Day: December 27, 2010
The Iraqi nationalist Maliki is back
While the Wall Street Journal has awkwardly divided its interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki into two pieces, one concerned with oil issues and one concerned with the departure of U.S. troops, together they make interesting reading. We seem to be back to the pre-election, Iraqi nationalist, Maliki (as opposed to the far more sectarian one we saw during the campaign and immediately thereafter).
On the one hand, the renewed Prime Minister insists all American troops will leave by the end of 2011 (except for a rather large defense cooperation group at the U.S. embassy, presumably with a contingent of contractors), as provided for in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). On the other, he is at pains to make clear that international oil companies are welcome in Iraq, no matter what coalition partner (and Iranian ally) Moqtada al Sadr says, and that Iraq is making plans for major expansion of oil exports and diversification of export routes. In other words, this is an Iraq that can stand up to both Iran and the United States and pursue its own interests effectively.
What is far less clear is how Maliki intends to proceed on Iraq’s more pressing internal problems, especially the dispute with Kurdistan over its boundaries. There is an indication in the part of the interview on the U.S. troop presence that Maliki thinks he can continue to slow roll the Kurdish insistence on the constitutionally mandated referendum. But how will he handle the withdrawal of the U.S. troops, who play a vital buffer role between the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish peshmerga? Substantially increased oil revenue would likely lubricate the situation–the Kurds have shown a good deal of willingness to delay so long as their 17 per cent of the revenue flows and grows.
If this Iraqi nationalist Maliki is back to stay, Washington should be content. So far at least, the Sadrists have been kept out of the security ministries, Allawi’s Sunni allies got a good slice of the government (and may get more), and the Kurds are in but unable to call the shots. Maliki is a clever operator and may well be able to continue to govern relatively unimpeded, finding the support he needs from different configurations of his unwieldy grand coalition, depending on the issue. This is the high wire act Maliki’s staff told me last June he could perform better than anyone else, not leaning too far towards the Americans or too far towards the Iranians. It’s a good spectator sport for those who like their politics both subtle and risky.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Does God cause Nigerian violence?
The press will portray yesterday’s violence in the Nigerian town of Jos, following on Christmas eve bombings, as inter-religious, between Christians and Muslims. And some of the main battle lines are certainly drawn along that divide.
But the driving factors lie far from religion: political status, property rights and power distribution are the underlying causes. As my former US Institute of Peace colleague David Smock puts it:
The principal sources of this conflict are competition for resources and political power rather than theological differences.
The most important of the underlying issues seems to arise from the distinction between “indigenous” people and “settlers.” As Chris Kwaja and Darren Kew explain:
This distinction becomes a major legal problem because Nigerian law allows local governments to determine their own qualifications for residency, and local administrators across the country typically make this determination based on ethnic heritage and historic control of the land.
Consequently, many Nigerians are considered “residents” of local governments in ethnic homelands from where their grandparents or great-grandparents may have migrated and where they themselves may never have even visited. These same Nigerians may be denied residency in the very neighborhoods where they were born. Without certificates of residency, individuals face a host of problems in voting, gaining political office, accessing certain types of employment or public services, and even buying land.
The largely Muslim Hausa have generally been regarded as non-indigenous “settlers” in Plateau State, of which Jos is the capital, no matter how long they have lived there. But in Jos North, where the Hausa control the local government, they treat non-Hausa as settlers.
These are problems considerably more mundane, and in a sense soluble, than at least some theocratic issues. While there are Nigerians committed to resolving them, resources have been lacking, and the justifiably admired Imam and Pastor need support (the video clip about them
here is only 10 minutes, despite what the label says). Unless the underlying issues are dealt with, Nigeria’s fault lines, which are not limited to Plateau State or Christian/Muslim tensions, will widen, with catastrophic consequences in a country that supplies about 2.3 million barrels of oil per day to the world market (including 8% of U.S. imports) and has the largest population in Africa (over 152 million).
RSS - Posts
