[LINK] "Kibaki Must Share Power, Wealth to Quell Kenya Unrest"

Bloomberg has a background piece on the ethnic tensions that have driven the recent post-election rioting.

The Kikuyu, the biggest and most-prosperous group, have dominated Kenya since it won independence in 1963, fueling resentment and repeated spasms of violence. Rioters killed more than 600 after the Kikuyu-dominated government of Kibaki, 76, declared on Dec. 30 that he had been re-elected over Raila Odinga, 63, a Luo.

``The conflict is taking an ethnic form, but it's got its roots in a failure of governance, rising poverty and the growing exasperation of an extremely young population with a geriatric bunch of leaders,'' said Michela Wrong, a journalist and author of three books about Africa, including a coming one about Kenya.

Kenya is a patchwork of more than 40 ethnic groups. About 20 percent of its 32 million people are Kikuyu. Four other groups, including the Luo and the Kalenjin, each have 10 percent or more.

The economy used to rely on tourists, attracted by Kenya's abundant wildlife and beaches. Now its port in Mombasa has become East Africa's main transshipment point, and the manufacturing and service industries are thriving.

``A few years ago, Kenya was seen as a place for holidays which sold its tea to Asia,'' said Razia Khan, chief Africa economist at Standard Chartered Plc in London. ``Now 42 percent at least of Kenya's exports go to neighboring countries.''

Economic growth is at an 18-year-high of 7 percent, and the most prominent beneficiaries are Kikuyu. Among them: Jimnah Mbaru, chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange; Central Bank of Kenya Governor Njuguna Ndung'u; Eddy Njoroge, chief executive officer of Kenya Electricity Generating Co., east Africa's biggest power generator; Gerald Mahinda, CEO of East Africa Breweries Ltd., the region's largest beer maker; and Eunice Mbogo, head of Kenya Reinsurance Corp.

``There was generally a tendency to shower benefits and certainly to shower jobs in the ministries and civil service on their own tribe,'' Wrong said. ``People saw that and resented it.''

Ethnic rivalry can be traced to the 1950s, when the Kikuyu- led Mau Mau resistance movement fought British colonialists. A million Kikuyus were placed in detention camps by the British and 100,000 of them died, according to the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Harvard University's Caroline Elkins.

In the 1960s, Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, oversaw a land-redistribution program that resettled many fellow Kikuyu onto fertile farms in the west's Rift Valley formerly owned by Europeans.

``Kikuyu farmers, pastoralists, were resettled in a land- reform exercise, and they did better than the nomadic groups,'' Khan said.

Kenyatta's successor, Daniel Arap Moi, was a Kalenjin who forged alliances with Kikuyu politicians. He was followed by Kibaki, a Kikuyu. He came to power in 2002 after bidding for the non-Kikuyu vote by promising to stamp out a culture of corruption that benefited his ethnic group and to appoint Odinga as prime minister.

[LINK] "Ghost Towns"

Over at Transitions Online, Ljubica Grozdanovska has an article up ("Ghost Towns") that takes a look at the accelerating phenomenon of rural depopulation in the Republic of Macedonia.

According to the State Statistical Bureau, half a century ago, 20 villages in Macedonia had fewer than 50 inhabitants. Today, there are 458 villages with fewer than 20 people living in them. There are 147 village that have no residents at all.

The draining of populations began soon after World War II and lasted for several decades. Government officials and economic developers in the newly formed Peoples Federative Republic of Yugoslavia – later the Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia – devised plans to stimulate the economy. They focused their attentions on developing mining, textile, and metal industries in lucrative regions and municipalities, most of which already showed signs of urban growth.

In turn, the government ignored the needs of rural, agriculture-based villages in order to save money for investment in new sectors, free up land for industrial complexes, and encourage laborers to move to newly growing areas.

With investments sent elsewhere, many villages were cut off from civilization. The government allowed roads to degrade, communication channels to disconnect, schools and hospitals to close, and electricity to shut off. Consequently, people in the villages moved to faster-growing areas to escape low standards of living.

[. . .]

According to a paper presented to the European Association of Agricultural Economists in 2001, Macedonia’s rural population in 1948 was roughly 72 percent. By 1981, the number had dropped to 46 percent. By 1994, it had hit 40 percent.

[LINK] "Angry White Man"

Over at The New Republic, assistant editor James Kirchick may have managed to significantly complicate the presidential campaign of Ron Paul with his article "Angry White Man". There, Kirchick reveals how newsletter published under Paul's name for nearly two decades and often with his byline reveals Paul to be affiliated with a variety of conspiracy theories and a variey of bigotries (against non-heterosexuals, against blacks, et cetera). In response, Paul's presidential campaign has issued a denial that Paul was responsible, though this would seem counterintuitive given the sheer volume of the material produced and--as Kirchick notes--the people Paul has surrounded himself with.

When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."

In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.

What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America. Jones--whose recent documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop themselves into "superhuman" computer hybrids able to "travel throughout the cosmos"--estimates that Paul has appeared on his radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.

Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern society. Christian Reconstructionists share common ground with libertarians, since both groups dislike the central government. North has advocated the execution of women who have abortions and people who curse their parents. In a 1986 book, North argued for stoning as a form of capital punishment--because "the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." North is perhaps best known for Gary North's Remnant Review, a "Christian and pro free-market" newsletter. In a 1983 letter Paul wrote on behalf of an organization called the Committee to Stop the Bail-Out of Multinational Banks (known by the acronym CSBOMB), he bragged, "Perhaps you already read in Gary North's Remnant Review about my exposes of government abuse."