President Michael Sata, Zambia’s Commander-in-Chief. Photo courtesy of Zambian Watchdog.
It remains difficult to confirm the existence of the Barotse Liberation Army, the supposed paramilitary wing of various groups calling for the secession of Zambia’s Western Province. However, if President Michael Sata’s order to the army to kill the rebel activists is anything to go by, the organization is nevertheless considered a serious threat to Zambia’s national security.
The November 30 order came after it was reported that the rebels were recruiting former soldiers and policemen to serve in the Barotse Liberation Army. Speaking at a Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional Defence Command Staff College graduation ceremony, Sata said:
In Lukulu (Western Province) people have formed a group called Barotse Liberation Army, they are recruiting people. As of today, I am aware that they have recruited 276 people. They are recruiting former army officers, police officers and former poachers…
ASEAN US cooperation. Photo: Abhisit Vejjajiva/flickr.
The transition between President Barack Obama’s first and second terms is the right time to develop a US-ASEAN Strategic and Economic Partnership (SEP). The move would serve to elevate and institutionalize existing US-ASEAN engagements. It would also compel US departments and agencies that have been compartmentalized and uncoordinated to raise their levels of engagement, share information, and align government mandates with strategic objectives.
President Obama made dual commitments with his ASEAN counterparts at the fourth US-ASEAN Leaders’ Meeting in Phnom Penh in November – to convert that forum into a summit, thereby indicating that the US president will participate annually, and to raise the US-ASEAN relationship to the “strategic level.” Creating the SEP could create a foundation for the president’s Asia-Pacific policy in his second term. It could lock in gains and allow the new national security, foreign policy, and economic teams to build on the progress of the past four years.
Security Council Summit on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Photo: United Nations Photo/flickr.
The UN General Assembly has recently approved a motion to grant a non-member observing state status to Palestine. Exactly 138 states have approved this motion, 9 rejected, 41 abstained. As predicted, Germany was one of these abstaining countries, again.
The expiring membership of the UN Security Council by the end of this year provides an ideal opportunity to evaluate German foreign policy after this two year period – also regarding next year’s elections. If you summarize this period, the pure absence of foreign policy positioning cannot be ignored. In fact, there was no German foreign policy.
Hitherto, German foreign and security policy was marked either by a close transatlantic cooperation, or by a counter balance towards a stronger European position. In the past four years, German foreign policy was lost in crisis management, completely dominated by the Euro Crisis resulting in a priority shift towards monetary crisis remedies, leaving foreign policy fields on the side-line. Particularly, security policy was marked by self-limiting abstention in the UN Security Council during the 2011 Libyan War. The Syrian Civil War caused a direct follow-up to these developments; a reluctance to provide Patriot Missiles for Turkey for border protection is another dead-give-away for Germany’s confusing foreign and security policy strategy.
Two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, tensions between Russia and its neighbors remain. Over the past twenty years or so, the former Soviet space has experienced, among others, border disputes and controversies over army exercises, military bases and oil supply routes. However, underlying issues like the withholding of citizenship rights remain largely unnoticed and, as a consequence, unaddressed.
The Usual Suspect?
Russia is widely regarded as the main culprit behind tensions with its neighbors and controversies surrounding citizenship issues. Scott Littlefield has argued that Russian passports and citizenship have facilitated Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatism in Georgia and served Russian ‘geo-strategic gains’. Some authors have even argued that Russia has ‘weaponized’ citizenship by combining its right to grant citizenship with its sovereign ‘right’ or ‘duty’ to protect its citizens at home and abroad. In light of the growing mobility of citizens, and Russia’s continued policy of conferring its nationality extraterritorially, such as in Transnistria and Crimea, this could spur similar secessionist feelings elsewhere.
Yet Russia is not the only state responsible for such behavior. Georgia has also been accused of using the 2008 conflict to discredit Russia internationally, thereby turning the war into a battle between ‘east and west’. However, Tbilisi was nevertheless responsible for fanning the flames of conflict by marching its military into its northern regions, thus violating agreements between Abkhazians, South Ossetians and the Georgian government. Russia perhaps overplayed its ‘responsibility to protect’ card by marching its army into Georgia, however concerns that ‘its’ Russian passport holding citizens were in need of protection appeared reasonable.
Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit 2010. Photo: www.kremlin.ru
At a recent international conference on nonproliferation and disarmament, a colleague asked, somewhat irreverently (but not irrelevantly), “Now that Obama has been re-elected, will he finally earn his Nobel Prize?” It’s a fair question.
Hopes were high within the international disarmament community after President Obama’s 2009 Prague speech when he pledged to move toward a nuclear weapons-free world. But those who cheered the loudest then are among the most disappointed now, frustrated over the slow progress toward this goal.
To be fair, there were a few other challenges on his plate: an economy and financial system in disarray; two messy, unfinished wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the United States’ international authority at a record low; an increasingly polarized and politicized domestic scene; other pressing priorities (universal health care being not the least); and more.
