JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Three weeks after Zimbabwe’s historic powersharing agreement was signed in Harare on Sept. 15 by President Robert Mugabe and opposition leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, the country’s national unity government has yet to materialize. The three rivals have failed to resolve a standoff over key cabinet positions, with the opposition accusing the Zimbabwean leader of trying to make it a junior partner in the proposed unity government. According to the deal, brokered by former South African President Thabo Mbeki under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Mugabe’s ZANU (PF) party is entitled [...]
On Sept. 25, Somali pirates armed with rockets and assault rifles and traveling in small boats called “skiffs,” scaled the side of the Ukrainian cargo ship Fainaoff the Somali coast and overpowered the 22 crew members on board. Inside the 530-foot roll-on, roll-off vessel, the pirates made a surprise discovery: 33 Soviet-designed T-72 tanks, plus small arms, rockets and ammunition. The arms shipment was reportedly on its way to an unspecified customer in Sudan, but now seems likely to wind up on the African black market instead, unless the vessel’s shady owners cough up the unprecedented $20-million ransom demanded by [...]
Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a new biweekly column by World Politics Review Contributing Editor David Axe. Axe is an independent correspondent who has covered conflicts from Somalia to Afghanistan to East Timor. The column shares its name with David’s blog, which is at WarIsBoring.com. On a morning late last November in Mogadishu, Somalia, a tall, toothy 65-year-old man climbed into his beat-up sedan parked in the makeshift squatter’s camp he called home. Ali Mohamed Siyad, chairman of the central Bakara Market — once the economic engine of Mogadishu, but now a mostly ruined battleground — motored [...]
