Mark A. LeVine: ...Meanwhile, Over in Ghana
[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).]
It was fascinating to watch Mubarak, Abdullah, Netanyahu, and Abbas-a rogue's gallery of oppressors and human rights violators if there ever was one-talk seriously about peace and protecting human and civil rights and expanding freedom while sitting a continent away from either Jerusalem or Washington, or in my case in Accra, Ghana, on the southern end of West Africa.
Here most people I meet have no more than passing interest, if that, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They have plenty of other issues to take up their time much closer to home.
Ghana is routinely touted as one of Africa's "success stories" because of its political stability. Certainly the United States has invested a lot in this idea; the US Embassy complex rivals the Presidential Palace in size.
However a closer look at the economic statistics underlying that claim underscores what a miracle the country's stability is, considering that Ghana ranked 152 out of 189 countries in the latest Human Development Report, poorer even than Yemen, the Sudan, Haiti and even violence torn Pakistan and the Congo....
Read entire article at GhanaWeb
It was fascinating to watch Mubarak, Abdullah, Netanyahu, and Abbas-a rogue's gallery of oppressors and human rights violators if there ever was one-talk seriously about peace and protecting human and civil rights and expanding freedom while sitting a continent away from either Jerusalem or Washington, or in my case in Accra, Ghana, on the southern end of West Africa.
Here most people I meet have no more than passing interest, if that, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They have plenty of other issues to take up their time much closer to home.
Ghana is routinely touted as one of Africa's "success stories" because of its political stability. Certainly the United States has invested a lot in this idea; the US Embassy complex rivals the Presidential Palace in size.
However a closer look at the economic statistics underlying that claim underscores what a miracle the country's stability is, considering that Ghana ranked 152 out of 189 countries in the latest Human Development Report, poorer even than Yemen, the Sudan, Haiti and even violence torn Pakistan and the Congo....