Arab Spring bleeds deeper into Africa

[FarCenter]

Gaddafi deftly positioned himself as the solution to many of Africa's persistently unstable regions whilst often stoking these very same disputes with arms and boilerplate rhetoric about perennial Third World revolution. Now five months after Gaddafi's deadly demise, Libya's North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Gulf Cooperation Council-backed revolution threatens to destroy or at least bifurcate the wobbly Republic of Mali, whose president was overthrown in a military coup in the capital of Bamako on Thursday morning.

As the Gaddafi ship was definitively sinking, Malian and Nigerian ethnic-Tuareg fighters returned to their respective bastions in the Sahara armed to the teeth with looted Libyan arms. The Malian state, which until earlier this week was led by President Amadou Toumani Toure, is now facing an almost insurmountable security challenge in the country's vast under-governed north due south of the Algerian border as an insurgent group calling itself the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (Mouvement National pour la Liberation de l'Azawad-MNLA).

Shown in footage careening across Mali's Saharan north in vehicles identical to Libyan army issue Toyota Hi-Lux technical trucks brandishing Soviet bloc small arms, the MNLA seeks to secede from the Malian republic and form an independent nation called Azawad. The MNLA has overrun towns and army garrisons along the borders with Niger, Algeria and Mauritania, causing thousands of refugees and, in the case of Algeria, Malian soldiers themselves-to flee Mali's borders.

The current crisis began on January 17 with an MNLA attack on the eastern town of Menaka. It was however borne of Libya's internationally backed war on the cheap and has the potential to create further destabilization in the wider Sahara and Sahel regions beyond the current chaos in Mali. In simplest terms, the Arab Spring has now bled into Africa. And the mercurial, egomaniacal Gaddafi is no longer available to mediate such deadly disputes.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NC24Ak01.html

[tabatha]

1. Apartheid struggle bled into surrounding countries

The dry rolling plains of northern Kenya seem an unlikely place for an arms race. But in less than a generation the pastoral Pokot people and their neighbours have gone from protecting their herds with spears to outfitting their young men with cheap, reliable and deadly automatic rifles from the war zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The impact of modern military weapons on the Pokot and surrounding communities was brought tragically home in early 2001, when Pokot youth opened fire on a rival settlement, killing 47 people, burning down the village and transforming the almost-ceremonial tradition of cattle raiding into an occasion for human slaughter. "Guns are changing things," one young Pokot man told the Washington Post newspaper. "The young ones, they don't respect elders." "If you don't have a weapon," added another, "your grave is open."
Photo: © Impact Visuals / Teun Voeten

In fact, small arms, which include rifles, pistols and light machine guns, are filling African graves in ever-increasing numbers -- from the killing fields of Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the streets of Lagos and Johannesburg. While the international community searches, so far unsuccessfully, for agreement on the regulation of the global trade in small arms, a growing number of African countries, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations are grappling with the human and development consequences of gun violence and seeking to reduce both the supply and the demand for what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called "the weapons of choice for the killers of our time."

Reducing the availability and use of small arms in places where fighting has ended has become increasingly important to Africa's development prospects as the number of conflicts has increased over the past decade. The widespread abuse of weapons diverts scarce government resources from health and education to public security, discourages investment and economic growth, and deprives developing countries of the skills and talents of the victims of small arms. Millions of light arms -- lightweight, highly portable, and devastatingly effective in the hands of even young or poorly trained users -- were shipped to Africa during the Cold War to equip anti-colonial fighters, newly independent states and superpower proxy forces alike. The collapse of the Soviet bloc saw a new flood of small arms entering Africa as manufacturers put additional millions of surplus Cold War-era weapons on the international arms market at cut-rate prices.

In the 1970s, the apartheid government began supplying thousands of tons of arms and ammunition to its domestic and regional allies for the defence of white minority rule. An estimated 30 tonnes of guns and explosives were smuggled into the country by the anti-apartheid movements, which also left arms stockpiles at their base camps in surrounding countries. As many as 4 mn weapons from various sources have illegally found their way into the hands of South African civilians. The presence of so many weapons outside government control has overwhelmed law enforcement efforts, contributed to crime and public insecurity, hampered economic growth and caused tragic and avoidable deaths and injuries.

http://www.un.org/en/africarenewal/vol15no4/154arms.htm

I am by no way advocating the distribution of arms, but the arms supplied to the southern African countries in their quest for freedom have had devastating effects as well. Libya is not unique.