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(The Guardian) Jan. 1, 2008 – This is a lonely time for democrats in two countries, Pakistan and Kenya. Lonely, because in each case their western backers equivocate about the need to enforce free elections. In Pakistan, America and Britain fund a military dictatorship, which fails to protect its leaders, locks up its lawyers, and systematically nobbles the political process. In Kenya, we underwrite a president who has just stolen an election and set his country aflame in the process. We preach civil society, fair elections, a free press. We practise emergency rule, bent polls, and a muzzled media.
We invade our enemies in the name of democracy, but allow our allies to subvert it. All this in the service of the greater causes like counter-proliferation or the war against Islamic militants. In reality, nothing could be more calculated to heighten the risk of proliferation or to despatch millions of floating voters into the arms of rival creeds. When our client states collapse, as they inevitably do, we puzzle at how we “lost” Russia or Iraq. We fret about how anti-Western the world has become. The truth is simpler. We do not need tsars or mullahs to fan the flames. We do it quite effectively ourselves.
Elections in Pakistan looked set last night to be delayed for at least a month, as new video footage emerged challenging the official version of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The government’s insistence that her head injuries were caused by falling on to the sun roof lever of her armoured car, is contradicted by footage that shows her head and shawl rocking from the percussive impact of a bullet. She fell back into her car before the suicide bomber set his device off. The Bhutto family has asked for Britain or the United Nations to hold an independent inquiry, and this should be done.
WASHINGTON (AFP) Dec. 30, 2007 – The US State Department congratulated Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on his re-election, and called on all sides to accept the results despite opposition allegations of ballot fraud.
“We obviously congratulate the president on his election,” department spokesman Rob McInturff told AFP. “Again we would call on the people of Kenya to accept the results of the election and to move forward with the democratic process.”
US targets Somalia in hunt for al-Qaeda
LONDON (The Observer) Dec. 9, 2001 – American forces have already flown surveillance flights over Somalia looking for al-Qaeda forces to target in the next stage of the global war on terror.
Navy pilots have flown waves of missions to map two al-Qaeda camps near the Kenyan border with a view to launching air strikes, Pentagon sources said. US warships have positioned themselves off the coast near the capital, Mogadishu, to stop Osama bin Laden from hiding there, and to prepare for an attack if necessary.
Sensitivity over the killing of 18 Army Rangers in Somalia in 1993 is being overcome by the new, emboldened Pentagon which wants to ‘exorcise that ghost’, said a source.
The flights have intensified over the past few days. Relief workers in Somalia are reported by the State Department to be bracing for action, and the Kenyan government has said it fears a flood of refugees.
Walter Kansteiner, the US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, has warned that Somalia’s lack of central government could attract terrorists. He said the US had ‘strong suspicions’ of connections to al-Qaeda among individuals in Mogadishu struggling to establish some kind of authority. The US has named Somalia’s al-Itihaad Islamic group on its list of targeted terrorist organisations.
The Somalia move is the most forthright action in a steady widening of the war on terror. The hunt for fresh targets in pursuing the al-Qaeda terrorist network and its leader, Osama bin Laden, has now spread to Africa, South America and the Balkans.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
