Something borrowed, something new

I woke up Thursday morning at 3am with a text message indicating that one faction had decided to declare all out war.  The faction is headed by a small dissident group that broke away from the Front Sud nearly a year ago and resorted to the use of arms when he found his voice had no weight among the more seasoned rebel leaders.  He is a young man, barely 24 years old.

Later that same day, the group's civil wing announces that it has fiiled charges against the former president of Senegal with the International Criminal Court for facilitating the creation of death squads in Casamance during the 1980s and 1990s.  It accuses him of crimes against humanity and genocide. 

Both actions were borrowed from a playbook used by so many other movements of their type, using violence on one end and pseudo legal action on another to provide an air of legitimacy and sophistication.  Referring the leaders of the country to the ICC has become a widespread and common practice.  Some claims may be legitimate but the ICC's temporal jurisdiction begins July 2002, so it cannot investigate any violations of international law that took place before that date - something this group probably already knows but it looks snazzy to make reference to the fact that a supranational institution will be bending to its will.  

Last Friday afternoon just as I was heading home from the office, something new emerged on the horizon.  We hear that our program is being closed indefinitely.  Turns out that the reason for the closure may have indeed started as a misunderstanding and continued as stumbling missteps at a higher level, but, in the end, it became a golden opportunity for some reprisals over the criticisms of the US toward this administration that were revealed in Wikileaks early December 2010.

The immediate solution is to shift all programming into another area - governance.  That may become permanent unless diplomatic actions can create the political space for our program to continue.  In the meantime, I find myself pondering what a mediation specialist is doing working as a program assistant for a newly branded governance project.  I have worked on good governance projects in the past, but it is unusual for expatriates to hold jobs that a national staff member can do better given their facility with language and knowledge of local government.  

Not sure when an answer will come to that question but in the meantime, I continue to tread water.