Open Anthropology links to a 2005 interview of Mahmood Mamdani by Pete McCarthy. Mamdani is Professor of Government at Columbia University and I know him best as the author of When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001). This, along with Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (1995) is, for my money, the classic work on the political mechanics and historical drivers of 1994’s genocide.

The McCarthy interview is a good introduction to Mamdani’s views on the history, politics and culture of the Great Lakes region. It breaks no new ground but would be useful to anyone wanting an insider’s view (Mamdani is Ugandan) of the real dynamics of central African conflict.

One passage sent shivers down my spine. Mamdani relates the visit by Idi Amin to Makerere University in Kampala:

The early 70s was a time of romance with armed struggle and national liberation. I was at Makerere University in Kampala and the students at Makerere demonstrated during the Asian expulsion of 1972. And the student take was that they would support Amin if he expropriated all wealthy people - not just wealthy people of one particular origin or race or colour or classification. Amin, of course, was not impressed with this at all.

I remember seeing him when he came to the University. It was the 50th anniversary of Makerere and he came with an entire battalion of troops, armed. He stood there and said, “I came with a full battalion so that when you raise your heads from your books, you know who has power.”

We just froze completely.

Then he went on to say: “On my way, I stopped at Mulago (the university teaching hospital), and I looked at your medical records and I saw that most of you are suffering from gonorrhoea.” Then he paused and said, “I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhoea in Uganda.”

That was as explicit a warning as you can get. Students knew there would be no second chance. This man was ruthless and he would strike ruthlessly.

Amin was no brooker of dissent, I think it’s safe to say, and the elimination of academic resistance is a tried and tested dictatorial tool. The reason this struck me is that Kampala is a city I know very well and, despite having come a very long way under Yoweri Museveni, the ghosts of Amin’s victims continue to haunt Ugandans. Amin built Mulago hospital, in its time the best hospital in the region by a long chalk, but now plagued by chronic underfunding, staff shortages and a largely indifferent Department of Health. I’ve been there often and each time I can almost see the corpses that were allowed to build up there during Amin’s purges. It was chilling to see Mulago starring as itself in The Last King of Scotland (2006), a film I highly recommend for Forest Whittaker’s uncannily perceptive portrayal of Amin.

Every time a marabou stork appears in Kampala - and there are many scavenging carrion in the parks, rubbish dumps and central reservations - people mutter and cross themselves. They remember how marabou fed on the bodies of Amin’s victims, much like the Rwandan dogs in 1994. The ugly marabou has become inextricably linked with Amin’s transgressions and is now a convenient hate figure that embodies the sadness and anger so deep-rooted in Ugandan culture.

Münzenberg points us to the spring issue of the Bulletin of the Santa Fe Insitute, titled ‘Conflict: What It Can Teach Us - About Our Brains, The Internet, Ecosystems, and Financial Markets?’ [.pdf]. I’ve only read a couple of the articles thus far - ‘Patterns of Terror’ and ‘Malware Wars’ - and hope to polish the rest off later. Looks like a perfect bit of Sunday reading.

With complex systems in mind, it’s probably time to reread Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, a few years old now but still a classic. As Münzenberg said yesterday, ‘Hurrah for well stocked personal libraries!’ Damn straight. Turns out Johnson has a blog which might also be worth keeping an eye on.

On Friday, I picked up a copy of Ekaterina Stepanova’s Terrorism in Asymmetrical Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, a SIPRI report just published in the UK by Oxford University Press. The blurb:

This thought-provoking book challenges the conventional discourse on—and responses to—contemporary terrorism. It examines the synergy between the extremist ideologies and the organizational models of non-state actors that use terrorist means in asymmetrical conflict. This synergy is what makes these terrorist groups so resilient in the face of the counterterrorist efforts of their main opponents—the state and the international system—who are conventionally far more powerful.

The book argues that the high mobilization potential of the supra-national extremist ideology inspired by al-Qaeda cannot be effectively counterbalanced at the global level by either mainstream secular global ideologies or moderate Islam. Instead, it is more likely to be affected and transformed by radical nationalism. Unless the political transformation of violent Islamist movements in specific national contexts is encouraged and the transnational ideology of violent Islamism is ‘nationalized’, it is unlikely to be amenable to external influence or to be destroyed by repression.

Looks like an interesting read. The OUP says that the ’study also proposes an original typology of terrorism based on the overall level of a militant group’s goals and the extent to which its terrorist activities are linked to a broader armed conflict’, which sounds to me as if the usual definition of terrorism as ‘means’ rather than ‘ends’, i.e. tactics rather than strategy, has been altered. I look forward to finding the time to read it.