TONY COX, host:
This is News & Notes. I'm Tony Cox. Time now for our Africa Update. This week, Islamist insurgents seized the seat of Somalia's parliament. Plus, Rwanda arrests a Congolese rebel leader and Zimbabwe's opposition party is critical of the latest power-sharing deal. With us, Bill Fletcher, he is a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and former president of TransAfrica Forum. Hello, Bill.
Mr. BILL FLETCHER (Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy Studies; Former President, TransAfrica Forum): Hey. How are you?
COX: I'm fine, thank you very much. Let's start in the Horn of Africa, Bill, if we can, where a suicide car bomb killed more than a dozen people in Somalia's capital city of Mogadishu this weekend. And today, just today, a hard-line Islamist group seized the seat of the Somali parliament. Now, Al Shabab is on Washington's terror group list, that is, and leaders say that it will establish Sharia law in the city. So what is happening in Somalia right now?
Mr. FLETCHER: Well, the situation, you know, goes from bad to worse. And basically what has happened is that the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that happened a couple of years ago, allegedly to squelch the Union of Islamic Courts which was running the country, turned into the complete failure that most people predicted that it would. And what ended up happening instead was that there was a resistance movement, or an insurgency, that made it impossible for the Ethiopians to stay. The Transitional National Government of Somalia, which was being supported by the Ethiopians, never had a great deal of credibility, and it's basically just been unraveling. So now what we have is this ironic situation of the return of a faction from the Union of Islamic Courts, but it's a harder-line faction. And I guess the other thing I would just say is that even though al-Shabab is on the U.S. terrorist list, there's no clear evidence that this is a group that is tied to international terrorism, as opposed to being a domestic military organization in Somalia.
COX: Let's talk about the - of the humanitarian side of the crisis in Somalia, because there are reports of a hidden genocide there. Is that true, it's still going on?
Mr. FLETCHER: The humanitarian situation in Somalia is horrible, gets very little international attention. You've had a massive exodus of people from Mogadishu and from the country itself, because there really is no rule of law in Somalia. And what has further compounded the problem is that the resistance to the Ethiopian invaders and the Transitional National Government itself split. So they've been fighting one another, and have been carrying out incredible numbers of attacks on civilian personnel. So youth are attacked, women are attacked. If you happened to be in an area, it's open season, so it's - the situation is absolutely horrible.
And although the African Union has been attempting to work to resolve the situation, the difficulty is that there an insufficient number of AU troops on the ground. And they have been so far unsuccessful in getting all the parties to sit down to consider an opportunity, or - for the future. And I think part of that is that some of the Islamic factions think, why should they sit down? They are on the verge on winning.
COX: Let's move on to another topic. Last week, Congo rebel leader Laurent Nkunda was captured in neighboring Rwanda by a joint Rwanda and Congolese military force. My question is actually what his status is, because there are reports that he is not arrested, but is being held, not in jail, but some place presumably much nicer. What is his relationship with the Rwandan government, and are they going to send him back to the DRC?
Mr. FLETCHER: Well, this is a really interesting mystery, and I'm hoping that somebody writes about it, because you couldn't come up with this, you know, the best fiction writer. Laurent Nkunda is the head of a Tutsi militia in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He allied with the Rwandans, the Rwandan government, and basically took the position that his militia was protecting the ethnic Tutsis against attacks that they were suffering from ethnic Hutus, who were living in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. And the Hutus are refugees from Rwanda who left after the genocide which were carried out by Hutus against the Tutsis, and they've been living there in exile.
So Nkunda basically took the position that he was a champion of the Tutsis. Problem is that his activities, particularly his most recent military activities, created complete chaos in the eastern part of the DRC, and there were many allegations against him regarding human rights abuses. Then, in the middle of this, as you said, Rwanda announced that they had arrested him. And my guess is that what's happening is that Rwanda and the DRC have cut a deal that basically includes the cessation of Rwandan support for the Tutsi militias and the agreement for joint military operations against the Hutus. And that under those circumstances, the Rwandans will hold on to Nkunda at least as long as the deal lasts. That's my guess.
COX: So does that mean, then, that Nkunda's rebel army is no longer? It's not clear whether those guys - what happened to them?
Mr. FLETCHER: That's precisely right. It's very unclear what happened. What the press is indicating is that Rwanda and the DRC are engaged, or have agreed to engage in joint military operations against the Hutus. That may mean that Nkunda's troops get brought into the picture to fight alongside, or maybe they simply are demobilized. But at this point, no one is saying very clearly, and I think that that's purposeful, that is that no one is saying.
COX: All right. Briefly let's go in to Zimbabwe to talk about the latest there in terms of the crisis involving Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF party. What's the latest?
Mr. FLETCHER: The latest is that there have been continued talks. The Southern African Development Community, which is a regional organization in Southern Africa, primarily for economic development, has been attempting to guarantee some sort of peaceful transfer. But Mugabe and his clique had been very, very resistant to any degree of compromise. And the SADC has been pushing for, you know, a peaceful transition, for the establishing of some sort of internationally-supervised elections, things along those lines.
But President Mugabe seems to continue to hold out, and my guess is that until and unless the countries that make up to Southern African Development Community say, we will no longer cooperate with President Mugabe in any way, until that happens, I think that Mugabe's clique is going to continue to play a game.
COX: Well, it looks as if there's no telling how long that might continue. Bill Fletcher, thank you very much.
Mr. FLETCHER: My pleasure as always.
COX: Bill Fletcher is a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, and a former president of the TransAfrica Forum. He is the co-author of "Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path towards Social Justice." He joined us from our headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.