. Power generating capacity during this time-span will rise by 4,800 gigawatts, or five times the United States’ present output.

Virtually all of this growth will come from non-OECD countries, the IEA claims, and 28 per cent of it from China alone – where oil consumption is expected to nearly double, to 15 million barrels a day, by 2030. The IEA’s 2009 World Energy Outlook warns that current investments fall far short of what will be needed to meet future demand; it is the prospect of this looming shortfall that has stoked fears that the “end of oil” may come sooner than previously expected.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The National

For the span of a few weeks this autumn, the theatre of global diplomacy found a rare focus in the audiences of Emperor Akihito of Japan, a figure without constitutional powers whose life is ordinarily spent in the shadows.

The first half of the minuet in question is likely to be familiar, at least to news junkies in the West: the “scandal” that ensued, if only on American cable networks, after Barack Obama honoured the emperor with an unusually deep and deferential bow at his palace in Tokyo.

But the second act – which received far less attention in the headlines of the world’s newspapers – was by far the more significant one. On unusually short notice for such a thing, Xi Jinping, China’s number two and the slated successor to President Hu Jintao, was granted an audience with Akihito. Many warm words were exchanged, but there was no bow, at least none recorded by the cameras.

Obama had come to Japan in part to soothe nerves – one might even say to curry favour – with a historically subservient but suddenly prickly ally whose new leadership is determined to chart a much more independent course for the country. Xi’s visit, by contrast, was a shrewd mixture of bluster and tact, intended to press China’s advantage as the country engineers a return to its customary role as the paramount force in Asian affairs.

Though Japan remains the world’s second-largest economy, a decade of flat growth and a succession of mostly unremarkable leaders has left the world unaccustomed to looking toward Tokyo for important geopolitical signals. But the reorientation under way – best symbolised by the contrasting complexion of Obama and Xi’s visits – marks one of the most significant new dynamics of our age.

During his trip, Obama called himself America’s first “Pacific president”, a proclamation that is said to have unsettled some European chancelleries, and rightly so. The statement is a form of recognition, albeit belated and indirect, of a monumental shift in world affairs, whose centre of gravity is rapidly moving from the mid-Atlantic to the western Pacific.

That the tectonic plates of the international system, ordinarily so slow to move, have begun to reconfigure themselves with such speed is not merely a matter of China’s impressive economic rise, which has been abundantly acknowledged. Far subtler, and yet potentially as important, has been Japan’s new balancing act, as a new government in Tokyo emerges from America’s politico-military apron.

Under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan ended decades of virtually uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party at the end of August, Japan has embarked on a journey toward greater equidistance between its patron of the last six decades, the United States, and China, the country that has loomed largest in the island nation’s life for 1,400 years.

While Japan learns to say no to the United States on important security matters, like the contentious issue of hosting US Marines on Okinawa Island, or on refuelling American military vessels bound for Afghanistan, it is placing increasing store on relations with China.

China is already Japan’s largest trading partner, and the prospect of decades of strong growth in the world’s largest consumer market is almost certain to bring Tokyo closer to Beijing. America’s long run of uncontested influence in Japan is doubtlessly ebbing.

Where might this all lead? In the last two decades, Japan has invested tremendous political capital and huge sums of money in trying to rebuild its relationship with Asia. At nearly every turn, however, it has been blocked by China, which has been much more successful at corralling the nations of South East Asia and conserving the most important diplomatic trump cards on the Korean peninsula.

Today, many commentators have begun speaking a little hastily of a newly bipolar world; a condominium of sorts between the United States and China. But 20 years from now, this moment is likely to stand out for another important turning point, when China and Japan began to co-operate meaningfully on building Asian economic and eventually, perhaps, political bodies to rival the European Union.

The two countries will come to need each other not just for their markets and for investment, but for the management of their human resources. China, with its economic growth perhaps beginning to slow, needs to export people, and Japan, its own population nosediving, finally accepts the need to import them.

If pursued successfully, this new symbiosis built on capital, technology and especially a growing cultural convergence between East Asia’s two main powers will shift the locus of modernity for the first time from West to East. The US will not be suddenly chased from East Asia, but its era of predominance there will become a thing of the past.

As it increasingly discovers that getting things done means going through Beijing, Japan will abandon all pretence of containing China. But not wishing to kowtow to a new master any more than it did to an old one, it will resort to a classic game of balancing and will consequently find itself with an increasingly fine line to walk.

Howard W French covered East Asia for the New York Times from 1998 to 2008, serving as bureau chief in Tokyo and Shanghai. He is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, and teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Click to read more

Posted at 11:46 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo
By Howard W. French

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier

Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
by René Lemarchand

University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
by Thomas Turner

Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now, the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January, Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years.

Rwanda’s intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country.

Kabila’s hold on power was saved at this point by Angola and Zimbabwe, which rushed troops into Congo to repel the Rwandan invaders. Angola was motivated by fears that Congolese territory would be used as a rear base by the longtime Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, following the renewed outbreak of that country’s civil war. Zimbabwe appears to have been drawn by promises of access to Congolese minerals. The protracted and inconclusive conflict that followed has become what Gérard Prunier, in the title of his sprawling book, calls “Africa’s World War,” a catastrophic decade of violence that has led to a staggering 5.4 million deaths, far more than any war anywhere since World War II.[1] It also has resulted in one of the largest—and least followed—UN interventions in the world, involving nearly 20,000 UN soldiers from over forty countries.

Throughout this conflict, Rwanda—a small, densely populated country with few natural resources of its own—has pursued Congo’s enormous mineral wealth. Initially, the Rwandan Patriotic Front was directly operating mining businesses in Congo, according to UN investigators; more recently, Rwanda has attempted to maintain control of regions of eastern Congo through various proxy armies. Among these, none has been more lethal than the militia led by Laurent Nkunda, Congo’s most notorious warlord, whose record of violence in eastern Congo includes destroying entire villages, committing mass rapes, and causing hundreds of thousands of Congolese to flee their homes.

Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who is believed to have fought in both the Rwandan civil war and the subsequent war against Mobutu. In 2002, he was dispatched by the Rwandan government to Kisangani—an inland city in eastern Congo whose nearby gold mines have been fought over by Ugandan and Rwandan-backed forces. Nkunda committed numerous atrocities there, including the massacre of some 160 people, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2004, Nkunda declined a military appointment by Congo’s transitional government, choosing instead to back a Tutsi insurgency in North Kivu near the Rwandan border. He claimed that his actions were aimed at preventing an impending genocide of Tutsis in Congo. Most observers say that these claims were groundless.

Nkunda’s insurgency was put down, but clashes between his rebels, government forces, and other groups continued to foster ethnic tensions in eastern Congo, including widespread sexual violence against women; in 2005, the UN estimated that some 45,000 women were raped in South Kivu alone.[2] And in the fall of 2008, Nkunda—apparently with Kagame’s encouragement—led a new offensive of Tutsi rebels in North Kivu that uprooted about 200,000 civilians and threatened to capture the city of Goma, near the Rwandan border.

In January 2009, however, the Rwandan government made a surprise decision to arrest Nkunda. Kagame’s willingness to move against Nkunda appears to stem, in part, from increasing international scrutiny of Rwanda’s meddling in eastern Congo. The arrest took place just after the release of a UN report documenting Rwanda’s close ties to the warlord, and concluding that he was being used to advance Rwanda’s economic interests in Congo’s eastern hinterlands. The report stated that Rwandan authorities had “been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces,” while giving Nkunda access to Rwandan bank accounts and allowing him to launch attacks on the Congolese army from Rwandan soil.

Following Nkunda’s arrest, Congo president Joseph Kabila agreed to allow Rwandan forces to conduct a five-week joint military operation in eastern Congo against Hutu rebels.[3] But attacks against civilians have increased precipitously since the joint operation, and with Hutu and Tutsi militias still active it remains unclear whether there will be a lasting peace between Rwanda and Congo.

Africa’s World War is the most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Along with René Lemarchand’s The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa and Thomas Turner’s The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, Prunier’s Africa’s World War explores arguments that have circulated among scholars of sub-Saharan Africa for years. Prunier himself, who is an East Africa specialist at the University of Paris, has previously written a highly regarded account of the genocide. But these books will surprise many whose knowledge of the region is based on popular accounts of the genocide and its aftermath. In all three, the Kagame regime, and its allies in Central Africa, are portrayed not as heroes but rather as opportunists who use moral arguments to advance economic interests. And their supporters in the United States and Western Europe emerge as alternately complicit, gullible, or simply confused. For their part in bringing intractable conflict to a region that had known very little armed violence for nearly thirty years, all the parties—so these books argue—deserve blame, including the United States.

The concentrated evil of the methodical Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 is widely known. For many it has long been understood as a grim, if fairly simple, morality play: the Hutus were extremist killers, while the Tutsis of the RPF are portrayed as avenging angels, who swooped in from their bases in Uganda to stop the genocide. But Lemarchand and Prunier show that the story was far more complicated. They both depict the forces of Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front as steely, power-driven killers themselves.

“When the genocide did start, saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority,” Prunier writes. “Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly declared in September 1994 that the ‘interior’ Tutsi”—those who had remained in Rwanda and not gone into exile in Uganda years earlier—”deserved what happened to them ‘because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich doing business’” with the former Hutu regime. He also notes that the RPF “unambiguously opposed” all talk of a foreign intervention, however unlikely, to stop the genocide, apparently because such intervention could have prevented Kagame from taking full power.

Moreover, slaughter during the one hundred days of genocide was not the monopoly of the Hutus, as is widely believed. Both Lemarchand and Prunier recount the work of RPF teams that roamed the countryside methodically exterminating ordinary, unarmed Hutu villagers.[4] This sort of killing, rarely mentioned in press accounts of the genocide, continued well after the war was over. For example, on April 22, 1995, units of the new national army surrounded the Kibeho refugee camp in south Rwanda, where about 150,000 Hutu refugees stood huddled shoulder to shoulder, and opened fire on the crowd with rifles and with 60mm mortars.[5] According to Prunier, a thirty- two-member team of the Australian Medical Corps had counted 4,200 corpses at the camp before being stopped by the Rwandan army. Prunier calls the Kagame regime’s use of violence in that period “something that resembles neither the genocide nor uncontrolled revenge killings, but rather a policy of political control through terror.”

Some commentators in the United States have viewed Kagame as a sort of African Konrad Adenauer, crediting him with bringing stability and rapid economic growth to war-torn Rwanda, while running an administration considered to be one of the more efficient in Africa. In the nine years he has led the country (after serving as interim president, he won an election to a seven-year term in 2003), he has also gotten attention for the reconciliation process he has imposed on villages throughout Rwanda.

Firmly opposed to such views, the three authors reviewed here characterize Kagame’s regime as more closely resembling a minority ethnic autocracy. In a recent interview, Prunier dismissed the recently much-touted reconciliation efforts, calling post-genocide Rwanda “a very well-managed ethnic, social, and economic dictatorship.” True reconciliation, he said, “hinges on cash, social benefits, jobs, property rights, equality in front of the courts, and educational opportunities,” all of which are heavily stacked against the roughly 85 percent of the population that is Hutu, a problem that in Prunier’s view presages more conflict in the future. In his book, Lemarchand, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida who has done decades of fieldwork in the region, observes that Hutus have been largely excluded from important positions of power in Kagame’s Rwanda, and that the state’s military and security forces are pervasive. “The political decisions with the gravest consequences for the nation…are undertaken by the RPF’s Tutsi leadership, not by the political establishment,” he writes.

Click to read more

Posted at 7:16 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Letter from China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 28, 2009

SHANGHAI — For the last couple of months I have spent the first part of each day either teaching at a Chinese university or writing.

Nearly every afternoon, though, in what has distinctly felt like the start of a new day, I have set off with camera in hand by motorcycle and subway to some of the fast-disappearing old neighborhoods of this city, to knock on the doors of hundreds of ordinary, working-class people.

These encounters with strangers have plunged me deep into a world experienced by few foreigners, and indeed, one might venture, few Chinese — particularly those of the middle class.

Through the time spent in the cramped, dimly lit homes of my subjects — people whose portraits I’ve taken for a long-term photographic project about the city’s oldest neighborhoods — I may have learned as much about Shanghai and about China as I did in five busy years as a correspondent here.

Typically, I enter their world by climbing up a rickety, twisting wooden staircase, ducking to avoid bumping my head in the near-total darkness. This experience, eerie at first, but now utterly familiar, has come to feel appropriate for a photographic adventure, like the adjustment of one’s eyes, and perspective, upon entry into a darkroom.

My subjects come fresh to the experience, so it has been unexpected and unquestionably strange for each of them, at least initially. Once they have overcome their surprise at the sight of a very tall, camera-bearing, Chinese-speaking foreigner in the sanctum of their tiny homes, the most common question has been: What could possibly be interesting about a place like this?

The answer is: plenty.

The demographics of this city, said to have the oldest population in a country that has begun to age rapidly, has come to life before my eyes. I had not expected to find so much evidence of China’s thriving quasi-underground religious culture here. In house after house, I found people worshiping privately as Christians or Buddhists. Asked how she had come to the church, a woman who had been sent to the countryside as a youth in the Cultural Revolution told me she had been converted by her neighbors. “Everyone in this building believes in Christ,” she said.

We are ever more accustomed to dazzling images of China, the fast-rising nation that may soon surpass the United States and lead the world, according to one increasingly widespread trope. Those who know a bit about the country will be aware that there are still many hundreds of millions of people in the countryside who have not yet found a spot on China’s economic escalator.

Even in China’s richest city, huge numbers of people eke out a very modest existence. To be sure, these are very often migrants from provinces like Anhui or Jiangsu, or even further afield. But more than most Chinese would suspect — particularly the proud, newly affluent generations of Shanghai people who look at my photographs and sniff “wai di ren,” or “outsiders” — a great many of the denizens of the city’s dilapidated but character-rich old quarters are natives.

Much has been written lately about growing social inequality in China. The country’s social divisions, however, are much more complicated than statistics suggest, involving lots of fine-grained, identity-based prejudices.

I think, for example, of the poor and jobless Shanghainese parents in the old garment district who told me of their eagerness to be relocated across the river to Pudong, where the environment would be better, in part they said, because there would be fewer of the “wai di” people, whom they dismissed as having “no culture.”

Others pessimistically dismissed the likelihood that China’s increasing prosperity would continue to lift all boats. “I’m frightened for my son’s future,” said a migrant from Henan. “China’s biggest problem is the population. There are just too many of us, and the competition for opportunity is murderous.”

Inevitably, the theme of relocation comes up often in encounters like these, given the frantic pace of redevelopment. Some people are pleased with the take-it-or-leave-it buyout arrangements the government has offered to pave the way for the construction of high-rises; others respond with fatalism. “If the country needs this land, what can I do?” said one elderly man.

A great many people spoke bitterly and with surprising candor, though, about what they see as a crisis of social justice. Here, I think of the 75-year-old owner of a tiny barbershop whose neighborhood came down before my eyes this summer.

“What they are doing here is simply unfair,” he said, telling me how thugs had been dispatched to beat up residents who refused to quietly make way for the demolition. “There is no rule of law. The ‘lao bai xing’ have no rights at all.” That old phrase, meaning the nameless masses, never seemed more appropriate.

Others told me the stories of corrupt local officials, whom they said offered higher compensation for relocated people who were willing to pay bribes. These anecdotes took on special potency in a summer where a nearly completed apartment building fell on its side, killing a worker and setting off lurid rumors of government corruption.

I learned that large numbers of Chinese understand and value democratic ideals and yearn for them to be applied here. “We may have gotten richer, but our politics have not really evolved since imperial times,” said one elderly man. “Chinese people want democracy as much as anyone else, and one day we will have it.”

Click to read more

Posted at 12:07 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
Survivors’ Stories From China

* Sign in to Recommend
*
E-Mail
* Send To Phone
* Print
* ShareClose
o Linkedin
o Digg
o Facebook
o Mixx
o MySpace
o Yahoo! Buzz
o Permalink
o

Article Tools Sponsored By
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 24, 2009

One of the most curious forms of tourism in recent years has to be that of Chinese who travel to North Korea for the nostalgic gag of visiting a country that abounds in echoes of their past.

WOMAN FROM SHANGHAI
Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp
By Xianhui Yang
Translated by Wen Huang. 302 pages. Pantheon Books. $24.95.

Stories from these travelers typically focus on things like material poverty and a kind of totalitarian kitsch: the proliferation of statues and other symbols of a revered absolute leader, the spartan uniformity of dress, big state-owned stores bereft of goods to sell, broad avenues manned by traffic cops gifted in mechanized gyrations but missing that other basic ingredient of traffic, cars.

I have spoken with many of these Chinese travelers and have always been struck by how seldom their accounts dwell on the stark human costs of a system like North Korea’s, or on the political system that makes such extreme repression and deprivation possible on a national scale.

Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. As the circumstances of the publication of “Woman From Shanghai” help us understand, these are memories that the Chinese state still works hard to suppress.

Mr. Yang’s stories, which he painstakingly collected over a three-year period a decade ago, are those of people branded by the Chinese state as “rightists” in the late 1950s and sent to Jiabiangou, a notorious camp for “re-education through labor” in the northwestern desert wastelands of Gansu Province. In his introduction the translator, Wen Huang, explains that the camp, which was originally built to hold 40 or 50 criminals, came to hold roughly 3,000 political prisoners between 1957 and 1961. All but 500 of them would perish there, mostly of starvation.

When word of the soaring death toll reached the capital, Beijing began an investigation. In October 1961 the government ordered Jiabiangou closed and then mounted an exhaustive cover-up. After it was shuttered, a doctor who was assigned to the camp spent six months fabricating the medical records of every inmate. In letters to family members, the cause of death was attributed to all manner of illness except starvation, a word that was never mentioned.

Though less well known in the West than two other immense political disasters visited upon the Chinese people by Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the so-called Anti-Rightist Movement to which the subjects of Mr. Yang’s stories fell victim remains difficult to research because of continuing censorship. Chinese historians say this is partly because of the central role in these ideological purges played by Mao’s much revered successor, Deng Xiaoping, credited today with putting the country on the path of economic liberalization.

Mr. Yang first encountered stories of Jiabiangou’s horrors as a self-described idealistic youth working on a collective farm in the 1960s, and though he was unbelieving at first, they stuck with him. Years later, when he was denied access to archives from this period and when queries to the government on the subject of Jiabiangou went unanswered, his research turned to what he calls China’s human archives: living people and their oral histories.

In this regard, “Woman From Shanghai” represents a remarkable contribution to a growing literature based on personal histories. Mr. Huang, the translator, has played an important role in bringing such work to an English-language audience, having recently translated a work by a giant in this budding field: “The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up,” by the muckraking Sichuan journalist Liao Yiwu.

Readers of Mr. Yang’s book should not be put off by the frequent recurrence of common elements in these stories: the exposure to bitter cold; hunger so intense as to cause inmates to eat human flesh; the familiar sequence of symptoms, beginning with edema, that lead down the path to death; the toolbox of common survivor techniques, from toadyism to betrayal, from stealthy theft to making use of the vestiges of privilege, which survived even incarceration in this era of radical egalitarianism. It is through the accumulation and indeed repetition of such things that this utterly convincing portrait of a society driven far off the rails is drawn.

In one story, a man without medical training who is pressed into service as a camp doctor relates his dismay at watching a starving patient die when the one available remedy for the critically ill, glucose injections, fails. “Don’t blame yourself,” a real doctor tells him. “It was not your fault. We had brought him back to life twice already. His time had come. Nobody could have saved him.”

The stories contain no sugarcoating and are frequently grim in theme, and yet here and there one encounters the stubborn persistence of humanity’s best qualities. In the title story, a young woman travels to the labor camp to visit her husband, only to learn from reluctant fellow inmates that he has just died. In the face of threats from the camp authorities, she collects his remains from a shallow grave and carries them home for proper burial.

Most moving of all, perhaps, is “The Love Story of Li Xiangnian,” about the persecution of a young man and the persistence of his ardor for his girlfriend. The haggard Li escapes from detention to be reunited with her, only to be arrested again. Their touching reunion many years later, after the woman is married, would not be out of place in a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

Click to read more

Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 14, 2009

SHANGHAI — When Beijing won the right to hold last year’s Olympics, all of China celebrated, but somewhere in Shanghai’s heart there must have been a twinge of envy.

History has encouraged Shanghai’s people to feel a certain entitlement to the spotlight. After all, this is China’s first truly modern city, its first world city, and it remains China’s largest city, even if nowadays just barely so.

Shanghai’s day in the sun is fast approaching, however. In May, it will host the 2010 World Expo, an idea with a pedigree that dates back to the 19th century and which Paris, New York and Montreal, among other metropolises before it, have used to highlight their claims to trend-setting modernity and distinctive cosmopolitanism.

For some, hosting a somewhat anachronistic event like the Expo may seem a modest consolation prize compared with the glitter of the Olympics, but that does not mean that Shanghai is approaching things with anything less than the utmost seriousness. Official Shanghai, that is. Unwilling to be outdone by China’s old capital, this city is reportedly outspending Beijing’s vast Olympic preparations by a large margin.

For months now, that has meant extraordinary things for the neighborhoods of this city. Extensive new subway lines are being rushed into service. The finishing touches are being placed on flying cloverleaf expressways. And as buildings rise like plants in some Miracle-Gro commercial, construction cranes can be seen wheeling in every direction.

Much of this theater of change is occurring in the places one would expect, like main streets of central Shanghai, where the sidewalks are being ripped up for the umpteenth time in the seven years I’ve known this town. The police, meanwhile, are already stepping up their vigilance against perceived eyesores, like the unlucky beggar I saw being escorted away after he had squatted on the sidewalk on Nanjing Road for momentary relief from the heat in the plume of chill air that streamed out of a downtown shopping mall.

Shanghai is also reportedly rushing into effect new smoking regulations aimed at bringing this tobacco-friendly city into line with increasingly widespread global standards requiring smoke-free zones in restaurants, shopping centers and other public places.

The most interesting action, though, is taking place in slightly more out-of -the-way places, namely in the neighborhoods where Shanghai’s working-class people, the masses, dwell. Many of these areas have until now been bypassed by the ongoing Chinese economic miracle, and with just a few months to go, the city is pressing an all-fronts beautification drive.

The bulldozer is the most obvious tool in this drive, with whole neighborhoods, including some of Shanghai’s most architecturally and historically interesting places, being razed after decades of woeful neglect. But this uniquely Chinese campaign has other important facets worth dwelling upon.

Anyone wondering about the roots of North Korea’s political style, with Pyongyang’s showcase boulevards and its mass games, those carefully orchestrated displays of unanimity, could do worse than to visit workers’ quarters here. Shiny new aluminum facades are being hastily stapled onto grubby family storefronts, and fresh coats of paint and mortar are being applied, often for the first time in decades. This Potemkin salubrity is regarded with frank skepticism by many locals as a gigantic, government-run “face operation.” Its aim, they say, is to impress foreign visitors, even those who wander off the beaten path, with Chinese living standards.

Another key element in the city’s drive has equally deep roots in the revolutionary past, with its endless movements and campaigns. In any of these neighborhoods, one can’t fail to be impressed by the proliferation of red propaganda banners and slogans, festooned on buildings or hanging above the streets, that exhort the masses to help promote the Expo by being more “civilized.”

But amid all of this busy re-engineering, both physical and social, Shanghai has overlooked what is perhaps the most basic campaign of all: a hospitality campaign aimed at persuading Chinese people that they are the common siblings of the rest of mankind.

Why, one might ask, should there be such a need? The answer lies in the daily experience of any foreigner who wanders off the main streets, and it sometimes includes experiences on the main streets as well. Foreign visitors can often still draw stares as if freshly descended from the moon. People may talk about you in your presence, on the assumption that you don’t understand their language or, worse, that it doesn’t matter if you do. And the term “lao wai,” a less than endearing word for foreigner, hangs thickly in the air. Even the English word “hello” can take on a strange new meaning here, delivered as it sometimes is more as a sing-song taunt than as a true greeting.

The divide that lingers between the Chinese and the outside world has its roots, of course, in the political choices of the state, which has long taught people to regard foreigners with suspicion — the better to foster nationalism and control. In a chapter titled “Can We Be Friends?,” James Kynge captures this quality perceptively in his book, “China Shakes the World.” Chinese officials, he writes, are taught “that intimacy is forbidden and that making friends with foreigners is ‘work.”’

Observations like these certainly do not represent a judgment on the innate friendliness or unfriendliness of the people — Chinese, like people everywhere, come in all types, and that is indeed the point. For Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the country and the one that has arguably benefited more than any other from globalization, though, the time is past due to finally de-exoticize the “other,” and as good a place to begin as any would be with a sincerely meant “hello.”

Click to read more

Posted at 11:43 PM · Comments (3)

Copyright The New York Times

Lost in Uganda

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 29, 2009

As a matter of convention, we constantly say and write things about Africa that would be unimaginable with any other continent. An often thoughtless broad-brush treatment belies the fact of diversity on a continent of 53 countries (even this is not a settled number) and close to a billion inhabitants, a place of light and dark, rich and poor, increasingly well-governed and still appallingly ill-­governed people.

THE TEETH MAY SMILE BUT THE HEART DOES NOT FORGET

Murder and Memory in Uganda

By Andrew Rice

Illustrated. 363 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $26
Related
Mission From Africa (April 12, 2009)

Once in a while, though, the experience of much of the continent is crystallized in the story of a single country, and when that story is told with a combination of attentiveness to historical background and genuine care for the lives of real people, the small world of serious Africa books for nonspecialists becomes enriched. With “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda,” Andrew Rice has written just such a book.

“Africa the place is forever obscured by the shadow of Africa the notion,” Rice observes with characteristic insightfulness, as he sets about exploding much of the mythology surrounding Uganda’s notorious former tyrant, Idi Amin. “If one historical figure could be said to embody the continent as it is stereotypically imagined — dark, dangerous, atavistic and charged with sexual magnetism — it would be Idi Amin Dada.”

Though offstage through most of Rice’s book, Amin, who ruled his country from 1971 to 1979, manages nonetheless to be a central character. At its core, “The Teeth May Smile” is a keenly reported private detective story and police procedural about a son’s search for justice many years after his father’s betrayal and disappearance at the hands of Amin’s military henchmen.

At the same time, Rice’s book is an ably presented drama about the workings of a Ugandan courthouse. It is also an efficient primer on Uganda’s tumultuous history and a political précis of a succession of regimes, culminating with that of the current president, the increasingly authoritarian Yoweri Museveni.

And on the broadest level, it is a vivid prism for examining some of the largest themes in Africa’s history. Uganda’s guerrilla war of the 1980s, waged successfully by Museveni, with its heavy use of child soldiers, would prove to be prologue for horrific conflicts clear across the continent, notably the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Amin’s expulsion of the country’s ethnic Indian population in 1972 would pave the way for economic nationalism elsewhere, from Zaire to Nigeria. And the country’s ethnic politics, rooted in prejudices inherited from Europe, in some ways prefigured the murderous Hutu-­Tutsi cleavage next door in Rwanda.

Rice, who has written for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, perceptively describes the background of British colonialism, with its unmistakable patterns of divide and rule, including the literal invention of tribes. This involved propelling certain groups into education and pushing others, through coercive devices like the imposition of the “hut tax,” into military service. Such decisions had lasting, often bloody consequences.

Finally, “The Teeth May Smile” is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of memory, on forgiveness and reconciliation. In 2002, Rice read about the arrest of Amin’s second-in-command and two other men on the charge of murdering the local political leader Eliphaz Laki three decades before. “The country appeared rehabilitated, but the past always lurked just a few steps down the garden path,” he writes. “I was intrigued by the ways Ugandans accommodated that past: what they chose to remember, what went unspoken.”

As he recounts the efforts of Duncan Laki, an American-educated lawyer, to investigate his father’s murder, Rice achieves a near memoir-like intimacy. Peace may come, Laki learns as he watches the accused killers leave the courthouse as free men, but justice and reconciliation are more elusive.

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.” He is currently completing a novel about Africa.

Click to read more

Posted at 8:31 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Letter from China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009

SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.

The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.

What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.

This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.

The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.

The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.

Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.

China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.

Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.

At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.

I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.

A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”

Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.

Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:45 PM · Comments (0)

Books of The Times
A review of MYTHS, ILLUSIONS, AND PEACE: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 7, 2009

It is the common occupational hazard of the nonfiction writer to have events move beyond the scope of one’s work by the time of publication.

This is a particular risk in the field of diplomatic writing, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the shifting and unpredictable sands of the Middle East, where conventional wisdoms come and go as quickly as national unity governments. Washington’s longtime Middle Eastern diplomatic negotiator Dennis Ross and the former journalist David Makovsky have written a book that reaffirms such caution as well as any in recent memory.

If not explicitly announced as such, “Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East” reads very much like a foreign-policy blueprint for the region for a new administration. And yet so much has happened in the presumably brief interval since the authors completed their manuscript that much of the text and many of its prescriptions seem surpassed by events.

Foremost among these, of course, are the formation of an unwieldy conservative coalition government around Benjamin Netanyahu, a second-time prime minister of Israel with a long history of right-of-center politics. Then there are the first strong stirrings of a fresh diplomatic approach to the region by the new administration in Washington. Add to this Iran’s election and the sociopolitical effervescence it has engendered and the landscape looks substantially different from even a few months ago.

Only time will tell whether President Obama’s approach succeeds, but it has already bypassed some of the notions most central to Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky’s writing. Here one thinks especially of the series of unusually strong statements in which Mr. Obama has very publicly pressured Israel to halt all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, calling it illegitimate.

For its part, “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” begins with a lengthy attack on the diplomatic concept of linkage, which the authors initially define, in ways that seem somewhat overstated, as “the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all other Middle East conflicts would melt away.”

The authors’ formulation attempts to debunk the notion that resolving the Palestinian question could pay dramatic dividends elsewhere, whether in dealing with Iran’s rising power and influence in the region or in defusing rage around the issue that ostensibly fuels Islamic radicalism more broadly. Curiously, though, late in the book, Mr. Ross, who has served until recently as special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, and Mr. Makovsky themselves seem to at least partially allow for this.

After an opening section interpreting the diplomatic failures in the Middle East policy of past United States administrations going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the authors set up two models of thought as virtual antipodes, the neoconservatives and the realists.

The book begins and ends with scathing evaluations of the neoconservatives who drove policy under President George W. Bush and whose disengagement from the region and “fatalistic optimism,” the authors assert, did “great damage to America’s standing in the Middle East.”

Its greatest intellectual energy, however, is expended attacking the so-called realists, who believe, the authors say, that the United States has been “too close to Israel,” and for whom, in what sounds like another overreach, “it is largely inconceivable that Israel could have a case or that the Arabs and Palestinians might not be living up to their side of the bargain.”

The authors go on to denounce “the realist concept of external blueprints, of pressuring Israelis while offering inducements to the Palestinians,” as “strangely divorced from reality.”

The authors rely excessively for foils on John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a political scientist at Harvard, who wrote “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (2007) and who are cited frequently. But with the warnings in “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” about pressuring Israel, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Obama administration’s initial moves in the Middle East would also fall under the authors’ realist banner.

For many readers another issue that will arise is one of balance. Mr. Ross has led a distinguished career that is all the more remarkable for his staying power in Washington during both Democratic and Republican administrations — as a high-level Middle Eastern troubleshooter, envoy and policymaker. (He was recently transferred to the National Security Council.) At virtually no point in this book, however, are Israeli actions depicted as problematic or troublesome.

The closest the authors come to this is a passage describing mounting Palestinian disbelief in the peace process, in which they write, “They saw Israeli obligations under Oslo flouted — prisoners not released, withdrawals not taking place as scheduled, and the status of the territory constantly being changed to Israeli advantage, in effect prejudging the negotiations and their purpose.”

Elsewhere, speaking of an increase in the Israeli settler population on the West Bank from about 5,000 around the time of the Camp David accords in 1977 to over 300,000 now, the authors employ a counterfactual, saying “things could have been different if the Arabs had chosen a more pragmatic course.”

Given Mr. Ross’s recent position as an adviser on Iran policy, many readers will be drawn to this book out of curiosity about his views on relations with that country, and in particular, how to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

The authors advocate secret, high-level diplomacy with Iran, while working in concert with other Middle Eastern countries, the European Union and Russia. And they suggest a short time frame: 90 days. More specifically, they say, beyond that 90-day period “dissuasion steps” should begin. At a minimum, Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky conclude chillingly, “the use of force against Iran will look dramatically different should good faith, direct negotiations be tried and fail.”

Click to read more

Posted at 9:53 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation - This article appeared in the May 18, 2009 edition.
By Howard W. French

May 4, 2009

When it was published fifty years ago, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart caused a stir for its revelation of something hitherto strange and unfamiliar in the world of literature: genuine African voices. Achebe was not the first African novelist, as he has sometimes wrongly been called, but his use of standard English to produce believable characters who inhabited a complex and authentic world marked two existing traditions of writing about Africa as evolutionary dead ends.

Before Achebe’s breakthrough, there had been folklore-based African narratives, more entertainments than novels, written in English vernaculars that sought to reproduce the aural texture of African pidgins. The most famous of these, The Palm Wine Drinkard and my Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was written by another Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, and published six years before Things Fall Apart was released by Heinemann. Today it is hard not to hear a condescending ring in Dylan Thomas’s praise of Tutuola’s book for what he called its “young English.”

Earlier still, there had been yet another tradition of European writers ventriloquizing what they imagined to be an African voice. The classic example is a novel published in 1939 called Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary, a former British colonial officer in Nigeria. It is an ostensible tragedy written in a comical style with a central African character, the titular Johnson, whom Cary described as someone who “swims gaily on the surface of life.” Two decades ago, an essay about Cary in The New York Review of Books described the book’s lightheaded eponymous figure in terms that un-self-consciously echoed one of the oldest and ugliest stereotypes of Africans—their inability to master the concept of time: “A fragrant breeze, a blazing tropical sunrise, a pretty girl—such things so overwhelm him that past and future alike momentarily disappear.”

In interviews Achebe has suggested that his book, which has been translated into some fifty languages, was written partly in reaction to the patronizing caricature of Johnson. Things Fall Apart, however, unlike Mister Johnson, is tragedy pure and simple, both deeply personal—in the case of its main character, the excessively proud Okonkwo, whose Sophoclean fall is foretold by any number of omens—and collective, as Okonkwo’s society is sundered and then subjugated by the British empire’s one-two combination of missionaries and colonialists.

However remarkable on this score, Achebe’s first novel achieved far more than revealing genuine African voices. Things Fall Apart was the first novel in English to depict Africans who exist in an intricate moral universe; one that resonates with indigenous thought and values and concedes nothing, even in the face of the arrival of far more powerful outsiders. In place of the ignorant and superstitious “oogah-boogah”-muttering natives served up by generations of Westerners in literature and film, Achebe breathes life into sentient and articulate characters, people like Akunna, who delights in refuting a white missionary who insists that the Igbo divinities are false idols. “Yes,” says Akunna, referring to a carving. “It is indeed a piece of wood. The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like yourself. You are the head of your church.”

Among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland. Indeed, without ever stooping to polemic, Achebe sustains this quiet rebellion on nearly every page. One way is through an accumulation of anecdotal detail. In passage after passage he remarks on differences both subtle and dramatic between the customs and laws of various clans in his Igbo ethnic group, and less frequently with references to the world beyond. Briefly, sometimes, he even resorts to wicked humor, yet still manages to be pointed, as in a discussion of alien marriage rites. “But what is good in one place is bad in another place,” a character remarks. “The world is large,” replies Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” comes the incredulous reply. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.” Achebe’s defiance of Western contempt is married to a subtle but unmistakable appeal to Africans not to submit to feelings of inferiority, and this achievement is all the more remarkable for the book’s utter lack of mawkishness.

One could fill a small library with books examining Africa’s failings from the standpoint of economics, political science or even culture, which is usually taken to mean something that Africans lack. Things Fall Apart suggests a different answer. In a recent interview with the NPR program Studio 360, Achebe described the novel as “the story of colonial rule, one people imposing themselves on another people, who in this case happened to be the owners of the land. So you had a situation in which people come from somewhere else and say to the people they encounter, Everything you do is wrong. Your religion is wrong. You have no education. You have no culture. So it was that kind of situation, and it triggers by itself tremendous resistance.” The complications from this wound and the manifestations of this struggle echo down through the entire fitful, shambolic and half-realized experience of a half-century of post-independence Africa, and as if by miracle, so much of the coming disaster is anticipated in Achebe’s prose.

The full weight of this tragedy dawns on the reader late in the book in a scene where Okonkwo and some of his fellow clansmen are summoned by the district commissioner in the nearest city after villagers have burned down the white man’s church after its congregants profaned their clan’s god. “An Umofia man does not refuse a call,” Okonkwo says. “He may refuse to do what he is asked; he does not refuse to be asked.” The men are persuaded that their grievances will be heard, only to be brought before a colonial tribunal, disarmed, humiliated and broken.

“We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy,” the commissioner says, adding a moment later as he announces their punishment: “I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their place of worship. That must not happen in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world.”

For the self-righteous outsider, the entire encounter is about justice. For the natives, it is little more than a lesson in deceit and power. There are echoes here of the old lament often attributed to Native Americans: when the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible and he has the land.

In the words of the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria’s great musician of protest and one of Achebe’s legion of spiritual descendants, these modern institutions the white man has brought, from the statehouse to the courthouse, all ostensibly in the name of progress, but really as a means of imposing and extending their control, were but new “instruments of magic,” ill-fitting, alien ones that African leaders have eagerly appropriated nonetheless to “turn green into red” and “blue into white.” Indeed, the apprenticeship of the arbitrary and unjust begins in the wake of the tribunal’s judgment of Okonkwo, when the commissioner’s African messengers go to his village to demand payment of the imposed fine, secretly fattening the penalty by fifty bags of cowry shells to pocket the difference themselves.

What is most refreshing here is how deftly Achebe avoids the siren calls of neat moral conclusions that so often make literature of victimization unsatisfying. Tragedy and blame flow in two directions in his rare universe. “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” Okonkwo asks late in the novel. “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” comes the answer from a friend.

“But he says our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that hold us together and we have fallen apart.”

Click to read more">Click to read more

Posted at 5:31 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009

Rebiya Kadeer:
DRAGON FIGHTER
One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace With China

It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.

China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.

Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.

In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.

Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.

Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.

Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.

One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”

Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.

In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.

On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.

Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.

By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”

Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”

If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.

This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:14 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 29, 2009

For many who survey an African landscape strewn with political wreckage, nowadays merely to raise the subject of European colonialism, which formally ended across most of the continent five decades ago, is to ring alarm bells of excuse making.

SAVIORS AND SURVIVORS
Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
By Mahmood Mamdani
398 pages. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region, Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scholar at Columbia University and the author of “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,” is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror,” he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles. It is a brief, he writes, “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”

Mr. Mamdani does not dismiss a record of atrocities in Darfur, where 300,000 have been killed and 2.5 million been made refugees, yet he opposes the label of genocide as a subjective judgment wielded for political reasons against a Sudanese government that is out of favor because of its history of Islamism and its suspected involvement in terror.

At his most provocative Mr. Mamdani questions the distinction between what is often labeled counterinsurgency and genocide, saying the former, even when it kills more people, is deemed “normal violence” while the latter is considered “amoral, evil,” and typically it is the West that does the labeling.

Although he uses the United States war in Iraq as an example, with the International Criminal Court recently issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Mr. Mamdani’s most compelling example is the treatment of a crisis in neighboring Uganda.

In Uganda, long one of Washington’s closest African friends, Mr. Mamdani traces the history of ethnically targeted “civilian massacres and other atrocities” against the brutal insurgency known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. In 1996, under President Yoweri Museveni, a second phase of that war began “with a new policy designed to intern practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts in northern Uganda,” Mr. Mamdani writes. “It took a government-directed campaign of murder, intimidation, bombing and burning of whole villages to drive the rural population into I.D.P. (internally displaced persons) camps.”

In 2005 Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the government’s tactics, saying, “An entire society is being systematically destroyed — physically, culturally, socially and economically — in full view of the international community.”

But as elsewhere in Africa, Mr. Mamdani says, the International Criminal Court has brought a case against only the enemy of Washington’s friend, the Lord’s Resistance Army, remaining mute about large-scale atrocities that may have been committed by the Ugandan government. In this pattern the author sees the hand of politics more than any real attachment to justice.

Many argue that what makes Darfur different from other African crises is race, with the conflict there pitting Arabs against people often called “black Africans,” but here again Mr. Mamdani takes on conventional wisdom. “At no point,” he states flatly, “has this been a war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ ”

Much foreign commentary about Sudan speaks of its Arabs as settlers, with the inference that they are somehow less African than people assumed to be of pure black stock. If whites in Kenya and Zimbabwe, not to mention South Africa, vociferously maintain their African-ness, what then to make of the Arab presence in Sudan, whose slow penetration and widespread intermarriage, Mr. Mamdani writes, “commenced in the early decades of Islam” and “reached a climax” from the 8th to the 15th century, “when the Arab tribes overran much of the country”?

More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”

Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.

In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.

Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.

He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.

This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.

Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.

Click to read more

Posted at 8:08 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
February 16, 2009

Barely pages into Emmanuel Jal’s fast-paced memoir about growing up amid modern African warfare, the reader is brought up short by the following sentence: “There was peace in Sudan for the first three years of my life, but I cannot remember it.”

WAR CHILD

A Child Soldier’s Story

By Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies

262 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.
***

It is the first of many stark, declarative statements about a human condition of cruelty and wretchedness that afflicts the lives of countless young people in distant African lands, people whose stories we are unaccustomed to hearing.

Mr. Jal’s tale, of a lengthy and devastating civil war between northern and southern Sudan (not the conflict in Darfur, more familiar to readers today), begins in the mid-1980s when he is somewhere around the age of 7 — though he is not altogether sure because he inhabits a world where time is marked by seasons, including one for hunger, rather than calendars.

At the very outset we are introduced to the boy’s family as they move southward through their country in a convoy of trucks from an area controlled by “African Arabs” to their own ethnic heartland, inhabited by “pure Africans,” in the book’s somewhat overly reductive language of ethnicity.

Four Arab men with angry eyes speak among themselves about a rebellion brewing in the country. It will fail, and the pure Africans who seek to revolt “will remain slaves beneath us just as they are meant to be,” one vows.

Moments later, a fight breaks out when the Arabs steal the meager rations of Emmanuel’s family; after they begin to beat his uncle, the boy throws himself onto one of the men’s ankles and bites it.

The scene ends with a fadeout to unconsciousness. Thus started, time rushes past in this recollected tale of appalling violence, “like sand,” in the words of the narrator, “running through my fingers as I look back.”

The attack in the truck marks Emmanuel’s loss of innocence, and with it is born a burning hatred for Arabs that will drive his behavior, often with tragic consequences, through most of the story.

Emmanuel is taken by his mother from one village to the next in the south, each time under the pretext that the new destination will be safer. There is little respite, though, as Sudan’s relentless army, bent on ethnic cleansing, unfailingly closes in and attacks anew.

At one early stop the boy learns that his father has absented himself from the family to undergo officer training in the rebel southerners’ Sudan People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.).

In quick succession the young boy witnesses the rape of an aunt and then is separated permanently from his mother amid another army onslaught. At the next way station he is taken in with scores of other children who are told they are being moved to Ethiopia to go to school. But once there, he is told he must join the southerners’ rebellion as a fighter. It is his father’s will, the boy is told.

For good measure, an elder intones, “The gun does not know who is old or young.” Emmanuel, for the record, is 9.

Despite these grim contours, the story sometimes has the cloying feel of a fairy tale. This, perhaps, is a risk of the “as told to” genre. Mr. Jal, who received little schooling until well into his teens, after he was rescued by an aid worker, immigrated to England and eventually became a successful musician. His co-writer is Megan Lloyd Davies.

The writing is usually sturdy, and in a middle section that relates a long death march through the south it even rises to an urgency that recalls Jerzy Kozinski’s novel “The Painted Bird.” Elsewhere, though, it sometimes feels dreamily like Technicolor when color would do, and admits insufficient room for reflection on many themes, notably fear and hatred.

Some of the book’s most interesting observations seem almost inadvertent, depriving the reader of context that is important to understanding this conflict, and African conflicts in general. From Biafra to Rwanda, and now Darfur itself, the West has a long tradition of reducing them to good-versus-evil stories bereft not just of nuance but also of politics, history and complexity.

There is no gainsaying Mr. Jal’s experience of terror, but amid his frequent loathing for Arabs the book provides only a glimpse of the geopolitics of the war, with Ethiopia hosting hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees near their common border and allowing rebels to train on its territory.

In one recollection, the young Emmanuel, at the time he thinks he is being sent to school, astutely wonders why the Western aid workers are “nowhere to be found except in food lines or the hospital.” A few pages later he says that “while the khawajas” — a local expression for whites — “thought they ran the camp, it was the S.P.L.A. who were really in charge.”

These words amount to a provocative challenge to the myth of the beneficent and powerful Western humanitarian worker whose impact is thought exclusively good. Too often in African conflicts these workers’ presence has amounted to unacknowledged collusion.

Mr. Jal’s narrative makes another important point, but again almost incidentally. As horrible as civil conflicts are, often their collateral damage is worse. After lusting for vengeance against the Arabs, the boys’ first “battle” is a murderous raid against an Ethiopian village. The next combat is against the Ethiopian state, whose army evicts the rebels.

“War Child” ends with its least compelling material, a made-for-Hollywood account of how Mr. Jal succeeds as a antiwar musician, playing concerts around the world and toasted by the likes of Peter Gabriel. “I’m still a soldier,” he writes, “fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the day I cease.”

Click to read more

Posted at 9:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright © 2010 Howard W. French. All rights reserved. Reproductions of any portion of this Web site only with expressed permission.

A Glimpse of the World is a hirefrank production using Moveable Type and Gallery with XHTML and CSS. Design consulting by pixelflexmedia.

Questions, concerns or comments about the site? Drop us a line.