International Crisis Group
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Can the Vatican Pull Venezuela Back from the Brink?
Venezuela’s blocking of a recall referendum on ending the presidency of Nicolás Maduro has made a peaceful solution to the country’s festering conflict harder to achieve. Vatican mediation now offers one of the few hopes of progress.
If it fails, the Vatican’s intervention to restart dialogue will be remembered as yet another lost opportunity to halt the downward slide to greater conflict. However, such is the moral authority of the Pope, especially in a Catholic country like Venezuela, that to walk away from Vatican mediation could prove too costly for both sides and an agreement may eventually be reached. In that case, the moderates will emerge empowered, and the mediation could lay the basis for a negotiated transition.
IMAGE SOURCE: REUTERS/Marco Bello
SOURCE: Crisis Group
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CrisisWatch - Tracking Conflict Worldwide
Global Overview
October saw Venezuela’s tense political standoff at new heights amid economic stress and popular unrest, and Haiti’s weak political and security equilibrium struck by a major natural disaster and humanitarian crisis. In Africa, violence worsened in the Central African Republic (CAR), north-eastern Kenya, Mozambique and western Niger, while in Ethiopia the government hardened its response to continued protests. In Myanmar, unprecedented attacks on police in the north triggered deadly clashes and displacement threatening to exacerbate intercommunal tensions across the country, while Russia’s North Caucasus saw an increase in conflict-related casualties, detentions and counter-terrorism operations. In the Middle East, the election of Michel Aoun as president of Lebanon signals a long-awaited breakthrough ending two years of political deadlock.
SOURCE: Crisis Group
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Shoring Up the Status Quo at Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade
The southern and eastern façades, and the much-contested foundations, of Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade. PHOTO: Rob Bye
Even the name of Jerusalem’s holiest site causes fundamental disagreement. For Jews, it is the Temple Mount, for Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary or the Al-Aqsa Mosque. So when the Holy Esplanade looked set to become an Israeli-Palestinian flashpoint once again in 2014-2015, International Crisis Group raised the alarm and set out to forge some common ground in the notoriously intractable conflict.
Our steady flow of ideas for incremental ways forward in this tangible, vital microcosm of the conflict had a real, positive impact, more productive in some ways than grand plans to solve the whole century-long Israeli-Palestinian dispute
SOURCE: Crisis Group
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Myanmar’s Peace Process: Getting to a Political Dialogue
Image Source: AFP/Ye Aung THU
The current government term may be the best chance for a negotiated political settlement to almost 70 years of armed conflict that has devastated the lives of minority communities and held back Myanmar as a whole. Aung San Suu Kyi and her administration have made the peace process a top priority. While the previous government did the same, she has a number of advantages, such as her domestic political stature, huge election mandate and strong international backing, including qualified support on the issue from China. These contributed to participation by nearly all armed groups – something the former government had been unable to achieve – in the Panglong-21 peace conference that commenced on 31 August. But if real progress is to be made, both the government and armed groups need to adjust their approach so they can start a substantive political dialogue as soon as possible.
SOURCE: Crisis Group
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“Yemen cannot bear the demise of yet another opportunity to end the war. It has become a failed and divided state and soon could also be a starving one.” -
Picturing Islam in Kyrgyzstan
Crisis Group’s Publications Officer Julie David de Lossy, formerly a freelance photographer of Central Asia, travels to Kyrgyzstan to take a look through her camera lens at the context of our conflict-prevention work.
SOURCE: Crisis Group
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“Attention and interest has shifted away from the Burundi crisis. The government appears to have realised that keeping casualties to a minimum limits scrutiny and is forging ahead with plans to change the constitution and abolish presidential term limits. Discussions about this could begin at October’s parliamentary session. Though the 2020 election cycle seems far off, international actors should press harder for a political settlement.” —Crisis Group briefing, “The African Union and the Burundi Crisis: Ambition versus Reality”
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Burkina Faso: Preserving the Religious Balance
Burkina Faso’s great religious diversity and tolerance make it an exception in Africa’s sub-Saharan Sahel. Its model of religious coexistence remains solid but could be at risk of being eroded. For several years now, Muslim leaders have complained that Muslims are under-represented in the civil service and that the administration is not always even-handed in its treatment of Christianity and Islam. Meanwhile, the rising tide of religiously motivated violence in West Africa and the Sahel has created a new regional context. As Burkina is recovering from a period of instability following the October 2014 downfall of former President Blaise Compaoré, and faced with a security emergency and strong social pressures, the government could be tempted to ignore these developments. It would be risky to raise the sensitive issue of religion in a country where religious identity is of secondary importance. But the government must take steps now to ease frustrations and regulate religious discourse to safeguard Burkina’s model of peaceful coexistence.
SOURCE: Crisis group
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Turkey’s post-coup funk reaches far and wide
Turkey’s rulers say the world does not understand how much the attempted coup in mid-July traumatized the country. To judge by three weeks in the rural backwoods of the southern province of Antalya, they are not far wrong. But the distress is not just because of the shocking acts of the night of July 15, but also the aftermath.
Hugh Pope, Crisis Group’s director of Communication and Outreach writes on the situation in Turkey
Source: Nikkei
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