Our friends at Focal Point, the Web-exclusive international documentary series from PBS's acclaimed program Wide Angle, have a new documentary up titled "Underground Zimbabwe." The episode brings you to the black markets and underground protest movements that struggle to survive under Robert Mugabe's regime. Here are some clips:

In Zimbabwe's Life Lines, we meet a young man who survives by selling
basic goods on the black market.

In Demonstrating Under Dictatorship we meet a women's
empowerment movement that stages non-violent street protests to for agitate bread-and-butter issues in defiance of repressive laws curtailing public gatherings:

They're also presenting an interview with Columbia University African studies professor and FP top public intellectual Mahmood Mamdani reflecting on Mugabe's legacy:

When violence erupted in the island nation of Madagascar two weeks ago, few would have guessed that South Korean conglomerate Daewoo Logistics was partly to blame (or at least, there to take the blame). Daewoo won claim to plant corn on a Qatar-sized portion of Madagascar last November. And a leader of the protests says the deal is one reason for revolt.

The island leased its land to Daewoo for free for 99 years, claiming the benefit of jobs for Madagascar and a boost in investor confidence. Madagascar was cultivating its image as an island haven for peace, tourism, and investment. That is, until the seeds of civil war sprung up last month. Now, Daewoo says its plans are on hold.

About two weeks ago, a feisty opposition party mayor (and former DJ), Andry Rajoelina, proclaimed the government illegitimate and made his own move for power. In addition to organizing mass protests, Rajoelina even claimed to be the true president, that is until the current holder of that job fired him. So far, 100 people have died in violence between protesters and government forces.

So it wasn't that Daewoo didn't see this coming; it just inadvertently contributed to the mess. Years of poverty and a less-than-stellar government were enough for most Malagasies, so watching their land handed freely to South Korea was a bit over the top. "They sold the country's territory to foreign companies," Rajoelina complained to French Radio. "For these [and other] reasons, we demand a transitional government."

Now Daewoo's corn-to-feed-Korea project and Madagascar's government are both on the rocks. The opposition has named its own ministers and called for a general strike. But if Rajoelina gets his way (or even if he doesn't), I'm guessing Daewoo won't be the only company running for the coast.

Photo: WALTER ASTRADA/AFP/Getty Images

"Predictable" is pretty much the last adjective I would pick for Somalia. But here's something that we might have seen coming: after pulling out last month, witnesses now report that Ethiopian troops are back in Somalia.

When it comes to Somalia, Ethiopia just can't seem to get enough. The countries have fought border wars for decades. In 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union government took control of Somalia, Ethiopian troops started slipping over the border -- much as they are reported to have done today. A few months later, they invaded. So though the troops are out again, have no illusions that Ethiopia will yield its Somali influence so quickly.

That should make things nice and awkward in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where Somalia's newly elected President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed got a standing ovation at the African Union conference. You see, Ethiopia ousted Ahmed, who was president back in 2006.

Now, Ahmed has promised to reconcile with his neighbors. But he'll have to do the opposite to win respect for his government in Somalia, where Ethiopian troops are reviled as occupiers. Al Shabaab, (shown above) the Islamist radical group that Ahmed will need desperately to rein in, has more than once vowed to wage jihad on Addis Ababa. Here's where it gets unpredictable.

ABDIRASHID ABDULLE/AFP/Getty Images

In early January, Egypt starting deporting Eritrean refugees  -- somewhere between 45 and 65 are thought to have been sent home. These refugees tried to enter Isreal through the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. And the deportations say much less about the refugees themselves than the perilous but staunch relationship between Israel and Egypt.

In short, Israel has turned up the pressure on Egypt in recent months to secure that country's side of the Sinai peninsula border -- a hot spot for trafficking of humans (like the Eritreans), goods, and weapons into the Gaza strip).

In June of last year, just as a 6-month ceasefire with Gaza went into effect, 1,200 more Eritrean refugees were detained and later deported. Recently, during the Gaza crisis, Human Rights Watch researcher Leslie Lefkow says she believes Egypt has sent between four and six flights of refugees back to Eritrea.

From the looks of it, pressure to clamp down on migrants is both formal and implicit. Israel imposed a strict policy to limit non-Jewish immigrants in 2007, facing what it feared was a tsunami of Africans seeking work or amnesty. In April 2007, Israeli and Egyptian authorities reportedly agreed on a policy of 'hot returns' -- wherein all illegal border-crossers caught in Israel would be handed over to the Egyptians within 48 hours. The plan faced resistance from refugee advocates, but it's not clear that the process ever stopped.

Now, with Gaza smuggling at an all time high, Egypt is in the hot seat to get all border crossings under control. The change in Egypt's actions on the border -- at least on refugee policing -- is apparent. "Egypt has always been respectful of refugee law, but this is a different scenario," Abeer Etefa of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Egypt told me. 

Sinai has always separated Egypt and Israel -- in geography and politics alike. This time, it's refugees caught in the middle.

Photo:  JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

This morning's Times (London) reported that the Obama administration is planning a tougher stance against Zimbabwe's self-ordained president-for-all-time, Robert Mugabe. Then at the White House Daily Press Briefing today, we learned that Obama made a call to the president of South Africa, Kaglema Motlanthe.

Is Obama calling to talk Zimbabwe? Now would be good timing. Just today at a summit in South Africa, Mugabe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai look to have agreed to form their long-awaited unity government.

South Africa -- reciever of Zimbabwean refugees and primary economic partner -- is really the only country that can put enough pressure on Zimbabwe's Mugabe to make the deal work. So far, the signs haven't been promising. South Africa's former President Thabo Mbeki has muddled through moderating talks since September, favoring his fellow former-anticolonial comrade Mugabe.

Since Mbeki resigned as president and interim leader Motlanthe took over, the odds of South Africa putting on the pressure are even lower. South African elections are pending in just weeks time, and a split within the ruling party has raised the stakes for the first time in that country's history. As Human Rights Watch analyst Tiseke Kasambala recently told me, "there are domestic goings on in South Africa now that will likely take South Africa's eye off the ball."

None of the rumored Africa people from the new administration have returned e-mail messages about Obama-Zimbabwe policy. But my hope is that Mugabe's name came up in the phone call. I would bet more money on that than I would the Zimbabwean currency.

Photo: ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

Laurent Nkunda's arrest isn't the only recent major development in central Africa. Beginning in mid-December, the governments of Uganda, Congo, and Southern Sudan began a significant joint military operation to root out the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), an insurgent group out of northern Uganda whose leaders have outstanding arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court.

The LRA has a tumultuous 20-year history of not just destabilizing northern Uganda (which currently has about 1.5 million citizens in camps for internally displaced persons because of the group's activity), but also destabilizing southern Sudan, eastern Congo, and the Central African Republic. In the past few days alone, new reports of LRA attacks have trickled out of Southern Sudan, where some members of the group fled after their Congolese hideout was bombed by the tri-government military venture.

What is striking about this military operation -- which, so far, has failed to kill the group's notorious leader, Joseph Kony -- was the regional approach that the three countries took, especially in an area that's not exactly known for its international cooperation (particularly in the aftermath of the Congo War). True, Uganda's army and air force supplied the bulk of the manpower, but even the modest involvement of the Congolese and Southern Sudanese armies at the periphery of the operation is a step in the right direction. While the outcome of the current military operation is still not clear, greater regional coordination almost certainly holds promise for future efforts -- both military and diplomatic -- between the three conflict-rife states.

Over the next weeks and months, anyone who is interested in a political resolution to the crisis in Darfur would do well to pay attention to the actions of the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the semi-autonomous Government of Southern Sudan with regard to the LRA and other rebel groups in the region. Much has been made of the connections between the LRA and Khartoum, which covertly funded the the group's terrorist activity in southern Sudan during the country's most recent civil war. Indeed, whether this new regionalism will bear tangible fruit, only time will tell.

Meanwhile, the region's stability and the lives of possibly thousands of people hang in the blance.

As Bishop Gene Robinson is added to the roster for Obama's inaugural events, it seems pretty obvious why he and Rick Warren, set to give the invocation, don't exactly get along. Bluntly, Warren is an influential Conservative Evangelical who actively campaigns against gay marriage, and V. Gene Robinson is the first openly gay Bishop in the Episcopal Church.

The gaping divide between the two religious men actually goes even deeper -- all the way to Nigeria, where the powerful Episcopal Archbishop Peter Akinola presides. The famously anti-gay Akinola has led a global movement of Episcopalians against Robinson's consecration. The church in fact split over the issue, twice -- a wide global spectrum of parishes turning to Akinola for leadership.

And when Time named Bishop Akinola as one of the world's most influential people in 2006, guess who they got to write him up? Rick Warren. Just today, Warren was rumored to be willing to help disgruntled Episcopalians get as far away from Robinson as possible. No surprise that when Warren was chosen for the inaugural invocation, Robinson told The New York Times, "it was like a slap in the face."

They've both also said quite nice words about one another, by the way. But still. Yikes. If Obama is trying to "bring people together," that's quite a daring pairing. What must Akinola be thinking about all this?

Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

For the last several years, two things have helped keep the world informed of goings on inside Zimbabwe: the Internet, and mobile phones. Reports of protests, violence, and cholera have leaked over the borders through text messages and conversations with relatives abroad -- especially in South Africa.

Now, mobile phone companies will start charging customers in dollars in hopes of avoiding the burn from 231 million percent inflation (the country just intoduced a $50 billion note). That means the 94 percent of Zimbabweans who aren't employed will struggle to pay.

And reports will stop leaking out.

The world already struggles to find out what's really going on inside Robert Mugabe's police state. The local media has it rough. As Reporters without Borders put it in their 2008 report, "Since 2002, the daily lot of Zimbabwean journalists has consisted of permanent surveillance, police brutality and injustice." Foreign journalists rarely brave it (or are allowed) inside.

Not helping matters, on Jan. 9, Zimbabwe imposed new fees on all journalists -- between $1,000 and $3,000 for accreditation of local journalists, and $30,000 for foreigners. A temporary foreigner can get in for the bargain price of $1,500. Quite simply, "What it means is that they will no longer be able to report," Human Rights Watch analyst Tiseke Kasambala told me.

Perversly enough in both cases, it is Mugabe who is yet again cashing in. Journalist fees will go straight to the government And the country's reserve bank, says Kasambala, has been buying dollars on the black market. "They're making huge killings on the exchange rate." Add the press to the casualty list.

DESMOND KWANDE/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday in Washington, President Bush made one last ditch attempt for Darfur: he held talks with the least-worst person he could.

That person was Salva Kiir, who is both the Vice-President of Sudan and President of Southern Sudan. Hours earlier, the administration announced it was authorizing an emergency shipment of supplies to Darfur from Rwanda using two C-17 cargo planes. Another 240 containers of goods will be moved from ports into Darfur to help the fledgling UN-African Union peacekeeping mission.

That leaves me with two questions: Will the supplies do any good? And what exactly is the United States hoping to achieve?

First the supplies: The UN-AU hybrid mission is only at 63 percent of its strength, more than two years after the force was authorized, wracked with one difficulty after another (as if patrolling a space the size of France wasn't hard enough.) Cars and equipment have been stolen; fuel was siphoned from planes at night. Journalists have told me that Sudanese government forces are responsible.

But after months of quietly thwarting further deployment, the Sudanese government has finally swung open the door, "leaving the ball on the side of the UN," International Crisis Group Horn of Africa Director Fouad Hikmat tells me. It's up to UN member countries, particularly the U.S. which provides over a quarter of the budget, to handle the logistics of sending in peacekeepers. Will they be able to make a difference? Hikmat's read: "This is very very very good."

At first glance, it looks like President Bush is trying to cement his legacy as a genocide fighter. But if Bush is thinking Darfur, why meet with Kiir, a Southerner with little record in the region?

Country-wide voting is scheduled for Sudan this year -- part of a 6-year Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the decades long war between North and South Sudan in 2005. The light at the end of that long tunnel for Southerners is a vote on secession in 2011. If all goes according to plan, they'll vote on whether to remain autonomous, or become independent.

Like many Southerners, Kiir favors secession. But countrywide elections have to happen first -- and Darfur is in no shape to hold them. "[Southern politicians] for a long time weren't involved in Darfur, they were focused inward," Hikmat tells me. Now, they see they should become engaged because Darfur is a very serious threat to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [and their secession vote]."

One more complication: the International Criminal Court may soon issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir. That makes Kiir the international powerbroker with the most credibility.

So Bush's and Kiir's interest may be right in line. For now. The U.S. should think long and hard about whether they want to back a secession, an outcome that Kiir favors and that Khartoum will certainly fight to prevent. It is an open secret that both South Sudan and the Khartoum government are arming in anticipation of the referendum in 2011. Yet another dilemma for the new President to look forward to.

Photo: Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images

After Kenya's, Zimbabwe's and Nigeria's recent election mayhem, observers worried Ghana might fall into the same electoral dissaray. In the runup to the recent presidential vote, both major candidates claimed they were set for victory.

Initial polls in December left a tightly contested race -- with the two leading candidates within just one percent of each other. The governing party candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo and the opposition leader and former professor John Atta Mills bitterly contested the second round of elections. After being seperated by just 23,000 votes, Ghana's final constituency voted on Saturday and catupluted Mills to the presidency.

And thus Ghana avoided the election trap. The first African country to gain its independence in 1960 holds its reputation as a democracy where power has been transfered peacefully and often, with only minor incidents (like this one). The outgoing president didn't try to extend his term, and he urged a peaceful transition. Mills' opponent conceded gracefully and the incoming president promised to be a "president for all."

Good. But now, as many governments have learned the hard way, the more difficult part is yet to come, and Ghana finds itself in an unusually precarious (or promising) turning point.

Ghana is a commodity-dependent economy in a market reeling from bubble and burst. Gold, cocoa and timber make much of the country's GDP, and agriculture employs over half the population. The fall in commodity prices spells hope and disaster all at once; lucrative exports will suffer, as will farmers' bottom lines. But urban food prices -- once crushing for the average Ghanaian -- will come down from sky high.

And despite Ghana's healthy growth rate, the impoverished majority is hungry for prosperity to trickle down. Offshore oil -- found in the summer of 2007 -- once promised to pay for a host of new public services. Now, the sunken petrol price stop drilling before it even begins.

The incoming president seems to have a good head about the economic policies needed to move forward. But he'll need the world economy, the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy, and his country's belief in democracy to be on his side, as well.

Photo: PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images

There is a crisis. People are dying. Sending peacekeepers sounds great -- they come with U.N. neutrality, a mandate (usually) to use force, and the promise to do something. Who doesn't want to help out in places like the DR Congo, Zimbabwe, and Somalia?

If only it were so easy, writes the U.S. Government Accountability Office in a report released today. Future peacekeeping missions will be plagued by complex logistics, extensive troop needs, daunting political circumstances, and a reluctance from member states to donate troops and resources.

But the report is even more jarring. One cannot help but notice that the "hypothetical" situation described in the report sounds not-so-vaguely reminiscent of Somalia, to which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested sending peacekeepers just this week.

The potential new mission’s area of operations would have limited infrastructure and utilities, lacking roads, buildings, and water, and would thus require increased logistical planning...the potential new operation would be in a high-threat environment, political factions would recently have been fighting for control of the country, and there would be large numbers of internally displaced persons...According to UN planners, a potential new force would likely require units with the capability to deter threats from armed factions supported by international terrorist groups, which previous operations did not have to take into account to the same degree.

Sound familiar? There are only few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have that level of chaos with possible international terrorists to boot -- and Sudan already has two U.N. missions.

So what would a peacekeeping mission to Somalia look like? This "hypothetical" country would require 21,000 troops, 1,500 police, 4,000 to 5,000 civilian staff, and a costly helicopter force to supply aerial surveillance 24 hours a day. According to the report:

There are a limited number of countries that provide troops and police with needed capabilities to meet current needs, and some potential contributors may be unwilling to provide forces for a new operation due to such political factors as their own national interests and the environmental and security situation in the host country.

The U.N. is already short 18,000 troops to staff its mandated missions around the world, and is missing 22 percent of the needed civilian personnel. The GAO warns that, though there are efforts to help the U.N. close the gap, the U.S. has failed to support some incentives such as increased protection for civilian forces. And Somalia is far less appealing a locale than Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire, and maybe even Darfur.

So peacekeeping is failing -- or it might, if the world tries this particular case. Blue helmets are not one-size-fits-all countries. Hopefully Congress will read this "hypothetical" between the lines.

Photo: STUART PRICE/AFP/Getty Images

It isn't every day that Somalia beats China in a battle of military technology... and still loses.

On Tuesday, it was the well-armed, satellite-phone-wielding Somali pirates who held up a Chinese cargo ship. The crew members' defense? Petrol bombs! The makeshift Molotov cocktails worked well enough to hold off the pirates until an international patrol helicopter intervened.

No wonder China is dispatching ships to join the international contingent of navies patrolling against piracy in the gulf of Aden. 1,265 Chinese ships have passed through that same corridor this year and 20 percent of those came under attack. Not good odds.

Alas, should we just start shipping our Suez-bound goods over land? I'll let you see a lay of the land and decide for yourself: the president has fired the prime minister. Parliament is impeaching the president. The U.S. wants to send peacekeepers, but U.N. diplomats fear that's suicide. The entire country is food insecure, and about half is a humanitarian emergency.

As I wrote on Monday, the United States is hoping to send U.N. peacekeepers into turbulent Somalia. Yesterday, a U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the use of force on ground in Somalia to stop pirating passed. In a press briefing afterward, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was very cryptic in response to the final question:

QUESTION: (Inaudible) does this resolution mean that –

 

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you.

 

QUESTION: -- you can intervene militarily in Somalia?

 

SECRETARY RICE: We – there is a very – there is a very clear, longstanding understanding in international politics about the role of UN Security Council resolutions in this regard, and the fact that it is the Transitional Federal Government that is desirous of not having their territory used for safe haven for pirates. And so that is what has just taken place here in the Council.

Stay tuned...

According to Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times, the recent surge of U.N.-inspired naval patrols sent to thwart out of control piracy aren't having much of an effect on the Somali pirates.

More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.

And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.

The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea."

Outgunned and outnumbered, the pirates "seem to be getting only wilier."

While some ships have taken to alternative, and largely unsuccessful tactics -- the crew of a Filipino boat hurled tomatoes at assailants -- merchant vessels are now hiring private security guards, who offer more hands-on suggestions: "We should make 'em walk the plank," says one.