Wars and Conflict

Every summer Friday, we suggest foreign-policy-themed movies worth watching. This week: films about stormy relationships and battles at sea.

The conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, far from over following the federal government's declaration of a ceasefire and Tigrayan fighters' capture of Mekelle, is entering an anxious new phase.

The following interview is with Fatma El Mehdi, one of eight negotiators in the Western Sahara peace process and a leader in the Sahrawi community.

Every summer Friday, we suggest foreign-policy-themed movies worth watching. This week: films about romance amid conflict.

Each Friday this summer, we suggest foreign-policy-themed movies worth watching. This week: films about UFOs and aliens.

The Buhari administration's June ban on Twitter in Nigeria, combined with proposals within Buhari's All Progressives Congress (APC) to allow the federal government to establish a "code of conduct" for Nigeria's media to counter, among other things, "fake news," rightly sets off alarm bells within the human rights community. Nigeria is challenged on multiple fronts: a jihadi insurrection in the North East and increasingly in the North West; quarrels over water and land, especially in the Middle Belt; separatism in the South West and the South East; and kidnapping nearly everywhere. The growing perception among many in Nigeria is that the country does not meet the first condition of statehood: the provision of security for its citizens. This is the context for a drift to authoritarianism by a government under siege. As one observer writes in Foreign Policy, the Twitter ban is “another sign that dictatorship is back” in Nigeria. Such reactions draw on a well of suspicion—based on Buhari's 1983–85 tenure as military chief of state—that the now-civilian president remains, at heart, an authoritarian. While at present these concerns are overstated—institutional security-service weakness makes authoritarianism difficulty to implement—they are cause for concern and require close monitoring. Media is reporting that discussions are underway between the Nigerian authorities and Twitter about ending the ban. The proposed APC legislation for a code of conduct framework has not become law. Nevertheless, the Twitter ban, which remains in force, is certainly a blight on Nigeria's free-wheeling culture of freedom of speech, especially among young, well-educated urbanites not sympathetic to Nigeria's political economy. It also hurts Nigeria's reputation abroad. The Nigerian government banned Twitter after the tech company took down a tweet that violated Twitter guidelines. The text of the offending tweet, which made reference to the always neuralgic topic of Biafran separatism, is below. "Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand." Awkward relations between Twitter and the Nigerian government and between Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, and Muhammadu Buhari have a history. Many of the October 2020 #EndSARS demonstrations against police brutality—in particular, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police unit—were organized on Twitter; the #EndSARS protests were supported by Jack Dorsey. Then Twitter placed its African base of operations in Ghana, a country with a much smaller population, rather than Nigeria—a slap in the face of Nigerian aspirations to become the tech hub of Africa. In terms of cultural expectations, Dorsey aligns with the outward-looking, young, relatively well-educated urban elite. That is far from Buhari's political base and from the majority of rural, poor Nigerians. Nevertheless, Nigeria has by far the greatest population in Africa, and, with an underdeveloped banking system, it is a potential market for Square, the highly profitable bill-paying platform for which Dorsey also serves as chief executive. As for the Twitter ban, it would appear to shoot all parties in the foot—one estimate is that the ban costs the Nigerian economy $6 million per day—and it is likely that the government will rescind it as part of a face-saving deal with Dorsey. The capture of Biafran separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu is likely to increase government self-confidence, thereby facilitating an end to the standoff with Twitter. This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

On June 9, following a closed-door meeting, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) issued a public statement that the Igbo-dominated southeast should be allowed to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria if it was necessary to avoid a civil war. NEF spokesman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed said “the Forum has arrived at the difficult conclusion that if support for secession among the Igbo is as widespread as it is being made to look, and Igbo leadership appears to be in support of it, then the country should be advised not to stand in the way.” His statement continued that secession was not in the best interest of the Igbos or of Nigerians. Rather, all should work to rebuild Nigeria. But, blocking secession “will not help a country already burdened with failures on its knees to fight another war to keep the Igbo in Nigeria.” The statement also suggested that northerners subject to harassment in the southeast should return to the north. There was no reference to secessionist sentiment in Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria, to which former President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred. The former president said that Yoruba secession, too, would be unwise, but that maintaining unity should not come “at any cost.” Though there is no specific reference to it, clearly animating the NEF statement is the memory of Nigeria’s 1967-70 civil war, successfully fought by Nigerian nationalists to keep Igbo-dominated Biafra in the federation; it left up to two million dead. It, too, involved massive population movements, with Igbos fleeing to the south a northern pogrom and fewer northerners leaving the southeast. In the civil war, northern elites strongly supported the nationalists. Current Igbo disgruntlement has its roots in defeat in the civil war and the belief that they are marginalized from the upper reaches of the Nigerian state. (There has never been an Igbo president of Nigeria.) Such feelings of marginalization are exacerbated by Nigeria’s nationwide epidemic of violence and economic malaise. The NEF, for its part, has responded to rising insecurity in Nigeria by calling for President Buhari to resign or to be impeached. Resignation or impeachment is a reversal of the NEF’s support of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy in 2015. It should be noted that the NEF statement in support of allowing secession had two caveats: that there be widespread support for it among the Igbo but also among their “leadership” (not further defined). While secessionist advocates will argue to the contrary, prima facie evidence for both either way is thin. Do the views of the NEF matter? How representative is it of northern elite opinion? Buhari’s Special Adviser on Media Femi Adesina responded to its June 9 statement by dismissing the NEF as “a mere irritant” that hardly exists beyond its convener, Ango Abdullahi—a distinguished, former vice chancellor (president) of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. According to Adesina, the former vice chancellor is a general with no troops. Indeed, the influence of the NEF is hard to judge. But, its public statements attract widespread media attention. As with former President Obasanjo’s comments on Yoruba separatism, at the very least the NEF statements is an indication that rising insecurity is leading at least some of Nigeria’s elites to rethink the basis of the Nigerian state—and of the consequences of its civil war.

The United States has fought twelve major wars and numerous smaller skirmishes in its history. Memorial Day is how we honor the soldiers, sailors, airmen, airwomen, and marines who did not return home. The holiday dates back to the months immediately following the Civil War when a few towns and cities began honoring their dead. In 1868, General John A. Logan—at the time the head of an organization for Union veterans, later a U.S. senator from Illinois, and the man for whom Logan Circle in Washington, DC, is named—called for May 30 to be designated “Decoration Day.” He said the purpose would be for “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” The holiday was renamed Memorial Day after World War I, and its purpose became to honor all Americans who have died fighting the nation’s wars. Since 1971, Memorial Day has been celebrated on the last Monday in May. In honor of Memorial Day, here are the stories of four Americans who were awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, for making the ultimate sacrifice: Lieutenant Colonel Emory J. Pike was born in Columbus City, Iowa, on December 17, 1876, and spent most of his boyhood forty-five miles west in Sigourney, Iowa. He graduated from West Point in 1901, where he ranked seventy-third in a class of seventy-four. He did his first tour of duty in Cuba. Over the next fifteen years, he rose through the ranks and was stationed at various army bases around the United States. In April 1918, he was dispatched to Europe as a machine-gun officer in the 82nd Division. On September 15, 1918, Pike was in Vandieres, France, as the Battle of St. Mihiel raged. He was at the front surveying possible new machine gun positions when the advancing U.S. troops scattered in the face of heavy German shelling. Pike led the effort to help the troops regroup, encouraging the men to rally and resume their fire. When one of the soldiers was wounded by incoming artillery fire, he raced to the man’s aid. A second shell exploded as he reached the fallen soldier, badly wounding Pike. Despite his grievous injuries, he continued to oversee the reorganization effort and keep morale high. He died the next day from his wounds. Pike was the first member of the 82nd Division to be awarded the Medal of Honor, and the only West Point graduate to be awarded the Medal of Honor during World War I. Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Owen F. Hammerberg was born on May 31, 1920, in Daggett, Michigan, a small town in the state’s Upper Peninsula, not far from the Wisconsin border, but he lived in Flint when he was a teenager. Hammerberg dropped out of high school, hitchhiked west, and eventually landed a job working on a ranch. He joined the Navy in July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor. Hammerberg served on the USS Idaho and the USS Advent, where his heroics untangling a ship’s cable from a mine earned him a ticket to Navy dive school. After graduation, he was assigned to the Pacific Fleet Salvage Force, Mobile Diving Salvage Unit 1 at Pearl Harbor. On February 17, 1945, Hammerberg’s diving team was assisting with the cleanup from the West Loch Disaster, a series of explosions that began aboard a tank landing ship (LST) berthed at Pearl Harbor and that killed 163 people. As Hammerberg’s team was raising a ship that sank during the disaster, two divers from another team became trapped under the wreckage. Hammerberg volunteered to rescue them. After working for five hours in total darkness, he freed the first diver. It took another thirteen hours to discover the second diver. However, as he was seeking to extract the diver, the ship caved in, killing Hammerberg and pinning him against the diver he sought to save. The diver survived because Hammerberg's body protected him, and he was rescued two days later. In 1954, the Navy named the USS Hammerberg in Hammerberg’s honor. Major Louis J. Sebille was born in Harbor Beach, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron, on November 21, 1915. He moved to Chicago after attending Wayne State University and joined the Army Air Corps two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was twenty-six, just above the maximum age for pilots, so he needed a waiver to join. As a B-26 pilot during World War II, he flew sixty-eight combat missions and rose to the rank of major. He worked as a commercial pilot briefly after the war, but rejoined the service in July 1946. Two years later, he became the commanding officer of the 67th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, 18th Fighter-Bomber Group, 5th Air Force. Once the Korean War began, Major Sebille’s squadron was ordered to Japan and began flying missions against North Korean targets. On August 5, 1950, he attempted to release the two 500-pound bombs that his F-51 Mustang carried. Only one bomb released, however. As he went on to strafe North Korean targets, his plane was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. Major Sebille nonetheless decided to make one more pass at the enemy position, telling one of his wingmen: “I’ll never be able to make it back. I’m going back to get that bastard.” He flew his plane directly into enemy gun batteries. He left behind a wife and a nineteen-month-old son. Major Sebille was the first member of the Air Force to receive the Medal of Honor after the Air Force was established as its own branch of the U.S. military. Private First Class Robert H. Jenkins Jr. was born on June 1, 1948, in Interlachen, Florida, a small town located twenty-six miles east of Gainesville. He graduated in 1967 from Palatka Central Academy, an all-Black high school. The next year he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Within five months, he was deployed to Vietnam with the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division. Jenkins served first as a scout and driver, but later became a machine gunner with the battalion’s Company C. On March 5, 1969, Jenkins’ twelve-person reconnaissance team was defending Fire Support Base Argonne, located just south of the demilitarized zone, when the North Vietnamese attacked. Jenkins and another soldier were firing on the enemy when a North Vietnamese hand grenade landed near them. Jenkins pushed his comrade to the ground and threw his body on top of him. This quick action saved the comrade’s life but left Jenkins mortally wounded. He was twenty years old when he died. His name is engraved on Panel 30W, Line 46 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Robert H. Jenkins, Jr. Middle School in Palatka, Florida, is named in his honor. You can read about other Americans who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their bravery and supreme sacrifice here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post.

Attempting to shut down discussion of the potential weaponization of geoengineering is unwise. We can only see a short way into the future.

As the insurgency in northern Mozambique continues to escalate, not only is the humanitarian crisis deepening, but the instability’s ripple effects are being felt far beyond Mozambique’s borders.