Tag: United Nations

Too little, too late . . .

The US has finally imposed sanctions on the Gbagbo government in Ivory Coast.  This won’t accomplish anything.  Take the response of the Ivorian Interior Minister (via allAfrica.com):

A top adviser to Gbagbo has said the sanctions are “a threat” to Cote d’Ivoire and his interior minister told RFI the measures “make me smile.”

Of course they do – this is just what Gbagbo and his people wanted – now they have evidence of “outside interference” in Ivorian affairs which they can mobilize as a rallying point for patriotism – and in so doing, relegitimize Gbagbo as the defender of the country.
While it is interesting that Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs William Fitzgerald is leaving military intervention on the table as an option, note that he has effectively ruled out US military engagement:

He said it was unlikely that U.S. troops would participate if that option was taken and that it was more likely to be an African force.

This is not a threat.  ECOMOG, the armed monitoring group of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), was able to retake Freetown in Sierra Leone during that civil war, but could do little else.  And that was a relatively successful intervention in a much smaller country.  This is like threatening to hit someone, but only with a nerf bat – annoying, but not really terrifying.
This has gone too far down the road now – someone is going to have to commit real troops to this conflict, and quickly – the UN peacekeepers won’t be able to hold the line much longer.

Posted on by Ed 0

The right decision, but now we need action . . . quickly

Cote d’Ivoire gets a bit dicier, as the UN declares Ouattara the winner in the presidential election.  Russia was concerned about issues of sovereignty in this vote (of course they are – they have their own fairly entertaining electoral issues), but Gbagbo’s theft was so blatant, and so quickly condemned by the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS), that it took remarkably little time to get everyone on board here.  Well, that and Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t yet have viable oil or other resources anyone absolutely must have, so this turns out to be fairly “low stakes” for the Security Council.  Not so much for the Ivorians, of course.
Why is this decision, so clearly rooted in facts, possibly problematic?  Well, the likelihood is that Gbagbo will try to use this decision to rally his support around the “meddling of foreigners in Ivorian affairs” (or something to that effect).  Nationalism can be an ugly tool, and in this case the subtle argument will be that to support Ouattara is to cave in to foreign pressure, to sell out the country.  Once you have set this argument in motion, it is pretty easy for the situation to turn violent, as the fight becomes about nationalism, not candidates.  Hopefully the UN and ECOWAS are prepared to move quickly here, as their statements will likely precipitate this sort of crisis.  If not, we could see a resumption of armed conflict with great potential for regional spread (Sierra Leone and Liberia are still recovering from an earlier civil war/cross-border conflict).  Public pronouncements only do half the job – but create an awful lot of responsibility to which we must live up.

Posted on by Ed 2

We're not all that powerful, really . . . and Jeff Sachs, please shut up. Please.

I somehow missed this NY Times article on our impending failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Hey, it was my first week at work.  In any case, a few thoughts on a topic that should be getting more discussion.
As I’ve told my classes time and again, the MDGs are the sort of thing that everyone can embrace.  The NYTimes gets it right:

For all the bitter debates pitting nations against one another, there is conspicuously little disagreement over the United Nations goal of eliminating dire poverty. Virtually none of the countries that signed onto the endeavor in 2000 faults the idea of eradicating hunger, educating children, improving maternal health or combating disease. It would be like opposing mother’s milk.

Ah, but saying you want to eliminate suffering, and actually doing it, are two different things.  And at the end of the day, we have two big problems.  First, we live in a finite world where some of us consume so much that it creates real challenges for the rest to get to comfort, if not affluence.  Put another way, if we want everyone to live at an average American standard, we need to come up with between 2-3 Earths worth of resources (see posts here and here).  So, there is no way to achieve the MDGs without making hard choices . . . which leads to my second point: the rich countries do not feel an impetus to make these hard choices.  At least for now, poverty/hunger/suffering are things that happen to large numbers of people somewhere else (we conveniently forget our own poverty belts, like Appalachia and the inner cities) for the average policymaker – we’ll just build really high walls to keep all “those people” out.  Big kudos to Esther Duflo for pointing this out:

“If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?” asked Esther Duflo, a development expert at M.I.T. “Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade’ — there is no onus.”

But while this open assertion of the problem was necessary, I think Duflo is wrong about the fact nobody is going to punish us . . . well, perhaps not literally wrong.  However, you can only limit the opportunities of the global poor for so long before we start seeing things like ecological collapse in agricultural systems, or the destruction of the rainforests, as the poor are forced into choices they would rather not make.  No wall is high enough to guard against a changing climate or a disrupted global economy.  We’re playing Russian Roulette, only adding shells to the chamber each time we miss easy goals like the MDGs, or fail to act on the changing climate.  No, the aliens may not come to get us . . . there’s no need.  They can just wait until we get ourselves.
Oh, and the Times felt the need to quote Jeff Sachs.  Again.  And he was wrong.  Again.  Jeff Sachs, for God’s sake shut your piehole.  Really.  You are a supremely arrogant man who has wasted his considerable intelligence by not listening to anyone, not reading any economic or development history, and not really learning any of the economic geography you profess to be furthering.  Your brilliant idea for development, the Millennium Village Project, is a failure – I called that one four years ago – and yet you will not shut up.  Will reality ever intrude for you?  For the press?  You are the D-list reality star of development . . . every time we try to look away, you perform the intellectual equivalent of taking off your top and running around, only we’ve seen this show before and nobody cares or wants to see it again.  Put on your shirt and go read something by someone other than yourself, then come talk to us.

Posted on by Ed 4