U.S. Calls on Guinea Junta to Announce 2009 National Elections

US Calls on Guinea Junta to Announce 2009 National Elections

Press Statement
US State Dept, Sean McCormack, Spokesman
Washington, DC
January 16, 2009

The United States takes note of the Guinean junta's announcement establishing a cabinet of military officers and civilians. The United States calls on the junta to publicly announce a date for presidential and parliamentary elections in 2009 so Guinea’s Independent National Election Commission (CENI) can ensure the electoral process and elections are credible, free, fair, transparent and timely.


2009/066

US: New Ethiopian Law Restricts NGO Activities

New Ethiopian Law Restricts NGO Activities
Press Statement
US State Dept, Robert Wood, Deputy Spokesman
Washington, DC, January 8, 2009

The United States is concerned that the Charities and Societies Proclamation (CSO law) passed this week by the Ethiopian Parliament appears to restrict civil society activities and international partners’ ability to support Ethiopia’s own development efforts.

We recognize the importance of effective oversight of civil society organizations to ensure accountability, efficiency, transparency, and a clear set of operating procedures for NGOs. However, we are concerned this law may restrict U.S. government assistance to Ethiopia, particularly on promoting democracy and good governance, civic and human rights, conflict resolution, and advocacy for society’s most vulnerable groups -- areas the Ethiopian government has defined as critical for development.

2009/023

Darfur: Ban welcomes US pledge to airlift critical supplies to UN-African Union force

Darfur: Ban welcomes US pledge to airlift critical supplies to UN-African Union force
UN, New York, Jan 7 2009 2:10PM

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has thanked United States President George W. Bush for his country’s recent commitment to airlift supplies urgently needed by the joint United Nations-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

“The expedited arrival to Darfur of this material, which includes trucks and other essential equipment, will strengthen the ability of the United Nations to protect civilians and carry out other aspects of its mandate,” Mr. Ban’s spokesperson said in a <"statement'>http://www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=3649">statement.

The hybrid force, known as <"http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unamid/index.html%22%3EUNAMID, was set up by the Security Council to protect civilians in Darfur, where an estimated 300,000 people have been killed and another 2.7 million have been forced from their homes since fighting erupted in 2003, pitting rebels against Government forces and allied Janjaweed militiamen.

The US initiative “sets a constructive precedent for broad international support to expeditiously deploy UNAMID,” the statement noted, adding that the Secretary-General calls on other Member States to consider similar efforts to speed up the deployment of the mission.

At full strength, UNAMID, which marked its first anniversary last week, is slated to become the world body’s largest peacekeeping operation with some 26,000 military and police personnel.

One year on from transferring the task of suppressing the violence to UNAMID from the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS), some 12,374 blue helmets are now in place across Darfur, which is 63 per cent of the 19,555 military personnel authorized by the Security Council.

Jan 7 2009 2:10PM
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For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news

The Diversification Challenge in Africa's Resource-Rich Economies

Rowing Against the Current: The Diversification Challenge in Africa's Resource-Rich Economies

John Page, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Global Economy and Development, The Brookings Institution

Global Working Papers No. 28

For a growing number of countries in Africa the current commodity boom is a huge opportunity. But if the economic history of resource-rich, poor countries—especially in Africa—is any guide, rather than bringing prosperity, the resource boom may drive them into what Paul Collier (2007) in his influential book The Bottom Billion terms the “Natural Resources Trap.” In Africa, countries dependent on oil, gas, and mining have tended to have weaker long-run growth, higher rates of poverty, and higher inequality than non mineral-dependent economies at similar levels of income.

Two recent studies suggest both the potential and the risks of resource extraction. Alekseev and Conrad (2008) show the potential—resource wealth has tended to make countries better off. They find that in the long run resource-rich countries have significantly higher levels of income than other countries. However, Collier and Goderis (2007, 2008) suggest that this may be due only to the income generated by resource rents rather than to the growth of output. In resourcerich economies—unlike those with more diversified economic structures—production and income may diverge substantially. Collier and Goderis ask whether a commodity boom helps an economy to produce more output. They find that for the first few years following an increase in the price of commodity exports output increases relative to what it would otherwise have been, but usually the growth of output is not sustained. After two decades the typical resource extracting economy is producing less than it would have done in the absence of the boom. Collier and Goderis simulate the outcome of the current commodity boom and find that, if history repeats itself, after two decades output for the typical African commodity exporter will be around 25 percent lower than it would have been without the boom. This is the resource curse.

But geology is not destiny. Natural resource wealth can be an effective driver of growth. Chile, which has been the fastest growing Latin American country for the past 15 years, has relied almost entirely on exports of natural resource products. Botswana has been among the world’s fastest growing economies for the last 30 years, and Indonesia and Malaysia have used their natural resource wealth to diversify and grow their economies. From the global evidence Collier and Goderis find that although a decline in production is the norm, it is by no means inevitable. Some societies have succeeded in harnessing commodity booms for sustained increases in production, while others have not. The consequences of resource-riches, they argue, depend upon choices.

This paper is about one important set of choices faced by Africa’s resource-rich economies, whether and how to diversify production beyond the natural resource sector. Following this introduction, Section 2 examines the role of natural resource exports in Africa’s recent growth recovery. Using a new methodology developed by Arbache and Page (2007) it finds that Africa’s growth acceleration after 1995 has been driven mainly by avoiding the policy mistakes that led to sharp economic contractions in the past and by a strong surge in growth in the resource-rich economies. This makes Africa’s long-run growth prospects vulnerable to the natural resource curse.

Section 3 introduces the main theme of the paper: Africa’s resource exporters are rowing against the current as they attempt to diversify their economies. The relative price changes that occur in a resource exporting economy—symptoms of the “Dutch disease”— place Africa’s natural resource-rich countries at a disadvantage with respect to two drivers of industrial change and economic growth. Because Dutch disease discourages the development of new tradable goods producing activities, it inhibits the diversification of the manufacturing sector and limits the potential for increases in the sophistication of manufacturing production and exports. Both diversity and sophistication have been linked in recent literature to higher incomes and faster growth. In addition, research on the impact of agglomeration economies on production costs and international competitiveness strongly suggests that late-comers to industrialization, such as Africa’s natural resource exporters, suffer from a competitive disadvantage linked to the spatial distribution of global industry. It is far easier to expand an existing industrial agglomeration than to start a new one. Not surprisingly, then, the data show that Africa’s mineral rich economies trail both the Africa regional average and the least developed countries in general in key indicators of industrial dynamism.

Section 4 draws on the experience of three successful natural resource exporters—Chile, Indonesia and Malaysia—to make the point that geology is not destiny. Each of these economies had rising income growth accompanied by increasing diversity of their manufacturing and export structure between 1980 and 2000. Successful diversification away from dependence on natural resources was the consequence of different public policies to mitigate the impact of the Dutch disease. In the cases of Indonesia and Malaysia, government policies successfully targeted moving into new more sophisticated manufacturing sectors. In Chile public policy favored the expansion into new, knowledge-intensive natural resource based exports.

Some options for policy choices are set out in section 5. The basic theme of the section is that governments—through improvements in the investment climate and public expenditures—can mitigate the worst consequences of the Dutch disease. Section 6 concludes and offers some ideas for further research.

The key problem facing Somalia is not one of security, but rather the vacuum in political leadership, says UN envoy

Paucity of political leadership at root of Somalia's problems, says UN envoy

UN, New York, Dec 31 2008 10:10AM

Somalia’s problems are driven by a lack of responsible political leadership, the top United Nations envoy to the Horn of Africa nation said today.

In a letter to the diaspora, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said that there is an “emerging consensus that ultimately your country’s problems stem from the absence of accountable and committed national leadership.”

The key problem facing Somalia – which has not had a functioning central government since 1991 – is not one of security, but rather the vacuum in political leadership, he wrote.

“I am confident that progress is being made towards a situation where responsible leadership will have friendly relations with its neighbours, and smooth integration into the international community.”

The envoy hailed the recent “peaceful resignation” of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. He also noted the relocation of the leaders of the opposition group known as the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) and delegates from the Joint Security Committee, comprising both the ARS and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), to the capital Mogadishu.

In June, the two sides signed a UN-facilitated peace accord, known as the Djibouti Agreement, under which they agreed to end their conflict and called on the UN to deploy an international stabilization force to the troubled nation.

The Djibouti process “has opened a new era in the history of your country,” Mr. Ould-Abdallah said, adding that it has also “given the opportunity to all Somalis to witness the activity of a vital generation that is committed to peace and stability.”

With women and the younger generation losing hope after witnessing two decades of power struggles in Somalia, he said it is time for leaders to “demonstrate their commitment to peace and the well-being of their country.”

2009 will be a busy year for Somalia, with the first few weeks seeing the preparations for the election of a new president, the formation of a government of national unity and an enlarged Parliament. The Representative wrote that he hopes to hold talks with the business community, as well as with former top military and police officials to seek their views on how to bolster security and rebuild the national army.

“Somalia is entering a new era,” he said, calling on the diaspora to “catch the train of history and mobilize all efforts to maintain solidarity among all brothers in order to recover the integrity, sovereignty and dignity of Somalia.”

WaPo: Somalia goes from bad to worse

Still Sinking
Somalia goes from bad to worse.
Washington Post. Friday, December 26, 2008; A22

THE BUSH administration is trying to head off another disaster in Somalia, a failed state that has confounded three successive U.S. administrations. The administration won't succeed. Somalia's Western-backed "transitional government" is crumbling, and Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda are threatening to take over the small parts of the country they don't already control -- mainly the capital, its port and the town where the remains of the parliament sit. U.S. diplomats have attempted to stop this by trying to persuade the United Nations to sponsor a peacekeeping mission; they have also urged Ethiopia to postpone the withdrawal of its troops, which have been fighting the Islamists for the past two years.

Neither proposal has gained traction. As the United States painfully learned in the early 1990s, even a large and capable foreign military force with a U.N. mandate would be seriously challenged in Mogadishu, where it is easy to rally gunmen against a perceived invader. In any case, there is no prospect for assembling such an expedition. U.N.-mandated peacekeeping operations are already failing in Congo and Sudan because of inadequate resources and the peacekeeping troops' lack of professionalism. Unless President Bush chooses to end his term as his father did, by landing Marines in Mogadishu, no international force will rescue Somalia.

That means this strategically located country will continue to grow more miserable and more threatening to the rest of the world. The radical Islamists known as al-Shabab are comparable to the Taliban of Afghanistan in the extremism of their rule and in their willingness to harbor foreigners recruited by al-Qaeda. Some of the authors of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa are believed to be sheltered by the movement, along with fresh recruits from other African countries. Somalia could become a base for terrorist operations around the region, even as pirates based along its northern coast continue to threaten international shipping lanes.

The Obama administration, which will inherit this mess, will have to hope that Somalis will react against harsh Islamic fundamentalism that has no precedent in the country. As veteran analyst John Prendergast of the Enough Project points out, there are moderate Islamic factions; one of them recently reached a power-sharing agreement with part of the transitional government at U.N.-sponsored talks. If African neighbors and Western governments continue to support the consolidation and expansion of that centrist alliance, the fundamentalists may eventually face serious opposition. U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will have to seize opportunities to strike at known al-Qaeda targets, and more determined naval action is needed to stop the pirates. Somalia requires a vast nation-building effort, sponsored, supported and funded -- if not carried out -- by outside powers. The sad truth is that neither the United Nations nor any other alliance is up to the job.