"Sorry, Suzanne, but I can't drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night," my friend Marie-Chantal said.I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn't making an excuse; she was truly scared. I had lived in Madagascar for three months in 2001, and, like many writers and artists before me, I left convinced that Madagascar was as close as one could come to Paradise. This was not only because the island's landscape was phenomenally beautiful, filled with unique plants and animals that made the world's fourth-largest island a biologist's fantasy land. It was Madagascar's culture that floored me..

Describing the Malagasy concept of fihavanana as similar to the Golden Rule doesn't do it justice. Wikipedia's definition isn't bad: "Fihavanana is a Malagasy word encompassing the Malagay concept of kinship, friendship, goodwill between beings, both physical and spiritual. The literal translation is difficult to capture, as the Malagasy culture applies the concept in unique ways. Its origin is havana, meaning kin." But what makes Malagasy culture truly unique in the world is perhaps best described by the proverb "Ny Fihavanana no talohan'ny vola" which, loosely translated, means "the relationship is more important than the money."

It's that sentiment, even rarer in the 21st century than endangered lemurs, that may be lost forever if Madagascar's current political turmoil proceeds unchecked. The island nation's not-so-slow dissolve began in March 2009, when the mayor of the capital city, a 34-year-old nightclub disc jockey and aristocrat named Andry Rajoelina, seized power in a coup after weeks of demonstrations that many observers believe were at least partially staged by factions within the country's military. Over the following year and a half, attempts to forge a power-sharing agreement between Rajoelina and the country's elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, repeatedly failed after Rajoelina reneged. As the stalemate continued, foreign aid, which accounts for 70 percent of Madagascar's budget, has withered, and economic growth begun during Ravalomanana's presidency has stalled. On Nov. 17, international news services reported that the Malagasy military, which had supported Rajoelina, was attempting a coup against him. A standoff between rival military factions lasted for nearly a week. Yesterday, the faction of the military that supports Rajoelina announced victory, ensuring that Rajoelina's dictatorship will continue, at least until the next coup.

Before you shake your head, thinking that this is yet another story of African instability -- all those acronyms, weird names, and a confusing plethora of dates -- let's get to the real story. That story is familiar, too, if you've seen Syriana or read a Frederick Forsyth novel, but it is more closely tied to the U.S., because it involves a chess game between the French and the Americans, who have been vying for influence in Madagascar for the past decade. The real losers, per usual, are the people in Madagascar, who have been plunged from their already painful poverty into suffering that is, for many of us, unimaginable.

Only a few years ago, things were quite different. The 34-year-old Rajoelina's immediate predecessor, a self-made millionaire named Marc Ravalomanana, ... Lire la suite de l'article