Than Shwe's Shakeup Has His Subordinates Shaking

Image by thomaswanhoff via Flickr

By BAMARGYI

Saturday, July 3, 2010

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Snr-Gen Than Shwe is facing a mutiny among his subordinates. Although no rebellion is expected, there are growing signs of discontent among his cabinet ministers. The reason—they have been betrayed by their boss.

Than Shwe quietly ordered his uniformed cabinet ministers to resign from their army posts. In Burma, shedding the uniform means losing protection, security and livelihood. Like it or not, army uniforms are a symbol of authority in Burma. Those who wear them always get priority over those who don't; they are respected and can expect easy cooperation from others. Suddenly, they will lose that privilege.

Another reason Than Shwe's cabinet ministers are upset is that the army chief is holding the cards for the one-quarter of representatives in the People's Assembly who will be drawn from the ranks of the military. They wanted to be in that 25 percent to secure a place for themselves in the parliament. Now, they are on their own. They will have to contest the election, and unless Than Shwe supports them with some dirty deals from behind the scenes, they are sure to lose. Once this happens, they will be down the drain.

These are people who reached high positions through loyalty to their army bosses, nothing else. They are almost completely devoid of professionalism. Look at what happened to our country under their rule for more than four decades. Their track record reflects their total lack of creativity. But those who keep quiet about what is happening are rewarded with many privileges that are unthinkable in any transparent society. These privileges have made them very rich, and they want to keep their stolen goods forever. Now, however, they can only watch helplessly as they are quietly kicked out of their positions.

Furthermore, if they intend to run for parliament, they will have to declare their assets to the Election Commission. But that would be suicidal, because it would immediately reveal the extent of their corruption. No minister would ever dare to disclose what he actually owns. Even their houses are worth far more than they could ever afford on their official salaries. How could they ever account for the 10 luxury cars that are the bare minimum for anyone in a position of power to possess?

They can smell danger. They know that Than Shwe can easily find ways to put them in jail indefinitely. Look at what happened to Gen Khin Nyunt and his cronies. So they know they're in a very precarious position right now. But they also know that if they show any signs of rebellion, they're doomed.

But there is also some peril in this situation for the senior general himself. For every step of the election process, the Election Commission has the final say, subject only to the orders of Than Shwe. But this means that he has to instruct the commission to rig the vote in such a way as to ensure that all of his lieutenants get their assigned places. If he doesn't go about this very carefully, he could be hoisted by his own petard.

To change the system without changing people is a dangerous game. Late dictator Gen Ne Win tried it, with disastrous results. Unless Than Shwe can put a truly democratic system in place before he leaves the scene, his future is not safe at all. His deputies are the same fish in the same ponds; but if they ever find themselves in positions of real power someday, they may think nothing of turning on their old master. After all, these are people who have risen to high positions by concealing the depths of their ambition, much as Than Shwe himself did through most of his career. Treachery would be second nature to them.

More immediately, Than Shwe faces a few other obstacles if he plans to proceed with his rigged election.

On the ethnic front, his efforts to convince the armed cease-fire groups to transform themselves into border guard forces has met with a coordinated rejection from all the major ethnic armies. Moreover, China has said that it won't turn a blind eye if the Burmese army launches an offensive against armed groups based along the border between the two countries. In any case, the Burmese army is in no state to wage a major war with anybody. If they fight, they will lose.

Despite the forced dissolution of the National League for Democracy, Than Shwe's attempts to silence the democratic opposition once and for all are also faring rather poorly. Aung San Suu Kyi remains a hugely charismatic presence, with or without her party. The US, EU and now Asean have all indicated that Than Shwe's carefully orchestrated “democratic” transition will lack credibility without her participation. In other words, if he really wants to move on, he will need Suu Kyi's blessings.

The economy is something else that Than Shwe can't afford to ignore forever. Corruption is rampant and is only likely to get worse if the same old crooked generals and their cronies continue to control the country's assets. Chronic mismanagement of Burma's resources could become a flashpoint for social unrest, and could even weaken Than Shwe's hold over the military. No patriotic citizen, soldier or civilian, can be happy to see the country falling ever deeper into poverty while a handful of dirty officials become obscenely wealthy.

To our wild guess, the election will be held in October, during the school holidays, with schoolteachers as poll watchers. They are presently being trained in various places. An election law stipulates that representatives of candidates will be watching during the vote count. In other words, if the election is fair as it was in 1990, the ex-minister candidates will lose. If their dismissal from army positions was a deliberate move to eliminate them once and for all, Than Shwe is moving in the right direction. The next step we should see is the release of political prisoners and Suu Kyi. If we see Suu Kyi’s involvement in the next ruling council, Than Shwe will be remembered as a true national hero.

We hope the senior general will seize this opportunity for the sake of our country.

Limbo World: Dispatches from Countries That Do Not Exist

They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them.

BY GRAEME WOOD | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

KURDISTAN: A shepherd tends to his flock in Iraqi Kurdistan. Few would-be countries have reached a happier state of limbo than this relatively stable Iraqi region.

On my most recent visit to the Republic of Abkhazia, a country that does not exist, I interviewed the deputy foreign minister, Maxim Gundjia, about the foreign trade his country doesn't have with the real countries that surround it on the Black Sea. Near the end of our chat, he paused, looked down at my leg, and asked why I was bleeding on his floor. I told him I had slipped a few hours before and ripped a hole in my shin, down to the bone, about the size of a one-ruble coin. Blood had soaked through the gauze, and I needed stitches. "You can go to our hospital, but you will be shocked by the conditions," Gundjia said. So he pointed me to the building next door, where in about 20 minutes I had my leg propped up on a dark wooden desk and was wincing at the sting of a vigorous alcohol-swabbing by the health minister himself. I was not accustomed to such personalized government service. Fake countries have to try harder, I thought, and wondered whether it would be pressing my luck to ask for the finance minister to personally refund my vat and for the transportation minister to confirm my bus ticket back to Georgia, which is to say, back to reality.

Abkhazia, along with a dozen or so other quasi-countries teetering on the brink of statehood, is in the international community's prenatal ward. If present and past suggest the future, most such embryonic countries will end stillborn, but not for lack of trying. The totems of statehood are everywhere in these wannabe states: offices filled with functionaries in neckties, miniature desk flags, stationery with national logos, and, of course, piles of real bureaucratic paperwork -- all designed to convince foreign visitors like me that international recognition is deserved and inevitable. Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian separatist enclave within Azerbaijan, issues visas with fancy holograms and difficult-to-forge printing. Somaliland, the comparatively serene republic split from war-wasted Somalia, prints its own official-looking currency, the Somaliland shilling, whose smallest denomination is so worthless that to bring cash to restock their safes, money-changers need to use draft animals.

These quasi-states -- which range from decades-old international flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Ossetia -- control their own territory and operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real countries, and then hope to become them.

In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today's Limbo World countries stay in political purgatory for longer -- the ones in this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15 years -- representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the permanent second-class state.

This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these quasi-states' continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan, if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift capital. The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

My tours of Limbo World over the last few years have taken me around the full spectrum of these enclaves, from the hopeless chatter of virtual Khalistan, a Sikh separatist state that talks a big game and has a president in exile, but not a postage stamp of actual land, to the earnest dysfunction of Somaliland to the slick-running, optimistically almost oil-state of Kurdistan. Each of these would-be countries is, in its own way, an object lesson in the limits of statehood.

PHOTO BY BENJAMIN LOWY/VII

ABKHAZIA: A popular Soviet holiday destination, Abkhazia’s coast is now littered with rusted boats and scrap metal.

They are also ghosts of war-zones future -- most have enemies keen to take back the breakaway territory -- and past. They represent the wars that time forgot, frozen in unresolved crisis because it is either too convenient to keep them that way or too problematic for the Real World countries on their borders to come to a more lasting solution. Limbo, it turns out, is useful because it lets actual countries punish each other by proxy and allows them to exact loyalty and tribute from the quasi-countries dependent on their patronage. If Limbo status didn't exist, someone would invent it.

Unfortunately for these states, winning the full Rand-McNally, General Assembly treatment is more difficult than merely hiring a professional-quality printer to start cranking out the passports. Carving land from other countries is nearly always bloody and in most cases leaves borders that bleed for decades. Somaliland and Abkhazia have existed for almost 20 years, with little indication that widespread recognition is imminent. Indeed, the rare successful cases these days of countries making the leap from troubled enclave to independent nation have pretty much bypassed Limbo entirely. Think East Timor and Kosovo, which jumped from brutal occupation to U.N. administration to independence to become two of the first new countries of the 2000s. The Limbo countries tend to start with violence and then get stuck in the next stage: a path that leads on and on and on, apparently to nowhere.

The Abkhazian case is typical. Abkhazia (pop. 190,000) occupies a stretch of Georgia's Black Sea coast, an area whose beaches, pine forests, mountains, and lakes once attracted Soviet leaders Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev for holidays. A war in the early 1990s separated Abkhazia from Georgia, killing thousands on each side in the first 13 months and sending 100,000 ethnic Georgians and Mingrelians fleeing from their homes in Abkhazia.

Midwifing Abkhazia's rebellion was Russia, the Abkhazians' ally and guarantor. Georgia was one of the ex-Soviet states most eager to explore alliances with the West, and Abkhazia was Russia's way to make Georgia suffer for its infidelity. Russia sent support to Abkhazia, opened the Abkhazian border for trade, and gradually took steps just short of annexation. In 2006, it granted Russian passports to all Abkhazians, and finally -- once Abkhazia had become entirely reliant on Russia -- it became the first country to recognize Abkhazian independence. According to Abkhazians, Georgia planned to invade in the summer of 2008, and only an influx of Russian troops into Abkhazia at the last minute led Georgia to make a play -- ultimately doomed, due to Russia's surprisingly strong response -- for South Ossetia, another Russian client state inside Georgia, instead. The uneasy standoff meant Russia never formally annexed Abkhazia from Georgia, and in return the Abkhazians made sure the Russians never needed to annex them, because they do Russia's bidding anyway. This guarantee has emboldened the Abkhazians, who taunt the Georgian army just across the line of control. "The first Georgian soldier who crosses the Inguri River will be shot," Gundjia vowed when I visited in the fall.

As the health minister, a lapsed dermatologist named Zurab Marshaniya, rinsed the clotted blood from my leg, he sighed in frustration at his government's predicament. I told him how impressed I was at the pace of Abkhazia's return to its old Soviet status as a tourist resort. When I last came to the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi in 2006, the one-time jewel of the boardwalk, the Hotel Abkhazia, was bombed out and abandoned to weeds. Now it was half-repaired, and its rival, the Ritsa Hotel, had opened its suites to the richest of Abkhazia's 1 million annual visitors, nearly all of them Russian. (Ritsa's Room 208, from whose balcony a vacationing Leon Trotsky addressed a crowd on the occasion of Lenin's death, goes for about $150 a night.) Abkhazia's hospitals may have been "shocking," but the city as a whole looked no worse from the outside than a down-market cottage town on Lake Superior. Marshaniya was all shrugs and said as long as Georgia still intended to march back into Sukhumi, the gains were fragile.

In the meantime, Abkhazia's foreign policy is based on courting anyone who might recognize its sovereignty. Daniel Ortega's government in Nicaragua obliged in 2008, likely influenced by old Soviet ties, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez formally acknowledged Abkhazia in 2009. Except for Russia, though, Abkhazia has no real formal relations, and its diplomats are strictly limited in where they can go. The United States, a close ally of Mikheil Saakashvili's government in Georgia, denies visa requests from Abkhazian government officials, and other states such as India have been persuaded to do the same.

PHOTO BY NARAYAN MAHON

ABKHAZIA: An abandoned apartment block in the town of Dranda.

That leaves Abkhazia represented instead by quirky volunteers like George Hewitt, a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies who has made a specialty of Abkhazia's culture and its language, Abkhaz, a linguistic freak show with 67 consonants and only one vowel. Hewitt knows Abkhaz as well as any non-Abkhazian, and he writes impassioned and informed essays on the Abkhazian question. But he is very much a scholar, not a political strategist. I visited Hewitt before my first visit to Abkhazia in 2006 and asked whether he needed anything from Georgia, where he is decidedly non grata. I thought he might like a book, or a postcard. He said there had been calumnies against him in the Mingrelian-language newspapers; could I investigate? Alas, I could not.

Encouraging states like Abkhazia to flourish and proliferate has created precisely the kind of second-class statehood, with uncertain rights and responsibilities in the international system, that diplomacy was designed over the last several centuries to avoid. The Peace of Westphalia established an international order of fixed boundaries in 1648 and made no provisions for the existence of functionally independent enclaves in Brandenburg-Prussia, say, that France could use for leverage. The whole point was to come to conclusions about what was sovereign territory and agree to knock off the warfare and ambiguity. That was in part for the welfare of those enclaves, so they were not trapped in uncertainty and used as proxies -- or worse, neocolonies -- by first-class states. But Limbo World suffers that exact fate today.

Ethiopia, smarting from the loss of its actual colony Eritrea two decades ago, effectively adopted an unofficial second one on the northern edge of Somalia, called Somaliland. Somaliland was among the most noisome and rebellious areas in Somalia under the dictatorship of Muhammad Siad Barre. In the late 1980s, Siad Barre killed hundreds of thousands in bombings of its main city, Hargeisa, and the countryside. When Siad Barre fell, Somaliland rapidly asserted itself as an independent state, and it is now approaching 20 years of relative peace. The coastline that Ethiopia lost in Eritrea it has effectively gained back in Somaliland, with the port of Berbera now a key trade valve into the Gulf of Aden. Ethiopia's support for Somaliland also represents a perpetual outrage to the Somalis of Mogadishu. While continuing to fight among themselves for nearly two decades, most factions agree that Ethiopia is a mortal external threat, especially because it invaded Somalia proper in 2006.

Like the Abkhazians, the Somalilanders are as helpful as they are hapless, as I found from the moment I stepped into their small representation office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. At most African embassies, the diplomats regard visa applicants as captive sources of revenue. But rather than a droopy-lidded kleptocrat, the Somaliland office produced a slim, energetic young man with an endearing eagerness to show off his country. He came out to stamp my passport and sat down next to me to sketch a map of the complex land journey between Addis and Hargeisa. "They grow the best khat here," he said, referring to the mildly narcotic chew popular in the region. His index finger traced a proud little circle on an area just on the Ethiopian side of the border. For $20, he pressed into my passport a full-page visa, as official-looking as any in Africa.

On the journey he described, there was an emphatic lack of officialdom, a studied denial by Ethiopia that any border existed at all. At Jijiga, 10 hours from Addis and the last big town before I would cross into the nonexistent country of Somaliland, I had to hunt down a police officer to get him to inscribe my passport with a note confirming I had exited Ethiopia legally. This was a border that existed only by request.

Once on the Somaliland side it took about two hours of off-road driving -- through hills of desert scrub, past herders crouching in huts made of discarded U.N. and usaid flour sacks -- before I met anything resembling a sign of government. At the edge of Hargeisa, a hilly town whose lights were the one glowing dot on the horizon as I drove, two men with machine guns intercepted the car to demand my papers. This, I thought, would be my cue to do what one does at so many other African borders, which is to wink and offer smokes and a small bribe in exchange for safe passage. But before I could phrase my tentative offer, they found the inky blue stamp in my passport and waved me through, asking only that I register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the next day.

Unlike Abkhazia, Somaliland did not exactly enchant me as a place beautiful enough to die for. Perhaps it was the heat -- well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with nothing to drink, due to strict enforcement of the Ramadan fast -- or perhaps the buggy eyes and green-flecked teeth of the khat-chewers outside my hotel room each night. The standard meal, spaghetti and ground camel meat, eaten with the hands, made clear why I had never been to a Somali restaurant outside Somalia.

PHOTO BY NARAYAN MAHON

SOMALILAND: The port at Berbera, used as a trading center by Ethiopia.

The Somalilanders, of course, had already done quite a bit of dying for their land and for their spaghetti, and they missed no chance to tell me how cynical and cruel the international community had been by not recognizing their state. At the foreign ministry satellite office set up to stamp in the rare tourist, two excitable Somalilanders pointed out that Somaliland had multiparty elections, a free press, and an anti-terrorism policy that the government enforced with zeal. It had done all this without recognition and without help from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or any other agency that requires an international rubber stamp to operate. If this was illegitimacy, other African governments should try it.

And in any case, what was the alternative? A reconstituted Somalia would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world's most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of sharia law.

Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the region. Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League member, sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The African Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade separatist movements that if they just fight hard enough, they'll eventually get their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by pointing out that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as surely as Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks whether peaceful and responsible democracy isn't something worth incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia, Somaliland's closest regional ally, hasn't bestowed recognition, and there is no sign it intends to.

Critics charge Limbo Worlders with having things backward, even practicing a form of cargo cultism. Just as New Guinean tribes built crude airstrips to lure planes bearing valuable cargo, quasi-countries build crude foreign ministries in the vain hopes of luring ambassadors bearing credentials from London, Paris, and Washington. These critics say Limbo World countries are fatally misled about how independence is supposed to work: Recognition precedes, rather than follows, the creation of an actual state. The list of Limbo World alumni -- countries that gained independence by acting like independent states first, and then getting recognition -- is small, and the few examples of partial success (Kosovo is stuck on 63 recognizing countries, Taiwan on 23) suggest Limbo is a permanent condition when it is not a fatal one.

Indeed, once Limbo World countries have reached a certain level of development, many of them start considering the possibility that independence isn't the brass ring it once appeared. Abkhazia might have entered that phase. After Georgia suffered an embarrassing defeat trying to reclaim South Ossetia (the other quasi-state within its borders) in 2008, Abkhazia became emboldened and developed its trade and infrastructure significantly with Russian backing. It expanded its sea trade, despite a blockade vigorously enforced by the Georgian navy. (Occasional Turkish merchant vessels break the blockade by sailing to the Russian port of Sochi and then skirting the coast until they reach Sukhumi.)

No quasi-state has reached a happier Limbo status than Iraqi Kurdistan. Throughout the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan was riven by internal divisions, and at times its senior leaders viewed each other as greater bogeymen than Saddam Hussein. In 1996, the Kurdistan Democratic Party even allied with Hussein against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (puk) and invited his forces into Irbil to flush out the puk. The factions reached an icy truce in 2002, with the understanding that they would cooperate to dislodge Hussein and achieve eventual independence.

Nominally, independence remains the goal. Indeed, suspicions that Iraqi Kurdish politicians have discarded that goal have done much to alienate them from their people. But since my first visit there in 2003, the rationale for full independence has become less clear, just as the apparatus of the Kurdish state has become slicker and more sophisticated. On that first visit, the Kurdistan government asserted itself mostly through the indelicate searches by its peshmerga militia, which daily tore apart my luggage and rifled through it with ruthless attention.

PHOTO BY STEFANO DE LUICI/VII

ABKHAZIA: Doctors in Abkhazia’s Gulripsh hospital discuss a new TB case.

Within a few years the peshmerga had become smoother, and the government more comfortable with its fate. Barham Salih, the puk's representative in Washington, led the Kurds' successful push to get the United States to dislodge Hussein. He eventually became a deputy prime minister of post-Hussein Iraq, and puk chief Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president. In Washington, they retained Barbour Griffith & Rogers, the Republican-affiliated lobbying firm, and their presentation to the outside world became even cannier, with less mention of phrases like "autonomy" that might spook the Turks next door.

I crossed into Kurdistan from Turkey at midnight, on foot, and got a big stamp indicating "Republic of Iraq-Kurdistan Region." On either side of the border, trucks were lined up hundreds deep, loaded with goods and ready to pay a hefty sum in duties -- money destined not for Baghdad but for the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Turkey was a happy partner in this looting of the transport paths, eager to watch Iraq's Kurdish leadership enrich itself as long as it stopped short of asking the world to treat its borders as reality.

When I crossed the southern edge of Kurdistan, where Arab Iraq and its then-horrific carnage began, the only indication of the change in administration was the different color uniform, light blue for the Arab Iraqi police in lieu of the desert camouflage of the peshmerga. In the early days after Hussein's toppling, the border had been a vigorously policed checkpoint that separated Kurdistan unmistakably from its neighbor. Now the Kurds were less zealous in marking the line, as if to say: Feel the fear as you leave the safety of our territory and enter the land of Arabia and of car bombs. We don't need to mark our border on the map because the chill in your spine is marking it for us.

By 2006, the word "independence" was everywhere whispered but nowhere spoken. Instead, Kurdish officials brought me to eat at the buffet of the new hotel they called the Sheraton (not really a Sheraton, but this was not really a country either), to inhale the fresh paint fumes at the clean and orderly international airport, to ogle the tracts of luxury apartments under development by a Turkish construction firm. Pushing the independence issue would have seemed gauche, with Limbo so profitable.

Throughout my travels in Limbo World, the conversation would often swing back to Uruguay, where a 1933 agreement was sealed that is today an article of faith to Limbo Worlders. The Montevideo Convention established a theory of statehood that treated countries like starfish, capable of surviving after having their limbs hacked off and able to sprout new and independent states from those hacked-off limbs.

It has come to be known as the declarative theory of statehood: the idea that a state is any entity with a fixed territory and population, and a government that can enter into relations with other states. Needless to say, if the letter of this convention, to which the United States is a signatory, were followed, nearly every country in Limbo World would immediately convert into full nationhood and every rebel group on the planet would be scrambling to print business cards for its hastily convened diplomatic corps. Like many sweeping declarations of foreign policy, the Montevideo Convention has been the victim of wise neglect nearly ever since its signing. Still, the opposite extreme in international relations -- giving existing countries a veto over every self-determination movement -- hardly recommends itself, and whatever happy medium exists between the two has not yet been reached.

Some in Limbo World are at least temporarily content with this ambiguity. In his Sukhumi office, Maxim Gundjia pointed out that being Russia's pawn is no less embarrassing than being America's pawn, like Saakashvili. And in any case, recognition is overrated, as long as the quasi-state's economy is poor. "What's the use of being recognized like Afghanistan?" he asked. "They have the first flag at the U.N. square, but who wants to live there?"

That evening, as I limped along the Black Sea boardwalk (gingerly, to keep my leg from tearing back open), it was easy to see his point. Indeed, it wasn't obvious why Abkhazia was pursuing recognition so fervently, when even if it achieved legitimacy it would probably have to rely on Russia for most everything, including security. For now, a glance at the shore showed that Abkhazia had more than most real countries: the beauty of a moonlit sea, and the beginnings of prosperity from a flow of tourists glad to disgorge their rubles to buy fancy hotel rooms, cheap wine, and rich Caucasian pastries. The Russian holiday-makers who walked past me were a constant reminder that the desire for true independence, from Georgia and from Russia, was not a realistic one, no matter how hard Abkhazians worked to achieve it. But as I looked out on the scene, the moonbeams caught a ship in the distance, and the uncertainty over whether that ship flew a Georgian flag made me understand, for a second, what keeps them trying.

In Anbar Province, New Leadership, but Old Problems Persist - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By SAM DAGHER

RAMADI, Iraq — It has been just more than seven months since a mainly tribal coalition came to power here in Anbar Province, but already its leaders are being accused by many of doing little for most citizens while seeking to enrich themselves through sweetheart business deals.

“The majority of them are after personal gains,” said Sheik Ghazi Sami al-Abed, a prominent local businessman recently. “Few are looking to rebuild the country.”

The provincial elections at the end of January were supposed to enfranchise people in this staunchly Sunni Arab province, once a stronghold for insurgents and militants linked to Al Qaeda. After almost all the Anbar Sunni tribes boycotted the previous elections in 2005, this year’s voting was seen as a crucial way to bring them into government and perhaps ease tensions with the Shiite-dominated national government in Baghdad.

But extensive interviews with Anbar residents show that they see very little difference between their new government and the previous provincial council. That council, widely deemed illegitimate by many boycotting Sunnis, was accused so vehemently of corrupt and dysfunctional rule that it created fears of renewed intertribal warfare.

“They are thugs; they became politicians and now they have a lot of money,” said another Anbar businessman about the province’s current political leaders. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The discontent in Anbar is coming at a critical time, as the United States has reduced its military presence here significantly and completely stopped spending money on new projects despite the province’s “enormous” infrastructure needs, said one senior American official. It was American cash and contracts that spurred most tribal leaders to renounce the insurgency and switch alliances to the American side almost three years ago, in what is now known as the Sunni Awakening — a model the United States is seeking to replicate with tribes in Afghanistan.

In the absence of American patronage, the worrisome question in Anbar, which makes up roughly one-third of Iraq’s territory, is whether public dissatisfaction coupled with political and economic rivalries between the tribal leaders in power and those on the outside could lead to large-scale violence.

“The structure of modern local governance including transparency and accountability are at variance with the traditional expectations of tribal leaders,” said James Soriano, who leads the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Team based on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Ramadi. “There is a potential for a recipe for trouble if the pie is shrinking.”

Mr. Soriano spoke before his expected departure from Ramadi this month.

Anbar’s test also comes at a time when insurgents appear to be regrouping. Almost no day goes by without an attack or a bombing in Falluja, the province’s other main city. Several pro-American tribal leaders have been killed, and there have been a number of deadly bombings in Ramadi and other cities like Haditha and Qaim since July.

The picture is further complicated by a still uneasy relationship between this province, once among the most loyal to Saddam Hussein, and the Shiite-led national government. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki appears to be pitting Sunni leaders against one another and finding tribal allies here who can bolster his standing as a national leader and help him in his bid for re-election in January.

In addition to money spent by the Americans in Anbar, the previous provincial government received hundreds of millions of dollars from the central government. Much of it is believed to have been lost to corruption and mismanagement.

Among the new political leaders coming under increased criticism is the province’s governor, Qasim Abed al-Fahadawi.

In the absence of new American development aid, dwindling as the United States has urged the government in Baghdad to fill the breach, Mr. Fahadawi has followed the Western model and turned to the private sector for investment and help. The governor was even recognized for his efforts as “global personality of the year” by the London-based magazine Foreign Direct Investment.

But increasingly, the governor’s business affiliations are sounding alarm bells inside the province and elsewhere.

In a recent interview, Mr. Fahadawi made no secret of favoring a small clique of his tribal and business friends over others when it comes to future investments and contracts in the province. His relationship with Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, who two years ago took the lead role in the American-backed tribal Awakening movement, has caused hard feelings here.

Sheik Ahmed has turned the Awakening movement into the dominant political party here, leading the coalition that runs the Anbar provincial council. Many of the two men’s opponents say that Mr. Fahadawi has basically served as Sheik Ahmed’s money manager, with the two combining forces to use their political power to control how business contracts in Anbar are distributed to outside companies.

Both men insist that their business dealings are completely aboveboard, and Mr. Fahadawi says he has helped bring in investment and jobs that have helped revitalize local industries.

One of the biggest deals the men have been involved in is an effort to bring in two companies from the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum, to develop Anbar’s giant Akkaz gas field. Sheik Ahmed has taken the lead in the negotiations, and the two companies have committed to helping create as many as 100,000 jobs in the province, Mr. Fahadawi said.

But the men are circumventing the Oil Ministry’s plan to put the contract up for general bidding, instead appealing directly to Mr. Maliki for support. It was one of the main topics Sheik Ahmed and Mr. Maliki discussed when the prime minister visited Anbar this summer. Almost 175 sheep were slaughtered and the meat was distributed in Mr. Maliki’s honor, according to local residents.

Opposing tribal leaders in Anbar see the deal as an attempt by Sheik Ahmed to use national backing to cement his position as the province’s de facto chieftain and to freeze them out of lucrative business interests. They say he already has a dangerous amount of control over the local government and security forces.

“There will be a bloody struggle if he takes it all,” warned Sheik Ghazi, the prominent local businessman.

Another Anbar business magnate, Sheik Tariq Khalaf al-Abdullah, who was instrumental in introducing American forces to the local power structure at the beginning of the Awakening movement, also is fighting the deal. Sheik Tariq is now based in Amman, Jordan, but he has been trying to galvanize the opposition within Anbar.

In an interview in his plush office in Amman, he wondered why the Americans were not taking a bigger role in monitoring Anbar’s affairs. “I am surprised how they could withdraw before tying the loose ends,” he said.

Sheik Tariq established a tribal council and businesses for Anbar’s sheiks that benefited from American money and largesse when it was more abundant in return for allegiance.

Mr. Soriano, the leader of the State Department reconstruction team, said that the United States would continue to assist and advise Anbar’s government but that it would be up to Iraqis to resolve their differences and determine their priorities.

“A nice way to exit Iraq would be for a tribal society to support the structure of local government and local security forces to prevent a setback,” he said.

As Karzai Gains in Vote Count, Afghans Brace for Unrest - washingtonpost.com

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

KABUL, Sept. 1 -- As vote tallies keep dribbling out from Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, it appears increasingly likely that President Hamid Karzai will reach the 50 percent plus one vote that he needs to win reelection.

But what will happen after that is far from clear, and tension and suspicion have mounted as the vote count drags on amid widening charges of electoral fraud. Afghans are confused, jittery and bracing for street violence -- or at least a protracted period of political polarization and drift.

Legally, the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission will have the last word on whether the fraud was extensive enough to change the results, but its investigations could go on for weeks after the official tally is announced. That leaves open the possibility of a delayed runoff between Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, or even nullification of the election.

"I think it's clear Karzai has won, but that doesn't resolve the crisis we are facing," said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies. "The ultimate goal here is to stabilize the country and defeat the Taliban. If we don't come out of this election with a legitimate and strong government, it could have a major impact on both Afghanistan and on the entire NATO effort here."

Karzai's lead over Abdullah, his former foreign minister, has widened slowly but steadily. On Monday, with nearly half the votes counted, the Afghan election commission said Karzai was ahead by about 46 to 32 percent. But Abdullah has alleged "massive state engineering" of the vote and vowed he will not accept a flawed Karzai victory as legitimate.

Both major candidates have publicly urged their supporters to await the official results, which are expected in about two weeks. But behind the scenes, reports have circulated of threats of violence by the opposition and high-pressure tactics by government officials, alternating with rumors of power-sharing deals between Karzai and Abdullah.

The atmosphere of fraud and strong-arm behavior surrounding the election has also heightened tensions between Kabul and Washington, just as U.S. officials are scrambling to justify their military commitments here and find new strategies to salvage the faltering and expensive war against Taliban insurgents.

American officials have expressed rare public dismay at Karzai's electoral courtship of controversial former warlords. Karzai's aides, in turn, portrayed his recent meeting with the U.S. special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, as an imperious political lecture from Washington. If Karzai remains in power, it is unclear whether he will seek to mend fences with Washington or continue his populist demonizing of the West.

Despite the domestic and international concerns about an illegitimate election, the complaints commission is also under pressure to somehow address the fraud problem without forcing a second election. Many Afghans and outside observers say a runoff would be costly, stressful and just as vulnerable to fraud and insurgent attacks as the Aug. 20 poll. A flawed single election that lets the country get back to normal, they argue, would be the lesser evil.

"Would a second round clear the air and have more legitimacy? That's a question mark," said one U.N. official here, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He said it might be wiser for Afghans to forge a "consensus of governance, if not government," rather than force another electoral exercise in the middle of a guerrilla war.

But neither Karzai nor Abdullah appears inclined to reach out. Both represent ethnic groups that are bitter longtime rivals with large emotional and economic stakes in the outcome. Both have formed alliances with powerful figures who have demanded significant concessions in exchange for their support.

Abdullah has said several times that he will "defend the Afghan people's vote," while some of his supporters, including experienced militia fighters, have vowed to take to the streets if he is declared the loser. Karzai, in turn, has enlisted the electoral backing of several former militia leaders accused of rights abuses and drug trafficking.

Grant Kippen, the low-key Canadian elections expert who heads the Electoral Complaints Commission, has attempted to stay above the partisan fray as his staff sorts through more than 2,000 fraud complaints. He has said that several hundred are serious enough to potentially affect the results and that he will take as much time as is necessary to investigate them properly, regardless of the rising public tension and pressure for a final outcome.

But a certain amount of discretion and subjectivity is involved in both the vote tally and the fraud detection process, one foreign elections expert said. In addition to the formal complaints investigated by Kippen's panel, he said, polling results that "smell funny," such as a box full of genuine-looking ballots that favor one candidate by 600 votes to 1, can either be "set aside" by the election commission or added to the count.

Kippen's findings could be political dynamite if they show that, as many observers suspect, much of the fraud was committed on Karzai's behalf in the southern region that is his ethnic Pashtun heartland, and where insurgent violence kept hundreds of thousands of people from voting.

Such a finding would raise the prospect of a president being reelected with a slim and questionable mandate from his own supporters and facing the hostility of an opposition convinced that he stole the election.

"There are warlords on both sides of this divide, and we cannot afford to be drawn into another ethnic conflict over this election," said Mir, the policy analyst. "This needs to be a time of reaching out to the opposition, not exacting vengeance. Otherwise, the only beneficiaries will be the Taliban."

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