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Kenya and Britain: Drawing a line under history
A long wait for the Mau Mau
INDEPENDENCE songs were sung, antique walking sticks were waved and Britain’s representative in Kenya gamely ventured some words in Swahili to express his regret that Kenyans had been tortured during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule in the 1950s. As Britain made a carefully calibrated climbdown over colonial-era abuses on June 6th, none of those words was the Swahili for sorry. Britain has not formally admitted liability for torturing some of the 90,000 Kenyans detained during the rebellion. The compensation offered is modest compared with the payouts British citizens would expect for similar mistreatment back home.More than 5,000 Mau Mau veterans, some of whom gathered in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, for the formal announcement, will each get about $4,000. Wamutwe Ngau, now 82, who never had children after being castrated by colonial officers, said the money was “nothing much” but that an apology was worth accepting.Britain opted to settle after the High Court in London ruled last year that there was enough evidence of torture for four old Kenyans to take their case to trial. It took a British law firm,...
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Iran’s election and the internet: Behind a thick curtain
AFTER a string of strong performances on the world stage in recent years, Iran’s national kick-boxing team has had to drop out of an international championship in Greece this month. The Greek embassy in Tehran, citing “communications disruptions in Iran”, said that poor internet connectivity, which has drastically slowed down in the run-up to the presidential election on June 14th, was to blame. Apparently the Greeks could not get onto an essential server to process the fighters’ visas. “When the elections come, the internet goes,” explains a 31-year-old Iranian teacher. “We are behind a thick curtain at the moment. It happens at every election, even the parliamentary ones.”Wary of the role social networks and videos played in fomenting massive street protests after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2009, the state’s cyber sleuths are taking no chances this time. Since March, virtual private networks (VPNs), the chief means whereby many of Iran’s 43m internet users evade censorship filters, have been blocked. This is the first time the authorities have managed so protracted and comprehensive a blockage of the VPNs, which means that thousands of foreign websites, including The Economist’s, are blocked, along with Twitter and Facebook. Users trying to get access to such sites are redirected to a...
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Libya’s government and the militias: Is the tide turning?
Battling for the soul of Benghazi
THE scavengers for disused metal fled, as riot police wearing their old Qaddafi-era uniforms drove back into their old base after recovering it from one of Libya’s most powerful Islamist militias, Libyan Shield Number One. “It’s good to be back,” said the police commander after the battle on June 8th, which left 35 Libyans dead.Despite declaring three days of mourning, Libya’s leaders are celebrating what they herald as the beginning of the end of militia rule and the restoration of a functioning state. Since the rebels ousted Muammar Qaddafi’s forces, first in eastern Libya in February 2011 and then countrywide six months later, militias have largely ruled the roost, preventing the country’s elected government from asserting itself. “Farmers should go back to being farmers and let the army do its job of protecting the nation,” said the armed forces’ new chief of staff, Salim Gneidy. He vowed to confront Islamist renegades, whereas his predecessor, Yusef Mangoush, who resigned in the wake of the June 8th battle, had sought to co-opt them. Many expect further purges of Islamists, including veterans of the...
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Democratic Republic of Congo: Bigger guns are on their way
THE first stretch of road seen by new UN troops in Congo after their arrival at the airport in Goma, the country’s second-biggest city, is a stark indicator of what lies ahead. The road—a rare bit of tarmac—was the site of a stunning victory not long ago by Tutsi fighters opposed to central rule. Heavily armed, they swept down from volcanic hills late last year to the shallow shores of Lake Kivu along the road to Sake, a smaller town where UN troops will soon be based, pushing demoralised Congolese government soldiers ahead of them (see map). Man-high grass on both sides of the road was for days littered with uniformed corpses, flies swarming over the slow, the drunk and the unlucky.A 20,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission that has been in place since 1999 stood by and watched the rebels take Goma and hold it for several days. The UN Security Council, seeing its blue helmets humiliated, decided in March to send reinforcements of an unusual kind. The new troops are meant to “carry out targeted offensive operations…in a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner…with the responsibility of neutralising armed groups”. In other words, they are to fight a modern counter-insurgency campaign, a task the UN has never undertaken before. But will the troops really take the fight to the rebels? Or will they continue limp-wristedly to pretend to keep a peace that hasn’t existed for years...
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Syria’s civil war: The regime digs in
“YA GHALI,” says a driver greeting the soldier manning a checkpoint of concrete blocks painted with the Syrian flag and plastered with pictures of Bashar Assad in regime-controlled central Damascus. This salutation was never in use in the capital before the war but is now standard at checkpoints. “Ghali”, or precious, is used in the coastal homeland of the Alawites, the sect from which Mr Assad hails. It is a sign both that the president is in control here and that, for all its talk of a state for all of Syria’s communities, his regime has been largely reduced to a sectarian militia, though the most powerful in the country.This may be a harbinger of the future. The balance of power between the regime and the rebels has ebbed and flowed during the 27-month conflict, but the government’s recapture of the town of Qusayr from the rebels on June 5th has reinforced a feeling that Mr Assad has recently won the advantage. Rebels still control swathes of the north and east of the country and continue to clash with the regime in the countryside around the main population hubs of the west: Damascus, Homs and Hama. But nearly all the city centres are tightly in Mr Assad’s grip. In...
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