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1 freetoken  Mar 24, 2012 9:55:32pm

It’s probably too much to expect the current Mali situation to resolve itself as constructively as the early American situation. There are now so many vested interests in directing the control of African nations, not allowing real self determination, simply because outsiders can influence rulers to grant important economic favors. Add to that major climate and social changes and the situation looks not encouraging, e.g. from just three weeks ago:

Mali Drought, Violence Spur Exodus

More than 100,000 people have fled their drought-choked villages in Mali since mid-February, according to the United Nations, as new fighting has compounded a deepening food crisis in the landlocked Saharan country.

Ethnic Tuareg fighters, many trained and armed by late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, have renewed their bid for a trans-Saharan homeland that includes swaths of Mali. These fighters have repeatedly routed Mali’s ill-equipped military, causing whole villages to flee, in the latest reverberations from last year’s Libyan revolution.

At the same time, aid groups point to deepening cycles of drought in the band of drylands that stretches across 2,400 miles of Africa from Mauritania to Chad. The U.S. Agency for International Development expects “crisis-level acute food insecurity.”

The result is a chaotic regional movement of refugees and militants—displaced by war, drought and sometimes both. Many Malian workers were among those fleeing conflicts in two of the region’s most productive economies, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, last year. Amid this year’s drought and conflict, many Malians are moving—within Mali, or to Niger, Mauritania or Burkina Faso. In all, 172,000 Malians have left their homes since Jan. 1, according to the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

[…]

2 Mostly sane, most of the time.  Mar 24, 2012 10:00:00pm

re: #1 freetoken

Of course it won’t resolve itself as well as the US did.

This is why I appreciate how rare and blessed those early events were. They were not the norm.

3 SanFranciscoZionist  Mar 26, 2012 2:22:20pm

re: #2 Mostly sane, most of the time.

Of course it won’t resolve itself as well as the US did.

This is why I appreciate how rare and blessed those early events were. They were not the norm.

I remember that when Clinton won the election in 1992, my mother was working with a woman who had recently immigrated from the very-recently-Soviet Union.

When the election results came through, my mother remembers this woman looking at her with frightened eyes and saying ‘what happens now’? She realized that this was someone with no reason to believe a change of power between parties wouldn’t go badly. She didn’t really believe there would be no fighting over it until she saw the inauguration, she thought the Americans were just in denial.


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