Ending Africa's Hunger - Nation

Image via Wikipedia

By Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

This article appeared in the September 21, 2009 edition of The Nation.

September 2, 2009

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It's a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama's vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you've got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world's largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It's true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution.

At best, however, the first Green Revolution was an ambiguous success. As John Perkins writes in his magisterial Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, it was instigated by the US government not out of a direct concern for the well-being of the world's hungry but from a worry that a hungry urban poor might take to the streets and demand left-wing changes in the Global South. The term "Green Revolution" was coined by William Gaud, administrator of USAID in the late 1960s. Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, he announced, "Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution." Steeped in the cold war, the first Green Revolution was designed to prevent any other revolutions from happening.

The Green Revolution appeared successful because the global quantity of food produced increased dramatically. From 1970 to 1990 the amount of food available per person rose by 11 percent, and more than 150 million people were lifted from the ranks of the world's hungry. But most of that rise was driven by transformations inside China. Subtract China from the picture and the heyday of the Green Revolution saw global hunger increase by 11 percent. In South America, hunger grew by nearly 20 percent despite impressive gains in output driven, in part, by improved crop varieties. Those varieties required large landholdings in order to be economically efficient, which meant that the peasants working that land had to be kicked off. Those displaced peasants migrated to the hillsides and tropical forests, doubling the area of cultivated land--in other words, the increase in food came not only through technology but also simply by having food growing on a greater area.

Beyond the massive displacement of peasants, the Green Revolution wrought other social damage--urban slums sprawled around cities to house displaced workers, pesticide use went up, groundwater levels fell and industrial agricultural practices began racking up significant environmental debt. Today, because of the Green Revolution's catastrophic economic and ecological consequences, even its strong advocates in India have recommended that up to 70 percent of farmers farm organically.

The architects of Africa's new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation's agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as "smallholders") and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because "if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse."

Nonetheless, the Green Revolution being prepared for Africa bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, in the 1960s the push for a Green Revolution was accompanied by fears about national security and stability; the recent global spate of food rebellions, in dozens of countries from Egypt to Haiti to India, has made food a security concern once again. Furthermore, the first Green Revolution was made possible through the philanthropy of a billionaire American family--the Rockefellers; the second is bankrolled by Gates. This is not a superficial coincidence: the destinies of millions of the world's poorest farmers are again being shaped by the richest Americans, and philanthropic choices are very different from democratic ones.

One of the most important choices involves the role of technology. At the Gates Foundation, Roy Steiner emphasized that "we believe in the power of technology." It's a belief with clout: about a third of the foundation's $1.3 billion in agricultural development grants have been invested in science and technology, with almost 30 percent of the 2008 grants promoting and developing seed biotechnologies. Through a range of investments, the Gates Foundation is turning its faith into reality. This reliance on technology to address a growing political and social problem loudly echoes the thinking behind the first Green Revolution.

Why Africa Is Hungry and Knowledge Is Never Neutral

Some of the changes made possible by Gates's funding are welcome. An African Centre for Crop Improvement has been set up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which is designed to change the way African agricultural scientists work. Rather than carting them off to Europe or North America, where they learn about the pressing agricultural issues facing French or American farmers, the new center encourages African scientists to face African challenges while based in Africa. Other Gates investments are geared toward training more women PhDs and providing an infrastructure to source food aid locally.

These are valuable efforts, but one might pause to ask why the need for such philanthropic intervention arose in the first place. The faltering quality of African agricultural research institutions, and the decline in government spending on agriculture, is a result of the budget austerity imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in the 1980s and '90s. As Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello has noted, Africa exported 1.3 million tons of food a year in the 1960s, but after being subject to international development loans and free-market fundamentalism, today it imports nearly 25 percent of its food. In a 2008 report, the Bank's internal evaluations group lambasted the policies that led to this situation. What the Gates Foundation is doing is using its private money to fund activities that once were in the public domain and were, albeit imperfectly, under democratic control.

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

The first Green Revolution spawned and exacerbated many social divisions, especially around access to land and resources, since the scale required by Green Revolution technologies meant that it was systematically biased against smallholders. The Gates Foundation is clearly aware of the importance of smallholder agriculture; but a leaked internal strategy document suggests that something else is more important: "Over time, this [strategy] will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production." "Land mobility" is an Orwellian term meaning the land stays where it is but the people on it are driven off. The foundation stands behind this idea, saying that peasants will head to cities "because there are a lot of them who don't want to be farmers [and] people make their own choices."

This idea of choice is an integral part of the conventional wisdom about agriculture in Africa. At least until the financial crisis, it was true that young men tended not to want to remain in agriculture if they could avoid it; but that choice was conditioned, in part, by policies that underinvested in rural areas compared with urban ones. One of the consequences of the financial crisis has been to change that field of choices. For the first time in years, men who had migrated to the cities find there's less opportunity in urban than in rural areas.

They're returning to family land that has been farmed by women, who have developed rich knowledge about agriculture. The technologies that the Gates Foundation funds, like hybrid seed and synthetic fertilizer, require much less know-how than some of the diverse traditional systems managed by women. In many African cultures, women grow the majority of food, but men control access to cash. Rather than supporting and building on women's agricultural knowledge systems, cash-based agricultural technology allows men with the economic wherewithal to displace women as farmers.

African farmers' organizations have repeatedly rejected this high-tech approach to agriculture and instead are making their own choices. Since AGRA announced its plans in 2006, groups representing the largest farmer federations in Africa have come together in a series of meetings to organize support for African agroecological solutions to the food crisis.

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

It was innovative ecological technologies like push-pull (and not traditional Green Revolution approaches) that were praised by a recent international effort to assess the future of agriculture. "The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development" (IAASTD), a report modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took more than four years to complete and relied on the expertise of more than 400 scientists. It was adopted by fifty-eight countries in the global North and South (though not the United States, Canada or Australia). The IAASTD found that a focus on small-scale sustainable agriculture, locally adapted seed and ecological farming better address the complexities of climate change, hunger, poverty and productive demands on agriculture in the developing world. That report--the most comprehensive scientific assessment of world agriculture to date--recommended development strategies that are in large part the opposite of those backed by the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation acknowledges the relevance of the IAASTD's insights. But it continues to invest heavily in biotech solutions to the problem of hunger and gives short shrift to the agroecological approaches recommended by the report. What's more, there's empirical reason to doubt whether biotech can deliver what Gates is hoping for. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are expensive, proprietary and contribute to the corporate monopolization of the world's seed supply. Despite extraordinary restrictions on research into the effects of GM products--the industry refuses to allow independent researchers to study patented seed--evidence is finally emerging of the significant environmental and health risks they pose, prompting the American Academy of Environmental Medicine earlier this year to call for an immediate moratorium on GM food.

Prestigious research organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have demonstrated that GM crops (which are legal for commercial use in only three African countries) do not increase intrinsic yields, and, in the developing world especially, can increase costs and risks to smallholders, with mixed, often negative effects on their incomes. Although the Gates Foundation has promised crops genetically engineered for drought tolerance, these crops have yet to outperform traditional varieties, according to an assessment by the Australian government. The foundation has also spent more than $111 million to "biofortify" (genetically engineer) crops to have a higher vitamin content, despite past technical and cultural failures that indicate a diverse diet goes much further than genetically engineered supplements in supporting good nutrition.

Africa's New Poster Child: The Malawi 'Miracle'

One place where the new Green Revolution has gotten a head start is the small East African nation of Malawi. After a severe drought in 2003, more than a third of the country needed food aid to survive. Bucking advice from the World Bank, the country began giving out vouchers on a large scale for subsidized fertilizer in 2005. The rains returned, yields rose, Malawi began exporting grain and the international community declared the hunger crisis over.

The Gates Foundation has been aggressively supporting the funding of fertilizer in Africa through grants to establish a network of private agro-input dealers. While the program doesn't explicitly subsidize the price of fertilizers to farmers, it encourages national policies to increase fertilizer availability. If the problem for African farmers is soil fertility, funding fertilizer seems unimpeachable. A closer examination of the data raises some troubling questions, though. It isn't clear whether it was the fertilizer or the rain that caused yields to increase. Worse yet, according to sources in Malawi, hunger has not abated at anywhere near the levels believed by the international development community.

Indeed, there's reason to think that fertilizer subsidies may render societies more vulnerable to famine. Roland Bunch, a former agronomist at World Neighbors and author of Two Ears of Corn, a handbook on people-centered agricultural development, explains the problem. "The indirect effects of subsidized fertilizer are that farmers stop amending their soils with organic matter because it is easier to apply fertilizer. When the subsidies dry up--as they invariably do--farmers are left with soils that are so inert that they can't even grow a good green manure to restore fertility. At that point, with neither chemical fertilizer nor green manures being feasible, we could easily witness a famine across Africa like nothing we have ever seen before."

This is a concern echoed on the ground. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been working in Malawi for more than a decade. She says that Malawi's fertilizer subsidies are "masking food security problems for the long term." Bezner Kerr works with a project in Malawi that takes a different approach to soil health by relying on local farmer experimenters. One village headman has, for instance, encouraged his village to adopt ecological agriculture, which not only improves yields but produces a diverse diet that has improved the health of the community's children, at a fraction of the cost of Gates's genetically engineered nutrition projects. Much like push-pull, the result of that project, which spread to more than 7,000 households, is that families--and the soil--are better off.

When asked about how AGRA affects projects like hers, Bezner Kerr says, "When farmers get vouchers [for fertilizer], they wonder, Why incorporate crop residues? If AGRA is putting all that money into fertilizer, it is taking away from efforts like ours." Like Bunch, she's concerned about the economic as well as the environmental sustainability of fertilizer giveaways. "What happens when AGRA leaves?" she asks.

Is Bill Gates Africa's Latest Strongman?

The Gates Foundation responds to criticism of its funding decisions by saying that it is learning all the time, with a state-of-the-art system that will soon let the project officers seek feedback through the cellphones of more than 10,000 farmer stakeholders. It's unusual in the world of foundations to have such a strong commitment to correcting mistakes. In its flexibility and openness to reform, the Gates Foundation seems ready to depart from the trajectory of the first Green Revolution.

Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is an important step, the farm leaders are unhappy about being consulted so late in the game. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, recently convened a dialogue on AGRA. There, Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers' Forum expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: "You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!"

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, "If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies." This is feedback that can't so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.

The calls from African organizations to be able to set the agenda for their own agricultural development are heard only faintly in the United States. That's largely because when it comes to African hunger, prejudices about the incompetence of African farmers and the marvels of biotechnology do a lot of the thinking for us. But the Gates Foundation isn't a victim of poor reasoning. It actively promotes an agenda that supports some of the most powerful corporations on earth. Far more than the peer-reviewed IAASTD study, Gates's strategy reflects another report, funded by the foundation itself: "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty" from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Knocked out in a couple of months by a small team led by a Gates Foundation senior fellow and stacked with staff from institutions receiving substantial Gates money, the report, while rightly calling for renewed investment and education, again ignores the structural and political causes of Africa's hunger, ascribing it to a technical deficit. The report concludes that the United States needs to "reassert its leadership" in "spreading new technologies," because it will increase trade and "strengthen American institutions." Worse, the council's solutions--with classic Green Revolution hubris--ignore the successful endogenous solutions that have been spreading across the continent for three decades.

Rarely in the history of philanthropy has one foundation--or more correctly, one man--had this kind of power. When Obama made his remarks on the Green Revolution, one Seattle Times journalist suggested that "President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation." It's not hard to see the paths through which the thinking in Seattle might have made it to Washington, DC. Many AGRA and Gates Foundation employees are former industry and government insiders. Rajiv Shah, a doctor with no previous agricultural experience who was headhunted by the Gates Foundation, is now at the Department of Agriculture, as under secretary for research, education and economics, and also chief scientist.

The foundation's reach extends far beyond Washington. With billions committed to agricultural development, the Gates Foundation has a financial heft equal to that of a government in the global North. In 2007 the United States contributed $60 million to the system of international public agricultural research centers. Gates has pumped $122 million into the system in the past eighteen months alone and given a total of $317 million to the World Bank.

Africa's Green Revolution has another similarity with the first Green Revolution: the technological preferences of the philanthropist shape the approaches on the ground. For the Rockefellers, that meant agricultural technology based on industrial chemistry and oil. For Gates, it's about proprietary intellectual property. Africa's Green Revolution is, in other words, just a new way of doing business as usual.

In its push for technological solutions, its distaste for redistributive social policy and disregard for extant alternatives--as well as in the circumstances that have made food an international security concern--this Green Revolution looks very similar to its predecessor. The biggest issue, however, isn't one of commission but of omission. Just as in India, where peasant demands for land reform in the 1960s that might have led to more sustainable and durable progress (as such reforms did in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) were ignored, African farmers advocating their own solutions to the food crisis are being marginalized. In particular, the vocally articulated demands--for agroecological alternatives, state support for farmer-led research, for land reform, for women's rights in agriculture, and for sharing access to water--all fade into the background when Gates's answers are amplified.

It will take a suite of policies, addressing both the technical and sociopolitical reasons for hunger in Africa, to make lasting change. Technologies for development need to be accompanied by other, political reforms, including canceling debt, removing food and agriculture from the World Trade Organization, investing heavily in farmers' organizations and their proven sustainable agricultural technologies, and supporting the peer-reviewed approaches generated by the science of agroecology.

Models for this kind of change already exist. In Mali, peasant movements have successfully persuaded the government to adopt as a national priority the idea of "food sovereignty," a shorthand for the democratization of the food system. Similar efforts are happening at regional and local levels in other countries. But for those initiatives to register in the United States, the conventional wisdom regarding the Green Revolution needs to be replaced. The tragedy here is not that Africa hasn't had a Green Revolution but that the mistakes of the first may be repeated once more, and that one foundation has the power to make the rest of the world bend to its misguided agenda.

About Raj Patel

Raj Patel is a fellow at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...

About Eric Holt-Gimenez

Eric Holt-Gimenez is executive director at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...

About Annie Shattuck

Annie Shattuck is a policy analyst at Food Firstand has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Gimenez) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...

Related articles by Zemanta

• Top wheat experts call for scaling up efforts to combat Ug99 and other wheat rusts (scienceblog.com)
• Will the "Green Revolution" Ever Hit Africa? (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Poster103: Arresting hunger and environmental degradation in Sub-saharan Africa: Developing a dynamic and globally integrated African Soil Information Service AfSIS (slideshare.net)
• Reading ENOUGH (one.org)
• New study: Farmers protecting and growing significant amount of world's trees (scienceblog.com)
• Obama Enlists Major Powers to Aid Poor Farmers With $15 Billion (nytimes.com)

Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo - The New York Review of Books

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Those concerns are shared by human rights groups, which have documented the suppression of dissent in Rwanda.Freedom House ranked Rwanda 183 out of 195 countries in press freedom in 2008, while Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also described the Rwandan government as imposing harsh and arbitrary justice—including long-term incarceration without trial and life sentences in solitary confinement. Other Western observers and human rights activists have noted that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has never properly investigated atrocities committed by Tutsis. In June, more than seventy scholars from North American and European universities wrote an open letter to the UN secretary-general, President Barack Obama, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown expressing "grave concern at the ongoing failure" of the tribunal to bring "indictments against those soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rwanda in 1994," and warning that this omission may cause the tribunal "to be dismissed as 'victor's justice.'"

On the question of Rwanda's principal motive for seeking to control or destabilize eastern Congo, the books broadly agree: Kagame and his government want, as Lemarchand writes, "continued access to the Congo's economic wealth." Lemarchand says that within Congo itself the FDLR poses a "clear and present danger to Tutsi and other communities." Like Prunier, though, he concludes that the threat the Hutu group poses to Rwanda's own security is "vastly exaggerated," noting that its fighters "are no match" for Rwandan and Rwanda-backed forces amounting to "70,000 men under arms and a sophisticated military arsenal, consisting of armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and helicopters."

Thomas Turner draws parallels between the exploitation of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda and the brutal late-nineteenth-century regime of King Leopold of Belgium, whose thirst for empire drove his acquisition of what became known as the Congo Free State. Citing a 2001 United Nations investigation of the conflict, Turner concludes:

Resource extraction from eastern Congo, occupied by Uganda and Rwanda until recently, would seem to constitute "pure" pillage.... Much as in Free State days, the Congo was financing the occupation of a portion of its own territory. Unlike Free State days, none of the proceeds of this pillage were being reinvested.

According to a 2005 report on the Rwandan economy by the South African Institute for Security Studies, Rwanda's officially recorded coltan production soared nearly tenfold between 1999 and 2001, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons, surpassing revenues from the country's main traditional exports, tea and coffee, for the first time. "Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new mines in Rwanda," the report said. "However, the increase is primarily due to the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese origin."

When Rwanda moved to invade Mobutu's Zaire in 1996, Prunier says, the country's administration "was so rotten that the brush of a hand could cause it to collapse." Since the 1960s, Congo had remained relatively stable by virtue of a confluence of circumstances, which suddenly no longer held. After backing the wrong side during the Rwandan genocide, France had lost its will or interest in playing its longtime part as regional patron to several client regimes. Following the removal of Mobutu, who often did the bidding of Western powers, there was no longer any clear regional strongman to mediate disputes. The allegiance of African states to the idea of permanently fixed borders, which had held firm since independence, was being challenged. And finally, the vacuum created by Mobutu's overthrow unleashed fierce competition for Congolese coltan and other resources and led to what Turner calls the "militarization of commerce" by both foreign governments and rebel groups.

In allowing the Rwandan invasion of Zaire, the United States had two very different goals. The most immediate was the clearing of over one million Hutu refugees from UN camps near the Rwandan border, which had become bases for vengeful elements of the defeated Hutu army and Interahamwe militia, the agents of the Rwandan genocide. In Prunier's telling:

When Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice came back from her first trip to the Great Lakes region [of East Africa], a member of her staff said, "Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the US] have to do is look the other way."

The gist of Prunier's anecdote is correct, except that participants have confirmed to me that it was Rice herself who spoke these words.

In fact, getting the Hutu militia out of the UN camps was rapidly achieved in November 1996 by shelling them from Rwandan territory. Thereafter, the war against Mobutu dominated international headlines, overshadowing a secret Rwanda campaign that targeted for slaughter the Hutu populations that had fled into Congo. Here again, Washington provided vital cover.

At the time, the American ambassador to Congo, Daniel Howard Simpson, told me flatly that the fleeing Hutus were "the bad guys."^[6] One of the worst massacres by Kagame's Tutsi forces took place at the Tingi-Tingi refugee camp in northeastern Congo, which by 1997 contained over 100,000 Hutu refugees. But on January 21, 1997, Robert E. Gribbin, Simpson's counterpart in Rwanda, cabled Washington with the following advice:

We should pull out of Tingi-Tingi and stop feeding the killers who will run away to look for other sustenance, leaving their hostages behind.... If we do not we will be trading the children in Tingi-Tingi for the children who will be killed and orphaned in Rwanda.

There was a grim half-truth to Gribbin's assessment. The Hutu fighters traveling amid the refugees were often able to avoid engagement with their Tutsi pursuers by fleeing westward into the Congolese rain forest. The genuine refugees, who by UNHCR's estimate accounted for 93 percent of the Hutus in flight, could not. The best evidence suggests that they died by the scores of thousands in their flight across Congo, in what Lemarchand calls "a genocide of attrition." Prunier estimates the number killed in this manner at 300,000.^[7]

In August 1997, the UN began to investigate Tutsi killings of Hutu civilians and, as Turner recounts, "a preliminary report identified forty massacre sites." But the investigators were stonewalled by Kabila's Congo government—then still backed by Rwanda—and received little support from Washington. Roberto Garreton, a Chilean human rights lawyer who headed the UN investigation, was barred from the Rwandan capital of Kigali and his team was largely kept from the field in Congo. Garreton later wrote:

One cannot of course ignore the presence of persons guilty of genocide, soldiers and militia members, among the refugees.... It is nevertheless unacceptable to claim that more than one million people, including large numbers of children, should be collectively designated as persons guilty of genocide and liable to execution without trial.

Rwanda's designs on eastern Congo were further helped by the Clinton administration's interest in promoting a group of men it called the New African Leaders, including the heads of state of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. As Clinton officials saw it, these New Leaders were sympathetic and businesslike, drawn together by such desirable goals as overthrowing Mobutu, by antagonism toward the Islamist government of Sudan, which shares a border with northeast Congo, and by talk of rethinking Africa's hitherto sacrosanct borders, as a means of creating more viable states.

Then Assistant Secretary of State Rice touted the New Leaders as pursuing "African solutions to African problems." In 1999, Marina Ottaway, the influential Africa expert of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Senate Subcommittee on Africa:

Many of the states that emerged from the colonial period have ceased to exist in practice.... The problem is to create functioning states, either by re-dividing territory or by creating new institutional arrangements such as decentralized federations or even confederations.

In fact, the favored group of African leaders were also authoritarian figures with military backgrounds, all of whom had scorned democratic elections. According to Turner, support for the New Leaders "apparently meant that the USA and Britain should continue to aid Rwanda and Uganda as they 'found solutions' by carving up Congo."

As in the case of the Rwandan genocide, Lemarchand suggests, the policies of the United States and other Western powers toward the conflict in Congo have been misguided in part out of ignorance of Central Africa's complicated twentieth-century history. Episodes of appalling violence in this region have occurred periodically at least since 1959, and cannot be remedied without first understanding their deeper causes. As Lemarchand writes:

From the days of the Hutu revolution in Rwanda [in 1959–1962] to the invasion of the "refugee warriors" from Uganda [under Kagame's leadership] in 1994, from the huge exodus of Hutu from Burundi in 1972 to the "cleansing" of Hutu refugee camps in 1996–97, the pattern that emerges again and again is one in which refugee populations serve as the vehicles through which ethnic identities are mobilized and manipulated, host communities preyed upon, and external resources extracted.

Some will always quibble with where to begin this story, whether with colonial favoritism for the Tutsis by Belgium in the first half of the twentieth century, or with Brussels's flip-flop in 1959 in favor of the Hutus on the eve of Rwandan independence, which led to the anti-Tutsi pogroms that sent Kagame's family and those of so many others of his RPF comrades into exile in Uganda. These events in turn had far-reaching effects on Rwanda's small neighbor Burundi, a German and later Belgian colony that gained independence in 1962 and, like Rwanda, has a large Hutu majority and Tutsi minority. In 1972, an extremist Tutsi regime there, driven by a fear of being overthrown, carried out the first genocide since the Holocaust, killing 300,000 Hutus.

In the West, the Burundi genocide is scarcely remembered, but its consequences live on in the region. Terrorized Hutus streamed out of Burundi into Rwanda, helping to set Rwanda onto a path of Hutu extremism, and priming it for its own genocide two decades later. The final instigator of the Rwandan tragedy was the mysterious shooting down of a presidential plane on April 6, 1994, which killed presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaramyira of Burundi, who were both Hutu. This precipitated the horrific massacre of Rwandan Tutsis, but also a broader Hutu–Tutsi conflict, which by 1996 had begun to tear apart large swaths of eastern Congo.

The events that have followed Rwanda's arrest of the warlord Nkunda in January of this year suggest that Congo and Rwanda have finally found reasons to sue for peace. Congo's weak government and corrupt army are powerless to fight Rwanda or its proxies, and there is desperate need to rebuild the state from scratch. Rwanda, meanwhile, is seeking to placate important European aid donors, who account for as much as half of Rwanda's annual budget and who, for the first time since its initial invasion of Congo in 1996, are asking difficult questions about its behavior there.

As part of the deal that gave Rwandan forces another chance to fight Hutu militias in eastern Congo last spring, Kagame agreed to withdraw Rwanda's support for the Tutsi insurgency in eastern Congo while at the same time pressing Congolese Tutsis to integrate into Congo's national army. Kagame hopes now to find a legal means to sustain Rwanda's economic hold on eastern Congo, for example by promoting civilian business interests in the area. These are often run by ex-military officers or people with close ties to the Rwandan armed forces. In interviews, both Prunier and Lemarchand say that the direct plunder of resources by the Rwandan military has ceased, but that a large "subterranean" trade in minerals has continued through corrupt Congolese politicians and local militias.

For its part, the United States has begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem in eastern Congo. In August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a two-day visit to the country, during which she described the conflict as driven by "exploitation of natural resources" and announced a $17 million program to help women who have been raped in the fighting.

Notwithstanding these developments, the conflict in the east has been surging again, as the UN-backed Congolese army pursues a new campaign against Hutu rebels.^[8] It is hard to dispute Lemarchand's logic. Without addressing the problems of exclusion and participation, whether in a Rwanda ruled by a small Tutsi minority or in heavily armed eastern Congo, where contending ethnic groups want to get hold of the region's spoils, it will be impossible to end this catastrophe.

—August 25, 2009

Notes

^[1]According to the International Rescue Committee, whose epidemiological studies in Congo use methodology similar to that of studies it has carried out in Iraq and elsewhere.

^[2]See Adam Hochschild's account in these pages, "Rape of the Congo," August 13, 2009.

^[3]Nearly simultaneous permission was granted to Uganda and South Sudan to send their forces into Congolese territory to pursue factions of the Lord's Resistance Army, one of Africa's most vicious rebel groups.

^[4]Reports of RPF killings first surfaced, briefly, in a 1994 report by a UN investigator, Robert Gersony, who concluded that RPF insurgents had murdered between 25,000 and 45,000 people. Under pressure from the United States, the Gersony report was never released.

^[5]In his recent book, Journey into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda, Thomas Odom, a former US military attaché to Kigali, writes that the Kibeho massacre did not undermine US support for the Rwandan government. "The bottom line was a difficult operation had gone bad, and people had died. I put the casualties at around two thousand," he wrote. "Yet the United States did not suspend foreign assistance—just barely restarted—as did the Belgians, the Dutch, and the European Union. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Vince Kern passed word to me that our report had saved the day." See Journey into Darkness (Texas A&M University Press, 2005), pp. 229–230.

^[6]Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf, 2004), p. 142.

^[7]In his self-published manuscript on the events, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The US Role in Rwanda (iUniverse, 2005), Gribbin discounts this number, writing that "some would die in fighting, some would succumb to their terrible living conditions and to abuses by rebel forces, but 300,000 killed? Never." Nonetheless Gribbin acknowledges that serious efforts at investigation were blocked.

^[8]See Stephanie McCrummen, "A Conflict's Deadly Ripple Effects," The Washington Post, August 2, 2009.

Zelaya Speaks - Nation

Image via Wikipedia

By Tom Hayden

September 4, 2009

" width="388">

AP Images
Zelaya points to a State Department document as he speaks to the media following his meeting with Clinton on September 3, 2009.

In a significant development in hemispheric relations, the Obama admininstration yesterday condemned the June 28 Honduras coup d'état more strongly than ever, announced the cutoff of additional millions in economic aid and declared it would not accept the legitimacy of elections under the auspices of the coup government.

In an interview shortly after his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya pronounced the US decisions "a great step forward" for the Honduran popular resistance to the coup and a "positive message in favor of democracy."

Following the State Department meeting, a US spokesperson announced the termination of "a broad range of assistance" to Honduras as a spur to encourage the return of President Zelaya and democratic processes to the country, which has been under repression for two months.

Zelaya told The Nation that the US would terminate multi-year Millennium Challenge grants in the range of $200 million, involving funds for roads, ports and infrastructure. Clinton chairs the Millennium Challenge corporation, which meets next week.

Asked if Clinton intended a message to the coup regime in Honduras, Zelaya responded forcefully that it was a "direct blow in the face of [Roberto] Micheletti" because "the golpistas' [coup organizers] plan was to negotiate with the candidates for an exit strategy so that they don't have to pay for their crimes, and get away with their crimes after an election. When you don't recognize the legitimacy of the elections, you are breaking up the plan of the golpistas."

With these decisions, the Obama administration has made clear that it embraces the Latin American consensus that the coup was an illegitimate transfer of power. "Mexico, Central and Latin America already had taken a position on the elections. We were only missing the United States. Now in light of these statements, the entire continent is condemning these elections under the de facto regime," Zelaya said.

When probed on the conditions when the sanctions might be lifted, Zelaya said only "when democracy is restored and President Zelaya returns." He said he is "prepared to return independently of any US plans" in order to "protect the population."

There will be "a permanent convulsion" and a "permanently ungovernable country" if he cannot return, and "that's what everybody wants to avoid." The social movements in Honduras "are not willing to go back to the way things were before," he noted.

What the June 28 coup was able to prevent, for now, was an advisory referendum planned for three days later on whether there should be a constituent assembly to rewrite the Honduras constitution, promoting greater participatory democracy. But the same coup also provoked the rise of a new social movement with its own dedicated members, martyrs and new memories.

"The grassroots movement," Zelaya said, has only one purpose, the transformation of Honduras, including deep structural changes. "This movement is now very strong. It can never be destroyed," he said. Zelaya believes that the reforms of his administration, including an increased minimum wage, subsidies to small farmers, cuts in bank interest rates and reductions in poverty levels "are the causes which irritated the ruling elite of Honduras."

Zelaya said he hopes that Clinton understands that "the same opponents of Obama in the US are mine in Honduras. The transnational trade, oil and banking systems. Those who do not want health insurance here are the same as those who do not want to pay a living wage in Honduras."

For example, he pointed out, "during Bush there was no coup. The coup in Honduras during the first six months of the Obama presidency was a litmus test. The right-wing groups in America who are supporting the coup are betting that Obama will not solve the problem. I trust that that he will."

Warming to the point, Zelaya went on to argue that the coup plotters in Honduras "have copied some reactionary sectors in Washington," who publicly say that Obama "has no power, that he is weak, weaker than Jimmy Carter, that we should not pay any attention to the Obama administration, and they refer to him as the black boy who doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is."

But the right-wing groups from Latin America to the Beltway have employed a Democrat and ardent Clinton supporter, Lanny Davis, to lobby for their interests in the capital, or what Zelaya calls "the empire of capital." Democratic consultants also are sprinkled in the coup delegations to the Costa Rican talks.

Perhaps no lobbyist is closer to the Clintons than Lanny Davis. When his name was raised critically by Zelaya during the meeting, the secretary of state did not acknowledge that Davis was her longtime family ally but instead took notes on Zelaya's claim of Davis's false charges and promised to investigate them. "She didn't tell me what she would investigate," he added, with a good-natured chuckle.

For Clinton's State Department, the tone of the meeting marked a shift from frosty previous statements on the coup. After Obama's initial observation that an undemocratic coup had taken place, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that a coup had not taken place, in legal terms, and ridiculed Zelaya for being allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. "If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode," he remarked amidst laughter in a July State Department briefing, "that would be a good lesson." On August 4, a State Department letter to Senator Richard Lugar said Zelaya's "insistence on taking provocative actions...led to a confrontation that unleashed the events that led to his removal." The term coup d'état was not used in the letter.

Asked yesterday by The Nation whether the State Department certified what happened as a coup d'état or was calling it a coup, Zelaya responded, "I do not know the details of US law, but in the communiqué issued today the United States on behalf of the State Department said that in relation to the coup in Honduras various parts of the Honduran government are involved: the legislative, judicial and military. The State Department directly implicates the Congress, the army and the Court of Honduras in the coup."

Whatever Lanny Davis's spin may be, yesterday's developments represent a sharp rejection by the Obama administration of going it alone in Latin America.

The State Department's Crowley was not present at the meeting yesterday, which included longtime Latin American diplomat Tom Shannon, National Security Council representative Dan Restrepo, US ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, and a different public relations spokesman, Ian Kelly.

The present tension may be winding down, but it is not over. Micheletti, abandoned by the Americans in his quest to legitimize the coup, is under enormous pressure to accept the recommendation of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that he step down, which would be a huge victory for Latin America. On the other hand, any return to Honduras by Zelaya could be volatile, with the right-wing wanting his arrest or even his death. He cannot run for re-election under the present constitution. There is no visible candidate to replace him, and the constituent assembly proposal is off the agenda for now (or "por ahora", as a young Hugo Chávez once said upon release from prison).

The future may lie with the social movements that have risen against the military coup, with Zelaya serving as a transitional hero to the mobilized and awakened people on the streets of Honduras who are trying to take an unpredictable future into their own hands.

About Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and author of Street Wars (Verso, 2005).

Parents and children meet and clash on social-networking sites - WSJ.com

Cover via Amazon

• By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

David Rivera recently had someone "unfriend" him on Facebook: His own child.

For months, Dr. Rivera, an obstetrician in Lombard, Ill., had been exasperated that his 25-year-old son, Nate, often complained he was broke and asked for money, yet posted photos of himself on Facebook taken at bars, restaurants, movies and concerts.

Dr. Rivera says he tried to talk to his son, a senior in college, about his spending habits, but his son refused to listen. Frustrated, he finally wrote on his son's Facebook wall: "I can see what you are blowing your money on, so don't come whining to me about money."

"I think they figure that their friends are watching but we're not, because they think we are old and decrepit and we barely know how to turn the computer on," says Dr. Rivera, 54-years-old, of being a parent.

In the new era of helicopter parenting, more and more parents and kids are meeting up, and clashing, on Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites.

Nate Rivera, who lives in Chicago, says he unfriended his father for several reasons, including his comment about money and other "snide" remarks. "It was mildly pestering," he says. "I thought, 'Do I need this?' "

In my last column, I wrote about how our behavior on Facebook can harm our real-world relationships. That article prompted a great deal of response, including a number of letters from parents who wrote about how social-networking sites and texting have become a powerful means to stay connected to—and to spy on—their teenagers and young-adult children. As one father put it: "It's so much easier to keep track of what they eat and when they pick their nose this way."

Many kids dread getting a friend request from Mom or Dad. There's even a Web site, www.myparentsjoinedfacebook.com, where people post screen views of their parents' most embarrassing posts. Recently, these included one mother telling her daughter to stop drinking sodas because she had cavities, another mother requesting "intervention should she ever wear twill, tapered-leg, buttless mom jeans," and the results of one stepfather's "Which sex position fits you best?" quiz.

"Mom, it's like my friends and I are standing around having a conversation and you interrupt and say, 'Hi, guys! What are you doing?' " says Andrew Doerfler, a 17-year-old high school senior in West Grove, Penn.

Andrew has a solution for embarrassing mom posts, like the amusement she expressed after he linked to a video of the rock star Bret Michaels getting hit in the head by a prop at the Tony Awards: He deletes them immediately. (His mom, Megan Reese, a 40-year-old insurance-industry recruiting manager, says she's not trying to annoy her son, but just trying to stay aware of what's going on in his life.)

Parents of teens are used to being snubbed, of course, but it's getting harder for kids to ignore mom and dad when they have access to their children's entire virtual social life.

When Dave Hill's twin 14-year-old daughters Maddie and Megan wanted to create Facebook profiles in May, he laid down rules: They would have to be friends with him, and he would have to be friends with all their friends.

"Part of this is being a careful parent and part of it is being in law enforcement for so long, and knowing what kind of freaks are out there," says Mr. Hill, a 46-year-old police lieutenant in Orange, Calif.

When he's working late shifts, he sometimes checks in briefly with his daughters on Facebook so he can hear about their day or say good night. He also likes to comment on their pictures. Once, when Maddie forgot to log out, he posted a status update under her name: "My dad is the coolest guy in the world."

The girls mostly take it in stride. "I think he's funny, but not all the time," says Megan, who admits she likes when her dad comments that she looks pretty in pictures. Adds Maddie: "Our parents are looking out for us, and making sure no one is posting bad stuff."

"Facebook is kind of like a parenting tool," says Joel O'Driscoll, a 41-year-old father of eight in Woodside, Calif.

Mr. O'Driscoll likes to keep tabs on whom his 18-year-old daughter, Holly, is friends with on Facebook—especially the boys.

Several times recently, he says, he's used information he discovered on his daughter's Facebook page to spark a discussion with her in person, most recently about the need for a boy to ask her out by calling, rather than texting or emailing.

"It's a good way to have some contact in your child's life," says Mr. O'Driscoll, an executive at a consulting firm.

Holly O'Driscoll says she's fine with her dad monitoring her friends on Facebook. "I think it's sensible," she says. Still, she admits she sometimes blocks him from seeing her status updates, explaining she doesn't want him to see how often she's on Facebook.

For many parents, Facebook and MySpace are helpful conversation starters, particularly with older teens or young adults. Just ask Cherie Miller, who has seven sons, ages 15 to 28. She says she not only stays in touch via social-networking sites with the ones who no longer live at home; she also learns things about them she wouldn't otherwise know. "You know how boys are," says the 53-year-old mom, who administers a graduate-degree program at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta. "It's very hard to pull conversations out of them."

Thanks to pictures posted on her 21-year-old son's page, Mrs. Miller learned he started smoking and whom he is dating. She then talked to her son about the choices he was making, using private messages sent on Facebook. On this platform, she says, "you can get more words out of him. It's less threatening." Her son couldn't be reached for comment.

This virtual parenting is fine, experts say, but just to a point. "How would you feel if you were a teen and your mom listened in to every single conversation," says Neil Bernstein, an adolescent psychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of "There When He Needs You: How to Be an Available, Involved and Emotionally Connected Father to Your Son."

Dr. Bernstein says the danger of monitoring kids too closely through technology is that it may make them sneakier. "As we become better detectives, they become better fugitives," he says.

The bottom line: Relationships need boundaries. And so he suggests some guidelines: It's OK for parents to require younger kids and teens to accept their friend requests, but kids should gain more freedom as they get older, just as they do in real life. Also, parents should be open with their kids about whether they are monitoring their page.

Perhaps as Generation Facebook grows up, the virtual parent-child relationship will sort itself out. We're already seeing proof.

When 25-year-old Brandon Hendelman helped his mom set up her Facebook profile last year, he kept the password. He has used it to log on to her account and remove pictures of himself from his "awkward" teen-age stage, and sometimes to delete friends of his that she has befriended.

But he leaves up all the cute pictures of him as a kid, and admits he sometimes slyly steers girls he likes to his mom's page, telling them, "It's so embarrassing, my mom posts all these pictures of me. Please don't look." Once the girls see how cute he was and how fun his mom is, he says, they like him better.

"She's my virtual wingman," says Mr. Hendelman, a junior equity-derivatives broker in New York.

Does Diana Hendelman mind? "We're complicit," she says. The 51-year-old from Palm City, Fla., uses Facebook to check up on her son when she hasn't heard from him for a day or so. And she has no problem when he sometimes controls her page. "I would ignore a friend request from my own mom," she says.

—Email: Bonds@wsj.com

Twitter as a Job-Searching Tool - WSJ.com

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

More companies are tweeting for hires.

As online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, including Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Corp. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks, now list job openings on the Twitter microblogging site.

For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or "tweets," of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies' recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards.

Job hunters can sign up to follow a company's listings on Twitter or receive tweets about jobs through a third-party service. They usually need to click a link in the tweet to access the listing online, where they can submit their résumé or application. They can also reply to the tweet with a question or comment; sometimes, employers tweet back.

With so many people looking for jobs now, some employers say they like that Twitter yields just enough job leads—but not too many. Job boards have "become saturated," says Mike Rickheim, vice president of global talent acquisition for Newell Rubbermaid Inc., a global manufacturer based in Atlanta.

"With Twitter, we don't have to go through that huge pile of résumés." Mr. Rickheim says the company uses Twitter to fill positions that tend to attract tons of applicants on job boards, such as administrative roles, as well as to share company news.

(Of course, recruiters note, the more popular Twitter gets, the more applicants it will likely attract.)

People who respond to job tweets typically have social-media skills, and some employers say they use the service to target them. In March, MediaSource Inc., a video-production and publicity firm in Columbus, Ohio, advertised a media-relations specialist job only on Twitter, LinkedIn and two niche job boards, says Lisa Arledge Powell, MediaSource's president.

"We needed someone that understood social media, so we thought, 'Why not go to where these people go?' " she says.

Andrea Slesinski, who was following the company's Twitter feed, saw the job listing and quickly tweeted her interest. She got an interview request within a week and was hired.

Image is a big part of Twitter's appeal to employers, as using it to engage with job seekers can suggest they're cutting-edge. "Verizon is a technology company so we need to be out there," says Asif Zulfiqar, a talent-management specialist at the New York-based telecommunications firm, which began listing jobs on Twitter in March.

But the image issue cuts both ways, he notes, and job seekers don't always pay enough attention to how they appear to employers on Twitter. Recently a follower of Verizon's jobs feed tweeted to the company something along the lines of, "Hey dude, you got any jobs in California?" says Mr. Zulfiqar.

The writer's casual tone made a poor impression, he says. "I want to see something more professional," he says. "You want to put your best foot forward."

Indeed, people trolling for jobs on Twitter need to tweet with care—not just when they're interacting with employers, says Cynthia Shapiro, a former human-resources executive and career coach in Woodland Hills, Calif. Hiring managers could use information they find on Twitter, just as on Facebook, to form opinions about an applicant's employability. People sometimes disclose personal things over Twitter, like work-family challenges, that an employer couldn't ask about in an interview but which might color their impression if they knew. For example, if an employer sees on Twitter that a candidate is going through a messy divorce, they might "assume you're going to be distracted," Ms. Shapiro says.

Job seekers can do their own sleuthing on Twitter to research prospective employers. In June, Rob Totaro landed an interview for an account-manager job at Potratz Partners Advertising, a small agency in Schenectady, N.Y., after learning about the position on Twitter. In the meeting, he joked that he wasn't sure he could work for a firm that supports the Red Sox, which he had discovered from reading tweets the company posted about a recent employee outing to a ballgame. "It was a great ice breaker," says Mr. Totaro. He got the job.

Twitter users say the service can be more convenient than online job boards, allowing users to follow feeds that list jobs from a variety of companies rather than trolling through thousands of job-board listings. "It's an efficient way to get a general idea of what type of jobs are out there," says Ryan Kellett, a senior at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.

He subscribes to about a half-dozen job feeds on Twitter. "It's a little bit more of a chore to go on [job boards] on a daily basis," he says. "You don't know if there's new content on there."

Twitter's interactivity also can provide a new source of advice for candidates. Subscribers to Google Inc.'s jobs feed, which went live on June 29, can pose employment questions to recruiters at the Mountain View, Calif., company, says a spokeswoman. Recently someone posted a tweet asking what job candidates should wear to interviews at Google.

A little over an hour later, a recruiter tweeted back: "We care more about your mind than your clothes," the spokeswoman says.

Cost is a main draw for employers, many of which post jobs on their own Twitter feeds free. Some services distribute job listings for employers on Twitter for a fee, but they are generally less than the cost of posting on a big job board.

U.K.-based InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, which has U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, began listing jobs on Twitter in July through a distribution service called TweetMyJobs, which charges 99 cents to promote one position for a day. The service also offers volume discounts. Francene Taylor, a talent-acquisition technology manager for InterContinental, says the service is more affordable than most job boards and she expects it to help the hospitality company save money as more job seekers turn to the company's Twitter feed to look for postings.

"We will see a decline in a need to use the major job boards and that will mean we won't have to spend quite as much," she says.

Ms. Taylor says the quality of the candidates, for all positions including room attendant and housekeeper supervisor, is the same as what comes through job boards.

But sometimes, Twitter produces enough leads that InterContinental doesn't need to advertise the jobs elsewhere. During the last week of August, she says, 4,622 people clicked through to the company's job-listings section from Twitter.

Mexico Replaces Attorney General as Drug Violence Soars - WSJ.com

Image via Wikipedia

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón on Monday replaced his longtime attorney general, one of the key figures in his government's effort to bring Mexico's powerful drug cartels to heel, as the country's drug violence continues to spiral.

In a short speech, Mr. Calderón said Arturo Chávez, a former attorney general of northern Chihuahua state, was replacing Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. Chihuahua's largest city, Ciudad Juárez, has become the epicenter of Mexico's drug violence. Just last week, gunmen took over a drug rehabilitation center there and executed 18 patients, marking a new and grisly milestone in the country's drug violence.

Mr. Calderón also announced changes at the agriculture ministry and at state oil company Pemex. Mr. Calderón named former Pemex Chief Financial Officer Juan José Suárez Coppel as the company's new chief executive, taking over from Jesús Reyes Heroles, a former energy minister. Mr. Suárez Coppel takes the reins at a tough time for the oil giant: Output has fallen to 2.5 million barrels a day from a peak of 3.4 million in 2004 amid a dramatic decline in output from Mexico's main oil field, Cantarell.

The changes come as Mr. Calderón tries to regain political traction following July midterm legislative elections in which his center-right National Action Party suffered a major defeat to the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, which now has the most seats in the lower house of Congress.

Since coming to power in 2006, Mr. Calderón has made the fight against Mexico's warring cartels the centerpiece of his policy. He has deployed an estimated 40,000 soldiers to cities like Ciudad Juárez to take on the drug gangs, using soldiers instead of often-corrupt local police.

More than 13,000 people have died since Mr. Calderon took office, according to newspaper estimates, most victims of internecine warfare between drug cartels fighting over drug routes to the U.S. and increasingly lucrative Mexican drug markets.

Mr. Medina Mora's departure is a boost for Public Security Minister Genaro García Luna: The two men had clashed over Mr. García Luna's plans to create a single national police force under his command. Mexico's Congress killed that plan, but Mr. García Luna has begun creating a de facto national police, his new Federal Police force.

"This shows beyond any doubt that Mr. García Luna is the one driving the drug-war policy and is closest to Mr. Calderón's beliefs and ideas," said Guillermo Zepeda, a criminal justice specialist at Mexico's Center for Development Studies, a think tank.

Mr. Medina Mora, a corporate lawyer, had been attorney general for the last three years. During the previous administration, he served as head of the CISEN, Mexico's equivalent of the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Calderón said Mr. Medina Mora will continue to serve Mexico in a diplomatic post. Mr. Medina Mora is expected to be named Mexico's ambassador to the U.K., people familiar with the situation say.

Mr. Medina Mora posted some victories, such as the capture of an alleged methamphetamine dealer together with a record stash of $207 million in cash. Mr. Medina Mora also extradited a record number of alleged drug traffickers to the U.S.

But a year ago, his office was shaken by scandal when it was revealed that several top members of the attorney general's office's antidrug unit had been on the payroll of one of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs. Neither Mr. Medina Mora nor Mr. García Luna have been to recapture an alleged top drug dealer, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

Mr. Chávez, a member of Mr. Calderón's center-right National Action Party, was Chihuahua's attorney general from 1996 to 1998. Jorge Montaño, a former ambassador to the U.S. and a native of Chihuahua, said Mr. Chávez did a good job, but lamented that the president hadn't reached out beyond the ranks of the PAN. "It's all the same gang," he said.

—David Luhnow contributed to this article.

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mexican Police Make Arrest in Killing of Candidate and His Family (nytimes.com)
• Gunmen Shoot 17 Dead In Drug Rehab 'Hit' (news.sky.com)
• U.S. Indicts 10 Mexicans Reputed to Be Drug Lords (nytimes.com)
• Mexican officials sweat as drug-war tactics shift (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Key Week for Obama Starts on Feisty Note - WSJ.com

By JANET ADAMY, JONATHAN WEISMAN and GREG HITT

CINCINNATI -- President Barack Obama kicked off a crucial week for his top domestic priority by pressing for a new government-run health-insurance program just as key senators moved closer to a bipartisan deal that leaves out the public plan.

Speaking at a boisterous Labor Day rally of AFL-CIO members in Cincinnati, Mr. Obama sought to rally his fractious Democratic base in this swing region of a crucial swing state. Falling back on campaign flourishes he hasn't used since the election drive, he led chants and blasted Republicans for what he said was their lack of a solution for fixing the health system. "I continue to believe that a public option...will help improve quality and bring down costs," he told the crowd to applause.

Sen. Max Baucus, D., Mont., released his health-care proposal that would cost less than $900 billion over 10 years.

But the president faces a more delicate task as Congress returns to Washington Tuesday from a bruising month-long recess that turned into a battle over the president's signature domestic-policy issue. To revive his health agenda, Mr. Obama will address Congress in a special joint session Wednesday where he will more clearly spell out what he can and can't accept in a final health bill, according to White House aides.

Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, said Mr. Obama needs to do more than restate his priorities. "It's time for the president to hit the reset button and work with Republicans for better solutions, before more debt is piled on our children and more American jobs are destroyed," Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, said.

Mr. Obama is expected to reiterate his support for creating the public-health-insurance plan despite pressure from Republicans and some moderate Democrats to back away from the idea. Yet he is likely to leave the door open for a compromise on the issue. Mr. Obama will emphasize what he says the health-care system would look like without change, depicting a scenario of rising costs, more uninsured Americans and more efforts by insurance companies to block those with pre-existing medical conditions from buying insurance, the aides said.

His support for the public plan sets up a split with the Senate Finance Committee, which has been drafting the health bill that has been seen as the only hope of winning bipartisan support for a health overhaul in Congress. Over the weekend, the committee's chairman, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, distributed a draft of his health proposal that leaves out the public plan in order to win support from a small group of Republicans. Mr. Baucus's plan costs less than $900 billion over 10 years and would expand insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans. (Read the health proposal here.)

In recent days, the White House has signaled it could step in to broker a bipartisan deal on its own, particularly through negotiations with Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the key Republicans on the Finance Committee. While the White House insists it hasn't decided whether to present formal legislation, it has been drafting legislative language on health proposals since earlier this summer, a White House official said.

Liberal Democrats, especially in the House, are stepping up warnings that they won't vote for a plan without a public option. That suggests conflict in Congress if Mr. Baucus succeeds in pushing his plan through the Senate and the health bills come to a House-Senate conference committee, although that is still several stages away.

Representatives of the six Senate Finance Committee members who are negotiating the plan declined to comment. Mr. Baucus didn't make his proposal public.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was noncommittal when asked about Mr. Baucus's plan. "Obviously we'd be pleased if the Finance Committee throughout the course of the next few days came up with a proposal that can get through their committee hopefully with bipartisan support," he said.

Mr. Obama offered clues to his Wednesday address in his remarks before union members Monday. He said he envisions a system where people no longer worry about losing insurance coverage when they change jobs or get sick. He also called for cutting $100 billion in Medicare spending to insurance companies, signaling his support for proposals to cut payments that insurers receive for private insurance plans administered through Medicare.

And the president distilled his call for health-care changes into a few simple phrases, something Democrats have been pleading for. "That's what we're talking about," he told the crowd. "Security and stability for folks who have health insurance, help for those that don't -- the coverage they need at a price they can afford."

"The most important thing that he did here was take this thing head-on," Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said after the speech. "He's beginning to lead."

Mr. Baucus distributed his plan Saturday to the small group of senators who've been negotiating for months to reach an agreement. Instead of having a public plan, it calls for creating a batch of new nonprofit insurance cooperatives aimed at providing competition to private insurers.

The plan requires most Americans to carry health insurance and gives tax credits to low- and middle-income people to help them buy insurance, reaching as high as a family of four that earns about $66,000 a year. For the poorest Americans, it would expand the federal-state Medicaid program to include those earning as much as 133% of the poverty level. The plan sets aside some money to help states pay for the expansion, according to people familiar with the proposal.

Unlike other health proposals in the House and Senate, the plan wouldn't require employers to provide health insurance to workers, a concession aimed at winning support from Republicans. Instead, it would require companies whose workers receive government subsidies for insurance to cover the cost of those tax credits up to a certain level, people familiar with the plan said. That is likely to appease businesses, which have vigorously opposed mandating that employers cover workers.

Mr. Baucus's proposal closely resembles what the committee was seeking before the Senate left Washington for the August recess. The group of six senators plans to meet Tuesday where they could further refine the proposal before it goes to the broader committee for consideration. Besides Mr. Baucus and Ms. Snowe, the six senators are Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.), Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) and Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.). The full committee could act as soon as late this week on the plan.

Mr. Baucus's plan is paid for through a series of new revenue increases and spending cuts and is designed to not widen the deficit.

The committee needed to plug a $100 billion shortfall in the plan's budget over a decade, and Mr. Baucus assembled a combination of spending changes and revenue increases to make up for the gap, according to people familiar with the proposal. The main new item is an across-the-board fee placed on insurance companies that is based on their market share and is estimated to raise tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, according to people familiar with the plan. Another plank of the plan would tax insurance companies on particularly generous health-insurance plans.

Committee members had decided against the across-the-board fee earlier in the negotiations, but Mr. Baucus revived it in an effort to keep the new insurance levies from hitting middle-income people, according to people familiar with the plan.

The insurance industry balked at the fee proposal. "New taxes on health-care coverage will only make coverage less affordable for families and small businesses," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's main trade group.

Other sources of funding for the Finance Committee plan include cuts to Medicare, including reductions in the type of private-insurance-plan payments Mr. Obama outlined in his speech. People close to the committee said the cuts wouldn't reduce benefits to senior citizens. The plan also raises money by limiting the tax benefits of so-called flexible-spending accounts that consumers can use to pay for certain medical expenses, and changing the income threshold for itemizing medical deductions.

To make it easier to buy insurance, the plan calls for new health-insurance exchanges that would provide standardized information on insurance plans and pricing.

The proposal prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with a pre-existing health condition or dropping their coverage once they become ill. It also calls for caps on consumers' out-of-pocket medical costs.

CORRECTION

Mike Enzi is a Republican senator from Wyoming. An earlier version of this article misidentified him as representing Iowa.

Write to Janet Adamy at janet.adamy@wsj.com, Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com and Greg Hitt at greg.hitt@wsj.com