GOING TO AFRICA: So, a

GOING TO AFRICA: So, a massive war threatens in and around Iraq…. CNN, according to one report has or soon will have 250 people in the field there… As for JWN? Well, this trusty correspondent is hard at work planning a trip to– Africa.
The way I figured it, when I went final-final on this decision a couple of weeks ago, is that the Middle East’s bundle of issues ain’t going to go away. It’ll still be around, oh, three months from now, three years from now– even, three decades from now. (This latter being around my planned retirement point.)
Meantime, I have a (very) modest amount of research money from the U.S. Institute of Peace to continue work on my research project on “Violence and Its Legacies”– the VAIL project, more info here— which looks at the policies three African countries chose, back in the early-to-mid-1990s, to deal with their heavy burdens of atrocious violence…
This is important stuff! How countries and peoples escape from cycles of violence is actually a much more instructive thing to study– and hope to learn from??– than going to watch a bunch of guys shooting each other other up.
Of course, in the mainstream media, “If it bleeds, it leads”. But the blogosphere is not your grandfather’s mainstream media. So I’m not looking for blood and shooting. (Been there; done that; six years in Lebanon back in the 70s.)
When I leave home April 6, I’ll take my trusty laptop with me, and I’ll try to post to JWN every couple of days or so. Over the five weeks that follow you will hear from:
** Arusha, Tanzania, which is the seat of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I have written quite a bit about ICTR’s background and workings already, notably here. I’ve been to its sister court, the one for former-Yugoslavia, headquartered in The Hague. (Arrived there in 2001 the same day Slobo did, indeed.) And I did some really interesting research inside Rwanda last year. But this will be my first visit to Arusha. I have a request in already to interview the South African judge, Navanethem Pillay, who’s the President of the court– and she’s also one of the judges recently elected to the bench of the ICC. Then, on to–
** Mozambique, a country that suffered a truly atrocious, 17-year civil war that started right after the country’s independence in 1975. But then, one fine day in October 1992, the country’s President and the leader of the insurrectionist rebels shook hands– and bingo!– the fighting and the resentments were all over… Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. But still, the ability of the Mozambicans to get beyond the nasty, lingering legacies of their years of travail has been notable, and impressive. How did they do it? Well, for one thing, they reached their peace agreement just before the vogue in international circles suddenly switched to post-atrocity war-crimes trials. And for another, they still had many robust indigenous traditions of post-conflict healing on which they able to draw. I think it’s really important to try to learn about (and from) what worked in Mozambique. That’s why I’m spending just over two weeks there. And finally, to–
**South Africa. I did a few days of interviews in Johannesburg, about the record of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, back in 2001. And of my three “cases”, this is the one that’s been the most pored over by other western scholars. But I still think it’s worth going back. So I’ll be spending about five days each in Jo’burg and Cape Town.
You know what, though? I’m actually kind of glad I’ll be there in those different places trying to tease apart the tough questions of how countries escape from cycles of violence — which, I admit, these three countries have done to wildly varying degrees, and in different ways. But this task sure sounds better for a person’s mental health than sitting back and watching the Air-Blast and other types of mega-bombs rain down on Baghdad.
And along the way, I hope I can write some on this blog about how the people I’m talking and meeting with there in Africa feel about our Prez and his misbegotten drive for war. D’you think anyone in Washington even cares?
But hah! I’m not going to be writing this for people in Washington. My main message for Dubya is coming out tomorrow– Thursday– in the Christian Science Monitor. Don’t miss it.