Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In ‘strategic backwaters’, wrote Peter Gowan in 2001, even real genocide can be casually covered or countenanced, as the experience of Rwanda has shown. Where delinquent states are pivotal to American strategic interests, on the other hand, they are vigilantly shielded from human rights pressures, as the cases of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey or Indonesia, to name only the most flagrant examples, have long made clear.  — Peter Gowan, Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, New Left Review, Sep-Oct 2001.

And across the country, Congolese wonder whether Tshisekedi will leave office quietly if he is not voted in today— as a report by Human Rights Watch put it , the threat of election-related violence threatens to undermine the democratic process. How could one even talk about ‘the democratic process’ in the Congo? Related An in-depth analysis:  Africa's Leaky Giant

The Massacre of innocents  Scène du massacre des Innocents -  Léon Cogniet,  France,1824 In capitalist modernity

Dear Priti, Rwanda is not deterring ‘aliens’ . What are you gonna do about it? Related A couple of figures in the article below are not inaccurate.  There isn’t a single mention of the stark hypocrisy, racism and double standard in migration policies. “Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit.” Not true. A few people benefit of cheap labour and driving wages down, and others use restrictions on migration to win elections. The century of climate migration

The freedom to move and to stay

 

The ‘same’ headlines, attacks and vilifications uttered and published when I first arrived in England 20 years ago. The difference today is that white Ukrainians are welcome as it was with Polish labour. Johnson warns of the ‘healthy young men’ or ‘economic migrants’ who come here under false pretences, sometimes posing as minors, in place of the truly vulnerable.  Fables of migration

How France propped up slain ruler in Chad

France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks. Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out." — The BBC Even John Mearsheimer, a scholar of the now defunct but still predominant neorealist-International Relations theory, acknowledged this in 2002: "Despite claims that American policy is infused with moralism, Somalia is the only instance during the past hundred years in which US soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission’—and ‘in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers so traumatized American policymakers’ that ‘they refused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994’, although ‘stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and would have had virtually no effect on...