At the U.N.

Of all the Obama appointees announced today, I am personally most interested about the ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice -- another Rice from Stanford (she got her BA there in 1986).

For one thing, she seems quite a change from John Bolton who simply despised the UN in which he worked (I was appalled by his appointment). What's more, Obama is making UN Ambassador a cabinet position during his administration.

I'm excited about her because her particular specialty seems to be African affairs, and one of her primary goals is to prevent and/or put a stop to genocide. I'm nervous about her because she seems very hawkish.

During her first run at the State Department, Ms. Rice was a point person in responding to Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But her most searing experience was visiting Rwanda after the 1994 genocide when she was still on the N.S.C. staff.

As she later described the scene, the hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing, hacked up bodies that she saw haunted her and fueled a desire to never let it happen again.

“I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required,” she told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001. She eventually became a sharp critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the Darfur killings and last year testified before Congress on behalf of an American-led bombing campaign or naval blockade to force a recalcitrant Sudanese government to stop the slaughter.

But I don't know. This could be a very positive thing, especially for African nations. Or it could be a disaster. Here's hoping it's a good thing.

The country of Africa

Sarah Palin took a lot of (probably unjustified) grief for saying that Africa was a country, not a continent, but I have to say that understanding is probably deeply embedded in a lot of us. I heard it today when Barack Obama was announcing the Secretary of the Treasury and said that "Growing up partly in Africa" had given him perspective on global markets--and it does. But I was surprised to find myself instantly wondering "Where in Africa?" knowing now better than before that "Africa" is not a country, and to grow up in Africa doesn't tell me as much as I think it does.

Incidentally--and significantly--the African nation where Geithner spent some of his youth was Zimbabwe, a country with a sad history of economic disaster.

Pray for Mauritania

One thing I hope to do with this blog is introduce us all (myself included) to the news from Africa.

Mauritania is a former French colony on the west coast of Africa, between Senegal and Mali. It gained independence in 1960 and has since then had bouts of very long, single party rule, interspersed with military coups (in 1978, 1984, 2005).

According to Wikipedia, the first fully democratic election since 1960 (when the French-backed President Moktada Ould Daddah began his 18-year one-party leadership), occurred in March of 2007. "This was the first time that the president had been selected in a multi-candidate election in the country's post-independence history."

All this being a lead-up to the news in Wednesday's NY Times that "A group of senior military officers in Mauritania arrested the country’s president and prime minister on Wednesday in a bloodless coup against the first freely elected government there in more than 20 years."

Hard to say what the motives were. The Times says the National Assembly had been critical of the government's handling of rising food prices and dealing with oil revenue. In the speedily updated Wikipedia article, "A Mauritanian lawmaker, Mohammed Al Mukhtar, announced that 'many of the country's people were supporting the takeover attempt' and the government was 'an authoritarian regime' and that the president had 'marginalized the majority in parliament.'"

As of today, according to the BBC, the ousted president's whereabouts are unclear, the U.S. has suspended $20 million in non-humanitarian aid (i.e. money for miliary purposes and peacekeeper training), and diplomats from the Arab Union and African Union have arrived in Mauritania to discuss the situation with coup leaders.

Again according to the BBC, things are calm on the ground for most people going about their daily business. The reported noted that "some people at the airport were joking about the situation - possibly as it is not regarded as that out of the ordinary given the country's history of coups."

But I can't help but believe an ongoing pattern of military coups is not good for a place. Please keep Mauritania in your prayers.