Africa

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:48 pm

Ethiopians Go to the Polls Even After the US Tells Them Not to
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Jun 2021

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Ethiopians Go to the Polls Even After the US Tells Them Not to

Many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election, writes Ann Garrison.

“Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.”

On Monday, June 21st, Ethiopians went to the polls to select a parliament, which will elect a prime minister, even though US officials told them not to, warning of chaos and violence. Maybe they think it’s arrogant of the United States to presume to be the global arbiter of peace, justice, and democracy.

The African Union sent an election observer mission headed by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who told press midday on Monday that it was going well, far better than previous Ethiopian elections.

Lawyer, judge, and politician Birtukan Mideksa, chairperson of the National Election Board, no doubt agrees. In 2005, she helped found the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) Party, ran for parliament a second time, claimed the election was rigged, and was then among thousands imprisoned by the US puppet government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in the ensuing crackdown. She was sentenced to life in prison, pardoned in 2007, after signing a controversial document regretting past mistakes, but sent back to prison for life in 2008. International human rights advocacy, including that of Amnesty International, led to her release and exile in the United States, where she attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and spent time employed by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout that claims to promote democracy around the world while in fact promoting US global hegemony.

“Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told press midday on Monday that it was going far better than previous Ethiopian elections.”

It’s not clear whether her brief tenure with NED should be a red flag or simply something to keep in mind as her political career advances. The United States foreign policy establishment often likes to invest in any promising African leaders even if they are opposed to a government the US is supporting at the time, as was the case with Mideksa. And the leaders they invest in don’t always toe the line over time. Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, is a case in point. Abiy, Farmaajo, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki are now alarming US political and military elites by forming an alliance and threatening to chart an independent path in the Horn of Africa.

In any case, Mideksa seems to be enjoying rock star status in Ethiopia today. The BBC ran a lengthy profile of her including many of the aforementioned details.

Sitting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s. Abiy has served as Ethiopia’s caretaker prime minister since April 2018, when a popular uprising finally forced the Tigray People’s Liberation Front from power after 27 years. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian colony

“Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to win a majority large enough to make him prime minister and increase both his legitimacy and the party’s.”

Under the rule of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, commonly known as the TPLF , Ethiopia was a key US ally and military proxy in the Horn of Africa and on the African continent, putting boots on the ground under US command in both Somalia and South Sudan. The US and NATO have been hostile to Prime Minister Abiy, seemingly because of his alliance with Eritrea, the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM , the US Africa Command, or submit to the debt peonage that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have imposed on other African nations.

Last year Prime Minister Abiy postponed elections because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the US’s former ally, the TPLF, held elections in Tigray Regional State nevertheless and then attacked a federal army base in the state capital, Mekelle, ambushing and killing Ethiopian National Defense Forces who had been sleeping. Prime Minister Abiy responded, as any head of state would, by sending in the national army to put down the insurrection, and fighting is ongoing. Eritrea was drawn in after the TPLF fired rockets across its border at the Eritrean military.

Elections were not held on Monday in Tigray because of the civil conflict. They were reportedly not held in Somali State because of logistical problems or in Harrar City because of an unresolved lawsuit over who can vote. It was also reported that some did not vote in Benishangul-Gumuz region because ethnic violence prevented voter registration. However, these regions are all expected to elect parliamentary representatives by September, and many Ethiopians expressed enthusiasm for what they consider the country’s first real, competitive election. Fitsum Alemu, a member of the Ethiopian diaspora living in Virginia, told me that he didn’t expect the election to solve all of Ethiopia’s problems, but that voting was so important to members of his family that they stood in line for several hours in the rain to vote in Addis Ababa.

“Eritrea is the only African nation that refuses to cooperate with AFRICOM .”

Benyam Kitaw, a member of the diaspora living in Los Angeles, said, "All the people I spoke with in Ethiopia stated that they are excited about voting and the prospect of true democracy starting to take hold there for the first time. Democracy may be bumpy and have flaws, but progress towards the common Ethiopian finally having their vote counted means that Ethiopia is closer to self-determination, and this is a very good thing.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and USAID Chief and former UN Ambassador Samantha Power said that the Tigray conflict, and more, made an honest and peaceful election impossible and demanded that Abiy postpone the election.

However, in 2015, when Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and the TPLF claimed to have won an impossible 100% of the vote, Barack Obama called it democratic. Susan Rice, who was then Obama’s National Security Advisor, addressed reporters prior to their trip to Kenya and Ethiopia and said that the TPLF’s 100% victory suggested some procedural problems, but she didn’t doubt the rightness of the outcome. When a reporter asked whether she considered that an honest election, she responded “100%,” and then laughed, helping to make herself one of the most despised US officials in Ethiopia and on the African continent.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ethio ... s-them-not

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Don’t Allow Another U.S.-NATO Libya in the Horn of Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 24, 2021
Ready for Revolution
Protests in Ethiopia against US sanctions

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A joint statement from the US Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa PALS.

Paternalistic U.S. government political posturing toward Africa has a history of turning into fatal consequences for the masses of African peoples. A decade ago, several of the same individuals who now hold positions in the Biden administration were accomplices in the U.S.-led NATO decimation of Libya, which was rationalized under the guise of protecting “pro-democracy” activists from massacre by the so-called dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. Hiding behind a modern-day version of the “White Man’s Burden,” otherwise known as “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, the United States and its NATO allies killed and maimed thousands of Libyans, with U.S. leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking special satisfaction in the sadistic video recording of Gaddafi’s murder.

Given the catastrophic effects of the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya, the Black Alliance for Peace’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and BAP member organization Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity (HOA PALS), condemn, under no uncertain terms, any and all forms of intervention and meddling in the conflict in Ethiopia. As it did against Libya, U.S. imperialism is weaponizing disinformation and misinformation to exploit and distort the complexity, historical context and political realities in the Horn of Africa to create the pretext for more direct intervention.

“Should those responsible for undermining a resolution of the crisis in Tigray fail to reverse course, they should anticipate further actions from the United States and the international community. We call on other governments to join us in taking these actions.”

—U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, May 23, 2021 press statement


The attack on the federal base by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that started the conflict is now being used as a de-facto instrument of U.S. policy in Ethiopia to justify “humanitarian intervention.” In this way, the primary contradiction in the Tigray region reflects broader dynamics in the Horn of Africa as a whole and can be boiled down to the common denominators of global capitalist hegemony and Western imperialism by way of its proxy actor, the TPLF. Western powers only curtail the right of self-determination for the Horn of Africa and Global South states.

We condemn all military violence, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, displacement, theft, discrimination, harassment and intimidation perpetrated on innocent Tigrayans, as well as any and all unnecessary violence perpetrated on other Ethiopians and Eritreans in the ongoing conflict as a result of their ethnic, religious, or national identity, refugee status or political affiliation. We unequivocally support and uplift mutual cooperation, solidarity, and peace among all parties and people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the broader Horn of Africa region.

We support African-led, localized conflict resolution that is not tied to advancing imperialism, neo-colonialism or any other nefarious Western agendas. We believe in the inherent agency and ability of Africans on the continent to reach a resolution to the conflict peacefully and independently of Western aggression, destabilization, and extractive and exploitative economic interests.

The United States and its EU-NATO allies know no compassion or genuine concern for the Black lives in Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa or anywhere else Black people are in the world. Their true concerns are always selfish, racist and reflective of their objective geopolitical interests. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, their interests are:

To control or have undue influence over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint critical to securing global energy;
to challenge the robust presence of China; and
to impose AFRICOM in the only country left in Africa that has evaded its control, Eritrea.
Africa is not underdeveloped and fraught with militarized instability because there is not enough involvement by Western Europe and its evil settler-colonial spawn, the USA. Anyone who believes that must also believe Africans are inferior savages. The fact is Africa is underdeveloped and destabilized precisely because of centuries of European colonialism and decades of U.S. and Western European neocolonialism. Any disposition held by Africans that lends legitimacy to intervention, sanctions, or the fake moral or altruistic dominion of Pan-European, white supremacist capitalist interests in Africa are based either on severe ignorance or treacherous opportunism.

U.S. foreign policy in Africa always involves enveloping any part of the continent that poses a threat to its geostrategic interests into its sphere of forever wars. In 2011, Black anti-imperialist forces were unable to effectively counter the plan by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination to destroy the revolutionary Pan-Africanist nation of Libya. This was partially because the action had the political cover of the first Black president, which confused and disarmed left opposition and made them objective collaborators with U.S. reaction.

BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network and Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation & Solidarity refuse to allow this fatal mistake to be made again.

Hands off Ethiopia and Eritrea!

#ShutDownAFRICOM!

#USOutofAfrica!

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/ ... of-africa/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:05 pm

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Some of AFRICOM’s known permanent and semi-permanent military bases on the African continent, 2019.

Dossier No. 42: Defending our sovereignty: U.S. military bases in Africa and the future of African unity
Posted Jul 06, 2021 by The Tricontinental

Dossier no. 42 Co-publication with The Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group
How do you visualise the footprint of Empire?


The images in this dossier map some of AFRICOM’s military bases on the African continent–both ‘enduring’ and ‘non-enduring’, as they are officially called. The satellite photos were gathered by data artist Josh Begley, who led a mapping project to answer the question: ‘how do you measure a military footprint?’

For this dossier, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research physically projected images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today.

Meanwhile, the pins and thread connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes.

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

String showing relation to photos

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On 30 May 2016, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) held its 601st meeting. Though the agenda was broad, members of the PSC came to the meeting concerned about a range of conflicts: the collapse of the Libyan state and the impact that this had across the Sahel, the ongoing struggles in the Lake Chad region with the persistence of Boko Haram, and the wars that marked the Great Lakes region (with the loss of sovereignty by the Democratic Republic of the Congo on its eastern flank). The ‘primary responsibility for ensuring effective conflict prevention’, the PSC noted, ‘lies with the Member States’, namely the fifty-five countries on the African continent from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

The PSC needed no lessons from anyone on its own limitations, which were two-fold:

Internal fragmentation. Only months before the May meeting, the PSC had authorised the deployment of 5,000 troops from the African Prevention and Protection Mission to Burundi. This was partly due to the enduring causes of the long-standing conflict in the Great Lakes, which included the Burundian Civil War (1993-2005) as well as the political crisis occasioned by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s suffocation of the political system, which led to public protests and state repression in 2015. President Nkurunziza pushed an agenda amongst African heads of governments to block the PSC’s decision. The AU decided that the situation in Burundi had calmed down, despite the fact that the United Nations found evidence of crimes against humanity. This was one example of the fragmentation of the African leadership, which prevented the PSC from moving an agenda.
External pressures. In February-March 2011, the PSC met to draw up a full-fledged roadmap to dial back the conflict in Libya. A PSC mission gathered at Nouakchott, Mauritania to travel to Tripoli, Libya and open negotiations based on paragraph 7 of the PSC communique. This paragraph–which was known as the ‘roadmap’–contained an elegant four-point pathway, including the cessation of hostilities, delivery of humanitarian assistance through cooperation, protection of foreign nationals, and adoption and implementation of political reforms to eliminate the causes of the crisis. Both the government of Libya and the opposition initially rejected the roadmap, but the avenues for dialogue remained open, which is why a PSC mission was ready to go to Tripoli. The day before the PSC mission could leave, France and the United States began to bomb Libya. This bombing took place under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and UN Security Council resolution 1973 (voted on by three African countries: Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa). The ‘humanitarian intervention’ quickly exceeded the UN mandate of protecting citizens, moving towards regime change using immense violence that resulted in civilian casualties. The disregard shown by the North Atlantic states for the African Union and the PSC has gone by virtually unremarked.

In the aftermath of the NATO war on Libya, the Sahel region experienced a number of conflicts, many of them driven by the emergence of forms of militancy, piracy, and smuggling. Using the pretext of these conflicts, and inflamed by NATO’s war, France and the United States intervened militarily across the Sahel. In 2014, France set up the G-5 Sahel, a military arrangement that included Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, and expanded or opened new military bases in Gao, Mali; N’Djamena, Chad; Niamey, Niger; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The United States, for its part, built an enormous drone base in Agadez, Niger, from which it conducts drone strikes and aerial surveillance across the Sahel and the Sahara Desert. This is one of the many U.S. bases on the African continent. The United States has twenty-nine known military facilities in fifteen countries on the continent, while France has bases in ten countries. No other country from outside the continent has as many military bases in Africa.

The number of foreign military bases on the African continent alarmed the PSC, which raised this as an important issue in its May 2016 meeting:

Council noted with deep concern the existence of foreign military bases and establishment of new ones in some African countries, coupled with the inability of the Member States concerned to effectively monitor the movement of weapons to and from these foreign military bases. In this regard, Council stressed the need for Member States to be always circumspect whenever they enter into agreements that would lead to the establishment of foreign military bases in their countries.

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Arba Minch, Ethiopia 6.040864 | 37.588118
Source: Google Maps

Since 2016, little advance has been made on the PSC statement. It is telling that the PSC did not name the countries that have the most bases on the continent, a question of quantity that has an impact of the quality of suppression of African sovereignty. Had the PSC named the United States and France as the main countries that have military bases in Africa, it would have had to acknowledge the particular reasons why the U.S. and France continue to require a military presence for their ends.

It is important to acknowledge that these developments are neither the norm for Africa’s modern history nor are they inevitable. In 1965, Ghana’s former President Kwame Nkrumah published an important book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, which reflected on the phenomenon of military bases. These had been commonplace during the time of high colonialism, with bases across the continent from the British base at Salisbury in former Rhodesia (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe) to the French base at Mers El Kébir in Algeria. Both the British and the United States militaries had bases in Libya, from the Wheelus Air Base to the military posts in Tobruk and El Adem. In return for the land and the right to barrack troops at these places, the UK and the U.S. provided Libya with ‘aid’, which Nkrumah rightly said was a payment for the loss of sovereignty. Here is Nkrumah’s assessment of these bases in Africa:

A world power, having decided on principles of global strategy that it is necessary to have a military base in this or that nominally independent country, must ensure that the country where the base is situated is friendly. Here is another reason for balkanisation. If the base can be situated in a country which is so constituted economically that it cannot survive without substantial ‘aid’ from the military power which owns the base, then, so it is argued, the security of the base can be assured. Like so many of the other assumptions on which neo-colonialism is based, this one is false. The presence of foreign bases arouses popular hostility to the neo-colonial arrangements which permit them more quickly and more surely than does anything else, and throughout Africa these bases are disappearing. Libya may be quoted as an example of how this policy has failed.

In 1964, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser called for the removal of these bases, and in 1970–after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy–the bases were removed. Five years before this, Nkrumah correctly judged the mood of the Libyan people. This mood, from 1965, runs through to the present. Since it was set up in 2007, the U.S. government’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has not been able to find a home on the African continent; the headquarters of AFRICOM is in Stuttgart, Germany. The African people continue to pressure their governments not to give in to U.S. demands to shift the AFRICOM headquarters from Europe to Africa.

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Nzara, South Sudan 4.634998 | 28.26727
Source: Google Maps

Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah noted, seeks to fragment Africa, weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity and sovereignty, and thereby insert its power to subordinate the aspirations of the continent for pan-African consolidation. Neither the Organisation of African Unity (1963-2002) nor the African Union (2002 onwards) have been able to realise the two most important principles of pan-Africanism: political unity and territorial sovereignty. The enduring presence of foreign military bases not only symbolises the lack of unity and sovereignty; it also equally enforces the fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments.

The Surrender of Our Sovereignty

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense proposed that the U.S. and Ghana agree to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a $20 million deal that would allow the U.S. military to expand its presence in Ghana. In March, widespread unhappiness of this agreement swept large sections of the population into the streets; opposition parties, who worried about the possibility that the U.S. would build a military base in the country, raised their objections in parliament. By April, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said that his government had ‘not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America’. The U.S. Embassy in Accra repeated this statement, saying that the ‘United States has not requested, nor does it plan to establish a military base or bases in Ghana’. The SOFA agreement was signed in May 2018.

It does not require a close reading of the agreement’s text to know that there is in fact the possibility that the U.S. could build a base in the country. Article 5, for instance, states,

Ghana hereby provides unimpeded access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas to United States forces, United States contractors, and others as mutually agreed. Such Agreed facilities and areas, or portions thereof, provided by Ghana shall be designated as either for exclusive use by United States forces or to be jointly used by United States forces and Ghana. Ghana shall also provide access to and use of a runway that meets the requirements of United States forces.

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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 12.361688 | -1.511828
Source: Google Maps

Through this article, the U.S. is permitted to create its own military facilities in Ghana. By any definition, this means that it can set up a base. The surrender of Ghana’s sovereignty also comes to light where the SOFA agreement states (Article 6) that the U.S. would ‘be afforded priority in access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas’ and that said use and access by others ‘may be authorised with the express consent of both Ghana and United States forces’.

Furthermore, Article 3 says that U.S. troops ‘may possess and carry arms in Ghana while on Official duty’ and that the U.S. troops shall be accorded ‘the privileges, exemptions, and immunities equivalent to those accorded to the administrative and technical staff of a diplomatic mission’. In other words, the U.S. troops can be armed and, if they are accused of a crime, they will not be tried in Ghana’s courts.

In March 2018, Ghana’s minister of defence, Dominic Nitiwul, was challenged on a radio station by Kwesi Pratt of the Socialist Forum Ghana (SFG). Nitiwul said that there was nothing peculiar about this agreement, since other African countries–like Senegal–had signed such agreements. Ghana, said Nitiwul, had signed similar agreements with the U.S. in 1998 and 2007, but these were done in secret because there was no tax waiver. Pratt warned that Ghana would be ‘surrendering sovereignty’ in entering this agreement. The general sentiment in the country was opposed to the base, which is why both the Ghanaian government and the U.S. denied that a base would be built.

Pratt was right. The U.S. presence at Kotoka International Airport in Accra became the heart of the U.S. military’s West Africa Logistics Network. By 2018, weekly flights from Ramstein Air Base in Germany landed in Accra with supplies (including arms and ammunition) for the at least 1,800 U.S. Special Forces troops spread out across West Africa. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said in 2019 that this weekly flight was ‘basically a bus route’. At the Kotoka airport, the U.S. maintains a Cooperative Security Location. This is a base in all but the name.

The U.S. Footprint

The African continent does not have an unusually large number of foreign military bases. These can be found across the world, from the U.S. bases in Japan to the British bases in Australia. No country has a greater military footprint around the world than the United States. According to the U.S. National Defense Business Operations Plan (2018-2022), the U.S. military manages a ‘global portfolio that consists of more than 568,000 assets (buildings and structures), located at nearly 4,800 sites worldwide’.

In 2019, AFRICOM produced a list of some of its known military bases on the African continent, distinguished between those with an ‘enduring footprint’ (a permanent base) and those with a ‘non-enduring footprint’ or ‘lily pads’ (a semi-permanent base):



Enduring Footprint Non-enduring Footprint
1. Chebelley, Djibouti 1. Bizerte, Tunisia
2. Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti 2. Arlit, Niger
3. Entebbe, Uganda 3. Dirkou, Niger
4. Mombasa, Kenya 4. Diffa, Niger
5. Manda Bay, Kenya 5. Ouallam, Niger
6. Libreville, Gabon 6. Bamako, Mali
7. St. Helena, Ascension Island 7. Garoua, Cameroon
8. Accra, Ghana 8. Maroua, Cameroon
9. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 9. Misrata, Libya
10. Dakar, Senegal 10. Tripoli, Libya
11. Agadez, Niger 11. Baledogle, Somalia
12. Niamey, Niger 12. Bosaso, Somalia
13. N’Djamena, Chad 13. Galkayo, Somalia
14. Kismayo, Somalia
15. Mogadishu, Somalia
16. Wajir, Kenya
17. Kotoka, Ghana



The list does not contain the bases where the U.S. uses ‘host nation facilities’, such as in Singo, Uganda and in Theis, Senegal.

The large presence of the U.S. Armed Forces on the African continent is not a surprise. The U.S. has the largest military force on the planet, both in terms of the vast number of resources that the U.S. puts into its military and the reach of the military via its base structure as well as its naval and aerial capacity. No other military force in the world matches that of the United States, which spends more on its military budget than the next eleven countries combined. China, which follows the U.S. in military spending, disburses only a third of what the U.S. spends per year.

The footprint of the U.S. military on the African continent is not only quantitatively larger than that of any other non-African country’s bases on the continent, but the sheer scale of the military’s presence and activities gives it a qualitatively different character; this character includes the capacity of the United States to defend its interests on the continent and to attempt to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources and markets. There are two tasks that the U.S. military fulfils on the continent:

Gendarme functions. The U.S. military operates not only to provide an advantage to the United States and its ruling elites, but it functions–along with the armies of the other NATO nations, including France–as the guarantor of Western corporate interests and the principles of capitalism. Nkrumah came to the same conclusion in 1965, stating that ‘Africa’s raw materials are an important consideration in the military build-up of the NATO countries… Their industries, especially the strategic and nuclear factories, depend largely upon the primary materials that come from the less developed countries’. Reports from the U.S. military routinely sketch out the responsibility of its range of armed forces to ensure a steady stream of raw materials for corporations–especially energy–and to maintain unimpeded movement of goods through shipping channels. Such reports include National Energy Policy (May 2001) from the National Energy Policy Development Group, led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States (September 2018) from the Interagency Task Force in Fulfilment of Executive Order 13806. In this sense, the U.S. military–alongside its NATO partners–operates as the gendarme not for the world community, but for the beneficiaries of capitalism. Alongside the U.S. is France, whose military presence in Niger is closely linked to the imperatives of the French energy sector, which requires the uranium mined in Arlit (Niger). One in three French light bulbs are powered by the uranium from this town in Niger, which is garrisoned by French troops.
The New Cold War. As Chinese private and public commercial interests have increased on the African continent, and as Chinese firms have consistently outbid Western firms, U.S. pressure to contain China on the continent has increased. The U.S. government’s New Africa Strategy (2019) characterised the situation in competitive terms: ‘Great power competitors, namely China and Russia, are rapidly expanding their financial and political influence across Africa. They are deliberately and aggressively targeting their investments in the region to gain a competitive advantage over the United States’. The European Union followed with a report called Towards a Comprehensive Strategy with Africa (2020), which–while it did not directly mention China–worried about ‘competition for natural resources’.

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Agadez, Niger 16.950278 | 8.013889
Source: Google Maps

These two points–the gendarme function and the New Cold War–require further elaboration.

Resource Exploitation
Africa is the world’s second-largest landmass with the second-largest continental population (1.34 billion people in 2020) – more than the population of North America and Europe combined (1.1 billion people). Asia is the largest continent with the largest population (4.64 billion people).

Africa’s subsoil holds a range of important natural resources: 98% of the world’s chromium, 90% of its cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 70% of its coltan, 70% of its tantalite, 64% of its manganese, 50% of its gold, and 33% of its uranium, as well as a significant share of the world’s reserves of other minerals such as bauxite, diamonds, tantalum, tungsten, and tin. The continent holds 30% of all mineral reserves, 12% of known oil reserves, 8% of known natural gas, and 65% of the world’s arable land. The UN Environmental Programme estimates that Africa’s natural capital accounts for between 30% and 50% of the total wealth of African countries. In 2012, the UN estimated that natural resources accounted for 77% of total exports and 42% of total government revenue.

African states’ reliance upon the export of raw materials of various kinds–due to the power of multinational corporations and the lack of sufficient industrialisation in a range of African countries–has put them in a position of dependency on foreign capital. This condition of dependency was structured by the policies of the colonial rulers, who maintained economic activity in Africa based on the extraction and growth of raw materials which were then sold through colonial concessions to the countries of their rulers. This dependency was inherited by generations of post-colonial elites, who derived rents from it and did nothing to alter the structure. African states, therefore, rely upon external revenues from the export of raw materials, on aid programmes from Western governments, and on institutional aid.

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Entebbe CSL, Uganda 0.046175 | 32.45588
Source: Google Maps

Such dependency creates undue avenues for manipulations by these foreign governments who have a permanent interest in Africa. Ruling governments use the endowed natural resources to secure aid from foreign partners without paying particular attention to the aid requirements and conditions. These aid terms leech African countries of necessary revenues. For instance, the UN Economic Commission for Africa reports that over the past fifty years, illicit financial flows have resulted in the loss of at least $1 trillion, ‘a sum nearly equivalent to all the official development assistance the continent received during the same period’. These are precious funds that could be used to diversify African economies, build missing infrastructure, and enhance social wages on the continent. Economic dependency narrows the options for African governments, which become more and more subordinate to foreign interests and powers. Amongst governments who are economically subordinated, the political will to resist military intervention–from establishing new foreign bases to allowing foreign militaries to operate in a myriad of other ways–is negligible.

Several pan-African platforms have emerged over the past decade to rectify this dependency, including the African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (1989), the Africa Mining Vision (2008), the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainable Development in Africa (2012), the Arusha Declaration on Africa’s Post Rio+20 Strategy for Sustainable Development (2012), the African Development Forum’s communique at the eighth summit (2014), and then culminating in the African Union’s adoption of the First Ten-Year Implementation Plan (2014-2023), outlined in the third document of Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want (2015). Each of these documents–with different levels of emphasis–points to the need to break the reliance on raw material exports, better manage the contracts signed with multinational companies, and use the resources earned from exports to improve the conditions of social life as encapsulated in the UN agreements on Sustainable Development Goals.

The failure to properly harness resources and drive a people-centred development programme produces the social context for both political and military conflicts, including insurgencies that are often refracted along ethnic and religious lines, and for the expansion of migration around the continent and towards Europe. These two results of the deeper economic crisis of African states–conflict and migration–produce the surface-level excuse for countries like the United States and France to establish military bases on the continent.

Conflict. The U.S. government has established regular military relations–including lily pad bases–in São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea. On the one hand, explanations for the U.S. presence there do not shy away from directly saying that this is about the movement of Nigerian and Gulf of Guinea oil to the US; Nigeria, a member of Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the eleventh largest oil producer in the world. On the other hand, the U.S. government says that it has a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea to stem the growth of Islamic militancy, particularly ISIS and al-Qaeda, even though government officials agree that these groups do not have a threatening presence there.
In Central Africa, AFRICOM has been engaged for over a decade in training the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), particularly in Camp Base, a military base just outside of Kisangani. According to a communiqué by AFRICOM in 2010, the military training would be ‘part of a long-term, multi-lateral US-DRC partnership to promote security sector reform in the country, [which] will assist the DRC government in its ongoing efforts to transform the Armed Forces of the DRC’. These relations between the DRC and AFRICOM have since deepened.

A large discovery of oil (estimated to be 1.7 billion barrels) was made at the border of Congo and Uganda in the Lake Albert region in 2007. It is no surprise, therefore, to see that this region became heavily militarised. This is particularly evident in the town of Beni, North Kivu. Beni is the epicentre of scores of gruesome murders often attributed to the Ugandan rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has operated in the Congo since the early 1990s. On 27 January 2021, a delegation of AFRICOM officers arrived in the DRC to discuss with the Congolese military the need for ‘cooperation and engagements, security and stability efforts, and working together to further professionalise the DRC military and strengthen ties’.

On 10 March 2021, the U.S. State Department designated the ADF as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’ and ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’, although local organisations and the UN Group of Experts on the DRC say that there is no evidence to link the ADF to ISIS. The U.S. State Department adopted this stance based on a claim made by the Bridgeway Foundation, the charity arm of the Texas-based investment firm Bridgeway Capital Management. This designation allows for an increased U.S. military presence in the Congo. The main area for this presence will be adjacent to the oil reserves. The U.S. military will also continue to provide stability for the African strongmen, who have come to rely on U.S. support for their longevity.

Migration. IMF-driven austerity programmes and the failure of African states to manage resource sales in a way that provides decent lives for the population have resulted in large-scale migration across the continent. A quarter of the close to 41.3 million migrants displaced due to violence and conflict have attempted to migrate to Europe, while the rest have moved around within the continent. The migrants who wish to go to Europe travel across the Sahara Desert to Libya, broken by the NATO war, and then cross the Mediterranean Sea. The journey is dangerous, but when the UN surveyed those who made it across the sands and the waters, more than 90% of the migrants that they would do it again.
European attempts to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea have been futile. Foreign militaries have been used in the Sahel to limit migration and keep migrants as far as possible from the European border. That is partly why France assembled the G5 Sahel Initiative and why the U.S. built the large drone base in Agadez, which provides important aerial surveillance of migration in the region. What the countries of Europe have done is to export their borders far from their own territory and to make sure that the harsh interdiction of refugees and migrants is done outside the coverage of their own media. This is a kind of arms-length outsourcing of the refugee crisis: the West gets to drive its terrible anti-migrant policies at the same time as it gets to appear innocent while its subsidiaries do its dirty work. Europe has moved its southern border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert, now dotted with military bases from Mauritania to Chad.

The surface arguments of conflict prevention and migration management are commonplace. But, once in a while, deeper motivations are clarified by some U.S. officials. As Commodore John Nowell, who runs the Africa Partnership Station of AFRICOM, said in 2008, ‘We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t in [US] interests’. By ‘here’, Commodore Nowell meant the African continent.

The New Cold War
In the U.S. government’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the authors wrote that, ‘Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential of any nation to militarily compete with the U.S. and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional U.S. advantages’. In fact, China’s military capacity is largely defensive, since China has built up its military abilities in order to defend its coastline and its territory. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has emphasised that his country is committed to multilateralism: ‘China never seeks global hegemony’, he said on 24 April 2021. What the U.S. planners more precisely indicate is that they would not like to see Chinese commercial and political power challenge the overall hegemony of the United States. As Commodore Nowell put it, U.S. interests are the reason for the country’s presence in the region; any threat to those interests must be undermined by any means necessary.

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Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti 11.544409 | 43.14707
Source: Google Maps

In 2013, the Chinese government inaugurated the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Prior to the formalisation of the BRI, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was set up in 2000 between Beijing and, initially, forty-four African countries (fifty-three out of fifty-five countries on the continent have since established relations with China under the Forum). Since 2013, China has invested in almost all African countries, all of which–except for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)–have broken ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China.

Over the years, China has signed several Memorandums of Understanding with the African Union, including one in 2015 within the framework of Agenda 2063 to support building infrastructure. China has invested large amounts of money in key infrastructure such as the Mali-Guinea rail project and the Sudan-Senegal railway line; in energy infrastructure, such as a 2600MW Mambilla hydropower project in Nigeria and the 400MW Bui Dam in Ghana; and in telecommunications, such as telecom equipment for Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Sudan. In December 2020, construction began on the new China-funded $80 million Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters south of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. There are now about 600 completed BRI projects globally.

Chinese aid–unlike IMF aid, Western commercial investment, and overseas development assistance–does not come with the vice of debilitating conditionalities. Evidence for more favourable terms comes in the various agreements signed by China, but more than that, it comes from China’s theory of patient capital, which has until now been adopted within the boundaries of China but has slowly–through Chinese state banks–emerged as a major investor outside its territory. China is now the second-largest investing country in the world, with the China Export-Import Bank and China Development Bank being major investors. The loans that these state agencies provide are long-term investments and are not on short repayment schedules. China fully understands that its loans are given to release infrastructure bottlenecks and to therefore support social development. Borrower countries are given flexibility as benefits are forecast to come in the long-term. For example, 30% of the investment in Central Asia and 80% of the investment in Pakistan will not be recovered.

Rather than develop its own humane commercial and development aid policy that would benefit the African people, the United States has opened up a ‘new cold war’ against China on the African continent. The development of AFRICOM in 2007 alongside the escalation of U.S. and allied foreign military bases in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere are part of this New Cold War. Fundamentally, the New Cold War has been structured by a (mis)information war, which consists of two main elements:

China’s new ‘colonialism’. Stunningly, the old colonial powers, which continue a neo-colonial policy towards China Africa–as illustrated by Nkrumah and evident in the base structure–now turn their gaze on China and accuse it of being a colonial power. The main rhetoric used in this (mis)information war is that China allegedly uses its financial resources to ensnare countries in a debt trap, which forces these countries to hand over their resources at low prices. The term ‘debt trap diplomacy’ is used against China, and yet it was not China that enforced structural adjustment loans that drew most African countries into a cataclysmic debt trap that has only deepened during the pandemic. It was not China, but the IMF, which carried forward a policy framework driven by the U.S. Treasury Department. While the U.S. accuses China of ‘refusing to renegotiate terms [of loans], and then taking control of the infrastructure itself’, the reality is that Chinese lenders have cancelled, deferred, and restructured terms of existing loans (before and during the pandemic) and have never seized sovereign assets from any country. Two senior U.S. professors published an article in The Atlantic in February 2021 with the telling title ‘The Chinese “Debt Trap” is a Myth’. The charge of colonialism against China is made by countries that have a well-documented history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa.
China’s military capacity. The old colonial powers accuse China of building up its military presence in Africa. Reviving a false and dated trope, AFRICOM commander General Townsend recently made unsubstantiated claims that China seeks to build a naval base on the coast of West Africa. In fact, China’s military presence is negligible compared to the Western military footprint. In 2008, China joined the anti-piracy manoeuvres in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden; these operations were based on UN Security Council resolution 1816 (2008), which asked member states of the UN to provide the transitional government in Somalia with ‘all necessary means to repress acts of piracy and armed robbery’. A decade into these operations, China developed its first overseas military base in Djibouti. The purpose of this base was twofold, first to provide logistical support for escort vessels for Chinese tankers in the Gulf of Aden, and second to support the multinational anti-piracy campaigns. At the same time, in the highly militarised region of the Horn of Africa, the Chinese government financed the construction of the Ethiopian-Djiboutian electric railway under a $4 billion project, while the China Export-Import Bank provided funding for more than $300 million on a water pipeline to bring potable drinking water from Ethiopia to Djibouti. China’s approach to peace is qualitatively different from Western foreign military activities that focus on gendarme functions and armament, choosing instead to focus on infrastructure-led economic development and poverty alleviation.
The African Union
In 2016, the African Union (AU) raised the issue of foreign military bases on the African continent. The discussion has not been deepened since then. The African Union’s dependence on external funding and resources for its operations, including peacekeeping, has limited its freedom to take independent, strategic, and tactical decisions in its operations. For peacekeeping, for instance, African states raise only 2% of the cost of the AU’s peace and security operations, while foreign funders–such as the European Union–provide 98% of the funds. This has constrained the ability of the Peace and Security Council to drive its own agenda and is why the AU has not been able to effectively continue the discussion around the foreign military bases.

On 15 October 2003, Nile Gardiner and James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation in the U.S. published a white paper called US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution. They argued that the U.S. government should create a U.S. Africa Command that would intervene in Africa ‘when vital [US] national interests are threatened’ in the same tradition as was done in Latin America and the Caribbean with the establishment of the U.S. Southern Command in 1963. This became a reality in 2007. Two African countries, Botswana and Liberia, indicated that they would be pleased to house the headquarters of AFRICOM. At that time, South Africa voiced opposition to AFRICOM’s move to the continent. Through AU intervention, both Botswana and Liberia backed off.

The mood to prevent AFRICOM’s headquarters from being based on the continent remains amongst the African people. However, this has not stopped U.S. and some African heads of state. In a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State Blinken on 27 April 2021, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari asked the U.S. to relocate AFRICOM Headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany to the African continent in order to help fight insurgencies. Growing pressure from Islamic and other dissidents and increased instability in Nigeria may have been a contributing factor to President Buhari’s appeal, though he fell short of suggesting Nigeria as host for AFRICOM. Nigeria’s position is a major shift from its initial stand which, a decade ago, was against the presence of AFRICOM in Africa. Nonetheless, U.S. military bases proliferated after that date. The AU referred to the danger of this proliferation in 2016 but, even at that time, all that the AU could muster were the tepid words: ‘concern’ and ‘circumspect’. Despite these words, AFRICOM insinuated itself into the AU with an attaché to the PSC and staff in the AU Conflict Prevention and Early Warning Division, as well as the Peace Support Operations Division. With the entry of AFRICOM into the AU in the name of ‘interoperability’ to link U.S. military forces with AU peacekeepers, the U.S. has begun to shape the AU’s security framework more directly.

In his book on neo-colonialism in Africa, Nkrumah wrote:
The danger to world peace springs not from the action of those who seek to end neo-colonialism but from the inaction of those who allow it to continue. … If world war is not to occur it must be prevented by positive action. This positive action is within the power of the peoples of those areas of the world which now suffer under neo-colonialism but it is only within their power if they act at once, with resolution and in unity.
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Camp Simba, Kenya -2.171847 | 40.897016
Source: Google Maps

These words from 1965 ring true today.

References:
Campbell, Horace G. ‘The Quagmire of U.S. Militarism in Africa’, Africa Development 45, no. 1 (2020): 73-116.

Charbonneau, Bruno. ‘De Serval à Barkhane: les problèmes de la guerre contre le terrorisme au Sahel’, Les Temps Modernes 2 (2017): 322-340.

de Montclos, Marc-Antoine Pérouse. ‘La politique de la France au Sahel: une vision militaire’, Hérodote 172, no.1 (2019): 137-152.

Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Evrard, Camille. ‘Policier le désert. Ordre colonial, <<guerriers nomades>> et État postcolonial (Niger et Mauritanie, 1946-1963)’, Vingtiéme Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 4, no. 140, (2018): 15-28.

Gwatiwa, Tshepo, and Justin van der Merwe, eds. Expanding U.S. Military Command in Africa: Elites, Network, and Grand Strategy. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Klin, Tomasz. ‘The Significance of Foreign Military Bases as Instruments of Spheres of Influence’, Croatian International Relations Review 26, no. 87 (2020): 120-144.

Lutz, Catherine, and Cynthia Enloe, eds. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Luzzani, Telma. Territorios vigilados: Como opera la red de bases militares norteamericanas en Sudamérica. Buenos Aires: Debate, 2012.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1965.

Sun, Degan, and Yahia Zoubir. ‘Sentry Box in the Backyard: Analysis of French Military Bases in Africa’, Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) 5, no. 3 (2011): 82-104.

Turse, Nick. ‘Pentagon’s Own Map of U.S. Bases in Africa Contradictions Its Claim of “Light” Footprint’, The Intercept, 27 February 2020.

United States Government Accountability Office. DOD Needs to Reassess Options for Permanent Location of U.S. Africa Command: Report to Congressional Committee. Washington, DC: GAO 13/646, 2013.

United States Africa Command Public Affairs Office. Fact Sheet: United States Africa Command. 15 April 2013.

Wang, Lei. ‘China and the United States in Africa. Competition or Cooperation?’, China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies 6, no. 1 (2020): 1–19.

Vine, David. ‘No Bases? Assessing the Impact of Social Movements Challenging U.S. Foreign Military Bases’, Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (February 2019): S158-S172.

Vine, David. Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015.

Yeo, Andrew. ‘The Politics of Overseas Military Bases.’ Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 1 (March 2017): 129-136.

Yeo, Andrew. Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 10, 2021 1:11 pm

Ethiopian Conflict and International Law
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 08 Jul 2021

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Ethiopian Conflict and International Law

Legal scholar Francis A. Boyle told Ann Garrison that a “Responsibility-to-Protect” intervention in Ethiopia would be illegal and catastrophic.

“The NATO nations, and especially the US are hostile to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the government of Ethiopia.”

Ann Garrison: Francis Boyle, you're an expert in international law, including subsets, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law. Could you explain what international humanitarian law is?

Francis A. Boyle: There is a subset of international human rights law that is called international humanitarian law.

Now, the truth of the matter is that international humanitarian law is really a euphemism for the laws of war. When I was at Harvard Law School, I took a course on the laws of war from Richard R. Baxter, the world's leading expert on the subject. And there was no such thing as international humanitarian law then. The term “international humanitarian law” was invented by experts who didn’t like identifying as experts on the laws of war.

AG: The humanitarian corridor, a practice guaranteed by international humanitarian law, is one of the biggest issues in Ethiopia right now. The NATO nations, and especially the US are hostile to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the government of Ethiopia. They are arguing that Ethiopia is committing a humanitarian crime by not allowing aid convoys access into Tigray.

The same argument is being made about Idlib Province in Syria. Could you say something about how you see the humanitarian corridor issue in these two instances?

FAB: Well, certainly in Syria, the Biden administration is simply using this humanitarian corridor argument, as Obama did, to shore up support for their jihadi terrorists.

It's very simple in Syria. That humanitarian relief could be given to the Syrian government quite legitimately and the Syrian government could distribute it to its own people, as they have done before.

“The Biden administration is simply using this humanitarian corridor argument, as Obama did, to shore up support for their jihadi terrorists.”

I certainly don't support Abiy cutting off food to the people in Tigray right now if that's what he's doing. And international humanitarian law prohibits starvation of a civilian population as a method of warfare. But I would hope that the UN Security Council (UNSC) would be encouraging Abiy to reestablish food supplies to the people of Tigray to prevent famine conditions and more loss of innocent human life.

AG: No one on the UNSC seems to disagree on the need for aid convoys, but it’s not at all clear that Abiy's government is hindering them, just because Western powers who are hostile to Ethiopia are claiming he is. The Abiy government says that it is not only allowing aid in but sending aid in , but that it had to establish checkpoints , because at one point, a humanitarian convoy was determined to be carrying weapons and ammunition rather than food and other sorts of aid, and there is history of that in Ethiopian wars. Is this a legitimate stance on their part?

FAB: That's a legitimate, as long as they are letting aid in. They can check it for weapons. Sure. I don't see any legal problem with that.

The head of the Tigrayan forces recently said that for now he's not interested in proclaiming Tigray's independence from Ethiopia. But he could. And who knows what would happen then? I shudder to think.

AG: I think the first and most contentious issue would probably be the territorial dispute over what the TPLF, the US, and other Western nations call “Western Tigray,” but which the Amhara say is ancestral Amhara land. The TPLF redrew boundaries to claim it as their own after coming to power in the 1990s, but the Amhara Regional Forces have taken it back during the conflict that began last November. So, even if Tigray were to secede from Ethiopia with the government’s agreement, it's not clear what the boundaries of the secession would be.

FAB: Well, that could set off the crack up of a state, like what Obama and Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Susan Rice caused in Libya. As I’m sure you know, that whole state cracked up and remains in a dire situation today. We also saw Yugoslavia crack up in the 1990s, and that could be the consequence if Tigray declares independence. It could be what the US wants if it can’t tell Ethiopia what to do.

I'm not saying that Tigray can't secede. Under international law, people under these circumstances, can declare independence. I'm not encouraging it and I've represented several clients over the years who have declared independence, and they have paid a very high price for doing that in blood and treasure. So it's not something to be taken lightly at all.

AG: So much of what people are now claiming is right and lawful depends on investigations that haven't been done. And that can't very well be done in a conflict situation. Various parties to the conflict post photographs of atrocities and several times I've noticed that these are photographs I'm familiar with, from other conflicts that took place years ago. So there doesn't seem to be solid evidence about what is happening in a number of situations.

FAB: This is typical of international and internal military conflicts of this nature. It's very difficult at the beginning to sort out precisely what is going on. And of course, sure, everyone publishes atrocity photos to build up public support for their side, but that cannot justify military intervention like that Obama and Power used to destroy Libya, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Those are totally fraudulent.

I've written about that, in a book, “Destroying Libya and World Order,” and I have a whole chapter in there, just demolishing those two arguments. You can't allow these allegations of atrocities to manipulate you into supporting the use of outside military force to solve this problem. I'm afraid US military intervention here will only make the situation worse. So I'm calling for a diplomatic intervention in good faith by the United States, assuming they have good faith.

AG: That’s quite an assumption.

FAB: That's another issue. But the US, Russia and China, the major powers, and the UNSC should try to keep this thing under control and resolve it. Because again, the longer this goes on, the more likely Ethiopia is to crack up as a state. And that would be a catastrophe for the entire Horn of Africa and perhaps even a wider region.

Ethiopia and International Law

AG: The UN Security Council has considered this a number of times with the same result. Russia, China, India, and Kenya speak up for Ethiopia’s sovereignty, and say that this is a matter internal to Ethiopia for Ethiopia to solve. The African Union has come to the same conclusion.

FAB: This is an internal armed conflict. That being said, however, I would still hope that some of the great powers would get involved in international mediation here. There are many techniques for peaceful settlement of international disputes to try to resolve this before Ethiopia does crack up. If Tigray declares independence, all bets are off on anything.

AG: Well, on the other side of the aisle, the other three nations with veto power are the US, UK, and France. And they and their allies are constantly raising humanitarian alarm and seeming to suggest that some sort of intervention to protect the people of Tigray is going to be necessary. Secretary of State Blinken has issued ominous warnings that if the Ethiopian government doesn't do its bidding, basically, there will be grave consequences. There are already sanctions on specific leaders though not on the people as a whole. And no one is more adamant in all this than Samantha Power.

FAB: Well, now she's head of USAID, which we all know is a front organization for the Central Intelligence Agency. And unfortunately, she also sits on Biden's National Security Council. And you know, she's just a rabid warmonger. She was behind convincing Obama to destroy Libya, along with Mrs. Clinton. And Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of the State Department policy planning staff. And Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Council advisor for Obama, who is now part of the Biden Administration.

“Samantha Power is just a rabid warmonger.”

That’s what they did to Libya and then Syria while invoking humanitarian law. It's the same method of operation. All these Bidenites used to work for Obama, including Biden himself. So yes, this is a dangerous situation, if they're going to continue to push for some type of military humanitarian intervention.

I'm encouraging diplomatic negotiations before the situation gets completely out of control, and those statements by Biden, Blinken, and Samantha Problem from Hell Power don't help anything at all. I think that certainly the Russians and the Chinese would veto any type of Security Council resolution authorizing outside military force under these circumstances.

AG: There’s a UN Office on Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect, but the doctrine has never been incorporated into the UN Charter, has it? If it had, it would violate the Charter’s first principle, and the first principle of international law, which is the sovereignty of member nations.

FAB: No, it’s never been added to the UN Charter in and, as a matter of fact, what happened was this:

In the 1990s, when Clinton and NATO bombed Serbia over Kosovo, they tried to sell it on grounds of humanitarian intervention, but no one bought that argument. So then they tried to come up with a new euphemism for humanitarian intervention. Old wine in a new bottle. So they called it Responsibility to Protect, and you can go back and read Gareth Evans, the primary author of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, and others, and see that the criteria they establish contradicts the UN Charter on the threat and use of force and substitutes the Christian doctrine of a just war for the UN Charter rules on the use of force.

Now think about that for a minute. The Christian doctrine of a just war. I mean, that goes back to St. Agustine. I teach a course on jurisprudence, the philosophy of law, and I lecture my law students on the Christian doctrine of a just war. We have the United Nations Charter to counter it because every state in the world today has agreed upon the rules of the Charter, but they certainly have not agreed upon the Christian doctrine of just war. Or the Hindu doctrine of the just war. Or the Hebrew doctrine of just war, which the Israeli government likes to apply all the time, claiming God gave them the land of Israel. What about the Muslim doctrine of just war? Oh, excuse me, that's jihad, you know, which everyone condemns all the time.

So the UN Charter was written to transcend these religious doctrines with one set of rules that we can all agree upon. I discussed all this at greater length in my book, “Destroying Libya and World Order, ” about how Obama and Power and Rice and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, and Juan Cole at the University of Michigan, all tried to justify stealing Libya's oil and destroying Libya as a state on the grounds of Responsibility to Protect humanitarian intervention.

The tie-in to the Christian doctrine of just war should expose it all right now. That was that, as far as Christians were concerned, any war they ever fought against non Christians was just.

AG: Empire is always self righteous.

FAB: Yes, and these bogus doctrines like humanitarian intervention and R2P have historically been used by powerful military states in Europe and the United States to go to war in Third World countries primarily inhabited by people of color. There are both racial and religious components. So it's an extremely dangerous doctrine.

And conversely, is anyone talking about humanitarian intervention, or Responsibility to Protect the Palestinians from what Israel is doing to them? That proves the hypocrisy of the doctrine.

“Is anyone talking about Responsibility to Protect the Palestinians from Israel?”

AG: There are well over half a million homeless people in the United States, 40% of them black, and 34% of US prisoners are Black, even though the Black population in the US is only 13.4%, but nobody's daring to say they have a responsibility to protect them.

But is there any situation where a determination that genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are being committed within a nation’s internal armed conflict—not by an outside aggressor—can justify the use of outside force in accordance with international law?

FAB: Not unilateral intervention. But if there are massive atrocities along the lines of genocide or something like that, certainly the Security Council should do deal with it, in my opinion. And that's what the UN General Assembly said. If war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or genocide are going on in a country, the Security Council should deal with it. The Charter authorizes the Security Council to organize a multilateral response if they can agree on it.

Chapter Seven of the UN Charter says that the Security Council has authority to deal with breaches of the peace, acts of aggression, or threats of the peace, and certainly outright genocide would be a threat to the peace.

The Security Council would have to agree that the level of humanitarian crisis rose to the level that called for a UN Security Council intervention. Then there are variety of measures that they can take. As is laid out in Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, this would basically require the five permanent members to sit down and come up with an agreement on how to proceed.

AG: But they're deadlocked, just as they were during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Council is now deadlocked on Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, and most other situations, except for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the major powers seem to have agreed that UN Peacekeepers will manage the conflict while they share the spoils, Congo’s vast natural resource wealth.

Deadlock is better than dominance by the United States, which was the case in the 90s. But it seems extremely unlikely that the Security Council is going to agree on Ethiopia.

FAB: Well, I think we should point out nevertheless that if the US government were serious, it would try to sit down with Russia and China, and come up with measures for the peaceful resolution of this dispute.

There is one other mode here. That is, if there is a deadlock at the Security Council, meaning if at least one of the permanent five members with veto power—the US, UK, France, China, and Russia—is threatening a veto, then, under the Uniting for Peace Resolution , the issue could be turned over to the United Nations General Assembly to deal with. But it's really the Security Council that's supposed to take first crack at it. We'll just have to see.

AG: This is the first time I’ve ever heard of the Uniting for Peace Resolution. Has it ever been used?

FB: Yes. I have also advised the Palestinians to use it and they have repeatedly. See my book “Breaking All The Rules, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment .”

AG: OK, finally, I thought we might have news of the Ethiopian elections by the time we had this conversation, but we don’t. Instead there’s news that Ethiopia has notified Egypt that it's begun the second filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam , which Sudan and Egypt are adamantly opposing. Do you have any thoughts about this?

FB: Well, yes, there was going to be a meeting of the Security Council on this matter. It looks like Ethiopia has tried to preempt the Security Council. My understanding is that Ethiopian prefers to have this dealt with by the African Union, which is the appropriate regional organization under Chapter Eight of the United Nations Charter. I do agree here with Ethiopia that the African Union should have been given the first crack at this to resolve this matter, under the terms of the UN Charter, as a regional organization.

That being said, of course, the Security Council can step in. I haven't looked at this in a long time. I believe there is a treaty involving the riparian states regulating the flow of water. But it might have been imposed by the British when they were a colonial power in the region and therefore may no longer be relevant.

“The African Union should have been given the first crack at this to resolve this matter.”

AG: The Security Council meeting has been requested by the Arab states, who are siding with Egypt and Sudan, and they didn't want to let the AU deal with it, because there are a lot of Black states there. So that's why I think they’re trying to jump it up to the Security Council right now.

There is fear of a war over filling the dam, and the dam itself is under military guard. Trump at one point warned Ethiopia that he might help Egypt blow it up.



There’s also fear that, since the US is hostile to the Ethiopian government and its ally, Eritrea, the US might back some sort of proxy war against both led by Egypt.

FAB: That would be a disaster, and the dam would not be grounds for the use of military force by Egypt and Sudan against Ethiopia. All riparian states have right of access to that water.

Francis Boyle teaches law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and represents clients, which have included Libya and Palestine, in cases involving international law. He is the author of “Destroying Libya and World Order ,”

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 15, 2021 12:43 pm

Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan Clash as River Waters Fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 15 Jul 2021

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Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan Clash as River Waters Fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Three nations share the same water, but not the same foreign connections, which makes for a dangerous mix.

“Russia is rumored to be helping Ethiopia guard the dam.”

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is the largest hydroelectric power project in Africa, and the seventh largest in the world. Despite internal conflict in its Tigray state, external threat, and long-running international disputes about sharing Nile waters, the dam is expected to begin producing power later this year. It promises to lift Ethiopia's subsistence farming majority from poverty, generate electricity for sale to neighboring nations, and make Ethiopia a regional powerhouse.

However, the dam is under heavy military guard due to a 10-year dispute with Sudan and Egypt over rights to the Blue Nile River, which flows downstream from Ethiopia's Lake Tana to Sudan, Egypt and the Mediterranean. Seventy-five percent of the Nile that flows into Egypt comes from the Blue Nile, and only 25% from the White Nile, which flows from headwaters in the African Great Lakes Region of East and Central Africa.

The US and the EU have most often taken Egypt’s side against Ethiopia in disputes over the GERD, and in one of President Trump's last reckless moments in office, he said that Egypt wouldn’t be able to live with the dam, so they’ll blow it up , but it’s hard to imagine that Egypt would attempt such an attack without a green light from the US.

At the time, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying, "The incitement of war between Ethiopia and Egypt from a sitting US president neither reflects the longstanding partnership and strategic alliance between Ethiopia and the United States nor is acceptable in international law governing interstate relations."

“The dam promises to lift Ethiopia's subsistence farming majority from poverty, generate electricity for sale to neighboring nations, and make Ethiopia a regional powerhouse.

Russia and China have most often sided with Ethiopia about the GERD, and China is heavily invested in its electricity delivery infrastructure. The $4.6 billion dam itself has been financed by taxes and bonds issued to Ethiopians and the Ethiopian diaspora.

Russia is rumored to be helping Ethiopia guard the dam, and on July 7, 2021, Russia and Ethiopia inked a new military cooperation agreement . On March 28, 2021, China and Ethiopia signed “an agreement to protect investment projects .” China has significant investments in all three nations involved in this particular dispute over Nile waters.

Russia and France have been claiming a share of the Egyptian weapons market previously held by the US since 2015, a development that National Defense News recently identified as a national security issue .

Last week, the UN Security Council met to consider a draft resolution put forth by Egypt and Sudan that would call on Ethiopia to halt the second seasonal filling of the dam. Everyone who spoke during the meeting called for a return to African Union negotiations despite a 10-year impasse, but the Western ambassadors were more sympathetic to Egypt and Sudan, the Russian ambassador was more sympathetic to Ethiopia, and the Chinese ambassador appeared to be attempting to remain neutral.

Egypt and Sudan both emphasized the importance of the issue to them by sending their foreign ministers to speak instead of leaving that to their ambassadors, while Ethiopia sent their Minister of Water and Irrigation. Here are a few of their remarks:



Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry: All that Egypt has called for and sought is a binding agreement that includes an insurance policy against the harmful impacts of the GERD on Egypt's water security, by designing a mechanism through which our three countries could cooperate to collectively bear the burden of addressing future periods of droughts.

Unfortunately, however, Ethiopia remains steadfast in its rejection of any form of agreement that provides any meaningful measure of protection to the interests of downstream states. For us, the harm that the GERD might inflict will affect every aspect of the lives of the Egyptian people like a malignant plague. In the absence of an agreement that regulates its filling and operation, the GERD can cause cumulative water shortages in Egypt amounting to 120 billion cubic meters.

It will diminish access to clean drinking water. It could deprive millions of farmers of the water they used to irrigate their fields. It will rob countless families of their income and livelihood. It will destroy 1000s of acres of arable land. It will increase desertification and degrade the riparian ecosystem, and it will increase vulnerability to the effects of climate change. This is a situation that Egypt cannot and will not tolerate.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Mariam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi: We dearly hope that the Council will assume its responsibilities in maintaining regional peace and security in a preventative way by strengthening stepping up negotiations under the auspices of the African Union. I should like to say, unequivocally, that this issue is a just cause. You are called, ladies and gentlemen, to promote a process which continues to meet obstacles, and you can help this process easily, freely, by freeing the courageous people of Sudan from their current suffering by ensuring that the filling and functioning of the Renaissance Dam happens pursuant to a legally binding agreement. However, silence from the Council would send out the wrong message and would signify a tacit approval of the fact that this unilateral filling was acceptable.

Ethiopian Minister of Water, Irrigation, and Energy Dr. Sileshi Bekele: Mr. President, colonialism and colonial treaties thwarted Africa's ability to utilize its natural resources for the benefit of its people. The Nile Basin countries have recognized this problem and worked towards addressing it. In 1999, we established the Nile Basin Initiative, and in 2010, we adopted the Cooperative Framework Agreement, or CFA, on the Nile after 13 years of negotiations. The insatiable demands of Egypt and most recently Sudan are not mostly about the issue of the GERD but about the future development projects in Ethiopia and the other riparian countries. Without an effective CFA and regional mechanism, similar application will inevitably come to this Council. Today it is Ethiopia’s dam; tomorrow it will be any one of the Nile Basin countries.

The Nile belongs to all the people of the Basin countries, all the half a billion of us in the 11 riparian countries, and the water is enough for all of us. In this regard, we urge our Egyptian and Sudanese brothers and sisters to understand that a resolution to the Nile issue will not come from the Security Council. It can only come from good-faith negotiations, with due care for the well-being and development of each other. As Ethiopia looks forward to continuing the AU-led, trilateral negotiations on the GERD, we have the solution at hand, and we can herald the good news to the world led by concluding a mutually acceptable outcome.

Finally, Mr. President, allow me to respectfully request the Council to return this matter to the ability and the legitimate leadership of the African Union and encourage Egypt and Sudan to seriously and faithfully negotiate towards a negotiated settlement on the first filling, and on all operations of the GERD.

We also request the council to make this meeting the last of its deliberations on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. There is no subject matter as far from the mandate of the Council as this one. I thank you.

(End of UNSC statements.)

The UNSC may vote on the resolution this week, despite Ethiopia’s request that the matter be sent straight back to the African Union. However, should there be a vote, deadlock between the five permanent members with veto power is all but certain.

I spoke with Mohamm e d Basheer, a civil engineering researcher at the University of Manchester about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Ann Garrison: First, I believe your training is civil engineering and you teach that subject there at the University of Manchester, is that correct?

Mohammed Basheer: My training is in civil engineering, but I specialize in water resources management. So we look at how water resources can be used in the best way possible. And part of that is building dams and operating dams. But my focus is on research. I only do research.

AG: Okay, and what's the name of the school there where you teach?

MB: The Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering Department of the University of Manchester.

AG: And are you or your family originally from Ethiopia or elsewhere in the Horn or the region?

MB: Yes. I’m originally from Sudan.

AG: Okay, I want to make it clear, I didn't ask that question with any mistrust about how scientifically you're approaching this. I just thought we should be upfront about it, given all the international tensions over the dam.

MB: Yeah, there's no problem here. Yeah, that's fine.

AG: Okay. I contacted you after reading a BBC article on the dam titled “River Nile dam: Why Ethiopia can't stop it being filled ,” which quoted you. It said that Egypt and Sudan's accusations against Ethiopia give the false impression that filling up the dam is like filling up a bath and that Ethiopia can turn a tap on and off at will. They quote you saying, for one, “Given the stage that the construction is at engineering wise, physics wise, there is no way to stop the filling now until the water level reaches the top of the dam wall.” Is that an accurate quote?

MB: Yes, yes. That's an accurate quote. Yes.

AG: So does that mean that once the rainy season begins, the dam starts filling?

MB: Yes. So the way the dam has been designed is to fill up as it's being constructed. So what happened in the past few years is that Ethiopia has been building the two sides of the dam— the left and right sides, on either side of the river—and leaving the middle part open. That means that now they’re building up the middle part of the dam during the dry season. That's when the flow of water is low. That's normally between November and June. So during that time, the river flow can be passed through the outlets of the dam. But once flood season starts from July to September, that's the peak of the fall season, then the outlets will not have the capacity to pause the high flows of the flood season. That means automatically the reservoir will start filling up until the water level of the reservoir is the height of the middle wall, and then water will start flowing over the wall. So that means, because the outlets of the dam are too small to pass the entire flood wave, the reservoir will be filling up. In other words, because the wall is now constructed, there's no way to stop the filling from happening. So the reservoir will start filling at least then, fill up to the level of the middle wall, and then water will start flowing over the wall.

AG: Does that mean over the wall into Sudan?

MB: Yes, that means to Sudan, downstream to Sudan and then to Egypt.

AG: Egypt and Sudan have a resolution under consideration at the UN Security Council which demands that Ethiopia stop the second filling of the dam. Does that make any sense in the circumstance?

MB: Physically, it's not possible to solve the filling as I just explained, now. The decision to continue filling, in this second year of the filling, was already taken a long time ago by Ethiopia when that middle wall was being raised.

AG: So it's not really possible to stop the second filling of the dam now, but it is possible to negotiate agreements about management of the dam here and going forward.

MB: We're talking about only the second year of the filling. The filling goal is to continue in the next few years. So I think what Sudan, Ethiopia, and Egypt need to work on is an agreement for the subsequent years. And then also for the long-term operation.

AG: The dam is already producing some electricity, isn't it?

MB: No, not yet. There needs to be a certain amount of water behind the reservoir for it to start generating electricity. But this is expected to happen this year.

AG: Sudan and Egypt are saying that they want to stop the second filling of the dam. Do you think that's a misunderstanding of the engineering?

MB: No, I think they both know that the filling cannot be stopped now. In fact, in a press conferences in the past week that the Sudanese Water Ministers gave, he stated that the filling cannot be stopped now and the decision to fill the dam had already been made when Ethiopia started the building of that middle wall. So they know the engineering of the dam, they know that the filling cannot be stopped. I think what they are trying to do here is to make a statement that the filling shouldn't have been carried out according to a unilateral Ethiopian decision made back in in April/ May, when that middle wall was being built.

AG: Some say that Egypt and, in turn, Sudan are not really concerned about their share of the Nile waters, but about the possibility that Ethiopia will rise to become a regional power rivaling Egypt. Does that make any sense to you as a civil engineer?

MB: No, it actually does not. I think both Egypt and Sudan would benefit from a stronger Ethiopia, a more stable Ethiopia, a more economically strong Ethiopia, because the ties between these three countries are quite strong. And both Sudan and Egypt expressed their support for Ethiopia's development and Ethiopia's use of the Nile water resources. I think the issue of Sudan and Egypt with the dam is they want to have certain assurances about their water security.

The problem with the dam is different for Egypt and for Sudan. For Sudan, what they want to know is how the dam will be operated, because the dam is very, very close to Sudan. So they want to have a mechanism for exchanging data and making sure that there are certain rules to govern changes and flows from one day to the next and etcetera. A lot of technical details. I think that, for Sudan, there have also been concerns because Sudan hasn't received any final documents on the dam safety.

There are also some missing studies on the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the dam for Egypt. What they worry about the most is how the dam would be operated during times of droughts. So that means that, if a drought happens, like the one that happened in the 1980s, when we had multiple years with very low flows, then how much water is going to be released from the GERD? Because that will impact the agricultural sector in Egypt. It will impact employment and the economy of Egypt as well.

Another concern is, following a drought, how will the reservoirs be recovered? Because, typically, after a drought, the reservoirs will be at a very low level. How fast will the GERD be filled up following a drought? Is the GERD going to be filled faster compared to the Aswan High Dam, which is also a very large dam located in Egypt?

So these are completely different issues, I think, for the two countries. And I think these are the concerns of the countries, but I believe that both Sudan and Egypt are not against the development of Ethiopia.

AG: That's good to hear. We constantly hear the word famine associated with Ethiopia. The two words are almost irrevocably identified because of the great famines of previous decades and the massive charitable efforts to respond to them. Would the GERD be one of the best ways of protecting Ethiopia against famine in the future?

MB: So the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, it's a hydropower dam, and it's located next to the border with Sudan. That means it is used for hydropower generation only.

Of course, it will provide hydropower for Ethiopia's different sectors and would enable the development of the economy. But again, it doesn't provide water for irrigation or for other purposes. So it wouldn't protect from famine in that sense, because the GERD does not provide water for agriculture.

AG: But possibly the electricity could be used to power irrigation systems. Does that make sense?

MB: That could be one way to look at it. So yeah, because electricity is an input to many, many activities in the economy, it can be used as well to pump water from groundwater to power food production and so on. But the impact is indirect. It’s not directly from the GERD but through the hydro power that the GERD generates.

AG: Last year, according to the BBC, Sudan was taken by surprise when Ethiopia shut three of the four diversion outlets for the water. This led to lower levels downstream, which disrupted Sudan's pumping stations for irrigation and municipal water supply. If that's true, then it does seem that Sudan and Egypt have legitimate concerns about their share of the Blue Nile waters.

MB: Yes. Last year, Egypt didn't have any problems because the flow was very high. And Egypt has the Aswan High Dam which has a huge water wall, and that can be used to mitigate any reductions in the Nile flow from Ethiopia as a result of GERD filling, at least in the short term.

For Sudan, the situation is different because the GERD is located very, very close to Sudan, and there is no large reservoir in Sudan that is capable of storing a lot of water. So what happened last year was that, when the filling started, three of the gates were closed and only one was open, which resulted in a sharp drop in the river flow. And that resulted also in a sharp drop in river water levels. And that left a lot of the inlets of pumping stations along the Blue Nile out of the river. And that resulted in drinking water supply stations going out of service. That could have been avoided. If there was clear communication with Ethiopia about the filling process--how much water would be released and when the filling was going to be started--Sudan could have taken some measures to mitigate that. But because there was no exchange of information, and because that process was unilateral, Sudan wasn't aware of it. That caused the damage. So one of the lowest levels of coordination is trans-boundary river exchanges of information. If that was available, Sudan wouldn't have suffered from the first year filling.

AG: The UN Security Council is considering this as a matter of war and peace. And in one BBC report, they said there's really nothing Egypt can do about this now, unless it wants to go to war with Ethiopia, a horrible prospect, or do you think that can be avoided?

MB: Definitely war is the worst solution. And in fact, it's not a solution, because it creates more problems than it solves. Anything that war can provide can instead be gained from talks and negotiations. So I think there is absolutely no need to go into war for negotiations over this dam on the Nile waters. Talks and negotiations can resolve this issue. And I don't think Egypt would turn to that solution.

AG: The other day, you told me that the US and Mexico had renegotiated the treaty regarding the Colorado River Basin 300 times and that something like that kind of cooperation is needed here. Could you say a little more about that?

MB: Yes. So one of the concerns of Ethiopia is that if they enter into a binding agreement, it might constrain their use of the river in the future. And indeed if, for example, they committed to releasing certain water volumes in the drought to the downstream, then they will have to continue doing that. And that will impact the way water is used in the upstream.

Now, there are solutions that have been done elsewhere in other places in the world. And there is an example from the Colorado River Basin. There was a treaty between the US and Mexico about the management of the river, and they actually introduced changes to this treaty in minutes. So they made the changes in the regular meeting minutes, and then they added them to the agreement. And that has been done quite a lot. That is an example that Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt could follow in addressing Ethiopia's concern about the GERD now, but they could also be open to meeting again in the future when Ethiopia decides to go on with their further plans, and then come up with new minutes and add them to the agreement.

The idea is to have flexibility, legal flexibility, to accommodate future uncertainties.

AG: Human and climatic situations are both fluid, right?

MB: Yeah, that's right. We still don't know how climate change is going to impact the Nile flow. So some studies show that climate change will increase the Nile flows; some studies show that it will decrease the flows. So all these factors will need to be taken into account as they unfold.

And there are also uncertainties around population growth and about the paths that countries will take to economic development. All these are going to impact the demand for water resources in the region. And these would have to be taken into account, or at least we should have the flexibility to accommodate these changes in any agreement about water management.

AG: So the three countries have to negotiate and continue negotiating well into the future?

MB: Yes, definitely. I think what they need to do is try to think a little bit creatively. So instead of trying to figure out ways to share the water resources, I think they should start thinking about sharing the benefits that the water resources would generate. And this is a very well known concept now in very basic management. It’s called sharing benefits. Because each of the countries has different potentials and different resources. Ethiopia has high hydropower potential. Sudan has great agricultural potential. Egypt has expertise and a long history in agriculture and agriculture-related industries. So if all these aspects were brought together in a collaborative framework, then the Nile water would be enough for everyone to obtain the benefits that they want.

AG: Okay, I’ve done my best trying to make sense of this, not being an engineer. Is there anything else you think we should understand that I haven't touched on?

MB: No, no, I think I think we covered pretty much all the points. But again, I mean, the last thing maybe I want to finish with is negotiations is the way to solve this, but the three countries need to figure out different ways to negotiate because the negotiations have been going on for over 10 years now, and there's still no solution. That means the negotiations need to be set up differently to reach a solution as soon as possible.

AG: Mohammed Basheer, thanks for speaking to Black Agenda Report.



MB: Thank you very much for having me.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 17, 2021 1:11 pm

A Senseless Cathedral of Doom: The Twenty-Eighth Newsletter (2021)

JULY 15, 2021

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Dear friends,

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

In early June 2021, the United States military led a major military exercise on the African continent: the African Lion 21. Major General Andrew Rohling of the US Army’s Southern European Task Force said it was the ‘largest US military exercise ever conducted on this continent’. The African Lion military exercise, which was first held with the Kingdom of Morocco in 2002, is – in the words of US Africa Command – an annual ‘joint, all-domain, multi-national exercise … to counter malign activity in North Africa and Southern Europe, and increase interoperability between US, African, and international partners to defend the theatre from adversary military aggression’. African Lion 21, which included the armed forces of 21 countries including Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Italy, Libya, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, took place in Morocco and in the occupied territory of Western Sahara as well as in Senegal and Tunisia. The overall military exercise – with over 7,000 soldiers – was conducted under the leadership of the US Africa Command with the assistance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

The exercise was conducted under the command of Major General Rohling and General Belkhir El Farouk, the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces Southern Zone commander. It is important to note that General El Farouk’s jurisdiction covers the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. On 10 December 2020, US President Donald Trump offered Morocco recognition of its illegal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco normalising its relations with Israel. Trump’s statement on Western Sahara goes against a range of UN General Assembly resolutions, including 1514 (XV) from 1960, which affirms that all people from former colonies have the right to self-determination, and 34/37 from 1979, which explicitly calls for an end to Morocco’s occupation of the territory. When Major General Rohling was asked about African Lion 21’s presence in Western Sahara, he demurred, saying that the choices of the location were made before Trump’s December 2020 declaration.



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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso



This month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, along with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group, released dossier no. 42 (July 2021), Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity. The dossier catalogues the growth of the Western military presence on the African continent, with special focus on the United States and France. The US, by itself, has 29 known military facilities in 15 countries, while France has bases in 10 countries. There is no doubt that the United States and France have by far the largest military footprint on the African continent, and that no country in the world has a greater global military footprint than the United States. According to the US National Defense Business Operations Plan (2018-2022), the US military manages a ‘global portfolio that consists of more than 568,000 assets (buildings and structures), located at nearly 4,800 sites worldwide’.

In the case of the US military, the sheer scale of the military’s presence and activities indicates a qualitatively different character. This character includes the capacity of the US to defend its interests on the continent, operating as the gendarme not for the world community, but for the beneficiaries of capitalism. Furthermore, it attempts to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources and markets through a ‘new cold war’, through which the US exerts pressure to contain China on the continent as part of its broader geopolitical aggression.

Both the US and France are members of NATO, whose own mandate has moved from the defence of Europe to aggression overseas. Two main objectives stand at the heart of NATO’s activity in Africa: to prevent migration into Europe and to obstruct Russian activities in northern Africa. In its recent strategic document, NATO 2030, the alliance notes, ‘NATO’s “South” refers to a broad geographic area including North Africa and large parts of the Middle East, extending to sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan’. This is not a new vision, since NATO has previously operated in Sudan (2005-2007), in the Gulf of Aden and off the Horn of Africa (2008-2016), and in Libya (2011). NATO took the lead in the destruction of Libya, which continues to be wracked by a political-military crisis and social collapse. NATO’s new missions include operations in the Mediterranean Sea such as Operation Active Endeavour (2001-2016) and Sea Guardian (ongoing); operations to support the African Union such as training the African Standby Force; and counterterrorism efforts in northern Africa.



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Agadez, Niger



Reading the documents by US Africa Command, the French military, and NATO, one could misleadingly believe that the Western military operates in Africa to prevent the growth of terrorism (largely the al-Qaeda variants). NATO’s operation in Libya in 2011 crushed the state, emboldening the extreme Islamist currents in the region to act with impunity. Some of these groups – such as al-Qaeda in the Maghreb – end up being smugglers of cigarettes, cocaine, humans, and weapons. It was the destroyed Libyan state which opened the door to both the rise of insurgency and criminal activity across the Sahara Desert and the increase in migration towards Europe.

It was in this context that, in 2014, France suborned five African countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) to form the G5 Sahel initiative. The Sahel is the belt that runs across Africa below the Sahara Desert. At the same time, the US has built a network of bases, including an enormous drone base in Agadez (Niger), and uses its drones to provide aerial support for US forces, France’s military, and the militaries of the G5 states. Europe has moved its southern border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert.

From interventions in Somalia in 1992 to present-day activities, the track records of US and French military interventions in African countries are clear: US and French troops exacerbate conflicts and use the internal weakness of African states to assert US and European aims. A recent study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that there are 23 active armed conflicts on the African continent (Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, and Western Sahara). With a 41% net increase in fatalities from 2019-2020, SIPRI writes, sub-Saharan Africa ‘was the region with the most conflict-related fatalities in 2020’. It is well-worth recalling that US and French arms manufacturers, whose combined arms exports accounted for over 43% of the global total between 2015 and 2019, provide the lion’s share of weapons for these conflicts.



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Camp Simba, Kenya



The principal causes of conflict on the continent, SIPRI summarises, are: ‘state weakness, corruption, ineffective delivery of basic services, competition over natural resources, inequality, and a sense of marginalisation’. The main reason that US Africa Command and NATO provide for their intervention in Africa – terrorism and geopolitical conflict – are not on the list.

To address these issues, it is important for African states to assert their sovereignty and chart out a credible project for the well-being of the people in these regions. That is why the African Union’s Peace and Security Council passed a resolution in 2016 expressing concern at the expanding foreign military bases on the continent. It is the weakness of the member states and their organisational disunity that have prevented that resolution from being enacted further and it is what enables the West to extend its neo-colonial pressures to intensify the causes of conflict. The austerity programmes of the International Monetary Fund produce the ‘ineffective delivery of basic services’, and Western multinational firms produce ‘corruption’ and ‘competition over natural resources’. The main authors of the problems on the continent are neither China nor Russia, whose presence is used as a justification for expanding the Western military presence.






The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier is enriched by satellite photos gathered by data artist Josh Begley. For the dossier, the art team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research physically projected images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today. Meanwhile, the pins and threads connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes.



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Kofi Awoonor, 1935-2013



In 2013, when extremists from al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi (Kenya), they shot and killed Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanaian poet, ambassador to Cuba, Brazil, and the UN, and chair of a UN committee against apartheid. Awoonor would often talk of the ‘distresses’ of his country – the same country that President Kwame Nkrumah led out of colonialism and into a new possible future. Military coups and IMF austerity deadened the hopes of generations of Ghanaians in their struggle for liberation, but Awoonor held fast. One of my favourite poems by Awoonor is ‘The Cathedral’, which carries forward that sense of the ‘distresses’ that are visited upon our world and that continue to be fought against today:

On this dirty patch
a tree once stood
shedding incense on the infant corn:
its boughs stretched across a heaven
brightened by the last fires of a tribe.
They sent surveyors and builders
who cut the tree?
planting in its place
A huge senseless cathedral of doom.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... on-africa/

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:44 pm

The TPLF Attack on Ethiopia Contains the Accumulated Evil of the War
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Jul 2021

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The TPLF Attack on Ethiopia Contains the Accumulated Evil of the War

The western nations that Ethiopia previously kow-towed to claim national government forces attacked Tigrayan troops first, when precisely the opposite occurred.

“The US and its allies haven’t even been able to get past the first step—UN Security Council censure—with regard to Syria, then Burundi, and now, Ethiopia.”

"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." -The International Military Tribunal for Germany, 1946

Although the Nuremberg Trials were, like most international criminal tribunals, a victor’s court, that became the foundation of the United Nations Charter, which, above all, empowers the UN Security Council to organize a multilateral response to a war of aggression, also called a crime against peace, in which one nation attacks another. It’s a good foundation, far from fully realized, but a good foundation nevertheless.

The UN Security Council is also empowered to organize a multilateral response if all five of its permanent members agree to a determination that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or genocide are being committed within a nation.

Security Council Deadlock

Right now the UN Security Council is deadlocked on Venezuela, Syria, Palestine, and Ethiopia, and probably more, with the veto power of the US, UK, and France on one side and the veto power of Russia and China on the other, as it was during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Many people complain that “the UN,” meaning the Security Council and the UN Charter, are therefore useless and ineffective, but deadlock is far better than domination by the US, as was the case during the 1990s, when the US had installed a drunken puppet, Boris Yeltsin, and turned Russia into a Wild West for domestic and foreign privatizers. It took some years for Russia to recover from the Yeltsin era and to reemerge as a world power.

And international law—even as an ideal codified in the UN Charter but far from realized—is better than no international law at all.

Deadlock of course hasn’t prevented the US from unilaterally going to war in Iraq, Syria, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, and a long list of other sovereign nations since the Nuremberg Trials, the writing of the UN Charter, and its ratification by sovereign member states. However, the US keeps seeking the UNSC’s approval for its own wars of aggression, disguised as humanitarian intervention or War on Terror, and Russia and China keep exercising their veto power to say no. And they now have backup from member nations now united in an alliance of 17 member nations, the “Groups of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations .”

“The US keeps seeking the UNSC’s approval for its own wars of aggression, disguised as humanitarian intervention or War on Terror.”

The first step towards military “intervention” in a domestic conflict is censure. It’s typically followed by sanctions, international criminal court indictments, and financial strangulation by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The US and its allies haven’t even been able to get past that first step—censure—with regard to Syria, then Burundi, and now, Ethiopia. Russia and China have exercised their veto power in all three instances. That didn’t stop the US in Syria, but in that case Syria asked Russia, along with Iran and Hezbollah, to join them in a legal international defense coalition.

Russia and China repeatedly vetoed motions to censure Burundi in 2015 and then failed to rally an African Union intervention to overthrow then President Pierre Nkurunziza, despite the usual shrill barrage of Western media on human rights abuses and atrocities in that country. With the help of Russia and China’s vetoes on the Security Council, Burundi survived its David and Goliath battle with the US.

The military attack that contains within itself the accumulated evil of the civil war in Tigray

Tigray is in Ethiopia. It's a state, province, region or however you translate it. An administrative region with a local government. So the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front attack on a federal army base in the Tigrayan capital in Mekelle last November did not initiate a war of aggression as defined by international law. It initiated a civil war. However, it’s only rational to say that the initiation of a civil war also “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” That’s not to say that atrocities have not been committed by both sides or to diminish the suffering of Tigrayans or any Ethiopians in this conflict, but atrocities are typically committed by all sides in a war, including World War II, which began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. That is why the attack that starts a war of aggression or a civil war “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And that’s why Western officials and media, who would like to see their longtime TPLF puppets back in power, have tried so hard to blame Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Ethiopian army. State and corporate imperialist media, and even Democracy Now, used phrasing like “an Ethiopian military offensive” and “the war began when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attacked Tigray, claiming that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front had attacked a federal army outpost,” as though the well-documented attack were nothing but Abiy’s claim.

Tigray also fired rockets at Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and Eritrea responded by entering Tigray to defend itself and support the Ethiopian army. Ethiopia, excepting Tigray, is now a close ally of Eritrea. International law professor Francis Boyle told me, "Eritrea had a right to defend itself against Tigray proportionately, and the TPLF keeps threatening to invade Eritrea to overthrow the government of President Isaias Afwerki."

American imperialist mouthpieces, like Michael Rubin, champion this proposed war of aggression. He concludes his essay, “Could the Tigray Defense Force Invade Eritrea? ” with: “the choice is simple: March into Eritrea. Isaias may believe that he will die in Eritrea and that his son will continue his rule. The next steps in the Tigray conflict will likely prove him wrong on both counts.” The rest of his essay is of course an argument that Eritrea deserves this, without mention that Afwerki refuses to collaborate with AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, or indenture Eritreans to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Or that he has largely socialized property in Eritrea, Dr. Boyle told me.

Eritreans in diaspora are sharply divided on whether or not Isaias Afwerki has realized or betrayed socialist ideals, but either way the US has every reason to take his government down and they have nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed’s decision to make peace with Eritrea after decades of war and the two countries’ subsequent alliance represent more independence than the US empire has been willing to tolerate. But on the UN Security Council, Russia and China keep saying no even to censure, the first step toward intervention, leaving the US and its NATO allies only the option of naked, unilateral imperial aggression in defiance of international law.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/tplf- ... d-evil-war
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 09, 2021 1:32 pm

Zambia’s Socialist Party Sets Ending of Rich-Poor Divide as Election Target
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 7, 2021
Peoples Dispatch

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Socialist Party presidential candidate Fred M’membe (center) and other leaders of the party after the filing of nomination papers in Lusaka.

A newcomer to the electoral scene, the Socialist Party is prioritizing health, education and peasant agriculture, and bringing to the forefront hitherto marginalized voices

Zambia is a nation divided into Kwa and Ku – the poor and the rich. Those in Kwa live in severely overcrowded conditions, have poor water supply, sanitation, shelter, nutrition, schools, healthcare, roads, and experience very high rates of unemployment. Those who live in Ku have the best of everything, from elite schools and private healthcare to luxury homes and cars.

Against this backdrop, the Socialist Party (SP) was born in 2018. As Zambia gears up for elections on August 12 – for the presidency, parliament, and local government – all eyes are on this young and energetic political contender.

While 16 political parties will contest these elections, the Socialist Party is unique in that it is the only formation pushing an agenda that wants to end the Kwa-Ku divide. Zivotele, meaning ‘vote for yourselves’, is their campaign slogan.

“For us, those who live in Kwa are the agents of change,” explains Faston Mwale, SP Central Committee member and MP candidate for Nkana Constituent Seat in the Copperbelt Province.

Part of building the people’s capacity to change, means working alongside the people, anchored on the principles of justice, equity and peace. SP is prioritizing health, education and peasant agriculture, with the Fred M’membe Literacy Program being one such initiative. M’membe, a renowned journalist, is the SP’s presidential candidate.

“We have married together a literacy and agroecology program, because the SP is not waiting until it gains political power to implement programs,” says Cloudias Musoma who is the SP Central Province Literacy Coordinator. “We are teaching people to read and write now. We are teaching the people how to make their own organic fertilizer now!”

Despite Covid-19 regulations limiting face-to-face interactions, the party has adapted to the circumstances it finds itself in. Campaigning is steeped in creative and innovative cultural activity. Virtual rallies across Zambia feature the party leadership and key candidates from various constituencies.

Penetrating mainstream media, SP’s message pumps through the frequencies of Zambia’s most popular national and community radio and television stations. Speaking local languages, the voices of the peasants and poor people have elevated the level of political debate, raising critical issues about water quality, teenage pregnancies, waste management, illiteracy, hunger and much more.

Across Zambia’s ten provinces, billboards speak in slogans that show a different politics. “Who got more money in their pockets? Them not you.” ‘Them’ is written in green, the color of the current ruling Patriotic Front (PF) and ‘not you’ in red, the color of the majority. Another reads, “5 times too many, it’s time for the real red” poking fun at the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) who have lost elections 5 times in red regalia but do not show traditionally red politics.

“Campaigning has given us opportunities to understand the challenges people go through in a much deeper way,” says Mwale. “On the Copperbelt (the mineral-rich region in the northern part of the country), there is a huge issue of unemployment. Mines have scaled down significantly. Many shafts have closed. Workers have been retrenched. Without employment how can we pay for electricity, water and other basic needs?”

Taking the baton from the Nguni Commander Nsingu who stood up firmly to the barbaric Cecil John Rhodes’ imperialist expansion project, SP is putting up a fight to close the glaring gap between Kwa and Ku.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/08/ ... on-target/

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

“We Are Telling People, Vote for Yourselves!”: Rehoboth Kafwabulula of Socialist Party of Zambia
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 8, 2021
Zoe Alexandra

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SP Candidate for Lusaka Mayor Rabecca Musonda (centre) and SP candidate for Kamwala Ward Councillor Ezekiel Ngisi with SP members in Kamwala Ward in Lusaka, Kabwata Constituency.

The spokesperson of the Socialist Party of Zambia, Rehoboth Kafwabulula spoke to Peoples Dispatch about the upcoming elections in Zambia and the key messages they are taking to the masses

Zambia is set to hold general elections on August 12. Around 9 million Zambians will choose their president and vice-president, and representatives to the National Assembly. The elections are being held amid violence between the two traditional ruling parties, the Patriotic Front, of incumbent president Edgar Lungu, and the United Party for National Development (UPND). This situation has led to the militarization of many areas of the country.

In addition to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the electoral process, these elections are also unique because there is a new player in the mix – the Socialist Party of Zambia. The party, which was founded in 2018 and is running the former editor of The Post and a long-time political activist Dr. Fred M’membe on their presidential ticket, is presenting an exciting alternative for Zambians who are currently suffering from a deep economic crisis and a shrinking civil space. Their platform which focuses on education, agriculture and employment seeks to break Zambia away from “the torturesome path we [Zambians] have traveled over the last three decades of neoliberal capitalist experiments that have landed us in poverty and despair.”

Cadres from the Socialist Party have been on the ground campaigning since early May. In order to hear more about their efforts and about their vision for Zambia, Peoples Dispatch spoke to Rehoboth Kafwabulula, the Spokesperson of the Socialist party and a member of the Central Committee.

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Rehoboth Kafwabulula is the Spokesperson of the Socialist Party of Zambia and a member of the Central Committee. Photo: SP Facebook

Peoples Dispatch: Can you kind of take us through the ground situation in Zambia as election day approaches? What is the kind of campaigning that is going on? What has been the response of the government to critics? Are there concerns of political violence?

Rehoboth Kafwabulula: It’s definitely been an interesting campaign of course – the first of its kind because of things like COVID-19 pandemic. Zambia is considered a democratic country. We do practice multi-party politics but even before COVID-19, there were lots of restrictions in terms of political space. We have what you call a shrinking civil space.

The government has been harassing media houses like The Post since the current administration took over in 2015. We’ve seen six media houses being closed for different reasons since then. But in fact, all of those editors took a stance that was seen as pro-opposition or anti-government.

Even before COVID, you could say that people who aren’t members of the ruling party haven’t necessarily been able to breathe what you would call fresh air because of restrictions and things like that. We have the Public Order Act, which is basically a law that restricts people from being able to gather without getting permits from the police. This is a law from when we were a colony, Rhodesia.

So, now you have a situation where if you want to meet, if you want to go out or have meetings as a political party, you need to get a permit from the police. But the police are not exactly an opposition political party’s best friend in this country.

I think that’s the backdrop. It’s been a very difficult environment to operate in but it’s been an environment that we’ve more or less navigated our way through despite the restrictions on gathering and despite not having the same amount of access when it comes to the media. But COVID-19 has added an extra dimension now because there are guidelines and restrictions on how political parties can act during this period or the way we can reach out to people.

Rallies, for example, are virtual now and we’ve had a few of them, very successful ones. We’ve had a door-to-door campaign. That’s really been the thrust of the campaign for the Socialist Party. It’s largely been our aspiring members of parliament, aspiring councilors and really just all the party members speaking to people in the communities that they live in.

We’ve also had our messages broadcast over private media – on print, television, and radio – which has been very well received.

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Rehoboth Kafwabulula speaks to the Socialist Party of Zambia’s presidential candidate Dr. Fred M’membe at a virtual rally on July 30. Photo: SP Facebook

But even during this period, the law has not been applied impartially. We have seen members of the ruling party being able to have mass meetings in which hundreds of people have gathered. But members of the opposition, especially the Socialist Party, can’t do that without getting in trouble with the police for not following COVID guidelines, and regulations. That’s been a real challenge.

Mass political violence has also taken place. Members of the ruling party have even shot at some of our candidates in constituencies like Kanyama in the Lusaka province. Members and supporters of other political parties have interrupted our meetings in other provinces too. They often come with live ammunition and fire shots or they throw stones at us.

Some people have described it as the bloodiest election in the past twenty years. We haven’t seen this kind of violence since the 90s. This is the first time in many years that the government has had to deploy the military police and the armed forces to curtail the violence. But it’s interesting to note that more often than not, it is members from the ruling party who start the violence. Once it spirals out of control, instead of controlling its members, the ruling party decides to police and almost militarize communities. So that’s where we are now.

There are only a few days left and we’re very hopeful that we’re going to do very well in this election because our message has been received very well. The party actually has grown much more since the campaign began than any other prior period. We have fielded the greatest number of women of all the political parties contesting this election. We also fielded the greatest number of young people. The minimum age in Zambia to be a member of parliament is 21. We’ve been able to attract candidates as young as 21 which is something that our competitors haven’t really been able to do. So we are the most vibrant party, and we think that will help us perform well.

Watch: Socialist Party of Zambia’s music video #Zivotele
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=556554059030346

PD: What is the message that the Socialist Party of Zambia is taking to the people? What is the vision for the future? What are the issues on the grounds that you are trying to address when presenting the platform of the Socialist Party?

RK: How have we been able to attract young people and women? Our message is simple. Our slogan for this campaign is “Zivotele.” That is a Bemba saying which in English means, “Vote for yourself.” And the reason we’re saying vote for yourself is because the people who we are fielding – these men, women and young people – are ordinary members of the community. Usually Zambian politics is a game of the elite. It’s a game for very wealthy businessmen and businesswomen. Those who win political office and wield power are usually from what you would call “extreme bourgeois” backgrounds.

But for the first time in this country, we are fielding ordinary poor citizens from working class backgrounds and working class communities, and we’re saying to them, nobody’s going to change your condition for you. In Zambia, rural constituencies are often represented by those who live and have grown up in the city. They often win only because they offer people money and food products in exchange for votes.

Now, for the first time, we are sending members of parliament – especially for the rural constituencies – who actually live in these communities. We are saying vote for yourself, because what you can’t do for yourself, nobody’s going to be able to do it for you.

We have candidates who work in the market and candidates who are bus drivers. This is unprecedented. This is why we’ve also gotten a lot of media attention too. We are telling people to vote for themselves and build their own communities and constituencies because the people from the uptown neighborhoods are not going to do it for them; they’ve never done it and they’ll never do it. That is really the cornerstone of our message. ‘Get out there, do it for yourself. What you can’t do for yourself, no one will do it for you.’

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Mwisiya Imbula, parliamentary candidate for Senanga constituency, Western Province. Photo: SP Facebook

There are three primary issues that we are talking about. Education is a priority. About 70% of the rural population is illiterate. People don’t have the capacity to read and write because they don’t have access to education. And the reason they don’t have access to education is because they don’t have money to afford it. Even here in the city, a good number of people from working class neighborhoods, especially elderly people, can’t read or write. Even the younger people are often semi-functional illiterates. They have basic language skills but not much beyond that. We’re saying that education should be free – from kindergarten all the way up to university level. Education should be free and education should be socialized. That is one of the key points in our Manifesto.

Another key aspect is jobs. We are very keen on agriculture and agro-processing. We are a rich country in that we can produce enough and sustain and support ourselves. This is not just in terms of mineral wealth but also food. We can rear cattle and chickens. We can grow our own food – any type of food you name, we can grow it here. We’ve got very good soil, but the challenge is that we are not processing a lot of our own vegetables. So we are tomato growers but we import ketchup. We don’t make ketchup here. The people who do so

make it on such a small scale that it’s not enough for a neighborhood of say 10,000. So we are also talking about agriculture and agro-processing which is also closely tied to employment.

So our three focus areas are free and socialized education from kindergarten to university, active investment in agriculture and jobs for our young people, especially those who don’t have access to employment.

PD: What is the position of the Socialist Party on demands for guaranteeing safe elections and the respect of the democratic rights of the people. According to the SP, how can this be ensured?

RK: We’ve said from the get-go – since March, when a lot of the violence began – that we need to hold people accountable. We hear of violence in different constituencies across the country and often, it’s known who was responsible but for every 100 cases, there may be one or two arrests at the most. And even then, those who are arrested may be the ones who were retaliating to the instigators of the violence. So it’ll be instigated usually by supporters of the ruling party and when members of non-ruling parties respond with more violence, the latter are arrested.

In order to hold people accountable, the perpetrators of the violence must be arrested and prosecuted in the courts of law. The challenge now is the impunity because those committing this violence know that there will be no consequences; there’s no backlash. Political violence is almost treated like a different category. Ordinarily, when somebody commits atrocities in the neighborhood or community, they are picked up by the police, taken to the court of law and prosecuted. Sometimes they’re convicted and imprisoned for a good number of years and sometimes they’re given a slap on the wrist, but either way, there’s that process that takes place. But when it comes to cadres who commit political violence or a political crime, there is almost always silence. We believe that the only way to stop the violence is to have these people face the consequences of their actions like they would for any other crime.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/08/ ... of-zambia/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 14, 2021 1:21 pm

Less than 2% vaccinated even as COVID-19 cases cross 7.1 million in Africa

Despite the recently increased supply, the continent suffers a severe shortage of vaccines due to stockpiling by wealthier countries and the credit rating agencies’ practice of disproportionately downgrading developing countries during the pandemic

August 13, 2021 by Pavan Kulkarni

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COVID-19 vaccine being administered in Uganda. Photo: WHO Uganda

The total COVID-19 cases in the 55 African countries crossed 7.1 million on Thursday, August 12, however only 1.75% of the continent’s population has been vaccinated. The pace of vaccination drive, which saw temporary suspension in many countries due to shortage in supply, has picked up over the last weeks after about 12 million doses were supplied in July through COVAX, a global vaccine sharing scheme backed by the WHO.

The number of doses received is thrice the total supplied to Africa over the last three months. Donations are also being facilitated through bilateral arrangements and via the African Union (AU). However, the supply continues to fall way short of the requirement of this continent of over 1.3 billion people, amounting to about 16% of the world’s population.

According to the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost 68% of the supply has already been administered. This has not been sufficient to vaccinate even 2% of the population fully. Only 4.04% have received the first dose.

“The gaps in the global health systems, particularly between low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs), continues to show, with some countries having secured vaccines for more than 100% of their population, while there are countries that have vaccinated less than 5% of their population,” Sibongiseni Dhlomo, deputy health minister of South Africa, wrote in an editorial in the Mail and Guardian on Thursday.

He went on to say that the wealthy countries negotiated deals with the vaccine manufacturers to procure in excessive quantities, even before the vaccines were produced, leaving the developing world unable to procure sufficiently for their populations.

South Africa has over half of all identified COVID cases on the continent and 75,774 of the 180,014 resulting deaths. Analysts have pointed out the actual death count may be far higher. A recently published paper by researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) has argued that the deaths in South Africa due to COVID-19 in 2020 were more than double the official figure.

The vaccine drive in South Africa, which began in mid-January, has administered 8.62 million of its total supply of 14.4 million doses, which suffices to fully vaccinate slightly over 12% of its 59.3 million population. AstraZeneca, BioNTech, and Johnson&Johnson (J&J) have been approved for use, although only the latter two are being administered for now.

The first dose has been administered to only 14.5% of the population, mainly healthcare workers and those with comorbidities. None have received the second dose. 0.57% who have received J&J jab, which requires only one dose, are fully vaccinated.

Of the total 52 million vaccines administered on the continent, only 1% has been produced there. Urging that “HICs should … support the North-South technological transfer to ensure that capacity is built in LMICs and that there are sustainable vaccine manufacturing projects,” Dhlomo also pressed on the need for African governments to invest in building vaccine manufacturing capacity.

However, the fear of being downgraded by private credit agencies, which makes it enormously difficult for states to borrow internationally, has been a significant factor holding the states back from undertaking public expenditure on health and other social sectors during the pandemic.

Private credit-rating agencies hold developing countries to ransom
Such fears are well-founded. For instance, Morocco — which, with 720,256 known cases, is the second most infected country on the continent — decided last year to expand its expenditure to combat the pandemic and has by now fully vaccinated 30.45%.

However, soon after the decision was made to increase expenditure, Fitch downgraded the country’s credit rating to ‘junk’ in October last year, citing this fiscal expansion on health and social sectors as the reason. In April 2021, Standard & Poor’s also followed suit.

In May 2021, Ethiopia — which with 286,286 cases follows Morocco after Tunisia that has recorded a total of 616,764 cases — was downgraded by Moody’s because the country sought debt relief under a G20 initiative, aimed at easing the mounting debt burden on developing countries during the pandemic.

The chief economist of Gemcorp Capital, Simon Quijano-Evans, had spelled out in as many words at the time that any sub-Saharan country seeking debt relief under this initiative will be denied access to private capital.

“Ivory Coast and Benin are the only two countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have been able to borrow in international markets since the pandemic began. Others chose not to borrow, at least in part, it seems, out of fear of the rating downgrades that might result. This has prevented them from financing much-needed spending,” Ramya Vijaya, an economic professor at Stockton University, wrote in The Conversation.

Based on an analysis of changes in the credit rating of 140 countries between 2000 to 2018, Vijaya’s research shows that downgrades in credit ratings lower government expenditure on healthcare.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published a working paper that argued that “credit rating is the only variable to show up consistently as the strongest determinant of fiscal policy during the COVID-19 crisis. Although high-income countries have better credit ratings than low-income countries, our results also hold when we control GDP per capita in our regressions. That is, even among high-income, advanced economies, a country’s credit rating affects its ability to pursue expansionary fiscal policies.”

Nevertheless, only 4.6% of the downgrades by these three agencies between January 2020 and February 2021 targeted the developed economies, while the remaining affected the developing countries, according to research by CountryRisk.io.

This is despite the fact that the collective debt of developed economies soared by 20 percentage points, reaching 124% of its GDP according to the IMF. At the same time, emerging markets had risen by less than half that of the former, by nine percentage points, reaching 61% of the GDP.

While developing countries were quickly downgraded for public expenditure, they have, on average, spent only about 2% of their GDP to support their struggling economies. On the other hand, the developed countries have, on average, directly and indirectly, subsidized their economies to the tune of 24% of their GDP, Vijaya pointed out.

Calling out the “Big Three” credit rating agencies for “conflict of interest,” “rating with ideological bias,” and “lack of accountability, the UN Human Rights Council published a report in February 2021. The report argued the need to reform and regulate these agencies to prevent them from thus impeding the enjoyment of human rights in developing countries.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/08/13/ ... in-africa/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:00 pm

Tigrayans Speak Out in Support of Ethiopia and Prime Minister Abiy, not the TPLF
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 18 Aug 2021

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Tigrayans Speak Out in Support of Ethiopia and Prime Minister Abiy, not the TPLF

A Tigrayan speaks in support of the Ethiopian government.

The Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, ruled Ethiopia brutally from 1991 to 2018 with a paper-thin guise of democracy and ethnic unity. In 2015, they reported that they had won 100% of the vote in a national election, and then National Security Advisor Susan Rice joked that it was 100% credible. The TPLF secured elite U.S. interests in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa until uprisings put Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in power. Last November the TPLF attacked a federal army base in Tigray, launching an ongoing civil war to overthrow Prime Minister Abiy.

Tigrayan leaders and commanders say that they must keep fighting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government until it is no longer capable of entering Tigray, which is their way of saying they are fighting to remove the Prime Minister from power.

U.S., Europe, and international NGOs have largely portrayed the Tigrayans as victims of atrocities, including rape by the Ethiopian National Defense Force, and the TPLF as heroes defending them. However, many Tigrayans have come forward to say that they neither support the TPLF nor believe this narrative.

I spoke to Negasi Beyene, a Tigrayan American bio- statistician working for the Centers for Disease Control in the Washington, DC area, who said that he supports Prime Minister Abiy, not the TPLF.

Ann Garrison: Negasi, first, how did you come to be a bio-statistician living in Maryland and working at the CDC?

Negasi Beyene: I completed my BS & MS in statistics in Russia when the Derg, formally the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), was in power and aligned with the Soviet Union.

However, despite its Marxist rhetoric about serving the people, the Derg was a repressive regime, so I eventually sought asylum in the United States. I also got my MS (Masters of Science) in biostatistics from San Diego State University.

I am a human rights advocate, and my motto for my motherland, Ethiopia, is "humanity before ethnicity."

AG: What do you think of all the atrocity reports, accusing the Ethiopian National Defense Force of atrocities in Tigray?

NB: Well, the Ethiopian National Defense Force had been in Tigray for 21 years before the civil war began. And there were no reports of atrocities or rape or any crime committed by them. Those defense forces were helping the poor by distributing necessities, and they were helping the farmers. They were helping school children, by buying the exercise books they needed. So they were part of the society.

Since it is under investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the UN Human Rights Council, I can’t be sure about who committed these atrocities being reported, but the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has always been known for misinforming and for creating stories that aren’t true. That is their habit. They’ve been doing that for the last 46 years.

AG: So you don't believe the atrocity reports?

NB: For the most part I don’t believe the ENDF will do such crimes, but the government brought in a few solders who are suspected of doing wrong, and the court will give them their verdict.

AG: Do you think that the TPLF committed those atrocities against the Tigrayan people?

NB: I don’t know, but the TPLF has committed a lot of crimes during the last 46 years, since its creation in 1975. They have killed and tortured a lot of people. That’s their trademark.

And they also released about 30,000 criminals from prisons on purpose to destabilize communities and the whole society. Those criminals were raping, stealing, and killing. That is on top of the TPLF atrocities.

Late at night last November 3, the TPLF committed a heinous crime by attacking a federal army base in Tigray and killing soldiers of the National Ethiopian Defense Force while they were sleeping.

This criminal organization, the TPLF, was even registered as a terrorist group by the Global Terrorism Database .

AG: I looked that up. The Global Terrorism Database lists 12 incidents in which the TPLF attacked private citizens and property, NGOs, businesses, journalists, or religious figures and institutions. And these incidents occurred between 1975, when the TPLF was organized, and 2018, its last year in power. Seven of them occurred while the TPLF was in power.

Do you think the National Ethiopian Defense Force will be able to defeat the TPLF?

NB: Yes, because the TPLF are terrorizing the people and destabilizing the country. The national defense forces are backed by the Ethiopian people, so I’m sure they will be victorious. The people will not allow the TPLF to return to power.

AG: What do you think of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) forming an alliance with the TPLF?

NB: That’s an old story, the alignment between the TPLF and the OLF. They have been working together to destabilize the country, especially since the Abiy government came to power in 2018.

The OLF have been in politics for 50 years, but they have never done anything good for the Oromo people they claim to represent. They just committed a lot of atrocities, like killing and cutting, inhumane stuff. Especially Shene, the armed wing of the OLF.

So I don't think it will change anything. It is just symbolic. The TPLF say they are allied with the OLF, or something like that, just to divide the Ethiopian people, but I don't think it will change anything on the ground.

AG: You don't think that the OLF has a significant base within the Oromo nation?

NB: There are a few extremists, but they don't have support. They used to have some support because the people were confused between the OLF and other groups. But a majority of the Ethiopian people just elected the current government. So I don't think there are any significant numbers praising the OLF anymore.

AG: What do you think Prime Minister Abiy is trying to achieve?

NB: Prime Minister Abiy has indicated, both by what he’s said and what he’s done on the ground, that he wants to unite and develop the country.

And that we should be self-sufficient instead of waiting for handouts from the West. So he's trying his best to create progress for the country or to go out and achieve most of what we were hoping for Ethiopia. He's doing that in practice, on the ground.

That's why he has a lot of enemies in the West and the Arab world. Also the TPLF and the OLF, who want to come to power without election. They want to come to power using the barrel of a gun.

So Abiy is saying that we should stop here. We have been killing each other long enough. So we have to stop here. Any group that wants political power should be elected by the people. He's trying to democratize and unite the country.

And he’s also trying to bring stability to the Horn of Africa by coordinating or cooperating with Eritrea and Somalia, even with Sudan. That is his plan and it’s a good plan. That’s why I support him.

AG: So he wants a strong, independent Ethiopia and Horn of Africa. Okay. And what do you think the US is trying to accomplish?

NB: I think the US is miscalculating their interests and those of Ethiopia. They want to install a government that takes orders from the White House, and you know some are looking out for their personal interests, but in my opinion, the interests of all the American people would best be served by a stable, united Ethiopia. I don’t believe that a fragmented Ethiopia is really in the interest of the United States.

But I think they probably want to install a puppet government that not only takes orders from the White House, but also lives on handouts from the US and the rest of the West.

No country, as you know, has defeated poverty with a puppet government living on handouts. We know that by looking at the experiences of Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. After 20 some years, how are they leaving the Afghan people?

I think it should instead be a win-win relationship between the US and Ethiopia. But that is not what is happening on the ground.

AG: Well, do you think that if the US cannot install a puppet, it would rather see the disintegration of Ethiopia into ethnic states?

NB: Probably, as you know, if they can’t have it their way. And even if Ethiopia doesn’t disintegrate, they would want it to be an ungovernable US franchise state.

But I hope they will come to their senses. I hope they will not go that far.

AG: I hope so too, Negasi. And either way, I hope that the Ethiopian people will continue to resist US efforts to destabilize and balkanize their country. Thank you for speaking to Black Agenda Report.

NB: Thank you for giving me a voice.

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

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 1:28 pm

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Sudan’s Bashir is yet Another African Leader up for War Crimes but the Real Story is, as Always, US Geopolitical Aims
August 26, 2021
By Finian Cunningham – Aug 25, 2021

With yet another African leader heading to the International Criminal Court, it’s time to recognize it for what it is – a political tool used by the US to further its agenda. In reality, the ICC has little to do with justice.
Sudan’s unelected government announced it is ready to hand over former strongman leader Omar al-Bashir to the ICC in The Hague to face charges of genocide and war crimes.

This is not just some random event, but rather seems to be part of a sequence of trade-offs between Sudan and the United States to deliver on Washington’s geopolitical aims. Those aims include furthering US interests in handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, equally important, the American desire to disrupt China’s ascent as a strategic economic partner for Africa.

Bashir (77) ruled over Sudan for nearly 30 years until he was deposed by a military coup in April 2019. During his rule, he was a thorn in Washington’s side, accused of harboring terrorists and impeding US regional political interests. He strongly aligned the country with a pro-Palestinian stance and opened the giant oil-rich North African territory to Chinese investment. Sudan became a vital link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative for the rest of Africa, Beijing’s visionary plan for global economic development.

The former Sudanese leader has had a warrant out for his arrest for more than 10 years, issued by the International Criminal Court, concerning allegations of war crimes committed during a civil war in his country’s Darfur region. Those charges fit with the US’s longtime depiction of Bashir as a renegade figure. For three decades, Sudan was on Washington’s blacklist of states sponsoring terrorism.

His luck ran out when a coup overthrew him in 2019, and he was placed under house arrest to face prosecution for corruption. The new authorities in Khartoum comprised a “transitional” civilian-military administration that has yet to hold elections more than two years on.

What followed was a rapid, if not unlikely, normalization of ties with Washington. In December 2019, the Trump administration announced that it would be exchanging ambassadors after an absence of nearly 23 years.

Later in 2020, Sudan became one of four Arab nations – along with UAE, Bahrain and Morocco – to normalize ties with Israel in support of the Trump administration’s much-vaunted peace deal for the Middle East. The Abraham Accords, as the deal is known, is seen as a sell-out of Palestinian rights and has not yet swayed the majority of Arab nations to support it. But it is a fair bet that Washington staked a lot on recruiting the four Arab countries in a bid to move the needle in favor of the so-called “deal of the century”.

In what can be seen as a quid pro quo, Sudan was removed from Washington’s terror blacklist in December – the same month that the Khartoum regime convicted Bashir of corruption.

Significantly, the new Biden administration has not reversed Trump’s policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, the Biden White House has restored some financial aid to the Palestinian territory, but by and large, the thrust of Trump’s sell-out in favor of Israeli claims has been accepted by the new administration. That means the importance of winning over Arab nations remains crucial to US Middle East plans, which in turn means keeping Sudan onboard.

For its part, the new rulers in Khartoum need Washington to lift onerous international sanctions as well as pay off its debts to the World Bank, which the US has signaled it would do.

This would seem to be part of the choreography in offering up former president Omar al-Bashir to “justice”. One problem, however, is that Sudan was not a signatory to the International Criminal Court, which therefore meant it had no jurisdiction over the country. That problem was obviated recently when Khartoum declared it was going to join the court, along with 123 other signatory nation-states. It has yet to be decided if Bashir and other former officials will be handed over to the ICC for prosecution, but it seems likely.

The irony is that decision was welcomed by Samantha Power, the head of USAID and former ambassador to the United Nations under Obama, who gushed that the move was a “revolution of freedom, peace, justice… a key step towards ending impunity”.

The United States has refused to ratify the ICC since it was established in 2002. Indeed, Washington has repeatedly slammed the court as being an affront to sovereignty and at various times has threatened to hit the institution with sanctions. (Russia and China, among others, also make the same criticism of the court, but at least don’t display the same level of hypocrisy as the US in its selective advocacy.)

Out of its 30 cases to date, the ICC has mainly prosecuted African leaders and military figures which have led to condemnations by the African Union of bias. The Hague court has done little to investigate prima facie crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq committed by American and British troops. Under pressure from Washington, the court has stalled investigation into alleged crimes by Israel against Palestinians.

The ICC is a political tool that is used by Washington and its allies to advance agendas for geopolitical control and dominance by demonizing targeted countries and leaders. There is no principle of justice involved. It is all a matter of expedience and cynical calculation.

Sudan’s unelected regime is playing the game. Handing over Bashir has little to do with justice for victims and is all about ingratiating the regime with Washington for favors.

Sudan is a lynchpin for China’s Belt and Road expansion on the African continent. Russia also opened a naval base in Port Sudan on the Red Sea in 2017, which is now under review by Khartoum. What Washington will be looking to do is thwart the inroads made by Beijing and Moscow to such a strategic part of the world.

Yanking Bashir and other former officials off to the ICC suggests that Khartoum is willing to do Washington’s bidding.

https://orinocotribune.com/sudans-bashi ... ical-aims/

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Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, and Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed

Cold War and War on Terror destabilize Somalia and cause great suffering for its people.

Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, is currently the Interim President of Somalia, pending parliamentary elections that have been repeatedly postponed since February. He first became the president of Somalia in 2017 after winning 184 of 329 votes in Somalia’s parliament.

Seven years earlier, in 2010, Farmaajo was a civil servant in Buffalo, New York, an equal opportunity compliance officer at the New York Department of Transportation. As a Somali refugee who arrived in the US in 1988, he had put himself through school, earning first a BA in history, then an MA in political science, both at the University of New York-Buffalo. The title of his master’s thesis is “U.S. STRATEGIC INTEREST IN SOMALIA: From Cold War Era to War on Terror ."

That might sound like an imperialist argument, but he was actually quite critical of US history in the country and the region. In 2009, he was still hopeful that the US might do better.

Farmaajo is currently Somalia’s interim president, but with the states of Puntland and Jubaland refusing to recognize his authority. Elections have been repeatedly planned but postponed due to disagreements between parties and lack of election infrastructure. In addition, the Islamist Al Shabaab continues to oppose the existence of a secular Somali state. Meanwhile, the US is still bombing to, they say, counter Al Shabaab.

Somalia is among the nations most often said to be a “failed state.” Farmaajo himself repeatedly referred to it as such in his Master’s thesis, in which he also described attempts at nation building, a project he still seems committed to. In his brief time as prime minister—from November 2010 until June 2011—and then as president, he has been known for fighting corruption, opposing clan conflict and Islamic extremism, and trying to make the Somali state function by, for example, ensuring that soldiers and civil servants got paid.

Whatever one thinks of Farmaajo and/or the Somali Tayo Party he founded in 2012, his thesis is a thought-provoking account of the chaos that Somalia has yet to overcome.

Clan structure in a harsh desert environment

When he wrote his thesis, in 2009, Farmaajo said that 70 percent of the Somali population were pastoral nomads, 20 percent farmers, and 10 percent fisherman. One of his story lines is about how some of the population came to seek political power in government rather than clans but without abandoning clan alliances. This is his description of nomadic clan alliances and how European colonists suddenly forced central government and some semblance of constitutional democracy on a culture alien to it:

Not only did they introduce one central, federal authority to the nomadic people in Somalia; they promoted a system of government based on the multi-party democratic system. This was totally foreign to the Somali pastoralist society; furthermore, the colonial epoch was not nearly long enough for them to learn it. The new "one size fits all" political system never matched Somalis’ anarchist culture. With new borders drawn, however, and the old system compromised, it was the only way for Somalia to function.

Somalia was branded with a political philosophy. It never had a chance to develop a brand of democracy that supports different political views and reflects clan-family values and beliefs. There were no competing ideas and views in Somali nomadic society because clan families had much in common. The main differences were in lineage and location. They shared the same culture, language and religion, and lived with perpetual conflict, which sometimes caused irrefutable disruption.

War is part of Somali culture; so too is working together. The harsh Somali environment in which Somalis live requires clan alliance as a rule of existence. The political maneuvering of any tribe depends not on how well they compromise, but what kind of coalition they put together in order to keep and retake territory and camels.


The Cold War

During the Cold War, Somalia was, like so many African nations, constantly torn between competing systems, neither of which were natural to it, and the competition between East and West became more about competition than anything else. Farmaajo writes:

Rather than help to stabilize East Africa, the United States and Soviet Union compromised their supposedly egalitarian and humane value systems in enabling its degeneration into war, chaos, and murder. The moral compass pointed nowhere when there was an opportunity to thwart the other's strategic ambitions. The tension between the two countries, [Ethiopia and Somalia], intensified when Somalia failed and warlords replaced the central government. Clan leaders competed against each other for Ethiopian support, running the country and its people into the ground over fiefdoms and bits of land.

At one point, Somalia and Ethiopia were both allied with the Soviet Union, with some semblance of a Marxist Leninist political structure. However, when longstanding rivalries between Ethiopia and Somalia over the Somali Ogaden region led to outright war between the two, the Soviet Union chose to back Ethiopia, the more populous and powerful nation. In response, the US backed Somalia until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. At that point the US no longer felt it had any strategic interests in Somalia and as soon as it withdrew financial support for the central government of Siad Barre, the government collapsed into a state of war between competing clans. At the same time the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized power in Ethiopia under cover of a multi-ethnic alliance, then became the USA’s “anchor state” in the Horn, providing troops in service to US goals in the region and on the African continent.

The brief US and UN intervention in the early 1990s, during the last years of the first Bush regime, which included the “Blackhawk Down” debacle, was actually undertaken with the humanitarian intent of feeding Somalis suffering from famine caused by incessant civil war. However, it quickly turned into a costly hunt for warlord General Mohamed Farah Aideed. In October 1993, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Eritrean President Asaias Afwerki, in which he wrote:

The military emphasis, which has derailed the Somali intervention and turned the U.N. into a party to the conflict, must change. An inordinate $1.5 billion has been spent on the military effort in Somalia as compared to just $160 million for relief and rehabilitation. The U.N.'s priorities must be reversed; humanitarian and political efforts must come first.

Despite his urging, the US and UN simply withdrew after the Black Hawk Down incident, during which jubilant Somalis dragged a dead US soldier through the dust of Mogadishu. Somalia subsequently descended deeper into anarchy and rule by warlords for the rest of the 1990s, and the US has been unwilling to commit US combat troops in Africa since. It has not, however, hesitated to commit special operatives, arms, and military advisors to various proxy forces and covert operations.

War on Terror

After 9/11, the US began to take interest in Somalia again, claiming to fear that its anarchic state had become a safe harbor for terrorists.

Farmaajo is well aware that US support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan fostered the Islamist terrorism that came back to haunt it. However, he did, at least in 2009, believe that the US returned to Somalia to fight it. Of course the US use of Islamic terrorists as proxy warriors, particularly in Syria, has reshaped the War on Terror narrative, but in 2009, he accepted the US’s stated goals.

Farmaajo writes that, without relation to Al Qaeda, a Somali Islamist movement arose to fill the power vacuum that had followed the Siad Barre government’s collapse into clan warfare. It eventually came to be the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which, despite its strict Islamic fundamentalism, seemed to be Somalia’s best hope of peace until 2006. At that point, when the US was lumping all Islamist movements together and calling them all Al Qaeda, it organized an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to overthrow the ICU. This exacerbated the longstanding rivalry between the two nations, and once again collapsed the fragile Somali state. The result was chaos, return to competition between competing clans and warlords, and the rise of Al Shabaab, a more extreme Islamist formation.

This is what gives Somalia the “failed state” label today. It is the condition that Farmaajo has tried to overcome. His platform is that a modern, secular, central government must supersede both clan rivalry and Islamic terrorism, but without the staggering ignorance and insensitivity to Somali history and social structure that the US and other foreign powers have shown.

An Independent Alliance Emerges in the Horn

On September 5, 2018, Farmaajo joined Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to sign the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea .

At first this regional peace agreement among three nations long at war was heralded internationally. In 2019, the Nobel Committee presented PM Abiy Ahmed with the Nobel Peace Prize, and the UN General Assembly presented all three heads of state with the Concordia Leadership Awa rd for promoting peace and economic integration in the Horn of Africa.

However, in November 2020, the US’s longstanding puppet, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, attacked a federal army base in Ethiopia’s Tigray Province, instigating a civil war. The TPLF and the US have both faulted Eritrea and Somalia, but most of all Eritrea, for sending troops to help Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed defeat the TPLF insurrectionists.

The US, missing its “anchor state,” backed the TPLF and made the usual unsubstantiated claims of genocide and state blockage of “humanitarian corridors” to deliver aid.

Can Somalia overcome tribalism and Islamic fundamentalism to establish a modern secular state? Can Ethiopia overcome tribalism to do the same? Will the alliance between the three nations, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, withstand the US attempt to create chaos and undermine government in the Horn, or in any nation or region attempting to escape its domination? How aggressive will the US be to overcome this challenge to its global hegemony?

Those are certainly not the only questions in the Horn, whose people have to overcome the challenges of their own history and current geopolitical situation on their own. They are the questions that we in the West should keep in mind as we challenge the narrative promoted by our propaganda press.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/somal ... war-terror

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Assassins of South African trade unionist at large as labor dispute continues
Originally published: Peoples Dispatch by Pavan Kulkarni (August 23, 2021 ) | - Posted Aug 24, 2021

Four days after the public assassination of Malibongwe Mdazo, an organizer of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the South African police are yet to make an arrest. Mdazo had led the strike last month by 7,000 workers in Rustenburg city’s five mining companies contracted to Impala Platinum Holdings Limited (Implats), the second largest platinum producer in the world.

Amidst the ongoing labor dispute with these companies, he was gunned down outside the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) on August 19. NUMSA had taken the five companies to this labor dispute resolution body because of their refusal to recognize NUMSA, which claims to have a majority membership.

These contractor companies, NUMSA alleges, are instead seeking to reach a three-year agreement with the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and bind to it the majority of the workers even though they are allegedly not represented by AMCU.

Before the shooting on August 19, the CCMA was in the process of verifying NUMSA’s membership forms to establish whether the union had a sufficient number of members to warrant recognition by one of the five companies, Newrak.

This session was adjourned at 12:10 p.m with the decision to extend the process and involve AMCU. Following a 20 minutes-break, at 12:30 p.m, the next session at the CCMA was scheduled in connection with the same dispute with another of the five companies, Triple M. The armed attack happened right outside the CCMA office during this break.

According to a source, who was present with Mdazo and managed to duck for cover in time to save his life, two hitmen, with their faces covered in balaclavas, snuck up behind Mdazo and other NUMSA members who were singing and dancing at the CCMA’s doorstep and fired more than 10 bullets.

Mdazo, who fell to the ground on being hit, died after being shot with more bullets. Another NUMSA member and a bystander who suffered severe bullet injuries were hospitalized. The next conciliation session between NUMSA and Triple M had to be postponed after this attack.

After the state-owned South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) reported that the firing began amidst a clash between NUMSA and AMCU, multiple local media organizations repeated this claim.

However, the source, a NUMSA member, refuted this and insisted that AMCU members were not present at the site.

AMCU’s General Secretary, Jeff Mphahlele, also told Peoples Dispatch,

I have made a call to my Rustenburg office to check who was at CCMA; there was nobody. I have demanded a report from my local secretary and verified the locations of all regional AMCU leaders; none were near the CCMA. It was some CCMA official who made this claim before the press, which is being repeated by media organizations. There is a tendency to paint the picture that unions are always fighting with each other in South Africa. But that’s not true.

Condemning the killing in a statement on August 21, Mpahlele said,

As AMCU, we pass our condolences to the victim’s family, friends and comrades.. We call on the authorities to act swiftly and to leave no stone unturned to bring the perpetrators to justice. All progressive forces must stand united in condemning these dastardly acts of violence.

Nevertheless, the relation between the two unions has been souring, especially after about 7,000 NUMSA members, mostly unionized by Mdazo, struck work in five Implats-contracted mining companies in Rustenburg city in North West province on June 20. These companies include Platchro, Reagetswe, and LPK Isivuno, along with Triple M and Newrak.

NUMSA’s struggle for recognition

Workers with NUMSA are demanding salary adjustment, living out allowances, and medical aid. The companies refused to engage with the striking workers on the grounds that NUMSA is not a recognized union. However, the workers continued strike action, complaining that AMCU, which is the union recognized by these companies, does not represent them. These companies dismissed over 4,000 workers by the beginning of July.

“The strike ended after the agreement was reached with contractors on the 13th of July. We negotiated for all employees to be reinstated. The only exception was the members of (NUMSA’s) interim committee who were dismissed. They could only be reinstated following a process of private arbitration,” said NUMSA’s national spokesperson, Phakamile Hlubi Majola.

As a part of this agreement to end the strike, the companies had also consented to participate in the verification exercise under the aegis of the CCMA to give NUMSA the chance to prove the majority it claims. However, when the NUMSA members returned to work at Reagetswe after ending the strike action, they were allegedly instructed by the Human Resource department to sign AMCU’s membership forms.

They were also asked to sign a pledge conceding to the company the right to terminate their employment contracts “should they engage in unauthorized meetings or embark on any illegal strike action or work stoppages in the future,” according to the letter submitted on July 21 by NUMSA’s attorney, Reynaud Daniels. This letter was addressed to the Managing Directors of Reagetswe Trading, Triple M Mining, Newrak Mining, and AMCU’s general secretary, Mphahlele.

At Triple M,

upon arriving for their induction, NUMSA members [were].. first addressed by two AMCU shop stewards, Zakhele Matiso and Joseph Ngxeke.. who demanded that members first sign an AMCU membership form or else they would not be permitted to work. This demand was made in the presence of management, who did not intervene to stop the shop stewards.

Daniels also added in the letter that “[o]ne NUMSA member, Khuselo Sigwabe who reported for duty on Saturday 17 July was assaulted by Matiso and Ngxeke. They threatened to kill him if he did not sign an AMCU membership form.”

At Newrak, he complained, “NUMSA members were required to sign stop order forms in favor of AMCU and a ballot sheet indicating that they were members of AMCU.” Under the threat of losing their livelihood, he said, some workers in these three companies signed these forms.

Daniels complained that this conduct of the contractor companies is illegal, in violation of the agreement which ended the strike, and “calculated to undermine our client in the agreed verification processes.”

Then, on August 19, when the first conciliation session between NUMSA and Newrak began, Mdazo, who had played a leading role in organizing workers under NUMSA, was gunned down at the entrance of the CCMA.

AMCU refutes allegations

When asked for a response to the allegations made by Daniels in this letter, Mphahlele refused to comment because the matter is sub-judice. He, however, referred Peoples Dispatch to an affidavit he had submitted to the Labor Court in Johannesburg on July 27, in which he claimed:

I deny that employees of Reagetswe, Triple M, and Newrak have been forced or pressured into signing membership or stop order forms or ballot sheets indicating that they were members of AMCU. All employees signed membership forms freely and voluntarily.

He had further claimed that “AMCU, as the majority union at Impala and its contractors, is not prohibited from recruiting members upon their return to work. In fact, it is standard practice for employees returning to work, as part of the induction process, to be directed to unions’ offices for recruitment purposes. Whether or not employees returning to work ultimately join a union is their choice which they exercise freely and voluntarily.”

NUMSA’s general secretary, Irvin Jim, had said in a statement,

NUMSA is very clear that the murder of comrade Mdazo is as a result of him recruiting workers at Implats, and we believe his work is the reason his life was taken.

Jim added,

We are calling on the police to leave no stone unturned in ensuring that these criminals.. are arrested before they continue to kill in a targeted fashion all those workers who have taken it upon themselves to voluntarily join NUMSA as the union of their choice.

“Once again, we call on activists to unite towards condemning violence of any shape and form”, Mphahlele maintains.

Incidents like this one undermines the goal of the working class to ensure social justice for our members and to make a difference in their lives.

“It is crucial that the police must put an investigation team together that ensures that such criminals are taken out of society as we cannot afford any more loss of life,” he added, warning that if the police fail to act,

they will leave us with no choice but to call on our members to defend themselves.

https://mronline.org/2021/08/24/assassi ... continues/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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