A not-inconsequential item from the world of international relations crossed the wires during the last week of October that was little remarked upon in the West, yet could have tremendous implications in an area of the world that is becoming increasingly important in the economic and geopolitical calculations of Washington and Beijing: Africa.
What was that event? Why, the pilgrimage of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, a practicing Christian, to Israel, where along with a number of Christian Nigerian government ministers and regional governors, he toured religious sites, spoke to members of the Israeli government and led a prayer service for nearly 3,000 Nigerian pilgrims who also happened to be in the holy, but disputed, city of Jerusalem.
At first blush, this might seem to be a relatively unimportant visit to Israel by the leader of an emerging African economy and major oil producer. Yes, the visit may have been more than a little overly religious in orientation, but given the religiosity of Africans in general it is perhaps not surprising that the presidential visit took on the air of a pilgrimage rather than a state visit. So, what’s going on here?
Culture war
First, it is important to understand that President Jonathan’s visit to Israel comes at a particularly interesting time in Nigeria’s history, for perhaps at no time has the country been as divided between its much poorer Muslim north and its relatively wealthy, oil-rich Christian south as now. Indeed, this basic faultline in Nigeria’s political makeup has been the source of unending sectarian conflict between the two religious communities and has led to the cessation of democracy on more than one occasion.
While repeated bouts of military rule proved disastrous to Nigeria – where corruption by ruling generals is legendary in scope – democratization has proven fraught with conflict that threatens to unravel the unity of the entire country. This is largely because Muslim and Christian political leaders have used sectarian division and violent incidents as opportunities to engage in demagogic rhetoric and the Nigerian equivalent of culture-war politics.
Nowhere is this conflict more acute than in northern and central Nigeria, where the legal implementation of Sharia law in many Nigerian states – meant to placate Islamist political movements and satiate demands for self-rule and political devolution to lower levels of government – has in many respects backfired. Instead of easing the political division between north and south, it has instead highlighted their cultural differences and instilled fear in non-Muslims living in Sharia-law states as to their ultimate legal status in their own communities. Indeed, by setting up a de facto separate legal code for Muslims in these areas, a major precedent has been set towards the greater penetration of religion into political and legal life throughout all Nigeria.
What’s more, placating Islamists with the adoption of Sharia in much of the country has done little to actually dampen sectarian conflict between the two communities. Mass riots killing hundreds has become commonplace, especially in the central buffer zone where Christian and Muslim communities are more mixed and their populations are more or less evenly divided. Even more concerning, however, is the emergence of a brutal Islamist insurgency led by the militant Boko Haram group that has stymied every effort aimed at containing it.
This is because Boko Haram, which loosely translates into English as ‘Western learning is forbidden,’ is quite unlike any militant group the Nigerian government has faced before. Indeed, the group looks and operates much more like the Afghan Taliban or the radical GIA that battled the military government of Algeria in the 1990s than the usual ethnic militants and organized bandits that the government commonly fights in the country’s south. Those bandits, in contrast to Boko Haram, mostly fight for a greater slice of Nigeria’s oil wealth.
Whereas southern rebels can mostly be bought off or otherwise contained and co-opted by the Nigerian powers-that-be, Boko Haram poses a much greater danger to the Nigerian state as it is effectively fighting for fundamentalism and religious revolution. Boko Haram is thus fighting for something a great deal more than a bigger piece of the oil-wealth pie, and their attacks have targeted more than just government officials and security personnel. Indeed, the group has carried out truly monstrous attacks against civilians that support the government and have in particular targeted schools and schoolchildren for destruction.
The Israeli connection
The similarity with the Taliban and the GIA, which also carried out gruesome attacks against anything smacking of western culture in their respective countries, is obvious – and the Nigerian government has so far shown itself simply not up to the task of containing the Islamist insurgency. Indeed, the military has proven itself relatively incompetent in its fight against the militants, and where Boko Haram has been defeated it has been a result of local vigilantism – effectively paramilitary death squads – directed by local leaders. Dirty war, then, has come to northern Nigeria in a major way.
With this background serving as prologue, the pilgrimage of Goodluck Jonathan to Israel – a country very much experienced in combating Islamic militancy – suddenly becomes much more understandable. While there is no official word as to how much security cooperation was mentioned during Jonathan’s visit, there is nonetheless little doubt that among the topics discussed in Jerusalem was Nigeria’s struggle with Islamic militancy and what, if anything, Israel could do to help.
Expectation of help is not unwarranted. Across the continent, for instance, Israel is widely acknowledged as having cooperated with Kenya on security issues, and gave warning to Nairobi that a major Islamist terror attack was being planned prior to the Westgate Mall attack in September. Once the attack was underway, Israel offered significant assistance to Kenyan security forces that was gladly accepted by officials in Nairobi.
Looking ahead, it’s not out of the question to suppose that a significant working relationship between two of the most important countries in Africa – Nigeria and Kenya – might develop in the future. During the Cold War, for instance, Israel worked closely with Apartheid South Africa on a number of strategic issues that included, say some, cooperation with Pretoria over the development of a South African nuclear arms program in the 1970s. Further afield, Israel and India, another country beset with an armed Islamist insurgency and threatened by a now nuclear-armed Muslim Pakistan, have grown increasingly close – particularly on security and strategic issues.
This raises several interesting issues. First, for Israel watchers, it points out that Israeli diplomacy is far more diversely promulgated than is typically thought. The usual focus is on Israel’s relations with its immediate Arab neighbors, Iran and the United States, whose ‘special relationship’ with Israel is both well-known and widely remarked upon. What Israel’s African and Indian relationships point out, though, is that Israel, like all states, hedges its bets by fostering relations with any number of states according to its perceived self-interest.
Second, and more disturbingly, the slow-motion creation of an alliance between Israel, African countries threatened by Islamist insurgencies, India, and, ultimately, the United States against what they perceive as rising radicalism in the wider Muslim world is something that was long predicted by the late Samuel Huntington in his famous – or infamous – ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. The controversial thesis, first articulated in a famous article in Foreign Affairs that was later turned into a book in the 1990s, postulated that cultural nationalism was the new driving force in international politics, and it would create conflict between rising, non-western powers, particularly China and the Arab World, and the West.
An anti-Islamic axis?
Given the emergence of this anti-Islamist axis on either side of the Islamic world and the elaborate geopolitical balancing act now going on in Asia, Huntington’s case – so widely criticized at the time – appears to have more truth in it that its critics would like. All the more so since increasingly tight alliances between major powers have long been noted as important precursors to major armed conflict – e.g. world wars – by scholars of international politics. So far, the emergent alliance system of the 21st–century is still nascent and loose enough that the danger of a major global conflagration is small.
That’s because, at the moment, everyone still has a lot of maneuvering room in which to avoid conflict with one another. Going forward, on a planet that is increasingly hot, flat and crowded, and where resources – particularly petroleum – are diminishing, however, and that all-important maneuvering room will become a whole lot tighter. What happens then is anybody’s guess, but one can bet that as the buffer against conflict lessens and alliances get tighter as a consequence, it won’t be pretty.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.