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FRIDAY 18th February 2011
Vol 52 N0 4


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AFRICA 
Activists versus authoritarians
After two months of courageous campaigning by determined young Africans, the region’s autocrats are preparing their counter-offensive

Where next for the democracy wave? The obvious targets are the other North African countries – Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Sudan – all of which are very different from Tunisia and Egypt. For Algeria, where pro-democracy protests in 1988 forced the Front de libération nationale regime to allow multiparty politics, bitter memories persist of the military intervention in 1991 to forestall an election victory by Islamist parties and the ensuing civil war which cost over 150,000 lives.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his government have responded cautiously to the shock waves from Tunis and Cairo. Bouteflika alternates between promises to liberalise the emergency laws and cracking down hard. To tackle some 5,000 protestors in Algiers on 12 February, the government deployed some 30,000 anti-riot police. Earlier, police had raided the opposition Rassemblement pour la culture et la démocratie. The government is also keeping a tight grip on the Front des forces socialistes but may offer seats in a reshuffled cabinet to the opposition.
For now, the opposition impetus is with young, educated and brave protestors who are struggling to build a mass movement that can reach out to the urban poor, whose scepticism towards the political class runs high. The young and educated also seem to be driving protests in Libya. After calls for a ‘day of rage’ against Colonel Moammar el Gadaffi’s regime, protestors went on to the streets of Benghazi, Zentan and El Bayda faced by well-financed and organised counter demonstrations. The regional head of security was replaced after clashes in El Bayda left several people dead on 16 February and the new opposition mood prompted Gadaffi to appear at a pro-regime rally in Tripoli’s Green Square on 17 February.
Heavily praised by Western diplomats for not overtly sabotaging Southern Sudan’s independence referendum, President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir had no qualms about detaining and beating up oppositionists, including several members of former Premier El Sadig el Mahdi’s family, in Khartoum. Yet Field Marshal Omer took a nuanced view of regional events: ‘We are very happy with what happened in Egypt and Tunisia because they [the regimes] harassed and oppressed Islamists’, he told students on 16 February. He also made a rare defence of the National Congress Party’s record on corruption: ‘I do not have money in Western banks, I do not have an heir to hand over the reins to and my family is not needy’.
Morocco’s monarchy faces its own pressures but is adapting. King Mohammed VI has allowed more press freedom, encouraged greater property and political rights for women, and tried to promote controlled multiparty politics, although the monarch retains absolute power. Sporadic protests, including some people setting fire to themselves, show that not everyone is convinced about his gradualist path, although bringing the Islamist Parti de la justice et du développement into the parliamentary fold has spiked its guns for now.
On the other side of the Sahara, there are also rumblings but few coordinated actions against the most authoritarian regimes. More directly, the democracy wave will play into the 20 or so elections due this year that give the traditional opposition parties a platform of sorts. The movements in North Africa – broad fronts against electoral fraud, human rights abuse, rising unemployment, inequality, grand corruption and nepotism – have sparked similar civil society organisations in West and East Africa, some of which are organising around the elections in Nigeria and Uganda. Those two elections will be critical barometers of African democracy.
Activists are ready to relay election results by mobile telephone and internet to counter efforts by incumbent regimes to steal votes. They are also working more closely with advocates for greater corporate accountability, to cut the ability of regimes to divert export proceeds into political and personal accounts.
Elsewhere, the hottest election spots will be Chad, Congo-Kinshasa, Madagascar and Zimbabwe, where all the conditions for a confrontation exist: discredited incumbent regimes with a record of electoral fraud, grand corruption and nepotism, gross economic mismanagement, poor social provision, high unemployment and a young and frustrated population. The lack of a strong middle class and widespread internet connectivity may constrain some oppositionists – but the example of the North may inspire them. However, the nationalist and anti-Western stance of the regimes of President Joseph Kabila and President Robert Mugabe earns some street credibility and they can call on China for at least some of their funding.
Both regimes face a growing social and political crisis which they are confronting with force of arms and show little interest in reform. Congo’s formidable mineral riches and now Zimbabwe’s giant Marange diamond field inoculate the regimes from immediate financial pressures. As in Egypt and Tunisia, the deciding factor would be the position taken by the military in the event of a mass mobilisation.
Chad and Madagascar, which rely on both overt and covert French backing, may prove more malleable to some external pressure although there is little sign that this would mean a real political opening in either state. Again, it will require a savvy opposition movement to play on Idriss Déby Itno’s and Andry Rajoelina’s vulnerabilities and those of their foreign sponsors to push through change.                                        

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