Djibouti: the port of the hope
Djibouti: 22,000km for a natural hub, a heart of the world trade, between Africa, Asia and Europe. [i] One of the pulses of the planet: it beats with the exchanges and suffers of excesses. Though the Djiboutian state wants to give his little millions of active and skillful citizens a feeling of peace and safety. In other words law and order, or democracy and freedom: a challenge and, already, a strategic project with all the free nations in the horn of Africa, facing terror, ignorance and traffics.
The key of East Africa is not any more a scale of the colonial times -- that Djibouti left quite gently -- but a metropolis of 500,000 souls, whose growth under the control of a stable government, and a modern port, in a troubled area, where a large part of world trade circulates.
So the Djiboutian state gives itself weapons for peace. Democracy, which grows in spite of terrorism, free expression at the risk of slander and destabilization, safety for people and properties fighting violence in synergy with the expectations of international society. With, yet, tangible political effects: a recent report of the CEDEF (Committee for the elimination of the discrimination towards the women) greets the obvious political will of Djibouti to promote the gender equality [ii].
Protect the democracy: the Djiboutian challenge
Djibouti
is a port and its complex energy needs stability.
Ismael Omar Guelleh (IOG), a classic statesman in the outposts of contemporary Africa, translates into modern terms a secular tradition of exchanges and contacts with Asia, Europe, and even, since the end of the 19th century, with the United States. The strength of Djibouti it is to know how to remain a credible partner of the Westerners suppliers of progress, as well as of emergent states; IOG has created and maintained the conditions of continuous transfers of technology in services, so that the port remains the pivot of economic development in the republic.
Against him, al shabaab horror and political and social obscurantism.
If the American presence remains an economic major lever, its sustainability always makes questions, mainly for budgetary reasons. IOG uses this scenario, however improbable it is, as a tool for strengthening national independence among satisfied and respectful western partners, as well as towards the Indian and Chinese [iii] appetites that appear to more than an observer as a new proof of the vitality and and reliability of the Djiboutian partner.
Who is afraid of IOG?
The most reactionary potentates of the gulf would like to change the Venice of Indian Ocean into a satellite devoted to their religious and economic aims: no matter, UN celebrates Djibouti's steps towards democracy and transparency.
And his detractors hate that: hucksters sold to obsolete monarchs, and reduced to play the sorcerer's apprentices with the most bloodthirsty terrorists of the area.
In this dialectic of transparency and slander, IOG is playing to win, on a chessboard where the values and interests of the young republic converges towards the ones of major states.
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