Dr. Peter Woodward is professor of politics at the University of Reading and program director of the Main Street Featured Site.
He's a leading expert in politics and international relations in Africa, with special reference to Sudan in the Horn of Africa.
He's been a visiting professor at the University Nichol in Durban and at the American University in Cairo.
He is regularly consulted by the British about the U.S. State Department and also speaks frequently on the BBC World Service on World Africa issues.
He has authored over 20 chapters and numerous articles and five books.
Most recently, he was published in December 2012. Crisis in the World of Africa,
and I've become intimately familiar with the 26 U.S. foreign policy the more about the past due to my dissertation this year.
I'm here today to speak on new wars in the Horn of Africa is Dr. Woodward.
Thank you very much. First personal apology.
I have a bit of a chest, so the volume goes down.
And to raise a hand at the back and remind me to speak up again.
And also, I should have said most that introduction should be in the past tense.
And I'd like to think I'm retired. That totally free time isn't always allowed to take over for me.
Too many of these things come back from time to time,
and I should say a little bit about the background of this presentation and indeed of the of the book.
It was part of a programme on liberal approaches to war, Liberal Way of War,
which was run by Alan CROMARTIE reading a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust and produced a variety of studies, a very eclectic bundle.
And so this was part of it. And my bet really is concerned with the approach of liberal states to the conflicts of the Horn of Africa,
and particularly since the end of the Cold War.
We've seen a number of new developments in the in the discipline of politics,
international relations, a number of which draw on events in that part of Africa.
So I guess you've already discussed you will have quite a lot of pretty clear idea of what you think you will say about very, very clear events.
And as you know, they involve lots of irregular forces and militias, things of that ilk, and they tend to have a heavy impact on civilian communities.
They can involve themselves in ethnic cleansing and they tend to lack clear outcomes.
And victories tend to struggle on from year to year, decade to decade.
Very often they move from one form into another. As time goes on, they've given rise to Mary Kaldor, started using the term New Wars 15 years ago.
They're not actually new you. I mean, plenty of wars of this kind around hitherto,
but we've been so dominated by the Cold War that we tended to forget about new wars until they
emerged as the major form of warfare around in so much of the world since the end of the Cold War.
They're complex. I nearly always have a variety of local aspects.
They have national dimensions. They have dimensions of international character which affect not only the wider international community,
but in particular the states immediately surrounding them.
So you get the growth of regionalism, which can be highly negative, as well as sometimes a positive experience.
So new wars, there are lots of them around the Horn of Africa.
But as I mentioned, and many of them were not really so new after all.
And I knew I've been going there for 50 years, and they were there when I first started, and hopefully they'll be there after I'm gone.
But there we are. And so what about this region?
Why is it a region? In what sense is it a region? Very loosely.
It's around centred around Ethiopia, as you can see from your your maps and its relations with the neighbouring states around it,
its own internal political problems and the political problems in which it's become involved in neighbouring
states and their internal problems and their involvement in Ethiopia generally on a reciprocal basis,
often a rather negative and reciprocal basis. In 2009, after the confidential set of this part of Africa,
the most dangerous corner of Africa is this north east horn where instability reigns and terrorism thrives on the antagonisms of its government.
And not just about embraces all the things that I want to talk about this afternoon.
And it is because they do have complex interconnections and they have regionalised so many of their problems over the last 50 years.
We'll go back to the 19th century to longer than that.
The kinds of issues that it's raised have given rise to a quite a lot of sub
disciplinary development within politics and international relations here in Oxford.
One of the earliest ones to take off was refugee studies and refugee studies up at Queen Elizabeth House.
It is now largely began from connections with Africa, including a lot of strong Horn of Africa,
as I mentioned, particularly in the late Ahmed Carey and his his work here.
Feminist studies, too, had a big boost from if that's the right word for feminist studies.
A big growth as a result of the famines in eastern Sahel,
Ethiopia and Sudan in the early 1980s and 2000 others became the centre of a
lot of studies relating to the famine that developed this whole literature.
Of course, we've long had a literature on conflict and the horn generally popped up in one or more of the pieces about the conflict in Africa,
or indeed often the world conflicts more broadly.
And then, of course, we had optimistically conflict resolution that became a theme and lots of books on conflict resolution.
And again, it popped up in various shapes and forms, one or other of the conflicts of the Horn of Africa.
And more recently, we seem to be popping into the world of post-conflict studies, and post-conflict studies are taking off.
And let us hope that there are many more post-conflict studies, because in the post-conflict situations it would be nice to think so.
And anyway, that's also been a growing area.
And I was in University Greenwich the other two ago and I saw a notice up for a conference on piracy studies and I thought,
Oh, splendid, a new field piracy studies and very appropriate.
It was Greenwich because it used to be the old Naval College, just just the place to have a gathering on conflict studies.
And now the NSC cautioned all this, and they said something just simply called the Crisis States Research Centre.
Well, you know, a much more than that. It's all in there, isn't it? Crisis States, Research Centre and whatever that means.
It certainly encompasses parts of the horn because one of its major figures known as Oxford,
David Keene, of course, cut his teeth on on the conflicts and.
Sufferings of the famines of the 1980s in western Sudan and southern Sudan.
So we can see all kinds of areas where academics have come together to look at things that are all too well illustrated from the Horn of Africa,
as well as being incorporated into other case studies from around the world.
Now what I'm particularly interested in today is the way in which the West and I mean essentially the West, we talk about the international community,
but essentially the West I'm talking about loosely understood and has responded to in what it
sees the liberal ways available to it in trying to tackle the problems of the of the horn.
And it's been looking at those varying approaches and involvements that I want to control you and to hear your comments.
Now, of course, the Cold War impact did very significantly on the Horn of Africa.
And we always think of that nice, stable situation of Europe with the Iron Curtain across it and predictability
and that the the the Cold War in the Horn of Africa was much more complex.
Could you speak a little right. Turn up the volume taken, but keep reminding me if it slips again.
Thank you. So the Cold War impacted very significantly, and some of you may be able to provide other examples of this.
But at different times, the Soviet Union and the United States were allied with all of the following Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.
They changed sides regularly through the through the Cold War, and generally not because the major powers sought to change sides,
because what they were concerned about was trying to stabilise their positions in relation to the Red Sea and the Gulf,
either to defend their interests or to seek to undermine their interests in the case of the Soviet Navy in that area.
But because domestic politics basically and brought them in, check them out.
As times changed in Egypt after Nasser, very much with the Soviet Union.
Sadat told the Soviets to go and they did.
In Sudan, we saw we went from the Americans to the Russians and then back to the Americans in the 19 by the late 1980s.
And Ethiopia was the similar experience, first American and then Soviet involvement.
And Somalia did likewise. It was involved with the Soviet Union and then later with the United States until the collapse of the Somali state.
And all this imploded, of course, at the end of the Cold War in about 1919, 1991.
And we see the dominoes as the rulers of the region fall, particularly Siad Barre in Somalia and Mengistu in Ethiopia.
And it wasn't accidental.
It all fitted into the way in which the region had been involved in international politics as it tried to resolve its own internal domestic issues,
largely in relation to what those allies could supply supply.
And that included, of course, supporting various conflicts that were taking place within the region in those days.
The outcome of which was a general reduction in interest in the area after the end of the Cold War,
when it was no longer a Soviet threat and in consequence,
interests of the West were not so obvious as they had been when they had been the threat to the the naval channels of the Red Sea.
So it always has to be said in a sense, partly within the context of the aftermath of the Cold War.
It wasn't a nice, clear tabula rasa that was being shaped or not shaped as the case may be in the Horn of Africa after the end of the Cold War.
Rather, it was what was left after the end of the Cold War across the region, including,
amongst other things, and quite unusually in Africa, one completely new state.
Eritrea, which hadn't been there before, which got its independence, but effectively from the time Mengistu went down.
And then I think officially in about 1993, if I remember.
Rightly so. These then left us with all kinds of problems famine, war, etc. ongoing.
And what kind of response, if any, should there be from them to the victorious West in this context?
And we've seen responses down the years under a variety of headings.
And these headings I briefly want to run through now.
And the first one, perhaps the most obvious one, because it happened so obviously is the use of military force.
And it began kicked off really in Somalia in 1993 and with the response to what was essentially a humanitarian crisis,
although there have been conspiracy theorists who tried to worsen it, I think it was a humanitarian crisis.
And it was thought that the intervention of the UN, led by the US, would be a way of resolving this.
The liberation of Kuwait had really gone quite easily with this great potential military force that would be used for good.
This is an easy number and that was certainly the view in the American military when they advised and George Bush senior that it would be very doable,
was their view. And so off they went leading the way.
And of the 35,000 roughly deployed by the UN overall in Somalia, a number 27,000 Americans.
So a large American presence pretty well recorded and the cameras of it were set up on the beach to film back
to prime time American television landings taking place of the American troops and of the of the ships.
And they entered into into it as if it were no problem at all.
But next door in Kenya, there was a rather savvy American ambassador and very experienced journalist by the name of Smith Hampton.
And he said, Think once, think twice, think three times before you embrace the Somali identity.
Call this Somali. Black something or other come.
The line I particularly like was, If you like Beirut, you'll love Mogadishu.
And of course, that's what I soon learned, that Mogadishu was another Beirut for all kinds of very local reasons.
And as we know, they're down to Black Hawk Down.
Admiral, how thinking that you could just crush these small militias that seem to pop up all over the place, which, of course, you couldn't.
And in the end, Clinton,
having taken over this mess and being told it was going to be quite easy and out quite soon and got an experienced diplomat, Bob Oakley,
simply to go in and negotiate with the warlords and get the American troops out,
after which, of course, every other U.N. force was pulled out and pretty quickly as well.
So the first military intervention.
Not to be followed in that shape or form, possibly ever, but certainly not for a long while.
And that, of course, Clinton was to admit, was one of the reasons why.
LAND The following year, the genocide in Rwanda, there was so little support for significant U.N. action to prevent genocide from taking place.
He went back to Africa at one point in his presidency and apologised for the wayward inaction in the Rwandan genocide,
essentially as a result of the Somali experience that America was still trying to come to terms with.
So did that mean the end of the end of the military?
I've lost the page. I'm going to go. Oh, yes, I will.
I'm not quite the end of the of the military. The first glimmerings began to emerge of terrorism and the terror in all of Africa,
and especially with the attacks on the American embassies in 1998 in Tanzania and in Kenya.
And they very nearly got away in Uganda as well. And I think intelligence would be better on that one.
They managed to stop stopping and getting to the the Entebbe and Embassy in Uganda.
But the realisation that there was something called terrorism was without that.
And indeed in 2003,
1993 for the US had put Sudan on the list of terrorist supporting countries because at that time Osama bin Laden had
turned up there and was involving himself in the in the developments both there and across the region as far as he could.
Military response to this? Well, in the end, it came down to missile strikes in 1998.
The coincidence of the missile strikes on the northern border in Afghanistan narrowly missed him.
And a missile strike on a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, north in Sudan, which was alleged to be connected to and to something nastier.
But that's never been proven, um, generally regarded as a tactical error.
The local officials in Sudan said, Well, yes, I can do this kind of thing, but you ought to aim for the President's Palace,
not for the and for a pharmaceutical factory with no love for the president.
There still isn't. Get your targets right.
But anyway, that was that was the missiles. And they were kind of a we got to do something quick.
We're not going to put your troops in. So bang, bang, bang.
And that was pretty much the end of that in terms of that kind of usage of of missiles and bases.
But it also brought us and capital money,
AFRICOM and all the American military presence in Djibouti that's grown up as the central area for involvement in in the Horn of Africa area,
much of North East Africa, which continues, but the importance of which is still open to discussion.
We were discussing much,
and I'm sure there are people here from the military who have far more knowledge than I do just what goes on out of the capital,
the money and all that. And perhaps the most notable aspect of it was the decision of the US government to give military support for the first
time since Somalia in crisis to the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union,
which was then ruling it in Mogadishu. So that was a deployment and that involved American air support.
And of course, what goes on in terms of covert operations, I'm no position to know, just overtly,
this was the first time an American bombs have been loose again, and certainly since 1998, when the first time back in Somalia.
It's been followed, as you know, by a continuing military support to the new government in Mogadishu,
including the use of drones and all the issues that grow out of that.
The ethical questions, the legal questions, the tactical questions, is it counterproductive?
Is it productive? Well, it can come back and discuss that, if you like.
I know I have no particular expertise in that area, but it clearly it is an ongoing issue now and will have to continue to be so.
Is the support for the government in Mogadishu survives?
Just as importantly, of course, there's been American military support to local allies and particular training programs for neighbouring countries.
Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and others have been on in support of receipt of American training programs.
And of course American intelligence also has quite close working relationships with the
intelligence systems in place in those national governments and across the across the region.
And then most recently we've had like somebody in the audience who've been involved in this on the work on the Pirates,
in which the Navy have become involved. And this is involved not only the Americans, but Europeans and increasingly Asian navies as well.
So we've got a splendid array of navies taking part in these activities on the whole, with a degree of success, at least at sea.
And most of the Somali experts, of whom I'm not one, however, argue that the war on piracy, if there is such a thing, can never be won purely at sea.
And it will come back to issues of how ground developments come on in time in in Somalia.
And that, of course, we have yet to really start upon.
The Mogadishu government hasn't got round to thinking about how to control its coastlines yet.
That's a fair way of simply trying to build its own area of support in relation to the continuing threats of al-Shabab.
Is quite sufficient, right enough of things military.
And there are a lot of other things that go on as well. Forms of soft power of one kind or another that have been.
Used by different outfits at different times.
Again one could say the US led the way in this in the vein mentioned in 1983,
putting the 1993 sorry, putting Sudan on the list of terrorist supporting states.
It at the same time brought in American sanctions against Sudan.
And these were followed by UN sanctions as well.
Uh, the UN sanctions came on after the attempted assassination of Mubarak, Egypt's president, in Addis Ababa in 1996, which very nearly killed him.
It certainly scared him and it went off and luckily didn't get driver was killed amongst others in that shootout.
And if it had organised with organisational support from Sudan's security forces.
It was carried out by Egyptians,
but with the operations would not be possible without the involvement of the Sudan security and in the embassy and in a suburb.
So as a result, you went on to the UN sanctions list as well.
So they had widespread sanctions from the West which have gone on being in place.
They were recently renewed. The American sanctions, I believe and are a nuisance, but really not that much more than a nuisance.
I mean, they're a nuisance in that you can't use them for international financial routes that you would normally have.
You have to go in with bucket loads of dollars and pay everything in cash and have no connection to any any kind of credit system.
Or because for any company that's listed on a new stock exchange to to think of
being involved in Sudan would be to lose their placement on the stock exchange.
That has a big impact in that sense, very inconvenient.
However, such has been the involvement of China and the Arab neighbours, particularly the Gulf states,
that Sudan's economy has not gone flat on its back as a result of the sanctions and indeed thanks to the Chinese investment in particular,
and to a lesser extent the Arabs.
And until two or three years ago, it was one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, going along with it at 8 to 10% a year.
From 1999, it became an oil exporter, most of the oil going to China and until two or three years ago,
and they now run into problems about oil supplies. But that's another issue.
And so sanctions have had a an impact, but they haven't been decisive.
And given the attitude of and significance of the Chinese and Arab neighbours,
there's no way they were going to be decisive in terms of significantly changing regime behaviour.
The Chinese to get a bit embarrassed for a moment in time with the Genocide Olympics,
which would happen to coincide with the Darfur crisis, which their allies,
the Sudan government of course were meting out violence right,
left and centre in in Darfur and the Chinese and got over that one and nobody boycotted in the in the Beijing Olympics.
So important sanctions but not a decisive.
This is how they continue to build American sanctions on the Sudan government.
It was very hopeful that making peace in 2005 lead to the lifting of sanctions
and they're getting all the Fed up with the way in which Americans just do this,
just through this, just through this. And the sanctions will be off and they never are.
There's always some reason why they they have reason to continue. And not least because the conflicts go on.
There's also an. Appreciated.
Understood. Particularly by.
Lobbyists in and around Washington who are very keen to and have been for a long time to raise the issues from Sudan's conflicts in particular.
Right. So sanctions has been a part of the kit and not a decisive part of the kit.
Diplomatic efforts, political interventions towards conflict resolution.
There's been an awful lot of this and around the around the area.
And in fact, just about every country has got involved in this at one time or another.
And lots of folk like me get drawn into this kind of thing, at least in the early stages,
to try and advise on what seems possible and doesn't seem possible.
The big one, I suppose, has been the Eritrean Ethiopian conflict, which began in 1998, 2000, and is still by far resolved.
And there are still tensions. There is some hope in the aftermath and always there is.
In Ethiopia, things may get a little easier.
It certainly was a strong hostility between the sides and militia itself personally, which maybe made ammunition may help.
We have yet to see signs of that.
Meantime, there were attempts to try to end this war, one of the two largest conventional wars in Africa since World War Two.
And Ethiopia was involved in the other one as well, which was the Somali invasion of Ethiopia in 1999, 1977, 78.
And with Ethiopia, Eritrea, which took everyone by surprise,
including I think the Eritreans and the Ethiopians and in 1998 was one in which it was thought that we can try and bring about agreement.
And indeed there was an agreement in Algiers, the Algiers agreement, and but it has never been implemented.
In particular, Ethiopia didn't like the outcome of the Algiers Agreement negotiations and Eritrea, on the other hand,
was delighted and kept trying to push for them to the point where Eritrea has asked for
the UN troops to be removed from the border and the border still stands there with
dispute and to quite significant forces blowing up on either side across it and taking
the temperature of the relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea at any moment.
And it's reflected in the kind of attitude they're striking respectively with regard to the border dispute, which goes on and on.
Other interventions? Well, of course, Somalia has had lots of interventions at peace efforts.
I was trying to remember at lunch time how many it is. It's either 15, 16 or 17 or something of that kind.
And you go on to some 1991 to try and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
And Humpty Dumpty proved remarkably resistant to being being put back together.
We had the most recent in so far, I have to say, one of the most successful efforts since the Ethiopian invasion in 2006.
Bringing down the ICU. The. The Islamic Courts Union.
But at the same time, of course, creating al-Shabab, it used to be the militia of the ICU.
And before they were cast off by the overthrow of their political wing and.
Now we've seen, as I mentioned earlier, that would be encouraging, particularly in the European Union, which took the lead on Somalia.
There were efforts to get governments created and we now do have a government established in Mogadishu with a lot of open British support,
particularly from the Prime Minister. Whether it will be able to stabilise itself is still a long way down the line.
We can be sure that it won't be able to do so on its own.
It will require continuing military support from the African forces that are essentially Western backed and trained on its own.
And on the military front. It will require continuing aid of all kinds on other fronts if it's going to be successful.
If it is, I mean, no better placed than anybody else to guess the likely outcome.
And I think we're the first for a long time.
And one limitation, which was I think another upsetting to Cameron and CO was that neither Somaliland nor Puntland, those two autonomous territories,
took part in the Somali talks or however they wish to be connected to the Somali government, particularly Somaliland.
Somaliland is probably the most democratic country in the Horn of Africa and twice change.
Change of government at the ballot box. And the international community doesn't recognise it, largely because an African opposition.
But it certainly got a better case to be an independent state in terms of any judgements of a state
like South Sudan that became independent in 2011 and was accepted by the international community.
I was mentioning the Somaliland delegation turned up wearing T-shirts saying Somaliland next the Juba independence of South Sudan.
And they had reason to.
I have yet to win international hearts and minds, particularly in Africa itself.
So a variety of reasons.
So Somalia is still very much in the balance and whether we'll see a stable government in the southern central areas of Somalia,
whether we'll see any further integration between Somalia and Puntland and Somaliland is still a long way down the line.
Bit more diplomacy. Well, South Sudan like a good one.
It made peace there in 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
And that seemed quite successful.
And. It seemed to return the possibilities of democracy to both areas of one country, then Sudan and South Sudan.
And that also included the right of South Sudan to choose independence.
Should Sudan fail to implement a secular constitution?
The government in Sudan did refuse to implement a secular constitution for all kinds of reasons.
It stuck with its choice of an Islamic state. South Sudan overwhelmingly voted in the referendum for separation beginning in thousand and 11,
which was to be delivered in July of that year, generally seen as an international success in terms of ending a war.
But at the same time, it certainly wasn't the outcome the international community was hoping for.
They had hoped there'd be a move toward national liberal democracy.
Talk to any of the diplomats involved. Was there a Western diplomat that was there aimed to try and see the unity of Sudan retained
and to see a power sharing develop in both South Sudan and in Sudan and more broadly,
national governments and all that kind of thing. In the end, none of that transpired.
It was about two armed camps who had negotiated and an outcome that they both thought they could live with.
In 2005 and those two armed camps persist, but now is entirely separate camps and two separate states.
And. And the state of conflict exists in both.
And both are involved in the conflicts in a new neighbour.
And so the usual pattern of internal and regional conflict involvement continues to present.
And where do we go next? Oh yes,
we had our two P popped up in particularly after Blair and his speech in Canada and we had the right to
protect each other in international debates and discussions wasn't going to be a use of the right to protect.
It seemed after all that I think it was very much focussed on ten years after the Rwandan
genocide and this seemed like a new version for sovereignty and international involvement,
the right to intervene internationally in the international community to protect
citizens who state governments were clearly damaging to their their interests.
Well, Darfur looked perfect for this kind of thing in terms of the obvious need.
It was the crisis in the moment in 2004 and.
Many thousands been killed,
hundreds of thousands being internally displaced and sent off as refugees into neighbouring countries for the usual mix of local,
national and regional politics. Which I haven't got time to go into now, but that that was, was there going to be an art movement?
It soon became apparent that there clearly aren't going to be any Western boots on the ground.
So who might do it?
Well, the EU, the new African Union, decided this would be a good one for them because they hadn't done anything of this kind before.
The old OAU did it once in the early 1980s in Chad, which was a disaster and gave up on that kind of thing after that.
But we had the EU deciding to take the lead with a lot, of course, of support from the wider world.
And it soon became clear that the African Union on its own was incapable of an operation of this kind.
So we saw a new form, a hybrid UN African Union movement force established for peacekeeping and UNAMID, UN African mission in Darfur.
In the I think about 2005, somewhere around there, one of the largest UN peacekeeping operations in the world.
And it's still there. But is it doing anything?
It's got 26,000 mostly African troops on the ground, a few Chinese engineers with the Chinese and a few along with engineers.
But if you've been following these things, you'll know that in this year,
the last five months have typically been a new round of fighting, 300,000 more internally displaced people.
And clearly the UN and UNAMID can only peacekeeping when there's a keep peace to
keep around a similar situation that's been found by the UN mission in South Sudan.
Now I notice the the Lady Hilda Johnson, who heads the UN mission in South Sudan,
saying last week and this can't be at least we don't think we can do the policing for you.
Quite what they do too far from clear. And you know,
they say we can't be the policeman with all kinds of essentially localised ethnic
conflicts taking place in seven out of the present ten states of South Sudan.
As we as we sit here. 402p.
Understandable as an idea of a record. Not a great deal so far out of this this region of Africa.
And then we had the ICC, the International Criminal Court.
This was almost the Tweedledum and Tweedledee about who would pay and actually hold accountable.
The rulers have been doing nasty things to their people, or indeed some of those people have been doing the nasty things.
And and it kicked off, quite understandably and obviously in terms of propaganda with Joseph Kony the last minute in northern Uganda.
And you've heard and you're probably aware Kony 2012 was one of the big campaigns in the United States last year.
Well, it's 2013 now, and he's still out there and we're still arguing about who's helping and supporting him along the way.
Maybe if things do turn out to change in eastern Congo, [INAUDIBLE] find life tougher there.
He's always moved around from state to state in that in that region.
And, well, we ain't got him yet.
So when Joseph Kony was the first and still on the loose and haven't got any of the others who are clearly associated with large scale violence,
particularly President Bashir of Sudan, and indicted over Darfur and a couple of others of his his government similarly indicted.
And it does limit them freedom of movement, but it hasn't got hold of them.
And it may have force, interestingly, have more impact in relation to Kenya and the Kenyan.
Prime minister, will president, president and vice president, both of whom may have volunteered themselves for the court.
But I suspect there'll be a lot of negotiating before they finish up in front of a of the court.
Indeed, you are following the African Union and 50th anniversary meetings in Addis last week.
It was general hostility all round towards the ICC, which was seen essentially as targeting Africans.
I totally. 202i was on their list and I think looks like a more viable and believable, believable than it has been so far.
So none of the characters the ICC has identified in relation to the broad Horn of Africa have yet turned up in May in The Hague.
Aid and development. And all that. Well, there is a good deal of development, and development programs may often be very important and successful.
They tend to be in areas that are not. My specialism is I don't want to comment on them and I certainly don't want to say they're all a waste of time.
So some are better than others. But in relation to overall development across the region, I still regard the impact of the presence of the Chinese,
in particular other Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, India especially, and the Arab Gulf states.
I think everything every bit as important as anything that DFID, USAID or anyone else is doing in the region.
And of course, they have rather different kinds of agendas and for the work that they're undertaking.
But the good bit of development doesn't particularly interest me, I suppose,
because my discipline is the good governance agenda and, and, and all that.
And one has to say that on the whole, in relation to the good governance agenda is having many successes.
We have a series of autocratic regimes that seem as autocratic as ever for the most part.
I said earlier, the most and the nearest thing to a competitive system that seems to function as such is Somaliland and certainly Ethiopia.
Since the shock of the 2005 elections was move in a less democratic or democratic direction.
The hopes for democracy engendered in the Sudan process and peace of 2005 have not come about either in relation to Sudan or South Sudan.
Eritrea goes on being the North Korea of Africa and on the whole, you know, these autocratic regimes are surviving.
If there is a glimmer, it is that the Kenyan elections of 2013 are a lot better than the last elections in Kenya.
And one has to hope that. But then Kenya has never been quite as autocratic.
It was Kenya and all that, but in some ways it was a slightly more open system within strict constraints than some of its neighbours.
Now it's time to move towards a conclusion. Well, first conclusions.
No quick fixes.
We all saw the Iraq program last Wednesday night and probably be watching it this Wednesday night and those first words uttered by Tony Blair.
We needed really to remake the Middle East. Naivete.
Arrogance. Combination of the two. You cannot remake regions of the world like that.
And by sending in the troops and thinking that somehow we pop up democracies and not be colonies, just emerge from the woodwork.
Life is much more complicated. In all these cases,
I going to give you the historical traces that run right through the region and are much more relevant to the
understanding of where we are in North East Africa now than anything that comes out of the textbook on good governance.
The world is simply a lot more complicated and that a lot more historical and in character.
I'm sure at least some of you here will attest.
We do have all these various forms of approach that can be used, and many of them are valuable in particular circumstances.
But you have to judge the circumstances. You have to decide when it's right to pursue one line of approach or another.
There's no blueprint, no quick fix in any of them.
And it's usually a combination of various approaches from a through diplomacy,
through responsibility in various kinds, as well as perhaps help in building security within states.
You can simply go to work out the mix. You've got to think also what you can do as opposed to what you'd like to do.
Because the idea that we had this idea arose at the end of the Cold War.
You can do whatever you like on it. It wasn't true then.
It's even less true now, particularly because of the role being played by China and Asia more generally.
And what is the continuing role of the Arab states?
And you do have to try and work with them rather than against them in relation to any kind of hopes for a more peaceful age for for north east Africa.
That's about. Look, in my mind, I think we have one more thing. We think before you embark on military intervention anywhere.
Sit down and watch. Carry on up the Khyber. You probably think twice after that.