Drew Sheneman, in the Newark Star Ledger.

Funny, but not entirely true. Andrew Natsios and USAID have done a good job of keeping an eye on Sudan - USAID has just released a set of satellite photos that provide an interesting perspective on the destruction. And Colin Powell is now enroute to Khartoum to put pressure on the Sudanese government.

Africa Action makes the argument that Powell’s trip is “dangerously naive”, and that there’s no reasonable way to negotiate with a genocidal regime. They argue that the US should declare the situation “genocide”, use intelligence techniques (presumably like the ones USAID is using) to monitor the situation, and deploy peacekeepers from Dijbouti to Darfur to stabilize the situation.

I doubt Powell is actually naive enough to believe most of what the Khartoum government has to say. I take it as a positive sign that the Bush administration is paying sufficient attention to Sudan to send the secretary of state on a mission. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that the US will intervene in the conflict.

The LA Times has an excellent (and disturbing) story on Darfur. The conclusion: it’s already too late. (Registration requried, but free, and worth it to read this excellent piece.) No matter what the international community does at this point, hundreds of thousands of people will die of starvation in western Sudan and eastern Chad. World Food Programme is reaching 800,000 of the 1.2 million refugees, but the lack of roads, security concerns and the Khartoum government’s lack of cooperation make it difficult to reach all those in need. The real suffering may be yet to come - since no one in Darfur was able to plant crops (and those planted were destroyed by the militias), over 2 million people may be starving come October.

While the world continues to debate whether or not what’s happening in Sudan constitutes genocide, a representative of Human Rights Watch offers the following: “Frankly, the job is just about done. They have ethnically cleansed a million people from their homes.”

The LA Times story offers an interesting bit of analysis to explain why world governments have sat on the sidelines of this conflict for 16 months. Quoting John Prendergast with the International Crisis Group, the story speculates that the US and others stayed uninvolved with Darfur out of fear of upsetting the peace process in Southern Sudan. As a result:

“Once Khartoum realized countries like Britain, America, Norway and the U.N. Security Council wanted to get Naivasha done first, they just started stringing out the Naivasha process,” Prendergast said. “They realized as long as the process was going on, they would have a cover for their activities in Darfur.”

There’s another reason, of course. With conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s obvious that neither the US or the UK would be likely to intervene militarily in Sudan. NATO is overcommitted in Afghanistan; neither the UN nor individual African nations have much peacekeeping capacity, and that capacity is deployed in DRC and Cote D’Ivoire. Not only does Bush’s “war on terror” chase critical African stories off the front page - it also helps ensure that there will be little or no intervention into these conflicts.

Microsoft recently announced plans to offer a Kiswahili version of their Office product in the next six months, perhaps followed by Windows XP. Microsoft is evidently looking for other ways to make their products more attractive to a Great Lakes audience, changing the Windows startup sound to a Taraab melody…

Microsoft’s manager for East Africa explains that the company is looking at the 100m Kiswahili speakers as a large possible market, and that the company is looking at other large language markets, like Hausa, Yoruba and Amharic. While there are certainly a large number of possible Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan users, the high level of piracy in the region suggests that the motivation may not be pure profit. Instead, this looks like an excellent way for Microsoft to maintain mindshare in the region while waiting for the market to mature to the point where they can later demand license fees from government offices and schools.

I had dinner a couple nights ago with Duane Bailey from the excellent translate.org.za project, who suggested that the project may be a direct reaction to some of the activities his non-profit has recently undertaken. Translate is working on localizing OpenOffice into all the eleven official languages of South Africa. They’re focusing on OpenOffice, instead of Linux, for instance, because they’re interested in tools that enable the creation of content in local languages. OpenOffice is also a great “stealth” way to introduce people to the power of open source - folks can try it out without changing platforms from Windows, making it lots easier to experiment with than setting up a Linux box.

Duane wonders whether Microsoft’s announcement is a response to the Kiswahili spellchecker he and Jason Gisethko recently developed at Tactical Tech’s Africa Source gathering in Namibia. In under a day, Duane and Jason were able to combine a list of Kiswahili terms Jason had been collecting for years with some existing spellchecking code and produce a functional and popular kiswahili spellchecker.

While that’s a great example of one of the advantages of Open Source - the ability to quickly localize existing code - the community as a whole doesn’t appear to have embraced Kiswahili as a high priority. It doesn’t show up as one of the 66 languages fully or partially supported by Mandrake, and the translation effort at Debian is one of the least popular, with less than 2% of essential strings translated.

David Gyewu, Ghana’s very sharp Deputy Minister of Communications, mentioned yesterday that he thought Open Source folks might be overfocusing on the importance of localization. He argued that, while most Ghanaians spoke at least some Twi (the language of the dominant Ashanti people), most didn’t read it, and that he didn’t therefore see a ton of need for a Twi Open Office. He also felt that IT was a great incentive for people to improve their English, which in turn improves their chances to succeed in global business. I’m not entirely sure I agree - I think there’s pretty good evidence that people learn to read best in their native languages, and that there’s an importance to protecting and preserving existing languages - but I need to chew on his comments for a while and see if I think localization is still the best argument in favor of Open Source.

Problems with how mercenaries are handling your war in Iraq? Why not hire Lt. Colonel Tim Spicer, one of the world’s best known mercenaries to handle security for you. He’s certainly no stranger to controvery and bad press.

Spicer’s previous firm, Sandline, was so intimately involved in a scandal in Sierra Leone, the event is generally referred to simply as “The Sandline Affair”. Spicer’s company procured and distributed 35 tons of light weapons to arm supporters of deposed Sierra Leonean president Kabbah - it’s likely he was hired by a bauxite dealer who wanted to recover concessions negotiated with the deposed Kabbah. Unfortunately for Spicer, this was illegal under British law and a UN resolution, and while Spicer avoided prosecution, the careers of several people in Tony Blair’s administration were damaged in the process.

The Sierra Leone affair wasn’t even Sandline’s darkest moment. That was Papua New Guinea, where Sandline mercenaries were hired to help put down an indigenous rebellion concerning a copper mine. The operation went off badly, and Spicer was captured by PNG soldiers, who wanted to know why government money was being spent on foreign mercenaries, not on local soldiers. British diplomats had to intervene on Spicer’s behalf and rescue him.

Sandline doesn’t exist any more, of course. A few weeks back, their site went offline with the poetic parting words:

“The general lack of governmental support for Private Military Companies willing to help end armed conflicts in places like Africa, in the absence of effective international intervention, is the reason for this decision. Without such support the ability of Sandline to make a positive difference in countries where there is widespread brutality and genocidal behaviour is materially diminished. “

But don’t shed too many tears for Sandline alumni - they’re doing a good job of making a name for themselves around the world. Simon Mann, who cofounded Sandline with Spicer, is in custody in Zimbabwe, accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Remember that story? I know I do…)

The complaints on the Sandline site aside, the US government seems to be quite willing to use Private Military Companies. Spicer’s new company Aegis, which looks a lot like a reformed Sandline, is in line for $293 million in security work on a cost-plus basis - i.e., they get they money spent plus an administrative overhead charge. Speculation suggests that the contract was given to Aegis, a British firm, to help reward the UK for their participation in the “Coalition of the Willing”.

But I gotta ask - what were they thinking? Anyone who’s concerned about dirty dealings in the developing world knows who Spicer and Sandline are, and what they’re done in the past. With accusations that PMCs tortured people at Abu Ghraib, why would the Bush administration hire a PMC with such a questionable track record? Was this an accident, or just incredible arrogance and an assumption the press wouldn’t follow this story?

I’ve been hanging out at Geekhalla, ancestral home of Geekcorps, and home to the volunteers working on Geekcorps’ Ghana program. It’s been a great chance to catch up with Jess Mitchell, one of the longest-serving, most successful (and coolest) of the geeks. She’s been working with GISPA, the Ghana ISP Association, helping the group become an effective lobbying force and helping organize the Ghana Internet Exchange point - the GIX.

The GIX is a cool, and critically important, project for the Ghana internet community. Ghana’s got dozens of Internet Service Providers, each of which provision their own Internet connectivity. Most do so via VSATs - very small aperature satellite terminals. This leads to an odd phenomenon: people sitting in adjoining offices in Accra, sending email to each other - if they’re using different ISPs - are likely to have their email routed through the United States. There’s no route from one ISP to another except through the Internet in the US, since each ISP connects to the outside world through a satellite, which then connects to the Internet in the US.

There’s several reasons why this is a bad thing. One, it means that websites for Ghanaians by Ghanaians are difficult to use if hosted in Ghana - it requires two satellite hops - each with a minimum latency of half a second - to request a page from a server. For performance reasons, most companies running web services oriented towards Ghanaians run their servers in the US. Second, satellite connectivity is very expensive, and is basically billed on a usage basis. When emails need to travel through the US to go from one part of Accra to another, both ISPs pay money to foreign satellite companies.

The solution to this is really simple, but also really hard - you need all the ISPs in the country to agree to connect directly to one another. While the concept is simple, the implementation is hard, both technically and socially. Jess has been helping shepherd the human part of the equation, working with Packet Clearinghouse, an NGO which helps set up IXPs around the world, on the technical side.

And the IXP is almost ready to go! It will be located in the Kofi Annan Center, a beautiful new technology training center co-built by the Ghanaian and Indian governments. Because the local phone system is so poor, most of the ISPs are connecting to the IXP via wireless. They’ve settled on a point to multipoint radio solution which uses 6 radio antennas to cover the city of Accra, allowing participating ISPs to joing the IXP for an equipment cost of under $600 for their transmitter. The point to multipoint solution uses 5.2Ghz, a licensed frequency in Ghana, but it looks like the government of Ghana will issue a license to the IXP to allow them to operate.

When it’s up, as many as 24 Ghanaian ISPs will be able to share traffic, reduce their bandwidth bills to the outside world and local hosting of websites will suddenly become a reasonable possibility. Jess has her fingers crossed and will be watching closely from Duke, where she’s returning after seven months of absence. My fingers are crossed, too - Ghana’s internet industry has been one of the most interesting on the continent, and while this won’t be the first African IXP, it has the potential to be one of the largest and one of the most technically innovative.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Guido Sohne, one of the leaders of Ghana’s vibrant software developement scene, at Wizards of OS this past week. We’ve got at least a dozen friends in common, but somehow have managed never to meet in Accra. Maybe that’s what technical conferences are for.

Guido helped found FOSSFA, Africa’s first Free and Open Source foundation… and left the organization when he became skeptical about his colleagues commitment to the movement. (He spectulates that some may be more interested in the possibility of raising money for an Open Source organization in Africa than in F/OSS itself…) He gave a bracing, skeptical and very powerful talk at the end of a panel on software development around the world.

Some of Guido’s points regarding the challenges F/OSS face in Africa are familiar ones - it’s hard to sell open source software as free as in “free beer” when no one is paying to use software due to widespread piracy (a point I made in an article for Linux Journal called “Why Free Beer Doesn’t Sell”. Guido goes a step further and argues that piracy is helping Microsoft gain market share. By allowing widespread piracy, Linux desktop software is forced to compete solely on its merits against Windows, since almost all copies of Windows in sub-Saharan Africa are pirated. Linux generally doesn’t do well in this battle, so new users get used to using Windows. Once the market is worth approaching, Microsoft can come in with an antipiracy campaign, the BSA and other groups to move corporate users towards compliance.

The point I found most interesting was Guido’s argument that most African developers are so busy struggling to make ends meet - in an environment where tech equipment costs 2-4x what it does in Europe and the US, where technical books are almost nonexistent, where there are no credit cards to purchase from Amazon - that they don’t have time to share, building code for public consumption. There are counterexamples, like the translate.org.za project, but not many examples of African programmers producing new F/OSS code. He suggests that the African programming community will have to grow greatly, and that the few programmers working in the field will need to get more economic security, before we expect African developers to seriously consider contributing to F/OSS projects.

I suspect his talk came as an eye-opener for many of the folks in the audience. There’s a lot of enthusiasm within the various “free” communities for the potential for their innovations to bring about change in the developing world. Unfortunately, economic realities often get in the way of idealism. Free mesh wireless networks sound like a great idea in bandwidth-rich countries… they’d likely work a little differently in a country where T1 bandwidth costs $5k a month - suddenly the free rider problem looks significantly more important. Here’s hoping Guido’s talk helped some folks understand the complexity of these issues.

Ingrid Jones is blogging some critical stories from Sudan, including some I haven’t done a good enough job of calling attention to. Her post today calls attention to the role of rape as a weapon in the conflict in Darfur, and in conflicts in Sudan as a whole. She points to a report from Knight Ridder which strongly suggests that rape is part of an overall strategy to “Arabize” Sudan by humiliating women, driving them away from their families and their tribes. It’s a harrowing and important piece, one you should make yourself read to understand just quite how awful this situation really is.

Various news, almost all of it bad, from Central Africa:

Hilary Andersson of the BBC has an update on the slow-motion genocide in Sudan. Andersson writes about 400 children in a refugee camp so severly malnourished that they are no longer able to eat. Their deaths are almost guaranteed, and their parents can do little other than watch them die.

As the rains begin in Darfur, it will be increasingly difficult to get food to refugees. And since there are hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, many of whom have had homes and crops destroyed by government-armed militias, these folks are likely to die as well. USAID’s Andrew Natsios told a donor conference that a third of a million people will likely die even if we can get aid into the region immediately - closer to a million will die if we cannot.

The UN (as well as the UK, US, and the EU) still haven’t found the political will to put peacekeepers in the region to protect refugee camps and allow food aid to be delivered. Nor have governments met the UN’s challenge to provide aid to the region - donor commitments are almost $100m short. It seems likely that the wider world will be in the position of those refugee parents, watching a million people die. If the media bothers to watch.

Of course, peacekeepers can introduce their own problems. The Uruguayan and Morroccan UN peacekeepers in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are being accused of trading food for sex with refugees in bordering camps. Young women - teenage girls - who have been raped by armed rebels are finding that their families reject them for becoming pregnant (at gunpoint) out of wedlock. The refugee camps reject them because they are designed to provide services to families. (If they didn’t, older children might show up to claim an extra share of food as the heads of families…) So girls who’ve been rejected by their families have no access to food within the camps. They trade sexual favors to soldiers in exchange for food to feed themselves and their babies. The UN’s spokesman promises a “full and thorough investigation…” Perhaps that will help explain why the UN stationed peacekeepers directly next to a refugee camp, a location that all refugee best practices suggest you avoid to prevent situations like this one from happening.

The UN, criticism aside, is doing more than its fair share to mediate conflicts on the continent. Glyn Davies of the US State Department has announced that the US will train 50,000 peacekeepers to complement UN forces for peacekeeping missions in Africa. On the one hand, this is great news - there’s an enormous need for peacekeeping in the region and the US generally points to other conflicts (you know, the ones we started) as reasons it can’t contribute to international peacekeeping efforts. On the other hand, this looks like an extension of the US’s “go it alone”, anti-UN strategy… and it’s hard to believe that there will be much support amongst the US public for the money and human cost of these missions.

The next place many more peacekeepers will likely be needed is in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Tutsi rebels - who may or may not be backed by Rwanda, have been seizing towns in the East, including the major city of Bukavu. The commander in charge of the rebels, Colonel Jules Mutebutsi, claimed that his men were intervening to prevent a genocide, then admitted that no genocide was taking place.

While the Kinshasa government struggled to regain control of cities in the region, it experiened a coup. Presidential guards briefly seized the television station. Unfortunately for them, it was 3am and the station wasn’t transmitting, so no one knew they’d “taken over”. President Kabila appeared the next morning, wearing military fatigues and assured people that everything was okay.

Depending on which gossip you listen to, the coup was either supported by Kagame in Rwanda as part of a bid for Rwanda to annex southeastern Congo and the mineral wealth associated with it, or was staged by Kabila loyalists to help strengthen his party as the country heads into transitional elections. Whoever you believe, increasingly, it’s looking like DRC may have a real challenge staying as a single nation.

Sorry, that’s a lot of misery in a single post, but it’s been an unusually bad week or two in the region.

I had a spooky experience with AT&T wireless yesterday. I’m in Berlin, with my cute new tri-band phone, designed to allow me to roam all over the world. While the phone roamed just great, I discovered that I was only able to call US numbers - calling my Hungarian or Danish colleagues here in Berlin got me a “number restricted error”.

So I ended up calling the AT&T help line to have them enable international calling (which I’d asked to be enabled when I bought the phone.) AT&T, understandably, wanted to authenticate me before allowing my phone to make some expensive calls. I expected to be asked for my social security number and billing address - and was. But then the nice phone support guy said something very interesting:

“Mr. Zuckerman, I’m about to ask you four questions. These should be questions to which only you have the answers.”

He proceeded on: “In which of the following counties have you owned real estate?” and then listed five counties around the country, including the county in which I own my house. The next two questions offered the “address” line of two of my previous mailing addresses - one of them over a decade old - and asked me to provide the city and state. And the final question listed six people’s names and asked me which ones I had a relationship with - the two listed were my parents.

I suspect this exercise was designed a) to help eliminate a particular type of fraud and b) to reassure me that AT&T wouldn’t do anything without my consent. The result was a different one - I found the experience deeply disturbing. My guess is that all the data AT&T was obtained was dug up when running a credit check on my account, which they do on all new subscribers. But it’s pretty disconcerting to see how much personal information a large corporation - or an ambitious private individual - can put together with a little motivation…

The irrepressible Tomas Krag is blogging here at Wizards of OS - notes on the panel I just spoke on are here. The Berliner Congress Center, while beautiful, is a disconcerting place to speak. The main hall holds about 800… there were maybe 100 for the panel I was speaking at, which meant that I was speaking to a small group of friends in the front, and then to a vast sea of empty chairs.

My friend Katrin from Aspiration (a very cool NGO building bridges between geeks and international non-profit organizations) has requested that I blog Jean Claude Guedon’s talk about Open Access Journals - a pleasure, given Jean Claude’s passion about the field. (I realize it’s non-obvious why I’m posting about Open Access Journals in my normal space to talk about Africa issues. However, there’s a real connection. The world of scientific publishing is very difficult to access for African libraries, who can’t afford to subscribe to expensive journals. Open Access Journals strive to make journals zero-cost to readers and libraries, increasing the flow of scientific knowledge, which is pretty critical for African libraries.)

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As open alternatives challenge market leaders like Elsiver, expect fierce competition and possible cooptation. But open access is alive and well, just hasn’t yet reached the state where authors spontaneously decide to publish open access.