It’s been a lively 48 hours in Mongolia, a country where it’s never too cold for political tumult. On Wednesday, ten ministers in Prime Minister Elbegdorj‘s cabinet resigned, forcing formation of a new government.

Elbegdorj was named Prime Minister in 2004 as part of a compromise “Grand Coalition” government. 2004 parliamentary elections were very close – the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP – the former Communist party) lost their dominance of Mongolia’s parliament, the Grand Hural, winning only 38 of 76 seats. They were forced into a coalition with the Democratic Union Coalition, a coalition of reformist parties. The head of the DUC, Elbegdorj was named Prime Minister, but the majority of ministerial positions were given to MPRP members.

The ten ministers who resigned were all MPRP members. It’s widely speculated that they’ve resigned in order to force formation of a new government with an MPRP Prime Minister at the head, marginalizing the DUC.

The ministers’ resignation led to street protests by supporters of Elbegdorj and the DUC. Supporters marched from the parliament building to the headquarters of the MPRP, where they smashed windows and attempted to enter the building. While the rioting took place, the Grand Hural voted to accept the ministerial resignations, dissolving the government. Next week, the Hural will reconvene to find a path forward, which could include a new coalition, or plans for a general election.

Mongolia’s not Ukraine, despite what the US blogosphere is likely to write once right-wing bloggers hear that people are rioting in the streets against the former Communists. Elections in Mongolia have been free and competitive since shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. The government elected in 1996 moved far from the policies of Communist Mongolia – when free market economics proved a challenge for a previously state-controlled economy, control of the Grand Hural swung back to the Communists in 2000. The dissolution of the coalition of the Communists and their opponents is hardly a surprise, and points to the fact that Mongolian politics is freewheeling and democratic. (Chris Miller, writing from Ulaanbaatar, has more insights on Mongolian politics and recent developments.)

Nathan Hamm of Registan (and Global Voices, where he edits Central Asia and Eastern Europe) is following the events from afar and links to several blogs with perspectives on the situation, including yuu bna?, Mongolian Matters and Tom Terry.

Mr. Terry, a Christian missionary, and one of the organizers of independent Mongolian television station, EagleTV, has a particularly interesting view of the events on the ground, as his reporters are rushing around Ulaanbaatar to cover the parliamentary debates and the street protests. His criticism of Mongolia’s state-owned television stations is a bit self-serving, as his venture competes with them, but his accounts have some great details in them:

Meanwhile, a quick scan of local channels reveals the irresponsibility of Mongolian TV stations as every single one of them is busy showing Sumo wrestling pirated from NHK in Japan instead of the dramatic changes taking place in their government today – sometimes with violence.

(Well, duh. Asashoryu’s 4-1, as is Ama, and former Sekiwake Hakuho is undefeated at 5-0. Maybe Tom’s not a sumo fan.)

Writing today, Mr. Terry wonders if the CUD’s supporers’ decision to call off protests until Monday suggests that the protests will fizzle out. Protests so far have been unusually lively, including burned effigies of MPRP leaders. Terry reports:

Mongols tend to be very respectful of their leaders, even when they disagree with them – or hate them. But today Mongolian politics rose to a new level when protesters burned President Enkbayar, parliament member Badamjugunai, and Chief of Public Transportation Puvedorj in effigy. Such a thing has never happened in Mongolia.

Indeed, one of Mongolia’s great assets is that it’s been a stable, sane, democratic state in a tough part of the globe. I suspect Mongolian pragmatism and good humor will lead to a rapid solution to this current tumult… but it’s certainly going to be interesting to watch.

“Aunt Akwe”, who was bemused at her appearance in my last post, just sent me a highly comprehensive dictionary of Nigerian pidgin. It’s very helpful if you want to decipher Emmanuel Oluwatosin’s translation of the 23rd psalm, which begins:

The Lord na my shephard, I dey kampe.

E make me sidon for where betta dey flow and come put me next to stream make mai bodi thermacool.

Or translate the lyrics of “I Go Chop Your Dollar”, for that matter.

(By the way, “Aunt Akwe” doesn’t live in Lagos, I don’t send money to her, and she tells me she’d buy the beer for herself, not for Uncle Pat.)

While we’re on the subject of the burgeoning Nigerian blogosphere, Imnakoya of Grandiose Parlor mentions that mainstream Nigerian newspapers seem to be catching on to the phenomenal growth of Naija blogs. An article in the Daily Champion features the Nigerian Blog Aggregator, which now features 130 blogs from Nigerians inside and outside the country.

If you read just one Nigerian blog this week (and who can stop with just one?), read “Teju Cole”, the lyrical chronicle of a journey home by a Nigerian living in the US. It’s hard to say whether his photography or writing is more beautiful, but they both demand your time and attention.

Emeka Okafor, of Timbuktu Chronicles fame, highlights a paper about the Nigerian diaspora on his new blog, Africa Unchained. The paper, by Nigerian scholar Uche Nworah, is about the role of the Nigerian diaspora in nation building, and focuses in part on remittance – the money Nigerians living and working abroad send to family and friends at home.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of remittance income to most African nations and many developing nations. Nworah cites a figure of $300 billion dollars sent from diasporas to developing nations via remittance. In Africa, the amount of money remitted by diaspora workers – $17 billion per year – is larger than the amount of foreign direct investment in Africa, and rivals official development assistance grants or loans ($25 billion per year). In some African nations, remittance represent as much as 27% of the gross domestic product of some nations. According to the UN’s Office of the Special Advisor on Africa, the average African migrant living in a developed nation is sending $200 per month home to his or her family.

While remittance income is incredibly important for the developing world, there are at least four major problems with the remittance system as it currently exists: cost, safety, potential for misuse, and scale issues.

Cost – It costs a lot of money to send money overseas. If you’re lucky enough to be sending money from your bank account to a bank account in another country, the process is somewhat complex, but not very costly – I routinely send money overseas for $5 per transfer. But use a service like Western Union and you’ll pay at least 6% of your money in fees – more, if you’re sending small amounts of money. (According to the calculator on Western Union’s site, sending $200 to Nigeria will cost you $12. Once past the $12 minimum, WU charges 6% of the amount you’re sending, up to $1000, their maximum amount allowed for a first transfer. Less than $200 also nets a $12 charge. Other countries are more expensive – $200 to Ghana or Mali costs $22, or 11%.) An article by Dilip Ratha, a senior World Bank Economist, reports that 13% of the average remittance is claimed by transaction fees.

Safety – If you send money to Aunt Akwe in Lagos and she goes to the Western Union to pick it up, she’s a target for a mugging, as it’s likely that she’ll be coming out of the shop with money in her hand.

Misuse – You may have been sending Aunt Akwe money to pay for your cousins’ school fees. But there’s no guarantee that Aunt Akwe isn’t going to spend it on lottery tickets, or beer for crazy Uncle Pat.

Scale – Sending money home will help Aunt Akwe repair the family homestead and send the kids to school, but it won’t pave the road the house is on, or build a new secondary school nearby. While $200 a month has a huge impact in the life of a family, collective action of many families is required to make major projects possible.

Hundreds of creative efforts are underway across the developing world to solve these problems with remittance. To address safety issues, MoneyGram is offering delivery services of money transfers in the Phillipines, bringing money to your door instead of forcing you to come and collect your funds from an office in town. Alternatively, if your recipient has an ATM card, they will transfer the deposit to her account.

A new remittance strategy – goods and service remittance – addresses the safety, cost and misuse issues simultaneously. Instead of sending money home, make a purchase from a store or website in the US or Europe, and powdered milk, cans of corned beef or a live goat is delivered to your relatives. Manuel Orozco, an economist with the IADB, estimates that as much as 10% of all remittance happens via goods and services.

Mama Mike’s – a pioneer in goods remittance – offers online shoppers the ability to buy supermarket vouchers and mobile phone airtime for relatives in Kenya and Uganda, as well as more conventional gifts like flowers and cards. SuperPlus, Jamaica’s largest supermarket chain, goes even further, allowing online shoppers to fill a shopping card for their relatives and arrange for them to pick up the order in one of the SuperPlus stores around the country. SuperPlus is a partner with both Western Union and MoneyGram and has been promoting its supermarket remittance service through Western Union and MoneyGram stores in New York City, home to a large Jamaican diaspora. Goods remittance services generally don’t charge a fee, making their profit off goods sales instead.

Harder to address than the first three problems is the scale issue – how can remittances have a positive impact beyond the immediate family receiving money from abroad? The Mexican state of Zacatecas has tried a financial incentive – for each dollar a worker sends home to support a local project (building schools, paving roads, digging wells), the state government matches with two dollars. Town governments have increased the match to three to one, and in 2003, $20 million was remitted to support 308 “tres por uno” projects in the state.

Would a three for one system work in Nigeria? It requires faith that money remitted would go towards community projects and not be diverted along the way. Unfortunately, in countries with long-standing government corruption problems, this sort of faith can be hard to build, especially in a diaspora that left, in part, to escape problems of poor governance.

I’ve been playing with PubSub for a few months now, ever since Jay Rosen told me that he was using it as a complement to Technorati and Blogpulse to find folks linking to his posts. He mentioned that PubSub was finding links to his posts that the other engines didn’t find… and he’s right – I’m seeing a lot of links through PubSub that I don’t get from the other two, especially from Livejournal, which PubSub seems to cover more closely than the other engines.

(In 1998, Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles wrote a cool paper – “Searching the World Wide Web” – which compared the results of various search engine catalogs to estimate their respective sizes as well as the size of the indexable web. It would be great fun to do the same with blog search engines… except you’d be indexing the pinging blogosphere, which I’m increasingly convinced is substantially smaller than the entire blogosphere. But that’s another post entirely.)

I got to meet Salim Ismail – the smart and charming CEO of PubSub – in Paris a few weeks back, and he joined Rebecca and me for a meeting at Berkman yesterday. (How can you not like a man whose blog is titled “You’ve Got Ismail”? He claims he’s not responsible for choosing the name…)

Salim’s pitch for PubSub to the larger Berkman group is that it’s about “prospective, not retrospective search”. It’s a good soundbite, but it’s taken me a while to unpack what it actually means. Most search engines build catalogs by spidering pages – they retrieve pages published on the web, follow links on those pages to find other pages, and build catalogs of these pages, which users then search. In the bad old days, search engines would sometimes take months to discover new pages – when I worked for Tripod, our acquirer, Lycos, took well over a month to build a new catalog. New homepages created in the interim had to wait weeks to get indexed. Engines like Google do partial catalog builds every day, and pages that get updated frequently (like blogs) can get spidered dozens of times a day. But fundamentally, existing search engines are about pulling down content, creating an indexed catalog and letting you search that index.

PubSub works on a different model. There’s no catalog to search. Instead, PubSub asks you to subscribe to a query and updates you on pieces of content added to the web that match your query. It does this by monitoring as many feeds as it can get access to, including blogs, EDGAR filings, usenet newsgroups – basically, anything that has an RSS or Atom feed. According to the site, 1481 new items from 21 million sources pass through the system every second minute (corrected 1/12/2006) – the system then needs to match each of these new items against all the subscriptions that users have registered (unclear how many subscriptions there are at present, but even with a few hundred thousand, that’s a LOT of computation handled quite quickly.)

Talking with Salim yesterday, one interesting implication of this model became clear – it’s pretty easy to create specialized catalogs of weblogs that can be monitored or “prospectively” searched on. Pubsub currently has a couple of “Community Lists”, a list of comparative popularity of all legal, PR, librarian and fashion blogs, for instance. It’s not hard to imagine doing a list of all Kenyan blogs, for instance, and tracking comparative popularity. Or making it possible to search for “Kibaki” on Kenyan blogs and get posts from that blogosphere that mention this term. I’m not convinced that setting up a competitive dynamic in local blogospheres is the healthiest project to get involved with, but I’m simultaneously intrigued to see whether the most popular African blogger is more popular than the most popular librarian, for instance.

(I don’t mean to suggest that Blogpulse or Technorati couldn’t implement the ability to search against custom catalogs. I’ve suggested to both teams in the past that they offer the feature of searching against a catalog of “most trafficked” blogs… which would allow me to do all sorts of fun research comparing linking and attention structure between all blogs and “A-List” blogs. But these searches on a catalog-based engine probably involve doing a keyword search and then filtering the results to choose only blogs represented in the catalog – kinda like searching for a term on Technorati then sorting results by “authority” of bloggers creating a post. On Pubsub, searching against a custom catalog just means adding an AND to a stored request (“kibaki AND in the set of Kenya blogs”) – my guess is it’s somewhat easier to run these searches, which is why PubSub is featuring this functionality. But hey, this is a blog post and I suspect that if I’m wrong, someone will let me know. Probably rather loudly.)

Tech aside, I wonder whether detailed, ranked catalogs of country blogs would do more to get people interested in Tunisian or Cambodian blogs than the open and chaotic index we currently maintain on the Global Voices wiki, or through the BlogAfrica aggregator. Is it a good idea to encourage the Jordanian blogosphere to compete to see who’s best linked? Does it help non-Jordanians decide which blogs to check out first from the region? Are other local blogospheres as competitive as the Indian blogosphere? And is this competition a good thing or a bad thing?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning more about PubSub to see whether it might be another tool we can use at Global Voices to help get people excited about different local blogospheres.

My friend and colleague Janet Haven writes that she’s heading to Uganda this week, to the Tactical Technology Africa Source conference. I’m doubly sorry that I’m not going, both because dozens of great people are going to be at the meeting and because it would be a really interesting time to have a front-row seat to observe Ugandan politics.

Uganda has been a one-party state for most of Yoweri Museveni’s 19-year rule. Even most of Museveni’s critics would acknowledge that he’s an improvement over his predecesors, the murderous Idi Amin and the corrupt Milton Obote. While he’s been ineffective in preventing attacks from the Lord’s Resistance Army in the north (perpetuating one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet), much of the rest of the country is safe, and Uganda’s reaction to the HIV/AIDS crisis has been celebrated in international aid circles. Indeed, Museveni was hailed by President Clinton as part of a “new generation” of African leaders, dedicated to democratic rule and fighting corruption.

On the other hand, the World Court has just determined Ugandan soldiers invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1998 – 2003 and looted mineral resources. The Congolese government plans to seek billions in restitution from Uganda. Museveni’s amendment of the constitution to allow him to run for an additional term, combined with aggresive repression of opposition parties have led several international donors to pull out of Uganda on the grounds that Museveni isn’t serious about a transition to multiparty elections.

It’s easy to see their concerns. Uganda’s most popular opposition leader, Dr. Kizza Besigye (the president’s former personal physician), has been in exile for the past four years. He challenged Museveni for the presidency in 2001 and won 27.8% of the vote, despite widespread vote rigging. After narrowly losing a challenge to invalidate the voting in Ugandan court, he was arrested and questioned on charges of treason – he wisely decided to leave Uganda for the United States. In October 2004, he returned to Uganda to register to vote (part of the process of registering as a candidate). A few weeks after his return, he was arrested and charged with treason, as well as a 1997 rape. When Besigye made bail, he was promptly re-arrested on outstanding military charges and put before a court-martial. The High Court released him on January 2nd. (The wikipedia article on Dr. Besigye has a more detailed timetable.)

(I’ve had trouble unravelling the rape charges against Besigye as it’s very hard to get an account of the accusations and Besigye’s response to them. The treason charges are easier to understand – Besigye is accused of ties to various rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as to the Lord’s Resistance Army. Comments he’s made threatening to “fight from the bush” if he’s not able to win an election tend to reinforce fears that he has ties to armed groups. Comments from Museveni supporters on blogs that have commented on the situation in Uganda suggest that some opposition to Besigye is connected to a perception that he supports the violence of groups like the LRA.)

If, as many suspect, the zealous prosecution of Besigye is an effort by Museveni to weaken his opponent before elections, the tactics may be backfiring. Besigye’s arrest sparked outrage in Uganda’s (somewhat independent) press and some rioting. Museveni’s government responded by banning public discussion of the trial and threatening to close down radio stations that allowed such discussions to take place. Blake Lambert, writing in the Christian Science Monitor’s notebook observes that massive street demonstrations are being held by Besigye’s supporters, despite the presence of military police, and their tendency to tear-gas and beat opposition supporters. One of Besigye’s supporters told Lambert that crowds of this size followed Museveni around the country for the first decade of his rule – they’re now following the opposition leader.

Joseph Were, in an op-ed in Ugandan newspaper “The Daily Monitor” uses a recent poll to speculate that turnout for the February election will be over 95% and that Besigye may be able to pull enough support from Museveni to force a run-off election (if Museveni does not receive 50% of the vote.)

The closeness of the upcoming vote appears to be bringing out the dirtiest of politics. Two Ugandan members of parliament from Besigye’s FDC party were released from prison today – they’d been arrested on murder charges, accused of “instigating” the murder of another politician in 2002. The judge who dismissed the case dismissed the prosecution’s arguments as “a crude and amateur attempt at creative work,” suggesting the case was politically motivated.

African and afrophile bloggers are watching the situation in Uganda closely. Brian at Black Star Journal has a (very little) bit of sympathy for Museveni, recognizing him as a man who can’t change with the times:

When he took power in 1986 following a guerrilla war, the African Big Man was in vogue. From Mobutu in Zaire to Omar Bongo in Gabon to Daniel arap Moi in neighboring Kenya, the head of state-as-God phenemon seemed well-entrenched. Little did he know that this trend would start its downward decline in the 1990s. Museveni never adjusted.

Janet, I don’t know how much of this will be apparent from the blissful isolation of the Africa Source camp, but I hope you’ll write an less us know. And hey, bring me a copy of “The Monitor” if you can.

Blogafrica includes a number of Uganda-focused blogs, including the explicitly partisan Museveni Out Campaign, as well as UgandaCAN, which focuses on the under-reported conflict in the north of the country.

The image above is an ad for Besigye’s campaign, taken from the Monitor’s website. My reproduction of it here does not constitute an endorsement of Besigye’s campaign.

I’m a firm believer that a positive transformation of the African continent will come from increased trade, both between African nations and with other continents. But it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about the news that trade between China and Africa has increased 39% over the last year.

Much of the China/Africa trade involves Sudanese oil. Now the world’s second-largest consumer of petroleum, China has been investing heavily in oil infrastructure around the world. This includes a pipeline that brings oil from Sudanese oilfields to a terminal in the Red Sea, representing 10% of China’s total oil imports. Peter Goodman of the Washington Post reports that Sudanese troops have been given rifles, tanks, helicopters and other weapons by the Chinese government to protect this pipeline, and that Chinese assistance has helped Khartoum build three munitions factories. It’s highly likely that these weapons have been used in the government’s struggles against rebel groups in Darfur. When free trade advocates suggested that African nations trade more widely, they probably weren’t advocating trade that included transfers of arms to a genocidal regime.

While countries like the US have accompanied trade and aid to African nations with economic advice and policy prescriptions, the Chinese government has been content to stick to trade issues in many of their negotiations. From Goodman’s story:

In an interview in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, Energy and Mining Minister Awad Ahmed Jaz praised his Chinese partners for sticking to trade issues.

“The Chinese are very nice,” he said. “They don’t have anything to do with any politics or problems. Things move smoothly, successfully. They are very hard workers looking for business, not politics.”

As Abe McLaughlin of the Christian Science Monitor has pointed out in his reporting about China’s influence in Africa, this willingness to stick to business issues has made China a popular trading partner with nations like Zimbabwe, which experience strong human rights pressures in other trade relationships.

Chad, Sudan’s neighbor to the west, has also seen its economy transformed by the discovery of oil. Exporting this oil required a pipeline to Cameroon, which the World Bank financed with a loan in 1999. Attempting to ensure that oil revenues would be used for education and health projects, not for military expansion, the World Bank required that 10% of all revenues be put into a fund that could be used only for human development. At the time of the deal, it was hailed a “new model for natural resource development” in Africa.

Now facing increasingly tense border skirmishes with Sudan, the Chadian government has changed its policy and is now allocating some of the reserved money towards “other priorities”, which include defense spending. The World Bank has responded by suspending all lending to Chad, attempting to pressure President Idriss Déby to honor the original agreement. (VOA has a good story on Chadian reactions to the World Bank decision.)

It’s admirable that the World Bank is attempting to ensure their investment has the social impacts it was intented to have… though it’s worth noting that lots of smart people doubted the efforts to sequester oil profits into this account would work. But it’s worth asking this question: What happens when African leaders are faced with the choice between doing business with a partner that asks no questions versus one that uses investment to create pressure for social change? If Déby were building a pipeline now, rather than in 1999, it’s reasonable to speculate that he might have looked to China, not to the World Bank and IMF for funding.

If you’re interested in this topic, please see my earlier post “Haier, Huawei and the new Scramble for Africa”.

I couldn’t figure out anything to write to help contextualize this (soul-crushingly depressing) story about sex tourism in West Africa. Fortunately, Sokari could, and did.

Hanging out with geeky friends Nate and Beth, we got talking about technical customer support experiences. I had a horrible, then excellent service experience recently with Verizon. I needed to know what address Verizon’s DSL service wanted me to use as a DNS nameserver. The first person I spoke to insisted that Verizon wasn’t required to tell me an address for a DNS server, that she didn’t know any DNS server addresses and that DNS was a special feature of Apple computers and that Apple would need to help me with a DNS problem. My (not very patient) explanation that Apple did not, in fact, run Verizon’s DNS nameservers and insistence that she let me talk to someone more experienced went poorly, and I spent half an hour on hold before I got to speak to a third-level support person.

He promptly apologized for his colleague, gave me the information I needed, then worked with me for ten minutes to write a script for Verizon tech staff to support Macintosh users on DNS issues, so that other folks wouldn’t have the bad experience I’d had. The last thing he said to me before we parted amicably: “I’m going to change the first-tier script so that anyone who knows the word ‘DNS’ gets escalated. If you know enough to know about DNS, you shouldn’t be talking to our first tier people.”

I used to run a pretty big customer service department for Tripod, supporting 15 million web users. We didn’t use a tiered support system out of some sort of collectivist sense that everyone should suffer equally and even our most experienced customer service reps needed to stay true to their roots and answer basic emails. But most tech companies do: most calls or emails are handled by less experienced CSRs, who rely on scripts – tough problems get “escalated” to higher tiers of customer support, where they’re answered by more experienced engineers, who often have more authority to solve problems for a user.

Tiered support makes some financial sense to companies who’d prefer to pay a few geeks well and many CSRs poorly… or outsource their jobs overseas. But it tends to lead to a pretty bad experience for customers, especially technically knowledgeable customers. (“Is your computer plugged in?” “Why no, I never thought of that. Does it need to be?”)

(Then again, there are companies that use scripts all the way up the tech support chain. After making it to third tier tech support with DirectTV’s Direcway satellite service, I had a wonderful dialog with a CSR which began: “I can’t believe I have to ask you this question: do you have a voltmeter handy?” Why yes – I always have a voltmeter handy!)

So here was our idea: use the time when a caller is on hold to figure out the caller’s level of technical expertise. Perhaps a trivia quiz: ask the user a couple of multiple choice questions and escalate based on her answers. Answer “What does IP stand for in TCP/IP?” correctly and you pass the first level of CDR responders. Get the next one – “What’s special about the address 127.0.0.1?” – and we’ll give you a third tier CSR. Get the advanced questions – “Who’s Paul Vixie?” – correct and get connected directly to the engineering staff.

We’d need to change the questions frequently or people will be passing around answer keys they way they pass around cheat sheets that get them through interactive voice response systems. And perhaps once you established your geek cred by answering one quiz correctly, you’d get a free pass through the system the next time. (Nate wants these passes to be transferrable – establish yourself as a tier-3 user for Earthlink and you’ll automatically make it to tier-3 when you call Dell…)

Is it unfair to less technically knowledgeable users to give a free pass to the more knowledgeable users? Possibly – you could argue that it simply gets the users to the right person to answer their question. But what a great incentive for users to learn more about the tools they’re using – I’d happily spend a few more hours getting smart about the tech I use if it would help save me from tech support hell.

It’ll never happen. But wouldn’t it be fun if it did?

Lisa Stone is interviewing me and my Global Voices co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon. tomorrow on the weekly Yi-Tan conference call. The Yi-Tan call is a cool institution – a free conference call hosted by Pip Coburn and Jerry Michalski which features cool technical folks and gives people a chance to ask them hard questions, either over the phone or email.

Rebecca and I will be talking about the Global Voices summit, some of our history and thoughts about where Global Voices is going in the next year. If you’d like to be part of the conversation, check out Lisa’s post for ways to join in.

I wrote a couple of days back about my sense of guilt at not covering the plight of Sudanese refugees in Cairo more carefully. Thinking about stories that I – and others – haven’t covered closely enough in Africa, two come to the front of my mind: Darfur and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. A few links on both subjects:

The Lancet has released a study (free registration required) that estimates that the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo – active from 1996-7 and then 1998-2002 – continues to have a massive effect on mortality in the vast country, causing 38,000 deaths a month, primarily from preventable diseases like dehydration caused by diarrhea. The study estimates that the war in the DRC is responsible for 3.8 million deaths that would not have otherwise occurred, making it the largest humanitarian disaster in the world, and making the “First African World War” the most deadly worldwide since World War II.

The study establishes a baseline for mortality by surveying households, asking how many people died each year and of what causes for each year over the past several years. The years without wars are used as a baseline for the “crude mortality rate” for the nation, and are contrasted to the crude mortality rate in the years where the nation is at war.

This is an estimation method – it’s impossible to count all the people who died in a country like DRC in a given year – it can be highly accurate if careful random sampling takes place… and from my brief glance at the Lancet study, it appears to have been very carefully done. Because it’s a sampling method, not a count, the survey can’t state definitively that 3.8 million people have died in DRC – instead, that’s the middle of a confidence interval of the survey. There’s a 95% confidence interval that DRC’s crude mortality rate was between 1.6 to 2.6 per 1000 per month, as contrasted to sub-Saharan Africa’s crude mortality rate of 1.5 per 1000 per month. In other words, there’s less than a 3% chance that there isn’t a significant affect on mortality from the conflict above the continent-wide baseline, and a strong chance that the effect is a profound one.

The same methodology was used in the Lancet study of civilian deaths in Iraq – Dr. Richard Garfield was an author on both studies and is an expert on the cluster sample survey methodology. The Iraq study, as you may recall, caused some controversy because its 95% confidence interval included a range of Iraqi civilian deaths from 8,000 to 194,000 deaths. That survey tallied results from approximately 900 Iraqi households – the DRC study, which has now been performed four times with similar results, most recently surveyed 19,500 households.

While the Iraqi study found that most deaths were due to violence – specifically collateral damage from US airstrikes – the vast majority of deaths in DRC are due to disease, often complicated by malnutrition. Basically, the war – which destroyed the public health system and displaced hundreds of thousands of people – is a man-made disaster beyond the scale of natural disasters like the Southeast Asian Tsunami or the India/Pakistan Earthquake. While the DRC government is making progress on holding elections and rebuilding some social services, Eastern DRC is vast, desperately poor, extremely hard to navigate (few roads, militias still operating in some areas)… and isn’t getting much attention or aid from the global community. Updating the numbers of dead to this new, stunning figure probably won’t change that much, but it’s an important reminder that one of the most important conflicts of the 20th century is still having tragic impacts.

(If you need a refresher on the war in DRC, BBC’s timeline from late 2004 isn’t bad – the situation is less tense than it was when the timeline was published, though many of the underlying factors are still at play.)

Attention doesn’t always mean intervention, as the conflict in Darfur has demonstrated. Despite sustained campaigning by several groups, countless editorials by smart folks like Nicholas Kristoff and Samantha Power, the Sudanese government and their affiliated thugs have succeeded in chasing Darfurians off their land and into refugee camps.

Fortunately, the attention has helped sponsor relief efforts that are trying hard to prevent the sort of death rates in Darfur that were experienced in the DRC at the height of the conflict. My friend “Sleepless in Sudan” is on leave, getting a well-deserved rest, so I’ll take the opportunity to point you towards Yoo-Mi Lee, a remarkable activist and humanitarian, who has stories and photos of her recent work in Darfur, helping women in refugee camps learn to cook using fuel efficient stoves (critical, since woodgathering is an activity that exposes women to attack – including rape – by Janjawid thugs), distributing food and reporting on the warning signs of attacks by the SLA.

(Who’s the SLA? The Janjawid? Again, the BBC has help for you.)

Yoo-Mi’s photos help make the situation in Darfur more immediate to me, and I find myself wishing that there were dozens of DRC photos I could point to in illustrating this post. One of my big hopes for Global Voices this year is that we’ll be able to get some digital cameras donated by one or more tech companies and get them into the hands of bloggers who can help illustrate some of these critical undercovered stories.