Tweet, Tweet: You’re Dead

This is certainly a first. Late last week the Kenyan military took to Twitter to warn Somali towns of an imminent offensive against al-Shabab. From the Al-Jazeera article which was one of the first to cover the story:

Major Emmanuel Chirchir, the Kenyan military spokesman, said on his Twitter account that residents of Baidoa, Baadheere, Baydhabo, Dinsur, Afgoye, Bwale, Barawe, Jilib, Kismayo and Afmadow that their towns are under imminent attack.

Chirchir said that anyone with relatives and friends in the towns should be advised accordingly.

The Kenyan military said that it will attack 10 Somali towns where it believes al-Shabab has a presence and advised civilians to stay away from al-Shabab camps or being used as conduits for weapons.

Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste, speaking from Nairobi, said that while it is not unusual for the Kenyan government to make such warnings before attacks, the use of social media to do so is, however, something novel.

Bringing social media into protocol “advance warning” by a government has interesting implications for the future of civilian casualties in conventional warfare. Customary international humanitarian law makes it clear that the attacking force should give such a warning before an assault which may have civilian ramifications. “Effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit,” is what the Geneva Conventions officially say.

These standards aren’t new, obscure, or hippy-dippy; advance warning through traditional methods has been standard practice even before 20th century warfare. In modern times it was first codified in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 “Lieber Code”: “Commanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so that the noncombatants, and especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences.” But in Lincoln’s days (when it was prudent, of course) these commanders would send a messenger to a town on horseback to warn a centralized local figure; villagers wouldn’t get a pop-up in their inbox letting them know directly. While improvements to this practice came over time with the adoption of radio, television, and Internet, a “middleman” has always held some sort of role in advance warning.

The use of social media by governments to carry out advance warning effectively cuts out this middleman, a shift which is certainly a step in the right direction. When information doesn’t have to be filtered through a chain of command, reaction time can be reduced and lives may ultimately be saved. The egalitarian essence of public information like this also ensures, at least on its face, that no single group will be excluded from receiving it.

But the official use of social media to warn civilians of military offensives may not be all rainbows and butterflies. One unsettling possibility is that a public broadcast runs the risk of endorsing hatred and violence against the target. It is not difficult to imagine the role social media would have played in the Rwandan genocide, where Hutu radio and print media fueled killings through hate speech and direct calls to action. If the climate was right, an initial government advance warning tweet might signal an offensive among a country’s own citizens towards a minority population.

Regardless of its potential for “good” or “evil”, one thing is for sure here: the social media explosion is changing the way we do absolutely everything.

What the Huck?

Mike Huckabee’s recent comments on Obama and Kenya are truly perplexing. Most of the media has focussed on the fact that Huckabee is factually wrong – Obama didn’t grow up in Kenya. What I find more interesting is the theory Huck is trying to float. According to Huck:

[Obama's] having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American…But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Umm…okay. I’m not quite sure what Huck is getting at here. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Kenya isn’t the only country that ever fought a liberation movement against the mighty British Empire. Nor are the Kenyans the only colonists that felt persecuted by the British colonial apparatus. Lots of people who lived in Britain’s colonies felt this way and some even fought successful rebellions against the mother country…such as those living in what we call today the United States of America! So if Huck is trying to say that rebelling against Britain is somehow an un-American activity, what, exactly, would constitute an American activity? Huck might want to check out a rather important document in US history called “The Declaration of Independence” and rethink his position. By the way, since when did the GOP become pro-colonialism?

Defending colonialism and oligarchy?

Dinesh D’Souza is free to peddle his drivel anywhere. Why the Washington Post’s editors thought their op-ed page was a good place for it is beyond my comprehension. The bulk of the article is about how Barack Obama Sr.’s views shaped those of his son, President Obama. I have no idea whether this is true and why the Post published such a speculative piece is difficult to understand. In any event this is beside the point of this post. Rather, I want to focus on D’Souza’s weird views about colonialism and the bizarre political implications of them. Continue reading »

The traffic in Dar is bad, but not special

The Mikocheni Report has a spot-on post on the terrible traffic in Dar es Salaam. The city is seriously out of control: massive population growth + no new roads = traffic nightmare. Where I disagree is that the traffic situation in Dar is idiosyncratic. The traffic in Dar reminds me a lot of traffic in Nairobi a decade ago, or in Accra and Cairo today. Rather than being special, Dar es Salaam today is an excellent example of growth without government.

Technology is neutral

I have been writing a lot about the internet lately, primarily as a result of Secretary Clinton’s speech last week on internet freedom. It’s important to recall, however, that technology is typically neutral. Whether it is good or bad for democracy is a function of who uses it and for what purposes. Recent violence in Nigeria makes this clear:

Text messages that urged people to murder and then burn their victims’ bodies helped stoke inter-religious violence in central Nigeria that killed hundreds of people last week, police and rights activists said overnight.

Rights activists have identified at least 145 texts that circulated on mobile phones in the central city of Jos, the epicentre of four days of Muslim-Christian clashes that authorities said killed 326 people.

“The messages helped escalate the violence in Jos in that some of them instructed people on how to kill, dispose of and burn bodies,” said leading rights activist Shehu Sani.

The texts were aimed at “spreading rumours and inflaming tensions”, said Mr Sani, who heads a coalition of 32 Nigerian civil and human rights groups called the Civil Rights Congress.

One of the messages seen by AFP read: “War, war, war. Stand up … and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.”

Moreover, this is not an isolated incident. For example, people used SMS’s for similar purposes following Kenya’s flawed election in 2007.