Will it help anyone if I know about this?
It's hard to inform the people who might help if you don't tell some other people along the way.
2: That's a good point. Maybe someone here can help.
I try to keep informed since I got confused by a fundraiser and sent a donation to Kony.
First results are in - Tshiskedi is ahead, but with only 4% of votes counted that isn't very helpful. https://www.africanews.com/2023/12/25/dr-congo-presidential-election-partial-results-give-tshisekedi-a-clear-lead/
For those people whose principled view on foreign politics is conditioned on how much support the US gives the country in question, expressed specifically as a percentage of the country's military spending, it is worth noting that the US has given the DRC government $483 million in aid so far this year. This equates to 48% of the DRC's total military spending.
wait, i thought the sudan civil war was the next* horrifying cataclysm?
*actually currently underway. horrifyingly.
My sister, who has a hard case of white savior complex - though she has indeed managed to do a lot of good - has just had to move back from Uganda because ADF rebels had killed some people only about 5 miles from the village where she was staying. There was some concern that she was a tempting target for kidnappers.
We certainly ignored the wars in the same place 1996-2001, which involved megadeaths (although the relevant analysis is disputed).
For those people whose principled view on foreign politics is conditioned on how much support the US gives the country in question, expressed specifically as a percentage of the country's military spending,
It's at least a good heuristic for how much guilt I should internalize.
The DRC has such a sad history and it just keeps going.
It's probably still Belgium's fault.
6 It's not so much whether and how much one should deplore what is happening, but whether one has any conceivable political leverage to get that which is deplorable to stop or lessen. There are people who are at least nominally answerable to me who appear have some sort of ability to tell DRC to take this or that action. Will they do so? Not unless a bunch of us can agree on a specific ask, and communicate it intelligently.
More generally, for years I've been wondering why beautiful young women have seemed so keen to befriend me on social media and through texts. I mean, it's always obviously not been about me as a person, although that's the pitch. I never get far enough with them to find out how they're going to get money by flattering an old man's vanity. The explanation at last: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/asia/chinese-scam-operations-american-victims-intl-hnk-dst/
I'm ignoring the civil war in Myanmar as diligently as I'm ignoring civil wars pretty much everywhere else.
14.2: That may be the deepest it goes, but 95% of the "communications" probably would just turn out to be spam for camsites.
I don't even see a podiatrist anymore. Nobody looks at feet for free these days.
I know there's a million stupid things about borders in Africa because they were drawn by people who didn't know what was going on, but it seems especially strange to me that DRC contains a Great Lakes portion. Looks like this is the fault of the "1911 Anglo-German-Belgian Boundary Commission"? At any rate, it's a disaster. If you look at my favorite map (https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#6/-0.286/27.389) it's pretty obvious that DRC should end before it hits the high population portion east of the mountains.
17: There was a lot of really intense jockeying among the three colonial powers for territory in that region and the lines changed several times before that commission settled it. The Belgians having part made a little more sense after WWI when they also got the Mandate for Rwanda-Urundi, but yeah, the Great Lakes are a different world in cultural and demographic terms from the other parts of the DRC and it's never made any sense to have them together.
(It doesn't really make sense for it to include Katanga either, but at least there the mineral wealth provides an obvious motive.)
Also that map is fascinating; thanks for linking it!
I loved these remarks from Kenyan UN Ambassador Martin Kimani last year on borders, ethnicities, and nationalism.
Oh right, I'd somehow misremembered and thought Rwanda and Burundi were ex-British and not ex-German.
Anyway, my impression was that part of the Great Lakes being part of Congo is a big factor in terms of pushing more localized Great Lakes conflicts into continent-wide wars.
17, 20: That is a nifty map!
22: Ex-British is a good default guess, what with the sun and the never setting and all that.
I can't load the URL in 17, probably work computer restrictions, but I just learned from Wikipedia that the African Great Lakes variously drain into the White Nile, Congo, or Zambezi, plus two endorheic. I'd love to see a map like this but for that region - which I guess would work out to Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and Indian Ocean respectively.
I had to google Alex Mack. I guess generational differences in how we understand Africa.
24: This is the whole world but it does separate out the Mediterranean, which the other continental divide maps of Africa that I found don't do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1156wi/drainage_basins_of_the_principal_oceans_and_seas/
Here's a better link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_divide#/media/File:Ocean_drainage.png
Here's a more zoomed-in one with rivers instead of oceans/seas:
There's this. I've seen it, but have aged out of climbing it. https://www.summitpost.org/triple-divide-peak/155348
26/27: Thanks. Those are very good maps, except for it calling the Gulf of Mexico the "American Mediterranean Sea" and the actual Mediterranean Sea the "Eurafrican Mediterranean Sea".
Or I guess that's the union of the Gulf and the Caribbean.
TIL that "Mediterranean" is both a specific sea and a specific type of sea. Still, "American Mediterranean Sea" seems a couple orders of magnitude less separated from the ocean than the regular Mediterranean Sea and I think "American Mediterranean Sea" is fucking stupid.
"The name, which has been employed particularly by German oceanographers, is not recognized by the USGS, the International Hydrographic Organization or other international hydrological bodies."
In this house, we stand with the International Hydrographic Organization.
The slope from wholesome map-nerdery to batshit geopoliticism is lamentably short and slippery.
German's like to have things ordered. Just a bit too much.
Aha: it may make more intuitive sense in German where "Mediterranean Sea" is "Mittelmeer" (middle-sea) or "Mittelländisches Meer".
The German Wikipedia entry for Amerikanisches Mittelmeer yammers on trying to make it make sense:
The name was derived from the "European" Mediterranean. It has no particular similarities to it, either hydrographically or climatically. For this reason, the "more oceanographically correct" name Central American Sea was proposed. However, it plays a similar historical-cultural role for North America (old autochthonous advanced cultures, outcome of Romance-language colonization, favorable tourist locations). Thus, the the expression is quite common. There are also parallels in terms of geological history: both sea areas are older than the free Atlantic, and bordered each other before the opening of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Pangaea.
So yes, they are saying Florida is Italy.
(old autochthonous advanced cultures, outcome of Romance-language colonization, favorable tourist locations)
That sounds like tremendous bullshit.
No, bodies of water are always named with reference to which industries are prominent along their rims.
It's just so much trying to make fetch happen.
21: "At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later."
...who wants to tell him?
Corneille Nangaa is conveniently located.
I mean, we at least have an excuse (a bad one) for complete ignorance of the many vast and destructive African wars of the last sixty years, because none of us live in Africa. But this guy is the foreign minister of Kenya.
Also, surely the American Mediterranean is the Great Lakes? Largely isolated from the world ocean except by a couple of choke points, one of which is controlled by a rock with a fortress on it, effectively divided into several sub-seas by various lesser choke points, heavily used as a trade route, strategically vital, lots of industry and agriculture round the coast, French people, etc.
This does imply that JB Pritzker should be referred to as the Great Dey rather than the Great Khan, which is a bit of a shame.
47 et seq: His sense is clearly that an ethnonationalist irredentist Africa would have seen even more wars than it actually did.
And, AIHMHB, Africa's wars have been overwhelming civil, not international, only occasionally involve ethnic secessionism, and by my count include exactly three cases of attempted border revisions on ethnic grounds, all of them started by just one regime (Siad Barre in Somalia). As the ambassador points out, African regimes have almost without exception sanctified their inherited borders.
Blaming African conflicts on colonial borders is just another Euro-narcissist trope.
(Other avenues of colonial causation are of course not excluded.)
His sense is clearly that an ethnonationalist irredentist Africa would have seen even more wars than it actually did.
It's difficult to see how, frankly. I'm glancing at the wiki "List of conflicts in Africa" and it strikes me that the list of African borders that haven't had a conflict across them since independence is probably pretty short.
How mnay involved, as I said, "attempted border revisions on ethnic grounds"? The object of forces crossing borders in Africa has been, overwhelmingly, not to change borders at all, but to change, or change the behavior, of the regimes on either side.
||
Bonus shittiness!
https://apnews.com/article/congo-monkeypox-outbreak-gay-discrimination-mpox-bdfbae117989cfa41f5e7e36d583c036
|>
56: very few, I'm sure. But there have still been a lot of wars.
58: fair. But for the ethnonationalist possibilities, consider Ethiopia.
I suppose the flip side of having borders mostly left not a subject of political contention is that often you have bitter wars for which ethnic group will dominate others within their given set of borders.
Oh, there have been quite a few wars over redrawing borders in Africa - that's why mc was very careful to say "attempted border revisions on ethnic grounds" hadn't been common.
60: Not actually very many.
Starting the clock in 1963 (foundation of OAU, with ~60% of ultimate membership), we have ~30 rising to ~55 states in Africa, and among them we have 8 border/conquest wars:
Morocco-Algeria (1963)
Somalia-Kenya (1963-7)
Somalia-Ethiopia (1964)
Morocco/Mauritania-West Sahara (1975-)
Somalia-Ethiopia (1977-8)
Libya-Chad (1977-87)
Mali-Burkina Faso (1985)
Ethiopia-Eritrea (1998-2000)
In mainland Latin America in the same period, we have 22 states and 3 wars:
El Salvador-Honduras (1969), Ecuador-Peru (1981), Argentina-GB (1982).*
I don't have time to work out all the border dyads now, but roughly, wars/states: Africa 8/30=0.26, or 8/55=0.15; LatAM 3/22=0.14. Working out the dyads will make Africa look a lot better.
*Not mainland, but definitely a territorial war. If anyone can think of any other amphibious wars we can tweak. The results won't change much.
I think Bolivia should fight to get all of its land back.
61: ah, I think at this point we are making the distinction between "redrawing an existing border somewhere different" and "drawing a new border where there wasn't one before" and I think both should count as border revisions, and that gets you all manner of separatist wars, both failed and successful.
I think they need to work on their covertness.
This just in: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-258-war-peace-and-the-return
I never got the opportunity to express how much I detest the government of the UAE* in spreading violence and chaos throughout the region. Truly evil.
*a country and people I'm extremely fond of, MBZ excepted.
There are a lot of Sudanese here. My British-Sudanese knee surgeon had to spend a couple of frantic weeks trying to get his parents out of Khartoum when it kicked off.
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/somalias-cabinet-calls-emergency-meet-ethiopia-somaliland-port-deal-2024-01-02/
MOGADISHU, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Somalia on Tuesday rejected a pact its breakaway region of Somaliland signed with Ethiopia allowing it to use a major port with access to the Red Sea in return for recognition as an independent state, saying the agreement had no legal force.
Tanzania joing the SADC force (though it didn't join the EAC force).
https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/south-africa-tanzania-to-fight-against-m23-rebels-in-dr-congo-4482074
And:
https://www.barrons.com/news/dr-congo-annuls-vote-results-for-three-ministers-over-fraud-65fcde5c
Picked up by a Rwandan mouthpiece:
https://www.newtimes.co.rw/article/13574/news/africa/dr-congo-election-three-ministers-four-governors-disqualified-for-fraud-violence
Cosign 68. The governments of UAE and Saudi are just caricature awful.
