Africa

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 24, 2022 1:35 pm

The Other Russia-West War: Why Some African Countries Are Abandoning Paris, Joining Moscow
OCTOBER 21, 2022

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Young men chant slogans against the power of Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba, against France and pro-Russia, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Sept. 30, 2022. Photo: Sophie Garcia/AP.

By Ramzy Baroud – Oct 17, 2022

The moment that Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was ousted by his own former military colleague, Captain Ibrahim Traore, pro-coup crowds filled the streets. Some burned French flags, others carried Russian flags. This scene alone represents the current tussle underway throughout the African continent.

A few years ago, the discussion regarding the geopolitical shifts in Africa was not exactly concerned with France and Russia per se. It focused mostly on China’s growing economic role and political partnerships on the African continent. For example, Beijing’s decision to establish its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017 signaled China’s major geopolitical move, by translating its economic influence in the region to political influence, backed by military presence.

China remains committed to its Africa strategy. Beijing has been Africa’s largest trading partner for 12 years, consecutively, with total bilateral trade between China and Africa, in 2021, reaching $254.3 billion, according to recent data released by the General Administration of Customs of China.

The United States, along with its western allies, have been aware of, and warning against China’s growing clout in Africa. The establishment of US AFRICOM in 2007 was rightly understood to be a countering measure to China’s influence. Since then, and arguably before, talks of a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ abounded, with new players, including China, Russia, even Turkiye, entering the fray.

The Russia-Ukraine war, however, has altered geopolitical dynamics in Africa, as it highlighted the Russian-French rivalry on the continent, as opposed to the Chinese-American competition there.

Though Russia has been present in African politics for years, the war – thus the need for stable allies at the United Nations and elsewhere – accelerated Moscow’s charm offensive. In July, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Republic of Congo, fortifying Russia’s diplomatic relations with African leaders.

“We know that the African colleagues do not approve of the undisguised attempts of the US and their European satellites .. to impose a unipolar world order to the international community,” Lavrov said. His words were met with agreement.

Russian efforts have been paying dividends, as early as the first votes to condemn Moscow at the United Nations General Assembly, in March and April. Many African nations remained either neutral or voted against measures targeting Russia at the UN.

South Africa’s position, in particular, was problematic from Washington’s perspective, not only because of the size of the country’s economy, but also because of Pretoria’s political influence and moral authority throughout Africa. Moreover, South Africa is the only African member of the G20.

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Supporters of Capt. Ibrahim Traore wave Russian flags as they cheered in the streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Oct. 2, 2022. Kilaye Bationo | AP

In his visit to the US in September, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa defended his country’s neutrality and raised objections to a draft US bill – the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act – that is set to monitor and punish African governments who do not conform to the American line in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The West fails to understand, however, that Africa’s slow, but determined shift toward Moscow is not haphazard or accidental.

The history of the continent’s past and current struggle against western colonialism and neocolonialism is well-known. While the West continues to define its relationship with Africa based on exploitation, Russia is constantly reminding African countries of the Soviet’s legacy on the continent. This is not only apparent in official political discourses by Russian leaders and diplomats, but also in Russian media coverage, which is prioritizing Africa and reminding African nations of their historic solidarity with Moscow.

Burning French flags and raising Russian ones, however, cannot simply be blamed on Russian supposed economic bribes, clever diplomacy or growing military influence. The readiness of African nations – Mali, Central African Republic and, now, possibly, Burkina Faso – has much more to do with mistrust and resentment of France’s self-serving legacy in Africa, West Africa in particular.

France has military bases in many parts of Africa and remains an active participant in various military conflicts, which has earned it the reputation of being the continent’s main destabilizing force. Equally important is Paris’s stronghold over the economies of 14 African countries, which are forced to use French currency, the CFA franc and, according to Frederic Ange Toure, writing in Le Journal de l’Afrique, to “centralize 50% of their reserves in the French public treasury”.

Though many African countries remain neutral in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, a massive geopolitical shift is underway, especially in militarily fragile, impoverished and politically unstable countries that are eager to seek alternatives to French and other western powers. For a country like Mali, shifting allegiances from Paris to Moscow was not exactly a great gamble. Bamako had very little to lose, but much to gain. The same logic applies to other African countries that are fighting extreme poverty, political instability and the threat of militancy, all of which are intrinsically linked.

Though China remains a powerful newcomer to Africa – a reality that continues to frustrate US policymakers – the more urgent battle, for now, is between Russia and France – the latter experiencing a palpable retreat.

In a speech last July, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted a “rethink of all our (military) postures on the African continent.” France’s military and foreign policy shift in Africa, however, was not compelled by strategy or vision, but by changing realities over which France has little control.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-other-ru ... ng-moscow/

The Intricate Fight for Africa: The Legacy of the Soviet Union vs Western Colonialism
AUGUST 13, 2022

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African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat during a news conference following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Reception House. Photo: Dmitry Lebedev/Kommersant/Sipa via AP Images.

By Ramzy Baroud – Aug 8, 2022

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s recent tour in Africa was meant to be a game changer, not only in terms of Russia’s relations with the continent, but in the global power struggle involving the US, Europe, China, India, Turkey and others.

Many media reports and analyses placed Lavrov’s visit to Egypt, the Republic of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia within the obvious political context of the Russia-Ukraine war. The British Guardian’s Jason Burka summed up Lavrov’s visit in these words: “Lavrov is seeking to convince African leaders and, to a much lesser extent, ordinary people that Moscow cannot be blamed either for the conflict or the food crisis.”

Though true, there is more at stake.

Africa’s importance to the geostrategic tug of war is not a new phenomenon. Western governments, think tanks and media reports have, for long, allocated much attention to Africa due to China’s and Russia’s successes in altering the foreign policy map of many African countries. For years, the West has been playing catch up, but with limited success.

The Economist discussed ‘the new scramble for Africa’ in a May 2019 article, which reported on “governments and businesses from all around the world” who are “rushing” to the continent in search of “vast opportunities” awaiting them there. Between 2010 and 2016, 320 foreign embassies were opened in Africa which, according to the magazine, is “probably the biggest embassy-building boom, anywhere, ever.”

Though China has often been portrayed as a country seeking economic opportunities only, the nature and evolution of Beijing’s relations with Africa prove otherwise. Beijing is reportedly the biggest supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa, and its defense technology permeates almost the entire continent. In 2017, China established its first military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

Russia’s military influence in Africa is also growing exponentially, and Moscow’s power is challenging that of France, the US and others in various strategic spaces, mainly in the East Africa regions.

But, unlike the US and other western states, countries like China, Russia and India have been cautious as they attempt to strike the perfect balance between military engagement, economic development and political language.

‘Quartz Africa’ reported that trade between Africa and China “rose to a record high” in 2021. The jump was massive: 35% between 2020 and 2021, reaching a total of $254 billion.

Now that Covid-19 restrictions have been largely lifted, trade between Africa and China is likely to soar at astronomical levels in the coming years. Keeping in mind the economic slump and potential recession in the West, Beijing’s economic expansion is unlikely to slow down, despite the obvious frustration of Washington, London and Brussels. It ought to be said that China is already Africa’s largest trade partner, and by far.

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A Chinese national and a Zimbabwean man hug while welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping upon his arrival in Harare, Zimbabwe, 2015. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi | AP

Russia-China-Africa’s strong ties are paying dividends on the international stage. Nearly half of the abstentions in the vote on United Nations Resolution ES-11/1 on March 2, condemning Russia’s military action in Ukraine, came from Africa alone. Eritrea voted against it. This attests to Russia’s ability to foster new alliances on the continent. It also demonstrates the influence of China – Russia’s main ally in the current geopolitical tussle – as well.

Yet, there is more to Africa’s position than mere interest in military hardware and trade expansion. History is most critical.

In the first ‘scramble for Africa’, Europe sliced up and divided the continent into colonies and areas of influence. The exploitation and brutalization that followed remain one of the most sordid chapters in modern human history.

What the Economist refers to as the ‘second scramble for Africa’ during the Cold War era was the Soviet Union’s attempt to demolish the existing colonial and neo-colonial paradigms established by western countries throughout the centuries.

The collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago changed this dynamic, resulting in an inevitable Russian retreat and the return to the uncontested western dominance. That status quo did not last for long, however, as China and, eventually, Russia, India, Turkey, Arab countries and others began challenging western supremacy.

Lavrov and his African counterparts fully understand this context. Though Russia is no longer a Communist state, Lavrov was keen on referencing the Soviet era, thus the unique rapport Moscow has with Africa, in his speeches. For example, ahead of his visit to Congo, Lavrov said in an interview that Russia had “long-standing good relations with Africa since the days of the Soviet Union.”

Such language cannot be simply designated as opportunistic or merely compelled by political urgency. It is part of a complex discourse and rooted superstructure, indicating that Moscow – along with Beijing – is preparing for a long-term geopolitical confrontation in Africa.

Considering the West’s harrowing colonial past, and Russia’s historic association with various liberation movements on the continent, many African states, intelligentsias, and ordinary people are eager to break free from the grip of western hegemony.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-intricat ... lonialism/

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Ibrahim Traore Takes Over as Burkina Faso’s Leader Amid Worsening Crisis and Anti-French Sentiment
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 22, 2022
Pavan Kulkarni

Ibrahim Traore
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Captain Ibrahim Traore came to power after deposing his senior officer Lt. Col Paul-Henri Damiba in a military coup on September 30. He faces the challenge of rising attacks by Islamist groups which have taken over 40% of the country’s territory

34-year-old Capt. Ibrahim Traore, who deposed his senior Lt. Col Paul-Henri Damiba in a military coup on September 30, was sworn in as the new president of the transitional government of Burkina Faso on Friday, October 21.

On October 14, amid demonstrations by Traore’s supporters in capital Ouagadougou, he had been appointed as the Transitional President by a National Forum, consisting of 300 delegates from the army, police, civil society, unions, and political parties.

According to the Transitional Charter adopted by this Forum, the “President of the transition is not eligible for the presidential elections… that will be organized to put an end to the Transition.” The deadline to end the transition with “the organization of free, transparent, and inclusive elections” is July 2, 2024.

This timeline upholds the agreement that the former military government of Damiba had reached with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in July this year to hold elections to make way for civilian rule in 24 months, so as to avoid facing sanctions.

However, with the government having lost 40% of the country’s territory to Islamist terrorist organizations that are committing repeated atrocities on civilians, securing the country to hold such an election in less than two years is an uphill task. Two governments have fallen after popular coups this year, owing mainly to their failure to secure the civilian population from terrorist attacks.

Burkina Faso hosts a significant portion of the currently 3,000-strong French forces, deployed under Operation Barkhane since 2014, in France’s former colonies in Africa’s Sahel to fight the Islamist insurgencies France itself helped create by participating in NATO’s war on Libya in 2011.

Since the start of this counter-insurgency operation, incidents of organized violence in Burkina Faso went up from 16 a year in 2014 to 1,315 by the end of 2021. Under the government of Roch Kabore, president of Burkina Faso between 2015 and January 2022, the country lost a third of its territory, including to Al-Qaeda affiliated groups while in a security partnership with France.

Under these circumstances, amid mass demonstrations against French deployment, a group established within the army called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by Damiba, seized power in a coup against Kabore on January 24, 2022.

“People’s expectations were high after Damiba’s coup. They first expected an improvement in the security in the country as promised by the MPSR,” Moussa Diallo, General Secretary of the General Labor Confederation of Burkina (CGT-B), told Peoples Dispatch. Burkinabes had largely trusted Damiba to fulfill the stated “primary objective” of the coup, which was “the restoration of the national territory,” he said.

However, Damiba’s military government not only failed to recover lost territory but also lost more land to terrorist groups, and area under Islamist control went up from a third to 40% in the eight months under his leadership. The coup against him on September 30 by his junior officer, Captain Traore, came from within the MPSR itself.

In the aftermath of the coup, protesters also attacked the French embassy in Ouagadougou after the new junta’s spokesperson claimed on television that “Damiba [had] tried to retreat to the Kamboinsin French military base to prepare a counter offensive.”

The French Foreign Ministry said that the “camp where the French forces are located has never welcomed Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, nor has [their] embassy.” Mondafrique reported, however, that “contrary to denials” by France, Damiba “was indeed a refugee in the camp of the French special forces,” according to its sources. It added that, after the popular mobilization against the French embassy and other French centers in the capital city, Damiba “was forced to capitulate and go into exile in Lomé,” the capital city of neighboring Togo.

A broader regional process

The resentment against France is part of a broader regional process. Neighboring Mali has already moved away from relying on French support, turning instead to a security partnership with Russia, citing the failure of French counter-insurgency operations in the region. It was in Mali that the French regional deployment began in 2013 under Operation Serval, before expanding in 2014 under Operation Barkhane to four other former colonies in Sahel, including Burkina Faso.

After two governments fell to popular coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali’s transitional military government asked France to withdraw its troops from the country in February 2022. This was celebrated by demonstrators who had been protesting against French deployment in the country as Mali’s victory against imperialism.

The French withdrawal from Mali was completed by mid-August, soon after which Mali’s government complained to the UN Security Council (UNSC) that France had been assisting terror groups in the country, including by air-dropping arms and ammunition.

The US claims that the Russian mercenary group, Wagner, has been operating in Mali since the start of this year. Mali’s government, however, has denied these reports, and claims to be taking assistance only from Russian military advisers to defeat the terrorist groups.

“The populist approach of Malian authorities who have chosen Russia in their fight against terrorism has also contributed” to the popularity of the idea of a security partnership with Russia as an alternative to Burkina Faso’s dependence on France, Diallo added.

The “exacerbation of anti-imperialist sentiment against France in Burkina Faso” has been driving the popular demand for a partnership with Russia, Diallo explained. “It can be seen that the presence of French troops in Burkina Faso does not add anything to the fight against terrorism; on the contrary, the security crisis has only been getting worse. There are people who suspect French imperialism of instrumentalizing armed terrorist groups to justify its presence in the Sahel and plunder its resources,” he added.

“In such a context, Russia is considered as a power opposed to France, [and] has proclaimed itself since the period of the USSR as an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist power. This anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist past works in favor of Russia,” he further elaborated, adding on a note of caution, however, that this could be used to “lure populations” into “blindly believing” that Russia holds a solution to Burkina Faso’s crisis.

Amid several reports that the Wagner group is attempting to strike a deal to work with Burkina Faso’s government, its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, welcomed the coup and hailed Traore for doing “what was necessary… for the good of the people”.

This is “of great concern,” Diallo said, adding that a “foreign private security company cannot replace the institutions of the Burkinabe nation and its fight against terrorism. The fight against terrorism is above all a national issue.”

He added further that given the dire security situation in the country, the task of defeating terrorism could not be a “prerogative of the Burkinabe army alone.” Diallo stressed the need to mobilize vast “populations in the fight against terrorism by organizing them, training them, and providing them with substantial means of defense.”

Speaking on behalf of the CGT-B, he clarified that their vision of how to defeat terrorist groups does not “exclude the possibility of establishing multilateral or bilateral relations with Russia or with any other state.”

However, “the French troops stationed in Burkina Faso often carry out operations on our territory and in the sub-region without even involving the Burkinabe soldiers. These agreements on several points squarely alienate the sovereignty of the people of Burkina Faso,” argued Diallo.

“What we reject are partnerships that alienate the sovereignty of our country and our people, that prevent us from freely establishing cooperative relationships with partners of our choice,” he concluded.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... sentiment/

Sudan: The Military Push for an Agreement that Grants Them Immunity Reduces the Prospects for Peace
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 22, 2022

The agreement provides for the appointment of a non-military Head of state, and a prime minister chosen by civilians in exchange for immunity from prosecution

The chances of ending the political crisis are minimal because negotiations took place between parts of civilian and military components and there are disagreements between armies and military entities
While efforts for a political settlement in Sudan are continuing, street demonstrations against military rule continue, as an upcoming agreement to resolve the crisis has not affected their enthusiasm, reflecting that the chances of a solution are still slim after negotiations were limited to civilian components only.

Khartoum-the Sudanese army and a group of opposition forces are close to reaching an agreement, mediated by the United States, aimed at resolving the political crisis witnessed in Sudan since last year, while sources revealed that the expected settlement granted the army commanders immunity from judicial prosecution.

The proposed agreement stipulates that the army agrees to appoint a non-military Head of state and a prime minister chosen by civilians, while granting a form of independence and immunity to the army from prosecution, concessions that would cancel the obligations contained in the constitutional document written after the fall of former President Omar al-Bashir.

Bloomberg quoted the US State Department as saying that the agreement being drafted could help “form a transitional, inclusive, civilian-led government that is widely accepted”. The ministry added that the Sudanese government” must be civilian-led, and provide justice, prosperity, and peace, “stressing that”military rule is not, and will not be, sustainable”.

The talks held in recent weeks witnessed direct negotiations between the army and the opposition “forces of freedom and Change” coalition, according to insiders, including diplomats.

Knowledgeable people, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the talks arranged by the quartet on Sudan “quad” were held mainly at the residence of Sudanese army commander Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, who has the support of political parties. Shihab Ibrahim, spokesman for the forces of freedom and Change Alliance, said that the quartet facilitated talks with a military delegation including Al-Burhan and his Deputy, Lieutenant General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo “Hemeti”, commander of the Rapid Support forces.

As a starting point for the agreement, a proposed new transitional constitution drafted by the Sudanese Bar Association was used, although elements were added that included concessions in favor of the military. The draft transitional constitution also provides for the integration of the Rapid Support forces into the regular army.

UN Horn of Africa envoy Volker Peretz said in televised remarks last week that the political factions had “reached a common understanding ” on the formation of a transitional civilian government, with elections scheduled within two years.

Sudanese finance minister Jibril Ibrahim, in an interview with Bloomberg, noted that there are talks on the formation of a broad-based and inclusive government, and the withdrawal of the army from politics. “We hope that we will reach an agreement not between the activists and the military, but between the political entities of the country,”Ibrahim said.

A member of the Executive Office of the forces of freedom and change in Sudan, Khaled Omar Youssef, said Monday that the current learned of the acceptance of the military component of the transitional constitution prepared by the Bar Association as the basis for arrangements for the transfer of power to civilians, describing it as a “positive step”.

Sudanese sources said that the tripartite mechanism, which includes the United Nations, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on development “IGAD”, and plays the role of mediator in ending the political crisis in Sudan, received on Thursday the text of the agreement reached by the chairman of the sovereign Council Abdul Fattah al-Burhan with the forces of freedom and change.

The sources added that the tripartite mechanism will work on the task of facilitating the consensus process between the Sudanese, in the first “serious moves” towards a “comprehensive agreement” between the two sides, as a step towards resolving the political crisis that the country has been witnessing since the twenty-fifth of October 2021.

Since the measures taken by the Sudanese army commander Abdul Fattah al-Burhan in October 2021, Sudan has been witnessing political and economic unrest, and thousands of Sudanese regularly demonstrate in the capital and other cities to demand the return of civilian rule and accountability for the killers of demonstrators, while the Sudan Central doctors committee estimates that at least 100 people have died and dozens have been injured.

Last Saturday, Al-Burhan said that the current indicators bode well for the imminent arrival of reconciliation in the country with the participation of political and community forces and peace parties. In a statement, the sovereign council quoted Al-Burhan as saying, during a speech at a forum for African peace and security in Ethiopia, that these indicators come despite the “great challenges and complications”faced by the transitional phase in Sudan.

“All this strengthens the guarantees that ensure the stability of the transitional period and the formation of a civilian government that will run the country, create the climate and take the necessary measures to hold free and fair elections by the end of the transitional period,”he added. Al-Burhan reiterated the withdrawal of the military institution from the political debate and full-time to perform its basic tasks of protecting the security and sovereignty of the country.

The existing settlement collides with the strong reaction of the Communist Party, which threatened to thwart the new understandings, and this constitutes the general position of the party and the Resistance Committees, which are determined to overthrow the settlement and the coup, while the Central Council for freedom and change is convinced that this opposition will not affect the success of the talks and end the coup situation, and the Resistance Committees are closely following what is happening in the talks, and it is not impossible to convince them of what is being reached.

The reality indicates that the chances of ending the political crisis are slim because the negotiations took place between parts of the civilian and military components, and there are differences between the armies and military entities, as well as the situation for the civilian forces, which are fragmented into different currents.

The absence of some active forces, led by the Resistance Committees and the Communist Party, who insist on sticking to the three terms (no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimacy), along with the lack of clarity about the vision of the armed movements that will accept a settlement that guarantees their continuation in the power structures and adherence to the Juba peace agreement signed by the Revolutionary Front and the transitional authority.

As efforts for a political settlement continue in Khartoum, thousands of Sudanese demonstrated Friday against the “military rule” a year after the Burhan coup that put an end to the democratic transition process.

In Khartoum, thousands of demonstrators chanted “the people want the overthrow of the regime”. In the city of Omdurman on the West Bank of the Nile, where security forces fired tear gas, protesters chanted “soldiers to barracks” in reference to their demand for civilian rule.

Protesters also chanted “No to tribalism” and “no To Racism”, the day after two bloody days in the southern Blue Nile state. Clashes between the Hausa and rival tribes resumed in this agricultural state bordering Ethiopia, resulting in 150 dead, including women, children and the elderly, and 86 people were injured.

The security vacuum caused by the coup, especially after the termination of the mission of the UN peacekeeping force in the region following the signing of a peace agreement between armed factions and the central government in 2020, led to the return of tribal conflicts over land, water and pasture. The governor of South Sudan’s Blue Nile State declared a state of emergency on Friday and gave security forces full powers to stop tribal fighting that has killed 150 people in two days.

According to a decree issued by Ahmed mayor Badi, he “declares a state of emergency throughout the Blue Nile region for thirty days”. He also instructed local police, army and intelligence officials, as well as the Rapid Support forces, to”intervene with all available means to stop the tribal fighting”.

Al Arab

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... for-peace/

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Terrorist Attack on Hotel in Somalia Leaves Several Dead

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The hotel assault began with the explosion of a car bomb. Oct. 23, 2022. | Photo: Feisal Omar/Reuters

Published 23 October 2022 (16 hours 21 minutes ago)

Thus far, nine people died and 47 were wounded as a result of the attack on a hotel in the Somali city of Kismayo.


At least nine people were killed and 47 have been wounded as a result of an attack by terrorists on a hotel in the southern Somali port city of Kismayo, the 'Garowe Online' portal reported, citing Police.

"Five people died as a result of the attack on a hotel in the Somali city of Kismayo," it tweeted earlier. Since then the number of victims have increased as rescue operations continue on-site.

Earlier on October 23, the media outlet reported that terrorists from the Al Shabab group attacked the Tawakal hotel, resulting in eight injuries, including students from nearby schools.


According to Halgan media, the hotel assault began with the explosion of a car bomb. The Dalsan television channel, meanwhile, reported that the hotel is a popular venue for meetings of government officials.

Al Shabab, which swore allegiance to the terrorist group Al Qaeda, perpetrates attacks against the government troops of that country, the African Union Mission in Somalia, renamed the Atmis, and UN humanitarian operations.

The group, which is bent on imposing a radical version of Sharia law in Somalia, has also claimed several terrorist attacks in neighboring East African countries, including the massacre at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ter ... -0004.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 27, 2022 1:21 pm

Ethiopian peace talks begin as rebel TPLF suffers military setbacks
Negotiations between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began in South Africa on October 25, as the latter’s military defeat appears imminent. The civil war in Ethiopia started after the TPLF attacked a federal army base in November 2020

October 26, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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(Photo: Bozeman Daily Chronicle/AP)

The African Union (AU)-led peace negotiations between the Ethiopian federal government and the US-backed Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which were scheduled to begin in South Africa on Monday, began on Tuesday, October 25.

Representatives of both the TPLF and the Ethiopian federal government arrived in South Africa’s executive capital Pretoria on Monday. The negotiations will reportedly be mediated by the AU chairperson’s High Representative for Horn of Africa Olusegun Obasanjo, South Africa’s former Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.

The civil war in northern Ethiopia appears to be nearing an end after nearly two years since it began on November 4, 2020, when the TPLF attacked an army base of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) in Mekele, capital of Ethiopia’s northernmost State of Tigray.

Several reports claim that the ENDF has already entered Mekele, and that the TPLF leaders have fled the city. While these reports remain unverified at this time, the TPLF’s capacity to defend its positions in its stronghold has been severely hampered after the federal army captured several strategically important towns and cities around Mekele.

Under the circumstances, the question remains whether the current negotiations will be “peace talks” or “about an exit strategy for the TPLF,” observed Kenyan journalist Karanja Gacuca who has been following the developments closely.

While reiterating that “the ENDF will endeavor to avoid fighting in urban areas,” a statement on October 18 by the Government Communication Service (GCS) of the federal government confirmed that the “ENDF has taken control of the towns of Shire, Alamata and Korem, without fighting in urban areas.”

Among the largest cities in the Tigray State, Shire lies only 140 kilometers to Mekele’s northwest and is equipped with an airport. Between 170 and 180 kilometers to Mekele’s south are the towns of Korem and Alamata.

Predicting that the “capture of Shire” was “imminent,” French journalist Rene Lefort, who takes pro-TPLF position, had tweeted on October 16 that once Shire is taken, the TPLF will “no longer have the military capacity to prevent” the ENDF “from eventually reaching Mekele.” The TPLF has been incapacitated “essentially due to lack of munition,” he asserted.

With a military defeat thus appearing imminent for the TPLF, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres raised the alarm that the conflict was “spiraling out of control.” The Ethiopian prime minister’s national security adviser Redwan Hussein retorted back by saying that the conflict “was spiraling when being expanded to other regions.”

TPLF’s two failed offensives

The TPLF has twice taken the war to Tigray’s neighboring regional States. Its first offensive beyond the border of Tigray came when the federal government declared a unilateral ceasefire on June 29, 2021, and withdrew from Tigray the troops it had ordered in soon after the TPLF’s attack on its base in Mekele.

After the federal government declared a ceasefire, the TPLF made rapid advances southward, stealing over a thousand trucks of the World Food Programme (WFP) and using them to transport Tigrayans, including child soldiers, who were allegedly conscripted under threat and used as cannon fodder in human-wave attacks.

During its assault on the neighboring States of Amhara and Afar, the TPLF was accused of committing atrocities on civilians, including burning of villages, mass-killings of civilians, and gang-rapes. Soon, the TPLF reached almost 200 kilometers from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa by the end of last year.

At the time, the US government of President Joe Biden, whose diplomatic maneuvers were all aimed at depicting Ethiopia’s federal government as the aggressor, appeared to openly throw its weight behind the TPLF.

On November 5, 2021, a ceremony was hosted in Washington DC to inaugurate a new coalition against the federal government, comprised of the TPLF and eight other armed groups, some which were allegedly fictitious and created only on paper to amplify the size of the armed opposition.

The TPLF’s advances were reversed despite the foreign support it received and what many Ethiopians perceived as the UN’s partiality in joining in the Western attempts to depict the federal government as the aggressor while largely ignoring the TPLF’s atrocities.

The ENDF, along with the militias of Amhara and Afar regional States, drove the TPLF back to Tigray. However, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered his troops not to pursue the TPLF into Tigray. After encircling the TPLF inside Tigray by the start of this year, the federal government declared a ceasefire in March in order to enable the much needed flow of humanitarian aid.

The TPLF reciprocated and the ceasefire held out till August. However, in August, the TPLF dismissed the credibility of AU, which had been working to lay the basis for negotiations, and called for Western intervention. This happened shortly after envoys of the US and EU met TPLF leaders in Mekele. On August 24, the rebel group resumed warfare.

The TPLF invaded the neighboring State of Amhara once again, on two fronts. Its westward offensive aimed to open a corridor to Sudan, which is known to be supporting the TPLF, while the southward offensive was an attack on the strategic district of Raya Kobo that borders Tigray to its north and Afar to its east. The highway between Mekele and Addis Ababa passes through this strategically important district in northeast Amhara’s North Wollo zone.

After successfully defeating both these offensives, the ENDF went on the offensive, wresting control of several strategic towns and cities from the TPLF and advancing towards Mekele.

Coming in the backdrop of a looming military defeat for the TPLF, Guterres’ remarks about the conflict “spiraling out out control” provoked a quick response from Redwan Hussein, who pointed out that the conflict had in fact been spiraling out when the TPLF was on the offensive in the neighboring State. “Now, it’s just being extinguished.. Aid & services to follow soon,” Hussein remarked.

The Ethiopian GCS’ statement on October 18 added that the “Government of Ethiopia is carrying out the necessary preparations and will coordinate with the relevant humanitarian agencies to provide humanitarian aid through these areas that have come under the control of ENDF, including via the Shire Airport.”

Videos have since surfaced from ENDF-controlled areas showing the distribution of food aid that had apparently been hoarded by the TPLF. The TPLF’s denial of food aid to the families of those unable or unwilling to fight in the war against the federal government has been well-documented.


By the time the TPLF broke the ceasefire and resumed hostilities on August 24, nearly half of the population in Tigray was in “severe” need of food-aid, according to the WFP.

“The situation in northern Ethiopia will come to an end, peace will prevail. We will not continue fighting forever,” Prime Minister Ahmed said on October 20, the day when the federal government accepted the AU’s invitation to take part in the peace talks in South Africa. He added, “I believe that in a short period of time, we will stand with our Tigrayan brothers for peace and development.”

Eritrea’s stake and Western intervention

On October 14, US State Secretary Antony Blinken again referred to the TPLF as “Tigrayan authorities,” and called on the ENDF, which is alleged to be receiving support from Eritrea, to cease their joint offensive.

Repeating Blinken’s insistence on a negotiated settlement, the Council of European Union (EU) said in a statement on October 17, “The EU calls for an immediate halt to the joint offensives launched by Ethiopian National Defense Forces in collaboration with Eritrean Defense Forces, and a full withdrawal of Eritrean troops from the sovereign territory of Ethiopia.”

While neither Ethiopia nor Eritrea have acknowledged the presence of Eritrean troops on Ethiopia’s territory, the two governments have a cooperation agreement.

Eritrea has a considerable stake in ensuring that the TPLF is not resurrected. It was the TPLF which had led Ethiopia into a war with Eritrea while it ruled the country with the backing of the US after coming to power in 1991. Opposition parties and free press had no space in Ethiopia under the TPLF’s rule.

After being deposed from federal power in 2018 following massive pro-democracy protests, the TPLF was reduced to a regional party – in power in Tigray alone. It opposed the peace agreement signed between Eritrea and the new Ethiopian federal government led by Abiy Ahmed. This peace agreement was followed by a tripartite agreement for cooperation between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.

Historian and former Ethiopian diplomat Mohamed Hassan maintains that these agreements toward resolving the conflicts between the countries and people in the Horn of Africa undermine the ability of Western powers to pursue their interests by projecting military power. He therefore argues that the US and the EU are using the TPLF as a proxy to reignite conflicts in this region.

The TPLF “has taken away a convoy of 1,700 trucks from humanitarian organizations as well as from the government. These foreign powers didn’t utter a word. The huge amount of fuel was robbed by the TPLF. These foreign governments didn’t say anything to condemn the act of this terrorist organization,” remarked Aregawi Berhe, chairperson of the Tigray Democratic Party.

He added that “they are doing this.. simply because, the TPLF was a loyal servant of them and they want to push the legitimate government of Ethiopia to.. accept the TPLF.. and give it a share of power, so that they will come again through the TPLF to execute their own selfish desires.”

While the US and the EU have been calling on Eritrea to not intervene in this conflict, the Ethiopian diaspora demonstrated near the White House in Washington D.C. on October 23 condemning US interference in the TPLF’s favor.

At a similar demonstration outside the EU commission on October 20, one protester held up a placard confronting Josep Borrell, its vice-president, who recently provoked a controversy by referring to Europe as a “garden” and the developing world as “jungle.” The protester’s placard read: “Joseph Borrell, don’t forget that African lions live in the jungle.”

On October 22, millions took part in mass demonstrations held in over 20 cities across different regional States of Ethiopia, reported the Ethiopian News Agency (ENA). “No More Proxy War!”, “Disarm TPLF!”, “Stop elongating TPLF’s survival in the guise of negotiation!”, and “Tigrayans are our people and TPLF is our enemy!” – were among the common slogans raised at the demonstrations across the country.

“We had a state before the European states, the US and the rest. We had a structured government, religion, language and law. We had never surrendered to colonialism and never allowed foreign powers.. to run our country,” said renowned Ethiopian actor Debebe Eshetu while addressing the demonstration in Addis Ababa.

Taking aim at Borrell’s garden-and-jungle comparison which was widely condemned as racist, Eshetu said, “Some with colonial mindset call our part of the world a jungle. We want to remind them about the Victory of Adwa,” referring to Ethiopia’s victory against the invading Italian forces in 1896. “We are the lions in the jungle.. [whose] roar has silenced a colonial ambition,” he added.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/26/ ... -setbacks/

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Ethiopia Nears Victory in its Civil War, US Scrambles to Control the Outcome
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 26 Oct 2022

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Rally for Ethiopian sovereignty, Meskel Square, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 10.22.2022

War between Ethiopia and the TPLF may be coming to an end, but the US is using sanctions to have the final word despite the apparent defeat of its proxy.

The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies now seem close to winning a two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF,) a US-backed clique that ruled Ethiopia brutally for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018. As I write this, on October 24, 2022, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces are in control of most major cities in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region. They are reported to have surrounded Mek’ele, the Tigrayan Region’s capital, but it’s not clear whether or not they are inside.

On Saturday, October 22nd, huge crowds rallied for Ethiopian sovereignty in Addis Ababa and across the country, holding up signs that read “No More to a Proxy War,” “USA Respect Ethiopian Sovereignty,” and “No Intervention in the Name of Humanitarian Aid.” Establishment outlets including the Associated Press and Bloomberg News felt compelled to report the rallies.

The West, most of all the US, has given political, diplomatic, and narrative support to the TPLF throughout the war, and now they’re scrambling. UN Secretary General António Guterres and Western officials and NGOs keep calling for a “cessation of hostilities,” which seems to be a demand that Ethiopia and Eritrea stop short of victory.

Every day the propagandistic attacks on both Ethiopia and Eritrea become more shrill and extreme. Former US diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford wrote, in the Chicago Tribune , “[Anonymous] sources from the area claim Ethiopian and Eritrean forces (their allies) have been instructed to kill three Tigrayans each, including elderly and children, and that victims’ limbs and skulls are on display.”

Peace talks are set to begin in Pretoria, South Africa, on Tuesday, September 25th, and Reuters reports that the Tigrayan delegation has arrived on a US military aircraft, accompanied by Mike Hammer, the US special envoy to the Horn of Africa.

One sign held high at Saturday’s rally in Addis Ababa read, “We Oppose HR 6600 and S 3199 Bills.” These are the sanctions bills that have been hanging over Ethiopia and Eritrea’s head for nearly a year. Earlier this year, I spoke to people in internally displaced persons camps in Amhara Region, Ethiopia, who knew that the US was threatening them with these sanctions bills.

HR 6600 is the House bill, S 3199 the Senate bill. S 3199 has been revised to be even more threatening than it was when New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez introduced it in November 2021, and he recently resolved to push for its passage.

I spoke to John Philpot, international criminal defense attorney and researcher and activist with the Sanctions Kill Coalition , about S 3199.

Ann Garrison: The revised Menendez Senate bill, S 3199, proposes sweeping sanctions to control every aspect of Ethiopian society, its economy, its politics, and even information shared in any public forum, including social media. It's very similar to the House bill, HR 6600, but even more draconian in its current version. What are your thoughts after reading it?

John Philpot: Well, it is a form of full, all-out neocolonial policy. If you read between the lines, it's all about stopping Ethiopia from getting beyond the realm of US hegemony.

The other thing they want to stop is Eritrea's engagement with Ethiopia in this war. And we will recall that Ethiopia's de facto war with Eritrea was ended when Mr. Abiy came to power in 2018. He made peace with Eritrea and won a Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. These two nations are now allies, and Ethiopia has a right to ask Eritrea to help.

The US wants to impose itself as a facilitator in the negotiations, and it’s hanging sanctions over Ethiopia’s head to push for that. But this is a no-go because the US is not neutral. We all know that the US supported the TPLF government from 1991 to 2018, and throughout this 2020-2022 war.

The bill is also very broad in its definition of who the US can sanction. It talks about secondary sanctions punishing other countries willing to break the sanctions.

They also give themselves power to oppose international loans to Ethiopia. And we all know that one of the ways in which countries finance their development is by borrowing money from the international banking institutions. Whether we like it or not, this is one way in which developing countries function.

So it's a very strong intervention.

We don't know exactly why, but it seems that they're upping the ante right now. The previous version of the bill recognized the legitimacy of the change of government in 2018. The current version doesn't even talk about that. It may be a sign of desperation by the USA, since the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies are winning, but it's very dangerous.

AG: The TPLF attacked both Ethiopia and Eritrea, at the outset of the war, and the two countries’ armies have been fighting together for the past two years. One of the Menendez bill’s first demands is that, "The government of Eritrea must immediately and completely withdraw its military forces from Ethiopia." Don't Ethiopia and Eritrea have a right to collective defense, codified in Article 51 of the UN Charter ?

JP: Yes, but it's more than that. The right to self-defense is an inherent right of any country. And when the Charter talks about Security Council intervention, it says that the Security Council intervention cannot be done in a case of self-defense.

We have noted, for example, Syria, whose government asked Russia to intervene in September 2015. The US knows very well that Russia is in Syria legally, to help the Syrian government. Ethiopia also has full sovereign rights to ask Eritrea to join in their fight for national sovereignty.

AG: The TPLF also attacked Eritrea at the beginning of the war.

JP: Yes, that adds to the argument, of course, and that gives them the right to fight the TPLF, but whether that had happened or not, Ethiopia would be within its rights to ask Eritrea to join its fight.

AG: The bill would require the State Department to report to Congress as to whether parties to the conflict are guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Doesn't this mean that the US government would be usurping the UN Security Council's jurisdiction over international crimes?

JP: Yes, in many ways that’s exact, although it's more than that. If there is a threat to international peace, or if they believe a genocide is happening, the Security Council has the right to take coercive measures if all five permanent members agree. But the US has no right to judge that Ethiopia or Eritrea are guilty of genocide; that is not only assuming the UNSC’s jurisdiction but also intervening in the sovereign affairs of Ethiopia or Eritrea. It's totally illegal.

The US is using human rights to intervene in Ethiopia and Eritrea's internal affairs. And this has been something they've been doing for a long time, but particularly since 1990. You know the history of the wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

One thing repeated throughout this Senate bill and its previous version is the demand for unfettered access to deliver humanitarian aid, but we know that humanitarian aid convoys can be used to transport arms, so it’s totally reasonable for Ethiopia to demand that they go through checkpoints.

We have a major conflict underway in Ukraine, and this conflict over Ethiopia and Eritrea is one of the second most important in the world right now.

There's no agreement about it on the Security Council, because Ethiopia is trying to develop itself and assert its sovereignty. The US won't tolerate that, but Russia and China will defend it. Remember that from 1991 to 2018, Ethiopia was basically controlled by the US through its puppet the TPLF.

Now Ethiopia is trying to be truly independent. They want to deal with Russia, with China, with the United Arab Emirates, and with other nations not under US control.

AG: Some of the most frightening measures in the bill are those about information control. These are specific instances of the US and its Western allies’ broader, ongoing efforts to control information. At one point, the bill says it's going to "ensure the government of Ethiopia respects the rights of all Ethiopians to free expression and political participation," but then it says that it's targeting anyone who "spreads disinformation, to further the civil conflict or incite anti-American sentiment in Ethiopia." And that includes the Ethiopian diaspora.

This is obviously a violation of Ethiopia's sovereignty and the civil liberties of American citizens. What are your thoughts about that?

JP: Well, what they're saying to Ethiopians and Eritreans and to citizens or residents of any other nation, including the US, Canada, and European nations, is that they have the right to speak so long as they don't go against the stance of the US foreign policy establishment. Do that and then you can be sanctioned or repressed. This is now the US approach to freedom of information.

AG: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

JP: Yes. One of the biggest flaws in this bill is that it treats the TPLF and the Ethiopian government as equals. Ethiopia is a sovereign nation and its army is fighting this uprising within its own borders, which is probably inspired from outside the country. The TPLF is not a sovereign nation, so you cannot treat them as equals.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ethio ... ol-outcome

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Current Chaos in Chad Poses Another Challenge for France in Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 24, 2022
Uriel Araujo

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On October 20, deadly clashes between security forces and demonstrations erupted in Chad. This is a major cause of concern for Paris and can also be seen as a sign of the challenges European powers are to face in Africa in general. In May there were major anti-French protests in the country, which has been under French military occupation. Protests in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso (former French colonies) have included calls for greater military ties with Moscow instead of Paris.

Europe is considering relying more and more on African resources amid today’s energy crisis – and this could increase should the EU’s relations with China deteriorate, as seems to be Brussel’s desire if one takes seriously the recent anti-Chinese recommendations the European External Action Service issued to its member states.

From 1900 to the country’s independence in 1960 Paris controlled Chad. One could say in fact the country has hosted an almost non-stop succession of military operations since its independence.

In 1990, Paris went to great lengths to support Idriss Déby’s coup d’état against then president Hissene Habré. France, in the following years, offered its support to Déby against internal attempts to overthrow him and has kept a military presence in Chad. It also maintains an air force base at N’Djamena International Airport.

The country is located in a strategic area, and the relationship between Paris and the Chad authorities in N’Djamena has been mostly about military interests. Déby was not just a mere provider of troops to French regional wars. Chadian armed forces are today regarded as among the most efficient in the region and have played an important part in interventions in Central Africa, including in Mali. By means of its military interventionism and Déby’s role as a strongman, Chad was able to acquire global political capital as a partner of the West in the “war on terror”. N’Djamena has maintained regional stability, from a French perspective, by combating terrorist groups Boko Haram and other organizations. However, its interference elsewhere, particularly in the Central African Republic, could be described as having destabilizing outcomes instead.

Some analysts argue that N’Djamena diplomacy was succesfull in portraying the country and its government as indispensable to the West, and also argue that over the years Chad’s government has skillfully instrumentalized the “war on terror” by branding internal rebels and opposition as “terrorists”. French Operation Barkhane in the country, for example, has targeted several Chadian rebels that had nothing to do with the Jihadist organization in the Sahel with which Paris was really worried.

When Déby was killed by rebels in 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron attended his funeral and even Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Representative to the UN, had very nice words to say about the departed leader (largely seen as a dictator). Upon Déby’s death, the government and the parliament were dissolved, and a Transitional Military Council was set up, headed by Mahamat Déby Itno, the deceased leader’s son. This opened the way to a troublesome transition crisis and conflict.

Paris and Washington cooperate and also sometimes compete for influence in Africa, but both powers see Chad as a major proxy – and now that it is haunted by the specter of instability and chaos, how will Paris respond?

We should expect an increase of European aggressive interventionism in Africa in general, but this could backfire and also expand the potential for US-European competition, as France has its own interests in Djibouti and nearing Somalia, while US President Joe Biden has escalated the American “forever war” in the latter – a situation that very much concerns Paris.

The African continent is targeted to become a major stage of great power competition, in a neocolonial manner, it would seem. However, things are changing. African nations and other emerging states are increasingly building on multi-alignment, non-alignment, and multilateralism while developing beneficial relations with China and Russia, as exemplified by the Egyptian Russian-built nuclear plant, while the West hypocritically campaigns against energy projects in the continent. In fact, despite green commitments, coal-fired plants are back in Europe – and so is Nazism, despite democratic commitments. These developments potentially undermine part of the Western soft power, as we have seen recently with the UN October 6 vote against a report (on China) written by its own human rights commissioner.

In fact, Europe today faces not only an economic, political and energy crisis, but a spiritual one, pertaining to its own values and self-perceptions – and this impacts on its very capacity to project its power abroad.

On October 13, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, stated that “Europe is a garden” while most of the rest of the world “is a jungle”. He bluntly added that the jungle “could invade the garden.” This was of course not well received in Africa and elsewhere. Regarding Borell’s remarks, volumes could be spoken about European self-perceptions of exceptionalism and the implicit dichotomy of culture (or “civilisation”) versus nature or “barbarism”. One could argue that the so-called “garden” (of freedom, democracy and so on) already has to deal, from Brussel’s perspective, with inconvenient dissonances inside, exemplified by Hungary and Poland. By embracing Ukraine, with its long record of neo-Nazism and human rights infringements, the “garden” has already opened its gates, so to speak, according to its own standards. In any case, the political and diplomatic power of the West’s human rights narratives is wearing off.

Moscow and Beijing have much to gain from such a situation – as Europe seems to be bluntingly unmasking its neocolonialist tendencies and exposing the hypocrisy of its green and human rights narratives in broad daylight. And African states also have much to gain, by navigating the emerging polycentric world through multialignment.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... in-africa/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Algeria’s Economy is One of the Fastest Growing, in Continuous Recovery
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 28, 2022
Ahmad Karakira

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Despite the repercussions of the difficult global crisis that are still looming over the global economy, Algeria was able to control economic indices over the past three years.

The World Bank, in early October, indicated that developing oil exporters, including Algeria, are expected to witness an economic growth of 4.1% this year and 2.7% in 2023.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also forecasted that the growth rate of Algeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will score 4.7% at the end of 2022, one of the fastest-growing rates in the world.

Based on its forecasts for global economic growth rates, the IMF published last week an interactive map that divides growth rates into five descending categories, from fastest to slowest, in which Algiers was placed in the second category.

It topped the Maghreb region economies in terms of growth, compared to Morocco (0.8%), Tunisia (2.2%), Libya (-18.5%), and Mauritania (4%).

The IMF highlighted that Algeria’s GDP growth rate is also the fastest in the Western Mediterranean region, which includes Italy (3.2%), France (2.5%), and Spain (4.3%).

The United Nation’s financial agency had expected in its recent report that Algeria’s economy will be one of the fastest-growing Arab economies in 2022.

The IMF placed Algeria among the six Arab economies that will record the highest growth rates in the mentioned period, despite the effects of the global economic slowdown, in light of the continuing crisis of the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, Algiers is set to achieve a growth rate of 4.7% by the end of the current year, ranking second in North Africa after Egypt (6.6%).

In an exclusive interview for Al Mayadeen English, Ezz El Din Dedan, an Algerian economics specialist, said that despite the repercussions of the difficult global crisis that are still hanging over the global economy, Algeria “was able to control economic indices over the past three years, despite the collapse of energy prices.”

Dedan pointed out that “with the recent recovery of oil and energy prices globally amid the war in Ukraine, there is a significant increase in Algeria’s foreign exchange earnings, and this is what gives the country a margin of greater financial movement in economic decision-making.”



He highlighted that “the supplementary Algerian budget law for 2022, as well as the budget law for the coming year, witnessed a record increase in public spending by 56%, which is another indication that the Algerian economy is in a continuous recovery.”

Dedan added that the Algerian government presented figures on the high levels of foreign exchange available in Algeria with expectations of reaching 56 billion dollars by the end of 2022 and a trade surplus of about 18 billion dollars.

According to the economics specialist, “These figures have not been recorded in Algeria for almost 10 years, since the beginning of the oil price plunge in 2014.”

Historical rise in non-hydrocarbon exports

Despite depending on oil revenues from the hard currency by 98%, Dedan said, Algeria “has sought to diversify its economy through a set of measures that have been taken over the past years, yielding a historical rise in non-hydrocarbon exports, where Algeria was able to increase these exports from 4.7 billion dollars last year to 5 billion dollars until the end of last September.”



He said that the Algerian government expects this value to reach 7 billion dollars and aims to reach a target of 10 billion dollars in 2023, underlining that “this volume has not been recorded by Algeria since its independence, which signifies a historical performance of non-hydrocarbon exports.”

Algeria, a reliable energy supplier

In a related context, the Algerian state hydrocarbons firm, Sonatrach, expects the total level of gas and oil exports to reach 50 billion dollars by the end of this year.

Algerian Prime Minister Aimene Benabderrahmane pointed out that Sonatrach had put in place an “accelerated program” to bump up output.

Algiers has helped Europe diversify its energy supplies by pumping more gas to Italy, which, in July, signed a deal to import billions more cubic meters via an undersea pipeline from the North African coast.

The North African capital has seen a series of high-profile visitors in recent months seeking to boost energy exports, as Europe struggles to replace Russian supplies.

European Council President, Charles Michel, said in September during a visit to Algeria that the North African country is a “reliable energy supplier.”

In August, French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed moves by Algiers to help “diversify” Europe’s gas supplies, and in July, Italy’s Eni, US major Occidental, France’s Total, and Sonatrach signed a $4 billion oil and gas production-sharing contract that Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said would provide Italy with “significant volumes of natural gas.”

In addition, Algerian Energy Minister Mohamed Arkab had indicated at an energy summit in Algiers that his country was examining the possibility of laying high-voltage cables under the Mediterranean to export electricity to Europe and that Algeria hopes to produce as much as 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035.

It is noteworthy that before the Ukraine war, Algeria provided the European Union with some 11% of its gas needs, against 47% provided by Russia.

First non-European country to introduce unemployment grant

Asked about whether Algeria’s current economic growth will help decrease the 15% unemployment rate in Algeria, economics specialist Ezz El Din Dedan clarified that “there are relative estimates regarding unemployment in Algeria. About 60% of the composition of the Algerian economy is based on Algerians that work in the black market.”

Dedan explained that the official figures do not represent the true proportion of the working class in Algeria as “most of the Algerian youth prefer not to declare their work, and the figures provided by the National Statistics Authority do not include young people who prefer to work in the black market.”



According to the Algerian specialist, “It is certain that unemployment rates in Algeria were not updated for two years, but there are some measures taken during the past months, such as the unemployment grant approved by the Algerian authorities,” highlighting that Algeria is the first African country to launch this grant of about $100 (£73) a month for unemployed youth, especially university students.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced in February that the government will introduce in March unemployment benefits for jobseekers aged between 19 and 40, noting that there are over 600,000 unemployed people in Algeria.

Tebboune said Algeria was the first non-European country to introduce such a benefit.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... -recovery/

Communiqué from the Polisario Front after the Vote of the UN Security Council
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 28, 2022

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Communiqué

[Bir Lehlou, Sahrawi Republic – 27 October 2022] On 27 October 2022, the Security Council adopted resolution 2654 (2022) whereby it decided to extend the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) until 31 October 2023.

In its resolution, the Security Council recalls and reaffirms all its previous resolutions on Western Sahara and reaffirms its commitment to assist the two parties, the Frente POLISARIO and Morocco, to achieve a just and lasting solution that will provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara while recognising the important role played by MINURSO on the ground and the need for it to fully implement its mandate. Nevertheless, the Security Council has failed once more to empower MINURSO with practical measures to ensure the full implementation of its mandate as established in Security Council Resolution 690 (1991).

The continued inaction of the Security Council in the face of the aggressive and persistent attempts by the occupying state of Morocco to obstruct and undermine the mandate of MINURSO and to forcibly impose a fait accompli in the Sahrawi Occupied Territories leaves the Sahrawi people with no other option but to continue and intensify their legitimate armed struggle to defend their inalienable and non-negotiable right to self-determination and independence.

In this regard, the Frente POLISARIO categorically rejects again the inaction of the Security Council, particularly some of its influential members, and its deplorable silence and unjustifiable reluctance to hold the occupying state of Morocco accountable for its continued illegal occupation of parts of our country, for breaching and torpedoing the 1991 ceasefire and related military agreements on 13 November 2020 and for its continuing aggression on the Sahrawi Liberated Territories.

Instead of adopting a balanced, unequivocal, and consistent approach to deal with the peace process and the realities on the ground, the Security Council has opted for destructive ambiguity that deepens the prevailing impasse in a way that will only lead to impairing the mission of the Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Western Sahara, aggravating the operational environment of MINURSO, and exacerbating the already tense situation on the ground.

The Frente POLISARIO reaffirms that the United Nations-the Organisation of the African Unity Settlement Plan remains the only mutual agreement accepted by the two parties, the Frente POLISARIO and Morocco, and approved unanimously by the Security Council in its resolution 658 (1990) and resolution 690 (1991) whereby the Council established, under its authority, MINURSO to hold a free and fair referendum without military or administrative constraints to enable the people of Western Sahara to exercise their inalienable right to self- determination and independence.

In this context, the Frente POLISARIO recalls its decision of 30 October 2019 to reconsider its engagement in the peace process as a whole, and strongly and unequivocally reaffirms that it will not participate in any peace process based on any approach that deviates, in both form and substance, from the United Nations-the Organisation of the African Unity Settlement Plan, which is the raison d’être of MINURSO and the basis of its mandate, or seeks to override the UN recognised legal nature of the question of Western Sahara as a decolonisation case.

The Frente POLISARIO further underlines that no one should therefore have any illusions that a genuine, credible, and viable peace process could start and advance in Western Sahara without ending the impunity with which the occupying state of Morocco has been allowed to undermine the United Nations-the Organisation of the African Unity Settlement Plan, obstruct the self-determination referendum, and eventually breach and torpedo the 1991 ceasefire and plunge the region into yet another spiral of violence and instability.

While reiterating its commitment to contributing constructively to a peaceful, just, and lasting solution to the decolonisation of Western Sahara in accordance with the principles of international legality and relevant resolutions of the United Nations and the African Union, the Frente POLISARIO reaffirms strongly that the Sahrawi people will continue to use all legitimate means, including armed struggle, to defend their inalienable and non-negotiable right to self-determination and independence and to restore sovereignty over the entire Territory of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... y-council/

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Horn of Africa Hit by Drought, Cholera: UN

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Photo taken on Oct. 9, 2022 shows flooded houses in the Ahoada West area of Rivers state, south Nigeria. | Photo: NAN via Xinhua

Published 28 October 2022 (17 hours 2 minutes ago)

Amid the worst drought in 40 years, Horn of Africa countries have been hit by outbreaks of cholera and acute watery diarrhea, while fighting in northern Ethiopia continues, a UN spokesman said on Friday.


The start of the October-December rains has been poor, and rainfall will likely continue to be below average. It would make this the fifth consecutive year of a failed rainy season, said Stephane Dujarric, the chief spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

"This could lead to a greater spread of cholera and waterborne diseases," Dujarric told a daily press briefing. "At least 29 countries have been impacted since January of this year."

He said the World Health Organization reported a shortage of cholera vaccines due to strained global supplies resulting from the high number of outbreaks globally. Because of the outbreak, the two-dose vaccine strategy will switch to a single-dose approach to save lives.

"But this will further compromise the health and lives of vulnerable children and lactating women, who are severely malnourished," he said.

The spokesman said that with thousands of people displaced in congested urban areas, there is limited access to water, health and malnutrition services -- a recipe for greater and more outbreaks.

In Ethiopia's Oromia region, 238 cases and seven deaths have been reported, while in the Somali region of Ethiopia, 35 cases and two deaths were recorded.

Kenya declared an outbreak on Oct. 20, and all counties were put on high alert, fearing the drought could worsen the situation. Six counties reported 94 cases and two deaths, he said.

Somalia reported, as of this month, approximately 11,300 cases of acute watery diarrhea or cholera since the beginning of the year, he said.

In northern Ethiopia, fighting continues.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that before the August resumption of hostilities in the northernmost Tigray region, 13 million people needed food and other assistance. With aid deliveries into Tigray suspended for more than two months, supplies are running low. Aid efforts also were disrupted in parts of neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, said the spokesman.

OCHA said humanitarian partners continue to work with all parties to try to get assistance to those who need it wherever they are, based on the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence, he said.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Hor ... -0013.html

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Millions Demonstrate in Support of Ethiopia Against Western Interference
OCTOBER 28, 2022

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Ethiopians Demonstrate In Support Of Central Government. Photo: New Ghana.

By Abayomi Azikiwe -Oct 25, 2022

United States backed rebels have been forced to the African Union negotiating table in South Africa

Analytical Review

Throughout the Horn of Africa state of Ethiopia millions of people joined government-endorsed demonstrations on October 22 calling for national unity and an end to the United States coordinated destabilization efforts.

These events took place just two days prior to the scheduled peace talks between the central government led by Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a rebel organization which has been fighting the administration based in the capital of Addis Ababa.

During the nationwide mobilizations on October 22, the marchers could be heard saying “Respect our sovereignty,” “TPLF is a mercenary group,” “TPLF is the cause!,” “End proxy war on Ethiopia,” “People in Tigray are our compatriots ; Junta [TPLF] is our enemy,” and “TPLF should not be given a chance to prepare for the fourth round of attack” are some of the words which echoed among the people while marching to Meskel Square in Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia is the headquarters of the 55-member African Union (AU) whose predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), hosted the founding summit nearly six decades ago in 1963. The same issues of national independence, sovereignty and continental unity remain on the top of the agenda for the 1.4 billion residents of the continent and its mass organizations, political parties and governments.

Since November 4, 2020, the TPLF has waged a war of regime-change against the now Prosperity Party and its allies within the central government. Ethiopia at the time of the attacks by the TPLF rebels, was poised to make fully operational the Grand Renaissance Dam Project GERD), the largest of such hydro-electric projects among all AU member-states.

On October 22, Ethiopians made a profound statement that they were firmly against the foreign policy of Washington aimed at fragmenting and removing its elected government. Prime Minister Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is committed to achieving the national unity of Ethiopia along with its program of ending instability and terrorism in the entire Horn of Africa region.

Abiy came into office in April 2018 after a national uprising against the previous government in Ethiopia which was under the political domination of the TPLF. The TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) constituted the administration in the country between May 1991 until the early months of 2018. After taking office, Abiy has normalized relations with neighboring Eritrea which had been at war with the TPLF-EPRDF regime since 1998.

Eritrea, a former Italian colony, had waged a war of independence against Ethiopia since 1961, is now closely allied with the Abiy government. As a result of the collapse of the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE) administration under Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, Eritrea declared independence which was recognized by the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations in 1993 after a national referendum. Reports indicate that the military forces of Ethiopia and Eritrea are working in alliance to counter the U.S.-supported TPLF rebels.

Since the initial military attacks in Mekelle, the capital of Tigray Province, in early November 2020, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) has been able to halt the advances of the TPLF. There have been several ceasefires between the Federal government and the rebels since 2021. However, on every occasion, the Abiy administration says that the TPLF has broken each agreement while refusing to negotiate for the conclusion of the conflict in good faith.

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Ethiopa Mobilizes Against Us Proxy War On Oct

The attitude of the United States government under former President Donald Trump and the current administration of President Joe Biden has remained unchanged. Trump and Biden have continued Washington’s hostility towards Ethiopia. High-level officials within the U.S. have repeatedly threatened the Ethiopian government and people to the point of engaging in public histrionics at the United Nations and within the corporate as well as western media outlets.

In an October 23 article published by Borkena.com, it notes that: “Renewed pressure against Ethiopia in connection with the war against the TPLF rebel groups is on the rise as the TPLF forces are losing ground militarily. The Ethiopian government confirmed earlier this week that the Defense Forces controlled three key towns (Shire, Alamata and Korem) in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Local sources also indicate that the Ethiopian government has already started distributing food aid in the areas recaptured recently. Work to restore power to the aforementioned towns is also underway.” (https://borkena.com/2022/10/22/ethiopia ... -ethiopia/)

Negotiations Are Being Held at the Aegis of the AU

The talks which were slated to begin on October 24 are an important challenge in the AU attempts to stabilize the situation in the Horn of Africa. The internal conflicts fueled by imperialist interference coupled with the impact of climate change where disruptions of rainfall, flooding and food deficits have further aggravated the overall social crisis in the region.

One prior attempt earlier in October to convene peace negotiations related to the Ethiopian situation was postponed due to what was said to have been logistical issues. Media reports on October 24 say that the TPLF’s delegation had arrived in South Africa.

Undoubtedly, the Biden administration will be monitoring the talks. Ethiopians in Africa and the U.S. have held mass demonstrations against a proposed bill that would impose sanctions on the government in Addis Ababa. The legislation as of now has been placed on hold. Nonetheless, it is a clear indication of the ongoing neo-colonial foreign policy directed towards Ethiopia and the entire African continent.

As in Ethiopia, the U.S. has continued to engage in military interventions in neighboring Somalia where the Biden administration upon taking office deployed hundreds of Pentagon troops to the country. The U.S. AFRICOM which has a major base in Djibouti, also in the Horn of Africa, at Camp Lemonnier, represents the commitment of Washington to maintain a military and intelligence presence in the Horn of Africa.

The region along with other areas of East Africa has been the source of recent findings of strategic minerals and energy resources. All along the coasts of East Africa there have been enormous discoveries of oil and natural gas.

In Mozambique, the northern Cabo Delgado province has been targeted by insurgents disrupting a massive Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) production project. Military forces from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have intervened in the struggle to defeat the rebel forces.

Unity and Stability are Key Elements in Securing East Africa’s Future

Any assessment of these internal conflicts in the Horn of Africa cannot be separated from the foreign policy imperatives of the U.S. and their allies in the European Union (EU). Since the late 19th century imperialist states have sought to colonize the territories which today are known as Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan.

Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya and Sudan were formally colonized by imperialist governments based in Europe. Ethiopia under the monarchical leadership of Menelik II, defeated the Italian imperialists culminating in the victory at the Battle of Adwa in early March 1896. In 1935, the colonial fascist regime of Benito Mussolini invaded once again the Ethiopian kingdom then under the leadership of His Imperial Majesty (HIM) Haile Selassie I. Although being forced to leave the country amid the Italian onslaught after 1935, Selassie and the Ethiopian people were able to mobilize international assistance from Allied governments and the anti-colonial movements leading to the defeat of Mussolini and the return of Selassie to the country by 1941.

In 1974, the masses rose up against the monarchy leading to a socialist-oriented revolution which attracted the support of the former Soviet Union, the Republic of Cuba and other anti-imperialist forces internationally. Monumental land reforms programs were implemented along with material assistance to the national liberation movements in Southern Africa still fighting for national independence.

The ascendancy of the EPRDF-TPLF administration in May 1991 was done under the tutelage of the U.S. administration of then President George W.H. Bush, Sr. In subsequent years during the 1990s through the uprising of 2018, the former government under the TPLF served as a conduit for the implementation of Washington and Wall Street’s foreign policies throughout East Africa.

It has been reported that the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Bush, Sr., continues to serve as a consultant and promoter of the TPLF. This unwarranted interference into the internal affairs of Ethiopia is unacceptable.

The outcome of the talks must guarantee the territorial sovereignty and social stability of Ethiopia. A sustainable peace agreement in Ethiopia would have positive implications for developments in neighboring Somalia and Sudan.

(News Ghana)

https://orinocotribune.com/millions-dem ... erference/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 31, 2022 2:44 pm

A year after military coup in Sudan, pro-democracy protesters reiterate call of “No Compromise!”

While right-wing parties negotiate with the army to reach a power-sharing agreement coalesced by the US, the streets show the people’s determination to overthrow the junta, argues the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP)

October 31, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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Photo: @hlfayatalmlook

On Monday, October 25, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to streets in at least 19 cities and towns across Sudan, calling for the overthrow of the military junta and marking one year since the military coup in the country. With the internet shut down from 9 am to 6 pm, the army, police, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – the notorious militia accused of genocide in Darfur – attacked the protesters with live fire, tear gas, and batons, and even ran over some people with armored vehicles.

185 injuries were recorded in hospitals in Khartoum State alone, according to the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD). Many others injured are not counted in this figure because the security forces took several measures to stop the wounded from reaching hospitals.

The CCSD said that one ambulance rushing an injured protester to a hospital in Omdruman, one of three cities in Khartoum State, was stopped and attacked with sticks and stones by the security forces.

The security forces also entered the premises of another hospital in Omdurman located close to the area where the protesters were rallying. Stationing themselves inside, the forces fired tear gas at the protesters outside. “There are patients in critical condition in the hospital.. Using its premises to fire tear gas.. confirms” the military junta’s disregard for the lives of the Sudanese, the CCSD said. It also reported that the entrance to at least one other hospital in Omdurman was barricaded. Such attempts by the security forces to prevent the injured from receiving timely medical care have contributed to the high death toll of protesters since the coup, added the doctors’ group.

Since the coup, several videos have appeared showing the security forces weaponizing vehicles to chase protesters and run them over. It was in Omdurman that 20-year-old Abu al-Qasim was killed after being run over by the security forces with an armored vehicle.

Qasim was the 119th protester killed since the coup, according to the CCSD. According to some other estimates, a total of 120 protesters have been killed since the coup on October 25, 2021. Over 7,000 protesters have been injured, hundreds of whom are still undergoing treatment. Hundreds of others are under arrest and custodial torture is widespread.

Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands have continued to rally against the junta several times nearly every month since the coup. This is testimony to the “determination” of the Sudanese people to “send the army back to the barracks,” said Osama Saeed, a member of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), who was at the rally from Omdruman to the neighboring city of Khartoum, the national capital of Sudan.

To stop this rally and another coming from Khartoum Bahri from reaching the capital to join the march to the Presidential Palace, the seat of the coup leader, the security forces blocked the connecting bridges with large containers. And yet, hundreds of thousands were mobilized from the neighborhoods of Khartoum city alone.

Aerial photograph of Bashdar's march on October 25 on the anniversary of Burhan's coup.
📷 By Al tayeb Siddig#KeepEyesOnSudan#مليونية25اكتوبر pic.twitter.com/KXemm85Hco

— Mohamed Mustafa – محمد مصطفى جامع (@Moh_Gamea) October 26, 2022

Most of the injuries recorded by the CCSD – 125 of the 185 – were from the capital. Marches here originated from 20 different locations and aimed to converge at the Presidential Palace. Despite heavy deployment of security forces all along the anticipated routes of the march, protesters managed to cross several junctions and main roads – many stretches under fire – and reached till El Gasr street, only a kilometer from the Palace from where the junta rules.

Rallies and demonstrations also took place in at least four cities in the war-torn Darfur region in western Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have been displaced and several hundreds killed since the coup in continuous massacres by militias armed by the state.

Protests were also reported in the northeastern city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast and in Dongola which lies in the northwest along the Libyan border, among several other cities in States across the length and breadth of Sudan.

If you're just joining us, here are the major headlines:

– At least 19 cities came out today in massive demos rejecting military rule, 1 year to the day since #SudanCoup upended the transitional period, dashing the people's hopes & efforts for a free and democratic Sudan. pic.twitter.com/6e6OUITKcZ

— Munchkin (@BSonblast) October 26, 2022

“No negotiation, No Compromise, No partnership” with the military was a common slogan resounding from the demonstrations across the country. Meanwhile, while commending the “revolutionaries,” the mainstream right-wing parties of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) coalition have already entered into a negotiation with the military to strike a compromise to form a government in partnership by sharing state power.

These negotiations have been underway on two parallel tracks. One is led by the UN, the African Union (AU), and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a trade block of eight African countries. On another end, the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also cajoling the military and the right-wing parties to find common ground.

Immunity for coup leaders on the table
Bloomberg reported on October 17 that “the secret US-brokered discussions” are nearing a deal under which the military is likely to be offered “independence and immunity from prosecution,” while civilians will be appointed as the prime minister and the head of state.

“A proposed new transitional constitution drafted by the Sudanese Bar Association has been used as a starting point for the deal, although elements such as concessions to the army have been added,” said the Bloomberg report.

The draft proposed by the Sudanese Bar Association (SBA) for a new Transitional Constitution envisions some legal immunities for members of the Sovereignty Council, the highest body of the transitional government, where FFC-chosen civilians will also get some seats.

However, one of the clauses of the draft which might go out under the “concessions to the army” clarifies: “Legal immunity shall not be deemed valid with regard to all the violations and crimes committed since the 30th of June 1989.”

This is when Omar al Bashir came to power in a military coup in Sudan and set up an Islamist regime under his dictatorship. He was overthrown in April 2019, four months after the start of the December Revolution in the country in 2018. However, following his removal by the army, under pressure from unrelenting mass-demonstrations, Bashir’s inner circle of trusted generals formed a military junta presided over by the current coup leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al Burhan.

The mass sit-in demonstration outside the army HQ in Khartoum continued, demanding that the army cede power to a civilian transitional government. On June 3, 2019, the RSF – which is led by the junta’s deputy president Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo aka Hemeti – was ordered to clear the sit-in. Over a hundred people were killed in the massacre that followed, hundreds more were injured and several raped.

It was in the aftermath of this massacre that the right-wing parties in the FFC started negotiations and finally reached an agreement with the junta. A joint civilian-military transitional government, much like the one being negotiated now, was formed in August 2019. Under the arrangement, the army held sovereign power to declare war and make foreign policy. Most of the country’s economy also remained in the control of the army.

The little state power that the army shared with the FFC-chosen civilian members was also taken back in the coup on October 25, 2021. Only months later, the FFC was back in negotiations with the army, and reportedly making additional concessions – over and above what was already made in the 2019 power-sharing agreement called the Constitutional Document.

This arrangement had also included immunity to Sovereignty Council members, but which could be lifted by the Legislative Council. However, before this body could be formed, Burhan led the coup last October seizing all power in the hands of the military.

“[N]o concessions to the military in relation to immunities should be accepted by either Sudanese opposition groups or international mediators – since this would be contrary to the international prohibition on amnesties in respect of international crimes subject to a treaty-based obligation to prosecute. This includes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, and enforced disappearance,” argued Emma DiNapoli, Legal Officer at REDRESS, an international organization campaigning against torture and working with survivors.

Now, deposed former dictator Bashir is standing trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Darfur. But the RSF, which is made up of members accused of being the foot-soldiers who carried out these atrocities during the civil war in Darfur under Bashir, has been tasked since 2019 to police the protesters in Khartoum. The RSF is also accused of pouring weapons into so-called “tribal conflicts” manufactured by the junta in another war-torn State, Blue Nile.

Several hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in Darfur since the coup due to attacks by RSF-backed militias. A depopulation campaign dressed up as a “tribal war” is alleged to be underway in this region, which is rich in minerals such as gold, whose mining has been monopolized by the family of RSF-head and the junta’s deputy president Hemeti.

Hemeti is said to be the most powerful person in Sudan, heading a paramilitary organization which operates outside the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and controls well over a billion dollars in finance. An agreement on immunity for Sovereignty Council members would give Hemeti an added layer of constitutional protection from prosecution.

It is important to note, however, that even without the immunity-concessions to the junta’s generals, the idea of sharing state-power with the military has been resoundingly rejected in the popular slogans on the streets.

“Revolutionaries will prevail”

Time and again, the demand for full civilian transitional government, under which the junta’s generals will be prosecuted for their crimes, has been reiterated by the Resistance Committees (RCs). Organized in neighborhoods across Sudan, a network of over 5,000 RCs are spearheading the anti-coup demonstrations since the coup.

“Let us be clear: The revolution will continue and the revolutionaries will prevail, despite… physical threats,” said a statement by the Khartoum RCs Coordination Committee following the demonstrations on October 25.

The junta in turn ratcheted up the physical threats by accusing unarmed pro-democracy protesters of being “forces trained with armed military formations that embrace violence and sabotage,” in a statement by its “Ministry of Internal Security.”

It went on to “appeal to the Ministry of Justice..to impose exceptional measures to enable us to confront these groups.. and present the perpetrators to successful justice” with “brief trials” for “crimes against the state.” The junta also asked for measures that allows them to take action against “intruders of the state’s prestige.”

“It’s a habit of the Sudanese Police Forces to fabricate stories about peaceful protests in order to legitimize.. arbitrary detention, torture and murder. We call on all human rights agencies and national and international organizations to continue to closely monitor and document violations by the Sudanese Police Forces against peaceful protestors and activists,” the Khartoum RCs retorted.

“As the number of those killed reaches 120 martyrs since the October 25th 2021 coup, and thousands since 2019, our determination shall not wane, nor shall we be discouraged from achieving our goal of establishing full civilian democratic rule,” reiterated its statement.

The scale and spread of the protests on Tuesday demonstrate the refusal of the masses to make compromises with the military, the SCP said in a statement. Instead of “forcing the dictatorial regime to relinquish power.. if the Sudanese revolution takes the path of settlement,” any share of political power ceded to the army will be used to prevent its restructuring, the party warned.

The urgent task of disarming all the militias, including the RSF, and establishing a unified national army – as opposed to the current coalition of warlords – can never be accomplished until the army is subjugated to a democratic civil authority, the communists maintain.

Mass-immiseration will continue as the “government resulting from a settlement will follow the same IMF-prescribed economic policies of the former regime,” added the SCP statement. 82% of state finances that are controlled by the military can never be wrested free from its stranglehold by reaching a settlement, it pointed out.

“Even the rank-and-file members of the right-wing parties in FFC are standing with the revolutionaries on the ground. They understand that overthrowing this junta is the only way forward. But their leadership has bourgeois interests,” Saeed told Peoples Dispatch.

“They are taking advantage of the severe economic distress and trying to convince people that the US and IMF will provide financial support and help alleviate their suffering if a compromise is reached,” he said, adding, “And people really are suffering.”

The prices of staple food have risen by 250-300% since the coup, and were “550-700% above the five-year average” as of last month, according to Famine Early Warning System Network. As of September 2022, “650,000 kids are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. If not treated, half of them will die,” said UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Representative in Sudan, Mandeep O’Brien.

Saeed says it is “understandable” that under these desperate conditions, the prospect of finding some international relief through the FFC compromising with the army may have some takers. “But for the majority of the masses on the streets,” it has by now become clear that unless the junta is overthrown and democratic civilian rule is established, there is no escaping from the cycles of starvation and bloodshed that Sudan has been reeling under.

“The US, UK, Saudis and other international actors trying to bring about a settlement between the right-wing parties and the army have no interest in democracy,” argues Saeed. He insists that the correct line is not to enter into a negotiation, but to work on strengthening the RCs, the trade union movement, and the farmers organizations, and create what the SCP calls Unified Centers in all regions to coordinate actions between them.

The task, he says, is “to sufficiently raise the level of organization” of the resistance movement to be able to deliver a fatal blow to the junta; an indefinite and total political general strike and civil disobedience that can paralyze the state machinery and force its surrender.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/31/ ... ompromise/

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Ghana Outlines Measures to Halt Currency Depreciation

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Sample of Ghanaian banknotes. | Photo: Twitter/ @steve_hanke

Published 31 October 2022 (2 hours 29 minutes ago)

The Ghana cedi has depreciated by 37.5 percent between January and August this year.


On late Sunday, Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo outlined measures to halt the depreciation of the Ghana cedi. He blamed the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian conflict for the country's economic woes.

He also blamed currency speculators and unlicensed currency dealers dubbed as "black market operators" for the recent sharp fall in the value of the Ghana cedi. Bank of Ghana's latest official data released in October said the Ghana cedi had depreciated by 37.5 percent between January and August this year.

"The government is working with the Bank of Ghana and the oil-producing and mining companies to introduce a new legal and regulatory framework to ensure that all foreign exchange earned from operations in Ghana are, initially, paid to banks domiciled in Ghana," the president announced.

He said this action, when introduced, would make available foreign exchange and boost the domestic foreign exchange market. The central bank had also enhanced its supervisory role by taking action to flush out illegal operators and ensuring that those permitted to operate legally abide by the market rules.


The president announced that some forex bureaus had had their licenses revoked. "And this exercise will continue until we restore complete order in the sector." Turning to the systemic challenges that create difficulties in the forex market, Akufo-Addo said the government would introduce more stringent measures to discourage the importation of goods that could be produced locally.

"We will review the standards required for imports into the country, prioritize the imports, and review the management of our foreign exchange reserves in relation to imports of products such as rice, poultry, vegetable oil, toothpicks, pasta, fruit juice, bottled water, and ceramic tiles," he stated.

With intensified government support and that of the banking sector, he said there was the capacity to manufacture and produce some of these products locally in sufficient quantities.

"In the interest of national security, we must urgently reduce our dependence on imported goods, and enhance our self-reliance," Akufo-Addo said, adding he was confident that these immediate measures will go a long way to sanitize the foreign exchange market and make it more resilient against external vulnerabilities going forward.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Gha ... -0002.html

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Guinea’s plight lays bare the greed of foreign mining companies in the Sahel

Over a year after the coup in Guinea, the military government is unable to construct a viable agenda to exit the country’s dependence on foreign mining companies. In the meantime, the protests for a return to democracy are unlikely to be quelled

October 29, 2022 by Vijay Prashad

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Guineans gather on the streets of Conakry after the coup of September 2021. Photo: Xinhua

On October 20, 2022, in Guinea, a protest organized by the National Front for the Defense of the Constitution (FNDC) took place. The protesters demanded the ruling military government (the National Committee of Reconciliation and Development, or CNRD) release political detainees and sought to establish a framework for a return to civilian rule. They were met with violent security forces, and in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, at least five people were injured and three died from gunshot wounds. The main violence was in Conakry’s commune of Ratoma, one of the poorest areas in the city.

In September 2021, the CNRD, led by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, overthrew the government of Alpha Condé, which had been in power for more than a decade and was steeped in corruption. In 2020, then-President Alpha Condé’s son—Alpha Mohamed Condé—and his minister of defense—Mohamed Diané—were accused of bribery in a complaint that the Collective for the Transition in Guinea (CTG) filed with the French National Financial Prosecutor’s Office. The complaint alleges that these men received bribes from an international consortium in exchange for bauxite mining rights near the city of Boké.

Boké, in northwestern Guinea, is the epicenter of the country’s bauxite mining. Guinea has the world’s largest reserves of bauxite (estimated to be 7.4 billion metric tons) and is the second-largest producer (after Australia) of bauxite, an essential mineral for aluminum. All the mining in Guinea is controlled by multinational firms, such as Alcoa (U.S.), China Hongqiao, and Rio Tinto Alcan (Anglo-Australian), which operate in association with Guinean state entities.

When the CNRD under Colonel Doumbouya seized power, one of the main issues at stake was control over the bauxite revenues. In April 2022, Doumbouya assembled the major mining companies and told them that by the end of May, they had to provide a road map for the creation of bauxite refineries in Guinea or else exit the country. Doumbouya said, “Despite the mining boom in the bauxite sector, it is clear that the expected revenues are below expectations. We can no longer continue this fool’s game that perpetuates great inequality” between Guinea and the international companies. The deadline was extended to June, and the ultimatum’s demands to cooperate or leave are ongoing.

Doumbouya’s CNRD in Guinea, like the military governments in Burkina Faso and Mali, came to power amid popular sentiment fed up with the oligarchies in their country and with French rule. Doumbouya’s 2017 comments in Paris reflect that latter sentiment. He said that French military officers who come to Guinea “underestimate the human and intellectual capacities of Africans… They have haughty attitudes and take themselves for the colonist who knows everything, who masters everything.” This coup government—formed out of an elite force created by Alpha Condé to fight terrorism—has captured the frustrations of the population, but is unable to construct a viable agenda to exit the country’s dependence on foreign mining companies. In the meantime, the protests for a return to democracy are unlikely to be quelled.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/29/ ... the-sahel/

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35 Years After His Assassination, Thomas Sankara Still Inspires Liberation in Africa
OCTOBER 31, 2022

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People gather for a wreath laying ceremony in front of the building where Thomas Sankara was assassinated in 1987 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, April 6, 2022, after the verdict of the trial of his assassins. Photo: Sophie Garcia

By Nigel Flanagan — Oct 27, 2022

Thirty-five years ago this month, one of Africa’s greatest revolutionaries was murdered by former comrades.

“Africa’s Che Guevara,” as he was known, was shot down in a coup d’etat by soldiers who were rebelling against his socialist transformation of Burkina Faso, a landlocked and poor remnant of the French colonial empire in West Africa.

He is less well-known than Che, but his legacy across Africa is immense. T-shirts with his image still appear all over Africa on demonstrations, picket lines, and protests, but of course, he is much less celebrated in the West.

Capitain Thomas Sankara became president at the age of 33 in 1983 after a popular uprising freed him from prison following disputes with a previous government. His four years in power completely changed the lives of the people of Burkina Faso.

A long-time admirer of the Cuban Revolution, he led the country away from the ongoing misery of the domination of French imperialism. One of the most symbolic moves was the renaming of the country. Previously known by its French colonial name, Upper Volta, it became known as Burkina Faso (“Land of Incorruptible People”) when he became president.

He led an unprecedented vaccine program against yellow fever and meningitis that saved the lives of over 50,000 children annually; he led the campaign to plant over 10 million trees to halt a deforestation disaster; and his government banned genital mutilation, forced polygamy, and forced marriages.

He set up Cuban-style democratic “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” and created revolutionary tribunals to try government officials for corruption.

School attendance went up from 6% to 22% in four years, homes were built, and the powers of tribal elders were stripped back to present a fairer and more democratic society. His government ended the powers of tribal leaders to retain forced labor and tribute payments, confronting head-on the many legacies of feudal-style social systems previously engendered by French colonialists.

In particular, the image of women in society was completely transformed. It was this that set him apart even from many other African liberation fighters.

Sankara appointed many women to senior government posts and even senior military positions inside the armed forces. He promoted contraception and introduced a “men’s market day” as an effort to reduce women being pressured to constantly visit markets to buy food for the family; his government insisted on certain days when only men should do the task.

His foreign policy was principled and progressive, offering support for the Palestinian people and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

He developed close links with Cuba and campaigned hard for African independence from former colonial powers. The latter brought him directly into conflict with President François Mitterand of France, who continued to try and rule Burkina Faso through economic domination.

This also led him into conflict with client African states of France, such as the neighboring Ivory Coast, from where the coup against him was organized.

Sankara’s speeches at the Organization of African States are legendary, rejecting aid and loans as a continuation of colonialism. He told the Organization of African Unity Conference: “He who feeds you controls you.”

His position on the resistance to colonialism was summed up in the statement: “We have to work at decolonizing our mentality and achieving happiness within the limits of sacrifice we should be willing to make. We have to recondition our people to accept themselves as they are, to not be ashamed of their real situation, to be satisfied with it, to glory in it, even.”

He lived in a different manner and style to many African leaders. He scrapped all government BMW cars and replaced them with Renault 5 cars, and he was often seen jogging, playing football, and playing guitar out in public.

His lack of concern for his personal safety was not arrogance, just an assumption that he posed no threat to the people of Burkina Faso.

Sankara was brutally assassinated, however, on Oct 15, 1987, along with 12 comrades with whom he was meeting. His body was riddled with 20 bullets by assassins acting under the supervision and support of the governments of France and the Ivory Coast.

The politics of Sankara’s revolutionary government were a severe challenge to French post-colonial rule in Africa and, in particular, in the enormous economy of the neighboring Ivory Coast.

Mitterand famously visited Burkina Faso and Sankara in November 1986. His attempts to patronize and dominate the young African leader backfired publicly, as Sankara refused to accept the “advice” of the French government.

In retaliation, France supported an invasion of Burkina Faso by 150 tanks of the Malian army and encouraged hostility and subversion by Morocco and other client states of the so-called French African Union.

Despite this organized subversion and aggression, Sankara continued to be an inspiration to Africans everywhere. It was this, sadly, that led to his violent death.

He had insisted that there be no public portraits of him in government buildings. When asked why, he said: “There are seven million Thomas Sankara’s in Burkina Faso.”

His grave site in Ouagadougou is smashed up and destroyed, the stones of it scattered across a desolate cemetery. His body was for years subject to a battle over exhumation.

Eventually, in April 2021, former President Blaise Campoare was found guilty of Sankara’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

Campoare became president after the assassination and ruled Burkina Faso for over 30 years, overturning all of the socialist programs Sankara had initiated. He has lived in Ivory Coast since fleeing there in 2014.

The four years of Sankara rule were and still is a huge inspiration to African comrades. His grave is desecrated by those who oppose liberation. Sankara will be mourned again across Africa and around the world.

As he said, “When the people stand up, imperialism trembles.”

(People’s World)

https://orinocotribune.com/35-years-aft ... in-africa/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 02, 2022 2:24 pm

SPEECH: Thomas Sankara to the United Nations General Assembly, 4th October, 1984
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 02 Nov 2022

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While the spirit of Thomas Sankara may be behind the recent coup in Burkina Faso, his vision remains an inspiration for everyone, everywhere, committed to anti-imperialism and third world autonomy.

The September 30, 2022 coup d’etat in Burkina Faso that brought Captain Ibrahim Traore to power – the second coup in less than a year – has a number of origins. There is, immediately, the failed attempts of the previous government to halt the incessant violence of Jihadi militias within the country that have killed thousands and displaced many more. There is the interventionist French and US military strategy in Africa that has effectively worsened the security crisis in the region by unleashing the very militias the Burkinabe people are fighting against. And there is also the widespread discontent in the country stemming from the devastating social and economic effects of the neoliberal regimes launched in the late 1980s by Blaise Compaoré, and supported wholeheartedly by France, the US, and other Western parasites. Under Compaoré, Burkina Faso’s national resources were privatized and sold off, the country took on a crippling burden of foreign debt (managed, of course, by the World Bank and the IMF), and the state – a relatively new and fragile entity emerging from fighting French colonial rule – was gutted, leaving huge swathes of the population in poverty and without the basic material support that should be the right of all citizens.

Yet if such factors are the causes of the revolt, the spirit of the revolt is embodied in Thomas Sankara . In 1983, Sankara took power in a coup, initiating a visionary era in which Burkina Faso sought to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, and disease, built infrastructure without appealing for foreign loans, took on an enlightened stance on the status of women, and sought to build alliances across the so-called Third World. Sankara’s progressive approach to politics and development led to his assassination in 1987 at the hands of Compaoré, and with the support of the West.

In October, 1984, Sankara addressed the United Nations General Assembly. His address, reprinted below, not only offers an overview of his policies, but also gives a sense of his personality. The vision he outlines remains relevant to not only present day Burkina Faso, but to all those across the world tired of the violence and chaos caused by arrogant, western imperial rulers.

Thomas Sankara to the United Nations General Assembly, 4th October, 1984

Originally delivered in French.

I bring the fraternal greetings of a country covering 274,000 square kilometres, where 7 million men, women and children refuse henceforth to die of ignorance, hunger and thirst, even though they are not yet able to have a real life, after a quarter of a century as a sovereign State represented here at the United Nations.

I come to this thirty-ninth session of the General Assembly to speak on behalf of a people which, on the land of its ancestors, has chosen from now on to assert itself and to take responsibility for its own history, in both its positive and negative aspects, without any complexes.

I come here, mandated by the National Council of the Revolution of Burkina Faso, to express the views of my people on the problems that have been included on the General Assembly's agenda, which form the tragic background of the events which are sadly undermining the foundations of the world late in this twentieth century. It is a world of chaos, in which the human race is torn apart by struggles between the great and the not-so-great, attacked by armed bands and subjected to violence and plunder. It is a world in which the nations, eluding international jurisdiction, command groups beyond the law, which, with gun in hand, live by preying on others and organizing the most despicable kinds of trafficking.

I do not intend to enunciate dogmas here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only ambition is a twofold aspiration: first, to be able to speak in simple language, the language of facts and clarity, on behalf of my people, the people of Burkina Faso, and, secondly, to be able-to express in my own way the feelings or that mass of people who are disinherited--those who belong to that world maliciously dubbed "the third world"--and to state, even if I cannot make them understood, the reasons that have led us to rise up, all of which explains our interest in the United Nations, the demands of our rights drawing strength in the clear awareness of our duties.

Nobody will be surprised to hear us associate the former Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, with that despised rag-bag, the third world, which the other worlds invented at the time of our independence in order to better ensure our intellectual, cultural, economic and political alienation. We want to fit in there without at all justifying this great swindle of history, still less accepting that we are a backward world left behind by the West. Rather, we do so to affirm our awareness of belonging to a three-continent whole and to state, as one of the non-aligned countries, our deeply felt conviction that a special solidarity unites the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa in the same battle against the same political traffickers and economic exploiters.

Thus to recognize our presence in the third world is, to paraphrase José Marti, to affirm that we feel on our cheek every blow struck against every other man in the world. So far, we have turned the other cheek. The slaps in the face have been redoubled and the evil-doers have felt no tenderness in their hearts. They have trampled on the truth of the just. They have betrayed the word of Christ. They have turned His cross into a club, and after putting on His robe they have torn our bodies and souls to shreds. They have obscured His message, making it a Western one, whereas we saw it as a message of universal liberation. Now our eyes have been opened to the class struggle and there will be no more blows dealt against us. It must be proclaimed that there will be no salvation for our peoples unless we turn our backs completely on all the models that all the charlatans of that type have tried to sell us for 20 years. There can be no salvation for us unless we reject those models; there can be no development without that break.

Now all the new "master minds" are awakening, roused by the dizzying increase of millions of men in rags and frightened by the threat to their digestion of this multitude hounded by hunger. They are beginning to change their tune and are again anxiously seeking among us miraculous ideas for new forms of development for our countries. In order to understand this it is necessary only to read the proceedings of innumerable colloquys and seminars.

I certainly do not wish to ridicule the patient effort of those honest intellectuals who, because they have t, ;s to see, have observed the terrible consequences of the ravages caused in the third world by the so-called development specialists.

I fear that the results of all the energies seized by the Prósperos of all kinds may be turned into a magic wand to be used to turn us back in to a world of slavery, dressed up according to the taste of our times. This fear is justified by the fact that the African petite bourgeoisie with its diplomas, if not that of the whole third world, is not ready--whether because of intellectual laziness or simply because it has sampled the Western way of life--to give up its privileges. It therefore forgets that all true political struggle requires a rigorous theoretical debate, and it refuses to do the thinking necessary in order to invent the new concepts needed to wage the kind of struggle to the death that is ahead of us. A passive and pathetic consumer group, it overflows with the "in" words of the West, just as it overflows with its whisky and champagne, in salons where there is a dubious kind of harmony. One will search in vain-- the concepts of Blackness or the African personality now being a little outdated--for truly new ideas from the brains of our so-called intellectual giants. Words and ideas come to us from elsewhere. Our professors, engineers and economists are content simply to add a little colouring, because they have brought from the European universities of which they are the products only their diplomas and the surface smoothness of adjectives and superlatives. It is urgently necessary that our qualified personnel and those who work with ideas learn that there is no innocent writing. In these tempestuous times, we cannot leave it to our enemies of the past and of the present to think and to imagine and to create. We also must do so.

Before it is too late--and it is already late--this élite, these men of Africa, of the third world, must come to their senses; in other words, they must turn to their own societies, they must look at this wretchedness that we have inherited, to understand that the battle for thought that will help the disinherited masses not only is not a vain one but can become credible at the international level. They must provide a faithful picture for their own peoples, a picture that will enable them to carry out profound changes in the social and political situation so that we can free ourselves from the foreign domination and exploitation that can lead our States only to failure.

This is something that we understood, we, the people of Burkina Faso, on that night of 4 August 1983, when the stars first began to shine in the heavens of our homeland. We had to take the lead of the peasant uprisings in the countryside, threatened by desertification, exhausted by hunger and thirst, and abandoned. We had to give some sense of meaning to the revolts of the unemployed urban masses, frustrated and tired of seeing the limousines of the alienated élite flash by following the head of State, who offered them only false solutions devised and conceived in the brains of others. We had to give an ideological soul to the just struggles of our masses mobilized against the monstrosity of imperialism. Instead of a minor, short-lived revolt, we had to have revolution, the eternal struggle against all domination. Others have noted this before me and yet others will say after me how broad the gap now is between the rich peoples and those that aspire only to have enough to eat, enough to drink, to survive and to defend their dignity, but nobody could believe how much of the food of our people has gone to feed the rich man's cow.

In the case of Upper Volta, the process was even more crystal clear. We demonstrated the essence of all the calamities that have crushed the so-called developing countries.

The truth about aid, represented as the panacea for all ills and often praised beyond all rhyme or reason, has been revealed. Very few countries have been so inundated with aid of all kinds as has mine.

Aid is supposed to help development, but one can look in vain in what used to be Upper Volta to see any sign of any kind of development. The people who were in power through either naivety or class selfishness could not or else did not want to gain control over this inflow from the outside or grasp the scope of it and use it in the interests of our people.

Analysing a table that was published in 1983 by the Sahel Club, Jacques Giri, in his book entitled The Sahel Tomorrow, concluded quite sensibly that aid to the Sahel, because of its content and because of the machinery in place, was only aid for survival. He emphasized that only 30 per cent of that aid would enable the Sahel simply to remain alive. According to Jacques Giri, this outside aid was designed only for the continued development of the unproductive sectors, imposing intolerable burdens on our small budgets, completely disrupting our countryside, creating deficits in our trade balance and, in fact, speeding up our indebtedness.

Here are just a few standard facts to describe what Upper Volta used to be like: 7 million inhabitants, with more than 6 million peasants; infant mortality at 180 per 1,000; life expectancy of 40 years; an illiteracy rate of 98 per cent, if literacy is considered to mean being able to read, write and speak a language; one doctor for 50,000 inhabitants; 16 per cent receiving schooling; and lastly, a gross domestic product of 53,356 CFA francs, that is, just over $100 per capita.

The diagnosis obviously was a very bad one. The source of the evil was political and so the only cure must be a political one.

Of course, we encourage aid that can help us to manage without aid, but in general the aid and assistance policies merely led us to become completely disorganized, to enslave ourselves, to shirk our responsibility in our economic, political and cultural areas.

We have chosen a different path to achieve better results. We have chosen to establish new techniques. We have chosen to seek forms of organization that are better adapted to our civilization, abruptly and once and for all rejecting all kinds of outside diktats, so that we can create the conditions for a dignity in keeping with our ambitions.

We refuse simple survival. We want to ease the pressures, to free our countryside from medieval stagnation or regression. We want to democratize our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future. We want to change the administration and reconstruct it with a different kind of civil servant. We want to get our army involved with the people in productive work and remind it constantly that, without patriotic training, a soldier is only a criminal with power. That is our political programme.

At the economic level, we are learning to live simply, to accept and to demand of ourselves the austerity that we need in order to carry out our great designs.

Thanks to the revolutionary solidarity fund, which is fed by voluntary contributions, we are now beginning to deal with the cruel questions posed by the drought. We support and have applied the principles of the Declaration of Alma-Ata/ expanding our primary health care. We endorse as a State policy the global strategy of GOBI FFF advocated by UNICEF.

We believe that through the United Nations Sudano-Sahelian Office, the United Nations should enable those countries affected by drought to establish a medium- and long-term plan to achieve self-sufficiency in food.

To prepare for the twenty-first century, we have begun, by creating a special tombola section, an immense campaign for the education and training of our children in a new school. The programme is called "Let's teach our children". Through committees to defend the revolution, we have established a vast house-building programme--500 units in three months--and we are also building roads, small water collectors, and so forth. Our economic ambition is to work to ensure that the use of the mind and the strength of each inhabitant of Burkina Faso will produce what is necessary to provide two meals a day and drinking-water.

We swear that in the future in Burkina Faso nothing will be done without the participation of the people of Burkina Faso themselves, nothing that has not been decided by us, that has not been prepared by us. There shall be no more attacks on our honour and dignity.

Strengthened by this conviction, we want our words to cover all those who suffer, all those whose dignity has been crushed by a minority or a system.

Let me say to those who are listening to me now that I speak not only on behalf of Burkina Faso, my country which I love so much, but also on behalf of all those who suffer, wherever they may be.

I speak on behalf of those millions of human beings who are in ghettos because their skin is black, or because they have a different kind of culture, those whose status is hardly higher than that of an animal.

I suffer, too, on behalf of those Indians who have been massacred, trampled on and humiliated and who, for centuries, have been confined to reservations, so that they do not have any aspirations to any rights whatsoever, so that their culture cannot become enriched through contact with other cultures, including that of the invader.

I speak out on behalf of those who are unemployed because of a structurally unjust system which has now been completely disrupted, the unemployed who have been reduced to seeing their lives as only the reflection of the lives of those who have more than themselves.

I speak on behalf of women throughout the entire world who suffer from a system of exploitation imposed on them by men. As far as we are concerned, we are willing to welcome all suggestions from anywhere in the world that will help us to promote the full development and prosperity of the women of Burkina Faso. In return, we will share with all countries the positive experience we are now undertaking with our women, who are now involved at all levels of the State apparatus and social life in Burkina Faso, women who struggle and who say with us that the slave who will not shoulder responsibility to rebel does not deserve pity. That slave will alone be responsible for his own wretchedness if he has any illusions whatsoever about the suspect indulgence shown by a master who pretends to give him freedom. Only struggle helps us to become free, and we call on all our sisters of all races to rise up to regain their rights.

I speak on behalf of the mothers of our poor countries who see their children dying of malaria and diarrhea, unaware that to save them there are simple methods available but which the science of the multinationals does not offer to them, preferring to invest in cosmetics laboratories and engage in cosmetic surgery to satisfy the whims and caprices of a few men and women who feel they have become too fat because of too many calories in the rich food they consume with regularity. That must make even members of this Assembly dizzy--not to mention the peoples of the Sahel. We have decided to adopt and popularize the methods that have been advocated by WHO and UNICEF.

I speak on behalf of the child, the child of the poor man, who is hungry and who furtively eyes the wealth piled up in the rich man's shop, a shop that is protected by a thick window, a window which is defended by an impassable grille, the grille guarded by a policeman in a helmet with gloves and a bludgeon, the policeman placed there by the father of another child, who comes there to serve himself or rather to be served because these are the guarantees of capitalistic representativeness and norms of the system.

I speak on behalf of the artists--poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors and so on--people of good will who see their art being prostituted by the show-business magicians.

I cry out on behalf of the journalists who have been reduced to silence or else to lies simply to avoid the hardships of unemployment.

I protest on behalf of the athletes of the entire world whose muscles are being exploited by political systems or by those who deal in the modern slavery of the stadium.

My country is the essence of all the miseries of peoples, a tragic synthesis of all the suffering of mankind but also, and above all, the synthesis of the hopes of our struggles. That is why I speak out on behalf of the sick who are anxiously looking to see what science can do for them--but that science has been taken over by the gun merchants. My thoughts go to all those who have been affected by the destruction of nature, those 30 million who are dying every year, crushed by that most fearsome weapon, hunger.

As a soldier, I cannot forget that obedient soldier who does what he is told, whose finger is on the trigger and who knows that the bullet which is going to leave his gun will bring only a message of death.

Lastly, I speak out in indignation as I think of the Palestinians, whom this most inhuman humanity has replaced with another people, a people who only yesterday were themselves being martyred at leisure. I think of the valiant Palestinian people, the families which have been splintered and split up and are wandering throughout the world seeking asylum. Courageous, determined, stoic and tireless, the Palestinians remind us all of the need and moral obligation to respect the rights of a people. Along with their Jewish brothers, they are anti-Zionists.

Standing alongside my soldier brothers of Iran and Iraq, who are dying in a fratricidal and suicidal war, I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

I wish to stand side by side with the peoples of Afghanistan and Ireland, the peoples of Grenada and East Timor, each of those peoples seeking happiness in keeping with their dignity and the laws of their own culture.

I rise up on behalf of all who seek in vain any forum in the world to make their voices heard and to have themselves taken seriously.

Many have already spoken from this rostrum. Many will speak after me. But only a few will take the real decisions, although we are all officially considered equals. I speak on behalf of all those who seek in vain for a forum in the world where they can be heard. Yes, I wish to speak for all those--the forgotten--because I am a man and nothing that is human is alien to me.

Our revolution in Burkina Faso takes account of the ills of all peoples. We are also inspired by all the experiences of mankind, from the very first breath of the first human being.

We wish to enjoy the inheritance of all the revolutions of the world, all the liberation struggles of the third-world peoples. We are trying to learn from the great upheavals that have transformed the world. We have drawn the lessons of the American revolution, the lessons of its victory against colonial domination, and the consequences of that victory. We endorse the doctrine of non-interference by Europeans in American affairs and non-interference by Americans in European affairs. In 1823, Monroe said "America for the Americans". We would say "Africa for the Africans; Burkina Faso for the Burkinabe". The French revolution of 1789, which disrupted the foundations of absolutism, has taught us the rights of man linked to the rights of peoples to freedom. The great revolution of October 1917 transformed the world and made possible the victory of the proletariat, shook the foundations of capitalism and made possible the dreams of justice of the French Commune.

Open to all the wishes of the peoples and their revolutions, learning also from the terrible failures that have led to truly sad infringements of human rights, we want to preserve from each revolution only that essence of purity that prohibits us from becoming servants to the realities of others, even though in our thinking we find that there is a community of interests among us.

There must be no more deceit. The new international economic order, for which we are struggling and will continue to struggle, can be achieved only if we manage to do away with the old order, which completely ignores us, only if we insist on the place which is ours in the political organization of the world, only if we realize our importance in the world and obtain the right to decision-making with respect to the machinery governing trade, economic and monetary affairs at the world level.

The new international economic order is simply one among all the other rights of peoples--the right to independence, to the free choice of the form and structure of government, the right to development-- and like all the rights of peoples it is a right which can be gained only through the struggle of the peoples. It will never be obtained by any act of generosity by any Power whatsoever.

I continue to have unshakeable confidence--a confidence I share with the immense community of non-aligned countries--that, despite our peoples' battering-ram cries of distress, our group will preserve its cohesion, strengthen its power of collective negotiation, find allies among all nations, and begin, together with all who can still hear us, to organize a really new system of international economic relations.

I agreed to come to speak before the Assembly because, despite the criticism of certain major contributors, the United Nations remains the ideal forum for our demands, the place where the legitimacy of countries which have no voice is recognized. This was expressed very accurately by the Secretary- General, when he wrote:

"The United Nations reflects in a unique way the aspirations and frustrations of many nations and groups all over the world. One of its great merits is that all nations---including the weak, the oppressed and the victims of injustice"--that is, us--"can get a hearing and have a platform even in the face of the hard realities of power. A just cause, however frustrated or disregarded, can find a voice in the United Nations. This is not always a well- liked attribute of the Organization, but it is an essential one."

The meaning and scope of the Organization could not be better defined.

Therefore, it is absolutely essential for the good of each of us that the United Nations be strengthened and provided with the means to take action. That is why we endorse the Secretary-General's proposals to this end, to help the Organization break the many deadlocks which have been carefully preserved by the great Powers in order to discredit it in the eyes of the world.

Since I recognize the admittedly limited merits of the Organization, I cannot but rejoice to see new Members join us. That is why the delegation of Burkina Faso welcomes the admission of the 159th Member of the United Nations, the State of Brunei Darussalam.

The folly of those who, by a quirk of fate, rule the world makes it imperative for the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries--which, I hope, the State of Brunei Darussalam will soon join--to consider as one of the permanent goals of its struggle the achievement of disarmament, which is an essential aspect of the principal conditions of our right to development.

In our view, there must be serious studies of all the factors which have led to the calamities which have befallen the world. In this connection, President Fidel Castro stated our view admirably at the opening of the Sixth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held at Havana in September 1979, when he said:

"Three hundred billion dollars could build 600,000 schools, with a capacity for 400 million children; or 60 million comfortable homes, for 300 million people; or 30,000 hospitals, with 18 million beds; or 20,000 factories, with jobs for more than 20 million workers; or an irrigation system for 150 million hectares of land--that, with the application of technology, could feed a billion people."

If we multiply those numbers by 10--and I am sure that that is a conservative figure--we can see how much mankind wastes every year in the military field, that is, against peace.

It is easy to see why the indignation of the peoples is easily transformed into rebellion and revolution in the face of the crumbs tossed to them in the ignominious form of some aid, to which utterly humiliating conditions are sometimes attached. It can be understood why, in the fight for development, we consider ourselves to be tireless combatants for peace.

We swear to struggle to ease tension, to introduce the principles of civilized life into international relations and to extend these to all parts of the world. That means that we can no longer stand by passively and watch people haggle over concepts.

We reiterate our determination to work actively for peace; to take our place in the struggle for disarmament; to take action in the field of international politics as a decisive factor, free of all hindrance by any of the big Powers, whatever may be their designs.

But the quest for peace also involves the strict application of the right of countries to independence. On this point, the most pathetic--indeed, the most appalling--example is found in the Middle East, where, with arrogance, insolence and incredible stubbornness, a small country, Israel, has for more than 20 years, with the unspeakable complicity of its powerful protector, the United States, continued to defy the international community.

Only yesterday, Jews were consigned to the horrors of the crematorium, but Israel scorns history by inflicting on others the tortures it suffered.

In any event, Israel--whose people we love for its courage and sacrifices of the past--should realize that the conditions for its own tranquility are not to be found in military strength financed from outside. Israel must begin to learn to be a nation like other nations, one among many.

For the present, we declare from this rostrum our militant, active solidarity with the fighters, both men and women, of the wonderful people of Palestine, for we know that there is no suffering that has no end.

Analysing the economic and political situation in Africa, we cannot fail to stress our serious concern at the dangerous challenges to the rights of peoples hurled by certain nations which, secure in their alliances, openly flout international morality.

We are naturally pleased at the decision to withdraw foreign troops from Chad so that the Chadian people themselves, without intermediaries, can find the way to put an end to that fratricidal war and finally be able to dry the tears that have been shed for so many years. But, despite the progress made here and there in the struggle of the African peoples for economic emancipation, our continent continues to reflect the essential reality of the contradictions between the big Powers and to be oppressed by the unbearable scourges of today's world.

That is why we cannot accept and must unreservedly condemn the treatment of the people of Western Sahara by the Kingdom of Morocco, which has been using delaying tactics to postpone the day of reckoning that will in any event be forced upon it by the will of the Saharan people. I have visited the regions liberated by the Saharan people, and I have come to believe more firmly than ever that nothing will stop its progress towards the total liberation of its country under the militant and enlightened leadership of the Frente POLISARIO.

I do not wish to dwell too long on the question of Mayotte and the islands of the Malagasy archipelago; since the facts are clear and the principles obvious, there is no need to dwell on them. Mayotte belongs to the Comoros; the islands of the archipelago belong to Madagascar.

With regard to Latin America, we welcome the initiative of the Contadora Group as a positive step in the search for a just solution to the explosive situation in the region. Commander Daniel Ortega, speaking here [16th meeting] on behalf of the revolutionary people of Nicaragua, made concrete proposals and posed some basic, direct questions. We hope to see peace in his country and throughout Central America on and after 15 October; this is what world public opinion calls for.

Just as we condemned the foreign aggression against the island of Grenada, so we condemn all foreign intervention. Thus, we cannot remain silent about the foreign military intervention in Afghanistan.

And yet there is one point that is so serious that each of us must give a very open and clear explanation of it. That question, as members can imagine, is that of South Africa. The unbelievable insolence of that country with respect to all nations of the world--even those that support the terrorism which it has erected into a State system designed physically to liquidate the black majority of that country--and the contempt that it has shown for all our resolutions constitute one of the most serious and overwhelming concerns of the world today.

But the most tragic factor is not that South Africa has outlawed itself from the international community because of its apartheid laws, not even that it continues to occupy Namibia illegally and keep it under its colonialist and racist boot or that it continues with impugnity to subject its neighbours to the laws of banditry. No, what is the most abject and the most humiliating for the human conscience is that it has made this tragedy a matter of everyday reality for millions of human beings, who have only their own body and the heroism or their bare hands to defend themselves. Sure of the complicity of the big Powers and the active support of certain among them, as well as of the criminal collaboration of some pathetic African leaders, the white minority simply ignores the feelings of all those people, everywhere in the world, who find the savage methods of that country to be absolutely intolerable.

There was a time when international brigades went to defend the honour of nations that suffered aggression. Today, despite the agonizing open wounds that are suffered, all we do is vote for resolutions that do nothing more than call on a nation of pirates, which "destroys a smile as hail kills flowers", to mend its ways.

We shall soon be celebrating the one-hundred- and-fiftieth anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. My delegation supports the proposal of Antigua and Barbuda for the commemoration of that event, which is of very great importance to African countries and the black world. For us, all that can be said throughout the world during the commemorative ceremonies must emphasize the terrible cost paid by Africa and the black world in the development of civilization. Nothing was given to us in return, which no doubt explains the tragedy on our continent today. It is our blood that nourished the rise of capitalism, that made possible our present condition of dependence and consolidated our underdevelopment. But we cannot hide the truth any more; it cannot be ignored. The figures cannot be simply haggled away. For every black man who came to the plantations, five died or were crippled. And here I do not mention the disorganization of the continent and its consequences.

While the entire world, thanks to you, Mr. President, with the help of the Secretary-General, will be commemorating that anniversary and noting this truth, it will understand why we long for peace among nations and why we demand our right to development with absolute equality through the organization and distribution of human resources. It is because we belong to one of the races that has suffered the most that we in Burkina Faso have sworn that we shall never accept any splitting up of our country or any denial of justice. It is the memory of that suffering that causes us to stand side by side with the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] against the armed bands of Israel. It is the memory of that suffering which, on the one hand, causes us to support the African National Congress of South Africa [ANC] and the South West Africa People's Organization [SWAPO] and, on the other, makes absolutely intolerable the presence in South Africa of men who say they are white and feel entitled on that account to set the whole world on fire. It is that memory of suffering that makes us put all our faith in the United Nations, with the common responsibility, the common task and the common hopes of us all.

We demand that throughout the world the campaign to free Nelson Mandela be intensified so that his presence here at the next session of the General Assembly will be a victory of collective pride. In memory of our suffering and as a collective pardon, an international humanitarian prize should be given for all those who have contributed to the defence of human rights through their work and research. We call for cutting all budgets for space research by one ten-thousandth and devoting that amount to research in the field of health and to improving the human environment which has been disrupted by those "fireworks" which are harmful to the ecosystem.

We also propose that the structures of the United Nations be reviewed and revised so that an end may be put to the scandal of the right of veto. The perverse effects of its abuse have, of course, been offset by the vigilance of some States that possess the veto right. However, nothing can justify that right--neither the size of the country nor its wealth.

If the argument used to justify that inequity has been the cost paid during the Second World War, then those nations that have arrogated those rights to themselves should know that each of us has an uncle or a father who--like thousands of other innocent people recruited from the third world to defend the rights that had been flouted by the Hitlerite hordes-- also suffered and died from Nazi bullets. Therefore, let those major Powers, which miss no opportunity to question the rights of peoples, not be so arrogant. The absence of Africa from the club of those that have the right of veto is an injustice which must be ended.

Lastly, my delegation would be failing in its duty if it did not call for the suspension of Israel and the pure and simple exclusion of South Africa from the United Nations. When, in the course of time, those countries have done what they must do to justify their presence in the international community, then we would be only too happy to welcome them here and to guide their first steps.

We should like to reconfirm our confidence in the United Nations. We are grateful for the work which its agencies have done in Burkina Faso and for their presence side by side with us in the difficult times in which we are living. We are grateful to the members of the Security Council for having allowed us twice this year to preside over the work of the Council. We only hope the Council will recognize the principle of the struggle against the extermination of 30 million human beings each year through hunger, which today is more devastating than nuclear weapons.

Our confidence and faith in the United Nations leads me to thank the Secretary-General for his visit, which we greatly appreciated; he came to see for himself the harsh reality of our life and to get a true picture of the aridity or the Sahel and the tragedy of desertification.

I cannot conclude without paying a tribute to the President of the General Assembly, who, with his great intelligence and perception, will guide the work of this thirty-ninth session.

I have traveled many thousands of kilometres to be here. I have come to ask each member to work together to put an end to the contempt of those who are unreasonable, to eliminate the tragic spectacle of children dying of hunger, to do away with ignorance, to ensure the triumph of the legitimate rebellion of peoples and to put an end to the use of weapons so that they can be laid down and fall silent, and to ensure that mankind will survive and that together, with the great poet Novalis we can all sing together:

"Soon the stars will come back to the Earth where they have long been gone; soon the sun will return, the star will shine again among the stars, all the races of the world will gather together again after a long separation, the old orphaned families will find one another again and every day there will be new discoveries, more people will embrace one another; then the inhabitants of the old days will come back to the Earth, the ashes will be relit in each tomb, the flame of life will bum again, the old houses will be rebuilt, the old times will come again and history will be the dream of the present extended to infinity."

Down with international reaction! Down with imperialism! Down with neo-colonialism! Down with "puppetism"!

Eternal glory to the peoples who are struggling for their freedom! Eternal glory to the peoples who stand shoulder to shoulder to defend their dignity! Eternal victory to the peoples of Africa, Latin America and Asia in their struggle!

Fatherland or death: we shall triumph.


Address of Captain Thomas Sankara, Head of State and President of the National Council of the Revolution of Burkina Faso, to the Thirty-Ninth Session, 20th Plenary Meeting, of the United Nations General Assembly , New York, Tuesday, 4 October 1984. Available via the Marxist Internet Archive.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/speec ... tober-1984

Glaring Western Hypocrisy on Human Rights in Africa: Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 02 Nov 2022

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The US and EU are complicit in the continued Rwandan and Ugandan incursions into the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in their support of their TPLF proxies against Ethiopia.

On October 31st, thousands of Congolese in Goma, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu Province, protested the war of aggression waged by Rwanda and Uganda’s M23 militia, which has reportedly tightened its grip on surrounding countryside. One sign read “Rwanda and Ouganda Is Killing in DR Congo,” and Congolese activists are using the hashtag #RwandaIsKilling. Mambo Kawaya, a civil society representative, told AFP, “We denounce the hypocrisy of the international community in the face of Rwanda’s aggression.”

US and EU hypocrisy

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more vivid than in the contrast between the US/Canadian/EU engagement in the Ethiopian and Congolese conflicts. As Ethiopia nears victory in its war with the US-backed, insurrectionist Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), huge crowds of Ethiopians have taken to the streets to protest US intervention and demand respect for Ethiopian sovereignty. The US has nevertheless muscled its way into “peace talks” in South Africa, with the US State Department gloating that US Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa Mike Hammer “is both an observer and a participant to these talks.” The US has given political, diplomatic, and narrative support to the TPLF, its longtime client, throughout the war and has quite likely provided arms and logistical support.

US and EU officialdom and press now repeat a daily refrain that Ethiopia and Eritrea are guilty of mass atrocities, that Eritrean troops must leave Ethiopia and that they are violating Ethiopian sovereignty, even though Ethiopia is perfectly within its sovereign right to ask Eritrea for help.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres parrots the US and EU talking points, although China, Russia, and African nations on the UN Security Council have consistently refused to agree to any resolutions to condemn or otherwise intervene in Ethiopia.

The West’s weaponization of human rights against Ethiopia is as glaring as it is against Russia, with threats of IMF and World Bank strangulation, draconian sanctions, ICC indictments, and ad hoc criminal tribunals.

The West’s objection to Rwandan and Ugandan aggression in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is by contrast tepid at best, even though Rwanda and Uganda have violated DRC’s national sovereignty for the past 26 years. They invaded and occupied the country, toppled two governments, committed decades of atrocities, seized territory, looted resources, and displaced so many Congolese that Congo has one of the world’s highest populations of internally displaced persons (IDPs), 5.53 million, and large refugee populations in neighboring nations.

There’s abundant evidence of all this, decades of evidence in UN Group of Experts reports, and if the UN Security Council did what it’s supposed to do, it would tell Rwanda and Uganda that they have to get out of DRC and, if necessary, take measures to force them to leave. Instead they’ve sustained an ineffective and often corrupt UN Peacekeeping operation, MONUSCO, that essentially manages the conflict in a way that enriches Rwanda and Uganda’s ruling elites and makes Congo’s resource wealth available to the major industrial powers at minimal cost.

The UNSC did form the Combat Intervention Brigade to drive M23 out of Congo in 2013, but they weren’t serious about defending Congolese sovereignty. It was a charade organized because reports of M23 atrocities had become so shocking that they had to appear to do something. Congolese sovereignty was not restored, but the international press moved on to new headlines.

Now, the UK and Denmark are both determined to use Rwanda to outsource migrants who reach their shores for processing, despite the outcry and legal battles of European immigrant rights groups. The UK’s new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has said that he will do “whatever it takes ” to succeed in sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, and he’s certainly not going to criticize Rwanda’s M23 war in DRC. The EU appears to be too busy hurling all its human rights weapons at Ethiopia and Eritrea to notice the horrific escalation in M23 atrocities in DRC.
During Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Rwanda, he released a statement about his conversation with President Paul Kagame in which he said:

“. . . we just came from a meeting with President Kagame, where we covered a wide range of issues, including many of the ones that I’ve just discussed. I also raised issues where we have real concerns. On those, our discussions were direct, candid, respectful. The president candidly conveyed his views as well. I discussed the credible reports indicating that Rwanda continues to support the M23 rebel group and has its armed forces inside the DRC. We recognize that Rwanda has security concerns of its own, including reports of cooperation between the Congolese military and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the DFLR, an armed group.”

In other words, he expressed a bit of obligatory concern about M23, while condoning Kagame’s decades-old excuse, that the DFLR, a Rwandan refugee group, threatens Rwanda.

There has been some faint objection in Congress, where, in May, New Jersey Senator Gregory Menendez, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent Blinken a letter calling for a comprehensive review of US policy towards Rwanda, and said he would place a hold on several million dollars in support for Rwandan peacekeepers participating in UN missions.

Menendez is also the author of a draconian sanctions bill, S. 3199, that aims to control every aspect of Ethiopian society, its politics, economy, and even its public discourse, which it threatens with sanctions on anyone spreading disinformation about Ethiopia, including the diaspora.

On October 26th, Ambassador Robert Wood, US Alternative Representative for Special Political Affairs to the UN, delivered a statement in support of ongoing UN management of the conflict in Congo, which included one mild paragraph about Rwanda’s presence in Congo:

“This violence is unacceptable, and the United States calls on armed groups to discontinue their assaults on the DRC’s most vulnerable populations. We also call on state actors to stop their support for these groups, including the Rwandan Defense Forces’ assistance to M23.”

Menendez tweeted Ambassador Wood’s remarks with a somewhat more forceful statement:

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Illinois Senator Dick Durban, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, and Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen voiced an extremely timid concern, also in a letter to Blinken , in which they noted that, “Credible reports by established human rights organizations indicate that M23 has a regular supply of modem arms and munitions that allows its members to regularly strike targets over long distances and execute precision fires against aircraft, suggesting direct state sponsored support. Given the years and degree of human suffering in eastern Congo we ask for an update on ongoing enforcement of U.S. sanctions against M23 as required by Public Law 112-239 [the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, written while M23 was rampaging through Congo’s Kivu Provinces, committing atrocities so horrifying that the international press took heed.]

The letter does not name Kagame, Museveni, or Rwanda, but concludes, “we respectfully request an update on persons and officials of foreign governments your departments believe to be providing support to M23, which can be by classified annex if needed. We also request you detail your current efforts to further identify and sanction persons and officials engaged in supporting M23.”

That could hardly be a more timid statement, given that the identity of persons and officials behind M23 have been known since they emerged in 2012 and 2013. This is how the UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo began their January 14 Final Report :

“The most significant event of the year was the military defeat of the Mouvement du 23 mars (M23) rebel movement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its flight to Rwanda and Uganda. The Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo documented human rights abuses by M23 during 2013 and confirmed that M23 received various forms of support from Rwandan territory, including recruitment, troop reinforcement, ammunition deliveries and fire support. At the time of writing the present report, the Group had received credible information that sanctioned M23 leaders were moving freely in Uganda and that M23 continued to recruit in Rwanda.”

On a positive note, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Congolese, Rwandans, and Ugandans are speaking out about the West’s hypocrisy and interference in their countries and building PanAfrican ties .

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 04, 2022 2:37 pm

Ethiopia Peace Talks Conclude: TPLF Agrees to Disarm
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 3, 2022

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Peace agreement joint statementRepresentative of Ethiopian government, Redwan Hussien, (seated left) and representative of TPLF, Getachew Reda, (seated left) signing the agreement in Pretoria, South Africa, on November 2, 2022

The Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on Wednesday reached a peace agreement in South Africa after ten days of intense talks.

It was the African Union that led the discussion. Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, now African Union Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, was the chief mediator. Former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and former South African Deputy President, Mlambo-Ngcuka, were assisting the facilitation.

The two parties have agreed to reach a cessation of hostilities on the condition that the TPLF disarm its forces and renounce its claims as the “Government of Tigray”, among other things. The United States has apparently dropped a reference to the rebel group as “Government of Tigray or Tigray authorities.” A statement from Anthony Blinken, which was released on November 2, referred to the group as “the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. ”

The Ethiopian Government and TPLF have released a joint statement regarding the agreement and its implementation.

It reads as follows :

“Joint Statement between the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF)

1. As per Article 3 of the Agreement for Lasting Peace and Permanent Cessation of Hostilities, the Representatives of the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the TPLF have agreed to announce to the people of Ethiopia and the rest of the world that after 10 days of intensive negotiations have concluded a peace agreement.

2. We have agreed to permanently silence the guns and end the two years of conflict in northern Ethiopia.

3. The conflict has brought a tragic degree of loss of lives and livelihoods and it is in the interest of the entire people of Ethiopia to leave this chapter of conflict behind and live in peace and harmony.

4. It is fundamental that we reaffirmed our commitment to safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ethiopia and to upholding the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, Ethiopia has only one national defense force. We have also agreed on a detailed program of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration for the TPLF combatants, taking into account the security situation on the ground.

5. We have agreed that the Government of Ethiopia will further enhance its collaboration with humanitarian agencies to continue expediting aid to all those in need of assistance.

6. We have agreed to implement transitional measures that include the restoration of Constitutional order in the Tigray region, a framework for the settlement of political differences, and a Transitional Justice Policy framework to ensure accountability, truth, reconciliation, and healing.

7. To start implementing these undertakings without delay, we have agreed to stop all forms of conflicts, and hostile propaganda. We will only make statements that support the expeditious implementation of the Agreement. We urge Ethiopians in the country and abroad, to support this Agreement, stop voices of division and hate, and mobilize their resources for economic recovery and rehabilitation of social bonds.

8. The Government of Ethiopia will continue the efforts to restore public services and rebuild the infrastructures of all communities affected by the conflict. Students must go to school, farmers, and pastoralists to their fields, and public servants to their offices. The Agreement requires the support of the public for its smooth implementation. This is a new and hopeful chapter in the history of the country.

9. We express our gratitude to all actors contributing to the success of this endeavor. In particular, the African Union Commission Chairperson, the African High-Level Panel led by His Excellency former President Olusegun Obasanjo, supported by His Excellency former President Uhuru Kenyatta, and Her Excellency Dr. Phumuzile Mlalmbo, former Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa. We thank the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, His Excellency Mr. Moussa Faki Mahamat, Commissioner Bankole Adeoye and his colleagues for their tireless work during these talks. We rely on their continued support as we implement the Agreement.

10. We thank His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of the Republic of South Africa, and Her Excellency Dr. Naledi Pandor, the Minister for the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa for the excellent facilities they put at the disposal of these talks and their words of encouragement to the parties towards these successful results. We are indebted for the hospitality accorded to us by the People and Government of the Republic of South Africa.

11. We are grateful to the people of Ethiopia for encouraging these talks and patiently waiting for the outcome. We are confident that they will embrace the results of these talks and ensure their timely implementation.

12. Finally, we are confident that friends of Ethiopia and members of the diplomatic community will lend their support in rebuilding infrastructures in affected communities and the economic recovery of the country. We call on all types of media outlets to support peace, reconciliation, unity, and prosperity in Ethiopia.

Jointly Delivered at Pretoria, the Republic of South Africa, on 2nd November 2022.”

Borkena

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/11/ ... to-disarm/

The Libyan Knot and a Dangerous Conflict Brewing in the Mediterranean
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 3, 2022
Viktor Mikhin

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How Turkey and Europe will divide up Libya’s oil remains to be seen…

In early October, Turkey and the outgoing government in Tripoli, led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, signed an agreement allowing Ankara to explore energy resources in the Mediterranean. According to general opinion in the Arab press and among political scientists, this is not only a blatant violation of international maritime law. It is also confirmation that neither side has any intention or desire to support the international efforts led by UN to restore stability in Libya. The only way to do so is through parliamentary and presidential elections that lead to a legitimate, stable government capable of preserving the unity and territorial integrity of the country and respecting international law.

It is worth recalling that the Dbeibah Government of National Unity (GNU) was approved by the UN-monitored Libyan Political Dialog Forum (LPDF) in February 2021 to carry out one main task during a short transition period: holding presidential and parliamentary elections on December 24, 2021. But that was not the only commitment Dbeibah made when he took office as interim prime minister. Along with Presidential Council Chairman Mohamed Al-Menfi, he pledged not to run in those elections.

Dbeibah failed on both counts. No elections were held on December 24, and he reneged on the commitment he made to UN and the international community not to run for president. Since taking office as prime minister, he has spared no effort, as reported by the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, to misuse public funds in an effort to build a powerful base of supporters. They are the ones he believes will support him in the upcoming elections in a very divided and fractured political scene in western Libya, dominated by militias and extremist Islamist groups backed by Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood (banned in the Russian Federation). When Dbeibah’s term expired at the end of 2021, the only legitimate elected body, the parliament in Tobruk, appointed former Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha as interim prime minister in February of this year. Not surprisingly, with Ankara’s military support, Dbeibah twice ordered the use of military force to prevent Bashagha from entering Tripoli and assuming his key post. It should be recalled that Bashagha is not new to western Libya, he originally comes from Misrata, but he decided not to bring his forces to the capital in order to avoid bloodshed.

Meanwhile, Dbeibah declared that his term would officially end on June 22, 18 months after the agreement backed by UN, and refused to recognize the Libyan parliament’s decision to appoint Bashagha. That deadline has also passed, and since then Dbeibah has repeated the far-fetched argument that he will only hand over his post to an elected government. Given the many difficulties standing in the way of holding a presidential election, both political and legal, Dbeibah’s message was that he would further deepen the divisions among Libyans and remain in office indefinitely. But the military support that Turkey provided to the Dbeibah government clearly came with all kinds of strings attached. As the saying goes, “free cheese only comes in a mousetrap,” and that is why he is now in a Turkish trap.

Even before UN could negotiate an agreement that led to the formation of the Dbeibah government in February 2021, Ankara signed a controversial maritime border agreement with former Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in 2019 that granted Turkey access to the Greek economic zone in the Mediterranean Sea for oil and gas exploration. The agreement exacerbated existing tensions between Turkey and Greece, which believes such energy deals encroach on Greek waters.

Neither the Al-Sarraj government nor the Dbeibah government had the authority or mandate to enter into international agreements or memoranda of understanding with Turkey. Indeed, in the view of many Arab leaders, Ankara is violating international law.

The current actions of Libya and Turkey were described by the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram as a new and latest “provocation” by the two states and must be firmly rejected by the United Nations and all countries involved in the situation in Libya. Following talks between Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias, both urged UN Secretary-General António Guterres to “take a firm stand on the illegitimacy of the outgoing Libyan government.”

Other Libyan political forces and major countries around the world also condemned the recent agreements signed by Ankara and the Dbeibah government. The European Union said that the energy agreements signed in this context violate the sovereign rights of third countries and do not comply with the maritime law of UN. Greek Foreign Minister Dendias accused Turkey of trying to “exploit the turbulent situation in Libya to further destabilize the Mediterranean and establish regional hegemony.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is actively trying to capitalize on the current global chaos following the start of the war in Ukraine unleashed by the U.S. and neo-Nazis in order to profit from the growing global demand for oil and gas production.

At their joint press conference, Shukri and Dendias reaffirmed their commitment to the Exclusive Economic Zone Agreement signed by the two countries in 2020, as well as their determination and pledge to protect the sovereign rights of Egypt and Greece as stipulated in the convention. They also reiterated their support for efforts to pave the way for Libyan presidential and parliamentary elections by helping Libyan parties reach an agreement on the necessary steps to hold a vote.

But in any case, a dangerous conflict is brewing in the Mediterranean that could explode at any time. It should be taken into account that Turkey has staked a lot on the Libyan card, and the supply of cheap oil from this African country could to some extent alleviate Ankara’s difficult economic situation and provide strength to the Erdogan regime. At the same time, given the volatility of the Libyan conflict, a new gross interference of the EU and NATO in the internal affairs of the Libyan people is possible. The European press is currently writing a lot about the prospect of establishing massive oil supplies from Algeria and Libya. But as the facts show, Algeria is by no means willing to supply the “black gold” and gas at the purchase prices unjustifiably set by Europe.

That leaves Libya, but how Turkey and Europe will divide up its oil remains to be seen by the world.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/11/ ... terranean/

*****************

Sudan Registers Record Trade Deficit Amid Deepening Crisis

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People protesting in Omdourman, Sudan, Oct. 21, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @salmrizza

Published 4 November 2022 (35 minutes ago)

For many years, the trade balance did not achieve a surplus because of the problem of decline in exports and increased imports.


Sudan has registered a record trade deficit of US$3.5 billion in the first nine months this year, amid signs of a deepening economic crisis.

"The deficit in the trade balance reached its highest level during the third quarter of the current fiscal year 2022, recording more than US$3.5 billion," the Central Bank of Sudan (CBOS) said in its newly released quarterly Foreign Trade Statistical Digest.

Sudan's imports of foreign goods from January to September amounted to slightly more than US$7.1 billion, while its exports dropped to the lowest level of about US$3.6 billion.

"For many years, the trade balance did not achieve a surplus because of the problem of decline in exports and increased imports," economic analyst Ali Ismail said, adding that the problem of weak exports should be blamed on more than one party, with the state, producers and exporters all responsible for the situation.

The need to address the issue of weak exports through attracting international companies to increase the production of exported goods at lower costs. Essam Al-Zain, director of an import and export company in the capital Khartoum, criticized the tax policies for leading to a rise in production cost, "which in turn leads to a rise in the size of imports."


Sudan imports many products that could have been manufactured locally, but its investment has been attracted to neighboring countries because of the low cost of production there. This African country imports most of its petroleum, food and medicines from other countries, with gold representing its major export.

To make things worse, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. and European countries suspended the flow of more than US$8 billion into Sudan in the wake of the state of emergency imposed by the military in October 2021.

Sudan's debt relief process under the IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative has also been halted. In fact, Sudan has been facing an economic crisis since the secession of South Sudan in 2011 which cost Sudan 75 percent of its oil revenues.

The Sudanese government has recently adopted measures including a significant increase in service fees in order to cover the deficit in state budget amid the economic crisis. Under these government measures, the Sudanese pound's exchange rate was weakened by 26.8 percent from 445 pounds to 564 pounds for one U.S. dollar.

Port fees have also been raised by more than 300 percent, as port floor fees have nearly doubled four times, in addition to an increase in container shipping fees by about 500 percent in some ports.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 07, 2022 2:54 pm

Africa Does Not Want to Be a Breeding Ground for the New Cold War: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2022)

NOVEMBER 3, 2022
Español Português Chinese Italian German

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Chaïbia Talal (Morocco), Mon Village, Chtouka, 1990.


Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 17 October, the head of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), US Marine Corps General Michael Langley visited Morocco. Langley met with senior Moroccan military leaders, including Inspector General of the Moroccan Armed Forces Belkhir El Farouk. Since 2004, AFRICOM has held its ‘largest and premier annual exercise’, African Lion, partly on Moroccan soil. This past June, ten countries participated in the African Lion 2022, with observers from Israel (for the first time) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

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Salah Elmur (Sudan), The Green Room, 2019.

Langley’s visit is part of a broader US push onto the African continent, which we documented in our dossier no. 42 (July 2021), Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, a joint publication with The Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group. In that text, we wrote that the two important principles of Pan-Africanism are political unity and territorial sovereignty and argued that ‘[t]he enduring presence of foreign military bases not only symbolises the lack of unity and sovereignty; it also equally enforces the fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’. In August, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield travelled to Ghana, Uganda, and Cape Verde. ‘We’re not asking Africans to make any choices between the United States and Russia’, she said ahead of her visit, but, she added, ‘for me, that choice would be simple’. That choice is nonetheless being impelled by the US Congress as it deliberates the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, a bill that would sanction African states if they do business with Russia (and could possibly extend to China in the future).

To understand this unfolding situation, our friends at No Cold War have prepared their briefing no. 5, NATO Claims Africa as Its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, which looks at how NATO has begun to develop a proprietary view of Africa and how the US government considers Africa to be a frontline in its Global Monroe Doctrine. That briefing can be read in full below and downloaded here:

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In August 2022, the United States published a new foreign policy strategy aimed at Africa. The 17-page document featured 10 mentions of China and Russia combined, including a pledge to ‘counter harmful activities by the [People’s Republic of China], Russia, and other foreign actors’ on the continent, but did not once mention the term ‘sovereignty’. Although US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated that Washington ‘will not dictate Africa’s choices’, African governments have reported facing ‘patronising bullying’ from NATO member states to take their side in the war in Ukraine. As global tensions rise, the US and its allies have signalled that they view the continent as a battleground to wage their New Cold War against China and Russia.

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Richard Mudariki (Zimbabwe), The Passover, 2011.

A New Monroe Doctrine?

At its annual summit in June, NATO named Africa along with the Middle East ‘NATO’s southern neighbourhood’. On top of this, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg ominously referred to ‘Russia and China’s increasing influence in our southern neighbourhood’ as a ‘challenge’. The following month, the outgoing commander of AFRICOM, General Stephen J Townsend, referred to Africa as ‘NATO’s southern flank’. These comments are disturbingly reminiscent of the neocolonial attitude espoused by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in which the US claimed Latin America as its ‘backyard’.

This paternalistic view of Africa appears to be widely held in Washington. In April, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Countering Malign Russian Influence Activities in Africa Act by a vote of 415-9. The bill, which aims to punish African governments for not aligning with US foreign policy on Russia, has been widely condemned across the continent for disrespecting the sovereignty of African nations, with South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor calling it ‘absolutely disgraceful’.

The efforts by the US and Western countries to draw Africa into their geopolitical conflicts raise serious concerns: namely, will the US and NATO weaponise their vast military presence on the continent to achieve their aims?

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Amani Bodo (DRC), Masque à gaz (‘Gas Mask’), 2020.

AFRICOM: Protecting US and NATO’s Hegemony

In 2007, the United States established its Africa Command (AFRICOM) ‘in response to our expanding partnerships and interests in Africa’. In just 15 years, AFRICOM has established at least 29 military bases on the continent as part of an extensive network which includes more than 60 outposts and access points in at least 34 countries – over 60 percent of the nations on the continent.

Despite Washington’s rhetoric of promoting democracy and human rights in Africa, in reality, AFRICOM aims to secure US hegemony over the continent. AFRICOM’s stated objectives include ‘protecting US interests’ and ‘maintaining superiority over competitors’ in Africa. In fact, the creation of AFRICOM was motivated by the concerns of ‘those alarmed by China’s expanding presence and influence in the region’.

From the outset, NATO was involved in the endeavour, with the original proposal put forward by then Supreme Allied Commander of NATO James L Jones, Jr. On an annual basis, AFRICOM conducts training exercises focused on enhancing the ‘interoperability’ between African militaries and ‘US and NATO special operations forces’.

The destructive nature of the US and NATO’s military presence in Africa was exemplified in 2011 when – ignoring the African Union’s opposition – the US and NATO launched their catastrophic military intervention in Libya to remove the government of Muammar Gaddafi. This regime change war destroyed the country, which had previously scored the highest among African nations on the UN Human Development Index. Over a decade later, the principal achievements of the intervention in Libya have been the return of slave markets to the country, the entry of thousands of foreign fighters, and unending violence.

In the future, will the US and NATO invoke the ‘malign influence’ of China and Russia as a justification for military interventions and regime change in Africa?

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Zemba Luzamba (DRC), Parlementaires debout (‘Parliamentarians Standing’), 2019.

Africa Rejects a New Cold War

At this year’s UN General Assembly, the African Union firmly rejected the coercive efforts of the US and Western countries to use the continent as a pawn in their geopolitical agenda. ‘Africa has suffered enough of the burden of history’, stated Chairman of the African Union and President of Senegal Macky Sall; ‘it does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War, but rather a pole of stability and opportunity open to all its partners, on a mutually beneficial basis’. Indeed, the drive for war offers nothing to the peoples of Africa in their pursuit of peace, climate change adaptation, and development.

"Europe is a garden. The rest of the world is a jungle. And the jungle could invade the garden."

"Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us."

– Shocking comments from EU foreign policy head @JosepBorrellF


At the inauguration of the European Diplomatic Academy on 13 October, the European Union’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, said, ‘Europe is a garden… The rest of the world… is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden’. As if the metaphor were not clear enough, he added, ‘Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us’. Borrell’s racist comments were pilloried on social media and eviscerated in the European Parliament by Marc Botenga of the Belgian Workers’ Party, and a petition by the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) calling for Borrell’s resignation has received over 10,000 signatures. Borrell’s lack of historical knowledge is significant: it is Europe and North America that continue to invade the African continent, and it is those military and economic invasions that cause African people migrate. As President Sall said, Africa does not want to be a ‘breeding ground of a new Cold War’, but a sovereign place of dignity.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -cold-war/

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Why NATO’s Wars Should Worry Africa
NOVEMBER 5, 2022

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Senegalese soldiers training during Africa Lion, US Africa Command’s annual exercise, at Cap Draa, Morocco, in June 2021. Photo: US Army/St. Nathan Baker.

By Farid Abdulhamid – Oct 27, 2022

NATO’s encroachment on Russia is not only a threat to world peace but a clear and present danger to resource-rich regions like Africa.

The raging international conflict in Ukraine is framed in mainstream western media as the “Russian invasion of Ukraine” and referred to in other circles as a “Russo-Ukrainian War.” The problem with this skewed misrepresentation is that it obscures the deeper layer of the unfolding war theatre, namely the NATO-driven geopolitical underpinning of the conflict. The spark that ignited the current hostilities can be traced to the longstanding NATO-Russia tension over the former’s expansion in Eastern Europe that has been building overtime, and which in the context of Ukraine, is viewed by Russia as an encirclement strategy that poses existential threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Simply put, the conflict in Ukraine is primarily a NATO-orchestrated geopolitical war targeting Russia but using Ukraine as a springboard to drive its expansion in the region.

After suffering a string of defeats in the Middle East and Central Asia, NATO turned its attention to Europe, where it aggressively pushed for Ukraine’s membership to the Alliance. NATO’s failure to oust the Bashar Assad regime where Syrian forces that relied heavily on Russian airpower defeated the West’s proxies on the ground and prevented the Alliance’s attempt to bring the Middle Eastern country under its sphere of influence, was followed by its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. The debacle in Syria and Afghanistan precipitated the Alliance’s drive to bolster its Eastern flank in a bid to regain the strategic edge over Russia and China that are spreading their interests around the world.

It was NATO’s encirclement of Russia that gave Vladimir Putin the pretext to “secure” Russia’s southern flank in 2014 by annexing Crimea while further provocations by NATO pushed Putin to shore up his western frontier through the annexation of the Russian-speaking Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. With Putin insisting he is at war with NATO, the Alliance continues to funnel billions of dollars into the Ukraine war campaign in the form of military hardware, communications, and munitions supplies that has chiefly become a boon for the US Military-Industrial-Complex.

In the wake of the ongoing escalation, there is no doubting the fact that the world should do everything to end the current conflict. Ideally, a negotiated settlement can only succeed if terms of a potential comprehensive peace call for the withdrawal of Russian troops, the halting of NATO’s eastward expansion in Europe and for Ukraine to embrace neutrality over the NATO-Russia stand-off.

The seven-month war has cost thousands of lives on both sides, leading to mass displacement and destruction of Ukraine’s public infrastructure. It has also created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II with an estimated 7.4 million refugees fleeing Ukraine and crossing into neighbouring countries. Further, the conflict has caused skyrocketing food prices and an acute energy crisis around the world that has hit Africa the hardest.

Africa’s neutral stance

In spite of incessant pressure from the West, African countries have largely rejected the condemnation of Russia over the Ukraine war and instead many took a neutral stance owing to the long history between the continent and Russia, dating back to the era of Soviet Union when Moscow supported anti-colonial, liberation movements in Africa.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose country is a BRICS member, a grouping of five emerging economies that includes Russia, China, India and Brazil, openly blamed NATO for the war in Ukraine stating the conflict could have been avoided had NATO heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater instability in the region. Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) party had strong ties to the former Soviet Union, which trained and supported anti-apartheid activists during the struggle against apartheid rule in South Africa.

Even within the upper echelons of the African Union (AU), the conflict in Ukraine is seen as a geopolitical contest pitting NATO against Russia. At the recently concluded 77th session of the UN General Assembly, African Union Chairperson, President Macky Sall of Senegal said that Africa “does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War,” alluding to the pressure mounting on the continent’s leaders to choose sides over the war in Ukraine. “We call for a de-escalation and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine as well as for a negotiated solution to avoid the catastrophic risk of a potentially global conflict,” he said, reiterating Africa’s position on the conflict.

A new scramble for Africa

Progressive analysts hold that NATO’s encroachment on Russia is not only a threat to world peace but also represents a clear and present danger to resource-rich regions like Africa. A victory in Ukraine will embolden the western military bloc to escalate its hegemonic agenda in Africa. Even if NATO’s advance in Eastern Europe is eventually halted by Russia, a setback in Ukraine could make it position Africa as an area where it can project its power on a global scale.

Camouflaged under the dubious arrangement “NATO-AU Cooperation” the western military bloc’s involvement in Africa is no longer a closely guarded secret. In fact, NATO has an official liaison office in the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, while high level AU and NATO officials have held closed door meetings in Addis and Brussels (NATO’s headquarters). With a new scramble for Africa unfolding fast, NATO is making its intentions clear as it seeks to occupy and militarise large swathes of the African continent.

Caught between the NATO-Russia and US-China superpower rivalry, the emergent geopolitical conflict has far-reaching security implications for Africa, which is already reeling under the effects of an undeclared cold war. “NATO-AU Cooperation” is fast transitioning from technical cooperation to strategic partnership, which could pave the way to fully fledged military intervention.

US Africa Command (AFRICOM)

Set-up in 2007, the US Africa Command, AFRICOM, is a direct product of NATO expansion in the region via EUCOM, the US European Command, a central part of NATO that originally also took responsibility for 42 African states. While the Pentagon boasts of AFRICOM’s operational roles in reconnaissance, training, and logistics, it is the hidden combat operations in the form of surgical strikes (drones, cruise missiles etc) directed at perceived enemy targets that is causing mounting civilian casualties, especially in Somalia. The US is seeking to build an expanded role for NATO in Africa as it refocuses its attention to the Asia-Pacific theatre, where it is looking to outflank China.

Located at Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, AFRICOM’s stated objectives “are to counter transnational threats and malign actors, strengthen security forces (African) and respond to crises in order to advance US national interests and promote regional security, stability and prosperity”. While anti-militarisation mobilisation on the ground has prevented AFRICOM from relocating its headquarters to Africa, the US Camp Lemonier base in Djibouti technically serves as AFRICOM’s de facto headquarters on the continent and has become the centrepiece of an expanding constellation of US drone and surveillance bases stretching from Libya to Mali to the Central African Republic.

According to its official website, the NATO-backed Command is active in 38 African countries, and is manned by security personnel, civilian officials as well as liaison officers at key African posts, including the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre in Ghana. Strategically, AFRICOM’s aim is to entrench US hegemony in Africa by securing unfettered access to the continent’s vital resources, including oil and gas reserves, and mineral deposits through militarisation and occupation. It also serves as a coup incubator with a spate of recent coups in West Africa linked to US-trained military officers.

NATO’s growing footprint in Africa

NATO’s expansion in Africa can be seen in the high-level military cooperation agreements it imposed on the AU, intended to consolidate the bloc’s expansionist agenda in the continent. In a series of events starting in 2005 NATO provided “logistical” support to the AU Mission in Darfur followed by a “strategic” airlift to support AU’s Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and a subsequent “sealift support” in 2009. In 2011 NATO’s involvement on the continent took another turn when former AU Commission Chairperson, Jean Ping, visited NATO. Ping’s trip was made in the context of Operation Unified Protector—the UN-mandated operation to “protect” civilians and civilian-populated areas in Libya, which ironically, was then under sustained NATO bombardment.

In 2014, the AU Commissioner for Peace and Security Ambassador, Smail Chergui, visited NATO and signed the technical agreement on NATO-AU cooperation. This was followed by a flurry of activities that further cemented NATO’s expansion on the continent with the opening of the NATO liaison office at the AU headquarters in Ethiopia in 2015, and the start of the annual NATO-AU military-to-military staff talks, and programme of mobile training solutions offered to AU officers which started in the same year.

With the NATO imposed agenda on Africa moving fast, AU leaders were pushed to agree to a further strengthening and expansion of the Alliance’s political and practical cooperation at the Warsaw Summit in 2016, which paved the way for a cooperation agreement that was signed in 2019, to bring NATO and the AU closer together. In 2021, the NATO-AU Cooperation Plan was signed to enhance the military cooperation offered to the AU. The so-called “cooperation plan” stipulated in the NATO-AU agreement is a cover to intensify NATO’s military operations in the region, which could mean putting boots on the ground.

According to Vijay Prashad, the 2011 war in Libya, NATO’s first major military operation on the continent, was part of a strategy to coalesce Western power and expansion into Africa. French President Emmanuel Macron has long called for a greater NATO involvement in Africa. As the conflict in Ukraine rages on, NATO leaders are making connections between Russia’s action in Ukraine and its advances in Africa. In the run up the NATO Summit in Madrid on 22 June this year, the Alliance leaders warned of Russia’s inroads into the continent calling for the bloc to closely watch its southern flank (Africa). At the summit, NATO declared Russia as “it’s most significant and direct threat.”

From NATO’s point of view, security threats emanating from Africa arise from Putin’s increasing traction on the continent owing to his growing political and diplomatic influence and the unmistakable military footprint of the Russia-linked Wagner Group, a private military contractor the West claims is staging Putin’s covert war in Africa. Russia denies links to the Wagner Group but reiterates its right to forge closer ties with African countries through mutual trade and partnership as well security arrangements.

Is Russia an imperialist power?
Even though Russia is seeking to expand its influence in Africa and the Middle East, it would be a mistake to characterise it as an imperialist power. Despite attempts by the western media to portray Russia as a neo-colonial force, its recent forays into Africa does not fit the classic definition of imperialism.

Lenin defined capitalist imperialism as:

The stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

Given that Russia is a country with limited export capital, with no stranglehold on global finance and capital or its own economic spheres and monopolies around the world, it can be correctly described as a non-imperial, capitalist state.

To put the above into perspective, Stansfield Smith, a prominent ant-war activist and writer, notes that Russia’s strength among international capitalist monopolies is negligible, its labour productivity is far below that of the US and the European Union, while its manufacturing output ranked 15th in the world, behind India, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil adding that Russian exports (and imports) do not fit in the pattern of an imperialist state, but rather of a semi-developed peripheral state, exporting raw materials, and relying on foreign import of advanced goods.

Further, Smith observes that Russia sees a substantial export of capital, but this comes in the form of capital flight to tax havens such as Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, which in 2018 stood at US$66 billion. When it comes to foreign assets, not a single Russian corporation is listed in the world’s top 100 non-financial multinational corporations with assets abroad. Furthermore, Russia remains a marginal actor in international banking and finance capital with only one of its financial institutions making the list of top 100 banks.

Smith also notes that although Russia has intervened in other countries (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria), it not in a manner of imperialist countries, which are motivated to seize natural resources and wealth. According to Smith, Russian intervention is nowhere near the scale of even secondary imperial powers such as France or Britain, nor has Russia engineered coup d’etats in other countries as imperialist countries constantly do.

Russia has 15 military bases in nine foreign countries but only two of these are outside the borders of the former Soviet Union, in Vietnam and Syria. China has one base outside of its borders, in Djbouti. The US has over 800 foreign bases. Russia’s heft on the global stage is measured by its military might (not its global economic dominance), and it plays no role in policing and enforcing world order through illegal sanctions, force and military occupation. Technically speaking, Russia is looking to curtail NATO’s expansion in Africa, not to recolonize it.

NATO’s threat in Africa

If left unchecked, heightened NATO expansion may turn Africa into the largest concentration of western-led militarisation in the world using the resource-rich continent as a base to relaunch its global agenda.

In terms of foreign military installations, Djibouti in East Africa is already a hive of activity as it host eight bases, key among them belonging to the US, France, the United Kingdom and China. The concentration of western military bases in Djibouti may become a trend elsewhere across Africa as NATO sets up militarised zones in an increasingly besieged continent.

With NATO militarisation taking root in Africa, progressive forces must act fast and lead a vigorous campaign to de-militarise the continent. To confront NATO’s threat, the anti-war and anti-militarisation movements in Africa and around the world must step up efforts to demand an immediate end to the NATO-AU Cooperation, shut down AFRICOM, call for the closure of all foreign military bases on the continent and push for the complete withdrawal of western forces from Africa. We may be seeing the future of NATO’s involvement in Africa being played out in Ukraine.

https://orinocotribune.com/why-natos-wa ... ry-africa/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 10, 2022 2:32 pm

Ethiopia: Peace Agreement Joint Statement
NOVEMBER 8, 2022

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Representative of Ethiopian government, Redwan Hussien, (seated left) and representative of TPLF, Getachew Reda, (seated left) signing the agreement in Pretoria, South Africa, on November 2, 2022. Photo: Phill Magakoe/AFP.

The Ethiopian government and the TPLF have reached an agreement “to permanently silence the guns and end the two years of conflict in northern Ethiopia.”

The Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on Wednesday reached a peace agreement in South Africa after ten days of intense talks.

It was the African Union that led the discussion. Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, now African Union Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, was the chief mediator. Former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and former South African Deputy President, Mlambo-Ngcuka, were assisting the facilitation.

The two parties have agreed to reach a cessation of hostilities on the condition that the TPLF disarm its forces and renounce its claims as the “Government of Tigray”, among other things. The United States has apparently dropped a reference to the rebel group as “Government of Tigray or Tigray authorities.” A statement from Anthony Blinken, which was released on November 2, referred to the group as “the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. ”

The Ethiopian Government and TPLF have released a joint statement regarding the agreement and its implementation.

It reads as follows :

“Joint Statement between the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF)

1. As per Article 3 of the Agreement for Lasting Peace and Permanent Cessation of Hostilities, the Representatives of the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the TPLF have agreed to announce to the people of Ethiopia and the rest of the world that after 10 days of intensive negotiations have concluded a peace agreement.

2. We have agreed to permanently silence the guns and end the two years of conflict in northern Ethiopia.

3. The conflict has brought a tragic degree of loss of lives and livelihoods and it is in the interest of the entire people of Ethiopia to leave this chapter of conflict behind and live in peace and harmony.

4. It is fundamental that we reaffirmed our commitment to safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ethiopia and to upholding the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, Ethiopia has only one national defense force. We have also agreed on a detailed program of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration for the TPLF combatants, taking into account the security situation on the ground.

5. We have agreed that the Government of Ethiopia will further enhance its collaboration with humanitarian agencies to continue expediting aid to all those in need of assistance.

6. We have agreed to implement transitional measures that include the restoration of Constitutional order in the Tigray region, a framework for the settlement of political differences, and a Transitional Justice Policy framework to ensure accountability, truth, reconciliation, and healing.

7. To start implementing these undertakings without delay, we have agreed to stop all forms of conflicts, and hostile propaganda. We will only make statements that support the expeditious implementation of the Agreement. We urge Ethiopians in the country and abroad, to support this Agreement, stop voices of division and hate, and mobilize their resources for economic recovery and rehabilitation of social bonds.

8. The Government of Ethiopia will continue the efforts to restore public services and rebuild the infrastructures of all communities affected by the conflict. Students must go to school, farmers, and pastoralists to their fields, and public servants to their offices. The Agreement requires the support of the public for its smooth implementation. This is a new and hopeful chapter in the history of the country.

9. We express our gratitude to all actors contributing to the success of this endeavor. In particular, the African Union Commission Chairperson, the African High-Level Panel led by His Excellency former President Olusegun Obasanjo, supported by His Excellency former President Uhuru Kenyatta, and Her Excellency Dr. Phumuzile Mlalmbo, former Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa. We thank the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, His Excellency Mr. Moussa Faki Mahamat, Commissioner Bankole Adeoye and his colleagues for their tireless work during these talks. We rely on their continued support as we implement the Agreement.

10. We thank His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of the Republic of South Africa, and Her Excellency Dr. Naledi Pandor, the Minister for the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa for the excellent facilities they put at the disposal of these talks and their words of encouragement to the parties towards these successful results. We are indebted for the hospitality accorded to us by the People and Government of the Republic of South Africa.

11. We are grateful to the people of Ethiopia for encouraging these talks and patiently waiting for the outcome. We are confident that they will embrace the results of these talks and ensure their timely implementation.

12. Finally, we are confident that friends of Ethiopia and members of the diplomatic community will lend their support in rebuilding infrastructures in affected communities and the economic recovery of the country. We call on all types of media outlets to support peace, reconciliation, unity, and prosperity in Ethiopia.

Jointly Delivered at Pretoria, the Republic of South Africa, on 2nd November 2022.”

https://orinocotribune.com/ethiopia-pea ... statement/

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Ethiopian peace agreement receives cautious welcome amid concerns over western pressure

While the agreement, in which TPLF has accepted disarmament, has been welcomed for bringing the civil war to an end, critics warn of the dangers of concessions made to the rebel group by the federal government

November 08, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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Redwan Hussien Rameto (2nd L), representative of the Ethiopian government, and Getachew Reda (2nd R), representative of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), signed a peace agreement in Pretoria, South Africa. Photo: Alet Pretorius/Xinhua

On Monday, November 7, senior leaders of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) and the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) met in Kenya’s capital Nairobi to “work out detailed modalities for disarmament for the TPLF combatants”, as per the peace agreement.

The peace agreement was signed between the Ethiopian federal government and the TPLF in South Africa’s executive capital Pretoria on November 2, the eve of the completion of two years of the civil war in northern Ethiopia.

The TPLF had started the war on November 3, 2020, by launching an attack on Ethiopia’s largest army base, reportedly killing thousands of soldiers and looting its armory containing 70% of ENDF’s weapons stock.

The agreement concluding this war requires the TPLF to be disarmed of all its heavy weapons, within ten days of the conclusion of the meeting that started yesterday in Nairobi, although the “ten-day period could be extended based on the recommendation of the senior commanders”.

The “overall disarmament of the TPLF combatants, including light weapons” should be completed by December 2, “within 30 days from the signing”, adds the agreement, signed after a 10-day-long negotiation, led by the African Union (AU). The UN had an observer status on the negotiating table, while the US described its status as “both.. a participant and an observer”.

Formally titled “Agreement for lasting peace through a permanent cessation of hostilities,” it was referred to as a “peace agreement” in the joint statement signed by the federal government and the TPLF. Olusegun Obasanjo, AU High Representative for Horn of Africa, who led the negotiations, also referred to “peace agreement” in his press address after the signing.

However, US State Secretary Antony Blinken did not acknowledge it as a peace agreement in his statement, which simply welcomed “the signing of a cessation of hostilities,” omitting even the word “Permanent,” which is included in the formal title of the agreement.

Challenges to disarmament
His statement, which is “undermining the peace process”, did not use “the main word, disarmament,” Ethiopian-American journalist Hermela Aregawi told BreakThrough News. “So it is like they are distancing themselves from the very thing that will create peace. It looks like they are giving room for the TPLF to continue to stay armed,” she opined.

“Credible sources indicate that 90% of the TPLF’s military capacity had been destroyed. It was forced to agree to disarmament against its will,” Elias Amare, editor of Horn of Africa TV, told Peoples Dispatch.

“Disarm TPLF!” has been a slogan of hundreds of thousands at peace demonstrations and rallies inside Ethiopia and by the diaspora in several cities of the US and Europe, condemning their support to the TPLF. A successful disarmament would be as much a victory of the Ethiopian civil society movement.

However, some observers remain skeptical about the implementation of the disarmament. Addressing the press conference after the signing of the peace agreement, TPLF’s spokesperson Getachew Reda, who led its delegation, had remarked: “I know there are spoilers from.. inside our ranks… We also know that they would not stop at nothing to sabotage our peacemaking efforts, and it is only through our collective resolve that we can hold these spoilers in check.”

Tsegaye (name changed), a prominent Ethiopian academic who has been closely following the conflict, told Peoples Dispatch, speaking on the condition of anonymity, that the “US continues arming and training thousands of TPLF fighters masquerading as refugees in eastern Sudan.” Elias, however, believes “it is too early to worry about the fighters in eastern Sudan,” and points out that all their previous armed incursions into Ethiopia over the last months of the conflict have been decisively defeated by the ENDF.

The agreement also facilitates ENDF’s entry into Mekele. It states that “the ENDF and other relevant Federal Institutions shall have an expeditious, smooth, peaceful, and coordinated entry into Mekelle, which shall be facilitated through the open communication channel,” set up between senior commanders on November 3.

While arguing for the need of utmost vigilance to ensure the implementation of this agreement, Elias maintains “it is effectively game over for the TPLF. It will no longer be capable of threatening Ethiopia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on behalf of its puppet master, the US.”

TPLF to become a legal political party
Tsagaye, however, points out that despite TPLF’s military defeat by the ENDF on the battlefield, its ‘puppet master’, sitting on the negotiating table “both as a participant and an observer”, has in fact manage to secure its proxy’s survival, now as a legal entity.

The multiple stresses in the agreement on “political dialogue” to resolve “political differences” implies that TPLF will continue operating as a political party. Tsegaye also argues that couched in references in the agreement to “reconciliation, and healing”, the federal government has effectively promised an amnesty to TPLF leaders for all their crimes.

The federal government has committed in the agreement to “Facilitate the lifting of the terrorist designation of the TPLF by the House of Peoples’ Representatives.”

“The people of Amhara and Afar will never psychologically accept this,” Tsegaye argues. The TPLF troops have committed large-scale atrocities in these neighboring States it had invaded from Tigray after the withdrawal of ENDF following the federal government’s unilateral declaration of ceasefire mid-last year. Burning of villages, mass-killings of civilians, gang-rapes, looting of food-warehouses and destruction of thousands of medical facilities are among its documented atrocities.

With the help of regional militias of Amhara and Afar, the ENDF pushed the TPLF – which had reached as close as 200 kilometers to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa – all the way back into Tigray by the start of 2022. Under pressure from the US and UN – which had been portraying it as the aggressor throughout the conflict – the federal government announced another ceasefire in March.

The TPLF reciprocated, and the ceasefire held out until August 24, when, only weeks after a delegation by the US and the EU met the TPLF leaders in Mekele, the TPLF resumed war and invaded Amhara again. Its southward attack from Tigray targeted Raya, and on the western front, it attacked the region of Tsegede, Wolkait and Humera.

The TPLF – which had annexed these Amhara lands into Tigray State when it seized federal power over all of Ethiopia in 1991 – calls these regions as Southern Tigray and Western Tigray respectively. During its 27-year-reign over Ethiopia from 1991, the TPLF is alleged to have committed large-scale and systematic ethnic cleansing, especially in the region it calls Western Tigray, to rid the Amhara population from this strategic region on the border with Sudan.

The annexed regions were wrested from the TPLF after fighting during the initial months of the war, and brought back under the control of Amhara regional State. Since then, Amhara militias have repeatedly fought and defended the areas from multiple TPLF offensives.

Arguing that the Amhara people are “a primary stakeholder” in this conflict, the Amhara Association of America (AAA) had demanded that “Amhara People’s Negotiations Delegation” be represented in the negotiations.

It consisted of four main negotiators, backed by a “delegation of more than 40 Amhara leaders from different segments of Amhara society.” AAA had argued its inclusion “would promote justice and accountability for war crimes and ensure any negotiated settlement receives wide reception and acceptance among Amharas, the largest stakeholder in the war.”

“Concessions to TPLF can provoke conflict with Amhara”
The bitterness provoked by the perceived amnesty, ceded to TPLF leaders in the negotiation from which the Amhara delegation was excluded, has only been exacerbated by what appears to be a thinly-veiled reference in the agreement to Wolkait and Raya.

The agreement states that the Federal Government and the TPLF “commit to resolving issues of contested areas in accordance with the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.”

This constitution, Tsegaye points out, was put into effect by the TPLF in the 90s after it had annexed these regions. The reference to the constitution in the above statement of the agreement, he argues, is an indication of the federal government’s intention to return these areas to Tigray.

Concerning the boundaries of the States, this constitution explicitly says little beyond, “States shall be delimited on the basis of the settlement patterns, language, identity and consent of the people concerned.”

Elias argues that the reference to the constitution was simply a way of avoiding an impasse in the negotiation, and does not necessarily imply that the regions will be handed over to Tigray. “The Wolkait and Humera region have been a part of Amhara for centuries before it was annexed by the TPLF. The ethnic cleansing it carried out for decades in order to change the demography of the region is very well documented. There are provisions within this constitution to appeal to the upper house for redressal of such grievances. But the TPLF was using its power to block any such attempts,” he explained.

Elias is confident that the federal government will use these provisions to ensure that the regions are not returned to Tigray. The contested Wolkait and Humera regions in the west have an additional strategic significance in that if returned to Tigray, it would give the TPLF a corridor to Sudan, whose military junta is known to be supporting the group.

The lack of clarification from the federal government about these contested areas has already provoked tensions in Amhara. “This constitution does not define the boundaries of Ethiopia,” said AAA’s chairperson, Tewodrose Tirfe. However, “we know what they are trying to say” in this reference to the constitution, he said, adding “the situation right now on the ground” is that “Wolkait is being administered by Gondor (district of Amhara), Raya is being administered by Wollo.”

“We have lost too many innocent lives and too many patriots to lose Raya and Wolkait again. That is a red line for Amharas, and any attempt to change that is going to result in additional conflict.”

The Amhara militias have played a critical role, fighting alongside the ENDF, which, after defeating TPLF’s latest offensive, marched into Tigray, wresting control of several strategic towns and cities around Mekele.

Does the TPLF have a political future?
The TPLF was in no position to defend its stronghold by the time the negotiations had begun in Pretoria. Nevertheless, argues Tsegaye, the “US won back on the negotiating table what it had lost to the Ethiopian government on the battlefield, namely the political survival of its main proxy in the region.”

Elias is not convinced that the agreement can ensure TPLF’s political survival. “600,000 Tigrayans who were forcibly conscripted by the TPLF and used as cannon fodder in human wave attacks in this war are said to have lost their lives. This is enormous for a population of less than 6 million,” he pointed out.

“The TPLF leaders will be questioned back in Tigray, ‘Where are our children? What did they die for?’ The TPLF has no answer. If a free and fair election is held as promised in the agreement, we may well be looking at the end of TPLF’s political future.”

Elias admits however that whether or not opposition parties are well-organized and strong enough to contest in any such upcoming election and defeat the TPLF remains unknown. Most of them are relatively new, formed only after 2018, when pro-democracy mass demonstrations put an end to TPLF’s 27 years of US-backed authoritarian rule over Ethiopia, during which opposition parties and free press were banned.

Even after TPLF’s ouster from the federal government, it remained a regional force, in power in Ethiopia’s northernmost State of Tigray. “For more than 30 years since 1991, the TPLF has not allowed free political activity in Tigray. It had total domination over the state’s finances and security, and cracked down brutally on any opposition groups challenging it in Tigray. This will be the first time an opportunity will be created for opposition parties to contest the TPLF in a free and fair election,” Elias argues.

However, until such an election can be “held under the supervision of the Ethiopian National Election Board”, the agreement states that Tigray will be governed by “an inclusive Interim Regional Administration” – inclusive of the TPLF, that is. It remains to be seen whether under the rule of such an administration, opposition parties will be able to freely organize and campaign against the TPLF.

TPLF’s victory in the election in Tigray would also win it a share of power in the federal government against which it had taken arms. “The Federal Government shall ensure and facilitate the representation of the Tigray region in the federal institutions, including the House of Federation, and House of Peoples’ Representatives,” the agreement states.

Nevertheless, Ethiopian civil society and diaspora organizations have exuded confidence of being able to tackle the TPLF on the political field, and have largely welcomed the agreement which ends the military conflict.

The TPLF has agreed “that the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has only one defense force”, which is the ENDF. It has committed to “[r]efrain from aiding and abetting, supporting, or collaborating with any armed or subversive group in any part of the country” and “from conscription, training, deployment, mobilization, or preparation for conflict and hostilities”. It has also committed to “[h]alt any conduct that undermines the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ethiopia, including unconstitutional correspondence and relations with foreign powers”.

Elias argues it is of relevance that nowhere in the agreement, or in any of the addresses by African leaders to the press conference in Pretoria following the signing of this peace deal, was the TPLF referred to as the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) or Tigrayan authorities. The latter terms, used by the US and the UN, rendering the TPLF an air of legitimate authority, have been refuted by the AU, Elias observed.

“AU has refused to scapegoat Eritrea”
He also finds the absence of any reference to Eritrea in the agreement or in the press addresses after the signing to be noteworthy. The TPLF had initially set the withdrawal of Eritrean troops – who are alleged to be in Tigray to assist the ENDF’s campaign against the TPLF – as a non-negotiable requisite for peace. The US, EU and the UN, had all amplified the TPLF’s demand for withdrawal of Eritrean troops.

For Eritrea, nothing less than its peaceful relations with Ethiopia will be at stake if the TPLF is successfully resurrected by the West. It was the TPLF which, while ruling Ethiopia with the support of the US, had led the country into a war against Eritrea. Following its ouster from federal power in 2018, Abiy Ahmed, who subsequently took charge as the prime minister, signed a peace deal with Eritrea which won him the Nobel Peace prize. The TPLF opposed the deal.

“Remember, after starting this war against the Ethiopian government, it was the TPLF which fired rockets into Eritrea, dragging it into this conflict. The AU knows this,” Elias said. By its omission of any mention of Eritrea in the agreement or in the subsequent press conference, the AU, he argued, has refused to play along with the western attempts “to scapegoat Eritrea and deflect attention from the aggressor, which is the TPLF.”

Elias maintains that the successful conclusion of a peace agreement in Pretoria is a victory not only for the people of Ethiopia and its neighbors with a common stake in peace in the Horn of Africa, but also for the AU. Despite all the efforts by the US and EU to skew the negotiation in favor of the TPLF – and what was perceived by many Ethiopians as an impartial conduct of the UN weighed down by western pressure – the AU, he argues, upheld respect for Ethiopia’s sovereignty.

The peace agreement, he said, is a realization of its slogan “African solutions for African problems”. In its realization, Elias reads the declining US hegemony and sees the first rays of a dawning multipolar world.

Tsegaye arrives at a different conclusion from the contents of the agreement. The “ruling elite” in Africa – in the Ethiopian government or at the AU – remain “neo-colonial, in character”. Their interests, he argues, are “heavily dependent on Western finance capital”. Therefore, it is only so far they can walk their anti-imperialist talk before striking a compromise and “agreeing to let the US to retain its main main proxy in the region, now operating as a legal political entity in partnership with the government.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/11/08/ ... -pressure/

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Africa Confronts the Food, Fertilizer, and Climate Crisis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 9, 2022
Ann Garrison

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Food production in Africa is complicated by climate change and the use of fertilizers which increase food production but which also create green house gases and create other environmental harm.

The UN has been in negotiations with both Russia and Ukraine to restart Russia’s ammonia pipeline. Before its closure due to the Ukraine War, the pipeline pumped up to 2.5 million tons of ammonia per year from Russia’s Volga region to Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Pivdennyi.

Ammonia is used as fertilizer or converted to nitrogen fertilizer, and the pipeline’s closure is said to play a major role in the food and fertilizer crisis triggered first by COVID and now by the Ukraine War. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to reopen it in exchange for Ukrainian POWs, but Russia declined. Both countries stand to benefit if it’s reopened, because Russia would have to pay Ukraine fees for the pipeline’s transit through Ukraine.

The pipeline runs through Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region, where there is sustained shelling, but it hasn’t been damaged yet.

I spoke to Timothy A. Wise , economist and senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy , who said that the pipeline’s closure, like the COVID pandemic, demonstrates the vulnerability of global supply chains for both food and fertilizer. He also spoke to the need to reduce dependence on fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, which has been heavily promoted by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa , a project of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. We focused particularly on Africa, where he did much of the research for his book, Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food .

ANN GARRISON: Timothy Wise, given that Russia was the top exporter of nitrogen fertilizers before the war, US fertilizer manufacturers are making a killing, just like US natural gas producers, while the prices of both soar because of shortages. Does this illustrate the long supply chain vulnerability of global food systems that you’ve been warning about for years?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes it does, and the companies that dominate fertilizer manufacture, like most industries that dominate agriculture, are highly concentrated. There are only a handful of multinationals engaged in capital intensive fertilizer production, and they’ve so consolidated their economic power that they can set prices. They’ve been doing that since the COVID crisis. Estimates are that they doubled their profits from 2020 to 2021, and they’re likely to double them again in 2022 because of the Ukraine War.

The biggest fertilizer companies are profiteering off people’s desperation. Sure, their natural gas costs have gone up and it costs them more to manufacture fertilizer, but they’re adding that and more to their prices to take advantage of the shortages.

Natural gas producers, fertilizer producers, and people all along that supply chain are making a killing. Many farmers in the US are failing to make much money because costs are eating up their margins.

ANN GARRISON: Can you walk us through synthetic fertilizers’ long supply chain, beginning with ammonia production?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Sure. Most ammonia is produced from natural gas, but some is produced from coal. It’s produced in a chemical reaction at high pressure and high temperature that combines hydrogen from the hydrocarbons of the natural gas or coal with nitrogen pulled out of the air. And it’s a highly volatile compound.

ANN GARRISON: I believe an ammonium nitrate storage facility caused the port explosion in Beirut.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That’s right. Ammonia’s original applications were for explosives. The first real boom, as it were, in ammonia production was in World War II.

ANN GARRISON: So what happens after ammonia’s manufactured?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Ammonia can be applied directly to fields as a fertilizer, but it can’t be moved around, stored, and used without risk, so it’s most often turned into synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in another chemical process, and that can take different forms. Most ammonia is turned into urea, but some is converted to other nitrogen fertilizer blends.

Nitrogen fertilizers are more stable compounds. They’re safer and easier to ship than ammonia and safer and easier for farmers to spread on their fields, but they are entirely fossil-fuel-derived products. One of the components—the hydrogen—is extracted from fossil fuels, and the process is energy intensive, so it uses a lot of fossil fuel in its production. They’re overwhelmingly produced by developed countries that have natural gas, capital, and industrial infrastructure.

ANN GARRISON: Since you’ve focused much of your research on Africa, can you tell us about the impact of nitrogen fertilizers and supply chain disruption there?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Africa is overwhelmingly an importer of nitrogen fertilizers. Most African countries do not have the natural gas or industrial capacity to produce them, so they’re particularly vulnerable to the supply chain disruptions we’re seeing now. Supply chains were disrupted by COVID and now they’re disrupted by the Ukraine War.

Russia and Ukraine are large suppliers of both food commodities—wheat in particular—and fertilizer, and both are exported to Africa. So, current impacts of the Ukraine War on Africa include interrupted wheat supplies, interrupted fertilizer supplies, and high prices for both.

ANN GARRISON: Nitrogen fertilizers cause environmental damage, don’t they?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes, and they’re not as stable as people would like to believe. When nitrogen fertilizer is applied in fields, it breaks down and emits greenhouse gasses. Some of the nitrogen becomes nitrous oxide, which traps far more infrared radiation than either carbon dioxide or methane. One unit of nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times more damaging than one unit of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it persists in the atmosphere for more than 100 years.

Industrial agriculture produces a third of total greenhouse gas emissions every year, and nitrogen fertilizer emissions account for about 10% of those if you consider the whole cycle of production and use.

We have the ability to curtail these emissions because there are organic substitutes for nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrous oxide and methane are two of the three big greenhouse gasses, and scaling them back in the short run is far easier than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which requires a lot more retrofitting and systemic change.

People are looking at methane and nitrous oxide as gasses that could be significantly reduced by 2030, which is what everybody says we need to do.

ANN GARRISON: Doesn’t nitrogen fertilizer runoff cause more immediate environmental damage? I know there are dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where there’s no marine life because of the runoff. And the people of the Gulf Coast have high rates of disease caused by all the nitrogen fertilizers coming at them down the Mississippi River.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of the flow of “excess nutrients” down the waterways that feed into the Mississippi River, and it’s a huge watershed coming from all the Midwestern farm states.

Phosphorous is another key fertilizer, and the combination of nitrogen and phosphorous creates algae blooms that choke off all the oxygen going to marine life below the surface.

They also make the water unsafe to drink. Des Moines, Iowa has the second largest nitrate removal plant in the world. Because of all the nitrates flowing into the Des Moines River, the city’s main water source, city officials see nitrate levels almost every year that could trigger a shutdown of that public water supply. It’s also a big problem in private wells, which many rural residents rely on.

Nitrate pollution is one of the things that can cause Blue Baby Syndrome, where babies don’t get enough oxygen.

For all these reasons, the US regulates nitrates in the water. Authorities rarely test all the private wells in places like Iowa, but when they have, they’ve found a high incidence of nitrates and other pollutants.

ANN GARRISON: You have written that these synthetic fertilizers can also decrease soil fertility.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Indeed, they should really be called “plant nutrients” rather than fertilizers, because they are mainly providing key nutrients to commodity crops, basically turning oil into corn. Monoculture cropping with nitrogen fertilizers can acidify the soil, cause erosion, and decrease soil fertility over time. No matter how much of these plant nutrients you pour onto the land, the organic matter in the soil will often decrease over time. It’s estimated that Iowa, which is among the richest agricultural lands in the world, has lost half its topsoil in the last 50 years by using this industrial farming model—monocropping and saturation with nitrogen fertilizers. Anyone who thinks that we can just keep going the way we’re going is dreaming. You can’t keep losing 50% of your topsoil and sustain productive agriculture.

For now it just keeps creating more dependence on nitrogen fertilizers and more supply chain vulnerability. There are a lot of efforts in Iowa to try to reform the way they’re growing food, but reformers are swimming against a very strong tide of agribusiness power, so it’s difficult to get any kind of serious change.

ANN GARRISON: Nitrogen fertilizer use hasn’t done this kind of damage in Africa yet, has it?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Not on a large scale. African farmers using nitrogen fertilizers are still in a minority, and Africa still has the lowest average rates of nitrogen fertilizer application in the world, very low by global standards. But the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations and other donors have said that Africans need to be using it at a much more intensive rate to be competitive exporters and to grow enough food to eat. Gates and others say they need to triple use by 2050 or, in some scenarios, by as much as 800% to catch up. In his climate change book, Gates called nitrogen fertilizer “magical” despite its negative climate impact. Mr. Science resorts to magic and implies in that book that there’s no way to grow enough food without it. But there’s a whole lot wrong with that formulation.

ANN GARRISON: The Gates and Rockefeller Foundations started pushing nitrogen fertilizers on Africa in their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), right?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Right. They brought AGRA to Africa in 2006, and it’s been a dismal failure on its own terms. This is a part of the story that I’ve covered a lot.

AGRA promoted policies and programs to increase fertilizer use, and many African governments adopted input subsidy programs, which are sometimes funded by bilateral donors. The entire purpose of those initiatives is to hook African farmers on commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizers. Many governments provide very generous subsidies, three quarters of the cost, by giving out coupons to farmers to redeem for these inputs.

A significant number of farmers are now using these so-called modern inputs, but they haven’t produced the kinds of yields and incomes that would allow them to buy more commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer after the subsidies run out.

So AGRA has been a failure on its own terms. Even when farmers use those inputs they don’t see large productivity increases. And as soon as the subsidies go away, most farmers just drop the commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer because they’re a waste of money. Their costs exceed their benefits, and those who’ve kept trying to make them work have often gone into debt to buy the inputs, and then they face all kinds of terrible choices.

ANN GARRISON: You’ve said that this has been particularly damaging in Rwanda, a nation that often serves as a petri dish for Western policies. Could you tell us what’s happened there?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Rwanda is considered a poster child for AGRA, and their agriculture minister, Agnes Kalibata, rose to become AGRA’s president, a position she still holds. But all the subsidies and strong-arm tactics to force Rwandan farmers to adopt commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizers just managed to increase the production of corn, which is one of their staples but not the only one. And that increase in corn production came at the expense of crop diversity and the environmental health of the land. They encouraged the expansion of corn production on lands where it shouldn’t be produced.

Our study suggested that where they claim a 66% increase in yield, it was more like 18% if you consider the increase in a larger number of staple crops, not just corn. And overall, hunger didn’t go down. It went up by 40% during the time that AGRA’s been operating. All that corn didn’t help feed the people, so Rwanda is really a hungry poster child for AGRA’s failures.

ANN GARRISON: Nearly 12 years ago Rwandan dissident and political prisoner Victoire Ingabire told me that Rwandan farmers were forced into growing so much corn for export that they weren’t growing enough food to eat.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: I think that’s right. And a diet that is too dependent on corn isn’t a healthy diet.

ANN GARRISON: I know a Rwandan exile in Belgium who says that her father had another job in Rwanda, but they had a small farm where they rotated crops throughout the year, and it largely fed them. She said you can’t do that anymore because you have to buy the seeds and the fertilizer.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That sounds right, and even when they come subsidized, as I believe they still do in Rwanda, it’s still a bad trade off because constant monocropping with nitrogen fertilizer is really bad for the land. It’s not making the soil more fertile; it makes the soil acidic and less fertile.

ANN GARRISON: You said that farmers using nitrogen fertilizer are still a minority in Africa. Do you have an idea how common it has become?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Many farms in South Africa are highly industrialized, and they look a lot like parts of the US Midwest where farms are saturated with nitrogen fertilizer, but smaller scale farmers tend to rely on traditional practices. Some are just subsistence farmers producing for their own families, and some also produce a surplus for local and regional markets. Some may use nitrogen fertilizer and commercial seeds on some of their land so long as they’re free or cheap. Then when they’re no longer free or cheap, they’ll stop.

So one of the great myths of the fertilizer crisis, as it’s called, in Africa, is that Africa can’t grow food without it, that Africa is going to have a famine if we don’t get fertilizer to the farmers now.

ANN GARRISON: That’s what David Beasley warned of in a recent Associated Press interview . He said that 50% of the food in the world is grown with nitrogen fertilizer and there’s a big shortage because China has banned nitrogen fertilizer exports and the Ukraine War has stopped nitrogen fertilizer exports from Russia, which was the top exporter of fertilizer before the war.

He said there’s going to be massive famine in 2023. What’s your response to that?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Well, there’s some truth to those warnings. Many African harvests are over now, so the nitrogen fertilizers Beasley is calling for would be for the next cropping year, in 2023, when he predicts a worsening crisis. Farmers who’ve become dependent on nitrogen fertilizer and commercial seeds are in a bad place, because they either can’t get those things, or they cost too much. Those farmers will see significantly reduced yields, and that will exacerbate food shortages.

ANN GARRISON: Are we talking here about the highly industrialized farms like those in South Africa, smaller scale farms, or both?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Mainly commercial farmers, who have large or mid-sized farms. But some small-scale farmers too. In Zambia, heavy subsidies have pushed up synthetic fertilizer use even among those farmers.

ANN GARRISON: Beasley also said, “The other factor is inflation and the value of the dollar. Because the value of the dollar is so strong now that it’s offset any movement we’ve had in the poor countries with regard to food pricing.”

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That’s true. The global shortage of food and fertilizers drives up the prices, and African currencies are sliding as the dollar surges. This further illustrates the vulnerability of global supply chains and the need to transition to local and regional supply chains.

The World Food Program is doing some heroic work trying to rally food donations and it’s working much better than it used to. They don’t just take surplus US grain and dump it on developing countries. Instead they buy more of it locally and regionally in markets where production is still good, and they mostly do it with cash. So that actually helps developing economies instead of hurting them, and gets food to people who are on the edge of starvation.

But I would love to see the World Food Program and other donors make a commitment to helping farmers transition away from dependence on external inputs. The COVID crisis and the Ukraine War should both tell us that we need short supply chains, not long ones. We need local resources and local markets. But the multinational firms that dominate the agribusiness sector don’t want to hear that, and they’re driving the bus right now.

Unfortunately, the African Development Bank’s response to the fertilizer shortage is to open up a $1.5 billion nitrogen fertilizer program to extend credit so that farmers and governments can buy more fertilizer, even at these high prices, just to keep the train rolling.

ANN GARRISON: How is agribusiness driving these changes?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: When governments subsidize commercial seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, the companies are the clear beneficiaries. The subsidies create markets for their products, and they lobby for other policies to push farmers to buy their products. Seed laws can threaten farmers’ right to save, exchange and sell good seeds to other farmers. The companies see Africa as the last great market to conquer, and that market is expected to grow.

African organizations for food sovereignty and sustainable farming are saying no to such policies. The fertilizer shortages and price spikes should be a wake up call that we need to decrease, not increase, their dependency. Sure we have a short term crisis. OK, get some nitrogen fertilizer to farmers that need it, but let’s start decreasing our dependency on these inputs that are manufactured and marketed on a global scale. If climate change and fertilizer shortages are telling us anything, it’s that we need to reduce our dependence on external, fossil-fuel-based inputs and increase our reliance on organic local resources to produce our food.

They can do it. African farmers have shown that there are a lot of ways to fertilize the soil that are better than nitrogen fertilizer. I wrote a lot about that in my book.

ANN GARRISON: Subsidized, globally manufactured inputs seem to exacerbate the debt and donor dependency that are among the biggest problems in Africa, in addition to creating the supply chain vulnerability.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That’s right. And the response of the African Development Bank—to give people more nitrogen fertilizer—just creates more dependence. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has called on African farmers and governments to put down the shovel, stop digging Africa deeper into a dependency hole, and chart a new path. That path is agroecology, reliance on local resources, lower input agriculture, and multicropping, not monocropping.

The head of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa wrote that Africa is not a monoculture and it should not become one. It has diverse cultures with diverse local food systems in diverse local landscapes.

ANN GARRISON: Do you see a lot of land grabbing putting further pressure on local food systems?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes. That’s particularly aggravated when there’s a big jump in food prices, and when returns from stock markets and other investments collapse. Capital then flows into commodities and land. I haven’t seen data on land grabbing since the Ukraine War broke out, but it won’t surprise me if we see an increase, as we did after the 2007-2008 food price spikes.

Global industrial responses to climate change, including so called carbon sequestration, and carbon offset programs also put pressure on land. They make it profitable for companies to “invest” in, for example, preserving forests in the Congo, in exchange for carbon credits, so they can keep polluting in their core business.

I almost fell off my chair when Jeff Bezos said Amazon has committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2030 by sequestering as much carbon as it’s emitting. When people asked how he was going to do that, he said that a lot of it’s going to happen in the Congo. In other words, not by them decreasing the fossil fuels they use in all of their vast supply chains. They may start using electric vehicles and things like that, but their main strategy is to claim a big chunk of the Congolese rainforest, say nobody can touch it, and get carbon credits for doing that.

ANN GARRISON: Congolese who live in the forest have various ways of producing food there and using it to survive without cutting the trees down.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes, there’s a long cynical history of corporate multinational “green” organizations walling off forests and other lands from the people who have relied on them for generations and maintained their viability. They’re protecting the forest and the land, but then they’re kicked out to allow Amazon and the like to keep polluting in other parts of the world.

ANN GARRISON: Well, we couldn’t expect Gates and Bezos to imagine anything but global corporate solutions.

Can you give us a picture of the alternatives? I think you’ve said that Mali has been particularly successful in developing local, sustainable agriculture.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: Yes, Mali and other parts of West Africa are particularly interesting because several governments there have made commitments to developing agroecology, farming with nature, and reducing dependence on inputs like commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer.

Mali has done some very interesting things in response to the fertilizer crisis. One of the leaders of one of the farm organizations there said that it’s actually helping, not hurting their food production.

The majority of the nitrogen fertilizer used in Mali is for cotton. But the fertilizer shortage has meant that cotton farmers can’t afford it, so they’re taking their land out of cotton and planting sorghum or millet, which doesn’t need fertilizer, and is relatively drought tolerant, resilient, and nutritious. So Mali gets a net increase in food production from the fertilizer crisis.

In addition, the government of Mali has made a commitment to creating alternatives to nitrogen fertilizers. They are encouraging the use of organic, biofertilizers that can be produced using local resources, not natural gas. They’ve started to scale up production facilities for biofertilizers and provided subsidies to farmers to use them instead of nitrogen fertilizers. That’s the kind of transition we need.

ANN GARRISON: And this encourages more small scale farming for local and regional markets?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: It does. And one of Mali’s advantages is that they weren’t drawn into the global industrial farming model to the extent that other African nations were. They’re not as dependent on imports of food or synthetic inputs. And they tend to have a diverse crop mix, unlike Rwanda. Rwanda went all in on corn, leaving the people without enough food to eat. In Mali, corn is just one of the staples they grow. Traditional crops like millet and sorghum are more important in Mali, even though the Green Revolution for Africa has tried to change that.

ANN GARRISON: African nations, like any others, need export products to generate foreign exchange. Can agroecology be applied on a scale that allows farming for export?

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That remains to be seen. Export dependence for commodities such as cotton is a legacy of colonialism, and it is very difficult for developing countries to find export markets that allow them to earn that foreign exchange. But remember: They are now spending a huge amount of foreign exchange to import fertilizers. Cutting that dependence has direct economic benefits, particularly if there are low-cost ways to fertilize the soil and get better results than the Green Revolution for Africa has produced.

ANN GARRISON: So in response to the current food and fertilizer shortages, you would recommend food aid where it’s desperately needed, with food purchased from African farmers where possible, combined with steps to transition to local and regional agroecology.

TIMOTHY A. WISE: That’s right. And there’s certainly a place for getting fertilizer this year to farmers who are dependent on it, but Mali’s showing a different path to African food sovereignty and sustainability by developing biofertilizers, crop diversity, local and regional markets, and short supply chains that aren’t as vulnerable to global shocks.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/11/ ... te-crisis/

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Macron Announces End of French Military Operation in the Sahel

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French President Emmanuel Macron, Nov. 9, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @PeoplesDailyapp

Since 2014, France has deployed around 5,100 troops to Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.

On Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron announced the official end of the French military operation Barkhane in the Sahel region in Africa.

"We do not intend to engage without a time limit," Macron said, adding that military support from France to the African states in the Sahel region will continue in another form.

Since 2014, France has deployed around 5,100 troops to the G5 Sahel countries -- Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger -- under operation Barkhane.

The goal was to help the G5 maintain control of their territories, and prevent the region from becoming a haven for Islamist groups.


France will hold discussions with its African partners on the format of its military support and on the current missions of French military bases in the Sahel and West Africa.

In February, Macron announced that France's withdrawal of troops from Mali would take four to six months. Between 2,500 and 3,000 French soldiers were in the African country.

He emphasized the important roles played by France and by Europe in the fight against terrorism in Africa. France "will continue this fight with neighboring countries of the Sahel region such as the Gulf of Guinea and Niger," he said.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mac ... -0001.html
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 13, 2022 6:23 pm

DAKAR MANIFESTO: Africa: from Resistance to Alternatives, 2001
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 09 Nov 2022

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The 2001 Dakar Manifesto had a simple but unassailable claim: the total and unconditional cancellation of the odious African debt.

Two recent incidents demonstrate in unembellished and unambiguous fashion how capitalism, to paraphrase the great Walter Rodney, continues to exploit and under-develop Africa. First, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office convicted a subsidiary of the Anglo-Swiss multinational corporation Glencore of paying millions of dollars in bribes to state-owned companies in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and South Sudan, in order to buy privileged access to oil reserves. Meanwhile, in an address to his country , President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of Ghana announced that he would be seeking help from the International Monetary Fund to aid an economy that was, as he put it, in “crisis.” In enumerating the causes of the crisis, President Akufo-Addo did not say that part of the problem was the IMF’s partner in financial crimes, the World Bank. Interest payments on a predatory 2015 $1 billion World Bank loan (managed by Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Charter) have compounded Ghana’s desperate economic situation.

Glencore has assets of $127.510 billion, a net income of $4.349 billion, and, as the world’s largest commodity trade, “global market share of 60% in internationally tradable zinc, 50% in internationally tradable copper, 9% in the internationally tradable grain market and 3% in the internationally tradable oil market.” Glencore was fined US$313.7 million, a sum reduced after they agreed to plead guilty. For the World Bank, there has been no consequences for their bare-faced fleecing of Ghana and other African nations, no consequences for the decades of imposed austerity budgets and structural adjustment programs that have prioritized Western creditors over citizens, made the repayment of foreign debts the highest goal of the state, and continued the history of the West’s underdevelopment of the African continent.

This is not, however, due to a lack of energy on the part of African activists and their allies. As writers like Walter Rodney and others have long argued, the question of odious debt, of illicit financial flows, of corruption and state capture, of revanchist extractivism, have long been part of the stable of practices constituting neocolonialism. When it comes to debt, in particular, the issue is not how to reform the regime of exploitative, predatory, and odious loans that constrict the fiscal operation and the social development of the continent. It is rather, as the Dakar Manifesto boldly argues, the “the total and unconditional cancellation of the African debt.” The Dakar Manifesto was the result of a December, 2000 meeting in Dakar, Senegal of hundreds of representatives from Africa, as well as Asia, Europe, and North and South America committed to the cancellation of Africa’s debt.

The Manifesto hinges on an unassailable logic: not only is Africa’s debt increasing underdevelopment, but given the long history of foreign exploitation and the continuing degree to which resources and wealth are stolen from the continent, Africa’s debt have have already been paid. In his address to the people of Ghana, President Akufo-Addo slid into French stating, “Fellow Ghanaians, as the French would say, l'argent n'aime pas le bruit, to wit, money does not like noise, sika mpɛ dede.” Certainly the executives of Glencore and the World Bank would attest to this as their profiteering has been done under the cover of cool and deadly silence. However, following the Dakar Manifesto – and those Ghanians who have taken to the streets to protest Akufo-Addo – it’s time to make some noise, and to expose those international speculators, swindlers, and loan-sharks who have stolen Africa’s money and continue a nasty history of exploitation and underdevelopment.



DAKAR MANIFESTO: Africa: from Resistance to Alternatives

THE TOTAL AND UNCONDITIONAL CANCELLATION OF THE AFRICAN DEBT is a demand based on undisputed economic, social, moral, legal and historical arguments. Because the debt problem is not a financial or technical issue as the World Bank and the IMF are tempted to demonstrate. It is fundamentally a human, social and political problem. Debt service and conditionalities associated to it have contributed to the aggravation of poverty. Moreover, the debt has been already been repaid: for the past few years, Africa has been transferring more resources to developed countries than she receives.

In addition, most of Africa's debt is odious, fraudulent and immoral. In fact, in most cases, debt has been contracted by not representative regimes that have used the amount received for purposes that have not served the interests of their peoples. Often, this debt served to consolidate and even legitimize dictatorships that used it to oppress their own people or to make war, with the benevolence and complicity of Western countries.

Debt has also been contracted to undertake mega projects designed to stimulate exportations at the expense of the satisfaction of people's fundamental needs.

The reimbursement of that debt is immoral: its service is diverting resources essential in the struggle against poverty, illiteracy and AIDS.

Thus, from whatever angle we consider the issue of Africa's debt, it is unacceptable. It is all the less acceptable that the historic debt that the West has incurred from Africa is immeasurable.

Accordingly, we demand both the restitution of what has been taken from Africa for centuries by sheer force and reparations for all the crimes and damages inflicted upon its people

Mobilized by the Amsterdam Appeal of April 2000, we representatives of women's movements, youth movements, rural and urban workers, and international solidarity, gathered from 11-14 December, 2000, in Dakar (Senegal), with the support of our partners of other continents,

- call again for the immediate and unconditional cancellation of the African debt

- demand the end to Structural adjustment Programs, even as they are renamed Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs (PRSPs)

- adopt the following program and promise to take all necessary measures for its implementation

1) SHORT AND MEDIUM-TERM PROGRAM

We call on social movements to increase the campaigns calling for the unconditional cancellation of Africa and other Third World countries' debt. We recommend the use of all opportunities to reinforce the pressure on Africa's debtors, by organizing or participating in initiatives of all kinds, to draw the attention of the world public opinion to the criminal nature of the policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF to compel African countries to pay a "debt", several times reimbursed. All the meetings organized by these two institutions and major Western leaders (G7) as well as other international gatherings will be as many opportunities to show our determination. Simultaneously, we demand that our governments set up a coalition of debtor countries and repudiate external debt by using the sums so saved to the profit of their people.

To better implement the above policy, we will endeavor to strengthen the international network fighting against Third World debt. We will first attempt to strengthen the relationships between organizations committed to this struggle in Africa and in other developing countries as part of the Jubilee South movement. In fact, we think that the strengthening of such links constitutes one of the preconditions for the success of the campaign for debt cancellation. Solidarity between these organizations represents the base on which the solidarity between South and North organizations must be built. The strategic alliance with the latter constitutes a solid link in the chain of the world human solidarity for breaking the resistance and egoism of Western states and multilateral institutions.

In this respect, regional campaigns will be undertaken and articulated to international campaigns. We have to massively involve public opinion within each country in order to put decisive pressure on governments to make them rethink their relationships with the World Bank and IMF and to refuse debt repayment.

Solidarity among members of the network will be forged and reinforced through data exchanges, organizations of joint events, mutual assistance in the reinforcement of human and organizational capacities in order to be better prepared for a higher level of the struggle.

The credibility of the campaign depends on the ability of civil society organizations to articulate coherent strategies and to propose alternatives. Thus, the reinforcement of the civil society's capacity to intervene is an essential task whose implementation requires patient work.

Citizens movements must reinforce themselves so as to be in a position to not only refute creditors' arguments but especially to move the debate towards the center and identify the real issues.

2) STRATEGIC PROGRAM

1. Radical change of policies

It is essential to tackle the structural factors, which are at the roots of the debt crisis. In this respect, it is necessary to revisit from top to bottom the external borrowing policies, as well as the use made of the loans. When those loans are necessary, parliamentarian institutions must be involved and the issue must be debated.

Transparent and democratic rules must be applied under the control of the citizens. We must reduce as much as possible the use of external loans by mobilizing internal savings through a progressive fiscal policy, which compels the richest to contribute to the development efforts.

On the external level, it is necessary to act on several fronts. In order to stop or reverse the trend toward the deterioration of the terms of trade, one should set up mechanisms aimed at stabilizing the prices of raw material and commodities. Producers should form cartels to defend the prices of their products subjected to manipulation by big trading companies from the North. Likewise, international agreements of price stabilization should be negotiated under the aegis of the United Nations system. This would allow the increase in export incomes; limit the depletion of the natural resources and save the environment.

On the other hand, African countries should speed up their economic integration in order to reduce their external dependence, create the conditions for establishing a regional market capable of supporting a regional industrialization policy, which could promote export diversification, thanks to a greater value-added of local products. Integration should go hand in hand with the establishment of viable monetary areas in the different regions of the continent; the only means that will allow them to avoid the tyranny of foreign currencies on African economies

2. Reinforcing South-South Cooperation

South-South cooperation shall be considered as an essential stage by social movements and African governments. It will allow African countries to reinforce the trend for less dependence towards developed countries. In this perspective, we are urging African countries, members of the OAU to explore all existing possibilities, especially the recommendations of the South Commission Report, under the supervision of the late Julius K. Nyerere and to implement concretely the agreements concluded between them at the Sirte Summit (Libya) in 1999 regarding debt cancellation. The cooperation between G77, that between G15 countries and other forms of cooperation must be developed in all areas.

Social movements must accept, support and widely circulate treaties signed among countries of the South.

African countries and their partners from the South should convince the United Nations to undertake concerted measures to discourage international financial speculations whose devastating effects have been observed in South East Asia, Brazil and Russia in recent years. The imposition of the Tobin tax, the funds of which will be devoted to human development, the fight against money laundering (notably by ending bank secrecy), as well as the shutting down or the penalization of tax havens, constitute appropriate measures.

3. Restitutions and Reparations

Another section of the strategic agenda is the issue of restitution and reparation owed to Africa by Western countries. Slavery, colonization and the various forms of exploitation and wealth plundering have left Africa drained, and caused a tremendous economic, social, scientific and cultural backwardness of the continent. One cannot understand the situation of the continent without taking into account the destruction, robbing and plundering Africa has gone through because of Western countries.

>From that perspective, we are compelled to demand both the restitution of what has been stolen from Africa by sheer force and reparations for all the crimes and damages imposed on its people. Restitutions include cultural and scientific wealth.

In addition, we must repatriate ill-acquired wealth by African leaders and return them to the people that have been deprived of it. To achieve this objective, we have to use appropriate legal actions.

4. For an endogenous development

We must replace the notorious "Washington Consensus" now largely discredited, with a vision of development inspired by the values of the African political, social, cultural, economic and scientific Renaissance promoted by an African people's consensus. The fundamental values associated with this Renaissance include restoring confidence in Africans, rejecting all forms of exploitation and domination, reinforcing the culture of solidarity and the spirit of self-reliance, relying on the creative genius of the African people in order to create a new civilization of autonomous development so as to bring a great contribution to world civilization

The concept of endogenous development is to be conceived as a process of strategic reflection on the fundamental conditions of an African development, understood as a multidimensional emancipating project, i.e. on the economic, social, political, scientific and cultural and gender levels

The need for an approach to endogenous development proceeds from the basic historical fact that there is no "universal model", out of space and time, e.g., valid everywhere and at all time. Development depends on the history, culture and experience of a people. It cannot be a carbon copy of another experience, especially one based on a reductionist view of the true history of the people, full of abiding cultural prejudices and built on the domination, exploitation and looting of the resources of other peoples. The outlines of an approach to an African endogenous development could have, inter alia, the following essential features:

1. A human-centered development, in order to meet the real basic needs expressed by the African people. The experience of Africa reveals the failure of the neoclassical model imposed as a turnkey model. The more one talks about growth rate, the more poverty expands. Well, what is the use of "growth" which crushes human beings and increases poverty and exclusion? The truth is that the only kind of development is the one which contributes to the full blossoming of the human being. Understood from this perspective, development is first of all a qualitative and not purely quantitative phenomenon. It is no longer an unrestrained accumulation of wealth, often for a handful of people, but the permanent search of solutions to the basic problems of the majority of the people.

2. A development based, first and foremost, on our own vision of our future and the defense of our fundamental interests. Therefore, a development formulated and implemented by Africans themselves and according to their own priorities. In fact, the second fundamental break to take place is the rejection of an imported development, which treats our continent as a dumping ground where the waste of industrialized countries is thrown.

3. Another characteristic of the new approach to development is that it can no longer be an "elite" issue, but a participatory, inclusive and democratic development. Especially, it is a development relying on agriculture and the mobilization of the numerous human and material resources of this sector, understood at the same time by intellectuals and non-intellectuals, by the rural areas and the urban zones. This raises the issue of the African cultural Renaissance and the use of the African languages in the formulation and implementation of development programs. The introduction of African national languages would allow hundreds of millions of Africans to use their creative power in order to fully participate in crafting development strategies and policies. Without the conscious participation of the people in the definition of policies that affect their life and future, there will never be any development, because the people are the driving force of all economic and social transformation.

4. The new approach must also focus on the search for the continent's collective self-reliance on essential and strategic needs, at the agricultural and industrial level. For this, it is must be within African integration, a fundamental framework of sustainable endogenous development. It is a truism to say that without integration, Africa has no chance to develop. The vicissitudes of history have made Africa one of the most fragmented continents in the world. That is one of the essential factors for its backwardness and current marginalization.

In the 21st century, Africa will be African only if the continent completes its integration and acts with a unique and single voice in the concert of nations. This approach does not mean that Africa will isolate herself from the world. On the contrary, it is to ensure the participation of the people of the continent in an alternative globalization to the neoliberal globalization. We are in favor of a globalization based on a solidarity among people of the North and the South and giving priority to meeting basic human needs.

5. That is why Africa must renew the ideal of Pan-Africanism and base its practice on the principles and values of the African Renaissance. This also means that we should walk on our two feet, take agriculture as the basis of development and lay the ground for building a modern and efficient industry.

6. Another development means promoting and ensuring social justice, gender equality, democracy and respect for human rights. The high level of poverty and exclusion results from the bad influence of the "all for market" policy and the unrestrained search for private benefit, which pushed the State to abandon policy aimed at promoting equality and social justice.

7. Another development in Africa involves the creation of new development institutions, one of which is a new State ridden of its oppressive, exploitative and repressive colonial heritage. In fact, it is imperative to reconsider all institutions inherited from colonization and create instead new institutions consistent with an endogenous and autonomous approach to development. The State and most present institutions are of "elitist" type and carbon copies of their European counterparts. That is why they participate more in the repression and exploitation of the African people than in the creation of conditions allowing them to develop all their potential and to blossom. In fact, institutions created to enslave Africans would not, under any circumstances, serve to free them. Therefore, new institutions whose nature and functions are different from the ones inherited from colonization, are needed. It is necessary to put in place a new State, which will ensure equity between all and promote an integrated human development

8. The governance issue should be examined and resolved from that angle and not from the perspective recommended by Western countries, which aim only at making our institutions even more docile instruments to serve their interests. Citizens must conquer anew the ground lost by democracy. Institutions consistent with an endogenous development, designed by and for Africans, are the instruments for African peoples' liberation, institutions with which they will identify themselves closely, because they participated in their design, understood their nature and mastered their functioning.

The implementation of the above program requires radical breaks and major sacrifices from both African leaders and civil society organizations. The success of the African Renaissance is at this price.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/dakar ... tives-2001

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Who’s really behind Burkina Faso’s coup?
Originally published: The Grayzone on November 8, 2022 by T.J. Coles (more by The Grayzone) | (Posted Nov 11, 2022)

The landlocked country of Burkina Faso has proven itself to be a valuable diplomatic and intelligence asset in the U.S. domination of the African continent. Over the last ten years, the U.S.-run Africa Command (AFRICOM) has built up the nation’s military capacity to assist U.S. regional operations.

On September 30, 2022, yet another military coup toppled the government of Burkina Faso, with protesters surrounding and vandalizing the French embassy in the capital of Ouagadougou. The demonstrators’ anger centered on the French, and behind them, their American allies, for their failure to stop a ceaseless wave of Islamist militant attacks around the country.

Both countries had dispatched military personnel to train Burkina Faso’s army, but the extremist attacks continued to escalate. The Islamist onslaught began in the country in 2016 as a result of the U.S.-led NATO regime change war against Libya, which ultimately destabilized the neighboring country of Mali, enabling the Al Qaeda-allied Boko Haram to seize slices of territory with weapons looted from Libya’s military depots.

In Burkina Faso, Western media has homed in on a small number of protestors waving Russian flags in the streets following the coup, suggesting Moscow may be to blame for toppling the government. The putsch has led to the swearing in of Capt. Ibrahim Traoré as President; or Interim President, depending on which report you read. But, as we shall see, it is the West that has the longest history of interfering in the country.

Over the last decade, Burkina Faso, which lies in West Africa and is surrounded by strategically-important countries, has endured multiple coups. Many of the military men deposing civilian governments, and indeed each other, have been trained by the Pentagon. But why does Washington wish to dominate such a small country?

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1576575986631835648[/youtube]

From French colonialism to U.S. neocolonialism

In the late-1880s, the French fought for control over parts of the Wassoulou Empire, including landlocked territory which they later renamed the Republic of Upper Volta. During the 1950s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency monitored French geological explorations, noting large deposits of copper, gold, and manganese.

After independence from France in 1960, the state was called the Voltaic Democratic Union.President Maurice Yaméogo accused the French Army of training his opponents. The CIA’s ears pricked up when Army Chief of Staff Sangoulé Lamizana seized power in 1966 to crush a general strike triggered by Yaméogo’s public spending cuts. The CIA said:

Upper Volta’s pro-Western orientation probably will not be affected.90

By the early-‘70s, Lamizana was still in power and had received funds from the USA. The hearts of the Nixon administration bled for the visually impaired people of the country:

river blindness… is endemic … As a result, large tracts of fertile land in the savannah area … cannot be opened to development.

In 1980, Colonel Saye Zerbo seized power. Described as a “moderate” by the CIA, he was overthrown two years later by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo, about whom the CIA made little comment.

In 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara, dubbed “Africa’s Che Guevara” by his supporters, took power. He imposed a program of mass education, women’s rights, localism, and infrastructure development. He renamed the country Burkina Faso, or Land of True Men. But Sankara retained economic ties to Paris. The CIA feared that Sankara was too weak to stop what they called “the extreme left” from gaining power and allying with the Soviet Union.

Sankara was overthrown and murdered in 1987. Blaise Compaoré, the former friend and alleged French and U.S. intelligence asset who betrayed and killed him, took over and ruled until 2014.

The CIA’s record dries up from this point. In 1995, the New York Times articulated Washington’s interest in Burkina Faso, portraying Compaoré as a prolific diplomatic middleman who had “turned his landlocked country … into an unlikely diplomatic powerhouse,” hosting exiled Algerian Islamists on behalf of France and mediating the opposing sides in Togo’s civil war.

AFRICOM’s “war on terror” arrives in Burkina Faso

Under U.S. President George W. Bush, Burkina Faso was removed from the list of prohibited countries, allowing U.S. military aid to flow to the country. Four years later, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) signed a bilateral military cooperation agreement.

By supporting Burkina Faso’s growing military role in the Economic Community of West African States and by hosting the annual exercises Operation Flintlock in 2010, AFRICOM groomed the small country’s armed forces.

In 2012, U.S. Special Operations Forces reportedly set up small bases in Burkina Faso, designed to support reconnaissance flights and so-called counterterrorism operations against Islamists operating in neighboring countries and regions, such as Mali, Mauritania, and the Sahara. Codenamed Creek Sand, the operations are a boon for U.S. mercenaries, like Derek Stansberry, who in 2010 was caught with dynamite and found not guilty. The regional information feeds into a fusion center, known as Aztec Archer.

Following protests, President Compaoré finally resigned in 2014. At the time, the military seized power under Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, former deputy commander of the Presidential guard. Zida had been trained at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, as part of courses run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University. In 2015, chief of intelligence, General Gilbert Diendéré, who had been trained by the U.S. under Flintlock as part of its so-called war on terror, led an ultimately failed coup.

Burkina Faso began to experience a wave of attacks by Islamist militants a year later. The extremist infiltration was a ricochet effect of U.S. and NATO interventionism in the region. As Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Cost of War Project, acknowledged,

The violence [in Burkina Faso] spilled over from neighboring Mali in the wake of the 2011 U.S.- and NATO-backed revolution in Libya that toppled longtime Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi and contributed to the 2012 political destabilization of Mali.

Amid coups and Islamist attacks, the U.S. trains Burkina Faso’s army

In 2019, the DC National Guard trained the country’s Armed Forces. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Agency, FBI, Marshals, and Secret Service contributed to the training.

Defense Post claims the program’s the aim was “to help stabilize the security situation in a fragile democracy.” But it was clear the U.S. military’s was at least as motivated by great power competition with Russia and China. As National Guard Bureau Division Chief for International Affairs, Col. Craig Hummer told Defense Post:

As this constellation grows, it will allow for us, the United States, to expand our competitive space on the continent.

In 2020, the U.S. Embassy confirmed in a fact sheet entitled “Expanded U.S. Engagement in Burkina Faso” that “over 3,000 Burkinabe soldiers and gendarmes are direct recipients of U.S. training and equipment programs each year, including peacekeeping training.”

President Roch Kaboré led the country until January this year when he was deposed by Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba. U.S.-based researcher Nick Turse notes that like his predecessors, Damiba had also enjoyed U.S. training under Flintlock, the State Department’s Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Course, the Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa, and the Pentagon’s Civil Military Support Element.

Over the years, the Muslim-majority country of Burkina Faso has endured hundreds of terror attacks, which were blamed on offshoots of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Parts of the population protested against the government’s perceived failure to end the attacks. The demonstrations took place in the capital, Ouagadougou, which happens to be where the bulk of secret U.S. operations are based.

The BBC, by contrast, spun the situation as follows: From the U.S., Damiba “received instruction on the law of armed conflict, and respect for human rights.” Among many things omitted by the BBC is that, around that time, many Burkinabé turned against the neo-colonial presence of the French, whose Embassy hosted the very military officials that, together with the U.S., had kept the nation militarized.

But Damiba did not last long. In September this year, he was overthrown by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who said that Damiba had proven impotent to stop the Islamist attacks.

Did the Pentagon train Traoré as well?

“This is something we will have to research and get back to you,” the Pentagon said in response to a query by Nick Turse.

As for the Russian flags flying in the capital of Burkina Faso, the U.S. government’s Voice of America broadcasting service found they were handmade by a local vendor, and were being flown by Burkinabé in an appeal for Russian intervention. Indeed, Russian military assets were not present in the country—at least, not yet.

According to VOA, the pro-Russian Burkinabé had been consuming media from Mali, where Russia’s Wagner Group was presently battling Islamist militants at the invitation of Bamako. They believed the private militia had proven successful next door, and now wanted them to replace the French special forces that had failed so miserably after seven years in their country.

But citing anonymous “experts,” VOA claimed,

Russia will do more harm than good in finding a long term solution to Burkina Faso’s security problems.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/11/whos-re ... asos-coup/

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Africa Confronts the Food, Fertilizer, and Climate Crisis (Interview)
NOVEMBER 12, 2022

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Women farmers in rural Ghana attend to their vegetable fields. File photo.

The UN has been in negotiations with both Russia and Ukraine to restart Russia’s ammonia pipeline. Before its closure due to the Ukraine War, the pipeline pumped up to 2.5 million tons of ammonia per year from Russia’s Volga region to Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Pivdennyi.

Ammonia is used as fertilizer or converted to nitrogen fertilizer, and the pipeline’s closure is said to play a major role in the food and fertilizer crisis triggered first by COVID and now by the Ukraine War. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to reopen it in exchange for Ukrainian POWs, but Russia declined. Both countries stand to benefit if it’s reopened, because Russia would have to pay Ukraine fees for the pipeline’s transit through Ukraine.

The pipeline runs through Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region, where there is sustained shelling, but it hasn’t been damaged yet.

Ann Garrison spoke to Timothy A. Wise, economist and senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, who said that the pipeline’s closure, like the COVID pandemic, demonstrates the vulnerability of global supply chains for both food and fertilizer. He also spoke about the need to reduce dependence on fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, which has been heavily promoted by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a project of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. He focused particularly on Africa, where he did much of the research for his book, Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food.

Ann Garrison: Timothy Wise, given that Russia was the top exporter of nitrogen fertilizers before the war, US fertilizer manufacturers are making a killing, just like US natural gas producers, while the prices of both soar because of shortages. Does this illustrate the long supply chain vulnerability of global food systems that you’ve been warning about for years?

Timothy A. Wise: Yes it does, and the companies that dominate fertilizer manufacture, like most industries that dominate agriculture, are highly concentrated. There are only a handful of multinationals engaged in capital intensive fertilizer production, and they’ve so consolidated their economic power that they can set prices. They’ve been doing that since the COVID crisis. Estimates are that they doubled their profits from 2020 to 2021, and they’re likely to double them again in 2022 because of the Ukraine War.

The biggest fertilizer companies are profiteering off people’s desperation. Sure, their natural gas costs have gone up and it costs them more to manufacture fertilizer, but they’re adding that and more to their prices to take advantage of the shortages.

Natural gas producers, fertilizer producers, and people all along that supply chain are making a killing. Many farmers in the US are failing to make much money because costs are eating up their margins.

AG: Can you walk us through synthetic fertilizers’ long supply chain, beginning with ammonia production?

TAW: Sure. Most ammonia is produced from natural gas, but some is produced from coal. It’s produced in a chemical reaction at high pressure and high temperature that combines hydrogen from the hydrocarbons of the natural gas or coal with nitrogen pulled out of the air. And it’s a highly volatile compound.

AG: I believe an ammonium nitrate storage facility caused the port explosion in Beirut.

TAW: That’s right. Ammonia’s original applications were for explosives. The first real boom, as it were, in ammonia production was in World War II.

AG: So what happens after ammonia’s manufactured?

TAW: Ammonia can be applied directly to fields as a fertilizer, but it can’t be moved around, stored, and used without risk, so it’s most often turned into synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in another chemical process, and that can take different forms. Most ammonia is turned into urea, but some is converted to other nitrogen fertilizer blends.

Nitrogen fertilizers are more stable compounds. They’re safer and easier to ship than ammonia and safer and easier for farmers to spread on their fields, but they are entirely fossil-fuel-derived products. One of the components—the hydrogen—is extracted from fossil fuels, and the process is energy intensive, so it uses a lot of fossil fuel in its production. They’re overwhelmingly produced by developed countries that have natural gas, capital, and industrial infrastructure.

AG: Since you’ve focused much of your research on Africa, can you tell us about the impact of nitrogen fertilizers and supply chain disruption there?

TAW: Africa is overwhelmingly an importer of nitrogen fertilizers. Most African countries do not have the natural gas or industrial capacity to produce them, so they’re particularly vulnerable to the supply chain disruptions we’re seeing now. Supply chains were disrupted by COVID and now they’re disrupted by the Ukraine War.

Russia and Ukraine are large suppliers of both food commodities—wheat in particular—and fertilizer, and both are exported to Africa. So, current impacts of the Ukraine War on Africa include interrupted wheat supplies, interrupted fertilizer supplies, and high prices for both.

AG: Nitrogen fertilizers cause environmental damage, don’t they?

TAW: Yes, and they’re not as stable as people would like to believe. When nitrogen fertilizer is applied in fields, it breaks down and emits greenhouse gasses. Some of the nitrogen becomes nitrous oxide, which traps far more infrared radiation than either carbon dioxide or methane. One unit of nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times more damaging than one unit of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it persists in the atmosphere for more than 100 years.

Industrial agriculture produces a third of total greenhouse gas emissions every year, and nitrogen fertilizer emissions account for about 10% of those if you consider the whole cycle of production and use.

We have the ability to curtail these emissions because there are organic substitutes for nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrous oxide and methane are two of the three big greenhouse gasses, and scaling them back in the short run is far easier than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which requires a lot more retrofitting and systemic change.

People are looking at methane and nitrous oxide as gasses that could be significantly reduced by 2030, which is what everybody says we need to do.

AG: Doesn’t nitrogen fertilizer runoff cause more immediate environmental damage? I know there are dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where there’s no marine life because of the runoff. And the people of the Gulf Coast have high rates of disease caused by all the nitrogen fertilizers coming at them down the Mississippi River.

TAW: Yes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of the flow of “excess nutrients” down the waterways that feed into the Mississippi River, and it’s a huge watershed coming from all the Midwestern farm states.

Phosphorous is another key fertilizer, and the combination of nitrogen and phosphorous creates algae blooms that choke off all the oxygen going to marine life below the surface.

They also make the water unsafe to drink. Des Moines, Iowa has the second largest nitrate removal plant in the world. Because of all the nitrates flowing into the Des Moines River, the city’s main water source, city officials see nitrate levels almost every year that could trigger a shutdown of that public water supply. It’s also a big problem in private wells, which many rural residents rely on.

Nitrate pollution is one of the things that can cause Blue Baby Syndrome, where babies don’t get enough oxygen.

For all these reasons, the US regulates nitrates in the water. Authorities rarely test all the private wells in places like Iowa, but when they have, they’ve found a high incidence of nitrates and other pollutants.

AG: You have written that these synthetic fertilizers can also decrease soil fertility.

TAW: Indeed, they should really be called “plant nutrients” rather than fertilizers, because they are mainly providing key nutrients to commodity crops, basically turning oil into corn. Monoculture cropping with nitrogen fertilizers can acidify the soil, cause erosion, and decrease soil fertility over time. No matter how much of these plant nutrients you pour onto the land, the organic matter in the soil will often decrease over time. It’s estimated that Iowa, which is among the richest agricultural lands in the world, has lost half its topsoil in the last 50 years by using this industrial farming model—monocropping and saturation with nitrogen fertilizers. Anyone who thinks that we can just keep going the way we’re going is dreaming. You can’t keep losing 50% of your topsoil and sustain productive agriculture.

For now it just keeps creating more dependence on nitrogen fertilizers and more supply chain vulnerability. There are a lot of efforts in Iowa to try to reform the way they’re growing food, but reformers are swimming against a very strong tide of agribusiness power, so it’s difficult to get any kind of serious change.

AG: Nitrogen fertilizer use hasn’t done this kind of damage in Africa yet, has it?

TAW: Not on a large scale. African farmers using nitrogen fertilizers are still in a minority, and Africa still has the lowest average rates of nitrogen fertilizer application in the world, very low by global standards. But the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations and other donors have said that Africans need to be using it at a much more intensive rate to be competitive exporters and to grow enough food to eat. Gates and others say they need to triple use by 2050 or, in some scenarios, by as much as 800% to catch up. In his climate change book, Gates called nitrogen fertilizer “magical” despite its negative climate impact. Mr. Science resorts to magic and implies in that book that there’s no way to grow enough food without it. But there’s a whole lot wrong with that formulation.

AG: The Gates and Rockefeller Foundations started pushing nitrogen fertilizers on Africa in their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), right?

TAW: Right. They brought AGRA to Africa in 2006, and it’s been a dismal failure on its own terms. This is a part of the story that I’ve covered a lot.

AGRA promoted policies and programs to increase fertilizer use, and many African governments adopted input subsidy programs, which are sometimes funded by bilateral donors. The entire purpose of those initiatives is to hook African farmers on commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizers. Many governments provide very generous subsidies, three quarters of the cost, by giving out coupons to farmers to redeem for these inputs.

A significant number of farmers are now using these so-called modern inputs, but they haven’t produced the kinds of yields and incomes that would allow them to buy more commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer after the subsidies run out.

So AGRA has been a failure on its own terms. Even when farmers use those inputs they don’t see large productivity increases. And as soon as the subsidies go away, most farmers just drop the commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer because they’re a waste of money. Their costs exceed their benefits, and those who’ve kept trying to make them work have often gone into debt to buy the inputs, and then they face all kinds of terrible choices.

AG: You’ve said that this has been particularly damaging in Rwanda, a nation that often serves as a petri dish for Western policies. Could you tell us what’s happened there?

TAW: Rwanda is considered a poster child for AGRA, and their agriculture minister, Agnes Kalibata, rose to become AGRA’s president, a position she still holds. But all the subsidies and strong-arm tactics to force Rwandan farmers to adopt commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizers just managed to increase the production of corn, which is one of their staples but not the only one. And that increase in corn production came at the expense of crop diversity and the environmental health of the land. They encouraged the expansion of corn production on lands where it shouldn’t be produced.

Our study suggested that where they claim a 66% increase in yield, it was more like 18% if you consider the increase in a larger number of staple crops, not just corn. And overall, hunger didn’t go down. It went up by 40% during the time that AGRA’s been operating. All that corn didn’t help feed the people, so Rwanda is really a hungry poster child for AGRA’s failures.

AG: Nearly 12 years ago Rwandan dissident and political prisoner Victoire Ingabire told me that Rwandan farmers were forced into growing so much corn for export that they weren’t growing enough food to eat.

TAW: I think that’s right. And a diet that is too dependent on corn isn’t a healthy diet.

AG: I know a Rwandan exile in Belgium who says that her father had another job in Rwanda, but they had a small farm where they rotated crops throughout the year, and it largely fed them. She said you can’t do that anymore because you have to buy the seeds and the fertilizer.

TAW: That sounds right, and even when they come subsidized, as I believe they still do in Rwanda, it’s still a bad trade off because constant monocropping with nitrogen fertilizer is really bad for the land. It’s not making the soil more fertile; it makes the soil acidic and less fertile.

AG: You said that farmers using nitrogen fertilizer are still a minority in Africa. Do you have an idea how common it has become?

TAW: Many farms in South Africa are highly industrialized, and they look a lot like parts of the US Midwest where farms are saturated with nitrogen fertilizer, but smaller scale farmers tend to rely on traditional practices. Some are just subsistence farmers producing for their own families, and some also produce a surplus for local and regional markets. Some may use nitrogen fertilizer and commercial seeds on some of their land so long as they’re free or cheap. Then when they’re no longer free or cheap, they’ll stop.

So one of the great myths of the fertilizer crisis, as it’s called, in Africa, is that Africa can’t grow food without it, that Africa is going to have a famine if we don’t get fertilizer to the farmers now.

AG: That’s what David Beasley warned of in a recent Associated Press interview. He said that 50% of the food in the world is grown with nitrogen fertilizer and there’s a big shortage because China has banned nitrogen fertilizer exports and the Ukraine War has stopped nitrogen fertilizer exports from Russia, which was the top exporter of fertilizer before the war. He said there’s going to be massive famine in 2023. What’s your response to that?

TAW: Well, there’s some truth to those warnings. Many African harvests are over now, so the nitrogen fertilizers Beasley is calling for would be for the next cropping year, in 2023, when he predicts a worsening crisis. Farmers who’ve become dependent on nitrogen fertilizer and commercial seeds are in a bad place, because they either can’t get those things, or they cost too much. Those farmers will see significantly reduced yields, and that will exacerbate food shortages.

AG: Are we talking here about the highly industrialized farms like those in South Africa, smaller scale farms, or both?

TAW: Mainly commercial farmers, who have large or mid-sized farms. But some small-scale farmers too. In Zambia, heavy subsidies have pushed up synthetic fertilizer use even among those farmers.

AG: Beasley also said, “The other factor is inflation and the value of the dollar. Because the value of the dollar is so strong now that it’s offset any movement we’ve had in the poor countries with regard to food pricing.”

TAW: That’s true. The global shortage of food and fertilizers drives up the prices, and African currencies are sliding as the dollar surges. This further illustrates the vulnerability of global supply chains and the need to transition to local and regional supply chains.

The World Food Program is doing some heroic work trying to rally food donations and it’s working much better than it used to. They don’t just take surplus US grain and dump it on developing countries. Instead they buy more of it locally and regionally in markets where production is still good, and they mostly do it with cash. So that actually helps developing economies instead of hurting them, and gets food to people who are on the edge of starvation.

But I would love to see the World Food Program and other donors make a commitment to helping farmers transition away from dependence on external inputs. The COVID crisis and the Ukraine War should both tell us that we need short supply chains, not long ones. We need local resources and local markets. But the multinational firms that dominate the agribusiness sector don’t want to hear that, and they’re driving the bus right now.

Unfortunately, the African Development Bank’s response to the fertilizer shortage is to open up a $1.5 billion nitrogen fertilizer program to extend credit so that farmers and governments can buy more fertilizer, even at these high prices, just to keep the train rolling.

AG: How is agribusiness driving these changes?

TAW: When governments subsidize commercial seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, the companies are the clear beneficiaries. The subsidies create markets for their products, and they lobby for other policies to push farmers to buy their products. Seed laws can threaten farmers’ right to save, exchange and sell good seeds to other farmers. The companies see Africa as the last great market to conquer, and that market is expected to grow.

African organizations for food sovereignty and sustainable farming are saying no to such policies. The fertilizer shortages and price spikes should be a wake up call that we need to decrease, not increase, their dependency. Sure we have a short term crisis. OK, get some nitrogen fertilizer to farmers that need it, but let’s start decreasing our dependency on these inputs that are manufactured and marketed on a global scale. If climate change and fertilizer shortages are telling us anything, it’s that we need to reduce our dependence on external, fossil-fuel-based inputs and increase our reliance on organic local resources to produce our food.

They can do it. African farmers have shown that there are a lot of ways to fertilize the soil that are better than nitrogen fertilizer. I wrote a lot about that in my book.

AG: Subsidized, globally manufactured inputs seem to exacerbate the debt and donor dependency that are among the biggest problems in Africa, in addition to creating the supply chain vulnerability.

TAW: That’s right. And the response of the African Development Bank—to give people more nitrogen fertilizer—just creates more dependence. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has called on African farmers and governments to put down the shovel, stop digging Africa deeper into a dependency hole, and chart a new path. That path is agroecology, reliance on local resources, lower input agriculture, and multicropping, not monocropping.

The head of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa wrote that Africa is not a monoculture and it should not become one. It has diverse cultures with diverse local food systems in diverse local landscapes.

AG: Do you see a lot of land grabbing putting further pressure on local food systems?

TAW: Yes. That’s particularly aggravated when there’s a big jump in food prices, and when returns from stock markets and other investments collapse. Capital then flows into commodities and land. I haven’t seen data on land grabbing since the Ukraine War broke out, but it won’t surprise me if we see an increase, as we did after the 2007-2008 food price spikes.

Global industrial responses to climate change, including so called carbon sequestration, and carbon offset programs also put pressure on land. They make it profitable for companies to “invest” in, for example, preserving forests in the Congo, in exchange for carbon credits, so they can keep polluting in their core business.

I almost fell off my chair when Jeff Bezos said Amazon has committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2030 by sequestering as much carbon as it’s emitting. When people asked how he was going to do that, he said that a lot of it’s going to happen in the Congo. In other words, not by them decreasing the fossil fuels they use in all of their vast supply chains. They may start using electric vehicles and things like that, but their main strategy is to claim a big chunk of the Congolese rainforest, say nobody can touch it, and get carbon credits for doing that.

AG: Congolese who live in the forest have various ways of producing food there and using it to survive without cutting the trees down.

TAW: Yes, there’s a long cynical history of corporate multinational “green” organizations walling off forests and other lands from the people who have relied on them for generations and maintained their viability. They’re protecting the forest and the land, but then they’re kicked out to allow Amazon and the like to keep polluting in other parts of the world.

AG: Well, we couldn’t expect Gates and Bezos to imagine anything but global corporate solutions.

Can you give us a picture of the alternatives? I think you’ve said that Mali has been particularly successful in developing local, sustainable agriculture.

TAW: Yes, Mali and other parts of West Africa are particularly interesting because several governments there have made commitments to developing agroecology, farming with nature, and reducing dependence on inputs like commercial seeds and nitrogen fertilizer.

Mali has done some very interesting things in response to the fertilizer crisis. One of the leaders of one of the farm organizations there said that it’s actually helping, not hurting their food production.

The majority of the nitrogen fertilizer used in Mali is for cotton. But the fertilizer shortage has meant that cotton farmers can’t afford it, so they’re taking their land out of cotton and planting sorghum or millet, which doesn’t need fertilizer, and is relatively drought tolerant, resilient, and nutritious. So Mali gets a net increase in food production from the fertilizer crisis.

In addition, the government of Mali has made a commitment to creating alternatives to nitrogen fertilizers. They are encouraging the use of organic, biofertilizers that can be produced using local resources, not natural gas. They’ve started to scale up production facilities for biofertilizers and provided subsidies to farmers to use them instead of nitrogen fertilizers. That’s the kind of transition we need.

AG: And this encourages more small scale farming for local and regional markets?

TAW: It does. And one of Mali’s advantages is that they weren’t drawn into the global industrial farming model to the extent that other African nations were. They’re not as dependent on imports of food or synthetic inputs. And they tend to have a diverse crop mix, unlike Rwanda. Rwanda went all in on corn, leaving the people without enough food to eat. In Mali, corn is just one of the staples they grow. Traditional crops like millet and sorghum are more important in Mali, even though the Green Revolution for Africa has tried to change that.

AG: African nations, like any others, need export products to generate foreign exchange. Can agroecology be applied on a scale that allows farming for export?

TAW: That remains to be seen. Export dependence for commodities such as cotton is a legacy of colonialism, and it is very difficult for developing countries to find export markets that allow them to earn that foreign exchange. But remember: They are now spending a huge amount of foreign exchange to import fertilizers. Cutting that dependence has direct economic benefits, particularly if there are low-cost ways to fertilize the soil and get better results than the Green Revolution for Africa has produced.

AG: So in response to the current food and fertilizer shortages, you would recommend food aid where it’s desperately needed, with food purchased from African farmers where possible, combined with steps to transition to local and regional agroecology.

TAW: That’s right. And there’s certainly a place for getting fertilizer this year to farmers who are dependent on it, but Mali’s showing a different path to African food sovereignty and sustainability by developing biofertilizers, crop diversity, local and regional markets, and short supply chains that aren’t as vulnerable to global shocks.

https://orinocotribune.com/africa-confr ... interview/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 18, 2022 3:11 pm

Sanctions on Zimbabwe Tool of Neo-Colonialism: Matinyarare

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People performing the Zimbabwe's Anti-Sanctions Day, Oc. 25, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @BruceDormice

Published 18 November 2022 (1 hours 3 minutes ago)

In the early 2000s, Britain and the U.S. imposed sanctions on this African country over differences with Zimbabwe on its land reform program.


Sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe over two decades ago by the West is a tool of neo-colonialism and a form of economic warfare, said Rutendo Matinyarare, the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Anti-Sanctions Movement (ZASM).

"The sanctions come from the same toolbox of the coercion that was used to enslave Africans and the coercion that was used to colonize Africans," he pointed out, recalling that Britain and the U.S. imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2001 and 2003 respectively over differences with Zimbabwe on its land reform program.

While the EU has eased its sanctions over the years, the United States still maintains the sanctions. They argue that the sanctions are targeted at a few individuals. But their impact is being felt throughout the whole economy, with ordinary citizens bearing the brunt.

"Sanctions were imposed to slow down Zimbabwe's human development, to slow down Zimbabwe's economy so that indigenization would not be successful and land reform would also be a failure," Matinyarare said.

"Economic sanctions are a form of warfare that is prohibited in wartime by the Geneva Convention, and also prohibited in peacetime by a number of resolutions, conventions and international legal customs," he added.


Furthermore, sanctions are used to coerce resource-rich nations like Zimbabwe to give control of their economies and resources back to former colonial powers thereby making Africa dependent.

"Sanctions are there to cripple our economy, cripple access to capital, cripple technology exchange, cripple technology transfer and cripple our ability to rise up the learning curve and to learn to produce our own industrial products and to get savings that will start to develop us into developing nations that will become developed nations tomorrow," Matinyarare said.

Earlier this year, ZASM sued the U.S. government and South African financial institutions at the Gauteng High Court in South Africa over the sanctions.

The implementation of extraterritorial sanctions and over-compliance by South African banks and international banks domiciled in South Africa has seen Zimbabweans being deprived of banking services and their human rights without trial and without court orders.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/San ... -0002.html

WHO Says Uganda to Receive Ebola Trial Vaccine Next Week

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Health workers in Uganda, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @switchtvkenya

Published 18 November 2022

Local authorities will evaluate the efficacy of three trial vaccines, which include Oxford from Britain, Sabin, and Merck from the United States.

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Uganda will receive the Sudan strain Ebola trial vaccine next week as the east African country grapples with containing the spread of the deadly disease.

WHO Representative to Uganda Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam said that the first people who will receive the vaccine are people who have got into contact with confirmed Ebola cases and the health workers who are treating the patients.

"We have to get engaged with contacts and health workers and inform them of the benefits and the potential side effects," Woldemariam said.

Henry Kyobe, incident commander for the Ebola outbreak at the Ministry of Health, said the trial vaccines have been tested before and are safe for humans.

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Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said WHO's committee of external experts has approved the candidate vaccines for inclusion in the planned clinical trial. Matshidiso said the start of the clinical trial marks a pivotal progression toward the development of the first vaccine against the Sudan strain.

Vaccines are some of the major tools that can be used to contain the spread of Ebola. Ruth Aceng, Uganda's Health Minister, said the ministry will evaluate the efficacy of three trial vaccines, which include Oxford from Britain, Sabin, and Merck from the United States.

The vaccines would be evaluated if they can protect the contacts of Ebola patients within 29 days of contact. WHO figures show to date there have been a total of 141 confirmed and 22 probable Ebola infections in Uganda, and 55 confirmed and 22 probable deaths.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/WHO ... -0001.html

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UN denounces increase in civilian casualties in Somalia

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The African Horn is suffering from a deep humanitarian crisis, which is torn between climate change and armed conflicts. | Photo: ohchr.org
Published 14 November 2022

The number of civilian casualties in Somalia during 2022 is the highest in the last five years.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced on Monday the increase in crimes in Somalia against civilian victims, where at least 613 people have died and another 948 have been injured so far in 2022.

The body led by High Commissioner Volker Türk, reported in a statement that these are the highest figures in the last five years, with acts of extreme violence attributable to the jihadist organization Al Shabab, tribal militias and state security forces.

Türk urged the parties to guarantee the protection of civilians, since "this year has ended a general downward trend in deaths and injuries since 2017."


The document states that at least 315 Somalis have died and 686 have received damage from improvised explosive devices, most of them at the hands of Al Shabab.

"Deliberately attacking civilians or destroying essential infrastructure for this population constitutes a war crime under international law, and must stop," Türk demanded.


The high commissioner critically emphasized the attacks by the jihadist organization against homes, wells, bridges and schools, objectives unrelated to the concept of war.

He also condemned the suicide attack on October 29 that caused 121 deaths in Mogadishu, the capital of the African nation, as a terrorist act.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/onu-denu ... -0009.html

Google Transl;ator

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Food, Farming, and Africa: An Open Letter to Bill Gates
November 17, 2022
Food sovereignty activists challenge a wealthy white man’s flawed assumptions, hubris, and ignorance

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Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

We, 50 organizations focused on food sovereignty and justice worldwide, want you to know there is no shortage of practical solutions and innovations by African farmers and organizations. We invite you to step back and learn from those on the ground. —Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa

Dear Bill Gates:

You were recently featured commenting on the global state of agriculture and food insecurity, in a recent New York Times op-ed by David Wallace-Wells and also in an Associated Press article.

In both articles, you make a number of claims that are inaccurate and need to be challenged. Both pieces admit that the world currently produces enough food to adequately feed all the earth’s inhabitants, yet you continue to fundamentally misdiagnose the problem as relating to low productivity; we do not need to increase production as much as to assure more equitable access to food. In addition, there are four specific distortions in these pieces which should be addressed, namely: 1) the supposed need for “credit for fertilizer, cheap fertilizer” to ensure agricultural productivity, 2) the idea that the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century needs to be replicated now to address hunger, 3) the idea that “better” seeds, often produced by large corporations, are required to cope with climate change, and 4) your suggestion that if people have solutions that “aren’t singing Kumbaya,” you’ll put money behind them.

First, synthetic fertilizers contribute 2% of overall greenhouse gas emissions and are the primary source of nitrous oxide emissions. Producing nitrogen fertilizers requires 3-5% of the world’s fossil gas. They also make farmers and importing nations dependent on volatile prices on international markets, and are a major cause of rising food prices globally. Yet you claim that even more fertilizer is needed to increase agricultural productivity and address hunger. Toxic and damaging synthetic fertilizers are not a feasible way forward. Already, companies, organizations, and farmers in Africa and elsewhere have been developing biofertilizers made from compost, manure, and ash, and biopesticides made from botanical compounds, such as neem tree oil or garlic. These products can be manufactured locally (thereby avoiding dependency and price volatility), and can be increasingly scaled up and commercialized.

Second, the Green Revolution was far from a resounding success. While it did play some role in increasing the yields of cereal crops in Mexico, India, and elsewhere from the 1940s to the 1960s, it did very little to reduce the number of hungry people in the world or to ensure equitable and sufficient access to food. It also came with a host of other problems, from ecological issues like long-term soil degradation to socio-economic ones like increased inequality and indebtedness (which has been a major contributor to the epidemic of farmer suicides in India). Your unquestioning support for a “new” Green Revolution demonstrates willful ignorance about history and about the root causes of hunger (which are by and large about political and economic arrangements, and what the economist Amartya Sen famously referred to as entitlements, not about a global lack of food).

Third, climate-resilient seeds are already in existence and being developed by farmers and traded through informal seed markets. Sorghum, which you tout in your interview as a so-called “orphan crop”, is among these already established climate-adapted crops. You note that most investments have been in maize and rice, rather than in locally-adapted and nutritious cereals like sorghum. Yet AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), which your foundation (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) created and financed, has been among those institutions that have disproportionately focused on maize and rice. In other words, you are part of creating the very problem you name. The AGRA initiative, which your foundation continues to fund, has also pushed restrictive seed legislation that limits and restricts crop innovation to well-resourced labs and companies. These initiatives don’t increase widespread innovation, but rather contribute to the privatization and consolidation of corporate monopolies over seed development and seed markets.

Finally, your assertion that critics of your approach are simply “singing Kumbaya,” rather than developing meaningful (and fundable) solutions, is extremely disrespectful and dismissive. There are already many tangible, ongoing proposals and projects that work to boost productivity and food security–from biofertilizer and biopesticide manufacturing facilities, to agroecological farmer training programs, to experimentation with new water and soil management techniques, low-input farming systems, and pest-deterring plant species. What you are doing here is gaslighting–presenting practical, ongoing, farmer-led solutions as somehow fanciful or ridiculous, while presenting your own preferred approaches as pragmatic. Yet it is your preferred high-tech solutions, including genetic engineering, new breeding technologies, and now digital agriculture, that have in fact consistently failed to reduce hunger or increase food access as promised. And in some cases, the “solutions” you expound as fixes for climate change actually contribute to the the biophysical processes driving the problem (e.g. more fossil-fuel based fertilizers, and more fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure to transport them) or exacerbate the political conditions that lead to inequality in food access (e.g. policies and seed breeding initiatives that benefit large corporations and labs, rather than farmers themselves).

In both articles, you radically simplify complex issues in ways that justify your own approach and interventions. You note in the New York Times op-ed that Africa, with the lowest costs of labor and land, should be a net exporter of agricultural products. You explain that the reason it is not is because “their productivity is much lower than in rich countries and you just don’t have the infrastructure.” However, costs of land and labor, as well as infrastructures, are socially and politically produced. Africa is in fact highly productive–it’s just that the profits are realized elsewhere. Through colonization, neoliberalism, debt traps, and other forms of legalized pillaging, African lives, environments, and bodies have been devalued and made into commodities for the benefit and profit of others. Infrastructures have been designed to channel these commodities outside of the continent itself. Africa is not self-sufficient in cereals because its agricultural, mining, and other resource-intensive sectors have been structured in ways that are geared toward serving colonial and then international markets, rather than African peoples themselves. Although you are certainly not responsible for all of this, you and your foundation are exacerbating some of these problems through a very privatized, profit-based, and corporate approach to agriculture.

There is no shortage of practical solutions and innovations by African farmers and organizations. We invite you to step back and learn from those on the ground. At the same time, we invite high profile news outlets to be more cautious about lending credibility to one wealthy white man’s flawed assumptions, hubris, and ignorance, at the expense of people and communities who are living and adapting to these realities as we speak.

Signed:

Community Alliance for Global Justice/AGRA Watch
Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA)
Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI)
GRAIN
African Centre for Biodiversity
Kenya Food Rights Alliance
Growth Partners
Grassroots International
Agroecology Fund
US Food Sovereignty Alliance
National Family Farm Coalition
Family Farm Defenders
Oakland Institute
A Growing Culture
ETC Group
Food in Neighborhoods Community Coalition
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville
Haki Nawiri Afrika
Real Food Media
Agroecology Research-Action Collective
Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN)
Les Amis de la Terre Togo/ Friends of the Earth Togo
Justiça Ambiental/ JA FoE Mozambique
Friends of the Earth Africa
Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF)
Committee on Vital Environmental Resources (COVER)
The Young Environmental Network (TYEN)
GMO Free Nigeria
Community Development Advocacy Foundation
African Centre for Rural and Environmental Development
Connected Advocacy
Policy Alert
Zero Waste Ambassadors
Student Environmental Assembly Nigeria (SEAN)
Host Community Network, Nigeria (HoCON)
Green Alliance Nigeria (GAN)
Hope for Tomorrow Initiative (HfTI)
Media Awareness and Justice Initiative (MAJI)
We The People
Rainbow Watch and Development Centre
BFA Food and Health Foundation
Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA)
Women and Children Life Advancement Initiative
Network of Women in Agriculture Nigeria (NWIN)
Gender and Environmental Risks Reduction Initiative (GERI)
Gender and Community Empowerment Initiative
Eco defenders Network
Urban Rural Environmental Defenders (URED)
Peace Point Development Foundation (PPDF)
Community Support Centre, Nigeria

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/1 ... ill-gates/

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China is Not an Enemy of Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 15, 2022

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Jw2BOG57_2M?list=PLCCEb ... 6jw19scMh2[/youtube]

(Playlist of the complete interview)

If the West really thinks China helping Africa to gain influence is a bad thing, the best thing it can do is help Africa even more. President of the Socialist Party of Zambia, Fred M’membe, and the convener of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, Kyeretwie Opoku share with us an African perspective on “Africa’s China problem”.

Prof. Fred M’membe was named as one of its World Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute. He supported the liberation struggles in southern Africa and other parts of the world with a true spirit of internationalism.

Kyeretwie Opoku is a committed socialist and a strong supporter of the African integration (Pan-Africanism).


https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/11/ ... of-africa/

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South African CP, SACP stands in solidarity with public service workers, calls on the government to refrain from undermining collective bargaining
11/11/22 11:17 AM

South African Communist Party

SACP stands in solidarity with public service workers, calls on the government to refrain from undermining collective bargaining


Friday 11 November 2022: The South African Communist Party (SACP) stands in solidarity with public service workers who embarked on strike action on Thursday 10 November 2022. The SACP congratulates the workers who seek unity in pursuit of common demands, including safeguarding collective bargaining.

The SACP vehemently disagrees with the manner in which the government is handling the public service negotiations. In particular, the government must refrain from undermining collective bargaining, including through the use of the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS). The government has not given the workers any say in deciding the content and direction of the MTBPS.

Instead of unilaterally implementing below inflation wage adjustments using the MTBPS, the government must engage in collective bargaining in good faith, to seek consensus with public service unions on an offer that the workers can accept. It is important to appreciate this against the background of the government having intransigently reneged from implementing the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council Resolution 1 of 2018. The government did NOT implement wage increases in the third year of the 2018 public service collective bargaining agreement.

Coming out of its 15th National Congress, the SACP declared to build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. The SACP urges the workers to be actively involved in building this revolutionary unity of the working-class broadly understood, including the unity of workers across union and federation affiliation in the public service and the economy at large.

http://solidnet.org/article/South-Afric ... argaining/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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