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Ensuring peaceful elections in Burundi | Insight on Conflict
As Burundi prepares for elections in 2015, political tensions are rising. Local peacebuilding organisations are determined to make sure the elections are not marred by violence. Landry Ninteretse, a Burundian peacebuilder, discusses how they are building an early warning network to monitor and respond to the volatile situation.
EASTERN CONGO
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In November and December 2013 I traveled overland from Kampala to Bukavu and back again – sharing taxis with the people of Kivu. No convoys and certainly no armed escorts. Only a few weeks before, the war with M23 had ended with a military victory for the FARDC supported by the international UN brigade. Some days before I drove from Butembo to Goma, the army dismantled ten road blocks in the Virunga National Park – a hiding place for many armed groups. I knew that insecurity had decreased in Kivu and I had heard that the relationship between the Congolese and their army had improved, but I wanted to see what difference that made to their daily lives.
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African Arguments has come into possession of a copy of the latest United Nations Group of Experts (GoE) report on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The report in full can be viewed here:
RWANDA
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The Impact of Armed Conflict on Economic Performance | Journal of Conflict Resolution
Important gaps remain in the understanding of the economic consequences of civil war. Focusing on the conflict in Rwanda in the early 1990s, and using micro data, this article finds that households and localities that experienced more intense conflict are lagging behind in terms of consumption six years after the conflict, a finding that is robust to taking into account the endogeneity of violence. Significantly different returns to land and labor are observed between zones that experienced low- and high-intensity conflict which is consistent with the ongoing recovery. Distinguishing between civil war and genocide, the findings also provide evidence that these returns, and by implication the process of recovery, depend on the form of violence.
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Paul Farmer’s Graph of the Year: Rwanda’s plummeting child mortality rate || Washington Post
For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. Here's medical anthropologist Paul Farmer's.
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What Col Karegeya said about Rwanda | The Observer -
He was found dead in his Johannesburg hotel, this week. Before this, Col Patrick Karegeya had been jailed twice over alleged indiscipline, desertion and insubordination and stripped of his rank of Colonel. The former Rwandan intelligence chief later fled to exile in 2007. He spoke to Robert Mukombozi in July 2010 about his fallout with President Kagame, escape, and life in South Africa.
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Rwanda : Karegeya, un meurtre trop parfait | Jeuneafrique.com -
L'assassinat de l'ancien patron des services de sécurité rwandais, Patrick Karegeya, soulève de nombreuses questions.
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Rwanda - RDC : scènes de liesse à Goma suite à une rumeur sur la mort de Kagamé | Jeuneafrique.com
À la suite d'une folle rumeur sur la mort du président rwandais Paul Kagamé, des habitants de Goma, dans l'est de la RDC, sont descendus vendredi dans les rues de la ville pour manifester leur joie. Une "fausse nouvelle" rapidement démentie par Kigali. Mais comment et pourquoi celle-ci s'est-elle propagée ? Lire l'article sur Jeuneafrique.com : Grands Lacs | Rwanda - RDC : scènes de liesse à Goma suite à une rumeur sur la mort de Kagamé | Jeuneafrique.com - le premier site d'information et d'actualité sur l'Afrique
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The Shroud Over Rwanda’s Nightmare | NYTimes.com
New details about the mysterious informant known to General Dallaire as “Jean-Pierre” serve as a reminder that history can take a long time to reveal its secrets. Important documents that could shed light on the unresolved mysteries and ambiguities of the Rwanda genocide remain under lock and key. It is now commonly recognized that the international community failed miserably in its efforts to protect the people of Rwanda. But even 20 years later, there is still much to learn. While the new evidence does not absolve the United Nations and Western governments for failing to take timely action, Jean-Pierre’s story illustrates the challenges that continue to vex decision-makers struggling to make sense of unfolding crises in countries like the Central African Republic or South Sudan.
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Toiling to Bring Rwanda Genocide Suspects to Justice | NYTimes.com
Mr. Gauthier and his wife, Dafroza, have been collecting information for 13 years on each of the 24 Rwandan men and women they suspect of having participated in their country’s 1994 genocide. The suspects are members of the Hutu ethnic group who now lead comfortable lives in France and deny any involvement in the slaughter of more than 800,000 people — most of them Tutsi — in just 100 days.
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President: Betray Rwanda, face consequences | US News and World Report
It's a matter of time before those who've betrayed Rwanda face consequences, Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Sunday, nearly two weeks after the killing of a former Rwandan spymaster turned dissident.
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The article assesses the effects of the new domestic cherry market on coffee-growing households in Rwanda using panel data. Findings from combined first differenced with instrumental variable specification and other estimation methods provide evidence that farmers who sell to the cherry market do not increase their expenditures compared to farmers selling to the traditional parchment market. The different time lags in terms of when farmers started selling to the new cherry market may explain the lack of statistically significant differences across the two groups. It is possible that farmers will adjust their expenditure patterns in subsequent periods after year-over-year market trends become more apparent to them.
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War and the Destruction of Human Capital | HICN
The identification of the effect of wars on human capital tends to focus on the population of school age children at the time of the conflict. Our paper introduces a methodology to estimate the effect of war on the stock of human capital by examining the changes in the presence of educated people after the Rwanda genocide. We find that the genocide reduced the stock of human capital in Rwanda severely. The before-and-after results show that highly educated individuals (i.e., those with primary education or more) are “missing” at a rate that is 19.4% higher than the less educated. Moreover, Rwanda's average years of schooling is lower by 0.37 years. When comparisons with Uganda are made, these estimates more than double suggesting that, if anything, the previous finding were biased downwards. Interestingly, when the cross-sectional variation within Rwanda variation in intensity of genocide is exploited there is no evidence of statistically significant differences. This suggests that the losses in the stock of human capital due to the Rwandan genocide were aggregate in nature.
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Paul Kagame’s rivals keep dying, but Clinton and Blair still shake his hand, writes Ian Birrell
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Guest Opinion: Karegeya’s Death – How Media Creates False Heroes | RwandaPostRwandaPost
Western reporting on African events is at best simplistic, relying heavily on stereotypes and rehashed, unverified claims by people of questionable integrity. At worst, it is patronising, adopting a tone not so different from that of Sir Rider Haggard’s novels or Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. The death a few days ago of Patrick Karegeya, a disgraced former Rwandan army officer, in South Africa has brought out both tendencies in the widespread coverage it has received.
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Genocide and constructions of Hutu and Tutsi in radio propaganda / Race & Class
Radio propaganda clearly played a role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which over a million people, mainly Tutsi, were killed. Foreign media and many commentators saw the propaganda as based on ethnic difference. Through an analysis of eighty-six Radio Rwanda and Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines broadcasts, the author shows how reliance on one explanation – be it of ethnicity, politics, ‘race’ or occupation – falls short and oversimplifies. She argues that in fact the broadcasts ‘othered’ the target group by simultaneously drawing on multiple constructions of Hutu and Tutsi identities from many periods in Rwanda’s history.
UGANDA
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Le Rwanda et l’Ouganda accusés de soutien au M23 par un nouveau rapport de l’ONU | RFII
RFI s’est procurée une copie de la version définitive du rapport annuel du groupe d’experts des Nations unies qui enquête sur la situation à l’est de la RDC. Ce document, qui date du 12 décembre dernier, doit être présenté officiellement dans les semaines qui viennent. Comme les précédents rapports, il pointe notamment l’existence d’un soutien du Rwanda et de l’Ouganda aux rebelles du M23.
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Tragedy in Uganda: Joseph Kony massacre survivors - in pictures | The Observer
The Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, its barbarous leader, left psychological as well as physical scars on the people of Uganda. Will Storr meets some of the survivors
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War experiences (WE) and postwar environments (PWE) are associated with mental ill-health. The present study aims to investigate the pathways from WE and PWE to mental ill-health and to define opportunities for intervention through analysis of the war-affected youths study (WAYS) cohort study. WAYS is an ongoing study of a large cohort of former child soldiers being conducted in Uganda. Mental health problems, subjective WE and PWE contexts were assessed by local adaptations of internationally developed measures for use with former child soldiers at least 6 years after the end of the war. PWE are a key determinant of continued mental health problems in former child soldiers. Interventions to reduce long-term mental problems should address both PWE stressors (psychosocial model) and specialised mental healthcare (trauma model) and consider both models of intervention as complementary.
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Decentralization in Uganda: Towards Democratic Local Governance or Political Expediency? | Springer
Since the 1980s and 1990s, a number of developing countries in Africa and the former communist countries in Eastern Europe have embraced fundamental political, economic, administrative, and institutional reforms. In Eastern and Central Europe, winds of change signaled the end of the communist era, while in Sub-Saharan Africa, the calls for democracy and good governance became undeniable. This period also ushered in the realization that prior economic development efforts in the countries have been hampered by the national governments’ monopolization and centralization of administrative, economic, and political fiscal power. Although belatedly, many countries appreciated that radical changes and alterations were necessary in order to decentralize and devolve administrative, fiscal, and political authority to local governments. During the same period, international organizations and donor agencies too, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), had a role in nudging these countries toward the reform path.
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Asian capitalism, primitive accumulation, and the new enclosures in Uganda African Identities
The new scramble for farmlands, similar to the colonial practice of allocating productive land for plantation agriculture, needs analysis. The failure of a dual economy resulted in the emergence of Asian capitalism, progressively changed from a colonial cotton frontier to a more lucrative sugar industry. The existence of relatively balance domestic power relations during British colonialism protected the local indigenous population from land alienation. A maximum cap of 10,000 acres was institutionalized to limit the amount of land owned by non-Africans. However, both Metha and Madhvani companies circumvented the cap to acquire more land, an insight not really being appreciated in the current land grab discourse. Using economic historical analysis, this article reviews how Metha and Madhvani accumulated more land, and compares with their current quest for primitive accumulation of 7100 hectares in Mabira Forest Reserve and 40,000 hectares of communal land in Amuru district.
