Due South: Liam Karr Returns!

Ladies and gentlemen good morning good evening good afternoon whenever and wherever you're listening to us from this is the deal south podcast with me your host boyfriend minor and today we're joined by our first time ever two-time guest liam kirk as promised we're we're doing a dual recording after realizing that idiom and i have so much to talk about we

Needed more than one episode to cover it all and liam say hi to the people thanks again for having me happy to be the first two timer and excited to keep the conversation going awesome so we were supposed to do this last week but a slight scheduling clash meant we didn't get to do it so in the time that in the time since we've spoken there's been a lot of

Developments first things first liam is the national supporter i am a chelsea supporter liam's team lost in the champions league which means chelsea is still the only random team of the champions league trophy second we're recording this on the 9th of june the knicks just beat the spars at madison square garden and the series is now 2-1 neither liam and i

Are major supporters of either the knicks or the spars but for this one we're just bandwagon knicks supporters so we hope the knicks wins it so that's what's happening on the sports side on the less depressing real world side but back to the geopolitical side back to the world of violence that liam and i cover there has been a lot of changes the biggest one

Is probably what is happening in iran where on one hand we keep hearing that a deal is close trump is so close to getting a deal we're 95 percent of the way there but then we get to hear about the five percent and it's the main things it's the straight over most it's the nuclear questions it's those kinds of things that iran considers existential to its

Existence and is well the best of our knowledge from what you know we're seeing publicly has been very publicly adamant that it won't give it up at any cost so those are the kinds of questions that iran will have to deal with that president trump rather will have to deal with in the coming weeks and months how does he find an exit ramp to this war when both

Iran and israel are escalating or striking each other israel was striking lebanon iran in an effort to protect its hezbollah ally or striking israel so it is just an entire compromise so that's the one of the biggest geopolitical updates but this is dear self this is not the middle east roundtable if you want to hear our analysis of what's happening in the

Middle east we have an entirely different podcast that comes was that.

So Liam, what has changed in your world in the past week since you spoke? Yeah, I think one of the big things we've been looking at were the elections in Ethiopia.

So those those happened. We haven't officially heard the results yet. The widespread assumption is that Abiy Ahmed's prosperity party is going to win those pretty handily.

Other than that, things in West Africa have quieted down a little bit since, you know, everything we were seeing in late April, obviously. But the DRC continues to churn along the conflict there. The Ebola outbreak has also complicated things, which was a thing last time we spoke.

But it's very much a will get worse before it gets better kind of situation there. As far as the security dynamics there as well. There were some new U.S. sanctions, I think, in the last couple of weeks.

But the fighting hasn't particularly slowed down too much. I know we were talking about the offensive around the Rubaiya line last time we spoke. And it seems like that has calmed down.

But now there's new, you know, buildups going on and, you know, low level fighting still still continuing. So that's kind of the main things on my radar.

I guess I'd be remiss also not to mention that Somalia is in a bit of a political crisis right now that's turned a little bit violent with shooting in the streets of Mogadishu between, you know, rival political forces, notably not the Al-Shabaab group.

So Somali government linked forces. So, you know, there's certainly no shortage of things going on to talk about. That's the benefit of working in a field as insane as ours is.

There's always something going on. There's always something to talk about. So let's start with the very first thing you've mentioned.

The elections in Ethiopia. Last time you and I were here, we were very heavily focused on Ethiopia's situation in relation to the war in Sudan.

How that it was, it was a factor in those war, given its allegiance to the UAE and the presence of other self-fighters within Ethiopia and whether that could, you know, boil over into a broader conflict between the SAF and the Ethiopian armed forces.

So today, let's take a minute to look at Ethiopia internally. There's a multitude of conflicts. My colleague Evan is writing a video which should go out.

Give me a second. The video on Ethiopia will go out at some point this week, I believe. Couldn't be sure.

But you know what? I'm not sure. I don't have the schedule right in front of me.

But we have a video on the situation in Ethiopia coming out soon. Liam and Evan are going to be talking about it. But that's a whole other thing.

Liam, take us to the situation in Ethiopia, the internal situation, the armed groups fighting. There's obviously the f**k. Pano, the Tigray, and how all of this relates to Ethiopia's situation with Eritrea, and what Abi Ahmed's re-election means, you know, with him having a new mandate for the conflicts that are raging in that country.

Yeah, certainly.

So to give everybody an idea of what the situation in Ethiopia looks like, you, well, I think it's worth starting off with that Ethiopia, since the overthrow of the Derg regime towards the, well, really at the end of the Cold War after the Ethiopian Civil War, which ended in 1991, the new ruling party, which was then basically Tigrayan-led, instituted an

Ethnic federal system, so regions were organized based on ethnicity primarily, and then those different ethnically-based regions were ostensibly given a higher degree of autonomy to, you know, govern themselves to an extent, protect their own languages, cultures, customs, etc., stuff like that.

And one of the criticisms of Abi, since he came into power in 2018, which replaced really the Tigrayan dominance of the government or of the ruling party, is that Abi has been trying to centralize power and kind of shift away from that ethnic federal system.

And so what this has led to is a lot of backlash from armed ethnic groups that feel marginalized or left out. So you obviously had the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which, you know, that led to the whole Tigray War.

The TPLF was part of that ruling party, was a main player in the Ethiopian Civil War, had really underpinned the ruling government for, you know, the better part of nearly three decades before Abi came into power.

But then Abi's efforts to sideline them, marginalize them, you know, move away from the ethnic federal system that the TPLF backed led to the Tigray War. After the end of the Tigray War, we also saw moves from Abi to centralized power in other regions.

So, for example, he tried to disband the Amhara regional forces, bring them into kind of the national government forces.

And that sparked the Fano rebellion that you mentioned, which is a loose collection of Amhara militia who are rebelling against the government, again, due to this kind of central federal tensions. And other areas that the TPLF and Fano are the are the two kind of main. or largest, most capable groups. But you also do have the Oromo Liberation Army.

There's also groups in the Agadan region, which is the ethnically Somali region. And there's even armed groups operating in like Beneshongol, Gamuz, various other regions of Ethiopia. And a lot of this is more ethnically based violence.

And so getting to the elections question and how this intersects with regional things, Ethiopia is such a big country. You know, kind of much like Africa, the talk with Ethiopia has always been about Ethiopia's potential, what it could be. And it still does play a very large role in Horn.

But for that reason, domestic issues become regional quite quickly. So the elections, one of the criticisms of them, aside from, you know, there were definitely issues with, certain opposition not being allowed to run, other opposition groups being co-opted, crackdowns on press freedoms. So there's those issues as far as it being free and fair.

But you also had the entirety of the Tigray region was not able to participate because the TPLF has effectively retaken control of the regional government there. And there's a standoff on going, even with military forces mobilized on both sides of the border, both federal and Tigrayan. And there's a standoff going on there.

So the Tigray region is effectively outside of federal control. So the government was not able to hold elections there. In the Amhara region, there were also a lot of Fano attacks targeting election sites and Fano warning people against voting.

So in the predominantly rural areas where Fano either controls the territory and even some more urban areas where Fano is able to project pressure, there were also issues with voting centers being closed.

And then a similar story in the Aromia region as well, although to a much smaller extent, because the OLA, the Aromia Liberation Army, is not quite as strong as Fano. So domestically, there are some issues with the legitimacy of the elections there.

But what we're expected to see is, you know, Abhi get a big victory, which he will then claim is a mandate to pursue his broader kind of prosperity agenda is what him and his government advisors call it, which, again, kind of follows along some of the things that I've been mentioning with, you know, pursuing the prosperity for Ethiopia and positioning

Ethiopia to help the entire horn achieve prosperity is how that's framed.

What Abhi thinks he needs to do to achieve that is centralized power within Ethiopia so that... You know, the full power of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian government can be directed toward pursuing those goals.

So what that means is continuing to pursue the centralization of power, continuing to go after violently if needed these rebellious groups such as TPLF, such as Fano, without, you know, making compromises, pursuing kind of peaceful mediation tracks.

And then even looking regionally, and this is where we can get into how does it intersect with other regional issues. There are kind of two regional hotspots that also fit within the prosperity agenda.

One is Ethiopia's use of the Nile River. So you have the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, other potential dams on the Nile, which is a huge part of Ethiopia's plans to electrify the country, build up the energy needed for energy intensive industries such as mining, other things that can attract a lot of investment and help develop the economy as well.

That is a big issue for downstream Nile countries, most notably Egypt, Sudan, to a lesser extent.

But the SAF-backed government is against the GERD currently. And so that's a big issue with Egypt. And then another thing is Ethiopian sea access.

This is another thing that Abiy and his advisors describe as an existential issue for Ethiopia to develop and reach its potential.

Ethiopia needs sea access so that it can, you know, control its trade flows, be connected with the world, etc., etc. And Abiy and his advisors have identified that the Eritrean port of Assab would be the preferable point for that, both because of historical ties with Eritrea having been a part of Ethiopia until 1993, also because Assab is so close to

Ethiopia.

There's already some infrastructure there back when Ethiopia and Eritrea were working more closely for a few years, probably back like 2018 to 2022.

So they list several reasons why Assab is the is the is the preferable point. Eritrea doesn't take particularly kindly to that. They see that as an existential threat to their sovereignty, both because they're worried that Ethiopia could annex it, but also the Eritrean regime is a very, very closed system.

And so by opening the border with Ethiopia, allowing trade flows to go through, there would be a real risk of people, you know, basically fleeing or migrating out of Eritrea or unrest because people go to certain parts of Ethiopia, see, you know, the development levels, stuff like that. And that reflects poorly on the Eritrean regime and Eritrean government.

And I think that's an important distinction to note.

As well as that, it's not just that Eritrea worries about Ethiopia annexing something because Ethiopian officials will say, you know, we want to strike a deal with Eritrea to use this port. And I think it's just important to note that Eritrea is not interested in any kind of deal.

And so to wrap this up where all of this kind of intersects together is that Eritrea to, you know, basically create a buffer zone to create more leverage and put itself more on par with Ethiopia has aligned itself with the various different rebel groups, most notably the TPLF, which is very interesting because during the Tigray war, Eritrea was actually

Fighting with the Ethiopian government against the TPLF.

Because like I mentioned, the TPLF used to be the main ruling party. So there was some longstanding beef there and Tigray and Eritrea border.

But now that has changed and Eritrea is working with the TPLF again to create kind of a buffer against Ethiopia, but also to keep Ethiopia fragmented because obviously Ethiopia is much bigger than Eritrea, much more developed, larger army.

So in a full one on one fight, it would be, you know, Eritrea, we're not going to get into a war gaming that out, but it would certainly be a tough fight. But also even supporting and, you know, using links with Fano and then even kind of getting into the Sudan angles here.

Eritrea has been backing the SAF as well, kind of is another way to cultivate kind of influence on the Ethiopian border, prop up another ostensibly kind of anti-Ethiopia ally because of the whole GERD issue.

The SAF and TPLF have ties dating back to the Tigray war and other things.

So from Adis, and there is some loose evidence of this also, there is a concern as well that Eritrea could be at the very least kind of loosely supporting a kind of broader coalition against Ethiopia that includes, you know, the TPLF, includes Fano, includes Eritrea, includes the SAF as well.

And then, you know, putting the final bow on top of things, it is worth noting that, you know, SAF and Eritrea are also partners with Egypt as well.

Egypt is trying to, you know, push back on Ethiopia and the dams on Nile, trying to make sure that Ethiopia doesn't get sea access there.

So there's a very real possibility as well that, you know, if conflict were to break out, Ethiopian arms that are going to the SAF, going to Eritrea through like legitimate, you know, partnerships with those respective governments could then end up in... the hands of some Ethiopian rebel groups that are working more closely with Eritrea, with the SAF.

So that was kind of a long rambling answer, but hopefully that made sense how everything kind of ends up tying together.

It made a lot of sense because we had come to basically the same conclusions that you have. And I just want to say it feels really, really good when our conclusions match your conclusions. So this was about a couple of months back.

We had a video on the Warfronts channel titled, Is Ethiopia at War Again? where we basically looked at the situation just as you have with TPLF, with the FANU, and the overarching antagonist being Eritrea, just that partnership between, excuse me, Eritrea and the local insurgents within Ethiopia.

So to give our listeners an idea of just how tense the situation is on the ground, I'll quote from a piece written in the New Humanitarian called, I Don't Want to Fight in Another Tigre War.

The author of the piece is someone who had fought in the previous Tigre War, is someone who is exhausted of fighting in war, is someone who's desperate to see peace in the region, is someone who more than anything else just wants for Ethiopia to be at peace, for his people to enjoy the benefits of peace.

Kids going to school, businesses starting, opportunities flowing, money in people's hands. And that's the thing that people in peaceful countries take for granted. We have all these perks because our countries are at peace.

You look at a country like Ukraine, where millions have had to free their homes and are now refugees. In countries that are, well, initially are supportive of the Ethiopian cause, sorry, for the Ethiopian cause, the Ukrainian cause, there's also a big strain on the, what are these facilities called?

My brain, on the social facilities, my brain just kind of second of blanking out.

There's a big strain on social facilities and it's affecting the local communities. And there's a big pushback against Ukrainian refugees, something I never thought I'd see when the war began.

So just to quote from the piece in the New Humanitarian, these days, everything reminds me of 2020, of the days and weeks leading up to the last war, the elders and religious leaders going back and forth between Addis Ababa and Mekele, which is the capital of the Tigris region, for negotiations, the tension, insecurity and confusion and the military

Preparations.

It feels like we are heading to war. So the people on the ground do genuinely feel like the situation is about to boil over. And again, it's a bad, bad situation all around.

So Liam, the last time we were here, one thing we mentioned was fuel. One thing that is keeping Ababa from launching into a full-fledged assault or any of these areas is just the fact that they can't afford to fuel their military vehicles, neither can they afford to fuel their civilian vehicles.

There's been a massive... fuel shortage in the region and here with the war in iran continuing as it has as long as it has and it's escalating just over the weekend and you at the moment tension seems seem to have come down but how likely how long do you think it will take for ethiopia to fix its oil situation its fuel situation and what do you see happening

Next that's such a good question i'm honestly not sure if i have a real good answer as to how long it'll take to fix the fuel situation just because there's so many variables that can go into that the iran war like you mentioned and then how long it takes to get the supply chains back in order it depends on if fuel remains at an elevated cost either due to

Whatever arrangement is worked out in hormuz or like lack thereof so it's really hard to know exactly when and i'll also note as well that i tend to be more pessimistic about the likelihood of war resuming in tigre or even you know looking more medium to long term the prospects for another eritrea ethiopia war but it is important to note that you know i've

Talked with a lot of other experts as well and there is a lot of reasons that this could not happen less because the ethiopian government or the tigrean government or the eritrean government don't explicitly want to but just because the conditions might not be right abi might want to go into tigre but the conditions might never be right for it and he's and

He's not going to you know blindly pursue something or even you know same goes with asab stuff like that so just given how fractured ethiopia is internally i think that one of the things to be on the lookout for as well as that for conditions to really be right to go after tigre and especially if ethiopia had any broader designs for eritrean territory one of

The things that i think we would see would be some kind of either effort to really crack down on fano or an effort to reach some kind of peace deal with them but basically some effort to sideline fano so that the government isn't fighting on several fronts and can kind of close that down and maybe even gain some allies out of it given that amhara forces were

Actually quite quite a big part of the government coalition that fought the tplf in the first tigre war so i think that's something that we would see and then as well i do think it's something that tigre less so but looking at eritrea in particular again just the role of those external actors especially when we're talking about fuel if you know the uae gives

That green light or is able to provide that green light or is able to provide that green light or is able to provide that green light or is able to provide any backing if the UAE is in a more stable spot.

And that includes them getting into stuff like Sudan. How stable is the situation there? If the situation in Sudan is stable, is there going to be a ton of political eyes and focus on the horn that would dissuade the UAE or Ethiopia from doing anything too crazy?

So I think that looking at how the UAE is analyzing things as well will be an important thing to note. And a lot of this sounds like I'm putting the onus on the Ethiopian government, which I do think is true, but that's not to say that it's entirely at fault or that it's the only kind of instigator here.

Like we talked about, the Ethiopian government has claimed, and there's pretty good evidence to support that Eritrea is violating its sovereignty by sending weapons to these armed groups with Eritrean forces still on Ethiopian territory years after the Tigray War ended, so on and so forth.

The TPLF is definitely, you know, both the federal government and the TPLF have violated various aspects of the Pretoria peace deal that ended the Tigray War. The TPLF is now pushing its luck because the federal government doesn't have fuel, because the federal government had elections coming up.

It's definitely kind of taking advantage of other things going on to really kind of, you know, thumb its nose, if you will, at the federal government and, you know, putting its own TPLF-backed government and officials into power.

So, you know, that's kind of inviting a response from the Ethiopian federal government.

I think that the Ethiopian federal government is the main kind of driver of a lot of things related to here and other things going on in the Horn, such as like, you know, GERD, Nile Dam, such as, you know, Ethiopian Red Sea Access is obviously a Ethiopian government initiative.

So it is in the driver's seat on a lot of things and is the kind of driving force.

But that's not to say that, you know, other regional actors are, you know, totally innocent or, and even innocent might not be the right word to use, but that they don't have any agency or that they're not kind of instigating or pursuing their own kinds of aims as well.

So it's basically just a volatile situation that over the coming weeks and months, we have to watch. It's, there's no easy answer, basically.

That's what you're saying. Unfortunately, yes. I do think now that elections are over, it will be important to watch what kind of rhetoric we see.

And, you know, we'll be keeping an eye out on all kinds of military buildups or, you know, weapon shipments or anything like that we, that we see.

But yeah, definitely something. watch and it's not you know totally clear especially in the short term you know the next six months what way things are exactly going to go all right so let's move on from Ethiopia I don't want us to focus way too much on one conflicts at the at the detriment of other regions let's move away to Somalia it's it has been an

Absolute absolute mess so just to give our audience a bit of background and then I'll pass it on to Liam the entire mess centers on President Hassan Sheikh Mohammed his original four-year term was set to expire on the 15th of May of 15th of May this year that's about two three four weeks back but the government said you know constitutional changes passed by

Parliament allowed the mandate to run until May 2027 which you know will give him an extra year in office and yeah the opposition did not did not like that Liam tell us what's happening in Somalia sorry I have myself muted there my bad but I think that the situation in Somalia there are some parallels we can draw from very loosely from the Ethiopia example

That I just talked about where this is another case of kind of central federal issues Somalia's and this Somalia is still working under a provisional constitution which is another you know one of the reasons that this is a little bit messy but the provisional constitution set out a federal system within Somalia in Somalia one ethnic group there so instead of

Breaking down the regions and society more broadly in Somalia instead of being broken down by ethnicity it's broken down by clan and sub-clan so on so forth if you're not familiar with this it is sometimes just easier to think about it loosely like ethnic groups for just as far as how like it works as an organizing system and pursuing like political power

And resources and so on so forth but basically the different regions are you know mostly affiliated with different clans and then you know even certain districts then are organized by you know a certain sub-clan is probably dominant in a certain district so on and so forth and this latest political dispute is really not anything new we actually saw something

Very similar happen during the last election cycle when the current president was an opposition figure and one of the leading opposition figures now was the president and they're both doing the opposite thing of what they were doing back then and accusing each other of and so this is a pretty predictable cycle that seems to happen every Somali election

Season but the president is trying to implement one the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is

Trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same

Thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president is trying to do the same thing as the president

Is trying to do the same thing as the one vote elections across the entire country.

This sounds good in theory, but Somalia's political system, another part of that is that it's based on kind of a indirect voting system.

And there's also a kind of clan based quota to ensure that every clan gets a certain number of seats and basically is ensured a say in who becomes president, who becomes prime minister. So it basically encourages power sharing, compromise, those kinds of things.

A shift to one person, one vote would basically shift things a lot more towards the largest clan wins, etc., etc. So this is drawing a lot of pushback from the opposition and even some sub-clan groupings within the president's own larger clan.

And so what we've seen is certain Somali federal member states totally breaking ties with the central government. These are the kind of the strongest, I would say, and more peripheral federal federal member states. So you have Jubaland, which is the southernmost state on the border with Ethiopia and Kenya.

Then you have Putland state, which is all the way up north and borders. Somaliland, there's a whole new thing we could get into with kind of a strip of land between Somaliland and Putland that's kind of becoming its own literal little state area. And so, yeah, you have Putland up there, which is on the Gulf of Aden coast.

Both of them have cut ties with the federal government.

Then you have opposition members within kind of the other areas that are trying to rally protests, saying that they're not going to recognize any extension of the president's mandate past his original term, which again was extended to so that one person, one vote elections could be organized extra time to set those up.

And so what we've seen the president do is start to, one, crack down on any federal member state presidents who are not fully in check with him.

He's tried to install loyalists, basically. And this is even in federal member states that are not fully breaking ties from Mogadishu. So late, I believe it was in late 2024, there was fighting between Jubaland forces and federal forces.

That did not go well for the federal forces. So currently the president is not, you know, Jubaland and Putland or there's stuff going on, but they're not the main focus right now. But in May, I believe he overthrew basically the Southwest state president because he wanted to replace him.

Basically the president wasn't really having it. So then did it by, by force. And then even in parts of Galmadug now, it seems like the Somali president has backed his own guy to take over the state presidency there.

The current president does not like that. So, again, we're seeing kind of tensions building up there. And then in Mogadishu, where we saw the clashes actually break out, the opposition forces were going to organize a big protest, a big rally against everything going on.

And federal forces basically moved in to contain that, prevent those from happening, and that turned violent. So that's kind of where things stand currently. As I mentioned, this is another case of it'll probably get worse before it gets better.

There have been international mediation efforts, but there hasn't really been neither side is really backing down in past elections. It basically has taken either a lot of outside pressure to really force the government's hand or some significant fighting that tips the balance of power and then leaves room for compromise and negotiation.

So that's kind of where we stand as stuff is still at a little bit of a deadlock as far as the whole election standoff goes.

And that deadlock is having a real, real impact on civilians. One thing I try to do in my coverage is show just how much all of this political maneuvering, all of these geopolitical happenings affect the average person on the ground. Al Jazeera has a very interesting piece, Why Mogadishu Clashes Are Deepening Somalia's Political Crisis Again.

And it begins with a civilian's perspective. Just allow me to read it briefly. Mustafa, 33, dreads election time in Somalia.

He drives a bajaj, a three-wheeled taxi. If you've been to India, they're the three-wheeled tuk-tuks that are very common. Basically, not just in India, all of Southeast Asia.

He drives a bajaj, a three-wheeled taxi, and says that when tensions rise, as they always do when pools are near, the whole city feels it. And drivers like him are among the first. On Wednesday, he was passing through Harl-Wadag district when heavy gunfire between government and opposition forces erupted all around him.

I couldn't even think. Everyone was shouting and running for their lives. And we all fled from the bullets.

He told Al Jazeera, We haven't seen fighting this bad in years.

The shooting that began that afternoon around the homes of former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Qaira and later former President Shaif Sharif Sheikh Ahmed came as opposition figures were planning to organize protests against what they described as an illegal term extension by incumbent President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.

So it's a very volatile situation in Somalia right now, just as Liam has wonderfully explained.

And part of that just comes from that attempt to implement one person, one vote, which is supposed to be the gold standard. of democracies in every single part of the world.

But that raises a very interesting question, Liam, that I've been dying to pose to you ever since, you know, this crisis erupted and I figured you and I were going to be on the phone together, we're going to record a podcast together. This is something I've been thinking about.

Whenever Western democracies, whenever Western powers are trying to intervene in Africa, are trying to intervene in a region that is essentially known for violence and, you know, they're trying to calm things down, one of the things they push for is representative democracy where, you know, one person has one vote and, you know, for all intents and purposes,

It's a good system.

It's the best of what we've had so far and it allows people to elect their leaders.

So do you think we've reached a point where one person, one vote, especially in African countries as volatile as Somalia where clan voting takes precedence, do you think we've reached a moment in time where that type of democracy has reached its utility and shouldn't be pursued further, especially, you know, in Somalia and we should instead focus on the

Systems that actually work there?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many kind of ways you can come at this.

I think that first and foremost, the democracy piece, really if you look at, like, development, if you look at a lot of other things, democracy is important, obviously, but when you're a country like Somalia where you have an Al-Qaeda group that controls, you know, a significant portion of the country, the government doesn't really control much outside of

Population centers, there are kind of higher priority issues, not to mention also that there's a famine that could impact certain areas.

Food in security levels are very high.

It's kind of very Maslow's hierarchy of needs where, you know, there are bigger, more pressing issues than one person, one vote elections currently, and I think that most Somalis would probably agree with that. I don't want to speak for them, but that would be my guess.

But even with the whole one person, one vote democracy also, it's important that, you know, democracies can be different in different areas and should be in line with kind of that country's societal customs.

And so in Somalia, where you have a very fragmented society based on these different clan groupings and stuff like that, one person, one vote, you know, might not be the way to go. Even if you look at the United States, we're one person, one vote, but we don't do popular vote presidential elections. That's a controversial thing here.

But the whole reason that, you know, the founding fathers here did it was so that, and even if you look at stuff like the U.S. Senate, it's very depressing right now because of the society. We don't know. But the great nation will make a decision to agree with that.

I should have where, you know, the smallest states in the country have as many senators as the biggest states. That's a whole thing where, you know, one person's vote in California is not equal to one person's vote in Rhode Island as far as the U.S. Senate is concerned, which is a very important part of our government.

So and part of the reason that the whole, you know, and we're taught this in U.S. school and stuff like that the founding fathers did this is so that, you know, the majority could not dominate the minority, the tyranny of the majority, basically.

And so in like, especially in countries that are experiencing high levels of violence or are very fragmented, you know, one person, one vote might not be the way to do it. Maybe there should be some type of quota system or power sharing system. I think of Northern Ireland also.

Northern Ireland is a democracy, but it's a very unique one where there's power sharing, you know, neutral vetoes and stuff like that. And again, it's not like that's, you know, totally like a fully one person, one vote, you know, voting on every single issue, stuff like that.

And so I think it's important to note that democracy should take place or must be fine tuned within the context of the country and the society that it's taking place in.

And I think that the provisional constitution and the whole federal system generally did a decent job at that. Certainly there's there's criticism that you could level at that. And this is a criticism in Ethiopia also that by having a federal system, it actually reinforces the divisions that are that are present.

And certainly that's something that can be debated. But I think we're seeing kind of the outcome of what's, you know, going on currently is that by fully shifting to one person, one vote that, you know, there is going to be a lot of backlash.

It's going to marginalize a lot of people and effectively, you know, maybe the government can do one person, one vote, but it can do it across it, but it cannot do it across the whole country.

So then at what point is that even like a legitimate or valid government, even if it is one person, one vote, but only, you know, the, a few parts of the country are actually taking part in said vote. So, you know, that's kind of my thoughts on that.

I think more broadly, I've, I've written previously that as far as outside actors go that, you know, for the most part, the state governments, the federal member states tend to be actually the most effective and most legitimate actors.

And so I've advocated for the U S and others working more closely with federal, federal member states. That's not to say that you know, we shouldn't work with the central government and that the central government has no role. That's not true.

The central government has a big role. The central government should definitely be. in charge of foreign policy and stuff like that.

But when it comes to like security coordination on the ground, development coordination, stuff like that, because of how fractured Somali society is, because of the issues with corruption, even within the central government, it doesn't really work to run everything through Mogadishu.

And I think that we've seen that trying to run stuff through Mogadishu too much for the last couple of decades, it's not like Somalia is significantly more developed, that there still aren't issues with poverty and famine, that the security situation has been totally solved.

So I think that we've seen maybe the limits as well of just going through Mogadishu purely. So those are kind of my thoughts on that, kind of rambled on for a little bit.

But yeah. No worries, Liam, I'm really rambling. I think it's an important question to ask, and you give a very important answer.

And it's something that we will need to think about as we move forward, as we try to figure out what's a permanent solution to the crisis that keeps facing Somalia. So it is something that will need to be sorted out because I see parallels in the DRC, which is where we're heading next.

One of the biggest issues in the DRC is that the DRC has a direct system of voting, if I'm not wrong.

Yes, they do. But even with that, the people in the Eastern DRC still feel very disconnected from what is happening in Kinshasa, rather, which is on the western edge of the country.

Because while it's such a huge country, I like to tell people all over the world this whenever we meet, it's easier for someone to get from Eastern DRC to Mombasa, Kenya than it is for them to get to Kinshasa on the other side of their own country.

That just shows you the scale of this one country and the scale of the conflict that's happening there. So recently, we did a piece on war fronts, which I really hope more people check out. It's titled, Ebola is making the Congo conflict even worse.

And we talked a lot about the same things Liam and I spoke about in our very first podcast recording, what an Ebola outbreak in the DRC means for the conflict. So there is one thing that we didn't really speak about during that conversation, and that's the fact that Ebola initially broke out in Initori province.

So whenever we think about M23 and a big Congo war, so to call it, we're only looking at two provinces, North and South Kyivu.

They're blessed when it comes to minerals. They're very minerals rich. But there are still fundamentally only two provinces in the entire country.

There's a ton more. But for this conversation, I want us to focus specifically on the province of Ituri, where the Ebola outbreak happened. So this is from my coverage of the crisis.

On the 15th of May, King Shia Sako... We found an outbreak of Ebola in the country's northeast. The outbreak happened in Ituri, a resource-rich province that has been the epicenter of a conflict between two communities, the Hima and the Lendu.

The conflict is distinct from the M23 war and is driven less by geopolitics and more by land, ethnicity, and resource competition that goes back decades. The latest flashpoint in this conflict happened on the 28th. So, by 28th, I mean the 28th of May, if I'm not sure.

I need to confirm. I don't know why I didn't put that. On the 28th of May or April, I'm not quite sure when.

The 28th of April, let's go with that. Fighters from the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo, which is called Codeco, a group of militias claiming to fight for the Lendu, killed 70 people.

These attacks appear to be retaliation for an attack on the Congolese army carried out by the Convention for the Popular Revolution, CRP, which claims to represent the Hima a few days prior.

The conflict has displaced close to a million people, most of whom live in camps that can best be described as crowded, which is the perfect environment for a disease like Ebola, which is transmitted by contact with bodily fluids from infected people to spread. So, already the situation in North and South Kibu is bad.

Liam, tell us what it's like in Victoria, what you're seeing there, just basically your thoughts on that specific situation away from the broader world.

Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly no health expert, and I know that you're, you know, maybe a preview of an upcoming pod, but our Great Lakes analyst, Yale Ford, might be on in the next few weeks, which you'll have certainly more details. Yes.

But as far as the situation in Aturi, and even, I mean, the Kibus, I do think that the violence certainly, like, is a hindrance to an organized response to everything going on.

And I think that another interesting piece is, aside from all of the armed groups, there's also just kind of organic local violence against health centers. We've seen lots of reports of that due to, you know, local, basically, like, misunderstandings of health clinics or local customs and wanting to bury their own dead and, you know, stuff like that.

And so I think that it is very challenging to organize, basically, a strong, organized, coherent response in an area that is as lawless might not be the right word, but an area with as limited of a government presence at times as the Eastern DRC can be, whether we're talking Aturi or the Kibus.

And I think that the situation in the Kibus is interesting in particular as well, because when we're talking about, you know, lack of governance and inhibit an organized response, this has been an opportunity.

For M23, who is, you know, who has carved out kind of a pseudo statelet, you know, is appointing, you know, various administrators, governors trying to create its own governance system.

It is basically an opportunity for them to tout their credentials, basically, as an effective governing actor and show, you know, hey, we're doing a better job of this than the DRC is, which is just interesting as far as, you know, for their narrative.

That they're, you know, a more legitimate and effective, you know, local governing actor than the Congolese government thousands of miles away in Kinshasa. That just plays into the narrative that they're trying to spin. So in some ways, this has been an opportunity for them.

So, yeah, I think that the kind of governance vacuum in the East certainly goes hand in hand with the Ebola outbreak and is honestly part of the reason why they keep popping up and why they tend to be particularly bad and hard to identify at first and get on top of.

Yes, just as you've said, the security situation is making it a whole lot harder for the Congolese government to try and contain the spread of the disease than it should have any right to be. The situation shouldn't be this difficult for the government to deal with.

And I just want to add one more thing that it's not just M23 that's and, you know, the two groups we mentioned in Ituri, Kodeco and CPF, that are making this challenging to deal with. There's also the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic State-linked militia initially formed in Uganda that is a lot more active in the DRC nowadays.

So on the 31st of May, ADF fighters attacked the city of Beni, killing at least 20 people.

And, you know, this was the first time that they attacked the city in more than three years. That, in and of itself, is a really, really big issue. The fact that they felt confident enough that the state was stretched thin enough that, you know, they could go back to a city that they haven't attacked in three years and they could attack.

That is a very big issue before anything else. And after the attack, the local government confirmed that three people who had confirmed cases of Ebola who were in isolation centers, three people escaped the containment facility.

So you'll look at a situation where already people are panicked over their attacks, they're looking for their loved ones, 20 people are dead.

A terrorist group, for all intents and purposes, because what else can you be if you're linked to the Islamic State? A terrorist group has killed 20 people, has just wreaked havoc on this city, and then three people infected with Ebola basically flee their containment facility.

It's just bad, so we're guaranteed. a lot more infections simply because this armed group attacked a containment facility.

And it raises a question of, are they aware of the risks they're imposing on everyone else? Are they aware of just how big an issue it is when they attack a treatment facility and they cause this much destruction?

So for the people who are living in Beni, who are living in the DFC in such horrible conditions, it's just a horrible, horrible situation all around.

Liam, I also want to address one more thing with you within the DFC before we move on to one final conflict, because I see once again, we are approaching 9 a.m. your time. And, you know, that's our usual hard stop.

When the head of the WHO, Tedros, was speaking, he said he had encountered a situation where the people in the DFC don't believe that Ebola is real.

And this isn't the first time. This is not the first time that people are outrightly saying they don't think that Ebola is a real thing. In the 20, what was this?

In the 2019 crisis, right? There was a study that said 25% of the people who are asked, that's a whole quarter didn't believe that Ebola is a real disease. They thought that it had been unleashed on their communities as a tool to destabilize it and for financial gain.

And a lot of this speaks to state mistrust. They don't believe the word of the government. And this goes back to what I was saying about how even in countries that are quote-unquote democracies, where one person, one vote, people are still feeling that gap between what the government says, what is actually being, what is actually transpiring on the ground.

So, William, tell us about that mistrust in the Congolese state. Why do people distrust the government so much, one? And is there anything the government can do, especially in the short term, to try and recover some of that trust?

Oh, that is a really big and important question. I think as far as recovering trust in the short term, I think that's very hard. I mean, ultimately, the best way to earn people's trust is delivering services, basically.

That's the government's job, ultimately, at the end of the day, is to provide, not necessarily provide for the people, but at the very least provide conditions for people to live happy, safe, prosperous lives.

And so, when you're looking at these areas where insecurity is rampant, living conditions are poor, you know, those things, there's very little reason to trust the government, because what has the government done for these people?

In many cases, many of their only interactions with government might be engaging with corrupt local officials. you know corrupt you know army personnel or you know corrupt militia people who aren't the government but that the government isn't isn't actually reigning in so I think that you know the real way for the government to gain people's trust is by

Being more effective which is a little bit of a of a not necessarily you know it sounds easy but obviously they would have done it if it was that simple but I do think that's what it fundamentally comes down to and especially in parts of the east in particular like you said at the beginning where the government you know the capital Kinshasa is so far away in

This area has always been fairly peripheral and for the most part it's been an extractive theater for minerals that then you know benefit the elites back on the other side of the country or benefit the army officers who are sent out to this area as part of patronage networks to you know get their slice so on so forth so you know how to do that in the short

Term I'm really not sure but I but I do think that fundamentally it's just about improving governance in these areas is that is going to be the quickest and easiest way to actually get people's trust is to actually you know for lack of a better phrase or to be to be blunt for the government to do its job better in these in these areas we read a good point

With the idea of corruption and just how if it was easy for the government to do a better job they would have already done it right it's it's not that they don't have the ability to do a good job it's just that there's corruption embedded so deeply within within the congolese system and within the entirety of the government that it becomes difficult to

Overcome I remember when I was writing a full length feature length documentary on the one the drc tracing its origins from you know the first congo war to all the way to the modern day there was a statement that I believe mobutus as a second made when he told his armies that you know he wasn't going to pay them basically telling them I'm not going to pay

You but there are all these lands out there are all these people out there why do I need to pay you when you can just take from the people and a lot of these soldiers internalize that and you know it's it's trickled down to up to right now where we're seeing a congoli state where corruption is the absolute order of the day it's it's the most accepted thing

It's just it's just like if you lived in Paris and you looked outside your window and you saw the apple tower it's got that normalized so or for the people in the drc it's it's just a difficult question how can a government they mistrust so fundamentally regain their trust and you know doing it in the middle of a war in the middle of a of an outbreak of

Ebola again just a difficult things things things For our final, final discussion point, Liam, we need to talk about what is happening in Mali.

Not the coordinated attack that has gained all the attention, but rather the offensive carried out by Jenin against the Dozo militia. So for anyone who is not familiar, the Dozo, and for this I'll use the work of Henny Saibia. Henny is another friend of the channel.

He's a senior analyst, West Africa, for the Armed Conflict Location Event Data Tracking Project, ACLED, someone whose work has featured almost as much as, you know, the work of the critical threat team in Mayon coverage, someone who's granted me, you know, his time to do an interview, put something together.

That was our piece on whether West Africa could be seeing the rise of an Islamic caliphate. So Henny and I go way back.

That's all I'm trying to say. So the Dozo, back to the Dozo. But Dozo militia are not a unified actor, but a fragmented and diverse ensemble of groups.

While they share a common identity rooted in hunter fraternities, Dozo armed groups differ greatly in their ethnic composition, their structure, their leadership, and political engagement. So it's a group of militia that have some uniting factors, but are still fragmented, are a fragmented group.

So following Janim's coordinated offensive in late April and subsequent announcement of a blockade on Bamako, the group partially shifted its focus towards central Mali in May, launching a deadly offensive against Dozo militias, including the Dan Na Ambasago movement in the Mopti region.

The offensive is linked to growing tensions in the area where villages have entered into local agreements with Janim, but have come under pressure from the Dan Na. And these tensions have centered on the establishment of new militia checkpoints, restrictions on mobility, and efforts to challenge agreements reached between Janim and local communities.

Liam, what can you tell us about this?

Yeah, I think this is the latest iteration, really, of another kind of cycle of violence that we've really been seeing going on in central Mali for several years now, you know, dating back to when the insurgency really started to gain hold in central Mali, probably in the mid to late 20-teens.

So much of my understanding of this also comes from Henny, so shout out to him and the great work that he does in this kind of, you know, open source, analytical, expert research community. So much work that we do all builds on each other, and certainly a lot of work that we do builds on Henny and Aklid's work.

So as far as what's going on currently, yeah, I think we're seeing another iteration, basically, of some breakdown on the local level in agreements, like you mentioned, reach between Janim and these groups, these groups, these agreements tend to be something to the effect of... of the groups the locals agree to lay down their arms surrender weapons and you

Know usually adopt some form of locally attuned sharia aspects so maybe like a dress code maybe paying a certain amount of tax of zakat taxes maybe some other aspects as well and in exchange jayden will no longer attack the village or if there was a blockade on the village jayden will allow you know kind of local economic activity travel etc to resume and so

It seems like those deals broke down sometimes that can be because of some you know maybe a local leader was killed maybe malian forces or their russian allies were trying to put out feelers to work with some of these groups that were still present or tried to reach out to some of these villages and jayden caught wind or believed that they were cooperating

With the government and so cracked down it's also possible that this sometimes happens where the government conducts an operation in an area and jayden just assumes that there was local collaboration going on and so then cracks down so there's really really any kind of number of things that could have that could have triggered this but really this is not

This is a flare-up in a cycle or a pattern that has been going on for several years now where in most parts of central mali especially rural areas these militia groups are really on the front line and in some cases the only real resistance to jayden in these these these areas so they do tend to bear the brunt of when jayden wants to assert its control over

Central mali over these areas these militias and the locals affiliated with them tend to be the ones that bear the brunt of that violence so look again it's a station where local communities that are caught in the crossfire between warring militias and governments that are overstretched and in the case of mangi woefully inept forgive me for saying this so

Openly woefully inept at governing because how often do we see military hunters that are actually competent governors taking over government so again it's the local people who are suffering through all this liam on that sad note i think we should end the episode there because again it's for our listeners it's about eight minutes until the top of the hour

Until 9 a.m eastern to give liam time to prepare for his second meeting but again it's it's such a saddening situation when we're covering africa because as we've made our way in this episode from Ethiopia, its issues internally, its issues with Eritrea, to Somalia, its own issues internally, without even touching on al-Shabaab, to the DRC, again, its issues

In multiple provinces.

This is something I like bringing up whenever I'm covering the DRC. The DRC has more than 70 armed groups active.

So we've gone from, again, back to DRC where 70 active armed groups, but only one, you know, gains attention, gains worldwide acclaim, M23 because of the Rwanda backing. And even now when we're talking about Mali and its own issues with Janim and the Dozo militias, it's just a saddening state of affairs.

There's very few places within Africa where there's a glimmer of hope.

There's something positive to look forward to. And I say this as someone who lives on the continent, as someone who covers this for a living and wants the continent to be better, wants the entire situation to be better. It's just saddening all around.

It's not a good situation. Liam, will you have the final word? Yeah, I mean, thanks again for having me on.

And I really appreciate the work you do to tie this back to, you know, obviously the people who are impacted most by this, the innocent civilians on the ground.

It's very easy to talk about these things at like a 30,000 foot view and lose sight of, you know, when you're talking about war and violence and all of this stuff to lose touch with the fact we're talking about, you know, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of, you know, people who have to live through these circumstances, through

These wars.

And so it's really important to never lose, lose sight of that.

And I'm, and I'm really glad that you make sure that doesn't happen on this, that this podcast, when we're talking about, you know, issues, when it would be very easy to do that, given how, how big and complex some of these issues are. So kudos to you for that. And thanks again for having me on.

Thank you so much, Liam. And as Liam hinted at earlier, the next person from the critical threats team who will be interviewed on the DoSelf podcast is Yale Ford. Yale is someone who's, if you watch the video on the DRC Ebola crisis, you'll have heard his name mentioned.

He's someone whose work I've been following for a while now, just as I was following Liam's work before we were all brought into the same orbit. And it's a conversation that I am really, really looking forward to. So yes, Liam, once again, thank you so much for gracing us with your presence.

I know I will hit you up within the next few weeks to say, Hey, do you want to appear on the podcast at that time? Because I genuinely enjoy talking with you.

You and I have so much to talk about because, you know, the similarities in the work that we do and the fact that, you know, we're both reliant on the same kind of guys to build our knowledge in areas where we might not be as conversant like Henny.

And Henny is someone who will be appearing on this podcast at some point in the pitch. We just need to lock down a time. But Liam, thank you so much for being our first two-time guest.

It is amazing for me. Absolutely amazing. And I will end it here.

Thank you so much, Liam. Thank you for joining us. And for every single person who listens to Duesal, thank you.

We really appreciate it. We don't take you guys for granted. Thank you for giving us your time.

And yeah, we'll end it there. See you next time.