Sunday, June 29, 2014

Holy city of beer: 82 mosques and a brewery

29 June 2014 Last updated at 00:42

Harar: The city of beer and mosques

By Aidan O'DonnellBBC News

Brightly coloured wall and mosque in Harar

In today's Magazine

Ethiopia's historic city of Harar is one of Islam's holiest centres - but in recent times it has built up another tradition and is now also known for its brewery.

As holy cities go, Harar is a colourful one. Inside the walls of the old town I find buildings in greens, purples and yellows - its women seem to take this as a challenge, dressing in veils and robes of shocking pink and the brightest orange.

Harar lies far in the east of Ethiopia, with a road that rises out of the town in the direction of Somaliland.

The mighty Muslim leader Ahmed The Left-Handed led some fierce campaigns from here in the 16th Century.

On its narrow streets I meet goats, old men collapsed from chewing the narcotic khat and a young boy who stops to knock a football back and forth with me for a few minutes.

Off the main square, tailors sit in front of fabric shops ready to run up alterations.

Binyam, slotted behind his sewing machine, does a small tailoring job for me, recounting his Greek ancestry and the provenance of his sewing machine - a gift, he says proudly, which would cost you thousands in the local currency.

He warns me off sellers of bad bananas and nearby thieves.

Historic gate in Harar

I've come to find the city's brewery, which is what it's known for - beyond its holy credentials. For three decades now it's turned out Harar beer, its bottles carrying a label that depicts the old city's famous gates.

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The main street in Harar

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Outside these gates a tuk tuk taxi driver knows where to find the birra fabrica - the beer factory - and we set off, away from the old city, putt-putting slowly up a hill.

The brewery entrance is flanked on one side by a sign prohibiting firearms and, on the other, by an enormous beer bottle - perhaps meant to remind you why you can't bring in your gun: here be alcohol.

The giant bottle is four times the height of a man. I know this because there's a man in front of it, a security guard who's delighted to have a visitor.

He's not quite standing to attention, but the huge beer bottle does loom behind him a little like the guardhouse of one of the Queen's Guards in London.

Inside the grounds, green beer crates frame the horizon, with a green mosque in the distance.

Underfoot there are disused rail tracks. The net on a tennis court looks like it's in working order though and in a rusty-looking playground a man is watching his young boy on a swing. The sleepy air around the grounds is deceptive.

Beer crates in the foreground, a mosque in the background

This brewery was sold off to the Heineken group by the government three years ago. The company says it plans to invest in the plant.

It wants to improve the manufacturing processes, bring in its know-how and start sourcing more material locally, either inside Ethiopia or in the region.

It's taken over another brewery at Bedele farther west, and is building a third close to the capital.

Many foreign companies point to cheap labour and helpful export tariffs as reasons for investing and the country's just been given a grade by the credit rating agencies for the first time.

Industrial parks have popped into view whenever I've travelled out on the arteries away from the capital, Addis Ababa.

Unilever, General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline, H&M, Tesco, Walmart, Samsung - they're all either in Ethiopia or thinking about it.

The Chinese are here too, turning out thousands of shoes daily for example, just south of the capital, for major international brands.

A bottle of Harar beer

For Heineken, one of the motivations is a national market, beyond the grounds of the brewery, which can get a lot bigger - beer consumption in Ethiopia, it says, is only a third of what it is in neighbouring Kenya.

In the interests of research I stop in the brewery's clubhouse and order a beer. The women in the kitchen are amused at my intrusion. It's a public holiday and quiet, although people are moving tables and chairs and I suspect things might get going later on.

There's a healthy-looking trophy cabinet beside my table, filled perhaps with trophies won by the brewery's football team.

It competes in Ethiopia's premier league although it's sitting near the bottom of the table when I visit, with relegation threatening.

Back at the walls of the holy city, people in the market are oblivious to the brewery and to big business. For them the only drug worth trading is khat.

Khat sellers in Harar

Outside my window two formidable-looking women have spread out their bags of khat leaves. A beggar, badly crippled, hauls himself over to them.

Moments ago they were screaming venom at a young man - a drug deal of sorts had gone bad it seems.

Now however they slip some leaves discreetly to the beggar, their way of giving alms, on the edge of the sacred town.

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Islamic Caliphate of barbarism and a strange shift in alliances

New alliances bring old enemies together as Isis advances in Iraq

Iran, the US and even the Shia militias who fought the American invasion are turning uneasily to each other

- Martin Chulov in Baghdad
- The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2014
- Jump to comments (490)
- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/29/iraq-isis-new-alliances-old-enemies-advance

Isis troops purportedly crossing Syria-Iraq border

A photograph from a jihadist news agency claims to show Isis troops and vehicles using a newly created road to cross the Syria-Iraq border. Photograph: Al-Baraka News/AFP/Getty Images

The Syrian air force jets swooped in low over the Iraqi border, dropping two bombs before soaring back to Damascus. The insurgents beneath, caught unawares, were obliterated, but the several thousand more nearby had already got what they wanted – an 800km stretch of border with Iraq that gave them an open passage between both countries.

The attack on Tuesday night was praised by Iraq's embattled leader, Nouri al-Maliki, even if he did dispute which side of the border the Syrians hit and claimed no prior knowledge of it.

In Syria, too, news travelled quickly. There though, and elsewhere, the strike in the desert was seen not as a random act but as a move choreographed with allies – some of whom were not long ago foes – to deter a common threat.

The stunning sweep made by the Isis insurgents through eastern Syria and northern Iraq has rattled the region over the past three weeks, shattering alliances and forging new ones as quickly as Iraq's northern cities have fallen. In its wake, the battle lines for the inevitable showdown with Isis are becoming ever clearer, rewriting the distinction between friend and foe, and even how wars in Iraq are fought.

Having taken Mosul and Tikrit and narrowly been beaten to Kirkuk by the Kurds, Isis is now near striking distance of some of Iraq's most strategic sites. It continues to menace the Baiji oil refinery and the Haditha dam and has encircled Iraq's largest airbase north of Taji. The advances have alarmed a region used to war but one where military threats have long been seen in conventional terms.

The Iraqi army has belatedly begun to fight back, boosted by new recruits from Shia militias. Helicopter gunships struck Tikrit on Saturday as part of what officials are describing as the start of a major offensive, though the extent of the fighting was unclear. What is almost certain is the difficulty the army faces in attempting to dislodge the militants from their newly acquired strongholds.

"A non-state actor that three years ago was a terror group that could wreak havoc in a city was one thing," said a senior Iraqi intelligence official. "But to have the same group now controlling an area from Raqqa in eastern Syria to Mosul in north-western Iraq, then down to Baquba just near Baghdad is a very different threat. It's something we've never dealt with before."

"Old enemies are now sharing intelligence," said a senior Iraqi political figure. "Even the Iranians are seeing some of the CIA work on Da'ash [a name used for Isis]."

On Thursday, the Observer witnessed a large US military cargo plane descending over Abu Ghraib and into Baghdad airport. Also watching was a convoy from the most feared militia in the land, the Iranian-backed Asa'ib ahl al-Haq, whose members sat nonchalantly under the flight path. Earlier that day, the group's leader, Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, had left Baghdad for Najaf, and then to Tehran, after overseeing plans for the defence of the capital.

Suleimani was well-known to the US officials who arrived in Baghdad's green zone earlier in the week for meetings with Maliki. For more than five years, between 2005 and 2011, he had been their chief antagonist in Iraq, with militias he directed responsible, according to Washington, for more than a quarter of all US battle casualties. This time though, the foes paid each other no heed.

The US military might that Suleimani fought so hard to counter will be needed if the battle with Isis is to be won. Iranian muscle in Baghdad will be just as important. So too will be the support of other regional states, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who have no affection for Iran or Iraq and have been at odds with the White House for the last three years.

Syria looms as essential to Iraq from here on, even given the fraught recent history between Baghdad and Damascus. "They are not our friends and we know it," said an Iraqi official linked to Maliki's office. "We had big problems with them in 2009." In the summer of that year, four Iraqi government ministries were blown up with massive truck bombs and Iraq was convinced that the plots were hatched by Syrian officials.

"I went to Turkey to meet with [Syrian General] Ali Mamlouk," said the former head of the intelligence division of Iraq's interior ministry, Major General Hussein Ali Kamal. "I showed them what we had. They could not have been more guilty. Mamlouk kept repeating to me, 'I will not recognise a country that is under American occupation'."

Iraq's enmity was set aside by Syria's civil war, which was framed first by Iran, and then by Iraq, not as a populist revolt but as a fight against jihadists intent on eradicating Shias. Iran is a Shia Islamic regime, while Iraq is ruled by a Shia majority government.

Before Suleimani arrived in Baghdad, he had been based in Damascus, Iraqi and US officials say, shoring up the Syrian capital against attempts by insurgents to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad. All the while, he had used Iraqi airspace to resupply the Syrian military with ammunition. The air route had been condemned by the US, which had demanded that Maliki force down several Iranian planes for inspection.

By late 2012, Isis operatives had become significant players in the war for northern and eastern Syria. Early the following year, the group felt strong enough to assert its supremacy over a rival jihadist organisation, Jabhat al-Nusra. Ever since, it has enforced a merciless interpretation of sharia law over Aleppo and Idlib and in the eastern third of the country, where it had used the city of Raqqa as a power base and a launching pad to push into Iraq.

All of this was while Assad turned his guns on other elements of the Syrian opposition. "We control the oilfields and all the tribal land towards Anbar," a senior Isis operative told the Observer in Antakya earlier this month. "We know they are not going to bomb our key sites. Their main enemy is the so-called moderates."

Raqqa was attacked a week after the conversation. But the main Isis base, a hospital in central Aleppo, remains unmolested by either jets or artillery. TheIsis operative said the absence of air strikes against its forces had enabled it to gather strength and numbers as it pushed towards Mosul. "Now the border is irrelevant," he said. "They are breaking down the state just as they said they would."

And herein lies the impetus for such a strange shift in alliances. "It serves no one's interests," said the senior Iraqi political figure. "Such a catastrophe would weigh everyone down for the next 20 years. Not even the Saudis want that."

The US-Iran detente has roots in attempts to solve the nuclear standoff between the Islamic republic and the west, which will reach another climax in mid-July. But Iraq's crisis is already testing the new-found connection. "There was even talk of an ops centre staffed by US and Iranians," joked one western official. "It won't go that far, but there will be an arms' length understanding."

How to stop Isis is also engaging Saudi Arabia which, despite its loathing of Maliki, is deeply uncomfortable with a jihadist push gaining momentum near its northern border. But Saudi help comes with a condition. "We will do what we have to to save our flank and play a constructive role in the region," a diplomat said. "But Maliki must go first."

Key figures

Nouri al-Maliki Fighting for his political life. Difficult to see how he could become Iraqi PM for a third term with rival sects and blocs strongly against him. Allied to Iran and Syria, civil to the US, estranged from much of the Sunni Arab world.

Barack Obama His hands-off approach to the Middle East is being sorely tested by Iraq, which is a grave test to regional stability and hence to US interests. Would rather the region solves its problems on its own terms, but has little option other than to take a stake in this crisis.

Qassem Suleimani The only non-leader on the list. Very powerful head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Reports directly to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Acts as an overlord in Damascus and Baghdad.

King Abdullah (Saudi Arabia) Loathes Maliki, and feeling is mutual. Strong supporter of the mainstream Syrian opposition. Enemy of Bashar al-Assad. Sees an Iranian hand in most of the region's flashpoints, and sees Syria and Iraq as a proxy of the Persians.

King Abdullah (Jordan) Almost powerless in the face of such regional turmoil, without support from the US and Saudi Arabia. Has tried to quarantine Jordan from the Syrian war, but has allowed the Saudis to run weapons from the south and the US to use his land to train rebel leaders.

Bashar al-Assad Holding on to Syria, with robust help from Iran and Russia, and tacit help from Maliki, who has allowed Iran to resupply his forces through Iraqi airspace. Indebted to both countries, and is going after Isis in co-operation with them.

Colonial powers set the Middle East ablaze

June 29, 2014 1:14 pm

Colonial powers did not set the Middle East ablaze

By Roula Khalaf

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/86c958c2-ff78-11e3-8a35-00144feab7de.html

To blame Sykes-Picot is to ignore the fact of deeply entrenched territorial nationalism in Arab states

When it launched its spectacular offensive through northern Iraq in June, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, bulldozed a berm on the border with Syria. “Smashing Sykes-Picot”, the jihadi group tweeted to its followers. The stunt worked wonders, reigniting the debate over the 1916 secret British-French agreement that carved the Arab territories of a collapsed Ottoman Empire into separate states.

Sykes-Picot is dead, declared some; it is at the root of the present mayhem in the Middle East, said others. As Iraq and Syria teeter on the brink of break-up, zeroing in on the artificial borders defined by the Sykes-Picot accord has a certain appeal. It offers a simple explanation for the extraordinary sectarian mayhem. It also makes the case for partition of the two Arab states less contentious. If people seem bent on killing each other because colonial powers unwisely lumped ethnic and religious communities together artificially, would they not be better off living apart?

Focusing on Sykes-Picot also conveniently obscures more recent foreign meddling, particularly the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which ousted Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime and sparked a sectarian struggle for the state. It suggests that the mistakes in Iraq were not committed a decade ago, but before anyone in the George W Bush administration was born.

Yet, while debating European colonialism might be a worthy exercise, relating today’s events to colonial borders is misleading.

True, the boundaries designed by Mark Sykes, a British diplomat, and François George-Picot of France, who divided up Arab territories into spheres of influence, took more account of European interests in the aftermath of the first world war than those of the populations concerned. The agreement also contradicted British promises made to the Arabs, and ushered in a period of colonialism the legacy of which the region has yet to shake off entirely.

But the Middle East is hardly the only part of the world to have borders defined by colonial powers. Nor have Arab societies been rebelling against the borders designed by the British-French duo.

As Reider Visser, a historian of Iraq, has noted, the Sykes-Picot borders were not as artificial as some think. They corresponded for the most part to administrative arrangements that had been in place under the Ottomans for decades, if not centuries. Syria and Iraq referred to specific geographic entities long before the collapse of the empire. Under the British and French mandates, the main protestation over borders was about the partitioning of Greater Syria into several mini-states, with one part also added on to Lebanon. The separate entities did not survive for long, linking up with Damascus in an independent Syrian state. To blame Sykes-Picot is to ignore the fact that territorial nationalism is deeply entrenched in Arab states today, despite the repeated outbreak of sectarian violence.

Isis’s ambition of creating a transnational Sunni Islamic state is not widely shared. “Islamists calling for an Islamist umma (nation) and who base their argument on a purely religious and communal basis are a minority opinion,” argues Paul Salem, a Lebanese political analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

With the exception of Iraqi Kurds, whose history of persecution has solidified their attachment to ethnic identity over national belonging, few Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians or Lebanese are clamouring for partition.

In the early decades after decolonisation, Arab nationalism that transcended borders was a dominant ideology. But it was undercut by repeated Arab defeats in wars with Israel. As Toby Dodge, author of Iraq: From War to New Authoritarianism, says, “the disillusionment with Arab nationalism, combined with the oil boom, led to states being deeply committed to territorial nationalism”.

Consider Lebanon’s experience during the 1975-90 civil war. Partition was raised repeatedly as a solution, yet the conflict ended with a new power-sharing arrangement that maintained the country’s territorial integrity. In the last years of the war, much of the violence was between rival groups within each of the main communities (Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslims.)

The Sunni in Iraq and Syria could well end up in separate enclaves, at least for a time. But their rebellion is not aimed at secession. The battles they are waging – some peacefully, others violently – are not for territory but control of the state.

To emphasise Sykes-Picot in the Middle East’s current predicament, is to miss the region’s real problem: the tragic failure of successive postcolonial governments to build inclusive states that would reinforce a national identity. It is the tyranny of Syria’s ruling Assad clan, the dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the ineptitude of Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, that have driven the Middle East to catastrophe, rather than century-old lines drawn in the sand.

roula.khalaf@ft.com

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Nigeria have an image problem

26 June 2014 Last updated at 02:22

Does Nigeria have an image problem?

By Adaobi Tricia NwaubaniAbuja

Lagos carnival participants - Nigeria, 2012

Some years ago, a British filmmaker discovered an exotic site in Nigeria: An entire community of human beings subsisting on mountains of refuse.

And not in some remote state, but in Lagos, the country's commercial nerve centre - a city of fast cars, luxury shops and sleek folk, with women in Brazilian hair weaves and men in Ferragamo shoes.

Shortly after the Welcome to Lagos series aired on the BBC in April 2010, Nigerians around the world went berserk.

"There was this colonialist idea of the noble savage which motivated the programme," Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said of the documentary.

"It was patronising and condescending," he added.

“Start Quote

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

The Nigerian just has to kick up a tornado whenever he is perceived unpalatably”

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Nigeria's High Commissioner to the UK Dalhatu Tafida described it as "a calculated attempt to bring Nigeria and its hard-working people to international odium and scorn".

Online forums also went ablaze. "They are giving us a bad image," many Nigerians fumed.

Then the Lagos State government submitted a formal complaint to the BBC, calling on the organisation to commission an alternative series to "repair the damage we believe this series has caused to our image".

These patriots were not distressed that their compatriots in the oil giant of Africa were living in such squalor - that development had somehow eluded those Nigerians.

They did not rally with cries of: "There are people in our country living like this? What shall we do? How fast can we act?"

No, no, no.

The majority of voices were harmonised in one tune: Anxiety over their country's image.

Nigeria in a word

BBC Africa asked people to describe Nigeria in one word using the hashtag #onewordnigeria. This is a word cloud of the responses:

Graphic word cloud showing short descriptions of Nigeria

Similarly, Nigeria was reluctant to accept desperately needed foreign assistance to fight terrorism, despite the country's armed forces being clearly overwhelmed.

We were more worried about how requesting help might affect Nigeria's image than about forestalling the wanton destruction by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

In October 1960, Nigeria was loosed from the shackles of imperialism when the colonialists packed their bags and left.

Africa Debate banner

Tune in to the BBC World Service at 1200 GMT on Friday 27 June to listen to The Africa Debate:Is Nigeria ready to lead Africa? It will also be rebroadcast that day in Africa at 1900 GMT.

To take part on Twitter - use the hashtag #BBCAfricaDebate - Facebook or Google+

Is Nigeria ready to lead Africa?

But over five decades later, Nigerians remain in captivity: Foreigners control our self-image.

What the West thinks of us often takes manic precedence over who we really are, what we know and feel about ourselves.

The Europeans who first landed in Africa were unconcerned when the people they regarded as monkeys equally assumed that the white interlopers were ghosts.

The Germans can shrug it off when they are stereotyped as humourless; the Russians can dismiss it when they are described as cold.

But the Nigerian just has to kick up a tornado whenever he is perceived unpalatably.

He is touchy because he has no alternative image on which to base his confidence.

Like many Africans in the diaspora, a number of Nigerians abroad have erected careers out of defending their people's image.

With indignant frowns and stern tones, they strut from one global stage to the other like superintendents, dismantling stereotypes and whitewashing sepulchres.

A woman having her hair done at a hair salon in Lagos Island, Lagos, Nigeria - April 2014

Lagos is home to a burgeoning middle class....

Children playing in the Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria (Archive shot)

It also has many poor suburbs to accommodate the rapidly expanding population of the city

This passion probably sprouts from a desire to blend into their host communities, to not be perceived as savages from some nihilistic jungle.

Unknowingly, they reinforce the subconscious message that has been passed down to generations of Nigerians and other Africans: That the West's opinion of us is paramount; that enlightening and convincing foreigners matters more than discerning who we are and who we want to be.

Fret and panic

And so, when the West claps for us, we get excited.

When they tell us off, we get upset.

When they applaud one of us, we automatically join in applauding the person.

We frantically monitor foreign opinions and we panic at the slightest hint of a negative perception of us.

Nigerian reading newspaper headlines in Delta State - April 2011

Nigerians are anxious about how they are portrayed in the international media

We fret about the many uncomplimentary stories from our land making the rounds on international media circuits, more than about the actual negative circumstances that birth those narratives.

From politicians to intellectuals to entertainers to terrorists, Nigerians have been socialised to rate themselves in the light of Western perceptions.

And as some of us have discovered first hand, the most effective way to draw the attention of our own people to any issue, is to speak to them through a Western medium.

It is unhealthy for a people's self-image to be hinged almost entirely on outside forces.

Nigeria expends too much valuable energy on sweeping dirt under carpets and stuffing skeletons inside closets.

Consequently, we deny ourselves the opportunity of frank dialogue, cultural criticism and self-examination—processes that are vital for a society to advance, by which the imperious West itself has developed thus far.

Nigeria can lead the rest of Africa in freeing our people from this image bondage.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a writer and the author of I Do Not Come to You by Chance.

The Africa Debate - Is Nigeria ready to lead Africa?- will be broadcast on the BBC World Service at 12:00 GMT on Friday 27 June and again at 19:00 GMT in Africa - and will be available to listen to online or as a download.

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