Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Ethiopia - Tigray Conflict

24-1-12 Ethiopia could trigger Africa's deadliest conflict - Caspian > .
24-1-12 Somaliland | A Crucial Breakthrough? - Prof J K-L > .
23-12-14 Is Abiy Ahmed the Most Dangerous Man in Africa? - Waro > .The Tigray conflict which started as a so-called policing operation has devolved into a violent ethnically based civil war, with some commentators making comparisons to the Yugoslav wars and predicting the breakup of Ethiopia. How did Ethiopia polarise along ethnic lines? Could it lead to the same kind of ethnic cleansing and violent state collapse that we saw during the breakup of Yugoslavia? And what approach can unite Ethiopia to prevent the collapse?
00:00 Intro
00:42 Ethnic Polarisation
05:48 The Road to Civil War
11:17 Yugoslavia 2.0?
18:11 Medemer

  
How Geography DOOMED Africa - AtPr > .
African Conflicts - PrTe >> .

In Ethiopia, the political calamity between the federal government in Addis Ababa and the regional government in Tigray has turned violent.

21-6-29 Ethiopia Tigray conflict: Rebels build on recapture of capital BBC

Rebel fighters in the Tigray region of Ethiopia are continuing to gain ground after recapturing the regional capital Mekelle from government forces. The rebels have now entered the town of Shire, about 140km (90 miles) to the north-west, according to UN officials. Eritrean troops backing the Ethiopian army had earlier abandoned the city. The government has declared a ceasefire in the eight-month conflict, but the rebels have vowed to drive their "enemies" from Tigray.

The fighting between the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and government forces has left thousands of people dead. More than two million have been displaced and 350,000 pushed towards famine. The fighting began in November, when rebels rejected political reforms and captured army bases. Government forces captured Mekelle later that month.

21-6-23 Ethiopia's Tigray crisis: Heavy casualties reported after air strike: A medical doctor at Mekelle's main Aider hospital told the BBC that at least 60 people were killed and more than 40 were injured. There are fears the numbers will increase further.


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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Mali

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Mauritius

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Mauritius: Fiscal Paradise of Africa Dreams of being Singapore - VisPol > .
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Monday, June 15, 2015

Nile

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Sudan 
24-7-26 [Sudan Collapsing: Al-Bashir Overthrown ⇉ Warring Warlords] - Cogito > .

The Nile river is subject to political interactions. It is the world's longest river flowing 6,700 kilometers through ten countries in northeastern Africa – Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt with varying climates.

Considering the basin area of the Nile, Sudan has the largest size (1.9 million km²) whereas, of the four major tributaries to the Nile, three originate from Ethiopia – the Blue Nile, Sobat and Atbara. The modern history of hydropolitics in the Nile basin is very complex and has had wide ramifications both for regional and global developments.

Agreements that favour Egypt’s rights to Nile waters are an anachronism.

Egypt has historically adopted an aggressive approach to the flow of the River Nile. Cairo considers the Nile a national security matter and statements continue to include threats of military action against Ethiopia should it interfere with the flow as set out in agreements signed in 1929 and another in 1959.

The first agreement was made between Great Britain, as the colonial power in eastern African, and Egypt. Cairo was favoured over other riparian countries as an important agricultural asset. In addition, the Egyptian-run Suez Canal was vital for British imperial ambitions.

The British riparian colonies – Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) – as well as Ethiopia had no say.

Under the terms, Egypt would receive 48 billion cubic metres water annually and Sudan 4 billion cubic metres. Egypt would not need the consent of upstream states to undertake water projects in its own territories but could veto projects on any tributaries of the Nile in the upstream countries, including the 43,130 square kilometre Lake Victoria. The world’s second largest fresh water lake is fed by direct precipitation and by thousands of streams from Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda and Kenya, all located in the central east of Africa.

To this day Egypt argues that the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and its modified version, the 1959 Agreement, are still valid. The 1959 agreement, signed by Egypt and an independent Sudan, increased Egypt’s share to 55.5 billion cubic metres and Sudan’s to 18.5 billion.

These bilateral agreements totally ignored the needs of other riparian countries including Ethiopia which supplies 70% to 80% of the Nile waters. Consequently, none of the other Nile basin countries has ever approved the agreements.

On the other hand, the Cooperative Framework Agreement signed by four Nile basin countries in 2010 was strongly rejected by both Egypt and Sudan.

Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam constitutes a recent but probably the biggest challenge to Egypt’s militaristic approach to the Nile flow. The dam is a huge project on the headwaters of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia in Benishangul-Gumuz region, 500 km North West of the capital Addis Ababa and about 32 km east of the border of Sudan.

The dam is considered to be the largest hydropower project in Africa and 8th-largest in the world. It’s designed to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity. The reservoir can hold more than 70 billion cu metres of water which is nearly equal to the flow of the Nile in one year.

The Ethiopian government intends to fill the dam’s immense reservoir in five years. This will have considerable impact on the downstream countries. Even after the reservoir is filled there will not be too much hope for the normalisation of the flow of the Nile because Ethiopia will hold the key to the dam. Normalisation is also not expected because of evaporation in the reservoir.

Another challenge to the Nile is the fact that the river is shrinking due to less and more intermittent precipitation in Ethiopia and in other upstream countries. In addition, Lake Victoria, the source of 20%-30% of the Nile waters, is shrinking at an alarming rate.

What these developments mean is that Egypt’s insistence that the old agreements should remain untouched is no longer practical.



The limits of the new “Nile Agreement”: 

On Monday, March 23, 2015, leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan met in the Sudanese capital Khartoum to sign an agreement that is expected to resolve various issues arising out of the decision by Ethiopia to construct a dam on the Blue Nile. The Khartoum declaration, which was signed by the heads of state of the three countries—Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Egypt), Omar al-Bashir (Sudan), and Halemariam Desalegn (Ethiopia), has been referred to as a “Nile Agreement,” and one that helps resolve conflicts over the sharing of the waters of the Nile River. However, this view is misleading because the agreement, as far we know, only deals with the Blue Nile’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project (GERDP) and does not tackle the broader, still contentious issues of sharing of the Nile River waters among all riparian states. Thus, the new agreement does leave the conflict over the equitable, fair, and reasonable allocation and utilization of the waters of the Nile River unresolved.

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Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Sahara

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Sahara: Earth’s Greatest Desert - Geog > .
23-7-21 LIBYA | A Foreign Policy Disaster? - J K-L > .
22-12-28 Too many people? Challenges of demographic change | DW > .
> Border Issues >>

The Sahara (الصحراء الكبرى‎, aṣ-ṣaḥrāʼ al-kubrá, 'the Greatest Desert') is a desert on the African continent. With an area of 9,200,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi), it is the largest hot desert in the world and the third largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic. The name 'Sahara' is derived from the Arabic word for "desert", ṣaḥra (صحرا /ˈsˤaħra/), plural ṣaḥārā (صَحَارَى /ˈsˤaħaːraː/).

The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including the western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains, the Ténéré desert, and the Libyan Desert.

For several hundred thousand years, the Sahara has alternated between desert and savanna grassland in a 20,000 year cycle caused by the precession of the Earth's axis as it rotates around the Sun, which changes the location of the North African Monsoon. The area is next expected to become green in about 15,000 years (17,000 CE).



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