Via Mideast Wire, here's a translation of what the Sudan People's Liberation Movement ambassador to Washington, Akec Khoc, told the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat about Gration:

Q: “How do you see the current American-Sudanese relations?

A: “For more than ten years, i.e. during the term of the administration of President Clinton then the administration of George Bush, the relationship has been very tense. And there have been many differences and clashes. But of course and thanks to the efforts of General Gration and after president Barack Obama has declared his new Sudan policy, it has became clear that the relationship developed greatly. We are very optimistic. For many years now, the relationship has not improved that much and it is not the best relation. But things are on the right track."

Q: "But many American NGOs are criticizing Obama's policies towards Sudan?"

A: "In the United States as in other countries, there are some parties that want our relations with Washington to deteriorate and wish to give a negative image of Sudan around the world, not only in regard to the Darfur issue but also in other cases. They think that Sudan is an easy target. But we in Sudan will always welcome anyone who wants to work with us peacefully and away from any media commotion. And now under Obama who has decided to open up to everybody and deal with many countries among which is Sudan, I sincerely hope that his efforts will be successful."

Update: This post has been updated to reflect a correction. A wise commenter has pointed out that our Arabic transcript was incomplete. The ambassador, Akec Khoc (not John Akweg) is a member of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) -- not the Khartoum government. We regret the error and thank our commentor for pointing this out! 

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It was reported last week that attacks on and kidnappings of aid workers in Chad have caused six aid organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, to suspend operations there. Undeterred, this morning the top U.N. official in Chad announced "positive signs on the horizon," predicting increased peace and stabilization in the country.

This isn't the first time violence has driven away aid groups: in May, 2008, the head of the Eastern Chad mission of British aid organization Save the Children was shot and killed. At first, the organization announced that it would continue working in the country, but five months after the killing ultimately decided to leave.

At this point, the situation doesn't seem that dire with regards to the ICRC: In an interview, Bernard Barrett, an ICRC spokesman, said, "We're not pulling out totally. We're suspending some activities -- we're maintaining life-saving services, particularly medical services." The organization's other work in Chad ranges from water sanitation projects to animal vaccinations; hardly trivial work, particularly given the persistent lack of food security. As far as resuming these activities, Barrett reports a wait-and-see scenario. "Once we've obtained the release of our delegate who was kidnapped, at that point we'll be able to ascertain the security situation," he says.

Chad is a country in dire need of help. Last May, Doctors Without Borders led the effort to combat an outbreak of meningitis, immunizing 7.5 million people in the region. DWB is another organization that has been driven to suspend operations in Chad because of the recent violence. It's terrible to contemplate how many deaths might have resulted from the 65,000 cases of infection in and around Chad had DWB left just six months earlier.  

The violence that has hindered desperately needed assistance ultimately stems from poor governance, said Richard Downie in an interview with FP. According to Downie, a fellow with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Until you have credible political parties and some sort of civil society developing, it's hard to see the long-term prospects of Chad looking bright."

That sort of civil society seems a ways off. Chad ranks 173 out of the 180 countries surveyed in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index, just three spots up from Afghanistan. And the country's heavily oil-dependent economy has only reinforced the political maladies that accompany "the devil's excrement."

It's tough to avoid Downie's conclusion: "I don't see a long-term solution to what's going on in Chad at the moment without much more engagement from the international community."

Photo:  FRANCESCO FONTEMAGGI/AFP/Getty Images

A guest post from Foreign Policy contributor and human-rights activist Rebecca Hamilton.

Last week, the State Department partnered with two U.S.-based advocacy organizations (Save Darfur and STAND) to launch AskUS -- a web 2.0 initiative to connect the Obama administration with citizen activists.

More than 500 citizens emailed and used the Twitter hashtag #AskUS to submit questions on Sudan policy that they wanted Save Darfur to ask; students around the country voted online for the questions they wanted answered. The exercise culminated yesterday with a meeting, web-streamed live and cross-posted on the State Department's Facebook page. Leaders from Save Darfur and STAND asked a selection of the citizens' questions to U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan Scott Gration and Director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council Samantha Power.

The event was not quite as "live" as its billing implied. Advocates had to give the administration their questions in advance. One former State Department official I interviewed referred to Darfur activists as "noise we had to manage" -- and I feared that AskUS would be nothing more than a web 2.0 opportunity for the administration to "manage" a vocal and often critical advocacy movement.

As it turned out, the shoe was on the other foot. Activists were given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, and they pursued that avenue with such vigor that any fear of them being co-opted by their well-publicized access to the White House ceased to be a concern. What was a concern was the administration's inability to provide concrete answers to the advocates' questions.

During the session, Gration explained that there are some aspects of policy that cannot be shared publicly, and presumably no one would disagree that the need to keep some material confidential is inherent in any nation's diplomatic activities. But Gration's backtracking caused confusion among advocates who had eagerly tuned in: Despite the AskUS initiative being promoted as a forum for open dialogue, the administration was cagey on some fairly rudimentary points about its new Sudan policy.

Indeed, the Obama administration's Sudan strategy, rolled out on October 19, focuses on calibrating pressures and incentives on the basis of "verifiable changes in conditions on the ground." Yet during yesterday's meeting, advocates were told that the benchmarks for measuring progress were "a process we're working through."

The best summation of the State Department's first foray into citizen engagement 2.0 is, appropriately enough, encapsulated in a tweet by TechPresident blogger Micah Sifry. Responding to the frustration advocates were expressing in real-time to the vagueness of the administration's answers, he wrote, "Whatever you may think about substance of Gration/Power's answers, State Dept just raised the bar on admin transparency efforts." Indeed. 

It's not by chance that AskUS was launched around an issue that has such a strong U.S.-based constituency. Let's hope the next meeting sees activists on Congo, Burma, Sri Lanka, or any of the other many neglected crises, get an invite to the White House.

AFP/Getty Images

According to opposition parties in Ethiopia, nearly 450 of their members have been jailed, as part of an effort by the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to secure national elections being held this May. One opposition party reports that seven of its members have been murdered for political reasons during the course of this past year. The allegations fit Ethiopia's history of violent repression, including arrests and harassment of dissenting students and teachers.

During Ethiopia's last elections, held in 2005, widespread protests led to violent clashes with police, with about 200 protestors killed and many opposition leaders jailed. The ruling party, led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, said that the crack-down was simply to maintain law and order, and to stave off widespread ethnic conflict. Members of the opposition said it was a means of denying opposition parties electoral success.

The ruling party's bid for electoral dominance has certainly been effective -- during last year's local and bi-elections, the EPRDF and affiliated individuals lost only three seats, out of nearly 3.6 million contested seats. This past January, the government took another step towards consolidating its power by essentially outlawing human rights work and curtailing freedom of association. And according to a Reuters news analysis, the EPRDF's dominance is bolstered by a general sense that the West "would be comfortable with Meles staying on - as long as he remains a loyal ally in the volatile Horn of Africa and liberalises his potentially huge economy."

Even so, former Ethiopian Minister of Defense Seeye Abraha characterizes his country as a dormant volcano. A recent statement posted by the opposition party Ginbot 7 makes it abundantly clear that tensions remain high:

[One type of nation] is composed of countries that are ruled by corrupt tyrants whose governance is characterized by gross human rights abuse, economic polarization, ethnic conflict and political intolerance...almost all of these dictators have become turn coat democrats and hold sham elections to satisfy the demand of donor nations. The reality, however, is that they never respect election results, or care for democracy. A perfect example of one such government is the illegitimate regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia that deviously preaches democracy, but has ruled the country with an iron fist for the past 18 years."

Its supposed success signing deals with China aside, the junta in Guinea may well be falling apart. The coalition led by Moussa Dadis Camara that took over last fall is looking increasingly frayed -- its leadering increasingly unstable, and the situation increasingly volatile. (Watch out China -- if you were planning to invest, might be rough times.)

To be honest, the junta didn't get off to a bad start -- for a junta, that is. The soldiers were greeted with cheers back in December, when the military officers replaced a notoriously corrupt and patronistic President Lansana Conte. Junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara promised to hold elections -- and not to stand as candidate. The junta even made gestures toward cleaning up the state, including the arrest of high profile leaders thought to be involved in the international drug trade, a Congressional Research Service report issued at the end of September, explains. 

After months of muddling through, however, the junta took a turn from unpleasant to drastically worse on September 28, when opposition protestors were massacred in a stadium, in a pre-mediated way, Human Rights Watch claims this week. Those killed were protesting a change of heart by Dadis about elections -- he now says that he may well stand as candidate. Taken together, the election bid and the massacre have catalyzed the opposition in a way rarely seen in the small, West African state. There are about 91 or 92 political parties in the opposition, says an international NGO worker who cannot be named for security purposes. "Most political parties and civil society organizations are all working together" against the coup, she told me.

All the comes at a time when the junta itself is falling apart. Dadis comes across as crazy, drugged, or bi-polar in his interviews and TV spots. He has become increasingly fragile, observers say, as the pressures of patronage and a fractured junta coalition weigh on him. 

And fractured the junta certainly is. The group of 30 or so soldiers who came to power, with the backing of about 500 more, make up just a handful of the armies 20,000 forces. Within the high ranks, the most obvious split has emerged between Dadis and his defense minister, General Sekouba Konaté. The latter was an important figure in the military prior to the coup as is largely percieved as the biggest "threat" to Dadis's rule -- an impression codified by the fact that, since earlier this year, Dadis has refused to let his defense minister out of his sight for more than a few moments (they are pictured together above). When Konaté left the country several weeks ago to Morocco (the rumor mill claims he was sent to procure arms), many in Guinea wondered if he would be let back in to the country. His whereabouts now are unknown.

All this raises the scepter of civil war that Guinea has been fighting back literally for decades. During the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia earlier this decade, Guinea's role was largely in taking collateral damage and refugees. But internal ethnic strife has always been both a real component of governance in Guinea, and an element of the society with the potential to be exploited for the worse. "You have a sporadic history of state-sponsored violence targeted at different ethnic groups thorughout Guinea's history," CRS researcher Alexis Arieff told me. "Now, you have a situation in which every self-identified group has a narrative of political exclusion, and there's some truth to all of those narratives." Instrumentalize the grievances, many fear, and Guinea will be headed for trouble.

Add to that one more ugly truth: "many observers will say that it is likely or at least possible that members of the [junta] and or business interests that support them are involved in the international drug trade," a business increasingly penetrating Western African shores. It's got the potential to truly criminalize the state -- though the junta has done a pretty good job of this already. 

Photo: SEYLLOU/AFP/Getty Images

It's not a good sign when your leadership prize runs out of eligible candidates to honor after a whopping two years. Welcome to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation's Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, whose winner was meant to be announced in London today. 

This year the Prize Committee has considered some credible candidates. However, after in-depth review, the Prize Committee could not select a winner."

Yikes. It's been a rough year for African governance. A coup in Guinea led off the year last November, followed shortly by another unwelcome transition of power in Madagascar. Retiring heads of state this year included only Ghana's John Kufuor and South Africa's Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe, who served for under a year. All the other elections were marred by voting irregularities, repression, and/or the reinstatement of long-time rulers for whom 3rd term is not a dirty word.

The good news? The Mo Ibrahim Foundation was founded to make a statement about the need for more and better African Leadership -- and it has certainly done that this year.

SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

The city council of Nairobi passed a series of by-laws yesterday outlining new illegal activities for the streets of Kenya's capital. Newly outlawed activities include blowing one's nose in public without using a hankercheif and spitting into trash cans. Another of the laws criminalizes loud noise.

This particular ordinance may have the biggest impact on the economy of Nairobi, in which street hawkers, cab drivers and store owners rely on verbally cajoling customers into their services. One resident argued the city is just trying to make money, either from imposed fines or bribes, and directly ignoring the needs of its citizens:

"We get our daily bread here,We are not making noise. The council must know that we are self-employed."

The city maintains that the purpose of the news laws is to make the city more habitable and reduce general nuisance. 

AFP/Stringer

Later this afternoon, Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina will address the General Assembly here in New York, but some don't want him here at all. Rajoelina took power in a military-backed coup in March, toppling then leader Marc Ravalomanana. The two leader signed an internationally-mediated power-sharing deal in August, but Rajoelina unilaterally disolved it this month. 

General Assembly President Ali Treki met with foreign from the Southern Afircan Development Community -- which has refused to recognize Rajoelina's government -- after the foreign minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo wrote a letter to him protesting Rajoelina's presence at the assembly.

The U.N. maintains that the invitation was not a reflection on Rajoelina's legitimacy and that the president was invited to participate in the climate summit earlier this week. 

Speaking today at the Center for American Progress in Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson discussed yesterday's Special Forces operation in Somalia on alleged terrorist Saleh Ali Nabhan. "[T]he individual who was reportedly killed in Somalia yesterday was in fact one of the two top leaders of al Qaeda in East Africa. He was in fact the individual who was directly responsible for organizing the destruction of the Paradise hotel [in Kenya in 2002] and the attempted shoot-down of the Isreali aircraft [also in Kenya]."

"We think that his departure form the ranks of the al Qaeda leadership in East Africa will substantially reduce the capacity of that organization to plan and carry out future attacks," Carson said.

The discussion comes on the heels of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's August trip to Africa, a subject that Carson brought up in greater detail. He re-emphasized that among the countries visited on that trip, Nigeria remains "the most important" for its size, population, oil supplies, and ongoing challenges (read: conflict, corruption, poverty). Similar concern was expressed about the dire humanitarian situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Clinton's visit took her to meet with victims of rape and abominable living conditions. 

Most interesting of all were some of the meetings that Secretary Carson alluded to, both past and present including: 

• The secretary's meeting with Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe in Libya last month, which the secretary found to be a "not very pleasant, unsuccesful meeting." (though he had a "much more satisfactory meeting" with the country's Vice President Joyce Mujuru, also a member of Mugabe's party.) Carson told the audience that he believed the power-sharing agreement between Mugabe's party and that of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was yet to be fully implemented, to great U.S. and broader international concern.

• A trip by Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew to Ethiopia and Tanzania in July. (The past administration had very close ties with the former on intellgience and counterterror in the Horn of Africa. It is yet unclear whether such a relationship is ongoing in the Obama administration today.)
• Finally, Carson will travel to Minnesota in the next weeks, where he will "meet with leaders of the Somali community in Minneapolis" -- the country's largest Somali diaspora. In recent months, reports have surfaced that radical messages from Somalia's Islamist insurgency have helped recruit Somali-Americans back home to fight for these groups.

Photo: PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images

Amidst the continued debate and controversy surrounding South African world champion runner, Caster Semenya, South African officials have gone a bit overboard in their outrage about gender testing procedures used by IAAF. In regard to revoking Semenya's title, South African Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile stated earlier today:

"I think it would be the third world war. We will go to the highest levels in contesting such a decision. I think it would be totally unfair and totally unjust."

AFP/Getty Images

 

Somalia may generally be thought of as a source of refugees, but fierce conflict in Ethiopia is sending more and more refugees into the country with predictably negative effects. There's recently been a large increase in street children and a rise in gang conflict in the city of Hargeisa, which is often an initial stopping point for immigrants seeking to travel further into Somalia or Yemen.

Children flocking to Hargeisa join Somali kids in searching for the most basic necessities, using any means necessary to find their next meal off the streets.  Current estimates claim there to be about 3,000 children, most of them boys between five and 18, living on Hargeisa's streets. Lacking families and home environments many of these children cling to gangs as a source of fraternity and stability. In the past two years, approximately 5,000 knives and weapons, commonly used in robberies, have been recovered from street children. Mohamed Ismail Hirsi, Hargeisa's Central Police Station commander recently stated:

"In the last 72 hours, we have arrested more than 30 street children who have committed crimes such as stealing mobile phones in different parts of the town."  

Increased crime by these young boys is complicated further by the fact that a 2008 juvenile justice law has yet to be implemented, forcing these children to be charged and processed as adult perpetrators.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, and his her office released two reports on violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, citing "possible war crimes and crimes against humanity" by the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a rebel group formerly led by Laurent Nkunda and backed by the government of Rwanda.

Talk about your diplomatic understatement. The crimes involved dozens of killings and rapes. But for those following the DRC this statement has to seem kind of weak. There have been all sorts of atrocities in Eastern Congo for years, and the only questions really are which militia was guilty in which case. Possible? The U.N. head of mission in the DRC called the attacks war crimes immediately after they happened. 

Reuters reporters shrewdly dig into the problematic fact that while Nkunda was later arrested by Rwandan forces, it was his lieutenant, Jean Bosco Ntaganda (shown above), nicknamed "The Terminator" who was commanding the CNDP forces at the time of the November killings. Guess where he is? 

Ntaganda, who is being sought by the International Criminal Court on separate war crimes charges, wasintegrated into Congo's army in January along with other members of the Tutsi-dominated CNDP...

"We know he is there. We are aware of it. He was integrated. He wasgiven a role. And according to our partners, he does not play a role inthe operations that MONUC is supporting," said Kevin Kennedy, MONUC's head of communications.

"But it isn't our job to investigate the role of Bosco Ntaganda in the (army)," he told journalists in Kinshasa.

One other question for other Congo watchers out there. Doesn't a lot of focus seem to be just on the CNDP, when the Hutu FDLR militia has been committing terrible massacres for years? In fact, wasn't a key reason--along with grabbing minerals--for Rwandan support of Nkunda that he was protecting Congolese Tutsis from the marauding FDLR, many of whom were genocidaires? Maybe I've just missed it or Nkunda made such a good media character. Is the FDLR getting as much U.N. heat?

Update: This post originally mistook the gender and misspelled the name of U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navanethem, or Navi, Pillay. 

LIONEL HEALING/AFP/Getty Images

Another piece of news from today's roundtable with Sudan envoy Scott Gration comes more subtlely, but perhaps just as importantly for anyone watching Sudan. "The neighbors" are pushing for unification when a vote comes in 2011. In other words, they are not keen on an independent Southern Sudan.

Gration says: "In many ways, the neighbors are all pushing for unity because they understand that the instability caused by a fledgling nation that is not ready for independence will have ramifications that spread far and wide across Africa. So countries like Ethiopia and Egypt and others are fearing, to some degree, an independence [vote]."

To recap: the 2005 peace agreement signed between North and South Sudan, ending a decades long war, stipulated that in 2011, the autonomous South would hold a referendum in which it would be allowed to decide whether it would prefer independence or unification. If the vote were to happen today, it's almost certain they would vote to become Africa's newest state.

If only it were that easy. In recent months, tensions have picked up along the border. The South blames the North for stirring up trouble and arming militias. The North blames the South for the same. More importantly, there has yet to be a settlement on the referendum law that will govern the 2011 vote. So it's far from clear that Khartoum is ready to let its Southern half... go.

If the neighbors are reluctant, matters are even more complicated. (Imagine moving into a 7 person townhouse with 6 hostile roommates... multiplied by South Sudan's between 7.9 and 9.5 million people.... and you've got the idea). Reticient neighbors would, uh, complicate the process that Gration already described as seriously daunting: "We're trying to bring about an environment [such] that, in five months, we can help make a country -- a country that will have its own currency, if they choose independence, have embassies around the world, have a central bank, control it's own airspace... there's a lot of work."

Gration promised to push ahead with the referendum law, acknowledging the overwhelming popular support for independence.

Unrelated, one more piece of news from the briefing: queried about the statement by the outgoing peacekeeping chief that the war in Darfur is essentially over, Gration replied that the he agreed, but said the tasks ahead in Darfur were no less daunting: "Even though the war, where the technical answer in terms of military view is that the war is over, the insecurity and the fear associated -- fearing for your life -- is still there."

A Canadian immigration court has granted refugee status to South African citizen Brandon Huntley, saying that he faces persecution as a white man in his home country:

Huntley, 31, "would stand out like a 'sore thumb' due to his colour in any part of the country", the board's panel chair, William Davis, said in his decision.

Huntley, who grew up in Mowbray, said he had been attacked seven times and stabbed four times "by African South Africans" between 1991 and 2003.

Davis found he "was a victim because of his race rather than a victim of criminality".

The South African goverment is peeved that it wasn't even allowed to testify in the case, particularly since none of the attacks on Huntley were ever reported to the police. "Canada's reasoning for granting Huntley a refugee status can only serve to perpetuate racism," said an African National Congress statement.

The "sore thumb" remark is particularly ripe for mockery, as evidence by this Onion-esque piece reporting the tribunal's shock that Hartley "wasn't the last white in South Africa" and warning Canada to "expect a deluge of young, unemployable, white South Africans."

Hartley's case, argued by a South African immigrant who had been looking for a test-case for years, does seem a little dodgy. And all the more so since the country's "white flight" and its high crime rate are real issues that deserve more serious discussion.