Sept. 23-25, 1999
University of Kansas
“What It All Means”
by
Dr. Crawford Young
University of Wisconsin
Department of Political Science
John Janzen:
(I am the Director of) the African Studies Resource Center here at the University of Kansas and I would like to welcome you all to the opening session of the 5th Mid-America Alliance for African Studies Conference with the special theme of “Africa and the Democratic Wave” and although I have been told never to open with an apology I will apologize for bringing you all to this huge auditorium. The numbers in our preparation work suggested that we would not all fit into that room where you registered. So I’m going to ask you to please come forward a little bit, especially those of you in the back, come forward a bit if you would so that our opening speaker will have an idea of where he is and who he’s speaking to. I would like to make just a few remarks and then turn the podium over to Claire Dehon who is the President of the Mid-America Alliance for African Studies.
This conference was spawned so to speak within the executive committee of the African Studies Center here at the University of Kansas. We were looking for a focus or an engagement with Africa that would be interdisciplinary and would bring people from various universities together around the topic of studying Africa. Very soon the topic of democracy emerged, and on the recommendation of Leo Villalon we decided to take a retrospective angle on this topic. A year and a half ago, eighteen months ago, Nigeria was still in the clutches of a military dictatorship. Things looked fairly optimistic in the Congo, and the second round of elections had not yet taken place. In the ensuing year much has happened, and I think it is a good topic to be looking at for several days.
People who have come together here today represent several distinct groups. I would like to welcome all of you who have registered to present papers who have come in the MAAAS framework. We also have here 30 teachers who have come to participate in the somewhat parallel, somewhat-involved-with-us Teacher’s Workshop. You’re sprinkled throughout here, I’ll just acknowledge that you’re here. Lynn Tomlinson, our outreach coordinator, has worked hard with them, and they will be meeting at the stairwell here just around the corner immediately after Professor Crawford Young’s lecture to go to their venue down the street. We have also a delegation from Universite Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis in Senegal. Our university has an exchange agreement with Gaston Berger and today we are happy to welcome the delegation. I will name them briefly and I would ask them to stand up to be recognized. The rector, Amado Lamin Undai (sp?) is with us this morning. Professor Baba Kante, the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science. He will be addressing the conference later. Professor Diawar Sar(sp?), Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities, is not here. Professor Maritu Nein(sp?), Dean of the Faculty of Math and Computer Science. Professor Ottoman Diau(sp?), Dean of the Faculty of Economics. Prof. Isiaka Prosper-Lalaye, who is the Senegalese coordinator of the exchange and Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy. We welcome you here this morning in a special way.
I will then turn the podium over to Prof. Claire Dehon of Kansas State University to say a few words about MAAAS. Claire.
Claire Dehon:
Good morning and welcome to the Fifth Annual Conference of the Mid-America Alliance for African Studies. This is the first time I am behind a big box with such a little head and I apologize, I lack majesty. (laughter) My name is Claire Dehon and I am Professor of French at Kansas State University and I am President of MAAAS until tomorrow morning when I will pass the baton to Ed Sankofski(?) who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. You see that we have many geographers, historians, social scientists, but MAAAS includes also members who are philosophers and people interested in literature, so it is truly an association of Africanists in the general term. It is befitting that for its Fifth Anniversary that MAAAS meets here at the University of Kansas because it is here that it was born, and we are all grateful that a few people really decided to organize this association. The association is dedicated to the study of Africa in the largest term, and every year it organizes a conference which is where it culminates all our activities, where scholars and specialists from all over the world meet. MAAAS also sponsors a number of projects such as faculty and student exchange and workshops and so on. However, the Mid-America Alliance for African Studies cannot fulfill its ambition without your support. And so I invite all of you, all the Africanists of the region, all the assistants of this conference today, to become members of the association and to attend our business meeting today at 4:15 in the Jayhawk Room. We will appreciate your participation and your input. For the next two days we will hear internationally known scholars, artists, personalities who will discuss numerous topics all centered around the theme “Africa and the Democratic Wave.” Such an exciting conference, really, cannot take place without the generosity and hard work of many, and so the Mid-America Alliance of African Studies thanks the University of Kansas Chancellor’s Office, the Division of Continuing Education, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the USIS Government Exchange Grants between the University of Kansas and the Universite Gaston-Bergeis(?) of Senegal, and the Department of African and African-American Studies. We also owe this meeting to the hard work, and it takes work to prepare a meeting like this one, to KU MAAAS members, faculty, and employees, such as John Janzen, Director of the African Studies Resource Center, Lynn Tomlinson, outreach coordinator for the area studies program, Pia Thielmann, Program Assistant for the African Studies Resource Center, Judy Farmer, Secretary for the African Studies Resource Center, and last but not least, our Secretary-Treasurers Garth Myers and Ken Lohrentz. Now as I am just the President I am going to silence myself and let the conference begin, and have a good conference. We thank everyone, and have a good conference. I pass the mike now to Ken Lohrentz.
Ken Lohrentz:
Thank you Claire. It’s a bit late already, just a bit past the hour intended for our beginning, so I’ll keep it very short, but I do have a few conference-related announcements to make at this time. First of all I want to be sure that you all have the most recent corrected conference program. The one that is correct is the one that is in your packets which you received this morning when you registered. There are earlier copies of this that were sent out and of course there are revisions in a couple of room assignments for some of the events tomorrow and also a few changes in the presenters. If you compare the program that you received in your packet this morning with the ones that you received earlier you will notice that there are a couple names that have been dropped out and a couple added. It almost got to the point here where I was reluctant to open my e-mail over the last few days because I wasn’t sure what the most recent change in the program might be, but it has stood substantially as we had it arranged earlier, and all the last minute changes are reflected in this version of the program so make sure you are using this one, except for one. This was the last e-mail I got yesterday. In panel session 1A, which is the first one for this morning, the paper by Jean Germain-Gross(?) on “Comparing First and Second Wave Democratic Elections in Africa” will in fact have to be moved to the panel session 2B in the International Room this afternoon. Admittedly, it is a paper on politics and not culture and the arts, but we will do that perhaps in the best tradition of interdisciplinary studies. It is necessitated by the fact that his schedule has changed and he will not be able to be here until this afternoon. So we prefer to have him present the paper and change it to a different panel rather than to delete it entirely, so that is the way that it will be done. For the dinner tonight I just wanted to mention. The place for that is 1204 Oread, and I’m not sure that we had good directions for how to find that place for the West African Dinner. As you go out the main entrance of the Kansas Union you turn to your left and go along Oread until you come to a T, which is approximately one block. That will be 12th street and it will be on your right just before you come to 12th street, so it is within walking distance from the Union, it’s very close by. I’m also told, and this isn’t in the program notes, there will be a party that is being planned by the African Students Association for tomorrow evening. Parties just happen, and this one is going to happen. I understand there will be a handout on the table too. The details and the map to get to the location for that will be there. If you have any questions about anything throughout the conference please get in touch with us at the registration desk.
John Janzen:
Professor Crawford Young of the University of Wisconsin department of Political Science, for me, had written essentially the bible by which I understood politics in the Congo when I did my field research there in the 60’s, but he has not only written that book, he has gone on to write many others, including The Politics of Cultural Pluralism in 1979, Ideology and Development in Africa, 1982, with Thomas Turner The Rise and Decline of the Zairean State in 1985, The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay in 1993, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, 1994, and The Accomodation of Cultural Diversity in 1999. He is clearly someone whom we would want to hear in this topic on the recent past of democracy in Africa and so without further ado I will present Dr. Crawford Young from the University of Wisconsin who will tell us “What it all Means.”
Crawford Young:
Thank you John for that gracious introduction. It’s a pleasure to be back in Lawrence. I say back - I was I believe in this building one time before in my life that was in, get this, 1954. I was then stationed at Fort Riley as an infantry lieutenant to take the law school aptitude test in this building. I never went to law school. Indeed, not long after I began preparing myself to give this lecture this morning, preparing to return to Lawrence, Kansas some 45 years later. Having thus established my credentials as a senior citizen, let me welcome the theme that was suggested by those introducing the conference of democratization of Africa in some kind of retrospective perspective.
The Nigerian and South African elections to which reference was made are indeed signal events and, in a way, have revived and rejuvenated a sense of some momentum to democratization, some vitality remaining in the democratization movement. Notwithstanding, the dominant mood at the present time in the most recent period has been one of some sense that the energy of democratization which had been so powerful at the beginning of this decade has partially played itself out, that democratization has, not receded particularly, but stalled out at a partial level of institutionalization on the continent. As that has happened in the most recent period a new set of concerns has appeared on the horizon which has to do with the viability and survival of African states themselves. Thus status joins democratization as a core issue, a core challenge, at the present time. I want to frame this presentation in terms of a kind of dialectic one can see looking backwards between democracy/democratization on the one hand and state and stateness on the other in the period of time since World War II.
Now in the first period, this dialectic appeared in the form of a kind of opposition between democracy and stateness. Stateness during the terminal colonial period rapidly increased throughout Africa. It was a period of remarkably expanding revenues for most African states. One can go up and down the continent. The revenue expansion from 1945 to 1960 ran from 10 to 30 fold. That permitted in the last years a very rapid expansion of the scope of state action, the introduction of a wide array of technical and social services that had never existed before WW II. Now that deepening stateness, however, had maintained the quintessential characteristic of the colonial state, its alien nature. New technical and social services remained largely staffed by European personnel and above all the command structures of the state remained, until the very last minute, dominated by Europeans. Even in a country like Nigeria, where it started relatively early, Africanization, the admission of any Africans into the senior acts of the civil service, dates only from 1948. In a place like the Congo, at the time of independence, of the 4600 personnel in the top three ranks of the civil service, only three were Congolese. Now, the state, thus, was an alien European entity at its command apex. That was, above all, true in the security forces, the last component of colonial states to be Africanized. Democracy, then, appeared as the Africanized sector. Access to African participation came through the electoral institutions, the representative institutions. The elements of democracy that first become a part of the terminal colonial state only after WW II are reflected in this representative or democratic sector. Therefore the democratic sector became, as it were, the site of combat, contestation, of the colonial state to accelerate its, not its liquidation, but its departure, its transfer into the hands of African successors. So in the terminal colonial period we can say “Democracy good, State bad.”
Now that equation rapidly reverses itself after independence, as the state becomes Africanized at a singular moment in world history when the confidence worldwide in the capacity of states to conceive, to organize, to manage, to be theologian of, even to be principal proprietor of, the developmental process, was at an all time peak. Irrespective of ideology, it wasn’t just the Socialist lands where this perspective held forth. It was conventional wisdom amongst Western development, economists, African intellectuals, observers of the African scene. There was little challenge to the notion that the developmental venture rested entirely in the hands of the state for its direction, energy, and leadership. In pursuit, in keeping with that premise, in the early post-independence years, the vitality of the representative structures, the democratic structures, of the state were gradually marginalized. The state insisted upon its unification, its centralization, upon an effective monopoly of power in the hands of its leadership. Now the strong state that was in favor in early post-independence years, by the end of the ‘70’s, really in the 1980’s, began to come into question. It was over-consuming, it was under-performing, it was permeated by venality. It was, in short, the problem rather than the solution. So in the 1980’s there was a wave of anti-state reflection in which democracy reappears as the remedy. “Democracy good, state bad.” Back to the equation of the 1950’s. Now it was on the basis of that premise that the phenomenal wave of democratization to which we will return shortly took off at the beginning of the 1990’s and literally swept the continent. Now, by the middle of the 1990’s there appeared to be another shift in process. States weakening, a spread of disorder to important parts of the continent, a question as to whether perhaps the preoccupation with democracy had gone too far in setting aside a concern with what was indispensable about stateness, whether, indeed, we needed to once again reconsider that equation. We’ll come back at the very end towards how we might possibly resolve that dialectic, whether there is any synthesis possible between stateness and democracy. But let me, having stated that, then turn essentially to this most recent period, the wave of democratization and then the resurgent preoccupation with stateness in the 1990’s.
Now, why did democratization occur? Why did this wave sweep Africa so dramatically? Well a lot of it had to do with an eternal dynamic that draws upon what we just suggested. There was by the 1980’s a widespread perception that states had failed, that their poor developmental performance was beyond dispute and indeed, not disputed by African leaders themselves. That there was, by the 1980s, a visible deterioration in public service in many, if not most, states. It had become apparent that the state was not capable of the scale of macroeconomic management and ownership on which it had embarked. And, consonant with that, there had crept into the popular consciousness a whole set of negative descriptors of states. States, rather than developers, rather than leaders of societies, came to be viewed as creditors, as pirates, even as vampires, and indeed, there came into public view during the 1980’s and 90’s instances of truly colossal venality. In Mali at the time of the overthrow of the longstanding autocrat Mousa Trare(?), it was widely believed and stated that he had managed to accumulate no less than 2 billion dollars. Now if you know anything about Mali, even over a two-decade period, to steal 2 billion dollars is a performance of extraordinary magnitude. Interestingly, when he was subsequently put on trial over a seven year period, at the beginning of the trial the alleged embezzlement was only 1.6 billion. By the time they got to the end of the trial it was down to only 20 million. That the figures bandied about of 2 billion turned out in practice to be gross exaggerations. But nonetheless, the public at the time of democratization believed the 2 billion dollar story. That was what was important. Now in other cases there is not much doubt that the figures bandied about came fairly close to reality. A few people contest the 5 billion dollar figure for the late, unlamented Congo-Zaire autocrat Mobotu Seseseko. I think it comes fairly close to reality. In the case of Sani Abacha, the late, equally unlamented dictator of Nigeria, we have a clear record of one of his most grotesque operations, a 2.5 billion dollar scam, that came about through his forming with some of his henchmen a straw company, purchasing from the Russians 2.5 billion dollars worth of debt, primarily for the Achaputa(?) steel mill, at 20 cents on the dollar, and then instructing the Nigerian treasury to pay off his company at the full rate. Now that’s 2 billion in his pocket overnight, and that’s well documented. In Africa Confidential there was reference a couple of issues ago to a private fortune of the late King Hassan of Morocco of as much as 32 billion dollars. Now that makes him a world champion of some sort. So, the venality of the state, of its leaders, I should say, did much to discredit the state in the eyes of the citizen. The state had, by any standards, become hypertrophic, excessively large in its payroll, in the range of things it was trying to own and operate. The Nigerian public service, for example, was 70,000 at the time of independence in 1960, had a million on its payroll by the 1980s. There was a vast, indebted para-statal sector that was in many cases all but moribund. The autocratic nature of the state as well had undermined its legitimacy. The widespread human rights abuses in many lands, the excessive concentration and personalization of power in the hands of a life president, and generally speaking the failure of the vision of a comprehensive, integral state that had been a widespread dream in the late 60s early 70s in response to the challenge of development. Now all of these things fed into a large reservoir of public unrest amongst the intelligentsia to be sure, but not just the intelligentsia. This went down to all levels of society, that when the trigger moment came, when the moment of enthusiasm appeared, could bring about very rapid politization/mobilization of street crowds, of oppositional forces, to undermine seemingly impregnable regimes. The internal pressures were combined with international system affects. The collapse of the camp of socialism certainly was a major factor, both in its demonstration effect and in the end of an alternative source of support for African states, except by pressures from inside and outside. There certainly was a sense of virtually inevitable historical force which had gathered elsewhere. First in Europe, then in Latin America, spreading to Asia as well as the former Soviet lands, Eastern Europe, that gave a potent feeling at the time that this was certainly a worldwide process like the colonization several decades before, that represented an unstoppable kind of force in world affairs. And at that moment of international intoxication there were quite strong pressures, from the major resting powers, even from the international financial institutions. And the contagion effect operated within Africa itself. Africa is a highly intercommunicative system of states. What happens in one state enormously affects the neighboring states, and as one state after another was inflicted with the democratic contagion immediately the pressure spread and intensified upon its neighbors. So with the combination of external and internal forces, the kinds of patrimonial autocratic regimes that had become predominant in the 60’s and 70’s could not withstand the pressures. What then happened? Well the apparent scope of what happened was truly phenomenal. Of the 53 African states, by my reckoning, only one totally and completely withstood this pressure. The one, Libya, Ghadafi has made a career out of a set of contrarian positions. From his very first days in power there wasn’t much sign of a democratization movement in Libya, at least not that was visible to me. But even in Sudan there were some tremors felt. Now, that said, although pressures for some, at least the appearance of some kind of democratic transition had to take place almost everyplace, in many instances what actually occurred was quite limited. That incumbent regimes, seeing the handwriting on the wall, democratization was inevitable, managed to construct appearances of democratization which left largely intact their hold on power. Nonetheless, there was quite literally a moment of enthusiasm at the beginning of the 1990s in which high hopes were held by many people, African publics, the African intelligentsia, observers outside. I think most of us, I certainly was strongly affected by this moment of enthusiasm. Even though in a certain number of cases the democratization from the outside was a hollow sham, initially there were quite impressive results to demonstrate. Depending on how one counts, between a dozen and 18 longstanding rulers either lost power through some kind of competitive or electoral mechanism or chose not to stand for election, voluntarily withdrew in the face of the democratization process. Now something else that was of signal importance to my mind in that first moment of enthusiasm was the emergence of a set of discourses that really entirely discredited the arguments, the narratives of legitimation that had preceded. It had become impossible to justify, in the way one could in the 60s and 70s, single party monopolies, military regimes, thus any regime, whether or not it was genuine in its transition, had to put on, as it were, new clothing.
A decade has passed since this process began and we can begin to make some evaluative judgements. Now if we use the Samuel Huntington criteria for assessing the consolidation of democratic transitions, that is a second democratic alternation, there have been very few. By my count, essentially Benin, Madagascar, of course Mauritius, but Mauritius had long been democratic with alternations, arguably Cape Verde. But the consolidation by any kind of rigorous standard is far from achieved, and even in Benin and Madagascar it is striking that what met the Huntingtonian criteria was an electoral return to power of autocrats, or let’s say reformed autocrats, who had initially been ousted by the electoral process. We begin to get by the middle of this decade a set of demeaning or pejorative labels that get attached to democracy in Africa. It’s “illiberal” democracy, it’s “virtual” democracy, it’s something that is preoccupied with this external presentability and lacks the internal essence of the democratic form of rule. And indeed, the experience of the 90s has shown a number of major limitations. In large numbers of countries where the longstanding ruling party or leader has managed to stay in power, the Senegals, the Ivory Coasts, the Camaroons, the Kenyas, and so forth, we see the enormous advantage that incumbents have in terms of the possession of the state apparatus and resources associated with it. Tremendous difficulties that opposition forces have in finding resources to finance themselves. Now in places like Nigeria or South Africa, these two successful elections, there are a lot of people that have enough money that they are willing to invest in politics, unhappily in Nigeria with the notion that they’ll get it back with interest, that it is possible to finance opposition political activity. But in many countries it is exceedingly difficult to do so. Opposition forces, although they have going for them the high negatives that attach to longstanding rulers, anybody in Africa who has been in power for 15, 20, 25 years will inevitably have, in the eyes of much of the public, a lot of negative baggage. So that is a resource, that’s Arap Moi in Kenya, that’s Abdugu from Senegal, and so forth, nonetheless, it is very difficult to sustain a united front. Put another way it is relatively easy for incumbents to maneuver opposition forces into splits of different sorts. Arap Moi in Kenya has proved a master in this tactic, and has thus sustained himself in power. Another limitation has been the “get out of jail free” card that has been available to leaders who were faithful pupils of Western prescriptions in the international financial institutions on economicl reform. Museveni in Uganda, whereas it’s hard to call his movement system a highly democratic one, nevertheless has had minimal pressure from the international system to engage in any kind of political opening. And lastly, something we’ll return to, the very weakened condition of African states themselves has made the democratization venture a singularly difficult one. Indeed a recent colloquium organized by a Pan-African social science research outfit, Codus Reia(?), based in Dakar, the general theme was one of disappointment, disillusionment, a feeling that what was being imposed upon Africa was a kind of choiceless democracy, that no choice was permitted in terms of the basic economic and social policies to be pursued, and African states were invited to organize around that basic constraint a set of functioning competitive democratic institutions. Now all of those limitations notwithstanding, there have to my mind been some quite positive results. Even if opposition parties are in a minority in elected legislatures, legislatures, even in a country like Uganda, can make a great deal of noise. They’ve driven any number of ministers from power. They’ve served as a vehicle for imposing a much higher degree of transparency and openness on government operations. There is no doubt but what there is generally speaking a better observation of human rights in most African states in the 1990s than was true in the 1960s and 70s. Part of that reason is the existence of not just international human rights NGOs but of very courageous human rights NGOs and activists, who have been a loud voice for the protection of human rights. There is a much greater vitality in civil society, generally, a multiplication of associations of autonomous independent action at many levels. My colleague Ilene Tripp(?) has just completed a fascinating paper arguing that whatever scepticism one might have about democratization in general, that it has been very good for women, it has opened a lot of social and political space for women’s organizations to flourish, to raise gender issues, the foster the well-being of women in many ways. Democratization, whatever its limits, is indispensable to exit from intractable conflicts. One might say the democratization moment opened in Algiers in October of 1988 with astonishing street riots that shook the FLN regime to its foundations, and then the limits of democratization were in a way first felt when the military set aside the prospective results of an electoral process in 1991/92, creating thereby a far reaching impasse, and the better part of a decade of serious civil violence affecting all levels of society. The exit from that could only be through some sort of electoral process. Democracy had to be the part of winning back some minimal consensus. Now the Mozambique instance is another example. Mozambique is one of the relative recent success stories in that its macroeconomic figures in the 90s have been very good, after a period from independence up until 1992 or so when the country was locked in a ferocious civil war fed by outside intervention of different sorts. It was an electoral mechanism that permitted Mozambique to exit from that condition of intractable endemic civil war, and therefore to have a possibility of a different direction of a movement towards a more prosperous life for all. South Africa is another example. In most countries we have a more vigorous media, a more independent media, a more critical media, the state, the rulers are more exposed to public criticism and are thereby rendered a bit more accountable to the citizenry. Now nonetheless stateness returns as a key issue.
I don’t want to get the conference behind schedule at its very beginning, so let me not exceed my allocated 45 minutes, and merely make the points I wanted to put before you under this heading in bullet form. Now the other end of the equation from democratization - at the very same moment there happened something equally unanticipated - state collapse. Somalia, Liberia in 1991. Subsequently Sierra Leone, the two Congos. Our eyes became open to a range of possibilities that were never before really apparent to us, and that outer risk of state collapse suggests that one needs somewhat to put back on the agenda the idea of stateness. Indeed, if we define stateness in Weberian terms, that is the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion over the territorial domain of the state, between a quarter and a third of African states do not fit at the present time as we speak with that notion of stateness. Now that’s a wide enough phenomenon to evoke our concern. Not only that, but civil strife has become inextricably interwoven - that is, what is happening in Senegal affects what is happening in Guinea-Bissau, and vice versa, what happens in Liberia is interwoven with what’s happening in Sierra Leone, what’s happening in Congo is connected to what’s happening in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan. So we have at the moment these two large zones of crisis, the biggest one extending from the horn of Africa, involving every single state down through the southwestern arc, Angola and the two Congos. We have a smaller zone in West Africa, maybe coming into remission, involving Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal. Now that’s a large dose of disorder. Further, and more disturbing, as we look closely at this pattern of disorder there are some very disconcerting aspects to it. There is the massive diffusion of modern weaponry - AK-47s are everyplace. In Northeastern Uganda - government sources estimate that the small pastoral population has since 1979 come into possession of 35,000 AK-47s. That’s more than the government forces have in the area. The government forces are outdone. Cattle raiding, which historically was endemic but small scale, carried out with spears, is now carried out on a massive scale with AK-47s. Now, the diffusion of weaponry is connected to the emergence of a new kind of warlord that has proved itself able to subsist indefinitely without any local support from the populace. You don’t need *********(?) to be fish swimming in a peasant sea, you can be sharks out there feeding on, predating the local population, abducting their children as warriors, seizing their food stock, stealing their livestock, and yet you can sustain your operation in the area over extended periods of time. You can do that by the ability to exploit high value resources: gold, diamonds, timber, coffee - things that are high value, easy to smuggle and exchange. There is not only a diffusion of arms, but a diffusion of sophisticated military knowledge. These guys are not amateurs. These guys are well-trained military professionals that are leading most of these movements. They know what they’re doing, in contrast to insurgents in early years of independence, these are professionalized insurgencies. A recent piece by a by a Malian officer at the National War College I found particularly illuminating describing his experience in trying to deal with a Twareg(?) uprising in Mali. There had been such an uprising in the 1960s. It was put down, with great brutality, but it was put down. Now this one they couldn’t put down because they had more arms and because they had skilled military leadership. Where’d the military leadership come from? The Afghans. That is, people who had learned their military trade fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and wound up back in Mali providing military knowledge to the Twareg(?) insurgents. The only option, the good option anyway, was to deal politically with the issue, which the Malian government, at least up to know, has successfully done. Certain new techniques - the child soldier. Abduct them, brutalize them, terrorize them, turn them. They become quite ferocious warriors, they’re perfectly capable of carrying an AK-47. Make them do things that separate them from their community. Make them kill people in their own village and you’ve got in your possession a very fierce and fearless fighter. So we’ve seen a multiplication of these armed fragments over time, and one of the great challenges of the coming decade is precisely going to be, how can one....
[break in tape]
...of stateness. Not stateness as it was imagined in the 1960s. Not a return to the all-embracing, all-invasive, integral state notion, but an efficacious state, a state that is basically capable of protecting its citizenry as well as fostering and facilitating the efforts of the citizenry, the energies of the populace, in the struggle to win a better life. Thank you.
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