South Africa After Mandela

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

On July 18, Nelson Mandela turned 95. Although he left office in 1999, after serving five years as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, he has remained the conscience of the country and a man beloved throughout the world. He has been a unifying symbol of the “rainbow” nation.

How will South Africa fare after he is gone? Will it remain, two decades after the dismantling of white-minority rule and legally-entrenched apartheid, and as the most industrialized state on the continent, a beacon of hope, or might it slide into ethnic conflict and dictatorship – the fate of so many other states in Africa? 

The transition from white-only to majority rule was carefully managed and thus the country did not fall into chaos. The interim constitution, in place from 1994 to 1997, introduced an entrenched bill of rights, and created a Constitutional Court with broad powers of judicial review.

In any new country – and post-apartheid South Africa was effectively just that -- individual leaders have played important roles. They set the “rules of the game” and provide the state with a new political culture. In general, they can either enhance democracy and state legitimacy or undermine it through corruption and excessive preoccupation with power, which often leads to dictatorial rule.

Fortunately for South Africa, Mandela’s absolute commitment to democracy kept post-apartheid South Africa on a democratic path. Although the African National Congress (ANC), the organization Mandela headed for decades, has won every election since 1994 by overwhelming majorities, elections have been free and fair and opposition parties have had full opportunity to contest them.

Mandela’s successor was Thabo Mbeki, like Mandela a member of the Xhosa national group. During Mbeki’s time in office between 1999 and 2008 he created employment in the middle sectors of the economy and oversaw a fast-growing Black middle class. He expanded trade with other rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC nations.

However, Mbeki was criticized for his failure to denounce Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial rule in neighbouring Zimbabwe, and, according to some observers, he grew remote, paranoid and autocratic while in power. His ongoing clashes with his own deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who had been accused of corruption, fraud and rape, led the ANC’s executive in 2007 to remove Mbeki as party leader. Instead, Zuma was nominated by the party as its presidential candidate in 2009 and won the presidency.

The country’s first Zulu president, Zuma has battled controversies throughout his career. He has been reproached for introducing Zulu nationalism into a party that prides itself on rising above tribalism. Then there were the allegations of money-laundering and racketeering, stemming from a controversial $5 billion 1999 arms deal; Zuma was charged with enriching himself in the procurement of arms for the country by accepting bribes while he was deputy president under Mbeki. However, the charges were thrown out just weeks before the election which saw him become president.

Zuma has also faced repeated investigations over $27 million in government money spent on security upgrades to his private residence in his home village of Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal province. Not surprisingly, he has failed to tackle increasing corruption among members of the ANC at all levels, from government members to local councilors.

While some people were getting rich, life remains very hard for the majority of Black South Africans. The unemployment rate averages 25 per cent but twice that among young Black workers. Whites, just 10 per cent of the population of 48 million people, earn on average six times as much as Blacks. About 40 per cent of the population survives on less than $2 a day, nearly a quarter are without electricity, and nearly a fifth are without proper sanitation facilities.

South Africa has one of the greatest divides between haves and have-nots anywhere in the world. But Black-empowerment schemes to redress apartheid’s injustices have been widely abused to enrich ANC-linked people, including Zuma’s relatives. Meanwhile the economy is floundering.

In August 2012 miners went on strike at the Marikana platinum mine in the nation’s northwest. The strike turned violent, and police opened fire on demonstrators, killing 34 workers. An additional 10 people died in the protests, including two police officers. Working and living conditions were terrible, as was the pay.

Deadly violence, illegal strikes and union infighting have continued to plague South Africa’s platinum belt since last year’s deadly strikes. This past June, a union official was killed and another injured in shootings at the Marikana mine.

Thousands of truckers have also staged strikes, threatening supplies of fuel and food. But since 1994 the ANC has overwhelmingly won every election and controls two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. The opposition Democratic Alliance is still largely perceived as “too white.”

None of this bodes well as the country faces a future without the stabilizing inspiration of Nelson Mandela.

Concern for all Rights is Increasing

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Do you despair of human beings ever changing their ways, given the state of our planet? Then I recommend that you watch some old Hollywood movies made in the 1930s through 1950s, on the Turner Classic Movies television channel. It will give you renewed hope.

The first thing you’ll notice is that virtually everybody smoked – everywhere, all the time, from the time they woke up in the morning to their bedtime. They smoked at breakfast, lunch and dinner, they smoked at work and while driving, doctors even smoked in hospitals! People were always offering each other cigarettes, and ashtrays were everywhere.

Women were constantly being sexually harassed, in dramas and even in comedies, where it was deemed to be “funny.” They had to swallow their anger, ignore it, or “laugh it off.” (And by the way, they wore fur coats.) Domestic abuse was swept under the rug, lest families be “shamed.”

Blacks appeared in films only as “Stepin’ Fetchit” type buffoons, played for amusement, or else they were super-polite butlers, maids, servants, or porters on trains, always at the ready to wait on their white employers.

In the “real world,” of course, southern states practised legal segregation, and African-Americans couldn’t attend the same schools, stay in the same hotels or resorts, and eat at the same restaurants, as whites. They had to sit in separate sections on public transit or in theatres. The military was segregated. In many states, they couldn’t marry whites.

Most of these laws were still in place 50 years ago in many places. And Blacks had no political power, not even being able to vote in most jurisdictions. Every now and then, public lynchings took place as authorities stood by and did nothing.

Gay and lesbian people didn’t exist in American motion pictures, other than as unmarried, “effete” and nervous men, or as “spinsters” – usually in minor roles.

Ethnic groups such as the Irish, Italians or Jews were usually typecast as immigrants with “humorous” accents, comic sidekicks to handsome Anglo-Saxon heroes.

This trip down memory lane to the “good old days” (of racism, sexism, and homophobia) gives us hope that attitudes towards our fellow non-human creatures are also undergoing a transformation. We have begun to recognize another “ism” – “speciesism,” the exclusion of all non-human animals from the protections afforded to humans.

We can see this idea – that animals, whether domestic or in the wild, also have rights -- gaining strength here on Prince Edward Island. Three recent examples will demonstrate this point.

In 2010, two Island snowmobilers pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to a fox killed after their snowmobiles ran over the animal four months earlier, and were fined and placed on probation. In another case, a man who ran a “puppy mill” was sentenced to five months in jail for improperly caring for animals, and ordered to pay the province $68,000 to provide care for the 76 cats and dogs removed from his property.

This year three teenagers were fined and ordered to perform community service for their roles in the death of 65 seals on a Prince Edward Island beach. “They did not expect the immediate and severe reaction to their behaviour,” said the judge who sentenced them. “They now understand what a big deal it is.”

Decades ago it would not have been a big deal. We are making progress.

Pakistan Lurches from Crisis to Crisis

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Pakistan has been called “the most dangerous place in the world” by Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul, the executive director of the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies.

It was an artificial state right from the start, the product of the territorial partition, based on religious criteria, of the Indian subcontinent, with Muslim majority areas in the west and east forming the new country, and the rest, mainly Hindu and Sikh, remaining in India. Both countries achieved independence in mid-August of 1947.

The Hindu ruler of the disputed princely state of Kashmir, though majority Muslim, joined India, resulting in a war that divided it between the two new countries; it has been a source of conflict ever since.

Sind, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province (now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the “area of Pashtuns”), and part of the Punjab, along with some princely states, became West Pakistan. Some 1,600 kilometres to the east, Bengal was also partitioned, with Muslim areas becoming East Pakistan. This didn’t last and in 1971 the east became Bangladesh, after a bloody war.

Even the name Pakistan was invented, agreed upon at a meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore in 1940. It means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, the Muslim language similar to Hindi.  As well, the name Pakistan is also an acronym, referring to the names of the five northwestern regions of British India: the initials of Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Sind, with the ending the last four letters of Baluchistan. (It was not a good omen for the future that Bengal didn’t get a place in the name.)

The country got off to an inauspicious start, as hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died in the in the bloodletting that followed the partition – nor have things improved much in the succeeding 66 years. For most of its history, Pakistan has been run by the military, which has had little compunction deposing civilian presidents and prime ministers.

The current president is Asif Ali Zardari of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party. He is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who served two terms as prime minister and was assassinated in 2007. He was called “Mr. Ten Per Cent” over accusations of widespread kickbacks and other corruption. His term ends in September. The presidential election for his replacement will be held Aug. 6 and official nominees will be announced on July 29.

A former general, Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999 and ran the country until 2008, now sits in jail, charged with treason over the emergency rule he imposed in 2007 which saw the suspension of the country’s constitution, the firing of senior judges and the arrest of thousands of people. He is also accused of having been involved in the conspiracy to kill Bhutto.

In the most recent parliamentary election, the winner was the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz. Ironically, its leader, Nawaz Sharif, now the prime minister, was the one deposed in the army coup mounted by Musharraf in 1999.

Sharif, whose stronghold is in the Punjab, faces major challenges, as have all his predecessors. The country suffers from a homegrown Taliban-led insurgency in the Pashtun-inhabited federally administered tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan and mounting anger over the retaliatory CIA drone strikes, especially in North Waziristan. Other parts of the country also suffer from terrorism: President Zardari’s own security chief was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi earlier in July.

Figures provided by the Edhi emergency services organization show that between April and the end of June, 247 people were killed in bombings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. And these figures do not include Waziristan, a militant hotspot.

There has also been deadly violence against Shi’ites, who comprise about 10-15 per cent of the population, by Sunni extremists. In the last five years, more than 1,000 Shiites, belonging to the Hazara community, have been targeted and killed in the Baluchi city of Quetta by, among others, the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

In Baluchistan, whose people are poor and feel neglected, the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) is also responsible for numerous attacks.

And in the large port city of Karachi, ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. There is considerable animosity between the native Sindis, Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border, and Muhajirs, the term for Muslims from elsewhere in India who moved into what became Pakistan after the partition. More than 2,400 Karachi residents were shot in the street or kidnapped and tortured to death in 2012.

And, of course, there’s the continued tension with India, over Kashmir. Both countries have nuclear arsenals. Maybe Imtiaz Gul is right.

What Were the Crusades About?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many modern people think of the Crusades, lasting almost 200 years between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, as an unprovoked attack by “white Europeans” on the “Third World,” an early example of “western imperialism” trying to conquer the “Arab Middle East.” Osama bin Laden used the word as an epithet for today’s western powers.

A quick look at the historical record that contextualizes them will disabuse one of that idea. These were medieval people – religion, not economics or ethnicity, is what mattered to both sides.

The nine major crusades began with a call to arms by Pope Urban II in 1095: Christians in western Europe were answering a plea from the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, whose army had been defeated by the Seljuk Turks in 1071 and was in danger of collapse. The pope also wanted to regain Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had conquered it from Byzantium in 637.

Jewish communities in the region favoured the Muslims, who were less hostile to them than the Christians were. In fact, on their way to the Middle East, the Crusaders in 1096 massacred Jews in France, the Rhineland and in central Europe.

Jews were perceived as just as much an enemy as Muslims and thousands were killed. It is estimated that one quarter of the Jewish population of Germany and northern France perished. When Jerusalem was taken in 1099, all its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were killed.

The Catholic Crusaders set up a number of feudal statelets in Antioch, Galilee, Jerusalem, Tripoli and elsewhere, in what are now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Muslim general Saladin reconquered much of the Christian-held territory in the 12th century. The last Crusade took place in 1271–1272, and the last Crusader holdout, at Acre, fell in 1291.

In reality, the Crusades were just another chapter or two in the continuous Christian-Muslim religious warfare that had begun almost from the time of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The Muslim Arabs had already been fighting the Greek Orthodox Byzantines in the east, and the Roman Catholic Christians in Iberia, for centuries. Most of what are today Spain and Portugal were Muslim Arab al-Andalus for hundreds of years, with the peninsula slowly retaken by Christian kingdoms, and the last Muslim state, Granada, subjugated in 1492.

In any case, even in the Middle Ages, Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Levant (Palestine and Syria), and even Mesopotamia, weren’t distant lands, like far-off India or China. Nor were they “exotic” or “strange” – this area is after all the birthplace of Christianity! Europeans probably knew more about the geography and landscape of the “Holy Land” from their Bibles and religious instruction than about neighbouring countries.

The Crusading Franks and Germans were, from their perspective, simply reclaiming what had been lost to Arab armies over time. And the losses had been ongoing for centuries, as the Arabs and then Seljuk Turks nibbled away at the Byzantine Empire and seized many islands in the Mediterranean – even Sicily for a time.

This wasn’t the same as Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes turning up “out of nowhere” in the Americas and destroying the Aztec Empire, or Portuguese sailors arriving in India, the East Indies and Japan. In any case, the various Muslim polities were at the time stronger than their European counterparts (which is why the Latin kingdoms didn’t survive).

And of course not long after the Crusades had ended, a new Muslim power, the Ottoman Turks, arrived. In 1396, at the Battle of Nicopolis in Bulgaria, the Ottomans crushed a pan-European crusading force and continued their advance into the Balkans. By 1453 they had extinguished the Byzantine Empire and for centuries ruled over much of Europe, twice almost capturing Vienna.

In 1600 the Muslim states of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India were, along with China, the most powerful empires in the world. The western Europeans only began to pull ahead of them following their conquests in the Americas and in South and Southeast Asia over the next three centuries.

The Maldives Confront Environmental, Political and Religious Issues

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Republic of the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka, consists of a double chain of twenty-six atolls comprising 298 square kilometres. Its population of 328,000 people inhabit 192 of its 1,192 islands. The national language, Maldivian, or Dhivehi, is closely related to Sinhalese, spoken on Sri Lanka.

The Maldives were originally settled by peoples who came from South Asia and today’s Maldivians are closely related to the Sinhalese, with an admixture of Arab, Malay, and African background as well. Formerly Buddhists (like the Sinhalese), they adopted Islam in the 12th century and the Maldives became a devoutly Muslim country. The system of government was monarchical with sultans as sovereigns.

The islands become a protectorate first of the Dutch rulers of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and later of the British who took control of Ceylon in 1796. The Maldives Sultanate became an internally self-governing British protectorate in 1887.

The islands acquired full independence in 1965, but three years later Sultan Muhammad Fareed Didi was removed after a referendum and the country became a republic with Ibrahim Nasir as president.

In 1978 Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was elected president and he would go on to rule in an increasingly autocratic fashion, winning five further elections of dubious legality. Amnesty International and other human rights groups accused his government of imprisoning and torturing its opponents, and he managed to survive three unsuccessful coups and an assassination attempt.

Forced by increasing protests to democratise the political system, Gayoom finally allowed honest elections in 2008, and was defeated by opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed, who had been imprisoned more than twenty times for his struggles against Gayoom. “In politics in this country,” Nasheed had told the British magazine the Economist in 2006, “you’re either in government or in jail.”

But Nasheed was forced out in February of 2012 after a mutiny by police and the military. He said his resignation had been forced on him at gunpoint. The vice-president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, widely seen as a puppet of Gayoom’s, was sworn in as his replacement.

Nasheed was later arrested on a charge of illegally arresting a judge, a charge he dismissed as politically motivated. This past February he briefly took refuge in the Indian High Commission in the capital, Malé. Nasheed maintains that the charges against him are intended to keep him from trying to reclaim the presidency in elections set for September. He will be running against Waheed Hassan.

Islam is the state religion and government regulations must conform to Sunni Islamic law. Adherence to Islam is legally required of citizens following a revision of the constitution in 2008.

Religious parties had protested against policies advocated by Nasheed that they contended were anti-Islamic. On the day Nasheed resigned, a group of men swarmed into the National Museum in Malé, and destroyed about 30 Buddhist statues dating back to the sixth century.

The development of the tourist industry has fueled economic growth in the Maldives. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in terms of purchasing power parity was $8,700 in 2012.  However, many conservative Muslims frown upon the Europeans who come as tourists. As it is, most tourists are taken straight to a few uninhabited islands set aside for them by seaplane or speedboat, insulated from the populated Maldives, where alcohol is outlawed and skimpy beachwear frowned upon.

The current coalition government, led by Mohammed Waheed Hassan, which includes the Islamic Adhaalath (Justice) Party, could have a dramatic impact on the future of tourism in the archipelago. Growing Islamisation could lead to the banning of spas, same-sex beaches and alcohol from holiday resorts in the Maldives.

Nasheed has accused the current government of reversing “hard won freedoms” and awarding “Islamic extremists” with cabinet positions. (The Adhaalath Party dominates the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.)

The 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami caused severe damage to many of the country’s low lying islands. None of them measures more than 1.8 metres above sea level, making the country vulnerable to a rise in sea levels associated with global warming. There is a fear that as sea levels rise, island countries such as the Maldives, will simply disappear.

A documentary about Nasheed’s efforts to halt climate change, “The Island President,” was released in 2012, to worldwide distribution (including a showing at City Cinema in Charlottetown). He has also addressed the issue at venues in Europe and North America. It probably won’t help get him re-elected, though.

Mandela Had Help Fighting Apartheid

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Nelson Mandela, now almost 95 years old and in perilous health, is truly one of the great men of our time. He has been a source of inspiration to people around the world.

Mandela had joined the African National Congress (ANC), already 32 years in existence, in 1944 and would eventually become its leader. He was imprisoned by the South African apartheid regime for 27 years for leading the struggle against white minority rule. Released in 1990, four years later he became the first black president of South Africa.

Less well-known is the part played by some Jewish South Africans, many of them Communists, in the anti-apartheid movement. Among the white population, Jews were disproportionately involved in the struggle, many times greater than one would expect for a community that never formed much more than three per cent of the white population.

Mandela acknowledged this in his 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, writing that in his experience, he had "found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice."

The most prominent Jewish member in the ANC was Joe Slovo, who rose to occupy key positions within both the Communist Party and within the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), founded in 1961. He was the first white to be elected to the national executive of the ANC.

After the transition to democracy in 1994, he served as minister of housing under President Mandela. His wife Ruth First, murdered while in exile in 1982, was also an active member of the resistance to the South African regime.

"When future generations look back on the 1994 breakthrough," said Nelson Mandela, speaking at Slovo's funeral in 1995, "they will be justified in saying: Uncle Joe was central in making it happen."

Two other opponents of apartheid were Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which 69 Black South Africans were killed, Goldreich, who had fought in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, and Wolpe, a lawyer, bought Liliesleaf Farm, near Johannesburg, in 1961.

It became an operations centre for Umkhonto we Sizwe. Goldreich passed on to Mandela and others the military expertise he had gained more than a decade earlier in Israel. As Mandela later recalled, "He was knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding."

On July 11, 1963, security police raided the farm and captured 19 members of the underground, charging them with sabotage. All of the white activists arrested in the raid or shortly thereafter were Jews with Communist affiliations. Of these, only Lionel Bernstein and Denis Goldberg actually stood trial in the end.

In October 1963 Nelson Mandela joined Bernstein, Goldberg and seven others accused of sabotage in what became known as the Rivonia Trial, which stirred anti-Semitic responses. Criminal Investigation Chief R. J. van den Bergh made reference to the raid in a speech in which he stated that foes of apartheid might be "instruments of Jews."

On June 11, 1964 Nelson Mandela and seven others, including Goldberg, were convicted and the next day they were sentenced to life imprisonment. Goldberg was sent to Pretoria Prison because he was white while the others went to Robben Island. Bernstein was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Also radicalized by the Sharpeville massacre was Ronnie Kasrils, who was a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and was appointed its Chief of Intelligence in 1983. He held various cabinet positions in the post-apartheid governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki between 1994 and 2008.

During the mid-1960s, some 30 white anti-apartheid activists served prison sentences ranging from three years to life on account of their underground political activities. Twelve of these were Jewish.

Yes, there were those in the Jewish community who condoned the system of racial segregation, or looked the other way, though few voted for the Afrikaner-based National Party, the architect of apartheid, which took power after 1948.

Jews had to tread warily in a country governed by people who looked askance at them. The governing party was home to many anti-Semites who had admired Hitler and the Nazis during World War II.

Still, the best-known leaders of the opposition in the South African parliament were Jewish, including Harry Schwarz, who had been a defence counsel at the Rivonia trial, and Helen Suzman, who from 1961 to 1974 was the sole elected representative of the Progressive Party.

She was regularly jeered in the House of Assembly with taunts such as "Go back to Israel." Schwartz became South Africa's ambassador to the United States when apartheid was dismantled.

Within the white population of South Africa, none had a record as good as that of the Jewish community.

A Tropical Island State with a Troubled Political System: the Comoros

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

As most Journal Pioneer readers know, the academics affiliated with the University of Prince Edward Island’s Institute of Island Studies engage in research on island states around the world.

The findings of many scholars who study sovereign islands have demonstrated that island countries have a higher percentage of democratic political systems than other countries around the world. (I published an article on “Small Island Nations and Democratic Values” in the journal World Development in February 2004.)

This is especially gratifying, as most of these nations are located in the so-called Third World – where so many countries are victims of civil wars and dictatorships.

There are, though, exceptions, including two island chains in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros and the Maldives, one off Africa, the other south of India. I’ll deal with them in two instalments.

First, there’s the Union of the Comoros, an archipelago of 1,862 square kilometres located northeast of mainland Mozambique and northwest of the world’s fourth largest island, Madagascar.

Its 773,000 people live mainly on three islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli. A fourth Comoro island, Mayotte, with 194,000 people, refused to join the new country at independence from France in 1975, and is now a French overseas department.

The islands’ inhabitants are descended from Arab traders, Malay immigrants and African peoples and speak Arabic, French, and Comoran (a blend of Swahili and Arabic). Most are Muslim.

The islands’ chief exports -- vanilla, cloves and perfume essence -- are prone to the uncertainty of price fluctuations, so the country is heavily reliant on foreign aid and remittances from Comorans living abroad. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in terms of purchasing power parity was only $1,300 in 2012. 

The Comoros become a French protectorate in 1886 and were granted autonomy in 1961 and sovereignty fourteen years later. The country has experienced more than twenty coups or attempted coups, beginning just weeks after independence, when the first president, Ahmed Abdallah, was deposed in a coup d’état, replaced by Prince Said Mohammed Jaffar.

His successor, Ali Soilih, tried to turn the country into a secular, socialist republic. But in 1978 Soilih was toppled and killed by mercenaries led by a French soldier of fortune, Bob Denard.

Denard was involved on attacks against the government of this small island group four times, the last being in 1995, when he removed Said Mohammed Djohar from office, before being himself arrested by French forces.

Mohamed Abdulkarim Taki, elected president in 1996, drafted a constitution which extended the authority of the president and established Islam as the basis of law. This increase in the powers of the central government, located in the capital Moroni, on Grande Comore, did not sit well with many islanders.

Secessionists on the islands of Anjouan and Moheli declared unilateral independence in 1997. After four years of violent conflict within and between the various islands, the Comoros gained some stability in 2001 under a new constitution granting the islands of Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli greater autonomy within the federation. The new Union government retained control of security and financial matters.

Yet things went downhill again in 2006, when Anjouan politicians refused to accept the election of Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi as federal president and set up a rebel government. Two years later, Comoran and African Union troops recaptured the breakaway island.

The current president, Ikililou Dhoinine, from Moheli, won the presidency in 2010. The opposition said the poll was marred by massive fraud, alleging that ballot boxes were stuffed, voting papers stolen and opposition observers chased away from polling stations.

Clearly, the country is far from being a consolidated democracy. Political tensions and instability remain major issues.