Africa

A couple of weeks after a state institution in Tripoli was stormed by gunmen and a suicide bomber in 2018, I was sitting in a Tunis café with a friend who had been working in the building on the day of the terrorist attack. Aymenn believed that the suicide bomber was wandering the premises in the run-up to the tragedy and had walked by his desk. He described a beatific smile on the man’s face. “He was drugged up in some way,” Aymenn said. “And this is the thing that kept running through my head: He definitely wasn’t Libyan.”

While a precarious ceasefire has uneasily prevailed in Libya since the end of its third bout of civil war in 2020, the country is increasingly showing signs of an eventual relapse into conflict today. This may be why many policymakers were quick to hail as a breakthrough the appointment of Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of the United Nations (UN) Support Mission to Libya in September. After two months into the job, SRSG Bathily may be quickly realizing that Libya’s war never abated, and that it is now simply fought by other means in the halls of the UN and corridors of foreign capitals.

When

May 30, 2023
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Where

Zoom Webinar

A report has revealed that the British Special Air Service and the European country’s other special forces have carried out operations clandestinely in Nigeria and 18 other nations for the past 12 years.

This was corroborated by an incident in 2012 when a group of SBS commandos attempted and failed to rescue a Briton and an Italian held by an Islamist group in Nigeria.

The US and other donors should avoid bailing out the country in ways that bolster Abiy’s personal political agenda.

For decades, Ethiopians were accustomed to their politics moving at a glacial pace, punctuated by rare but decisive regime turnover. Citizens didn’t know what their rulers were up to, but they were confident conspiracies hatched in the palace and party headquarters would be executed efficiently.

The truth is that no one was doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy to prevent the bloody power struggle we’re witnessing today.

Sudan is tearing itself apart, and Washington is watching, seemingly unable to do anything to stop the carnage. America’s diplomats lament that the U.S. has lost leverage. The truth is that no one is doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy — coordinating disparate actors.

Given the number of potential spoilers and intruders, the US and other peace brokers urgently need to bring in the United Nations.

Sudan’s war is on the brink of igniting a regional ring of fire. That can be prevented — but it needs the United Nations to play its role.

Countries in West Africa need to collaborate to stem the tide of weapons flowing through Niger.

Arms and ammunition seizures by security forces in Niger’s Agadez and Tahoua regions between January 2021 and February 2022 helped dismantle trafficking networks in the country. This is positive, but what do the seizures say about the extent of the problem? Is arms trafficking from Libya to countries in the south on the rise again?

For a decade, gold exploitation, legal or illegal and official or informal, has known a speedy expansion throughout the Sahel. Its actors are numerous and range from Canadian and Russian multinationals to small informal local operators. Financial incomes and especially jobs creations, even dangerous ones, are considerable for all: private companies, governments and small operators as well as their equipment suppliers often from Middle East. More than other industrial activities, gold mining in the Sahel has a confirmed impact on the health of workers and on the environment. This is especially true of its informal activities. The wells, dug to reach the ore as well as the use of mercury to separate gold from the rock, are mortal and lasting dangers for all: people and nature. For many observers this informal gold exploitation has obvious links with radical groups. Faced with multiple international controls on financial transfers, they therefore have found sources of a local, sustainable and unrestrained funding. Thus, destabilizing the formal local gold exploitation gives them more space and freedom to access local sources of revenues far from the many national and international controls or surveillances of money transfer. The recent murderous evasion of four terrorists from Nouakchott main civilian prison, already a privilege, is a latest power demonstration of these groups various and powerful networks in the Sahel. The paper below, on gold mining in Burkina Faso, shows the importance of this mineral precious but not only for governments and private companies. – Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, President, centre4s.org

Nouakchott — Obvious, that very complex question is now more frequently raised than ever before. It calls for an answer. Ten years of wars – with international forces support – deaths, injuries, displacements and budgets in billions of dollars, have not reduced terrorists presence or expansion. Isn’t it then time to change – analysis, strategy and combat – to openly ask, experts and especially the victims, that is to say the populations?