Sunday, July 05, 2009

DTN News: Failed States Index Places Ethiopia Among Vulnerable Countries

DTN News: Failed States Index Places Ethiopia Among Vulnerable Countries
*Source: DTN News / The Fund for Peace
(NSI News Source Info) WASHINGTON - July 5, 2009: Ethiopia has ranked 16th worst in the world scoring 98.9 points in the failed state index 2009, released Wednesday by the Fund for Peace, a Washington DC-based institution. Out of the 12 indicators showed in the index, Ethiopia has scored 9.8 point in demographic pressures, while other indicators like group grievance, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, de-legitimatization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, etc have contributed to the worst score in the failed state rank in the index. Using 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance, compiled through a close examination of more than 30,000 publicly available sources, it ranked 177 states in order from most to least at risk of failure. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings, The Fund for Peace said. “It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries' virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong and who is to blame,” the organization said. This is a sober question for sober times, and it is the backdrop for the fifth annual failed states index collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and foreign policy, according to the organization. The organization said that Somalia was, once again, the number one failed state on this year’s index. A recent report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, drawing on captured al Qaeda documents, revealed that Osama bin Laden’s outfit had an awful experience trying to operate out of Somalia, for all the same reasons that international peacekeepers found Somalia unmanageable in the 1990s: terrible infrastructure, excessive violence and criminality, and few basic services, among other factors. In short, Somalia was too failed even for al Qaeda. “It is also a harsh fact that a greater risk of failure is not always synonymous with greater consequences of failure. For example, Zimbabwe (No. 2 on the index) is technically failing more than Iraq (6), but the geopolitical implications of state failure in Iraq would be far greater than in Zimbabwe. It’s why we worry more about Pakistan (10) than Guinea (9), and North Korea (17) more than the Ivory Coast (11),” according to the index. It also said that Yemen is being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.

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