The 5 Most Secretly Badass Countries
#4. Canada’s Secret Forces Are Great at Murdering Terrorists
O Canada, you’re so adorable with your maple syrup and hockey and “Eh”s and moose. You’re like North America’s great big fuzzy John Candy-shaped teddy bear.
The Reality
Canada’s special operations unit is like a bear alright — a stealthy grizzly bear that has mastered modern weapons and can silently kill you in the night (so we guess it’s more like a group of highly trained humans, which it is, so just ignore the whole bear thing). Not only does Canada have a military, which in itself is probably a surprise to some people, but their anti-terrorist unit is one of the best in the world … a world that never ever attacks Canada.
AU Blames International Indifference for Somalia Famine Deaths
voanews.comAn African Union report says many people are dying in famine-stricken Somalia because of international indifference to their plight. AU officials are urging the United Nations and the donor community to move quickly now that Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked militants are in retreat.
African Union Commission Chairman Jean Ping said Somalia’s famine is needlessly claiming lives that could have been saved if early famine warnings had been heeded.
In a report to the AU Peace and Security Council, however, Ping said recent security improvements in Mogadishu present a fresh opportunity to act on both the humanitarian and security fronts.Aiding Somalis most in need
Briefing journalists after a council meeting Tuesday, Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra said he is encouraged by a surge in attention to Somalia, beginning with a U.N. Security Council meeting scheduled this week. He said the world body must take the lead in creating humanitarian corridors that would allow aid to reach Somalis trapped in the famine zone.
“It is politically necessary and technically doable. We need to put our minds together with a number of key players at the United Nations,” said Lamamra. “U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening a summit on Somalia on 23rd September and that would be the right place to consider all related issues. Humanitarian corridors are necessary given the risk of further degradation of the situation at the humanitarian level.”
Lamamra said the Security Council should seize the moment created by last month’s retreat of al-Qaida-linked fighters from Mogadishu to take the kinds of action that could defeat the militants and allow distribution of life-saving food in the famine zone.
Africa idle as thousands die
timeslive.co.zaby Justice Malala
Emaciated and parentless children, looking like walking skeletons, are arriving in camps in Kenya after walking for days without drink or food. Behind them lie arid lands and warfare.
Don’t bother looking for the story on the front page of your newspaper. It is on page 11, hidden among sexier stories. Our front pages are reserved for earth-shattering events such as the death of Amy Winehouse.
Eleven million people are affected by the famine sweeping across the Horn of Africa. No, you have not heard about it from our politicians. Don’t worry. Black life is cheap. It is the cheapest thing in the world.
We are here again. We are back in the 1970s, when Europe and other Western powers looked at our continent, shook their heads and muttered about African mismanagement. They said they would send “humanitarian aid”, they would send doctors.
We are back in the 1980s. Bob Geldof or someone like him will help put together a song, we will all mutter that “We are the world”, money will be raised and some of it will buy food and medical supplies for those children and their starving families.
But Africa will not lift a finger to help its own. That is because black life is at its cheapest in the regard of African political leaders. Black lives are nowhere as invisible as they are to African leaders. African leaders do not see black people - especially not when they die.
Over the past few weeks President Jacob Zuma has been running a spirited campaign against the Nato bombing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. He has travelled the world, drumming up support for this dictator, a man who has been in power for an astonishing 42 years.
Zuma has found his courage. In defence of Gaddafi, he has managed to stand up to David Cameron of the UK and Barack Obama of the US. He has been a hero in defence of one man.
He has not raised a sweat to highlight the plight of thousands of starving, dying, fellow Africans on the Horn of Africa.
The chairman of the African Union, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, of Equatorial Guinea, cannot be relied on to lift a finger for starving people either. In power since 1979, and accused of rigging elections, jailing opposition activists and running one of the most corrupt, oppressive and undemocratic states in the world, Nguema is exactly what the African Union is not supposed to be about.
Nguema and Zuma coming to the rescue of a discredited, megalomaniac dictator such as Gaddafi is exactly what they would do. How much did Gaddafi contribute to the rise of dictators in Africa? If Gaddafi is deposed by his own people, will the people of Equatorial Guinea start wondering aloud why their own man has been in power for so long?
The Nguemas and Zumas of this world have serious intellectual muscle behind them in support of Gaddafi. Thabo Mbeki, our former president, has been active in beating the drum for Gaddafi, too.
In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Mbeki said: “What happened in Libya might very well be a precursor of what might happen in another country. I think that all of us need to consider this matter, because this is a major disaster.
“We can’t say that we can’t stop these Western powers from acting in the way that they have been acting because they will do it again tomorrow.
“I think we can, provided that we act and they can see that if they take this kind of action, they are going to meet the resistance of the entire African continent.”
Such vigour! Such energy! How about showing the West that, with our massive mineral wealth, with our intellectual might, we are capable of helping our own people dying on the Horn of Africa?
It is these same men whose voices are quiet while the people of Africa die of hunger. You are likely to hear from Nguema, Zuma and Mbeki when they start accusing “the West” of wasting time instead of helping. Their silence over the past few months while they have wasted jet fuel defending Gaddafi - who, by the way, is being attacked by his own people - will not be remembered.
- I have lied to you in this article. South Africa cares for dying fellow Africans. On Friday, our government pledged a massive R1-million for famine relief.
“We are planning to give [about] R1-million,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Marius Fransman.
That is less than the price of Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s R1.1-million car. See how greatly our government values black life?
IMAN on Somali Crisis via Independent Newspaper UK:
Sunday, August 7th, 2011
Until last week, I had not let my 11-year-old daughter Alexandria see the pictures of the food crisis in my home country of Somalia.
I didn’t think she was ready. Finally, I showed them to her, and she cried. No wonder: thousands of children arrive at feeding centres having not eaten or drunk for days.
My daughter cries, but I am angry. We know how to save those children’s lives – and there’s a huge aid effort under way. Yet it is incomprehensible to me is that while children are dying, there is a huge shortfall in funding for the emergency response.
I was born poor in Mogadishu but I never knew poverty and never went to bed hungry. If there was no money, someone in the community would bring home food. But the Somalia I remember from growing up is no longer there
Read More here
African Union demands 'immediate' halt to Libya attacks | AFP
google.comThe African Union’s panel on Libya Sunday called for an “immediate stop” to all attacks after the United States, France and Britain launched military action against Moamer Kadhafi’s forces.
After a more than four-hour meeting in the Mauritanian capital, the body also asked Libyan authorities to ensure “humanitarian aid to those in need,” as well as the “protection of foreigners, including African expatriates living in Libya.”
It underscored the need for “necessary political reforms to eliminate the causes of the present crisis” but at the same time called for “restraint” from the international community to avoid “serious humanitarian consequences.” [read more]
Haiti to join the African Union?
blog.foreignpolicy.comIt could be happening soon, reports Afua Hirsch for the Guardian:
And sure enough, in January the African Union is poised to admit Haiti as a member, which if it happens, will be the first time any nation with no geographic connection to the continent of Africa will have joined.
More than any other Caribbean nation, Haiti occupies a special place in the affection of many Africans and members of the African diaspora. The country endured decades of still prescient punishment for daring to overthrow its slave masters, becoming the world’s first independent black nation in 1804 – the slave rebellion’s leader Toussaint L’Ouverture hailed from Benin. Haiti used its independence and membership of the United Nations in the post-war period to back decolonisation during the fraught period of African independence.
And now it has a level of poverty gives it more in common with many African nations than its wealthier Caribbean neighbours, who have been known to regard Haitan refugees as a nuisance. After the 2010 earthquake, the Democratic Republic of Congo – which struggles to finance its own budget – pledged $2.5m in aid to the devastated country. Senegal offered land and places at its university to Haitan students. As the African Union chairman, Jean Ping, said: “We have attachment and links to that country. The first black republic … that carried high the flame of liberation and freedom for black people and has paid a heavy price for so doing.”
Some of the more practical factors include the potential for Haiti to participate in intra-African trade and receive investment from some of the continent’s relatively booming economies.
It would be a geographical oddity, to be sure, though it makes more sense than Panama adopting the euro.
African Union Accuse Libyan Rebels of Killing Blacks Indiscriminately
ibtimes.comThe African Union (AU) will not recognize the Transitional national Council (TNC) of Libya as the legitimate government of that country because they charge that rebels in Libya have been indiscriminately killing black Africans, confusing innocent migrant workers with mercenaries.
Could be John Baird’s Neville Chamberlain moment.
Read This
inside.org.auReport on how corruption is harming the attempt to achieve the MDGs (tweeted by the UNDP). Ghana example inside. Very serious.
Clinton Tells African Leaders Economies Would Fail Without Women’s Toil
bloomberg.com
Hillary Clinton’s speech was met with silence from the male-dominated envoys at the African Union as she criticized the continents aging autocrats. The mood changed when the U.S. Secretary of State turned her attention to women.
“The women of Africa are the hardest working women in the world,” said Clinton, addressing the 53-nation body in Addis Ababa on June 13. Interrupted by loud cheers from the visitors’ area in the upper gallery in the back of the hall, she exclaimed: “If all the women in Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town, decided they would stop working for a week, the economies of Africa would collapse.”
If African women were given equal access as men to vocational training and technology, the continent’s economy would expand by at least 40 percent, according Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The disparities are most evident in agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of employment and 30 percent of the gross domestic product of sub-Saharan Africa. About 100 million women in Africa use only rudimentary farm tools. That limits them to cultivating at most an hectare (2.5 acres) of land, which they spend almost 2,000 hours a year weeding.
“Weeding is literally breaking the backs of African women,” said Juma author of “The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa.”
After all that, as much as 45 percent of what they produce is wasted because they cannot store their crops adequately or access markets, Juma said in an interview.
Zambian BusinesswomenFor Clinton, the plight of women has helped drive an aggressive travel schedule that her office says has clocked up more miles than any of her predecessors. She’s gone 567,305 miles, visiting 85 countries in 232 days on the road since taking office in January 2009. She makes it a point to meet local women in impoverished nations.
In Zambia, which hadn’t hosted a secretary of state since Henry Kissinger in 1976, Clinton was met by a singing and dancing chorus of local businesswomen who had taken part in a U.S.-funded program to train female entrepreneurs on how to tap financing and export their goods.
“Have you been to a market? Have you looked at fields being tilled? Have you watched children being raised?” Clinton told her hosts at a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia to discuss a U.S. trade agreement with 37 African countries. “Women are holding up half the economy already.”
Financing of the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur
The UN Secretary-General has published is his report, A/66/596 on the budget performance of the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) for the period from 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2011.
UN Resources:
Photo: UN Photo Library, Photo # 424423
Al-Shabaab Don't Stand A Chance Against Burundi's Hardened AMISOM Troops
The future isn’t looking too good for Al-Shabaab now that the combat-hardened Amisom troops are in the game. It’s arguable that the only reason Al-Shabaab was able to survive all this time was because the African Union’s rules of engagement didn’t allow Amisom troops to launch strikes on their enemies—but since that isn’t an issue anymore, it’s safe to say that the militia group is in big trouble.
Unlike the US and Ethiopian troops that tried to take them out before, the Burundian and Ugandan Amisom forces, who’ve been hardened by a 13-year war back home, enjoy widespread support among the Somali people, and that’ll be a huge advantage since approval for Al-Shabaab is at an all-time low.
Just to make matters even worse, Al-Shabaab tried to scare off African Union troops by posting photos of dead soldiers online. Needless to say the attempt was a total flop, only pushing the AU to send even more troops into the country. Looks like it’s time for Al-Shabaab to drop the guns and start digging their own grave ‘cause that’s where they’re gonna be laying in a few months.
