Gérard Prunier

The Catholic Church and the Kivu Conflict

This paper examines the role of the Catholic Church in the armed conflict that has engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 1993. The conflict itself has two dimensions. Since 1996 the DRC has been at the centre of a major war that has spilled well beyond its borders, embroiling neighbouring states and others further afield. Less well known is the local struggle, in the eastern part of the country in the two provinces of North and South Kivu, which began three years earlier. While having a dynamic of its own, Kivus fate has become entwined in the wider international conflict. Given its large constituency and immense wealth and infrastructure, the Catholic Church has come to wield enormous influence in the DRC, particularly in the context of a declining state. It was a key player in the movement for democratisation in the early 1990s and more recently it has sought to offer moral guidance on the conflict. But its attempts to adopt a superior moral outlook have been severely tested by the fact that its clergy are now thoroughly zairianised, and have come to embody the ethnic and political prejudices of their respective communities.

Darfur: Genocidal Theory and Practical Atrocities

This article begins by addressing the limitations imposed on contemporary genocidal situations by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, described as a “historically circumscribed” text. The author then discusses the inability of the international community to confront the atrocities in Darfur and analyzes if and how these atrocities could be stopped.

British Somaliland: An Administrative History, 1920–1960 by Brock Millman

The modern media image of Somalia is very simple: a terrible place with no government at all where people kill each other for obscure reasons vaguely linked with the rise of radical Islam. A specialized literature has developed on the subject, and, even if this image is exaggerated, it does have a strong element of truth. But then, at the same time, in an unrecognized “state” in the north, issuing from a former British colony, lies a country similarly populated by Somali, similarly Muslim, belonging to the same Islamic turuq (brotherhoods), speaking the same language, and sharing the same culture: Somaliland. And yet Somaliland, the internationally unrecognized smaller brother of the more violent southern country, is probably the most peaceful nation in Africa, with streets so safe at night that one might be in Geneva. “Reborn” on May 18, 1991, Somaliland did not share the colonial fate of its southern twin but was a British protectorate. There are, of course, a variety of reasons beyond divergent colonial histories for the enormous difference in political climate between north and south, but it has long been my suspicion—not shared by every Somalia specialist—that colonial history has a lot to do with it. However, until recently, we lacked a global and comprehensive history of the British Somaliland Protectorate. There were many books on the so-called “Mad Mullah,” Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, who fought both the Ethiopians and the British in the territory between 1899 and his death from the Spanish flu in 1920. But this was proto-colonial, with the British spending all their time fighting and not administering. And after

The 1943 Woyane Revolt: A Modern Reassessment

The conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea (1998–2000) as well as the ongoing tensions between the two states is, at a certain level, an intra-Tigrean struggle. In order to understand this dynamic, it is necessary to go back to the 1943 Woyane revolt and its subsequent impact on Tigrean consciousness.