AFRICA - May 1996

May Article Abstracts

Title: Nigeria: Inside the Dismal Tunnel
Author: Richard Joseph
"Nigeria first entered. . .'the dismal tunnel' on January 15, 1966, when the military overthrew all the institutions of a democratically elected government. . . If there is light at the end of [this] tunnel, it is imperceptible to anyone not paid to see it."

Title: Somalia: Whose Failure?
Author: Michael Maren
"The Pentagon is now dancing in the ruins of Yugoslavia, and Somalia has slipped back into its pre-intervention stateless state. There is almost no evidence that the United States and UN were ever there, little trace of the $4 billion that was spent. . .in a global operation to settle what was at its core the politics of dysfunctional families."

Title: Burundi: The Obsession with Genocide
Author: Jean-Pierre Chretien
Burundi has, so far, escaped the genocide visited on Rwanda. But with more than 100,000 people killed in Burundi the last three years, there is growing concern because, as Jean-Pierre Chretien argues, "the fate of the two countries [has been] parallel, as in a game of mirrors in which each reflects the fantasies of the other."

Title: The Business of War in Liberia
Author: William Reno
"The conflict in Liberia is not a result of cultural flaws or the stresses of modernity; Liberia's rebel leaders have proved to be quite sophisticated in building new commercial ties to the rest of the world. The war's cause can be traced to cutoffs of aid after the cold war's end and the collapse of patron-client politics that had bound Liberia's politicians to one man."

Title: The Afrikaners after Apartheid
Author: Ben Schiff
"So far the Afrikaners' traditional deference to authority has dominated public responses to [South Africa's] majority government, but this has been easy because Afrikaner economic interests remain unchallenged even as formal apartheid has given way to legal equality."

Title: Zimbabwe's Reluctant Transformation
Author: Virginia Curtin Knight
"Once hailed as a model for democracy by Western governments and agencies, Zimbabwe has lost its luster. . . [It] is now perceived as a de facto one-party state, ruled by an aging, autocratic president whose policies have enriched a new black political elite and white business community."

Title: Western Sahara: Peace Derailed
Author: Stephen Zunes
"Supporters of Sahrawi self-determination and the [UN] peace plan assumed that in accepting the plan, King Hassan had backed himself into a corner. It now appears that the UN and other powers-including the United States-are letting him wriggle free. . . Time appears to be on the side of the Moroccan occupation."