There are moving and beautiful pictures coming in from Khartoum as northern and southern Sudanese come together to celebrate the end of the Sudanese civil war together. The BBC has reporters and photographers on the ground and is offering a number of photo portfolios on their website. There’s a set of photos and interviews with northern and southern Sudanese about their hopes for Sudan after the civil war, a portfolio of photos of Janjawid militia and Darfur rebels and photos of refugees displaced in the conflict in Darfur.

The BBC reports that Sudanese vice president Ali Osman Taha predicts that the North/South peace will lead to peace in Darfur. That’s certainly a possibility - feeling less threatened, Khartoum’s government might act to disarm Janjawid militias and provide security in Darfur. Or the government might take advantage of a reduced threat on the southern front to move decisively against rebels in Darfur, displacing more civilians and causing more carnage.

One lesson I’m taking from the peace in Sudan - it’s clear that the Khartoum government is sensitive to outside pressure. The peace agreed on this week is the result of a great deal of outside pressure on the Sudanese government, especially from the US, which has put substantial resources into mediating the conflict. It suggests that the global community would be well served by keeping a close eye on Darfur and reminding the government of Sudan that the world is watching what takes place there.

Jim Moore is asking good questions about interest - and lack of interest - in the blogosphere about Sudan. He observes that Feedster mentions of Sudan have increased dramatically, with twice as many mentions in the past 24 hours as in the past year. This is likely due to the good news about the end of the North-South civil war, a bloody conflict that’s been raging for over two decades.

I’m looking at the same trends with a different tool - BlogPulse’s Trend Search, an elegant little tool from the fine folks at Intelliseek, featured on Blogpulse’s showcase of research tools, alongside my GAP research, which uses the BlogPulse API. Trend Search lets you see how a particular term (or boolean arrangement of tools) has been represented in the Blogosphere over the past month. While it’s not as up-to-the minute as Jim’s Feedster data, it gives some historical perspective to these trends.

This graph from Trend Search seems to suggest that much of the blogging about Sudan has been about Darfur - the peaks on the searches for “Sudan” and for “Darfur” align neatly, with the peak in early May aligning with a New York Times front page story on Darfur and the news that Sudan would retain its seat on the UN’s Commision on Human Rights. I would expect to see a boom in results for “sudan AND peace” - the green line - over the next couple of days.

Since my interest is in comparative media interest, I thought I’d look at blogs mentioning Sudan, versus blogs mentioning Afghanistan and Iraq. Blogpulse sees roughly 1.75% of blogs, on any given day, mentioning Iraq. In comparison, about 0.25% mention Afghanistan and 0.04% mention Sudan. In other words, roughly 44 times as many people are blogging Iraq as are blogging Sudan. (That’s a much lower multiple than I would have expected, actually.)

Jim is trying to organize a google-bombing of Sudan by getting folks to blog the word “Sudan” and link it to Passion of the Present, a site he’s helping organize to call attention to the plight of the residents of Darfur. Unlike John Kerry and waffles, or George W Bush and “miserable failure”, this google-bombling has a point - the Khartoum government has proven very sensitive to public pressure. If Google tells them the world is paying attention to Darfur, perhaps they’ll ease more of the restrictions making it difficult for food and aid to reach refugees in Darfur.

(I’m interested in the google-bombing for research reasons as well as political ones - could the 0.04% of us who are blogging about this crisis manage to affect search engine rankings?)

Meera Selva, writing for CSM, has a heartening piece about land reform in Nairobi. Nairobi’s slums, like those in many African cities, provide housing for large numbers of people who’ve immigrated to central cities in search of work. Built on public lands by squatters, the shantytowns are periodically bulldozed by the government, a “solution” that does nothing to address the key problems of unemployment and housing scarcity that cause shantytowns.

Importing a model pioneered in India, an association of people living in the Kambi Moto neighborhood approached the Nairobi City Council for title to the land they were squatting on. Armed with ownership of the land, they’ve invested in constructing small concrete-block houses replacing the cardboard and wood shacks they’d previously lived in. In the process, they’re creating a local employment boom as people set up businesses making concrete blocks and working as masons.

While the CSM article doesn’t reference Hernando de Soto, it certainly puts me in mind of the argument the Peruvian economist makes in The Mystery of Captial. de Soto argues that people in developing nations are less poor than commonly concieved, but that they have a very difficult time turning their assets - usually, their homes - into capital because of bad property rights regimes. In a developed nation, an entrepreneur might take out a loan with her house as collateral, and use the money to start a business. In Kenya, she can’t take out a loan on her house, because she doesn’t own the land it sits on. No house, no capital, no business…

The fact that extremely poor people are building concrete houses looks like an object lesson in the importance of property rights. Since the City Council isn’t funding house construction, this suggests that homeowners are finding money to build real houses, instead of shacks, once they’re confident that they own the land and that their investment won’t be destroyed. Here’s hoping that this experiment succeeds and that more governments figure out that land rights are a better solution to urban slums than bulldozers.

BBC correspondent Mohammed Adow reports that Somali diplomatic passports are widely available for sale in Nairobi. Adow reports that the passport seller - who sees himself as providing a public service to Somalis who otherwise can’t obtain travel documents - offered to sell him a passport certifying he was the Somali ambassador to a nation of his choice for $100. As diplomatic passports often allow travellers carrying them to avoid searches when entering a country, they’re sometimes used by drug or weapon smugglers; obviously, they’d be very useful for anyone trying to avoid detection through a terrorist watchlist.

Realizing that Somali passports are less than trustworthy, Kenyan immigration officials have stopped accepting them. Given that Kenya has suffered two major terrorist incidents in the past decade, and that it’s a major travel hub, this seems like a wise precaution. But it’s a huge problem for Somalis travelling on legitimate business and Somali traders in Kenya explain that it’s putting them out of business, as they can no longer fly to China to buy goods and bring them back into Nairobi.

AllAfrica’s Charles Cobb Jr. has an excellent article talking about possible motivations for the Khartoum government’s reaction to rebel groups in Darfur, a reaction that’s included ethnic cleansing and possible genocide. Cobb quotes (US) Acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles R. Snyder as saying that SLM and JEM forces (the two major rebel groups in Darfur) had threatened Khartoum more than the SPLM, the rebel group in the South that’s fought Khartoum for a decades-long civil war. Snyder asserts that, while SPLM never threatened attacks on the city of Khartoum, Darfur rebels managed to shut down a major road between Khartoum and Nyala, the main city of southern Darfur, causing panic within the Khartoum government. There’s also fear of a domino effect - if the Darfur rebels get what they want, what about other rebel groups around the nation?

Complicating the situation is the fact that over 50% of the Sudanese military is from Darfur, primarily from the African Muslim population. These soldiers have had a great deal of sympathy for Darfur residents who complain of Arab favoritism. This may explain why the military has used Jinjiweed militias to fight a proxy war rather than formal military forces.

Roger Winter, an assistant USAID administrator focusing on the Darfur issue, now estimates that at least 100,000 people will die in Darfur due to starvation, exposure and disease even with massive international intervention now. He projects a worst case scenario of 350,000 deaths.

I’m happy whenever the media pays attention to stories in undercovered parts of the globe. So I’ve been celebrating the appearance of cartoons about Sudan. But the above cartoon by Sandy Huffaker gets the current situation in Darfur badly wrong.

While the civil war in Sudan has pitted Muslims of Arab descent from the north against Christians and animists of African descent from the south, that war has largely calmed down as a result of international peacemaking efforts. The conflict in Darfur is a Muslim on Muslim conflict, with muslims of Arab descent attacking their darker-skinned Muslim brothers. It is an age-old story, but probably not the one Huffaker thinks - it’s a conflict between farmers and herders, a conflict so old we find it in the Old Testament. It’s possible that Huffaker is referring to the larger historical situation in Sudan, but given current headlines, it seems more likely that he’s misunderstood the sides involved with the conflict.

There’s an unfortunate tendency in the US to associate Islam with violence and to assume that Muslims are somehow planning to destroy Christians and Christianity. It’s worth remembering that no religious or ethnic group has a monopoly on genocidal hatred. Reports from the Plateau State of Nigeria indicate that over 350 Muslims were killed by Christian militias in the latest attacks in a three-month religious conflict. The killers used machine guns and machetes, burned down houses, and looted buildings. Reuters reports that corpses showed signs of sexual abuse and mutilation.

Tragically, the real age-old story is the capacity for man’s inhumanity to man, not any one struggle between faiths or ethnicities.

NGOs funded by the US government, like my former employer, have been waiting with bated breath for the announcement of Millenium Challenge Account countries. The envelope, please:

Winning unspecified amounts of development aid in exchange for reforming markets, protecting civil rights and rooting out corruption are: Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Armenia, Georgia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Vanuatu, Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Center for Global Development’s Steve Radelet released a paper a few weeks back, predicting the countries that would qualify - he listed 17 likely to qualify and an additional 17 near misses.

The surprises? Georgia and Bolivia, which both have corruption levels too high to be acceptable somehow squeaked in - Georgia was probably given a pass given it’s progressive new president, and Bolivia was right on the line. Bhutan, Vietnam, Guyana and Mauritania didn’t make it, despite qualifying on paper.

I’ve worked in five of the qualifying countries, and they rank among my favorite places in the world. Two are countries I’ve thought seriously about starting businesses in. All of which makes me think that the process of country selection was likely a pretty good one. I’m sufficiently cynical that I expected the US government to sneak a repressive but compliant country like Uzbekistan into the list, and I’m thrilled that they didn’t.

The question now on everyone’s minds (okay, everyone who cares about these issues sufficiently to have read to this point in my post)

is how much money will really get committed to the program, and whether this aid will be above and beyond existing aid levels, or will serve as an alternative. While the program may never reach the promised $5 billion a year in aid, the $1 billion budgeted for the first year of the MCA program is big. $62.5 million per nation big. Given that the total USAID budget for Mongolia last year was $12 million, and that national GDP is only around $1 billion, that’s serious money.

Does this mean the US is finally stepping to the plate and taking on it’s fair share of international development? Not even close. Despite the continuing misperception that the US spends 20% of it’s annual budget on foreign aid, the actual number is less that 1%. Even with the additional MCA money, the US will still rank dead last among aidgivers in foreign aid spending as expressed as a percentage of GDP.

If you’re a regular NPR listener, the name Sarah Chayes may be familiar to you. From 1996 to 2002, she was one of NPR’s best foreign correspondents. In the run-up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, she reported a number of stories that attempted to explain the complex relationships between the Taliban, Al-Quaeda and average Afghani citizens.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t realized Chayes’s voice was absent from NPR until I found this piece on Alternet, reprinted from the Columbia Journalism Review. In a piece called “Breaking Ranks in Afghanistan”, Chayes talks about her decision to leave journalism and become an activist, working for an NGO in Afghanistan.

Early in her career, she thought of her work as a journalist as important and relevant:

…given the paucity of foreign news in the U.S. media, just being a foreign correspondent was a kind of subversion. If by the end of my career, I told myself, I had convinced some Americans that the United States is not the only country in the world, I would have achieved something.

While she initially thought reporting on Afghanistan post-9/11 would be an opportunity to do balanced, nuanced reporting, her hopes were quickly dashed. Her stories were criticized for being insufficiently anti-Taliban - she explains that she had begun to understand that “pro-Taliban” and “pro-bin Laden” were not synonyms, a difficult distinction for American listeners - and her producers - to understand. She quotes a fellow journalist as complaining:

“They simply didn’t want any reporting,” he explained. “They told us the story lines, and asked us to substantiate them.”

So when one of her sources, the uncle of Hamad Kharzai asked her “Wouldn’t you come back and help us?”, she said yes, and became the field director of Afghans for Civil Society, a new NGO in Kandahar.

She’s got lots more to say about being an activist and a critic, moving from talking to sources to being one. While I’m thrilled she’s found a way to help Afghans and to keep Afghanistan an issue in the US media, it breaks my heart that she had to leave journalism to do it. You would think that a seasoned journalist with experience in the Middle East, working for one of the better news outlets in the US would be allowed to show us the complexities of situations like the US invasion of Afghanistan. And you’d be wrong.

My regular rant is about media attention and the problems we court when we ignore countries and regions. Chayes’s article is a good reminder - one that colleague Rebecca MacKinnon has made over and over with NKZone - that lots of coverage doesn’t mean we get the real story unless it’s good, honest, nuanced coverage. And that if mainstream journalism doesn’t do the job, we may need to become activists to ensure important stories get heard.