1. Anyone who has done any kind of archival research will know immediately the use of the WikiLeaks cables, and also their limits. Now that the superficial and the obvious are out of the way, the truly interesting material is coming to light; specifics of diplomacy and statecraft in an era where those arts are […]
This Sunday, Guineans will go to the polls in a presidential run-off contest between ex-Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo and his rival Alpha Condé in what is considered their first democratic election since independence in 1958. It’s been a long road since the first round of voting in June—the run-off has been delayed several times […]
The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has discovered high-tech vessels with “EU [European Union] numbers, indicating that they were licensed to import to Europe having theoretically passed strict hygiene standards” were not only operating without licenses in exclusion zones off the coast of West Africa–near Sierra Leone and Guinea–but that they used “forced labour” – in […]
Foreign Policy’s website has this story: “David M. Crane, the former U.N. war crimes prosecutor for the Special Court in Sierra Leone, and his chief investigator, Alan A. White, indicted former Liberian warlord and president Charles Taylor in 2003. Three months ago, their new firm CW Group International offered to sell legal services to the […]
The former Liberian warlord, who is being tried for war crimes, is in mainstream American news again this week:
I was a bit surprised today to read that Guinea’s military leader, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, has agreed not to return to Guinea (he’ll hang out in Burkina Faso with fellow dictator Blaise Compaore) and that a transitional government organize elections without him. Especially since only a few months ago it seems this guy won’t […]
The opening minutes of the excellent 2007 documentary, “Sur les traces du Bembeya Jazz,” about the great Guinean group, Bembeya Jazz. The intro is brilliant for showing the band members in their prime (in 1979) and now years later. [I had the pleasure of seeing them play in London around 2003. They still had it.] […]
