Africa

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 17, 2020 1:16 pm

THOMAS SANKARA: "WE WANT TO BE THE HEIRS OF ALL THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE WORLD"
F. David Arráez Y.

15 Oct 2020 , 12:18 pm .

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Thomas Sankara was known as the "African Che Guevara" (Photo: Alain Nogues / Sygma / Corbis)

Small editorial note: we published this article in this rostrum on December 26, 2014. We decided to republish it for two reasons: 1) so that we do not forget who he was and what is the legacy of Thomas Sankara, leader of the revolution in Burkina Faso in the 1980s, whose death is 33 years old today; and 2) because whoever wrote this note about the "African Che Guevara" was a great friend of us, an organic intellectual and a partner in the revolutionary struggle for decades in Venezuela, whose courage we still honor: David Arráez.

This note is just a small tribute, of the many deserved, that can be given to both Sankara and David Arráez. May it serve, then, to remember them both with the honor they have always given.

On December 21, 1949, Thomas Sankara was born in the city of Yako, in the French colony of Upper Volta. Sankara chose a military career and, together with other colleagues, formed a generation of young officers with a political culture superior to their bosses.

With the rank of captain he rebelled on November 7, 1982 against the neo-colonial regime of the West African country of Alto Volta, a rebellion that led Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo to the presidency, and Sankara to serve as Prime Minister until May 1983, when he was dismissed from the Popular Salvation Council on suspicion of subversive activities and clandestine relations with Libya, and was under house arrest.

With the support of a company of paratroopers, he assumed power on August 4, 1983, beginning in the Republic of Alto Volta a profound revolutionary process with the goal of turning the nation into an agriculturally self-sufficient country, with a public health system that privileged primary care - following the postulates of the Alma Ata Conference - dedicated to establishing the parameters of first level public care, an educational system that will defeat the high degree of illiteracy, a frontal fight against corruption, transformation of centuries-old traditions that they turned women into beasts of burden.

Thomas Sankara used to say: "Our revolution is interested in all the oppressed, in all the exploited in today's society. It is therefore interested in women ... The revolution, by changing the social order that oppresses women, creates the conditions of his true emancipation ".

"The women and men of our society are all victims of imperialist oppression and domination, that is why they fight the same battle. The revolution and the liberation of women go together. To speak of the emancipation of women is not an act of charity. or a burst of humanism, is a fundamental requirement for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold the other half of heaven. "

What clarity of thought, what a lesson given to machismo and a certain outdated feminism that does not understand that the struggle is of the oppressed against the oppressor, of the exploited against the exploiter, the class struggle, because the task of emancipation is of women and men together .

Sankara said: "It is necessary to have a fair understanding of the problem of the emancipation of women. It does not mean acquiring habits typical of men such as drinking, smoking, wearing pants ... that is not the emancipation of women ... the true The emancipation of women is what gives them responsibilities that link them to productive activities, to the different battles that the people face ... emancipation, like freedom, is not granted, it is conquered. "

Thomas Sankara wondered if it would be possible to liquidate the system of exploitation while maintaining the exploitation of women, who make up more than half of society. In relation to the armed forces, Sankara's thinking was advanced:

"According to the defense doctrine of the revolutionary High Volta, a conscious people will not cede the defense of their homeland to a group of men, no matter how competent they may be. Conscious peoples assume the defense of their homeland themselves. In effect, Our armed forces constitute just a detachment that is more specialized than the rest of the people for internal and external security tasks in Upper Volta ... The revolution dictates three missions to our national armed forces:

Be ready to fight any internal and external enemy and participate in the military training of the rest of the people.
Participate in national production. Indeed, the new soldier must live and suffer within the people to which he belongs ... he will be in the fields and will raise cows, sheep and birds. It will build schools and dispensaries.
Develop each soldier as a revolutionary militant. Gone are the days when the army was pretended to be neutral and apolitical, while in reality it was a bulwark of reaction and guardian of imperialist interests ... As an army at the service of the revolution, the National People's Army will not accommodate no military man who despises, vilifies and mistreats his people. It will be an army of the people at the service of the people ... Military officers must respect their men, love them and treat them fairly. "
Thomas Sankara promoted an independent, self-sufficient and planned national economy, at the service of a democratic and popular society, for which he required:

An agrarian reform
An administrative reform
An educational reform
A reform of the production and distribution structures
Make agriculture the fulcrum of industrial development
Food self-sufficiency
Sankara had a keen perception of the vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie and stated: "The middle bourgeoisie, this section of the Voltaic bourgeoisie, although linked to imperialism, rivals it for control of the market. However, since it is economically more weak, it is marginalized by imperialism. Therefore, it has complaints against imperialism, but it fears the people and this fear may induce it to form a bloc with imperialism. However, due to the fact that the imperialist domination of our country prevents it from carrying out Its true role as a national bourgeoisie, some of its elements, under certain circumstances, could be in favor of the revolution, which would objectively place them in the field of the people.Among the people a revolutionary distrust must be cultivated towards those elements that gravitate towards the revolution, because in order to cover themselves they will turn to all kinds of opportunists revolution. "

Sankara cambió el nombre de República de Alto Volta por Burkina Faso ("Tierra del hombre íntegro").

Vincent Ouattara, an intellectual from Burkina Faso, says in a book of his authorship: "The revolution established a development model driven fundamentally from within. It was above all about teaching the population to be masters of their destiny, to appreciate their values, to develop their capacity for reflection and creation, to put aside the frustrated mentality that leads to laziness, conformism, which makes men consumers of models and theories of development not assumed, inappropriate ... It is necessary to highlight that with the revolution , Thomas Sankara and his colleagues restored trust to desperate populations, forgotten by national elites ... In short, they established three types of trust: trust in the management of the public good,the confidence towards the leaders and the confidence in themselves and in their ability to achieve the objectives linked to national emancipation ... ". Sankara said that living as Africans is the only way to live free and to live with dignity. He was based on that maxim its political program.

At the international level, Sankara stood out for the respect for the self-determination of the peoples and the deep sense of solidarity, the moral support, and if necessary even material, to the peoples who are fighting for their emancipation. He supported the struggle of the Sahrawi people, the Palestinian people, the people of Namibia.

Its principles regarding international relations were reciprocal respect for independence, territorial integrity, national sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, and trade with all countries based on equality.

Thomas Sankara always remembered that the Burkinabé revolutionary model is inexorable, each people must make their own revolution, think globally and act locally.

His speech at the opening of the exhibition in honor of Che Guevara ended with the following words: "Every time we think about Che, let us try to be like him and make the man, the combatant, and, above all, come to life again. that we have the idea of ​​acting like him, let us think of self-denial, rejecting the bourgeois goods that seek to alienate us, while also rejecting comforts; let us not forget education and the rigorous discipline of revolutionary ethics: every time we try to act like this we will serve better to Che's ideas, we will spread them better. "

En sus afirmaciones Thomas Sankara asumía la herencia de las revoluciones mundiales: "Nuestra revolución en Burkina Faso se inspira en todas las experiencias de los hombres, desde el primer aliento de la humanidad. Queremos ser los herederos de todas las revoluciones del mundo, de todas las luchas de liberación de los pueblos del Tercer Mundo. Sacamos lecciones de la Revolución Americana, la Revolución Francesa nos enseñó los derechos del hombre, la gran Revolución de Octubre permitió la victoria del proletariado e hizo posible los sueños de La Comuna de París".

On October 15, 1987 Sankara was assassinated by henchmen of his old friend and colleague Blaise Compaoré, who assumed the presidency and backed down from the conquests achieved in the four years of Tom Sank's administration, as his people called him. Compaoré has since been a faithful ally of France and has followed the prescriptions of the IMF and the World Bank.

A week before his assassination, Sankara had said: "Revolutionaries, as individuals, can be killed, but ideas are not killed."

Thomas Sankara has become a symbol for millions of African workers, peasants and youth, and sooner rather than later, we believe, the Burkinabe people will rebel and will retake the path of that profound African revolutionary martyr who only wished, in his own words, "May the image of a man who has led a useful life for all be preserved from me."

Honor and glory to that revolutionary whose example will live forever in the peoples of Africa and the world.

On October 30, 2014, a popular rebellion broke out in Burkina Faso. The felon Compaoré, in despair, delegated the government to General Honoré Traoré, who imposed a night curfew that was disobeyed by the people in rebellion, concentrating on the "Plaza de la Revolución" or Plaza de la Nación.

The people continued to mobilize and popular pressure forced Compaoré to resign and take refuge in the city of Yamoussoukro, capital of the Ivory Coast. Faced with this fact, the rebel people came out to celebrate their triumph; However, Traoré - a close collaborator of the overthrown felon - was still at the head of the government, which apparently produced a clash for power between him and the head of the presidential guard, General Zida, but the truth was that popular mobilizations also threw Traoré.

After Zida proclaimed himself head of government, the people took to the streets to protest against the military leaders. In response, the presidential guard opened fire on the concentration. The parties and groups of society that opposed the military regime met and declared that the transition should be civil and democratic and not kidnapped by the military leaders.

The following Sunday thousands of people took to the streets to protest the kidnapping of the military of the popular revolution, expressing slogans such as "Zida is Judas!" However, the mobilization was losing vigor and this, in our opinion, has a reason: the lack of a homogeneous and solidly united political leadership with a clear purpose.

The most radical group and spearhead of this popular rebellion is Le Balai Citoyen (The Citizens' Broom) led by rapper Smokey and a reggae musician, Sams'K Le Jah. Reactionary groups such as "People for Progress" made up of members of the party of the asylee traitor also sneaked into these protests.

As the protests in the street subsided, the group Le Balai Citoyen announced its support for General Zida, this demoralized the people. Here the powers that see Africa as a territory that belongs to them come to play. France and the US intervene through their diplomatic channels and their power of blackmail to convince the military to appoint a civilian government.

The State Department declares and condemns the military takeover and describes it as a coup. The African Union supports this statement, as expected.

This is how things are. For now, a lackey "civil government" has been imposed, headed by diplomat Michel Kafando, who will convene presidential elections within a year, but there is a rebellious people that demonstrated their power in five days, but due to lack of political leadership cohesive and clear, it could not impose its just aspirations and vindicate the legacy of the great Thomas Sankara.

We all admire the sobriety and humility with which our Pepe Mujica lives, we also remember that Tom Sank decided to use a Renault 5 as a presidential vehicle, the most economical model in Burkina Faso. When he was murdered, he only left as property a humble house with a mortgage not yet paid; he did not accept the salary of president, but that his salary remained that of captain of the army.

https://misionverdad.com/memoria/thomas ... -del-mundo

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 21, 2020 2:16 pm

America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 21 Oct 2020

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America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC

This is an excellent chronicling of the Rwandan government’s racist policies toward the majority Hutu population, writes Ann Garrison.

“The Rwandan government will be enraged by this book, but that’s a badge of honor.”

Justin Podur’s new book, America’s War s on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC, is about Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and their inextricably entwined histories within the framework of European colonization and American empire, and it’s excellent.

I believe it will come to stand alongside the best of recent research and writing on the subject, including Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction by Robin Philpot, The Accidental Genocide by Peter Erlinder, How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi by Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, by Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family’s Five Year Flight Across the Congo by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga, Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and the 1994 [UN] Gersony Report, the 1998 [UN] Garreton Report, and the UN Group of Experts Reports on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2001-2020.

“It will come to stand alongside the best of recent research and writing on the subject.”

America’s War on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC added to my understanding of all those works without redundancy, and, like them, it challenges the book that became the most common textbook on the Rwandan Genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. That’s a godawful book, a disservice to Rwandans, Congolese, and anyone else who takes a serious interest in the subject, so the more challenges to it the better.

My strongest response to Podur’s book came with Chapter 10, “How Africanists Present Hutus as Deserving of Death,” which is long overdue. I have never seen more virulent racism than that directed at Rwandan Hutu people, thanks to the “Africanist” scholars Podur critiques, the powerful interests that racism serves, and the distortions and omissions in the popular movie “Hotel Rwanda.”

I have written about this racism myself, as have others, but I haven’t read anything that describes it as well as Justin Podur has by devoting a whole chapter of his book to it. Like so much racism, it is deeply ingrained, not only in Rwanda but also throughout the West. This should be obvious to anyone who observes the constant Western prosecutions of Hutu people for the crime of being a Hutu in Rwanda between April 6 and the first week of July 1994. Often the defendants in these prosecutions are in the dock because the Rwandan government felt threatened by their success, their advocacy for justice in Rwanda, or their testimony on behalf of a fellow Rwandan Hutu on trial in the West. Sometimes those found guilty (of being Hutu) are sent back to be imprisoned in Rwanda, and sometimes they are imprisoned here in the US or in Europe.

“I have never seen more virulent racism than that directed at Rwandan Hutu people.”

Last year I covered the trial of Jean Leonard Teganya in Boston, where the mostly white, all-American jury found him guilty on all counts within an hour of deliberation, despite a public defender’s excellent case.

Some years ago I covered the case of Lazare Kabogaya , an 80-year-old Burundian Hutu who was unfortunate enough to have been in Rwanda during the first six months of 1994. The Rwandan government had trumped up some genocide crime charges, but he was in fact on trial for testifying in defense of another Rwandan Hutu somewhere in Europe. The US government wasted a million dollars trying to deport him and failed.

Another case I covered was that of Joseph Nkusi, a Rwandan refugee in Norway who was deported to Rwanda for dissident blogging that the Rwandan government labeled “genocide ideology.”

I recently read an essay by a Rwandan American friend of mine, Claude Gatebuke, in which he wrote that the Rwandan government is withholding genocide survivors benefits from young people who were orphaned by the Rwandan Genocide because—having little idea of who their parents were—they might unknowingly give survivors’ benefits to Hutus as well as Tutsis. (This is a concern of the Rwandan government because it considers Hutus, as Justin Podur writes, “innately evil,” even if orphaned in infancy or early childhood.)

“Joseph Nkusi was deported to Rwanda for dissident blogging.”

This fundamental racism took root not only in Rwanda, with Rwandan Tutsi supremacists, but also with well-meaning Western liberals who somehow imagine that it’s a humanitarian response to the Rwandan tragedy.

Discussion of the Rwandan Genocide, and Rwanda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is always controversial. The Rwandan government will be enraged by this book, but that’s a badge of honor. Its current allies controlling the Congolese government won’t like it either. Nor will the American imperialists it implicates. This bunch are all so self-protectively cloaked in their own self-righteousness that few are likely to read far into it if at all, but nevertheless, the truth continues to emerge.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ameri ... da-and-drc
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 28, 2020 3:19 pm

From Eritrea to Bolivia: who supported the Washington backed coup?

On October 18th, 2019 Eritrean activist Vanessa Tsehaye quote tweeted an article from Bolivian activist Jhanisse Vaca Daza published on the Human Rights Foundation page, encouraging the overthrow of socialist leader Evo Morales.

If democracy and human rights are further compromised, Bolivia could become the next Venezuela. The presidential election on October 20 is a critical opportunity to remove Morales from power and restore justice in Bolivia. Our planet cannot afford another authoritarian leader who remains in power at the expense of the natural world.

A few weeks later in Bolivia, the world witnessed a successful coup by the fascist junta and the ousting of Evo Morales, leaving him in exile, humiliated, and targeted. The new regime immediately went on a killing rampage, murdering dozens, massacring Indigenous protesters, and overturning all economic and political gains made by the socialist government. The coup advanced Washington’s foreign policy that has been consistent from Latin America to Africa in targeting socialist leaders or any non-compliant state.

Who is Vanessa Tsehaye, and why is an Eritrean activist so close with a Bolivian regime change activist?

The connection is the Human Rights Foundation, where Jhanisse Vaca Daza is the manager of the Freedom Fellowships, a program they selected Tsehaye to be a part of on May 21, 2019. Daza revealed on the announcement of the fellowship program:

Anyone running a non-profit or civil society organisation or start-up needs help and guidance with personal leadership, movement building, marketing and media strategy, fundraising, and digital security. My own experience was transformative, and I’m looking forward to bringing world-class expertise in each of these areas to 10 new Fellows.

What is her experience and who are the ‘world-class experts’?

A more detailed examination of Jhanisse Vaca Daza’s connections and working relationships reveal that she guides an international network of Washington-backed regime change operations from Bolivia, Hong Kong and other strategic regions.

As first reported by Wyatt Reed and Ben Norton from the Grayzone, Daza is linked to Venezuelan figures Leopoldo Lopez, and Thor Halvorssen, the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation. They are both connected to the right-wing and racist oligarchy who have been waging a long campaign of destabilising Venezuela with the support of Washington.

Furthermore, Daza is associated with Srdja Popovic, the former organizer with the group Otpor which had substantial financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Otpor group was one of many decades-long sophisticated operations to target socialist Yugoslavia and break it apart.

As per the investigative report by The Grayzone revealed:

CANVAS had been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change.

According to internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the ‘shadow CIA,’ CANVAS ‘may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.’

CANVAS grew out of the Otpor! movement, a US-backed cadre of youth activists that brought down Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was targeted for overthrow by NATO for being insufficiently compliant. An email by a Stratfor staffer boasts:

the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of colour revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).

Stratfor revealed that CANVAS

turned its attention to Venezuela’ in 2005, after cultivating opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime-change operations across Eastern Europe. Among those trained by CANVAS were the leaders of Venezuela’s coup attempt this year, including Juan Guaido, Leopoldo Lopez, and scores of figures associated with the US-supported Popular Will party.

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Bolivian anti-Evo Morales activist Jhanissa Vaca Daza (center) with Otpor leader and CANVAS founder Srdja Popovic (right)

On July 19th, 2019, Tsehaye also tweeted in support of Srdja Popovic: ‘We can only succeed by learning from the ones who fought similar before us.’

Meron Estefanos is another Eritrean activist that is also associated with Human Rights Foundation and connected with Popovic as seen by the tweet below in May of 2015. Both Estefanos and Tsehaye’s Twitter accounts are verified and are always centred on all news developments to give the impression of representing an impartial Eritrean voice, despite their connection to shadowy elements and aims for the state. Tsehaye was also nominated for the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award in 2016:

As reported by Morning Star:

Index on Censorship continues to function today, posing as an organisation that promotes freedom of expression across the world. But a cursory glance at its major donors sets alarm bells ringing. As well as the aforementioned Ford Foundation, it is funded by Open Society Foundations, Open Democracy and the shady soft power organisation the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

What can we infer about the active harm on the state of Bolivia and Eritrea from Tsehaye in the Eritrean diaspora spaces, and her links with Daza and the Human Rights Foundation? Her emergence is part of many counter-revolutionary aims over the years to defang the Eritrean revolution of its socialist roots, demoralise the Eritrean people’s sense of revolutionary nationalism, and weaken the state. The strategy of Washington has been multi-faceted and sophisticated in its deployment and execution in the diaspora since 2007, as stated in WikiLeaks cables from former Ambassador Ronald K. McMullen. The Impeccable achievement of the Eritrean revolution under the guidance of ELM, ELF initially and then EPLF, which had a socialist foundational aim after independence, was a threatening example for Africa. Therefore, Eritrea has been a victim of imperialist design and destruction for decades:

1890-1945 Survived and resisted Italian colonialism without the influence of Italian culture, language, and the racist period of the fascist era.

1945-1960 Survived and resisted British colonialism objectives in partitioning Eritrea and dividing its people.

1961-1991 Survived and resisted US/UK/USSR supported Ethiopian colonialism and brutal occupation.

1991-1998 Peace and transition.

1998-2000 Survived western supported invasion of Eritrea by Washington backed TPLF just like it did years later in Somalia.

1998-2018 Survived and resisted Washington aggression and support of the Ethiopian regime aims at state collapse, destabilisation, and economic sabotage to make the people revolt and submit.

2009-2018 Survived debilitating UN sanctions against the state, defence capability, and collective punishment of the people.

The prevailing emergence of neoliberal diaspora activism currently led by Tsehaye and OneDaySeyoum is operated on individual issues in a celebrity-like consideration over the community and collective struggle. This is why it is social media-driven with no serious offline popular legitimacy with the Eritrean community, as the aim is not unity but to sow discord, political fragmentation and externalise all of the actual problems in Eritrea. Neoliberal diaspora activism is directed by Twitter likes, metrics and online drama, like the dogpiling of comedian Tiffany Haddish who visited Eritrea on a personal narrative and wanted to publicise her father’s country. It must be understood why Tiffany Haddish was viscously targeted when she was not a political voice at all: Tsehaye purposely used the social media bullying of Haddish to publicise her organisation and use that public stunt toward centring her organisation and profile. The social media campaign around Ciham and its performative spectacle only benefited the career profile of Vanessa Tsehaye. As Ivan Marovic, one of the founders of Otpor stated: ‘It’s not cool. Normal people hate politics . . . but . . . you need normal people if you’re gonna make change. To do that, you need to make politics sexy. Make it cool. Make it hip. REVOLUTION as a FASHION LINE’.

OneDaySeyoum and Tsehaye did not oppose the Susan Rice-lobbied sanctions on Eritrea from 2009 to 2018 and was silent on the 18-year war of aggression from Washington backed regime in Addis Ababa. Most of the Gen Z diaspora youths who support her on Twitter are being misled into an imperialist undertaking, filled with superficial campaign and PR with no serious impact on the Eritrean people nor the state. The social media campaign only helps to build the ‘activist brand’ and their profile; it doesn’t materially address the problems of the Eritrean people. They politically exploit the serious problem of Eritrean refugees in Libya to blame the state only, with no mention of the role of imperialism in destabilising Libya and the aggression on Eritrea. This is likened to being an arsonist at night but performing like firefighters in daylight. What does supporting sanctions, economic and military destabilisation of the Eritrean state have to do with advocating for refugees? We must move away from single issues social media campaigns as that itself is liberalism, and truly engage in a high-level approach to supporting the Eritrean people beyond PFDJ by not selling out to imperialism. Advocating for Ciham’s freedom is the right thing to do, but there is no reason to engage in liberalism and align the campaign with Tsehaye and the Human Rights Foundation.



In Defence of Eritrean Leftist Commentary

‘Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…’

Amilcar Cabral

Over the years there has been an external push toward a neoliberal-flavoured type of activism that aims to reverse the legacy of the elder generation of Eritreans with leftist politics and a sense of revolutionary nationalism. The revolutionary nationalism itself is being targeted, although it must be clear that PFDJ has been failing Eritrea and the diaspora to be a vanguard in the same spirit as the true socialist vanguard EPLF. The elder Eritrean generation who were active in the late 1980s and 1990s with revolutionary nationalism, built up the diaspora communities and developed a long-lasting movement to help Eritrea. The rise of Tsehaye and OneDaySeyoum opposes the rich history of the community-owned activism and bottom-up grass-roots that was prevalent in the 1980/90s and early 2000s in the diaspora, originally shaped by the true socialist vanguard EPLF. The neoliberal diaspora activists are running counter to the history of Eritrean organisers, who stood for solidarity, anti-imperialism, and collective struggle building that united Eritreans and defended the state and revolution. Unfortunately, Isaias Afewerki and PFDJ have not been able to maintain that legacy and now we have youth who are vulnerable to grifters and counter-revolutionary warfare. The fear of critical leftist narratives against both PFDJ and the pro State Department elements like Tsehaye is serious, and the counter-response is to spew ad hominem attacks and discredit any leftist criticism.

For example below, in the past few months, I have been targeted by Vanessa Tsehaye and OneDaySeyoum by spreading misinformation and gaslighting my commentary, dismissing me as a man who is misogynistic, sexist, and targeting Eritrean women for publicly condemning her ties to imperialist hands and her support of the coup in Bolivia. The below tweet of mine is addressing imperialism and Vanessa Tsehaye responded by falsey proclaiming that I’m misogynist:

Is legitimate public criticism of a hyper-visible activist misogynist or sexist? If that is the case I have no problem being self-corrected, but this is motivated with aims to smear my political criticism.

Equally important, the individual’s account associated with Tsehaye has sent direct messages to popular black leftists with large followings, by proclaiming with no public independent investigation, that I’m targeting Eritrean women when that is not true. My personal address has been doxxed by one of the vocal members of OneDaySeyoum with threats to do me harm offline, plus other Youtube comments threatening to call my family and publishing the name of my partner. Moreover, the individuals associated with Tsehay and OneDaySeyoum have targeted the organisation I’m a member of by continuously aiming to send their associates to monitor our activities, and to penetrate and sabotage our efforts. The HOA-PALS (Horn of Africa-Pan Africanist for Liberation and Solidarity) is aiming to build an alternative leftist space that is multi-generational, women-led, and LGBTQ+ welcoming. Fallacious claims of me targeting Eritrean women are flawed, considering I am a member of a women-led organisation where we have had various internal dialogue on how this was a political hit job to discard my commentary. My commentary is direct, blunt, and has no aim to harm marginalised communities, but to question reactionary elements, whether it is the activists or the cadres of PFDJ or Eritrean officials. I have been blocked by the Eritrean ambassador to Japan for criticising his anti-Cuba/USSR/Marxist views, I have been blocked by WHO Director, Tedros Adhanom for his time as Foreign Minister under TPLF, I have been blocked by US ambassador in Djibouti, MC Hammer for support Selassie/Menliek and have had more issues with reactionary men in our community than women.

As a cis Eritrean man, I understand the optics of publicly criticising women and have been doing more to be careful in the language I use, reading Queer Marxist feminist works to better stamp out my internalised patriarchy to do better with my approach, while maintaining the guiding principles of anti-imperialists, and highlighting the problems of Washington foreign policy in the Horn of Africa.

To be a revolutionary Eritrean in the diaspora demands one not be associated with the Washington State Department on the one hand, or uncritically support Isaias Afewerki on the other. There is a transformative approach to transitioning Eritrea beyond Isaias Afewerki and it won’t work by being in collusion with the State Department, Human Rights Watch, or Amnesty International. Eritreans have a right to defend the state and we should not be intimidated and gaslighted to work with imperialists and their lackeys. No Eritrean with revolutionary potential believing in our collective struggle is my enemy, whether they operate within PFDJ or in the opposition, as we must maintain a united frontline.

Kwame Ture spoke on the differences between mobilisation and organisation. He says, mobilisation usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. ‘Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system.’ Mobilisation of the masses on a bigger scale will require radical approaches through organisations focused on collective struggle rather than individual issues and social media spectacles.

The young diaspora Eritrean youths and non-Eritreans drawn by the emotionally targeted propaganda campaign on Twitter are innocent in that they don’t recognise they are being pulled into something dangerous for Eritrea and the region. This sophisticated campaign targets diaspora youths and individuals with large followings, who are unfamiliar with Eritrea.

One can engage in deconstructing the role of imperialism in how Eritrean refugees are displaced in Libya and facing grave threats, without excusing the internal failures of Isias Afewerki to reduce harm and destructive policies. One can be leftists without supporting PFDJ.

People’s class positioning in the diaspora reflects in their politics for the Horn of Africa. Class perspectives and analysis have been buried by diaspora neoliberal oriented activism towards single issues that deflect emotions and spectacles instead of historical analysis and deeper investigation.

Do you want freedom for your people? From what class positioning? We black leftists are duty-bound to be media savvy and well versed in informational warfare targeting Black America and Africa. Oftentimes people with liberal politics don’t understand piercing’ criticism and ideological persuasion. Do we have malicious intent by bringing to light the harmful political positioning of Eritrean elements from the pro-State Department accounts and pro-Isaias Afewerki accounts? No. The intent is to push the conversation to the left away from reactionaries via PFDJ or a few opposition accounts.

We have a problem with the rampant anti-socialist sentiment within the neoliberal Eritrean activist spaces and their continued online surveillance campaign with support of shadowy backers. Eritrean leftists are being targeted and harassed for their critical commentary and views. The Black global left needs to understand that elements like those in this article who want to discredit Eritrean leftist viewpoints and that those leftists who organise online, must be clear to investigate who they interact with and their shadowy associations.

As to discredit the Eritrean leftist position, any defence of the state or revolution is intentionally equated with the support of Isaias Afewerki and his failures. This is how pro-State Department Eritrean activists rationalise demonising any defence of the state by deflecting to Isias and PFDJ. Defending Bolivia, Venezuela, Iran, China from western aggression does not mean one agrees with the internal politics or head of state just like Eritrea, but we are guided by the principles of anti-imperialism and a non-interventionist line.

In the spirit of Pan Africanism, the Black Radical Tradition, and anti-imperialism, the Eritrean leftist commentary and the Eritrean revolution must be defended beyond hyper-nationalism, neoliberal diaspora activism, and rightward tendencies.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/fro ... to-bolivia

Twitter screen shots at link.
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 19, 2021 3:17 pm

South Africa to get 9 million J&J vaccine shots - ministry
By Reuters Staff

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa, which has yet to receive its first coronavirus vaccine doses, will be getting 9 million from Johnson & Johnson, the health ministry said on Monday.

Vials with a sticker reading, "COVID-19 / Coronavirus vaccine / Injection only" and a medical syringe are seen in front of a displayed Johnson & Johnson logo in this illustration taken October 31, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo/File Photo
The government of Africa’s most advanced economy is trying to secure enough COVID-19 vaccines after health workers and scientists criticised it for not moving fast enough to inoculate its people.

The country has recorded more than 1.3 million infections and more than 37,000 deaths related to the virus, the most in Africa.

Health ministry spokeswoman Lwazi Manzi did not specify when the J&J doses might be available. She was confirming a report in the Business Day newspaper.

The J&J doses take the total number of doses that South Africa stands to receive to more than 30 million.

J&J did not respond to an email seeking comment. The U.S. healthcare company’s chief scientific officer said last week it was on track to roll out its single-shot coronavirus vaccine in March, and expects to have clear data on how effective it is by the end of this month or early February.

South Africa should also receive about 12 million doses from the COVAX global vaccine distribution scheme co-led by the World Health Organization, about 12 million from an African Union (AU) arrangement, and 1.5 million from the Serum Institute of India which is making AstraZeneca shots.

The calculation for the AU allocation is based on South Africa’s share of the continent’s population.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the AU chair, said last week that the organisation had secured 270 million vaccine doses and that they would be distributed based on countries’ population size.

South Africa’s health ministry said this month it was in advanced negotiations with J&J.

Local pharmaceutical company Aspen will be manufacturing J&J shots but unless a firm agreement is signed with the South African government all those doses will be exported.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-heal ... SKBN29N1D9

That last paragraph....the obscenity of capitalism.

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

CP of Swaziland, on the dire Covid-19 situation in Swaziland; Mswati must be charged with mass murder
1/18/21 12:55 PM

18 January 2021

Communist Party of Swaziland on the dire Covid-19 situation in Swaziland; Mswati must be charged with mass murder

The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) calls for urgent intervention by the African Union as Covid-19 threatens to wipe out our population under the incapable, callous and incompetent Mswati dictatorship.

The situation is dire. The number of deaths and infections is skyrocketing. The 33 reported weekend deaths are far lower than the actual figures. The recording of Covid-19 deaths is inaccurate as the death recordings form does not include Covid-19 as cause of death, but, instead, the form only includes 'Upper Respiratory Infection', leaving the declaration of Covid-19 as cause only at the discretion of the doctor on sight to only include on the bye-side of the form of declaration.

Additionally, home Covid-19 deaths are not determined. Hospitals wards, all over the country, are already full and cannot take any more patients. There is no oxygen in all the hospitals in the country. Conditions of tests are based on clinical symptoms and some infected people are only done temperature tests and returned home with high potential to infect others as likely contacts are turned back.

The average family size in the country is 7 people per household in an average housing structure of three rooms including a kitchen. Home isolation is impossible and spread risks are very high.

Funeral parlours are full. There are no more coffins to bury the dead. The only available coffins are the expensive ones, ranging from a minimum E25,000 (about US$1,700), which the great majority of the people cannot afford. Close to 70 percent of the people of Swaziland live below the poverty line, and over a third of the population need urgent food aid to survive each day.

The heavily overworked health workers of our country are now fatigued as the conditions get unbearable. Deaths occur continually with little to no help from Mswati’s government. The reason for the health sector union to strike, which the political police are clamping down, is to highlight this plight for the necessary external interventions as the incompetent Mswati government is overpowered and systematically giving up. Many government top officials are either incapacitated or have also contracted the virus.

It is clear that the current spread nest was Mswati’s incwala event, which Mswati organised in the midst of the second wave despite warnings of the new wave by the World Health Organisation. Due to this, many countries have enlisted Swaziland as a Covid-19 hotspot, which must not be visited. The CPS calls for the World Health Organisation to investigate Mswati’s actions. Mswati must thus, accordingly, be charged with causing the mass deaths of our people.

The CPS further calls for our people to stick to the preventive measures and, where possible, avoid any movements in order to control the spread.

The CPS further calls for a nationwide protest against these failures by the regime, in particular demand for the availability of oxygen in the hospitals and support to the health workers whose fatigue is now undermining any commitment to save the lives of those still alive and in need of their attention.

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Swazi ... ss-murder/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 22, 2021 3:18 pm

Uganda: Bobi Wine Rocks the Vote but Museveni Claims Victory
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 20 Jan 2021

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Uganda: Bobi Wine Rocks the Vote but Museveni Claims Victory

Ugandan pop star turned presidential candidate Bobi Wine is not Sankara or Lumumba, but he has risked his life to mount a fierce challenge to the 36-year dictatorship of President Yoweri Museveni.

“These elections were not credible, not transparent and will not be acceptable.”

Thirty-six year dictator Yoweri Museveni claims that he won Uganda’s January 14 presidential election, but pop star turned presidential candidate Bobi Wine claims that he won by a landslide and promises to challenge the results in court. Museveni has kept Bobi Wine and his wife under house arrest in their own home since election day.

The Black Alliance for Peace calls for support for Bobi Wine, as does Ugandan American Black Star News Editor and CUNY African Studies professor Milton Allimadi. I spoke to Allimadi.

Ann Garrison: Milton Allimadi, do you have any doubt that Bobi Wine is Uganda’s choice and that he would have won the presidency this week if it had been an honest election?

Milton Allimadi: I have no doubt that he's Uganda's choice. I have no doubt that he did win the election. But only the fraudulent results have been announced by the Election Commission, which is handpicked by General Yoweri Museveni.

AG: We saw huge crowds turning out for Bobi Wine, even as his guards and some of the media traveling with him were shot. Could you say anything about that?

MA: Of course. Absolutely. These are the folks, the young folks that he'd signed up. He had a national voter registration drive and he added millions of young new voters to the voting rolls. Who in the world believes that he's going to go out there and register all these millions of new voters and, at the end of the day, these young folks are going to end up voting for the 76-year-old dictator. It is illogical and ludicrous.

Everybody knows Bobi Wine won. Even General Museveni's Western supporters know Bobi Wine won, as you can see if you read carefully between the lines when the US State Department starts saying this was a fundamentally flawed election. Translation: These elections were not credible, not transparent and will not be acceptable.

AG: I think we should add here that three quarters of Uganda's population are under 35 years old, with very few prospects under Museveni, right?

MA: Absolutely. And Bobi Wine is 38 years old, so you have a situation where 80% of the population is under the age of 35. You also have an unemployment rate of 80%. Why would anyone vote for Museveni?

There was a story that appeared in the Uganda Daily Monitor, which of course is the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, on Friday. And it reported that the first results announced by the Election Commission giving General Museveni a lead gave him 4.7 million votes and then when the next batch of returns, the purported returns came in and each candidate got additional votes added to their total, General Museveni's totals went down by 129,000 votes, the clearest evidence that these numbers were being concocted and somebody made a mistake during the concoction process.

AG: What is the U-Vote app?

MA: The U-Vote app is an app that was developed by supporters of Bobi Wine, and it allows people to capture the images of the declaration forms at each one of those 34,000 plus polling stations around the country, and each of those declaration forms have the totals of what each candidate got in each of those precincts, and each of those forms are signed by the representatives of each of the candidates. It means that Bobi Wine's representatives have evidence of the true numbers from each of those police stations, and those numbers should have been transmitted to U-Vote as soon as possible, but Museveni shut the Internet. They've only been able to get very few of those declaration forms. Yet at the last count, I think they had tally sheets from only about 400 polling stations but had a consistent pattern. Bobi Wine was leading by wide margins in all of those stations that had been able to send their information nationally, including in all the regions where the Election Commission claims General Museveni won. And their aggregate was that Bobi Wine was leading by 74% to 16.2% with the other votes going to the other well known candidates. I believe Bobi Wine when he says this was an overwhelming victory, and just based on the demographics alone, it actually reflects the population of Uganda, the young population, so 74% wouldn’t shock me at all, since 80% of the population is youthful.

“Bobi Wine was leading by 74% to 16.2% with the other votes going to the other well known candidates.”

AG: What are the people who sign the tally sheets called?

MA: Each party has a polling agent, a representative observer. This role is often called “poll watcher” elsewhere. So Museveni would have his polling agent, Bobi Wine would have one for the National Unity platform, as would candidates of the Democratic Party, the Alliance for National Transformation, the Forum for Democratic Change, and the minor, little-known candidates as well.

AG: Did the polling agents put themselves in danger by signing these?

MA: Yes. And now we're getting reports that many of them have been killed already. Many have been kidnapped, and the Army is essentially searching for every polling agent that may have a copy of a declaration form.

AG: Oh my God.

MA: At the end of the day, I think Bobi Wine and the National Unity platform are going to be able to prove that they won this election, to use Bobi Wine’s own term, “massively.” And I think there are indicators that the countries that have been supporting Museveni’s dictatorship all these years will finally stop. I've also come to that determination. Now, if you read the United Kingdom calling for an investigation of the electoral process, this is something that's never happened in the past. They would accept whatever was declared to be the outcome of elections.

AG: Tibor Nagy, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, said that “the US response will depend on what Museveni does next.” He said that without specifying a preference. Would you call that unusual and significant in this case?

MA: It is significant, and I think we're going to hear even stronger language after Joe Biden is sworn in as the President of the United States. And what are the things that the US could do? First of all, it should be made clear that the soldiers that are surrounding Bobi Wine’s home must be withdrawn. Many of these soldiers, after all, are trained by the United States. They're armed by the United States. They're sustained by part of the $1 billion in American taxpayers’ money that the United States sends to the Ugandan regime annually. That's number one.

“Many of these soldiers are trained by the United States.”

Number two, as Bobi Wine himself has said, the United States should reconsider and halt military assistance to the Museveni regime because, as he put it, even though Ugandans understand that the US works with Uganda on national security issues such as trying to stabilize Somalia, Ugandans do not want the US to support Museveni's terror against the people of Uganda.

AG: On Ghetto TV, the channel created by Bobi Wine and his supporters to cover the election, I heard people saying that Bobi Wine supporters should try to be persuasive rather than confrontational with police and military, and that they should not throw rocks at them. Does this seem wise to you?

MA: Absolutely. I think that the police forces and the armed forces have had enough of General Museveni as well. In fact, there are reports that many of the soldiers that have been most brutal in enforcing Museveni's terror, particularly during this election season, are not even Ugandans, that some of them have been brought in from South Sudan. Some of them may be remnants of the M23 terror movement that Museveni used to finance in eastern Congo.

AG: Troops from Uganda and Burundi have been part of AMISOM, an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, which is in fact managed by the Pentagon. Horace Campbell, a professor at Syracuse University, was on Pacifica airwaves recently, and he said that the conflict in Somalia had been manufactured by the US, that the US has funded terrorists in Somalia, as in so many other countries, and that Ugandan soldiers have been proven to be selling them arms.

Bobi Wine has said in interviews, television interviews, that he will sustain the Ugandan troop support for AMISOM. I don't know whether Horace Campbell heard him say that, but either way, I'm sure he agrees with you that Bobi Wine should end the tyranny of Museveni.

However, some anti-imperialists are alarmed by this. Western anti-imperialists are alarmed by this support for a clearly imperial project, not only imperial but also profoundly dishonest, and by other soft power support that Bobi Wine has in the West. But I don't think there's any way Bobi Wine would have gotten this far if he had described the Somali conflict as Horace Campbell did.

MA: Absolutely not. But Bobi Wine, on the contrary, has said the problem with the Somalia intervention is that it's a purely Museveni project, and that in order to actually resolve the crisis in Somalia, to stabilize Somalia and create a peaceful Somalia, a more multi-state African force must be involved. It should not just be soldiers from Uganda and Burundi. You have to get other major African countries involved. For example, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal. If you have a multi-state African military force, the people of Somalia would be able to understand that this is indeed an authentic operation to help the people of Somalia. But right now, the Ugandan soldiers in large segments of Somalia are seen as an occupation force fulfilling US interests in Somalia.

And yes, it's absolutely true that Ugandan soldiers have been selling weapons to al-Shabaab, the same movement they're supposed to be fighting against. Now why would they do this? It’s obvious that Museveni really does not want this conflict to be resolved. The longer it’s prolonged, the longer Museveni has an opportunity to get financial and military assistance from the United States and the longer he can get the US to shut up when it comes to issues of human rights abuse in Uganda. Because Uganda can always play the Somalia blackmail card and threaten to withdraw Ugandan soldiers.

AG: The Ugandan and Burundian troops in Somalia are paid by the US and they make more than they would at home. Why would a more PanAfrican force, presumably paid by the U.S., be any less beholden to the U.S.?

MA: The mission would have a firm timeline so it really wouldn't matter who pays for it. By a date certain they would all leave Somalia, unlike the Ugandan scam where Museveni not only prolongs the conflict by selling weapons to al-Shabaab, but also threatens to withdraw anytime he's confronted about human rights abuses.

AG: OK, Milton Allimadi, is there anything else you'd like to say?

MA: I think that any American taxpayers listening to this should ask themselves, “Do I want to really be a part of financing the terror regime of General Yoweri Museveni?” And if the answer is no, you should call your elected representatives, your member of Congress and your Senators and tell them “not with my tax dollars.”

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ugand ... ms-victory
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:47 pm

Uganda: Police, COVID-19, and Elections
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 21, 2021

Ready for Revolution

Image
British colonizers formed the paramilitary Uganda Police Force under the name “Uganda Armed Constabulary” in 1899. Officers placed in leadership positions had experience policing for British interests in Palestine, Jamaica, Gambia, Nigeria, and Kenya, qualifying them to suppress mass rebellions against the colonial government.

The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians.

– C.L.R James


In the early 1900’s, there were rebellions in several parts of Uganda, including Muhumza’s resistance wars to drive out Europeans, the 1907 Nyangire rebellion protesting the colonial imposition of Baganda chiefs in Bunyoro, the 1903 opposition to the growth of cotton cash crops in Ankole, and the Lamogi rebellion of 1911 against colonial taxes and exploitation. Through each of these rebellions, the police and military forces were there to control Africans and protect property. Whether or not they themselves were Africans, the very function of police remained the same: to protect and serve colonial interests.

In addition, or more accurately, an extension to the police working to stifle African rebellion, the British trained large bodies of troops called the King’s African Rifle (K.A.R). Though led by “ex”-British military fighters, most K.A.R soldiers, Walter Rodney outlines, were Africans. In fact, by 1918 there were 35,000 counted fighters and 9 out of 10 of them were Africans. On the German side, there were 3,000 German soldiers and 11,000 Africans by 1918. Leading Rodney to argue, during World War 1, “Africans were fighting Africans to see which European power should rule them”(How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 187). In Uganda, this meant continued British colonial rule or German colonial rule. Both contradictory to the livelihoods of Africans.

In capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and “bewildered” separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force.

– Frantz Fanon


In this way, we can start to redefine the meaning of violence. The state in itself, it’s existence is violence. That violence manifests in continuous wars, in hunger, in patriarchal violence, in the literal killing of people. Understanding systemic dominance and the ways it materially manifests as violence allows us to rethink the position of protestors, “looters” and all those responding to state repression. Redefining violence allows us to see the myriad ways it manifests. Not only through the police and military, but through the very existence of the systems- including the law.

In her recently released book entitled Decolonisation and Afro-Feminism, Sylvia Tamale argues that modern law in the African context is a product of colonialism.

Uganda’s first constitution of 1962, which is not much different than it’s current constitution states the role and purpose of police as for “the prevention and detection of crime, the apprehension of offenders, the preservation of law and order, the protection of property and the due enforcement of all laws and regulations; and as a military force to discharge military duties.”

Given many of the colonial structures remained in place and Uganda’s political system is an adaptation of British parliament, “Law and order” in Uganda is the law and order of the British colony.

Uganda’s national elections happened on January 14th, 2021. Bids for the seat of president, which has been forcibly held by Yoweri Museveni since 1986 have always led to increased displays of state violence and repression.

On November 18th of last year, the #StopPoliceBrutalityUganda hashtag started popping up on twitter when Museveni’s sent his police to arrest one of his main contenders, Bobi Wine.

The reason they gave for this arrest was that Bobi Wine was holding an event with too many people gathered- making it a safety concern over the spread of COVID-19. There are several disconnects here. First, if the cry is to prevent COVID-19 deaths, why are the police killing people? 50 people were killed through the course of these 3 days and hundreds of people were arrested. That’s almost 25% of reported COVID deaths in Uganda as of December 6th 2020. Second, despite attracting similarly large crowds in Kotido and Gulu, security forces allowed rallies and processions for the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party to continue uninterrupted.

This is because the Uganda police is the military arm of the National Resistance Movement (Museveni’s party). As such the job of the Uganda police and military is to protect the state and it’s interest. Museveni and the colonial apparatus’s objective is to maintain power so he uses the military to stifle protestors, candidates, etc. Anyone that is a threat to the colonial construct called Uganda, is a threat to the police. In this way, the state makes the purpose of the police clear. The police are not there to protect us.

The police and military alike are there to protect state interests. In this case, Museveni’s state is interested in maintaining power and arresting anyone he sees as a threat.

As outlined through the history of the colonial construct of Uganda, the Uganda police are accountable to the state. Not those they murder.

The United States Funds Museveni’s Regime

In 2017 alone, Museveni gained $444 million dollars in U.S military support. The U.S funds Museveni because his regime serves their imperialist interests in neighboring countries, continuing Uganda’s legacy as home to imperial rule. First with the British East Africa Company, and now with U.S imperialism.

These agreements with the U.S are not new. They were there when Joseph Kony was killing in Uganda and the U.S as also helping Museveni get richer with the Acholi genocide.
Uganda was founded as a home for neo-colonial rule

In a 2016 report, Nick Turse outlines the ways Hillary Clinton, under the Obama administration, aided militaries in South Sudan. In 2008, the U.S passed legislation, called the Child Soldier Prevention Act which banned them from providing “military assistance” to countries who utilize child soldiers. In order to bypass this legislation and continue funding South Sudan’s repressive president, Salva Kiir, the White house issued annual waivers since South Sudan’s 2011 independence. Turse reports this added up to almost $620 million in U.S assistance in 2012.

The relevance to Uganda is increased military aid leads to increased militarization. This increased militarization forced most South Sudanese, especially in the southernmost regions back into Uganda refugee camps.

This is not new. U.S.-Ugandan military partnership also dates back to the administration of Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, who used Uganda as a conduit for military aid to rebels in southern Sudan battling the government in Khartoum. Understanding Uganda’s history as a home base for imperialist control is a necessary step towards cultivating lasting change. Sylvia Tamale reminds us that “the ideal of Pan-Africanism cannot be achieved within the institutionalized coloniality of state politics.” If we accept this truth, what new solutions outside of the state can we come up with?

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/01/ ... elections/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:25 pm

BLACK CITIZENSHIP FORUM: The Roots of Xenophobic Violence in South Africa—A Pan African Response
Black Agenda Review Editors 24 Feb 2021

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BLACK CITIZENSHIP FORUM: The Roots of Xenophobic Violence in South Africa—A Pan African Response
South Africa must dismantle and transcend the colonial nation-state through creation of a Pan-African federation that stretches across the Southern African sub-continent.

“Madalitso Zililo Phiri traces the contemporary rise of xenophobia in South Africa to the colonial and imperial formation of the Union of South Africa.”

For the fourth post in the Black Citizenship Forum, we feature an essay from Dr. Madalitso Phiri, a sociologist and post-doctoral research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He is currently working on a comparative study of the political economy of social policy in South Africa and Brazil. For The Black Agenda Review, Phiri traces the contemporary rise of xenophobia in South Africa to the colonial and imperial formation of the Union of South Africa, and two pieces of legislation in particular: The Land Act and the Immigration Act, both passed in 1913. He makes a case for Pan-African federation as a resolution to the violence and exclusion constituting both the South African state and nationalist discourses on immigration.

The Roots of Xenophobic Violence in South Africa—A Pan African Response

Madalitso Zililo Phiri:

In South Africa, the Covid-19 pandemic has served to reify the manifold inequalities emanating from the country’s histories of colonial domination, Black genocide, and anti-black racism. But South Africa’s current social crisis is further exacerbated by internal perceptions that it has been inundated and infested with illegal immigrants who have eroded the country’s social fiber. It is a perspective that oftentimes leads to physical violence. Trucks driven by foreign nationals have been burned and there have been arrests and extra-judicial killings of ‘illegal’ domestic workers, gardeners, and small shopkeepers from countries including Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Somalia. While such violence threatens to further polarize working-class communities, it also highlights the key existential and political problem of twenty-first century South Africa: that of the nature of the relationship between South African citizens, the belonging and inclusion of foreign nationals, and the post-apartheid polity. As a Malawian national with a Pan-African orientation living in South Africa, recent anti-immigrant actions have, for me, pointed to a need to understand the origins of the formation of the colonial nation-state, with the aim of dismantling it, as a means towards forging a more expansive and inclusive idea of citizenship.

“South Africa’s current social crisis is further exacerbated by internal perceptions that it has been inundated and infested with illegal immigrants.”

Several dates are crucial to understanding how aspects of colonialism and Black resistance were at odds in shaping the trajectory of South Africa. These dates are 1910, 1912, and 1913. The year 1910 saw the formation of the Union of South Africa, whose sole aim was to unite the antagonistic British and Dutch (Boer) territories to exclude Black Africans from participating in this newly formed state under the guise of the mission civilisatrice. By contrast, 1912 saw the birth of the African National Congress (ANC) whose sole aim was to resist the exclusivist, colonial, and imperial idea that South Africa would be governed by privileged White citizens. If these two dates bring to the fore the origins of state bifurcated by White supremacy and resistance to it, then 1913 further consolidated ideas of difference and White economic privilege through two pieces of legislation: the Land Act and the Immigration Act.

The Land Act of 1913 instrumentalized the dispossession and economic destitution of Black Africans. In the same year , on May 8, 1913 the colonial parliament passed legislation that banned the recruitment of migrant workers from areas north of latitude 22 degrees which included British governed territories like Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Nyasaland (Malawi) and the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

“The sole aim was to unite the antagonistic British and Dutch (Boer) territories to exclude Black Africans from participating in this newly formed state.”

The Immigration Act of 1913 has received less attention than the Land Act because contemporary contestations on redistributive politics in South African have focused on expropriation of land without compensation. However, both land dispossession and exclusive migration policies were produced under the epoch of a violent colonial modernity, and their consolidation in the colonial era were in the service of British imperialism. The Immigration Act of 1913, I argue, with its ban on the “tropical native,” was a progenitor of contemporary violence toward African nationals in South Africa. Banning the tropical native served to cement the ideas of exclusive citizenship that has shaped South Africa’s post-apartheid migration policies. It is no coincidence that the colonial regime fused land dispossession and banned the “tropical native” in the same year.

That violence, which has been central to contemporary state making in South Africa, has been extensively documented, especially through the construction of ‘Nativism’ as a theory. Mahmood Mamdani distills ideas of White supremacy and segregation that are foundational to institutional state making by engaging with Jan Smuts’ policy of Nativism. Smuts suggested, “The British Empire does not stand for the assimilation of its peoples into a common type, it does not stand for standardization, but for the fullest freest development of its peoples along their own specific lines.” The mythical racial foundations of inclusion and exclusion in this newly formed union had been drawn. As Frantz Fanon conveys , colonial modernity has been adept at creating two centers: the universal “Man” and the bastardized “Other.” By this logic, the bastardized “Other” is perpetually condemned into the “zone of non-being”. More recently, Mamdani has argued that the global project of carving out the world into a European image was first experimented in Europe and the Americas.

“Colonial modernity has been adept at creating two centers: the universal ‘Man’ and the bastardized ‘Other.’”

Similarly, the modern South African state was founded on the premises of ethnic cleansing and perpetual servitude of the “tropical Native” and the “South African Native.” Both are produced and reproduced to serve imperial labor demands in an economy that excludes them. South Africa’s ban on migrant workers from its northern neighbors created an environment for illegal migration to thrive; thus, we can better understand the phenomenon of poverty, unemployment, low wages, wars, and other factors that compel people to move from one country to another. This challenges current narrow nationalist populism that is ubiquitous across Western countries and several African countries. Rather, the existence of a legal prohibition of any human activity almost always creates a field of illegal practices.

South Africa recently passed a new law in response to growing concerns in the country about its ‘porous’ borders. This became more topical when a Malawian who was living in South Africa and purporting to be a Christian prophet clandestinely escaped the country while facing charges of money laundering and racketeering, much to the dismay and embarrassment of South African authorities. Talk radio was filled with racist and xenophobic rhetoric that finds frequent expression in phrases like “we in South Africa” and “those people from Africa.” Figures on illegal immigration tend to be exaggerated. According to 2011 figures from Statistics South Africa , legal migrants were about 4.2% of the total population, or about 2.1 million people. Over 75% come from across the African continent, with the majority (68%) from within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Over 45% of those from the SADC region were Zimbabweans.

“South Africa’s ban on migrant workers from its northern neighbors created an environment for illegal migration to thrive.”

In contrast to the current discourse about legal and illegal immigration, radical Pan-Africanists aimed to unmake the racial hierarchies that have been solidified by European colonial modernity. It is common for people to superficially invoke Nkrumah’s ‘Africa Must Unite’ thesis by referring to ethnic and linguistic homogeneities across the Southern Africa sub-region and using tropes like “we are all the same” and “we should just unite.” The nation-state, however, continues to lure us into its symbols of belonging and exclusion, including sovereignty, currencies, national anthems, cuisine, linguistic identity, religiosity, music, art, sport and complex collective histories that define what and who we are.

Fanon’s admonition in The Wretched of the Earth helps us understand the contemporary trap: “[S]o comrades,” he averred, “let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her.” South Africa’s path toward the transcendence of a violent, exclusionary national state is the creation of a Pan-African federation that stretches across the Southern African sub-continent. This redivision would not be predicated on the Southern Africa Development Community , which retains neocolonial market imperatives. The Pan-African federation might geographically redraw colonial constructed borders and identities on three geographical fronts: South Africa- Namibia- Angola, South Africa- Lesotho- Swaziland- Botswana, and South Africa- Zimbabwe- Mozambique- Malawi- Zambia. Adom Getachew reconstructs this model in her discussion of Kwame Nkrumah’s and Eric Williams’ vision of postcolonial federation. For them, regional federations would overcome the postcolonial predicament by creating larger, more diverse domestic markets, organizing collective development plans, ensuring regional redistribution, and providing for regional security. Such a federation would help to overcome the current postcolonial predicament because, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Mhlanga suggest, “borders as political and social creations rather than natural phenomena, must be open to negotiation, re-construction, re-drawing, contestations, acceptances and total rejections”. This is, in part, the promise of Pan-Africanism.

This column was created by The Black Agenda Review team.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:24 pm

The US is Losing the Battle for Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 11, 2021
Mikhail Gamandiy-Egorov

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US analysts have not hidden their deep concern about the loss of influence of Washington on the African continent. This is particularly true in the face of its main geopolitical adversaries, including China and Russia.

In a recent article published on Foreign Affairs – the authors expressed deep concern about the decline of the US position in Africa, in the face of major international powers like China and Russia.

The authors of the article are not unknown: Marcus Hicks is a retired US Air Force Major General who served as the head of the US Special Operations Command in Africa from 2017 to 2019. Kyle Atwell is a serving U.S. Army officer and doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and co-host of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Dan Collini is an active duty US Army officer and associate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

All three are concerned about the weakening of the US position in Africa, saying that China and Russia are currently winning the competition.

“As former and current military officers, one of whom led the U.S. Special Operations Command in Africa from 2017 to 2019, we believe that the U.S. should position itself as the preferred partner of African countries in an era of growing great power rivalry. Failure to do so would jeopardize U.S. interests on the continent and, potentially, U.S. homeland security.”

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There are indeed many reasons to consider that the US is losing “the battle for Africa”. China has been the main economic and commercial partner of the African continent for quite some time. For example, if in 1999 the volume of trade between the People’s Republic of China and African countries was only 6 billion dollars equivalent, in 2010 – the figure was over 100 billion, and close to 200 billion in 2019. And according to McKinsey – China’s financial flows to Africa are about 15% higher than the official figures, when non-traditional flows are included.

Moreover, according to this international strategy consulting firm, China is also a source of fast-growing aid, as well as the most important source of funding for construction projects in African countries. Contributions that have supported many of the most ambitious infrastructure developments in Africa in recent years.

Also on the basis of countries like Ethiopia and South Africa, Beijing sees these African states as true partners, reliably and strategically committed to China’s economic and political interests. These countries have also created a solid platform for continued Chinese engagement through their leading participation in strategies like the Belt and Road (also known as the New Silk Road) – allowing them to benefit from continued rapid growth in Chinese investment.

According to Forbes, China is unquestionably by far the biggest player in Africa’s infrastructure boom, claiming a 40% share that continues to grow. Meanwhile, the shares of Western players are falling sharply: Europe has dropped from 44% to 34%, and in the case of the United States the drop is even more obvious: from 24% to only 6.7%.

Returning to the Foreign Affairs article, which mentions that the role of Russia is also increasing considerably:

“In recent years, Russia has significantly expanded its presence in Africa, signing military agreements with at least 19 countries since 2014 and becoming the main supplier of arms to the continent.” Adding, “that just days after the US announced it would withdraw its troops from Somalia in December 2020, Russia said it had reached an agreement to establish a new naval base in Port Sudan.”

As such, the Russian Admiral Grigorovich class frigate has recently arrived in Sudan. A Russian positioning that according to experts, including Western, will give Russia many advantages, all in a strategic location.

The Russian-African partnership is obviously not limited to the military-security sphere. As a reminder, in 2019 Russia hosted in the city of Sochi, the first Russia-Africa summit in history, which brought together nearly 10,000 participants, representing virtually all countries of the African continent. The volume of trade between Russia and African countries also continues to grow: from only 760 million equivalent dollars in 1993 to over 20 billion in 2018.

As a comparison of trade flows, it should be noted that the volume of trade between the US and Africa in 2020 was less than 1/3 of what it was in 2008.

Finally, it would certainly be fair to point out that the loss of US influence on the African continent is not only due to the rise of China and Russia, or the lack of interest in Africa during the Trump administration. History obliges: the USA, like Western European countries, played a major role in the shameful slave trade. From Africa to the US, of course. And that this harmful role was not only limited to this painful period for the memory of Africans and Afro-descendants, but continued largely during the 20th century.

Should we forget the US involvement in the assassination of the great Congolese statesman Patrice Lumumba? Or the CIA’s contribution to the arrest of Nelson Mandela by the South African secret service during the apartheid period? Moreover, this was far from being Washington’s only collaboration with the racist regime in Pretoria at the time – the war in Angola after it gained independence from Portugal in 1975 is just one more proof.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 15, 2021 1:57 pm

Movements Not Saviors: Lessons from Bobi Wine’s Tweet for Juan Guaido
Netfa Freeman and Jemima Pierre 10 Mar 2021

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Movements Not Saviors: Lessons from Bobi Wine’s Tweet for Juan Guaido

Bobi Wine’s flirtation with US Venezuelan puppet Juan Guaido indicates that the Ugandan is also auditioning for the imperial puppet job.

“A return to the oppressive conditions for the people will be inevitable if a dictator is removed but not the West’s ultimate control.”

On March 3, 2021, Ugandan pop star turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi (a.k.a. Bobi Wine) tweeted a picture of a Zoom call with himself and Juan Guaido, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition figure. “Very pleased to speak with President @jguaido of Venezuela this evening,” Wine tweeted, “We discussed the way forward for both countries, and the need to build synergies for the defense of democratic principles and human rights across the globe.” The responses were swift. Shocked critics from Uganda and throughout the world denounced Wine’s tweet. Within a day, Wine had deleted the tweet.

We should not be shocked. Instead, Wine’s apparent alignment with the U.S. State Department should remind us of a number of critical lessons concerning the struggle against U.S. and European imperialism. One key lesson is that our energies should always be focused on supporting radical movements, and not individuals or high-profile personalities. The second lesson is that even as we aim to support movements on the ground, we should also be aware of the new imperialist methods over the last few decades that have worked to co-opt, redirect, and deradicalize grassroots movements in the Global South.

“Our energies should always be focused on supporting radical movements, and not individuals or high-profile personalities.”

There is of course a long, documented record of these imperialist machinations. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has always been involved in secretly establishing and funding networks and operations aimed at exerting political influence over civil societies throughout the world. As CIA whistleblower Philip Agee demonstrated, these vast operations targeted political parties, trade unions, youth and student groups, intellectual and professional communities, and public information media, among others. They worked to “divide, weaken and destroy corresponding enemy organizations on the left, and indeed to impose regime change by toppling unwanted governments.”

Imperialism today wields both hard and soft power. Hard power comes in the form of militarism and sanctions while soft power is like a trojan horse that comes in the form of aid, “humanitarian” and “democracy” programs, conducted through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and several others. The NDI, NED, IRI, and Freedom House , currently conduct their operations openly, operations that the CIA used to conduct covertly.

“Imperialists have worked to co-opt, redirect, and deradicalize grassroots movements in the Global South.”

Imperialist machinations seem to be many steps ahead of our movements for liberation. And judging by the degree of surprise and disappointment in the “mistweet” by Bobi Wine, our movement is not yet a match for the shrewd counterinsurgency of white neoliberal power and its propensity to play both ends against the middle to preserve its dominance.

The question to ask is why Wine, at this moment, felt it necessary to express public support for imperialist flunky Guaido instead of, say, for any number of people’s movements as occurring in places such as Haiti or Nigeria.

Bobi Wine’s tweet was not simply an isolated incident. Just weeks before, on January 13th, an article bylined by Wine was featured in the prominent establishment friendly magazine Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. The article, which ran during the week of Uganda’s contested January elections, lucidly details Wine’s persecution by the Museveni government while also pointing to the ways the West, led by the US, has supported Museveni over the years. The article also clearly gives the impression that Wine, though a persecuted figure, is unafraid even to tell the truth about US policy in Uganda. Wine concluded the article by heaping praise on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for calling on the Donald Trump administration to impose sanctions against individual members of Uganda’s government security forces as well as the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for condemning his arrest in December 2020 and for demanding a free and fair election.

“Our movement is not yet a match for the shrewd counterinsurgency of white neoliberal power.”

But what is also telling is Wine’s association with some key U.S. institutions. On January 30, 2021, the U.S. ambassador for Uganda, Natalie E. Brown, released an official statement affirming that she held an introductory meeting with Bobi Wine in his capacity as leader of the opposition party, the National Unity Platform (NUP). In October 2020, Wine was the special musical guest at the virtual Annual Award Ceremony of the International Republican Institute (IRI), where former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo received the John S. McCain Freedom Award. U.S. Senators Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham also attended the event. Wine was tapped , in 2011, by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), to produce a song on election violence as an appeal to Ugandan Youth. NDI worked with Wine to have the song, “A Serious Matter” played on major TV and radio stations across the country.

Given Wine’s growing popularity among U.S. government and foreign policy circles, it would not be too far fetched to assume that support of Museveni may be waning and, given that Ugandan youth are restless for change, the imperialists may looking for a suitable replacement.

“Wine was tapped, in 2011, by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), to produce a song on election violence as an appeal to Ugandan Youth.”

The goals of African people must be more advanced than simply replacing a dictator. Imperialism is a global system that requires enforcement of certain conditions everywhere. This is precisely why autocratic leaders are supported by imperialism. These governments are the neocolonial political cover for the West’s control of the land, labor and markets of the colonized. A return to the oppressive conditions for the people will be inevitable if a dictator is removed but not the West’s ultimate control. We should be clear: if Wine or anyone else comes to power under the dictates of US imperialism, their political and economic policies will always be circumscribed, and set against the welfare of the majority.

This is why we, African people everywhere, must develop the political sophistication to support radical, socialist movements rather than individuals or high profile personalities. African solidarity with people on the ground in Uganda or anywhere cannot be superficial and/or unconditional. It must be based on unambiguous principles of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and self-determination.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 19, 2021 1:23 pm

Black Lives Matter Canada Stands in Solidarity with Deposed Tigrayan Puppets for US Imperialism
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 17 Mar 2021

Black Lives Matter Canada Stands in Solidarity with Deposed Tigrayan Puppets for US Imperialism

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#R2P Propaganda for US War in Tigray Reaches Young Anarchists and Black Lives Matter

Not just white phony “leftists,” but Black Lives Matter activists have been conned into mouthing vicious CIA and State Department propaganda against Ethiopia and Eritrea.

“The propaganda used to lure First World leftists to imperialism against the Third World states is easy.”

Shortly after the March 13 Black Alliance for Peace webinar on the Horn of Africa, I came across a radio broadcast featuring “Anarchists from the Horn of Africa.” They were presenting the rebellion of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as the struggle of a grassroots movement for autonomy being violently put down by the Ethiopian central government, currently led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa with the help of neighboring Eritrea. The show was produced by “The Final Straw , a weekly anarchist and anti-authoritarian radio show bringing you voices and ideas from struggle around the world” coming out of WSFM-LP, 103.3 FM in Asheville, North Carolina. The show is rebroadcast on several channels across the US, and the producers make it available to the several hundred stations in the Pacifica Radio Network by posting it to Audioport , Pacifica’s content sharing portal. I then spoke to Filmon Zerai, a blogger and a member of Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity (HOA-PALS ), which is a member organization of the Black Alliance for Peace.

Ann Garrison: Filmon, I’ve just come across these “Anarchists from the Horn of Africa” on a Pacifica Radio broadcast and on Twitter, where their handle is “Horn_Anarchists .” They seem to exist to advocate for US/NATO intervention in the Horn of Africa, and their Twitter banner image is three #slogans: #EthiopiaOutOfTigray, #EritreaOutOfTigray, and #R2PTigray. They want Ethiopia and Eritrea out of Tigray and Western military in. “R2P” is an acronym for Western “Responsibility to Protect ,” a doctrine promulgated by imperialists and relatively innocent do-gooders at the UN to justify military “interventions” that violate national sovereignty in the name of defending human rights.

Filmon Zerai: Yes, this is one of many social media campaigns for intervention in Tigray on many platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever. Even ClubHouse, the new all-audio social media network. All these campaigns have greatly intensified in the last few months.

The Washington Post even reported on the sophisticated Twitter campaign pushing for Western “intervention” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and sanctions on Eritrea with emotionally driven campaigns about atrocities, very much like those used to campaign for military “intervention” in Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria. This is from the Washington Post’s November 17th report, “Ethiopia’s cracking down in Tigray. But activists are spreading the news . :

“So who’s tweeting about Tigray and why?

“Twitter data collected from Nov. 1 to 10 showed that 30 percent of tweets about Tigray and Abiy were from accounts created this year. Nearly half (47 percent) of these tweets were from accounts created in late October and early November. After Nov. 4, the number of new accounts created per day grew from an average of 21 to 245. Their tweets are overwhelmingly (although not exclusively) anti-government.

“Despite their single-issue focus and clustered creation dates, most of these accounts do not behave like bots. But they do seem coordinated.

“’It is an organized movement,’ a Tigrayan community organizer in Canada noted during an interview. ‘Documents, even an online webinar, taught people how to share materials on Twitter,’ he said. Like others in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. He described a loose networks of activists using WhatsApp to teach people how to set up accounts and promote hashtags like #StopTheWarOnTigray . Users are told to tweet in English, when possible.”

AG: Very interesting that the Washington Post would take such pains to point out that “most of these accounts do not behave like bots,” leaning on the unnamed “Tigrayan community organizer in Canada” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal” to convince us that this is not propaganda, but a “legitimate organized movement.”

This Washington Post report looks like more sophisticated propaganda to me, and since those behind the new Twitter accounts are encouraged to tweet in English, I think we can assume that whoever’s behind them is trying to reach the Western Anglophone audience that might organize or support a Western managed “intervention” in Tigray.

FZ: That’s true and the article was published last November during a transition phase from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Trump had added Eritrea and Somalia to his Muslim travel ban, and he was terrible for the US domestically, but during the Trump years, the Horn of Africa did have an opportunity to reset without the heavy pressure of sanctions and chaos management. Trump and his team’s incompetence and Trump’s quasi-isolationist views actually helped regardless of his intention.

Now, under Biden, we are seeing a return to intervention and chaos management with Susan Rice and the other Bush/Obama/Clinton personalities returning to powerful Cabinet and other top administrative posts.

AG: So Trump was not sanctioning or managing the chaos that the US creates as firmly as Obama had?

FZ: No, the Trump administration wasn’t. That’s not to say that Trump was advancing anything good in the Global South, but in certain states, we saw breathing room due to his and his advisors’ incompetence and/or more hands-off approach. They didn’t try to interfere with Mexico’s center-left government, their regime change operation failed in Bolivia after less than a year, and they failed to topple Maduro and the Bolivárian Revolution in Venezuela.

The Trump administration, while it maintained wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and the drone bombing operation in Somalia, was more “hands off” than the Obama Administration in the Horn of Africa with regards to diplomatic pressure and all the usual hectoring. In 2018, Trump’s team lifted harmful UN sanctions on Eritrea, which US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice had put in place in 2009. Eritrea finally seemed to have breathing room without the usual suffocating Washington pressure and was able to pursue rapprochement with its neighbors Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and, to a certain extent, Djibouti.

During the Obama years, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) regime in Ethiopia had US diplomatic, military and developmental aid support due to UN Ambassador Susan Rice and USAID Administrator Gayle Smith, who were both personally close with former TPLF chairman Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister who died in 2012.

AG: I remember that. Susan Rice cried at Meles Zenawi’s funeral and said they had discussed one another’s children whenever they met.

FZ: Yes. Susan Rice and Gayle Smith both have long personal histories as neocolonial intelligence assets and handlers, not only in the Horn but elsewhere in Africa. That also defined their relationships with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, and others.

AG: The TPLF was a minority dictatorship in Ethiopia, wasn’t it? I believe that Tigrayans are just over 6% of the Ethiopian population, but the TPLF ruled the country with an iron fist and Washington’s support for decades.

FZ: The TPLF were protected proxy assets of Washington in the region from 1991 until their ouster in 2018, and the incoming Biden Administration did not bless Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s campaign against the TPLF. That’s why it’s pressuring Ethiopia and seeking to restore the sanctions on Eritrea.

For 28 years Washington foreign policy circles saw Ethiopia under TPLF domination as a model client state in Africa. Prime Minister Abiy, who came to power in April 2018, is learning the hard way that you can’t dispose of a key Washington proxy actor without Washington’s blessing; the Biden Administration is trying to throw the TPLF a lifeline.

AG: Do you think the Biden Administration is trying to put the TPLF back in power in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and sanction Eritrea again, restoring everything as it was before April 2018?

FZ:. The Biden Administration would rather Ethiopia revert back to be a more compliant US police force in the Horn, with more occupying forces in Somalia, destabilization and war on Eritrea, and resistance to the influence of China and other powers competing with Washington.

However, the political atmosphere in Ethiopia has changed since 2018, and the people won’t tolerate the TPLF’s return to its previous dominant role in Addis Ababa. The southern states have become more demanding, and they don't intend to return to TPLF proxy rule on the periphery while TPLF rules from the center.

Sadly, sanctioning Eritrea again might happen, but it will be a challenge for the US because China and Russia are assertive in opposing unilateral sanctioning states. But it's fluid and always changing.

AG: Eritrea is the only African nation still refusing to collaborate with AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, isn’t it?

FZ: Yes. There was this list that everyone would verbatim repeat a few years ago after NATO destroyed Libya: Eritrea, Sudan and Zimbabwe. These were the only African states who were not signatory to any AFRICOM agreements and still refused to cooperate. Sudan and Zimbabwe both have folded to Washington’s pressure, so Eritrea is the only one left resisting.

AG: Is there anything else we should understand about the military conflict between the Ethiopian Army commanded by President Abiy in Addis Ababa and the TPLF rebelling in Ethiopia’s Tigray State?

FZ: Yes, it’s important to understand that this is not a referendum on the demand for multinational federalism or self-determination. The TPLF struggles with Prime Minister Abiy are not the same as the struggles of the historically oppressed, non-Abyssinian nationalities in the south.

AG: This is particularly important in this context because these radio broadcasters at “The Final Straw” and other young American anarchist groups have been persuaded to conceive it as the TPLF’s battle for autonomy from the repressive central government, even though the TPLF was the repressive central government for nearly three decades.

FZ: Yes, but that’s an ahistorical reading of events echoing a particular narrative from the north.

AG: What does the TPLF actually say it wants?

FZ: TPLF centers itself as the only vanguard or the sole liberators of the oppressed nationalities who singlehandedly defeated the pseudo-Marxist, 13-year Derg regime in 1991, which is not historically valid. Its objectives are not about self-determination but its opposite: denying other nations’ sovereignty and right to exist as nations without their dominance. TPLF wants power and dominance as this has been clear by its track record over 28 years in power from 1991-2018.

AG: OK, as I understand it, since the ratification of its 1995 constitution, Ethiopia has been a multinational federation that is supposed to guarantee the self-determination, and even the right to secede, to each of its 10 member nations, which are for the most part distinct linguistic and cultural groups. Right? The 10 nations I find online are Tigray, Afar, Amhara, Oromia, Somali, Benishangul-Gumuz, Southern Nations Nationalities and People Region (SNNPR), Gambella, Harari and Sidama.

FZ: Yes that’s correct on paper, but for the last 28 years, the TPLF in fact continued the centuries old, centralized tyranny of the Abyssinian rulers from the northern nations of Amhara and Tigray, who used European firearms to conquer the southern nations that are now among the federated nations of Ethiopia. There were no nation-states Ethiopia or Eritrea before European colonialism penetrated the Horn of Africa in the late 1800s. The historic development of Ethiopia is one of genocide, conquest and slavery of indigenous African nations similar to other settler states like America. This preceded the multinational federalism promised in Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution, which was written to solve the historical grievances of the southern states conquered by Abyssinian rulers.

“The historic development of Ethiopia is one of genocide, conquest and slavery of indigenous African nations similar to other settler states like America.”

While in power in Addis Ababa, the TPLF disguised the centralized system with tokenized language autonomy policies and regional political parties that they created and controlled, while benefiting from the centralized control to enrich themselves and their top officials, not the poor workers of Tigray. This enabled them to loot Oromia’s and other southern states' natural resources, push people out to grab land, and let multinational corporations exploit cheap labor.

Ethiopia never became a fully realized multinational federation in which each state had political and economic autonomy, as promised in the constitution. The TPLF ruling oligarchy stole and looted on behalf of the good name of Tigray and its poor laboring class. Neither the Oromo Nation nor any of the other southern, colonized nations can be decolonized so long as Western actors stand in the way. They have not been willing to let Ethiopia transition into a state that is truly multinational, truly democratized and worker led.

The solution is a re-imagined state not founded on Abyssinian Fundamentalism but worker led and regionally integrated.

AG: Can you explain “Abyssinian Fundamentalism”?

FZ: Abyssinian Fundamentalism is an ideology that is an expression of settler-colonialism intertwined with an embellished Abrahamic storyline and white supremacy rationale in which the ruling class projects a pseudo, non-Black race origin story and suppression of Africanness. This ideology has been used to conquer, subjugate and colonize the southern states and create what we know as modern-day Ethiopia. Ethiopia is an African settler state created, much as America, Canada, and Australia were, by violence and white supremacy core ideology.

Opposition to Abyssinian Fundamentalism is not about the Amhara or Tigrayan people. The Amhara or Tigrayan are not the enemy; “Abyssinian” is a class- specific description of power. We specifically say Abyssinian not to ethnicize any group but to focus critical attention on the system and the historic ruling class core ideology. Critique of Abyssinian Fundamentalism is mainly targeted at the political, social intellectual and cultural elites who propagated the belief system and mythology. It also layered critique of the class dynamic of Abyssinian Fundamentalism because the poor Amhara and Tigray people don't know why they believe in the violent and racist Greater Ethiopia mythology—the myth of Ethiopia never being colonized, being a 3000-year-old independent state, and a symbol of Black resistance, despite its faux Solomon/Queen of Sheba lineage of a non-African Habesha pseudo race, etc.). So we must challenge Abyssinian Fundamentalism at its core from this standpoint on the framework of class struggle, anti-neocolonialism, and opposing white supremacy.

AG: OK, this white supremacist, Abrahamic origin myth sounds similar to the myth that Tutsis are the Jews of Africa who wandered south down the Nile to the African Great Lakes Region and became the ruling class of Rwanda and Burundi.

FZ: Yes, the mythology of Ethiopia has escaped many critical eyes and especially has disarmed the Black diaspora into admiring a European-created, neocolonial state that conquered other African nations by genocide, slavery, and violence with European backing.

So, again, TPLF’s political struggles should not be equated with the historically oppressed nationalities in the south and their internal struggles for autonomy. The current struggle between Prime Minister Abiy’s Prosperity Party and the TPLF is a continuation of the historic power struggle for dominance of the state between two competing Abyssinian political classes from the north.

Abiy, as an Oromo, is a clear example of Abyssinian Fundamentalism as an ideology because someone like him, a non-Orthodox Christian who speaks Oromo, can still believe in it. This is about maintaining the Ethiopian state image intact in the northern Amhara and Tigray region that projects non-African historic mythology with an embellished Solomonic bloodline and an anti-African belief system, which does not want to let the state transition towards a re-imagining of “Ethiopia” that unifies all nationalities. Presently, the Abyssinian ideological belief system is linked with the Menelikist base of PM Abiy’s Prosperity Party , and on the other side, the TPLF are more aligned with Yohannes IV , who was a Tigrayan Abyssinian ruler.

The Washington TPLF-backed regime were pressured out of power in 2018 from Addis Ababa to Mekelle, Tigray because of an internal party crisis; the grassroots, poor, and working-class movement of #OromoProtests; and shifting regional competition. The TPLF were an effective regional police force for Washington and the Western intelligence community that maintained the war of attrition between Eritrea and Ethiopia, invaded and occupied Somalia, and managed the partition of Sudan with troops in South Sudan. Plus Meles Zenawi was the African face that pushed the AID/NGO industrial complex and his friend Bill Gates’s type of interests at Davos and other Western institutions.

AG: OK, let’s go back for a minute to where we started, with these “Horn Anarchists ” on Twitter who want “#R2PTigray.” R2P essentially means Western responsibility to protect African and other formerly colonized savages from killing and committing international crimes against one another. Its founding documents, like those of “interventionist” lobbies all over the world, cite the wars in the Balkans and the Rwandan Genocide as the tragedies that stirred them to action.

FZ: This is one of the many social media accounts that represent the same TPLF diaspora circles from North America, Europe, and Australia.

AG: They got this anarchist group with a show, “The Final Straw,” on a Pacifica station based in Asheville, NC, to interview them on the air. This seems to be an emerging pattern, probably because the spy state has noticed left support for Rojava . The Grayzone has reported on a pseudo-anarchist, "eco-socialist" front for ruling class interests in Ecuador.

FZ: Leftist support for Rojava and an "eco-socialist" front in Latin America always is a go-to intervention front. They are always on the same side of Washington and will always beg for military intervention against the Third World states targeted by imperialism, and this account is part of that trend. The propaganda used to lure First World leftists to imperialism against the Third World states is easy. Anyone can claim to be anarchist, Marxist, etc. online and get away with laundering pro-State Department objectives and imperialist instruments to punish the Third World.

This is not to present Abiy or even Isaias Afwerki as revolutionaries. I personally don't like either of them, but on principle I oppose imperialism in all its forms in the Horn, regardless of which states or individual heads of state.

AG: Had you heard of these “Horn Anarchists” before? I hadn't until the producers of this show announced that they'd interviewed them and made the interview available throughout the Pacifica Radio Network.

FZ: No, I hadn’t heard of them. They are recently created and fooled the radio producer.

AG: Do you think they’re worth exposing at this point?

FZ: Maybe not just that one Twitter account, but there are many and even BLM activists have been spewing pro-TPLF views and asking for intervention. The larger issue is propaganda reaching certain circles pushing for intervention in Ethiopia and sanctions on Eritrea. Here’s a March 9 Twitter post by Black Lives Matter Canada saying that they’re standing in solidarity with Tigray, with the hashtag #24hrsforTigray:

Black Lives Matter - Canada

@blmcanada_

· Mar 9

“We join our voices with our Tigrayan comrades on Turtle Island and call for full humanitarian access to Tigray, now, and encourage our followers to support 24 Hours for Tigray, and other calls for solidarity from Tigray organizers. #24hrsforTigray”

The Twitter page of Chivona Renee Newsome, a New York #BLM co-founder , is replete with tweets demonizing Ethiopia and Eritrea, many of which include video of her speaking at a rally in New York City to stop Tigrayan Genocide.

AG: An Eritrean-identified account angrily retweeted one of her videos:

A wit https://twitter.com/EriZara3/status/1360947640247209988

@EriZara3

“A NY #BLM co-founder Chivona Renee Newsome calls #Eritreans monsters & making a threatening statement saying “I am coming for u” on the Tigray protest. Stop accusing & threatening #Eritreans. Get ur information right! #TPLFisaTerroristGroup #100DaysWithoutTPLF #Ethiopia #Eritrea”

FZ: Many of the same US leftist circles now echo the imperialist line on Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and China. It’s all propaganda to create a human rights pretense for US meddling, sanctions, bombing, and further military domination. The people of Tigray need peace and stability without Washington intervention or sanctions.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/black ... mperialism

Declaring these anarchists 'duped' is way too kind. Superficiality permeates the ultra-left and for good reason Lenin declared it an infantile disorder. Not all, for sure, some have done great work on the local level, particularly in regard to prisons. But the way they parrot the artifice coming out of the State Dept is the mirror image of the MAGAs swallowing Trump's baldfaced lies. It seems critical thinking is a rare and diminishing attribute in the Empire of Propaganda. Likewise the opinion that Joe Biden is the savior of decency, for that matter.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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