LMO’s blunder

Oh dear. How on Earth can Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC, start a press conference with the following statement.

“Judges confirmed that the first acts of violence in 2007/08 were planned and organised by members of the ODM led by Ruto a year in advance.”

Judges did not confirm this. They confirmed that there was enough evidence to suggest this may have been what happened, and that the case can now proceed to trial – where justice will then be delivered.

It is not Moreno-Ocampo’s place to pronounce the verdict ahead of the trial. His job is to submit the evidence and then let the judges make the verdict.

I’m still amazed how someone with his seniority – not to mention pay packet – can make such ill-thought out statements. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. Doesn’t he realise how politicised the debate has become in Nairobi. Anything he says will be lapped up by the Kenyan media – so he should be really, really careful when he says anything about the situation there.

Kenya: the case against the police

The first thing to say about today’s Kenyan ruling is, unfortunately, what a shambles the ICC is. Not, incidentally, because of the court decision, which was fairly predictable (will come on to that in a minute), but because the whole Internet infrastructure of the court seems to collapse when a case that it is pursuing generates interest from more than a handful of casual observers.

I woke up this morning at a leisurely hour, grabbed myself a cup of coffee and vowed to try and cover the court decision from the comfort of my own living room. I was undecided about whether the pyjamas would be staying on.

My initial findings, upon booting up the computer, was that the website of the ICC had unequivocally crashed. And it wasn’t about to come back up any time soon. Interest in the case is huge among Kenyans, which perhaps isn’t all that surprising. Whereas many in the Congo or Uganda are somewhat lukewarm towards the ICC, Kenya has a thriving and advanced media scene, and a highly literate population. Moreover, unlike in the Congo or Uganda, this case is directly targeting people at the high echelons of government. This case matters!

So, yep, the website had well and truly crashed. Which was fine by me. It meant that I didn’t have to agonise about the decision of whether the PJs were coming off or staying on (off, definitely), and I could simply tootle down to the ICC henceforth, to cover the decision from there.

For those hoping to follow it in Kenya, though, it must have been disappointing – and a needless insult to victims representatives over there, which the ICC could, with a little bit of planning (and maybe a better communications budget) have rectified.

(Once at the ICC, I discovered that the wireless Internet in the press room was also playing up. But, suppressing thoughts of conspiracy theories as best I could, I persevered.)

On to the decision. For those non-ICC followers, this decision relates to accusations that have been made against six senior Kenyan officials, three from the government and three who are supporters of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).

Four of the cases were confirmed and will now proceed to trial. Two were thrown out. You can read my IWPR article about the verdict here.

The particular point I want to make in this blog entry is about one of the defendants whose case was thrown out. Mohammed Ali, currently chief of Kenya’s Postal Corporation, was accused of helping co-ordinate police violence in the eastern areas of Nakuru and Naivasha. In their ruling, the pre-trial judges said there was not enough evidence to suggest that the police had participated in violence there.

Ken Wafula, a human rights campaigner from the area, disagrees. He maintains that the police were responsible for half the shootings in the area during the violence that followed the 2007 election.

Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, from the International Crisis Group (ICG), tells me that he was also surprised with this verdict.

This may suggest not that the police are free of responsibility, but that the OTP didn’t do a very good job of gathering evidence in the area. When I met Wafula during the investigation, in his office in Eldoret, he was becoming increasingly frustrated that ICC investigators were spending too much time with human rights campaigners in Nairobi and not enough with the folk on-the-ground  in the east of the country.

I imagine that the case against Ali is not over yet. The Prosecutor has the option of resubmitting the case to the court, providing that he can dig up fresh evidence. Wafula says that he has plenty he can provide.

France. Ha ha.

To say the French and British aren’t exactly in bed with one another is probably something of an under-statement. The British have always regarded the French as arrogant. For their part, the French tend to regard the British as awkward and difficult, clinging to a past that has long since evaporated and switching in emotions between colonial guilt and nostalgia.

In his autobiography, Tony Blair has an interesting description of French premier Nicolas Sarkozy. Blair met him before he won office and says:

“Nicolas and I had certain things in common… However, we differed in one respect: he had superabundant self-confidence. There was not a glimmer of self-doubt. As we walked through an avenue of trees that led down from the villa, he talked frankly and with complete conviction about his own victory: ‘I will win. I will become president.’

From anyone else it would have sounded vain or even slightly mad, but he said it with a combination of charm and clarity that made it seem entirely factual. The British would have wanted to cut someone who talked like that down to size, but I could see that the French would go for it. It was an attitude which had passion, elan and also that touch of arrogance which in some small way defines France, and which in some small way I admire. I could see them looking at Nicolas and saying: Now that’s a president.”

I must say that, unlike Blair, I’m not hugely enamoured with arrogant confidence. I think I’d probably have just felt like punching Sarkozy. But then I, unlike Blair, never have had the ambition to be prime minister.

Sarkozy has not been winning many friends in Britain recently. In December, Britain was forced to veto a new EU treaty that had precious little to do with saving the euro and quite a lot to do with giving more powers to Brussels. It’s difficult to know exactly what went on in that room of 27 leaders, but the outcome – with Cameron isolated, unable to sign up to a French-backed treaty that would bizarrely have placed an onerous burden on the City rather than actually done anything useful to salvage the euro project – had all the hallmarks of a French stitch-up.

Of course, the French position is entirely justifiable. Britain has never been a full part of the EU – it remains outside the euro, Schengen and the social chapter. So France might be quite entitled to ask: why are you in this EU club at all? By isolating Britain, Sarkozy clearly has more weight – along with German chancellor Angela Merkel – to steer things in the direction that he wants.

Troublesome Britain. Arrogant French.

My personal view is that Cameron did the right thing but for perhaps the wrong reasons. One of my arguments with the Conservatives is that they are somewhat incoherent on Europe. The party is divided over Europe, with the consequence that they say nothing, which, given the importance of the EU in British life, is clearly wrong. The party has been forced into this ridiculous position by the somewhat nutty eurosceptic movement in the UK – and the best thing for the Tories would be to decide exactly what relationship they want with Europe. Deciding this might also please the French.

Yesterday, Standard & Poor’s, a US ratings agency, downgraded French sovereign debt by one notch – from AAA to AA+. French government advisors responded in usual kind – by attacking the ratings agency in question, and saying this didn’t really matter since France is still a comparatively stable economy able to service its debts.

True, perhaps. But the S&P downgrade is still significant.

One can rant and rave at rating agencies until one is blue in the face – as the EU very often does – and there is a good argument to be made that they have too much power in the world. A friend of mine, who used to work at a rating agency, has endless stories about the politics involved behind ratings – and how his office would often get called by the finance minister of one country or another if a downgrade was expected, to perhaps steer things down another course.

This is not an indication that rating agencies are unimportant, as some in Paris might have you believe. Not only does the downgrade signal that things are not completely rosy in Paris, but also on a more practical level they make it more costly for France to borrow money. And that is going to hurt the recovery. It will also cause the euro’s rescue package to wobble since France is one of the biggest backers of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).

Of course one has to be careful of schadenfreude. The UK has its own distinctive problems and may very well be in recession (again!) But the downgrade of France holds in it a warning for those eurozone leaders trying to resolve the crisis. National arrogance is misplaced. Solidarity would serve the euro-group much better.

And, for Cameron, reading the reasons for the S&P downgrade might not be a bad idea. Austerity is all very well – says S&P – but it cannot work on its own, without solid policies to stimulate growth. This is of course what that maverick economist John Maynard Keynes once said – you have to grow your way out of a recession, not cut your way out.

There are signs that Cameron, which launched his premiership on the ticket of fierce austerity, might be heeding such advice and recognising that there is a complex balance to be struck.

Changing the Dutch drug law

With most things in life, I am pretty much a die-hard liberal. I believe that, providing you are not interfering with anyone else’s life, you should be able to do pretty much as you please. I’m thinking, in particular, of drug use.

There are a few caveats to this sweeping statement. You should be of sound mind and of a responsible age, for example. Furthermore, the condition of not doing harm to anyone else also extends to the financial implications for society. For example, if you smoke all your life, there is a better than average chance you are going to end up with cancer and need more expensive care than someone who hasn’t indulged in this disagreeable habbit. But, with a little bit of mathematical wizardry, it is fairly easy to ring-fence society from the costs of other peoples’ lifestyle choices – simply raise the level of tax on cigarettes so that you are sure that future medical expenses will be covered by this revenue (which, in England, they probably are already).

There should also be an abundance of information about the expected consequences of your chosen action. “SMOKING KILLS” labels are a good example.

Anyway, by and large, live and let live is a pretty good motto to follow.

This is why the decision of the Dutch parliament to ban foreigners from purchasing cannibis in coffeeshops wrankles so much. It will not stop people taking drugs in the Netherlands. It will simply push things underground and provide Dutch drug dealers with a new source of income.

It is dangerous, short-sighted and stupid in the extreme. The result, unfortunately, of populist politics rather than pragmatism.

This ban will be phased in from January 1 and, from the beginning of 2013, it will not be possible for non-residents to buy soft drugs in the Netherlands.

(This may also be contrary to European free-trade laws – I would expect a European court case to follow pretty soon.)

Crunch time for LMO

2012 will be the last year of Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s tenure as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He might have therefore wished for a slightly better christmas present than the news that court judges have just ordered the first-ever release of an indicted alleged war criminal: Calixte Mbarushimana of Rwanda.

Early in the New Year – probably in January – ICC judges will rule on the Thomas Lubanga case, and decide whether he should do a stint behind bars or be deemed a free man who was wrongly brought to the Hague. I obviously wasn’t privy to the Moreno-Ocampos’ Christmas celebrations, but as he pulled on the wishbone from his turkey he was almost certainly wishing for the former.

Most countries in the West have a right to be proud of their justice system – free, impartial and neutral, it really is a beacon that we can be proud of. Spend a little time in African countries – Uganda, Sudan, the Congo, even Kenya – and you will quickly find that ‘justice’ is the domain of the rich and that the poor have to scavange around for the scraps that have been cast off by the aid agencies. There is no real justice in these countries.

This is why the ICC was created – to give a chance for the downtrodden to have access to justice that would otherwise be denied to them.

However, from the point of the view of the prosecutor, he wants to win. He needs to win. He has to be seen to be making a difference in the world.

To lose his first ever case – which has already endured so much criticism since Lubanga essentially is one of the smaller fish in a whole web of tyrany, and also some of the evidence that the prosecutorial team came up with was highly suspect – would be a terrible blow for Moreno-Ocampo and more broadly for international justice as a whole.

I don’t want to suggest that, if Lubanga’s case is thrown out, the ICC will cease to exist. But an ‘innocent’ ruling will certainly provide ammunition for those critics, like myself, that has serious concerns about the way the ICC has been conducting itself over the past ten years or so.

I plan to write a longer opinion piece about the significance of the Lubanga ruling in the coming weeks.

Always winter and never Christmas

From some pictures posted on Facebook I see that Father Christmas arrived in Khartoum this year, distributing presents to some wide-eyed and presumably quite bewildered African children. An eminently Christian tradition meets an apparently hard-line Islamic country: interesting, I thought to myself.

For some curious reason, these photos immediately put me in mind of C.S. Lewis’s fabulous tale of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In this kid’s fable, four children enter the magical land of Narnia through a wardrobe, which has been cursed by a wicked white witch to be always winter. But, despite it being permanently winter in the land, Christmas never arrives. That is until the four children – sons of Adam and Eve and therefore heirs to the throne of Cair Paravel – enter the land and the spell starts to break. Then Father Christmas can get through.

To what extent can parallels be drawn with what has been happening to the government in Khartoum?

Yesterday a comment posted on my blog – suggesting that it is about time the Arab Spring arrived in Sudan – focused my thoughts even further.

It is a curious question as to why the Arab Spring has completely passed North Sudan by, given the obviously undemocratic leanings of the government. And it is one I have spent a great deal of time thinking of. Spring, of course, is what happened in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And the moment that the snow started to thaw, the White Witch’s sledge could no longer get through and she knew her reign was coming to an end.

But those who dream of a similar (though more Arabic) Spring in North Sudan are likely to be disappointed. Look at Tunisia, at Egypt, at Libya, to an extent at Syria. These were revolutions that were propelled forwards by a well-educated, articulate and above all numerous middle class.

Look, too, at Russia – where recent demonstrations are finally starting to make a difference. For years, certain echelons of Russian society have been calling for change, but to little effect. Now, though, something seems to have changed within this movement – and that is the buy-in of the middle class.

This is something that North Sudan lacks and, for this reason, calls for regime change are unlikely to gain momentum.

Christmas may have come to North Sudan this year, but this doesn’t mean that the snow is starting to melt. For those that want Spring in the country to arrive, they may have to wait a little bit longer.

Khalil’s passing

A few days ago, news came that Darfuri rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) were marching on Khartoum. Parallels started to be drawn with May 2007, when rebels from the same movement launched an attack on the northern outskirts of Khartoum, in Omdurman. The attack ultimately failed to topple the government, but was of huge symbolic importance – here, at last, this rag-tag bunch of doped-up teenagers had managed to reach the very epicentre of governmental power.

This latest news, that JEM was about to launch another devastating attack on Khartoum, was propaganda at its very best. The rebels decided to tell the world about their latest move on Khartoum when they were no more than 120 miles from the border with Darfur. It lacked all the element of surprise that had existed in their previous strike at the capital. It was an attempt to show that JEM - so often at odds with the government when all other rebel groups might be prepared to make peace – still matters.

Then today - on Christmas no less – it emerges that Khalil Ibrahim, JEM’s leader – has been killed. Whether he was killed at the hand of Sudanese soldiers, or in an airstrike, remains a matter of some dispute. But it does appear that he is dead – both the government and JEM confirm this.

I never met Ibrahim during my time in Sudan, although I would have liked to and felt that I knew a great deal about him. Between 2007 and 2008, out of all the dozens of rebel groups that exist within Darfur’s hinterland, it sometimes felt that only JEM mattered. The occasional Indian or Chinese worker was kidnapped – JEM was behind it. A UN convoy got hit – all down to JEM, The rebels are marching on Khartoum – JEM of course.

Mini Minawi, leader of a faction of the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), had made peace with the government in 2006 (a peace that has recently become unravelled). Abdel Wahid al-Nur, in charge of another SLM faction, was living in Paris and, as a consequence, the influence he had in Darfur was starting to wane (he has since returned to the country to resume his fight against Khartoum). It sometimes felt that JEM was the only rebel group that mattered – and, as I argued consistently in this blog, it probably was.

A great deal of JEM’s strength came from its slick media operation. I’m not the only one to opine this – fellow journalist Rob Crilly, who did spend time with JEM and met Ibrahim, had first-hand experience of how JEM were capturing the world’s attention (essential for any successful rebel movement).

It’s because of this propaganda machine, coupled with JEM’s allegedly strong links with opposition figures in Khartoum, that led prospective rebel fighters to presume that JEM offered the best chance of salvation from the Islamist agenda of the ruling elite (leave alone for the moment that JEM offered an Islamic alternative that was everybit as hardline as the one in place at the moment). The ranks of JEM swelled and even started to attract non-Muslims, although the core always remained vehmently Islamist.

I felt that I knew JEM so well – in fact, many of my Darfuri friends in Khartoum had links with its leadership – that the news of Ibrahim’s death came as something of a shock. This shock was all the greater given the legend that had sprung up around Ibrahim. Like so many similar rebel leaders for which pesonal image has become so important, people had started to regard him as untouchable. Something of a spectral wraith that could slip through the country unnoticed.

It’s too early to say what affect his death is likely to have on JEM as a movement. JEM has always projected more weight on to the Darfur stage than it really has behind it and will probably continue to be the obstreperous one in a bunch of rag-tag rebel groups. I remain unconvinced that such obstreperousness is the best way that JEM can achieve its stated aims – namely an end to the marginalisation of ordinary Darfuri citizens – but at least in Ibrahim there was a leader that other rebels could rally around. (A single rebel group, of course, is what Darfur always needed – and what Khartoum always sought to stop).

So JEM may continue to exist but in Ibrahim’s passing a part of the movement has surely died as well.

It’s out

Finally, after countless months of painstaking research and writing, the second edition of our guidebook to Sudan is out!

I have to say I’m rather proud of it – it looks really good – and has even more to it than the previous one. We’re heavily promoting the book as the first ever guidebook to cover independent South Sudan, so that should really help it sell. Plus all the other points, completely revised, which helped make the last one such a success.

I just hope that the orders now start pouring in.

If you are planning on visiting Sudan and want a good guidebook to the country (or even if you just have a passing interest in Sudan) I’d urge you to consider our book. Moreover, if you are going to buy our guidebook, please please please do so from our Sudan guidebook website! We’ll give you a discount – and your money will be going to an independent start-up rather than a corporate giant, who, to be honest, probably could survive without your cash.

Not to labour the point, please don’t buy our book from Amazon – we get exceedingly little money from such sales!

Waterstone’s way

I was disappointed to learn today what is becoming of Waterstone’s booksellers.

Waterstone’s may be this monstrous corporation that has truly taken over the retail market for books, making it quite difficult for any independent publisher not stopped by their shops to compete. But, when I last dealt with Waterstone’s, I was pleased to see they still had very much a local / regional focus. One bookshop in one part of town might decide not to take your book, but another one just down the road might – and it would then sell.

What has now happened is that all the buying for the chain is done through head office. This is likely to make it difficult for any publisher that the chain decides not to take – there is now little recourse available for those who want to approach the stores directly.

On one level, I can understand why they have done this: cost-saving and streamlining.

But on another, more fundamental level, I am very disappointed in them. This decision, taken only a month ago, is all the more surprising because of who became head of the chain earlier this. James Daunt, who set up one of the more successful independent book chains in London (and which is still going).

Is there no bookseller these days that is friendly to the independent publisher?

Update: In Daunt’s defence, though, I have just been speaking to a buyer of another bookshop. He says that things probably just need time to settle down at Waterstone’s, and that Daunt just needs time to sort out how things are running in the clunky business. I’m told – though haven’t yet coroborated this – that some of Waterstone’s shops do indeed have a local buyer. It’s all a bit uncertain at the moment.

Further update: This was the Telegraph’s assessment some months ago of Daunt’s appointment: “It is likely that as its new boss he will want to close stores, give power back to the staff and return the chain to its local roots, a strategy that Waterstone’s itself has been toying with to limited effect over the last year or so.” Come on James, live up to this optimistic assessment!

That funny Russian bloke

It’s terribly bad form when you’re at a party and get chatting to a complete stranger who is determined, come what may, to give you highly dubious financial advice – and, what is more, pick holes in every single financial decision that you have made since you were about 12. She didn’t ask for my opinion at all, or even take steps to find out anything about me or whether I know anything about finance. I think she just wanted to talk.

In the middle of our thankfully rather brief conversation, it emerged that we had made a really, really, really stupid financial error when we purchased our house. “I’m very sorry for you but that’s the way it is,” she said gleefully, which is why the conversation was as brief as it was.

I tried to understand something of her economic arguments, to persuade myself that they weren’t really as flawed as I feared they were. From what I could surmise, they were all to do with this book she’d read. About that 60 year economic cycle or something. It’s just that the entire world economy goes haywire every so often and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s just the way it is.

She was talking about, though she never named him, that funny bloke from Russia. The fact that she chose to link this economic cycle with our decision to purchase a house – a long term investment that almost always beats inflation, especially with the world’s population having just hit seven billion and rising – remains a mystery.

Nikolei Kondratiev, born in 1892, was a Russian economist whose claim to fame was to theorise that capitalist economies have a cycle of between 40 and 50 years of boom, followed by a prolonged period of bust. Then there’s a war.

The interesting thing is that, unlike the 11-year cycle of growth-then-recession, not every mainstream economist accepts the existence of this cycle; there’s just not sufficient data. Worryingly, though, the cycle (if it exists) does seem to correspond with conflict, aggression and war.

Take the 1870s and 1880s, when there was a drastic economic downturn. Shortly afterwards, Europe’s colonial powers, which were badly afflicted by the economic collapse, marched off to Africa for a bit of healthy pillaging, looting and country-making. They may have slaughtered a few African natives along the way.

Then, following the 1930s Depression… well, that sentence doesn’t even need an ending.

There are a number of theories about why the Kondratiev cycle might exist, but perhaps one of the most plausible is the generational one. This would also explain why the cycles seem to be getting longer. It was over 70 years since the Great Depression and, if one is to believe the Kondratiev theory, we may very well be in the midst of this cycle now. The fact is that politicians, policymakers and even economists tend to have a very short-term memory.

This is worrying.

All week, I have been speaking with asset managers and senior investment officers of large life insurers. Their views on European government bonds is telling. They no longer regard them as the safe haven they were before. They would prefer to sink their funds into emerging market debt, which not only offer pretty decent returns but actually come with a better guarantee that the governments might be able to repay their loans.

Oh, how the tables have turned. The shift of power in the world has never been more obvious.

The problem is that the European politicians are still living in the past, continuing to believe in European solidarity when it was clear right from the start that this never existed – at least not on the level that they wanted.

The euro is about to blow apart. This isn’t idle speculation but an honest appraisal of what we are now witnessing: the beginning of the end – or perhaps even the middle of the end. The only thing that could save the flawed euro project is if the European Central Bank (ECB) could be given free reign to act as a lender of last resort for Italy and Greece and all these other countries that have got into such a financial muddle. But Angela Merkel, who still remains married to the euro project, is dillying and dallying, and that is only going to cause more pain. Germans are so reluctant to allow the ECB print more money because, within their collective conscience, they recall the pre-war hyperinflation caused by just such central bank meddling, when a wheelbarrow of deutschmarks were needed to buy a loaf of bread. But eventually, I am certain, Merkel will have no option but to cave into pressure to let the ECB take control of the situation. The only other option would be a complete and disruptive break-up of the euro – and no European politician really seems to entertaining this idea. Yet.

In my view, the euro must be allowed to break up in an orderly and planned manner. Unless this happens, things are going to get really ugly.

What is astonishing about this whole sorry situation is that it has really got to the stage that it has got to. Watching a completely unelected government being appointed il parlamento italiano is unbelievable. It is almost like watching something from a movie set, but a great deal scarier. I write about Africa all the time. What would Europeans think if they saw South Africa, say, tell members that an unelected puppet dictator should be put in charge of an African country, just because their policies were a little bit friendlier to the continent as a whole than someone that the people had actually voted into office. There would be uproar.

Ms Merkel and others: we have just lost the last remaining shred of democratic legitamacy that we had to tell Africans and others how to run their lives.

What is absolutely astonishing is how effectively the elected politicians – what few remain – have completely ballsed up the entire world’s economy. Perhaps these cycles do exist and are always going to happen every 40-60 years. But if that is the case, it is only because politicians are so terrible at remembering what their forefathers did.

The situation was always going to be bad. But, really, did it have to get this bad?