Africa

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 22, 2022 1:19 pm

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EU-Africa Summit- Brussels, 2 April 2014 (Photo: Paul Kagame)

African leaders opting for nonalignment amidst tensions in Europe
Originally published: Internationalist 360 on April 19, 2022 (more by Internationalist 360) - Posted Apr 21, 2022

Amid volatile markets, they (African states] are realizing they cannot afford to take sides by playing along the Western line in this so-called “cold war”. Thus, non-alignment can pave the way for de-dollarization and strengthening multipolarity. And it can also help mitigate a global food crisis.

In addition to today’s fuel and energy crises, food insecurity has been a major issue for a number of reasons and, with the current Russian-Ukrainian war, a global food crisis and hunger is a real risk. Unfortunately, this may pave the way for a kind of food diplomacy and food wars. Facing this scenario of insecurity, the European Union, together with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is trying to employ its own food diplomacy in North Africa as part of the Western efforts to counter and isolate Russia. Moscow has been accurately describing the crisis as the result of sanctions and the West’s lack of diplomacy during the conflict, and many African nations are also perceiving it in this manner, which of course is a concern for Europe. The FAO is considering developing a food funding mechanism to help African countries and this (quite timid) initiative should be seen in this context. Even so, non-alignment is on the rise in the continent.

The whole food situation, in the context of sanctions and war, has its geopolitical, economic, financial, and currency aspects with profound implications. The Russian government suggests a number of proposals in order to improve Moscow’s cooperation with the African countries. They include establishing free trade zones, trade missions in the continent, and a Russia-Africa Trading House. The Russian Central Bank and its Ministry of Finance could come up with intergovernmental agreements with the African states to establish a trust fund to support businesses and a specialized import-export bank. Developing cooperation with friendly and neutral states is of course in Moscow’s best interests, but it would also tremendously benefit such countries.

Among other proposals–introduction of the Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), a kind of digital tokens which could be used, as well as cryptocurrencies, for mutual settlements and payments. The Russian Central Bank has already authorized Sberbank to issue and to trade digital financial assets, while Moscow is considering employing cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin for its gas and oil exports to countries such as China and Turkey. All these developments are hugely important because they mark the possible beginning of a global de-dollarization process.

However, in the case of Africa, Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, released a report on April 14 which indicates that free float of cryptocurrencies is still too low to allow for large-scale transfers. This could change, though. On April 11, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo issued a joint announcement about the three countries’ plans to adopt the TONcoin blockchain, a project that was started by Telegram. The three countries stated crypto coins could become a central pillar of their economies. Kenya, Gana, and South Africa have also made some progress with CBDCs.

These new developments and their potential consequences are only made possible by a kind of a new nonalignment tendency. Even though the African Union condemned the Russian military operation in Ukraine, there is not a clear consensus among African leaders. In fact, amid the “new cold war” (as some have described it), many African nations are pushing for dialogue on the Ukrainian conflict and opting for neutrality. This is so due to many factors.

On April 7, the UN voted to suspend Russia from its Human Rights Council, and African countries largely abstained, which is yet another indication of the tendency described above–in spite of intense diplomatic pressure from the United States. Even Senegal’s President, President Macky Sall (a Washington’s ally) has followed the African tradition of nonalignment, which has its roots in the 1960s and is now gaining momentum again.

According to British-Nigerian journalist Nosmot Gbadamosi, Washington’s aggressive tone has not been very well received in the continent, whose leaders cannot help but notice the double-standard and hypocrisy pertaining to the sanctions and the focus on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (which has serious humanitarian angles), while the American invasions of Libya and Iraq have not generated analogous responses. This is particularly ironic considering that the U.S. and the West are the main actors who have caused the Ukrainian-Russian crisis which started in 2014 and escalated in 2022–and they have fueled the intense Ukrainian provocations and Kiev’s bombing of Donbass which had been largely ignored by the Western establhsiment so far.

For example, in March, Mathu Joyini, the South African ambassador to the UN suggested the U.S. and its allies have been committing their own violations of the UN Charter and are now merely pursuing their own geopolitical agendas by invoking the humanitarian situation and championing the UN resolutions against Moscow. American senior diplomat reporter Colum Lynch writes that this poses a serious threat to Washington’s attempts to build a unified diplomatic “front” in support of Kiev.

Finally, the Western sanctions targeting Moscow also impact mostly Middle-Eastern and African countries.

All of this helps to explain why leaders from South Africa, Senegal, Central African Republic, and Mali, among others, have refrained from backing Washington’s position on Moscow. Amid volatile markets, they are realizing they cannot afford to take sides by playing along the Western line in this so-called “cold war”. Thus, non-alignment can pave the way for de-dollarization and strengthening multipolarity. And it can also help mitigate a global food crisis.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/21/african ... in-europe/

'Crypto currencies' are a scam that Africa would do well to ignore. Wanting to escape the dollar(and franc) hegemony which sucks rents out of Africa is an absolute necessity for sovereignty but the old phrase 'out of the frying pan into the fire' comes to mind. Too damn bad about that huge stash of gold that NATO stole from Libya which Qaddafi meant to launch a Pan-African currency with...I am sure that squelching that project was the primary motivation for the war against Libya.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 23, 2022 2:37 pm

Our Case Against NATO – Africans and the Struggle Against Imperialism
PENTAGON-LED POLITICO-MILITARY ALLIANCE CONTINUES TO SERVE AS MAJOR IMPEDIMENT TO PEACE, LIBERATION AND A JUST WORLD SYSTEM
April 22, 2022 fwstaff International News 0


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Note: This paper was prepared and delivered in part to a webinar entitled: “The Case Against NATO” which featured presentations from various scholars and activists around the world. The speakers, in addition to Abayomi Azikiwe, were Carlos Run, the Venezuelan Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America and the President of the Simon Bolivar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples; Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Jenny Clegg, former lecturer in International Studies and long-time China specialist; Chris Matlhako, the 2nd Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the General Secretary of the Friends of Cuba Society and member of the South African Peace Initiative; Prof. Qingsi of the Renmin University in China; and moderator Prof. Radhika Desai of the Department of Political Studies and the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. The entire webinar can be viewed at the following website: The Case Against NATO – YouTube

By Abayomi Azikiwe

While the Pentagon and the United States State Department continue to provide a distorted rationale for the instigation of a major military conflict in Eastern Europe, billions of dollars are being utilized to transfer offensive weapons aimed at preventing a peaceful resolution to the current war in Ukraine.

Although the corporate and government-controlled media outlets in Western Europe and North America have reported to the public on a daily basis that their own administrations cannot be blamed for the current war in Ukraine, for any serious observer, the culpability for the tensions now in existence on an international level can be traced back to the desire by imperialism to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

NATO was formed in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War and the initiation of the Cold War by Washington against the rising socialist and national liberation movements around the world. In 1949, only two countries on the African continent were independent, Ethiopia and Liberia. Both of these countries in 1949 were highly compromised due to the intervention of the United States and Britain in their internal affairs stemming from the legacy of African enslavement and the rise of imperialist fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. The founding members of NATO were all in North America and Western Europe being Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

Many of these states were involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialism. All of them benefited from the super-exploitation of African and other oppressed peoples after the transformation of the world economic system beginning in the 15th century. The outcomes of World War I and World War II left the U.S. as the dominant imperialist power in the world.

The only real and effective challenge to the hegemony of the U.S. and its allies during the post WWII period were the socialist states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) founded in 1949 after more than two decades of armed struggle, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) consolidated in 1948, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north which declared independence in August 1945, along with the other anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial movements arising in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, which were objectively bolstered by the burgeoning African American and workers’ struggles which developed during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The position of the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s represented the height of political hypocrisy. African Americans were being denied fundamental civil rights protections which were originally put in place during the period after the Civil War (1861-1865). There were Civil Rights Acts and amendments to the U.S. Constitution between 1866-1875 ostensibly designed to reconstruct some semblance of democratic governance. Nonetheless, the Reconstruction process was overthrown during the latter decades of the 19th century placing African Americans in the social position of neo-slavery at worst and second-class citizenship at best.

Participants in the leading civil rights organizations after WWII were pressured to denounce the socialist camp and pledge allegiance to U.S. imperialism as the only legitimate system of governance not only domestically but internationally. Those leading activists and public figures who refused to adopt the Cold War policies of Washington were subjected to investigations, prosecution, imprisonment, economic isolation and exile. All the while African Americans were being lynched by mobs, killed without justification by police, executed by the state and denied fundamental due process and equal protection under the law.

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Algeria war of independence against France

Military Interventions to Halt National Liberation

Two examples of repression and mass killings by countries in the aftermath of WWII were carried out in French-controlled Algeria and the British-dominated Gold Coast (later known as Ghana after independence in 1957). These acts by the colonial powers were designed to preserve imperialist rule in Africa. Both Britain and France were founding members of NATO.

In Algeria on the same day as Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied forces, French troops massacred thousands of people across the North African state for merely demonstrating against the racist and repressive policies of Paris. France had colonized Algeria since 1830 and would not relinquish control until the people waged an eight-year armed and diplomatic struggle aimed at national liberation.

Even France24 in a report published during 2021 said of the historical event:

“On May 8, 1945, thousands had rallied in Setif as allied powers, including colonial ruler France, marked a hard-won victory in Europe over Nazi Germany. ‘Long live the allied victory,’ demonstrators shouted.

‘But the festive gathering soon turned into a demonstration for an end to colonial rule, with cries of ‘Long live independent Algeria!’ That was a provocation for French police, incensed by the appearance, for the first time, of Algerian flags. As they ordered the removal of the green and white standards, scuffles broke out. Demonstrator Bouzid Saal, 22, refused to drop his flag — so a French policeman shot him dead. Outrage tore through the massive crowd. The ensuing riots and revenge attacks on Europeans sparked a wave of repression by French authorities that left as many as 45,000 dead, according to Algerian official figures. French historians put the toll at up to 20,000, including 86 European civilians and 16 soldiers.

‘The killings would have a transformative impact on the nascent anti-colonial movement. A full-blown independence war broke out nine years later, finally leading to the country’s independence in 1962…. The French launched a 15-day campaign of violence, targeting Setif and the surrounding rural region, bombing villages and hamlets indiscriminately. General Raymond Duval led French authorities’ ruthless clampdown, imposing martial law and a curfew on a patch of territory stretching from Setif to the sea, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north. Nationalist leaders were detained on pure suspicion, and villages suspected of harboring separatists were strafed by the air force and set ablaze. Women, children and the elderly were massacred, and some 44 villages were destroyed in 15 days of retribution. Executions continued until November 1945, and some 4,000 people were arrested.”


Of course, the official propaganda of the U.S. is that the purpose of their intervention in WWII was to fight against fascism and spread democracy in Europe. Yet the Allies utilized repression in an attempt to prevent the majority of people around the globe suffering under the yoke of western domination from achieving freedom and national independence.

In recent months the Algerian government has been involved in a diplomatic row with France as well as Spain over the legacy of colonialism and the status of the Western Sahara, which remains under the control of the Kingdom of Morocco with the support of the imperialist centers of authority in Europe and North America. French President Emmanuel Macron made statements suggesting that Algeria as a country did not exist prior to 1830 and the history of the anti-colonial movement, as told by Algiers, was a fabrication. These provocative comments by Macron and the role of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez who endorsed the continued colonization of the Western Sahara under Moroccan tutelage, represents the contemporary attitude of NATO member-states.

The second example related to the founding NATO member-states’ historic repression against anti-colonial movements occurred in the Gold Coast on February 28, 1948. African veterans of the war combined with traditional leaders boycotting the inflated prices of British-controlled goods, held peaceful protests to request adequate pensions and benefits for their military service for London as well as reasonable costs for commodities. British security forces opened fire on the demonstrators marching to Christiansborg Castle (Osu) to present their petition to colonial authorities when three leaders of the protest were assassinated. Later as the African masses rose up in rebellion against the massacre, the British arrested scores of people deemed as the organizers of the unrest. This series of events in 1948 led to the independence struggle headed by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who founded the Convention People’s Party in June 1949, just over one year later, creating the conditions for another eight-year campaign to achieve freedom from Britain on March 6, 1957.

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Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah leaders of the Tanzanian and Ghanaian Revolutions in Africa.

Nkrumah had been brought back to the Gold Coast in late 1947 to work as an organizer for the then United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), an anti-colonial grouping. In the aftermath of the event of February 1948, sharp differences would surface between Nkrumah and other leading UGCC officials.

A source on the events of 1948 in the Gold Coast notes:

“The people’s protests lasted five days. By 1st March the colonial governor had declared a state of emergency and put in place a new Riot Act. On 12th March the governor ordered the arrest of ‘The Big Six,’ leading members of the UGCC, which included Kwame Nkrumah, as he believed they were responsible for orchestrating the disturbances. The Big Six were incarcerated in remote northern parts of the country. It was around this time that Nkrumah and the other five began to have significant disagreements over the direction of the movement for independence. By 1949 Nkrumah had broken away from the UGCC to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP) taking the masses of the people with him. The CPP, through a campaign of ‘Positive Action,’ achieved an end to the Gold Coast colony and brought the new dawn of independent Ghana on 6th March 1957.”

The independence movements in Africa utilized various forms of organizational tactics aimed at achieving victory over colonialism. In the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, Africans had no other choice than to resort to arms in their fight against Lisbon. Portugal received maximum logistical and diplomatic support from NATO in their war against the national liberation movements of the PAIGC, MPLA and FRELIMO in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique respectively.

Azores island in the Atlantic served as a NATO base of operations against the guerrilla movements in Africa. Under the U.S. administration of President Richard Nixon from 1969-1974, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger even wrote memoranda encouraging the Pentagon and NATO unconditional support for fascist-colonial Portugal. These memoranda were also designed to undermine the morale of the liberation movements and solidarity efforts in the West seeking to end colonial rule of tens of millions of African people.

After the failure of the war by Lisbon to defeat the liberation movements, a military coup occurred in Portugal in April 1974. Although the question of NATO membership did not initially arise, a debate would erupt over the future role of the country within the military alliance. Portugal relinquished control over its African colonies. However the European country remained within the western sphere of influence including membership in NATO.

NATO and Imperialism in the 21st Century

Over the last two decades, NATO has enhanced its profile through participation in numerous U.S.-coordinated military operations in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya. These interventions have left untold numbers of civilians and government personnel dead, injured and displaced.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Yugoslavia erupted in micro-nationalist warfare which lasted until the conclusion of the decade. The 1999 bombing of Serbia, including the capital of Belgrade, was designed to solidify the dominance of the Pentagon-NATO alliance in Europe and consequently throughout broader geo-political regions of the world. Serbia was subjected to massive airstrikes for over two months. The following year, even after the government in Belgrade had been functionally neutralized, then President Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown, kidnapped and brought to the Netherlands to stand trial in a U.S.-engineered special tribunal on war crimes. Milosevic later died in detention while in subsequent years, several of the newly-independent states in the area were recruited into NATO.

Afghanistan in 2001 was bombed, invaded and occupied by the U.S. which mobilized other NATO states to engage in the 20-year war ostensibly aimed at ending jihadist terrorism in Central Asia. After eight months in office President Joe Biden ordered the withdrawal of Pentagon forces from Afghanistan. Other NATO states had already exited the country. The character of the pullout from Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 13 Marines stationed outside the airport at Kabul during the evacuation.

In retaliation, the U.S. launched a drone strike on innocent people in Kabul killing members of a family which had cooperated with the NATO occupation. At present, there is a widespread humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan leaving millions displaced, impoverished and hungry. To add even more distress to the Afghan people, Biden expropriated $3.5 billion in assets being held in U.S. banks. Consequently, the White House has turned its back on the victims of a disastrous NATO intervention and occupation leaving tens of millions without employment, food, medicines and the capacity to generate income and international trade.

This humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan by the Pentagon and NATO has served to further damage the popular standing of the Biden presidency. Nonetheless, there has been no reduction in the Pentagon budget which strangles the working and oppressed masses in the U.S. At present the war in Ukraine has taken center stage in regard to foreign and domestic policy. Countries around the world are being pressured into rallying alongside imperialism in its war drive to expand the NATO project through the destabilization of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in the Far East.

In the North African state of Libya during the early months of 2011, the U.S. backed counter-revolutionary rebel elements sought to overthrow the Jamahiriya government led by Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The United Nations Security Council at the time voted to pass two resolutions which authorized a total arms and economic blockade against Libya as well as the establishment of a so-called no-fly zone which is merely another form of war declaration. A similar no-fly zone had been imposed over Iraq during the 1990s accompanied by draconian sanctions which killed an estimated one million people, many of whom were women, children and seniors.

After the ground operations in Libya, which began on February 17 were not reaping the desired results by imperialism, a massive blanket bombing of the oil-rich country by the Pentagon and NATO was launched on March 19 which lasted for seven months. There were reports that anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people were killed and two million displaced. The longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi was targeted and assassinated as he was attempting to exit the areas around Sirte.

The impact of the destruction of Libya as in the cases of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan had regional and international implications. Instability due to the dislocation of millions during and after the air campaign fueled further destabilization in neighboring Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

Libya since 2011 has become a notorious center for human trafficking and internecine conflict that has spilled over into other states prompting migration across the Mediterranean into Southern Europe. The human traffickers engage in dangerous methods of transportation across North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. Thousands die every year seeking to escape the detention centers and continuing sectarian battles in Libya.

The migration of Africans and Asians to Southern Europe has provided a political rationale for the growth of ultra-right groupings and governments committed to ending entry into their countries by people of color. European Union (EU) coast guard units routinely intercept migrants at sea to repatriate them back to Africa. In Europe, migrants are often confined to detention centers where they are harassed by the authorities.

Moreover, on a political electoral level, the migration question has become a major wedge issue in Europe and the U.S. Successive administrations in Washington led by Democrats and Republicans have failed to develop a comprehensive immigration policy. At least part of this inability to adequately address the issue lies in the refusal to abandon the imperialist foreign policy of Washington and Wall Street.

Imperialist wars of occupation since 2001 involving Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Libya, among other states, are at the root of the dislocation of tens of millions. This is the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons since the conclusion of WWII.

The UN Refugee Agency reports on its website that:

“At least 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26.4 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement. At a time when 1 in every 95 people on earth has fled their home as a result of conflict or persecution, our work at UNHCR is more important than ever before.”

These figures are rarely reported on in the U.S. media, and when they are, it is not done in a manner which links the unprecedented levels of displacement with imperialist wars waged by the Pentagon, NATO and its allies around the globe. Absent a social and historical context in which to explain the origins of the crisis, people are encouraged to believe that the refugee, IDP and migrant situations are somehow a result of the purported moral deficiencies of people in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Yet the African, Latin American and Asian geo-political regions are still being targeted by NATO for containment, exploitation and conquest.

By absolving itself of culpability, the U.S. can attempt to justify its denial of entry to migrants and refugees and their discriminatory treatment while awaiting a decision on whether they can legally live in the country. Within the immigration laws and policies of the U.S., racism is often utilized to limit the number of peoples of African, Asian and Latin American descent into the U.S.

In the Horn of Africa state of Somalia there has been instability for the last three decades due to the political and military interference of the U.S. and NATO. More recently in 2006-2007, the administration of President George W. Bush encouraged troops from Ethiopia under the TPLF-EPRDF leadership of Meles Zenawi to invade Somalia in order to prevent the consolidation of power by the Islamic Courts Union.

Airstrikes by the Pentagon and the British Royal Air Force were initiated on a regular base in Somalia under the guise of preventing terrorism. Numerous attempts to form a unified civilian transitional government have not been able to include the Al-Shabaab underground armed guerrillas. Al-Shabaab has since its emergence as the major opponent to the western-backed federal government, has split into at least two identifiable factions.

For the last fifteen years, the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), which included troops from several regional states including Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda, has failed to military defeat al-Shabaab. Once again in recent weeks, the mandate of AMISOM was extended for another year with no real prospect of a final resolution to the conflict in Somalia.

Much of the military training and weaponry are supplied by the U.S. and its NATO allies for AMISOM. The putative peacekeeping operations also maintains UN Security Council diplomatic backing and funding. U.S. soldiers and other personnel working with intelligence agencies have been killed in action in Somalia. Suicide bombings and other armed attacks take place in several areas of the country including the capital of Mogadishu.

Relationships developed between AU member states with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and NATO are not just on a bilateral basis. NATO itself has outlined an extensive program of engagement, training and collaboration with the AU Secretariat in Addis Ababa. The same reasons cited by AFRICOM for its deployments of thousands of troops on the continent mirrors the language of NATO. Both institutions claim that they are invited to participate in joint training exercises with African military forces from various regions.

In addition, a significant number of African officers are trained in Pentagon war colleges in the U.S. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, some of these ranking soldiers have been involved in military coups against elected governments. This has been the case in Mali, Guinea and Libya where internal conflict and lack of democratization is objectively underwritten by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

AU-affiliated regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have been unable to reverse a series of military coups taking place in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. ECOWAS along with France and the U.S. have issued statements opposing the military usurpation of power yet these coup regimes remain in office with absolute impunity.

Therefore, the training supplied by the Pentagon and NATO cannot ensure stability and security on the African continent. In order for AU member-states to achieve genuine independence and sovereignty it must come from the internal dynamics within the political structures established by the democratic forces operating inside these countries. The western bourgeois democracies represented by NATO have never extended the notions of self-determination and independent foreign policies to the underdeveloped nations and regions of the world.

In language provided by NATO in regard to its cooperation with AU member-states, the military alliance says:

“Since 2005, NATO has been cooperating with the African Union (AU) – a regional organization with 55 members created in 2002. The NATO-AU relationship started modestly with AU requests for logistics and airlift support for its mission in Sudan. The cooperation has evolved over time and, although primarily based on ad-hoc military-technical cooperation, NATO Allies are committed to expanding cooperation with the AU to make it an integral part of NATO’s efforts to work more closely with partners in tackling security challenges emanating from the south.”

However, over the last 17 years the degree of instability in Africa has heightened substantially particularly since the Pentagon-NATO engineered counter-revolution in Libya during 2011. Conditions have deteriorated in some countries such as the Central African Republic and Mali that the governments of these states, even the military juntas, are turning towards Moscow for security assistance and training.

France and the U.S. have taken great exception to the presence of Russian-based military advisors in the CAR and Mali. The Wagner group, a defense services corporation which operates as a private enterprise, has been present in Mali in recent months prompting threats by Paris to withdraw its military assistance to Bamako. In response, the military junta in Mali ordered the French ambassador to leave the West African state within 72 hours.

In the same above-quoted NATO document on AU cooperation, it goes on to emphasize:

“In January 2007, the AU made a general request to all partners, including NATO, for financial and logistical support to AMISOM. It later made a specific request to NATO in May 2007, requesting strategic airlift support for AU member states willing to deploy in Somalia under AMISOM. In June 2007, the North Atlantic Council (NAC) agreed, in principle, to support this request and NATO’s support was initially authorized until August 2007. Strategic sealift support was requested at a later stage and agreed in principle by the NAC in September 2009. The AU’s strategic airlift and sealift support requests for AMISOM have been renewed on an annual basis. The current NAC agreement to support the AU with strategic air- and sealift for AMISOM extends until January 2022…. NATO has a liaison office at the headquarters of the AU. The liaison office is comprised of a Senior Military Liaison Officer, a Deputy and one support staff. The liaison office provides, at the AU’s request, subject matter experts, who work in the AU’s Political Affairs, Peace and Security Department alongside African counterparts. The NATO Senior Military Liaison Officer is the primary coordinator for the Alliance’s activities with the AU. The size of NATO’s presence on the ground in Addis Ababa is based upon the requests from the AU and the availability of resources from Allies.”

How can the AU member-states secure and protect the interests of the 1.3 billion people on the continent with these levels of penetration by NATO within its military structures? These contradictions must be corrected in order to build viable internal defense mechanisms, combined with strategies and tactics which are compatible with the needs of the workers, youth and farmers in Africa. Neo-colonialism is manifested in the economic and subsequent military policies of contemporary African states. The source of what is described as “Islamic terrorism” has its origins in the counterinsurgency efforts by Washington to undermine those governments seeking to build genuine independence, unity and socialism. The jihadist groupings founded and funded by Washington and its allies serve the interests of the Pentagon and NATO by providing a rationale for sanctions, bombings, invasions and the installation of puppet regimes beholden to the interests of imperialism.

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Global Impact of NATO Expansion in Eastern Europe: Food Deficits and Energy Crises

One of the most alarming aspects of the war in Ukraine and the ongoing sanctions against the Russian Federation are the sharp rise in prices for consumer goods and energy. Fuel prices in the state of California in the U.S. have gone up to as high as $6 per gallon. In other regions of the country, prices are coming down slightly, perhaps due to the release by the Biden administration of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a tactic which has been used by other presidents in the past.

The U.S. has witnessed the highest inflation rate in over 40 years. The 7-8% rate noted by the federal government does not tell the complete story. Costs related to living expenses such as rents, taxes, car prices, food and other commodities have increased substantially. Since there has not been a raise in the minimum wage means that working people are losing income every single quarter of the year.

On an international scale, food supplies to various geo-political regions have been seriously curtailed because Russia and Ukraine are considered two of the largest agricultural producers in the world. In various African and Middle Eastern states, the potential for enormous food deficits is more than apparent. These countries are attempting to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 which caused serious disruptions in industrial and agricultural production. Lockdowns and the rapid spread of the coronavirus has caused millions of deaths and many more severe illnesses which often have long term public health, economic and social consequences.

One report on the escalating crisis in food supplies published by the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington pointed out that:

“Russia and Ukraine are considered the breadbaskets of the world. In 2021, the two countries exported more than one-quarter of the world’s wheat. They are both major suppliers of corn, sunflower seed oil, and barley. Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer, which is critical for agricultural production. Food prices are soaring, exacerbating inflation rates and reducing the purchasing power of populations across the Middle East and Africa, where 70% of Russian wheat exports went in 2021. These escalating costs, fed by actual and anticipated scarcity, are exacerbating economic crises for Egypt and Lebanon, with a heavy reliance on Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports, and imperiling vulnerable populations in conflict zones, including Yemen, Syria, and Somalia, which heavily rely on emergency food aid.”

In the energy sector the banning of Russian oil and natural gas in Western Europe are inevitably causing disruptions in supply. Opportunistically the U.S. has proposed a plan to redirect its energy supplies to NATO countries in Eastern and Western Europe. However, this process. which is highly unfeasible, will take time to develop the necessary supplies of oil and natural gas to those states which have adopted Washington’s foreign policy.

Sanctions above all else are acts of war. The attempted strangulation of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Russia and China, etc. are designed to destabilize these states and to make them susceptible to regime change in favor of the U.S. and other NATO governments. Russia, China and a host of other states have vowed to resist these efforts to isolate them from world trade and international relations.

The New York-based think tank, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), acknowledged the strategic role of Russia in providing energy resources to European states. An article on the CFR website reveals:

“Overall, Russia supplies about one-third of European natural gas consumption, used for winter heating as well as electricity generation and industrial production. The European Union (EU) also turns to Russia for more than one-quarter of its crude oil imports, the bloc’s largest single energy source. Some EU states are far more dependent than others. Portugal and Spain use little Russian energy, while Germany, the largest European economy, gets more than half of its natural gas and more than 30 percent of its crude oil supplies from Russia. France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power but still relies on Russian imports to meet its fossil fuel needs. Analysts say plans in Germany and other countries to phase out nuclear and coal power could increase this dependence.”

These factors portend much for the economic and consequent political future of the capitalist and imperialist governments in Europe. The disruptions in food and energy supplies perpetuated by the foreign policy imperatives of Washington and Wall Street will have ramifications far beyond the theater of war in Ukraine and Russia.

The Need for a New Security System in Europe

Undoubtedly, the Biden administration is failing again in its efforts to enhance the electoral prospects for the upcoming midterm elections. Can the war propaganda against Russia and China be enough to ensure the maintenance of a majority for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives and the Senate which will be seated in January 2023?

EU countries would be in a much better position if they rebuffed the pressures exerted by the White House and State Department by initiating their own diplomatic overtures towards Russia and China aimed at developing a more reasonable approach to regional security on that continent. European historians should be fully aware of the dangers of another imperialist war.

The uncertainty generated by the war in Ukraine on an international scale could very well result in a similar and perhaps more costly defeat for U.S. foreign policy. This coupled with the lack of a social spending strategy absent legislative action by Congress could doom the second half of the Biden administration to a paralyzing gridlock positioning the Republican Right for a resurgence of dominance along with the potential for a second Trump presidency.

Working and oppressed people in the U.S. are compelled to unite on an independent basis to end the war drive of the ruling class and its surrogates in the political superstructure. The actual impediments to the realization of a just and equitable society in the U.S. are not to be found in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. These U.S.-based class enemies of the majority domestically and globally have a vested interest in maintaining the Pentagon-NATO budget to facilitate the continuing exploitation of the peoples of the world.

https://fighting-words.net/2022/04/22/o ... perialism/.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 30, 2022 1:20 pm

SPEECH: “The architects of this murder are many:” Kwame Nkrumah on the killing of Patrice Lumumba, 1961
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 27 Apr 2022

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Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba

Kwame Nkrumah’s 1961 speech on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba exposes the the international white supremacist cabal responsible for his death, and for the crisis of the Congo.

Today, it is common knowledge that the CIA had a hand in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democractic Republic of Congo. Yet when Lumumba was murdered on January 16, 1961, CIA complicity could not be directly ascertained. It was only in the following decades, with the slow release of classified documents and the confessions of figures such as CIA station chief Larry Devlin , that a portrait – one that is still incomplete – emerged of the agency’s sanguinary subversions in the Congo.

However, as Kwame Nkrumah stated in a Ghanian radio broadcast a month after Lumumba’s death, what was certainly known was that the architects of his murder were many. In the February 14th, 1961 broadcast, Nkrumah provided a timeline of Lumumba’s brief and fraught spell in power while cataloging the organizations and governments involved in his downfall and death. He lists an international white supremacist cabal that included the United Nations, NATO, Belgium and its military forces, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, the Union Miniere and other foreign mining, industrial, and commercial interests, mercenaries from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and Joseph Kasavubu, the ceremonial president of the Congo, and Army Commander Joseph-Désiré Mobutu – later known as Mobutu Sese Seko.

For Nkrumah, the Congo situation represented “the first time in history that the legal ruler of a country has been done to death with the open connivance of a world organization in whom that ruler put his trust.” It also represented an emerging counter-revolution (what Nkrumah referred to as a “colonialist war”) against decolonization in Africa, whose goal was to preserve European and US interests and investments while dismantling African sovereignty and pan-African unity. In February 1966, five years after Nkrumah’s broadcast on the death of Lumumba, Nkrumah himself would fall victim to this counterrevolution, with many of the same interests, including the CIA , the architects of his overthrow.

Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanist, was born on September 21, 1909 in Nkroful , in what was then the Gold Coast , was the first President and Prime Minister of independent Ghana, and died in exile Bucharest, Romania, on April 27, 1972.

“The architects of this murder are many”: On the Killing of Patrice Lumumba, February 14th, 1961

Kwame Nkrumah


Countrymen, African Freedom Fighters, Comrades and Friends: Somewhere in Katanga in the Congo – where and when we do not know – three of our brother freedom fighters have been done to death.

There have been killed Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, Maurice Mpolo, the Minister in his government who was elected from Katanga Province, and Joseph Okito, the Vice-President of the Congolese Senate.

About their end many things are uncertain, but one fact is crystal clear: they have been killed because the United Nations, whom Patrice Lumumba himself, as Prime Minister, had invited to the Congo to preserve law and order, not only failed to maintain that law and order, but also denied to the lawful Government of the Congo all other means of self-protection.

History records many occasions when rulers of States have been assassinated. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and his two colleagues, however, is unique in that this is the first time in history that the legal ruler of a country has been done to death with the open connivance of a world organization in whom that ruler put his trust.

These are the facts. Patrice Lumumba was appointed Prime Minister by the departing Belgian authorities because he was the leader of the parliamentary party with the largest representation and was the only member of a parliament who could obtain a majority in both the Senate and the Chamber.

Kasavubu was subsequently elected as the ceremonial Head of State but it was clearly agreed and understood that he should have no more authority or power than has the King of Belgians in Belgium. This fact, clearly written into the Constitution of the Congo, has been deliberately ignored and distorted by those who have sought for their own ends to give some appearance of legality to the military usurpers and the agents of Colonial rule who have illegally seized power in some parts of the Congo.

Shortly after independence, the Congolese army mutinied. Parice Lumumba nad his colleagues had to secure outside support from somewhere if they were to preserve the legal structure of the State.

In the interests of world peace, and in order to prevent the cold war being brought into Africa, Patrice Lumumba invited the United Nations to preserve law and order. The United Nations insisted that they should have the sole mandate to do this and that the legal Government of the Congo should not obtain that military assistance which would have otherwise been forthcoming from many other friendly African states.

However, instead of preserving law and order, the United Nations declared itself neutral between law and disorder, and refused to lend any assistance whatsoever to the legal Government in suppressing the mutineers who had set themselves up in power in Katanga and the South Kasai.

When, in order to move its troops against the rebels, the government of the Congo obtained some civilian aircraft and civilian motor vehicles from the Soviet Union, the colonialist powers at the United Nations raised a howl of rage while, at the same time, maintaining a discrete silence over the build-up of Belgian arms and actual Belgian military forces in the service of the rebels.

With a total disregard of the Constitution, which expressly provided that the President could not dismiss the Prime Minister unless there had been a vote of “no confidence” in the Parliament, Kasavubu illegally tried to remove Patrice Lumumba from office and to substitute another Government. When Lumumba wished to broadcast to the people, explaining what had happened, the United Nations, in the so-called interests of law and order, to prevent him by force from speaking.

They did not, however, use the same force to prevent the mutineers the Congolese Army from seizing power in Leopoldville and installing a completely illegal Government.

Despite the fact that one of the most important reasons for United Nations action was supposedly to see that all Belgian Forces were removed, the United Nations sat by while the so-called Katanga Government, which is entirely Belgian-controlled, imported aircraft and arms from Belgium and from other countries, such as South Africa, which have a vested interest in the suppression of African freedom. The United Nations connived at the setting up, in fact, of an independent Katanga State, though this is contrary to the Security Council’s own resolutions.

Finally, the United Nations, which could exert its authority to prevent Patrice Lumumba from broadcasting, was, so it pleaded, quite unable to prevent his arrest by mutineers or his transfer, through the use of airfields under United Nations control, into the hands of the Belgian-dominated Government of Katanga.

The United Nations is, on behalf of all its members, in control of the finances of the Congo. It is now two months ago since I personally wrote to Mr. [Dag] Hammarskjöld [the UN Secretary General] to ask him where the money came from which is being used to pay the soldiers in Mobutu’s illegal army. I am still awaiting an answer.

One thing is certain, however, this money does not come from the revenue of the Congo. It is supplied from outside by those who wish to restore colonialism in practice by maintaining in office a puppet regime entirely financially dependent upon them.

The time has come to speak plainly. The danger in the Congo is not so much the possibility of a civil war between Africans, but rather a colonialist war, in which the colonial and imperialist powers hide behind African puppet regimes.

At this very moment, North Katanga is being laid waste by military units under command of a regular officer of the Belgian army, Colonel Crevecoeur, armed with the most modern weapons, supplied by Belgium.

Recruiting offices have been opened in South Africa, in France, and elsewhere, and wages of over four hundred pounds a month are being offered to former German Fascist officers and to former collaborators of Hitler and Mussolini in other countries in order to persuade them to enlist in an unholy war against the African people.

Where, I ask again, does the money come from to pay all of this modern and expensive armament which is now being deployed against unarmed peasants and villagers?

The rulers of the United States, of the United Kingdom, of France, and of the other Powers who are militarily allied with Belgium, must answer these questions.

Why did they express so loudly their indignation when the Soviet Union placed at the disposal of the legal Government of the Congo civilian aircraft and civilian vehicles? Why are they so silent when their ally, Belgium, openly supplies military aircraft and armoured vehicles to the rebels?

Why is it that no single member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has on any occasion addressed to Belgium any public rebuke for the flagrant breaches of the Security Council Resolution in which Belgium is every day indulging? Alas, the architects of this murder are many.

In Ghana we realize the great financial stakes which some Great Powers have in the Union Miniere and in other industrial and commercial undertakings in the Congo.

I would, however, ask these Powers these questions: Do they really believe that, ultimately, they can safeguard their investments and their interests in the Congo by conniving at a brutal and savage colonialist war?

Do they realize that they are sacrificing African lives to continue in Africa the cold war at the very time when all powers, both great and small, should be concentrating on the abolition of colonialism and the establishment of world peace.

Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito have died because they put their faith in the United Nations and because they refused to allow themselves to be used as stooges or puppets for external interests.

There is still time for those who have supported this cruel colonialist war in the Congo to change their policy, but time is running out.

The cynical planning of the murder of Patrice Lumumba and his colleagues is a final lesson for us all . We cannot ignore the fact that this crime shows every evidence of the most careful preparation and timing. First there came the handing over of Patrice Lumumba and others to the Belgian-controlled authorities in Katanga.

Next there came the contemptuous refusal of these same authorities to allow the United Nations conciliation Committee any access to the prisoners. From this came the final proof that the United Nations would not effectively intervene to save the lives of the Prime Minister or his colleagues. This was followed by the formation of the so - called new Kasavubu Government and the formation of the so-called New Kasavubu Government and the warning by Belgium to Belgian nationals to leave those parts of the Congo controlled by the legal government.

Finally came the story so reminiscent of Nazi and Fascist technique—the false account of an attempt to escape and the death of the prisoners following upon it.

What are the next steps in this plan? The information before me now is that the Kasavubu-Mobutu group has planned an offensive against Orientale Province in an attempt to secure a quick military victory before the Security Council can deal with the matter.

My information is that this plan has been made with the full knowledge of the French and Belgian Governments and has their full support.

Let me issue a most serious warning: Any such action, unless immediately denounced by the other members of the Security Council, will have a profound effect on African relations with the Great Powers.

Our dear brothers, Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okita are dead, and I ask you all to join with me in mourning the loss which the whole African continent has sustainted through their cruel murder. But their spirit is not dead, nor are the things for which they stood; African freedom, the unity and independence of Africa, and the final and complete destruction of colonialism and imperialism.

The colonialists and imperialists have killed them, but what they cannot do is to kill the ideals which we still preach and for which they sacrificed their lives.

In the Africa of the future their names will live for ever-more.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/speec ... mumba-1961

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Africa and the Collective West after the Start of Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 29, 2022
Oleg Pavlov

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It was not yesterday that the US and EU countries, as well as the famous constellation (which in addition to the US includes the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) started a hybrid war against Russia, including on the African continent.

They started it back in 2012, when it became clear that Vladimir Putin was back in charge and that this did not mean anything good for the West. Moreover, there was the realization that the victory in the Cold War was not a final victory over Russia, which not only revived but also began to claim great power status.

This was particularly evident during the first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi in October 2019 attended by representatives from all African states came, including 45 at the level of heads of state and government. The success of the summit was a “cold shower” for Western countries, which did not even make a serious effort to sabotage the event, apparently believing with their inherent arrogance that no one would come to the summit.

However, shortly after these events, Western countries began a feverish search to counter Moscow on the African front. It was rather chaotic at first, as the Western countries themselves did not have a deeply developed and coherent model of behavior at the time, and were oriented mainly towards countering the active policy of China’s infiltration on the continent.

But on February 24, 2022, everything changed. Russia’s operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine and protect the inhabitants of Donbass was perceived by the West (which rushed to accuse Moscow of “aggression”) as the last chance to save its fleeting monopoly in the military, political, financial and technological spheres. Moreover, in its usual mental matrix, it staked on a blitzkrieg and, by deafening everyone with furious Russophobic propaganda, on isolating Russia in the international arena with its subsequent liquidation as an actor and subject of international politics.

However, in the Arab-Muslim world and in Africa, this strategy has failed enormously. The African region, including its constituent Arab and Muslim countries, have refused to follow the footsteps of Western policies and have moved en masse (almost half the countries) away from condemning Russia in UN votes.

After the third vote, even more discouraging for the West, held on April 7 to block Russia’s continued participation in the Human Rights Council, with only ten African countries voting in favor of the document, the Western line on the Russian presence on the continent has hardened dramatically.

Although even before that, Western representatives, particularly from the US, had their hands full. As early as March, the frequency of US-African contacts, both direct and in video format, at the level of heads of state and ministers had increased considerably. More than 30 official meetings and phone calls took place. In March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended the Eighth High-level Dialogue Session of the African Union (AU) Commission and the US, and held talks with Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire Patrick Achi, Morocco’s Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch and Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra. He held video conferences with the President of Senegal Macky Sall, and the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa Naledi Pandor. There were meetings of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee, Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Akunna Cook, Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa David Satterfield with the leadership of Algeria, Ghana, Djibouti, Morocco, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia, Chad, Ethiopia, South Africa, African Union Commission, self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland.

Realizing that these contacts are not enough and do not lead to a complete blockade of Russia, Washington has stepped up preparations for the 14th Business Forum (Marrakesh, July 19-22, this year) and the second US-Africa summit (Washington, DC, tentatively September-October this year). Simultaneously, the US is trying by hook or by crook to “drag” the Ukrainian agenda into discussions at various African forums and is seeking (unsuccessfully so far) the consent of the African Union to hear Volodymyr Zelensky speak at one of its meetings, perhaps even at an AU Extraordinary Summit on Humanitarian Affairs, scheduled for May 25-28 in the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo. All these steps suggest a poorly concealed aim to disrupt the second Russian-African summit, initially planned for 2022.

This, of course, is not the end of the West’s anti-Russian activities in Africa. In addition to accusing Russia of allegedly “unprovoked aggression against peaceful Ukraine,” they attempt to widely implant into the political discourse and public consciousness in African countries the thesis that Moscow is responsible for the impending famine on the African continent, deliberately rearranging its causes and consequences.

Indeed, many African states are heavily dependent on Russian and Ukrainian grain supplies. Egypt, for example, by 85%. This is true of many other countries such as Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana. There is also a dependence on Russian potash and phosphate fertilizers, without which one cannot grow crops. However, Western countries, while making accusations against Moscow on this issue, forget to specify one important circumstance: the possible decline in grain supplies from Russia is primarily due to the unilateral and completely illegal sanctions imposed in circumvention of the UN, which are the main reason for the eventual problems with grain supplies. The second equally important reason is the large-scale supply of Western arms to Ukraine, which is designed to prolong the conflict and put Ukraine’s spring sowing campaign in doubt, if not disrupted.

Of course, the political efforts and information campaign to discredit Russia are only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the collective West is also working assiduously to drive Russian companies out of the African market and replace them with its own, as well as to prevent Russian economic operators from gaining access to new major tenders and contracts. The truth is, these efforts harm Africans themselves, not just Russia. Moscow, for example, is the leader in the nuclear industry and the West has nothing even remotely comparable in terms of technology to offer its partners on the African continent. Therefore, by blocking Rosatom, the West is effectively preventing Africans from solving their energy problems in the most efficient way and starting large-scale industrialization, thereby preserving the continent’s neocolonial dependence on American and European products.

All these anti-Russian policies have recently become systematic and comprehensive, involving many components, from those mentioned above to attempts to curtail Russo-African military and technical cooperation to controlling the supply of valuable ores and metals, such as coltan tantalum or lithium.

The fight for the African continent seems to be just unfolding. And much depends on the African states themselves, their willingness to fight for their sovereignty and to break their neocolonial dependence on Western states.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/04/ ... n-ukraine/

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SouthAfrican CP, Let’s build maximum unity to tackle oligarchs and the manipulation of our basic wealth and resources to build a just, equal society
4/28/22 11:36 AM

Let’s build maximum unity to tackle oligarchs and the manipulation of our basic wealth and resources to build a just, equal society

SACP statement on the 28th anniversary of our 1994 breakthrough

South Africa has an oligarchy, whose members are wallowing in whopping amounts of monumental wealth. While heaping up multi-millions of rand in dividends and executive remuneration, the oligarchs intransigently deprive the workers, the downtrodden exploited in the economy, of any notable improvements in their terms of employment including wage increases. Here we are referring to the likes of Sibanye-Stillwater CEO, Neal Froneman, who the company paid an astronomical R300 million in 2021 as its annual report reveals.

The SACP expresses its unwavering support for the National Union of Mineworkers and for the co-operation it has forged in struggle with the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, in pursuit of the common interests of the downtrodden at Sibanye-Stillwater. The two unions are leading a strike declared on 9 March 2022 by the workers, which has today entered its 47th day.

Under the leadership of Froneman, who without doubt wants millions for himself, as showed by his 2021 annual pay, Sibanye-Stillwater is offering the workers increases of merely 7.8 per cent to their peanut wages in year one, 7.2 per cent in year two and 6.8 per cent in year three of a three-year bargaining cycle starting in 2022. The workers have rejected the insult. They are continuing with their industrial action, actively confronting inequality in the distribution of production income.

Uncritical economists and commentators in the print media, on television screens, on radio, and on the internet say the workers are unreasonable and Froneman is the reasonable man. This is obviously gibberish to any standard of social justice. The workers who have had to embark on the strike at Sibanye-Stillwater will not in their entire hard-working life receive the multi-millions in rand value terms that the oligarch and his counterparts in other sectors received in just one year, 2021.

At MTN, which together with Vodacom makes up a duopoly in the mobile information and telecommunications technology (ICT) network sector, the CEO Ralph Mupita was paid R84.2 million in just one year, 2021. Like other behemoths in the ICT network sector in other parts of the world, the duopoly raked in huge amounts of profits during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when many sectors were under lockdown and an increasing number of people worked from home, with digital connectivity and mobile data as key means of production. The ICT network behemoths drove up the cost of mobile data and other digital communication pathways, relying on their dominance. The auctioning of the high frequency broadband spectrum will deepen the Vodacom and MTN duopoly, its top two beneficiaries or capturers of the lion’s share.

The working-class and other progressive sections of our society need to deepen the struggle to achieve transformation in, de-monopolise and diversify the ICT network sector and every other sector of our economy. Another key developmental imperative in the ICT network sector is to bring down the cost of mobile data and digital connectivity. Just like water, the source of life, the high frequency broadband spectrum and mobile data are key means of production and are increasingly taking the centre stage in every economic activity and broader social transformation and development.

Compare the staggering personal acquisition of wealth by the oligarchs in the mining, information and telecommunications technology network sector, and in other sectors such as the banking sector and the pharmaceutical sector, with the likely elimination of the miserable R350 Social Relief of Distress grant—if the government will not extend it beyond the end of March 2023. This is a painful reality which must be challenged through workplace distributive and broader political struggles, including redistributive struggles.

Which is why, on this day, the 28th anniversary of our 1994 democratic breakthrough, the SACP reiterates its call that the government should extend the Social Relief of Distress grant beyond the end of March 2023 and gradually improve it to build a foundation for, and transform it into, a universal basic income grant.

In 1994, while others proclaimed, “Free at last!”, the SACP stressed the struggle had to continue, with the transition we achieved in that year a democratic breakthrough, a new basis for intensifying our uninterrupted struggle towards lasting freedom, complete social emancipation and a just, equal society. The position the SACP adopted is as relevant as ever, considering the lived experience of the masses 28 years later.

For sure, there are commendable gains benefitting millions of our people in housing, education, healthcare, social grants, electricity coverage, social infrastructure, and in other areas. However, there are two major problems.

The first problem is that South Africa has a population of 12.5 million active and discouraged work-seekers who are devastated by a long-term structural crisis of systemic unemployment and the failure of the neoliberal policy prescriptions. Together with millions of others, they are devastated by the crisis of social reproduction (the inability to support themselves because of the endemic crisis of capitalism) and the persisting high levels of poverty and inequality.

The second problem is that many of the post-1994 social gains are now under the real threat of erosion because of neoliberal policy prescriptions and state capture. The national electricity utility, Eskom, for example, has been weakened by both neoliberal macroeconomic policy orientation and state capture. Neoliberalism started first under the economic policy called GEAR, imposed in 1996. At the end of that decade, a White Paper on Energy was adopted under the neoliberal GEAR trajectory, depriving Eskom of investment in new, developmental power generation capacity to keep pace with the commendable massive electrification expansion of post-1994.

It is because of both neoliberalism and governance decay, mismanagement and looting under state capture that South Africa is frequently plunged into rolling nationwide load-shedding, did not build capacity for a just green transition and is facing frequent breakdowns in old power stations which are increasingly costly to maintain. The unfolding digital industrial revolution and trends in energy transition in the production process and products, such as the transition underway in the global automotive industry towards new energy vehicles, require a massive amount of consistently reliable power generation—sensitive to the environment. As things stand, South Africa is hamstrung by ailing, unreliable and insufficient power generation capacity. Needless to mention the failure to meet energy needs of the people and drive inclusive growth in the here and now.

To meet the economic and broader social transformation and development needs of the masses, we need to forge widest possible working-class unity and patriotic and left popular fronts, to tackle the manipulation of the basic wealth and resources of our country and exploitation by sections of individuals and elitist groupings, be they white or black. Intensifying the struggle against neoliberal and state capture networks and their agendas and safeguarding our policy space and democratic sovereignty are the integral strategic tasks of this just struggle.

The SACP calls on the working-class and progressive strata to unite against exploitation by the oligarchs and the crisis levels of mass poverty, unemployment, social reproduction and the inequality that the oligarchs are deepening. The oligarchs are deepening all these problems, including through retrenchments.

On this day, the 28th anniversary of our April 1994 democratic breakthrough, the SACP once again says: “A luta continua!”

http://solidnet.org/article/SouthAfrica ... l-society/

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Notes from Wartorn Ethiopia, Part II
April 28, 2022
By Ann Garrison – Apr 20, 2022

Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is experiencing a building boom, which includes all the foreign embassies near the airport. The din of construction is non-stop on weekdays. Lots of sky high office buildings and condos underway.

Even the Embassy of Bangladesh is building new floors right across the street from my alleyway hotel. Mercedes drive in and out, and I wonder how such a poor country affords them, but Mercedes seem to be the ambassadorial vehicle of choice. Governments like Bangladesh, which don’t maintain embassies in many other countries, no doubt maintain them here because Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union, and with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam coming online, Ethiopia is emerging as a regional powerhouse, despite how much that dismays US policymakers.

The European Union embassy flies its flag behind a concrete wall topped with barbed-wire several blocks around the corner from where I’m staying. The Embassy of Bangladesh doesn’t take such elaborate precautions because, I imagine, they have no anxieties about sudden anti-Western outbursts.

Curiously, it seems as though a number of high-rise buildings have been partially constructed, then abandoned midway, and they’re unsightly to say the least. Last night I asked a new friend why and she said that Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) elites had begun building them, then had gone off to Mekelle and left them that way after being forced from power. She also showed me the small garden next to the condo building she lives in and said that she manages and defends it—the garden—against developers who want to build another high-rise on it.

With regard to the partially constructed buildings, someone else told me that the real problem is a shortage of cement.

Connecting via social media
To be in Addis, you wouldn’t think there was a war going unless you were watching television. I was invited onto several local television stations to talk about what I’d seen in IDP camps near the front lines in the north, US strategies for toppling the government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and the pernicious sanctions legislation on the floors of both House and Senate, H.R. 6600 and S.B. 3199.

I count 10 foreign journalists, including two Canadians, one Russian, and one New Zealander based in Paris, who oppose the divide-and-conquer imperial pressures coming from the US and its allies. We’re so few that we’re asked to interview on Ethiopian outlets whenever any of us come here, and via Zoom from wherever we live.

We all write for dissident press, and these Ethiopians outlets, most of them state outlets, found us on social media. They commonly introduce me as a print, radio, and social media journalist. Last night I met a Le Monde Diplomatique reporter who had of course never heard of any outlets I write or produce radio for but knew me on Twitter.

House Resolution 6600 would make way for social media censorship
These connections made via social media explain the establishment’s desperate determination to control the narrative by controlling social media, as proposed in House Resolution 6600 , the brutal sanctions bill absurdly named the “Ethiopia Stabilization, Peace, and Democracy Act.”

This legislation, now on the House floor, resolves that, “The Secretary of State, in coordination with the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the heads of other relevant federal departments and agencies” develop a strategy to “combat hate speech and disinformation in Ethiopia, including efforts to coordinate with social media companies to mitigate the effects of social media content generated outside of the United States focused on perpetuating the civil war and other conflicts in Ethiopia, including through hate speech and language inciting violence.”

In other words, they don’t want us talking to each other in an uncensored public forum, without the Western state and corporate media filters they’re accustomed to relying on. And it’s not just “social media content generated outside of the United States” that they’re worried about. Particularly effective activists and collective Twitter hubs created by the Ethiopian and Eritrean diasporas have already been removed from Twitter altogether. One, Dr. Simon Tesfamariam, recounted his own Twitter ban and that of others here, calling for #NoMore Censorship of Africa’s Roving Digital Army of Peace.

The success of that digital army of peace is manifest in Ethiopian streets, from Lalibela to Dessie, and the capital Addis Ababa, where taxis sport the message #NoMore, sometimes with subheads like “Say No to Neocolonialism.” I know four of the founders of the viral #NoMore movement in the US, and two of them have been banned from Twitter.

I first saw #NoMore on one of the three-wheeled taxis known as bajaj in the mountain town of Lalibela, site of the rock-hewn Ethiopian Orthodox churches built by King Lalibela in the 12th century. I had gone straight to Lalibela from Addis, and when I shared my amazement at seeing “#NoMore” on the back of a bajaj there, photographer Jemal Countess told me, “Oh you’ll see a lot of those.” I briefly became preoccupied with getting a photograph of a bajaj with #NoMore emblazoned on the back until I realized that he was right. You see a lot of those, so there are lots of opportunities to take pictures.

More hashtag signage includes #GERD and #ItsMyDam, referring to the national hope invested in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which just came online though not at full power yet. The GERD promises to generate enough electricity for all of Ethiopia and some of its neighbors, ending the electricity poverty holding most African nations back.

It’s no wonder that the US wants to stop hashtags like #NoMore and #ItsMyDam from going viral but they aren’t hate speech and they aren’t inciting violence.

More next week.

https://orinocotribune.com/notes-from-w ... a-part-ii/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu May 05, 2022 2:37 pm

France: Mali’s Defense Decision Won’t Affect Withdrawal Plans

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France says that Mali's decision on defense accords won't affect the withdrawal of French troops. May. 3, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@Afropages

Published 3 May 2022

On Tuesday, a French foreign ministry spokesman said that Mali's decision to quit the military cooperation agreement with the country would not affect the military withdrawal.

On Tuesday, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman announced that Mali's government's decision to refuse to agree on military cooperation with the country after it fell out with the ruling junta was "unjustified" would not affect the military extraction of French troops.

According to the French spokesperson, Paris "considers that this decision is unjustified and absolutely contests any violation of the bilateral legal framework." On Monday, Bamako announced that it would withdraw from the 2014 accords, alleging "flagrant violations" of its sovereignty by French troops.

After the rising tensions with the military-controlled government and two coups in the country, France started to remove the military from its Barkhane force from Mali. "France will continue the withdrawal in good order of its military presence in Mali, in line with its commitments to its partners," added the spokesperson.

The tension emerged between the countries as diplomats have said that the UN Security Council held a closed-door session on Mali on Tuesday at Russia's request. Mali's government has passed some complaints to the international organization on reportedly violations of its airspace by French forces.


In 2014, the French-Malian defense accords were signed following the Paris intervention to stop a jihadist offensive. The relationship between the countries has got cold. After the first military coup in 2020, the junta resisted international pressure to set a timetable for a swift return to democratic, civilian rule.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Fra ... -0025.html

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Massacres in West Darfur: Depopulation campaign on mineral-rich lands by Sudan’s military junta?

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is led by Sudan’s military junta’s second-in-command, are accused of the massacres in Darfur in the last week of April, which led to at least 200 deaths and the displacement of around 100,00. Local sources say the armed forces were complicit

May 05, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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(Photo: IGS/Twitter)

Around 100,000 people have been displaced as a result of the massacres which unfolded in Sudan’s West Darfur State between April 22 and April 30, according to a flash update by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Monday, May 2.

At least 200 deaths were confirmed by the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD) on April 30 after four people were killed in the State’s capital city El Geneina. Violence spread to the capital after starting around 80 kilometers away in the town of Kereinik, engulfing several small villages in between. 24 of the total killed are children and 23 are elderly.

95 people were killed after being shot in the head. Another 51 were shot in the chest and 19 in the abdomen. Five people were burnt to death. The survivors are suffering a severe shortage of food, clean water and medicine. Most of the victims were Internally Displaced People (IDP) living in camps after having fled their homes during the civil war.

Eyewitnesses, civil society organizations and the Resistance Committees (RCs) that are leading the country-wide protests since the military coup on October 25 last year have blamed the notorious Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the massacres. West Darfur’s governor Khamis Abdallah Abkar also confirmed the involvement of the RSF. The RSF is led by the military junta’s second-in-command, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemeti.

“Military junta is fully involved in this massacre”

The de-facto military junta that seized power in the coup “is fully involved in this massacre,” said Mohammad (name changed), whose uncle and two cousins were killed in El Geneina’s market on April 29, allegedly by RSF men.

Speaking on behalf of the RC in the city’s Al Shati neighborhood, he told Peoples Dispatch that the military junta is “using all of its military might and planning” to aid the RSF in carrying out an alleged depopulation campaign over the mineral rich land containing gold, diamonds, uranium and copper.

Other Janjaweed militias – from which the RSF was organized in 2013 – are also involved in the attacks. Utilizing the conflict over land and water between the nomadic herdsmen and the sedentary farmers and pastoralists, which has been intensifying since the increased desertification since the mid-1980s, the Sudanese state created these militias from the nomads in the 2000s during the civil war in Darfur.

They were armed and trained to suppress the rebel groups which sprung up among the sedentary communities in Darfur. These sedentary communities were politically and economically marginalized under the regime of former dictator Omar al-Bashir. They are also an impediment in the way of cashing in on the mineral wealth of the region.

Bloody Gold

After displacing them in millions through a campaign of massacres, rapes, torture and burning down of entire villages, the Janjaweed with the connivance of the state had taken control of the bulk of the gold mines in this region by the end of the decade. Over the next four years – between 2010 and 2014 – an estimated 48,000 kg of gold, worth over USD 2 million, was illegally exported from war-torn Darfur.

After much of these Janjaweed militias were formally organized as the RSF in 2013 under the command of Hemeti, he quickly defeated his rival Janjaweed leaders, and brought all the gold mines in the region under his control by 2017 after the RSF took over the mines in Jebel Amer.

The “only large concession operational in Darfur” is under the control of the gold-trading company Al Gunade, owned by Hemeti’s brother and his brother’s two sons, according to an investigation by Global Witness. Hemeti himself is on the company’s board of directors.

By the time al-Bashir was ousted from power in April 2019 by the pro-democracy December Revolution which began in 2018, the RSF had become so wealthy that it donated over USD 1 billion to stabilize the finances of Sudan’s central bank.

Despite the dictator’s overthrow by the revolution, the inner circle of Bashir’s generals, including Hemeti, managed to retain power by deploying the RSF to clear the sit-in demonstration outside the army HQ in Sudan’s capital Khartoum on June 3, 2019.

An RSF captain told the BBC that the order to clear the demonstration was issued by Abdul Rahim Dagalo, Hemiti’s brother who owns Al Gunade. What ensued was a massacre of over 100 pro-democracy protesters, followed by a week of terror against the residents of capital as the RSF took control over the city, beating, torturing and killing residents who stepped out to the streets, in effect confining the population to a house arrest.

The RSF was then incorporated into the state’s security forces under the subsequent joint civilian-military transitional government formed in August 2019, after the military yielded a share of state power (taken back after the coup last October) to centrist and right-wing parties.

The Janjaweed militias which were not under the RSF have not been disbanded and disarmed. These militias retain close links with the RSF and receive its support during attacks. Mohammad argues that the RSF is “a natural outgrowth of the Janjaweed militia” and they “are inextricably linked”.

The current spiral of killings began with an attack on Kereinik on April 22 by these militias, supposedly in retaliation after two nomadic herdsmen were found dead in this town, which is dominated by farmers. According to the UN, 30%, or 146,700 of the 487,000 residents in this town are IDPs from the war living in camps.

The Um Dwayne camp was burnt down by the Janjaweed militias in this attack – for the second time. At least 20,000 people were displaced (in many cases re-displaced) as their homes were burnt down, the Darfur Bar Association said on April 23.

West Darfur governor Khamis Abdallah Abkar said that after this attack, he had reinforced the 25 vehicles of security forces, mainly the SAF, by dispatching another 12 vehicles, with 10 fighters in each. But the SAF had to withdraw because they were massively outnumbered by the attack that followed on April 24, he maintains.

Adam Regal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Displaced and Refugees, said there were only 15 security vehicles, which retreated when the attack started.

Army collaborating with RSF?

Given that the region had been witnessing regular large and well-coordinated attacks by Janjaweed militias and the RSF itself month after month, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands, 15 vehicles were bound to be an under-deployment.

The heavily armed attackers, wearing RSF uniforms, came in from all sides on 300 landcruisers along with several motorbikes and cars, according to the West Darfur committee of the pro-democracy group TAM. The four-wheel drives and weapons that were used in this attack are military grade and cannot be procured by ordinary citizens, the Coordination of Resistance Committees in El Geneina pointed out.

Mohammad believes that the SAF is guilty of more than simply withdrawing in the face of an overwhelming attack. He accuses the SAF of actively collaborating with the RSF and deceiving the victims into their trap.

He reiterated the allegations that those who had fled the town and taken to the mountains, armed with relatively smaller weapons which are awash in the region, were convinced to disarm and return to the town on the guarantee that the SAF would protect them. They were convinced after being tricked into believing that the SAF plane flying at low-altitude over Kereinik at the time was brought in to bomb the Janjaweed militias should they attack.

Just as the attack started, the plane disappeared from sight of those defenselessly trapped and encircled, while the SAF vehicles beat a retreat. TAM ‘s West Darfur committee added in a statement that “the plane was sent not for the purpose of protecting citizens, but to explore the region and provide anti-citizen intelligence to the RSF.” Initial reports indicated that 80,000 families had been displaced in this attack and 168 people killed.

While most media referred to this massacre as “tribal violence”, it is important to note that most farmers and nomads are not racially or ethnically distinct groups. Nevertheless, the largely Arabic-speaking nomads are portrayed as Arab tribes and the sedentary farmers and pastoralists who speak local languages are deemed to be non-Arab, African tribes. The massacres in Darfur are thus dressed up as a “tribal conflict.”

Sharing a video of the rows and rows of land-cruiser pick-up trucks carrying the heavily armed and uniformed RSF men on their invasion of Kereinik, the twitter handle of @SudanZUprising pointed out “No “tribe” has this amount of manpower, vehicles or artillery. Any reference to tribal clashes is categorically false.”


IDP and refugees camp spokesperson Regal added that “the government collaborates with the militias, supplies them with weapons and logistics, and guarantees immunity from prosecution.” He maintains that “the real purpose of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur is to take over their lands. Now the final step is to get rid of the witnesses in the IDP camps so no one can contest the new settlers’ claims.” Allegations are being made that the new settlers the government is bringing in include the Arabic-speaking “tribes”, often fighters from neighboring countries.

Violence spreads to West Darfur’s capital

Footage of the destruction in Kereinik show thick black plumes of smoke rising from the burning houses, markets and camps, as armed RSF men roamed the streets. Municipal buildings and a police station were also burnt. Medical workers, along with some patients, were reportedly killed in the attack on the Kereinik hospital, which has since been shut.

Many victims injured in this attack were transferred to the hospital 80 kilometers away in El Geneina. Later that evening, the Coordination of El Geneina Resistance Committees reported that heavy firing had begun in parts of this city. 26,700 of the 646,000 residents here are IDPs. This hospital here too had to be shut down and all the patients evacuated on April 25, when the intermittent firing escalated to blasts and shelling as the RSF clashed with rebel forces who fought back.

Silent protests were held across the country on April 26 condemning the military junta for being complicit in and responsible for the violence spreading in Darfur again. Later on that day, joint security forces were deployed in large numbers to bring the area under control. Along with the SAF, these included the RSF. While the rebel groups which shook hands with the military after the Juba peace agreement were also supposed to be included in this force, this is yet to materialize.

While the intensity of the violence and scale of the attacks have reduced after the deployment, the killings in El Geneina continued over several days, at least until April 30 when the CCSD confirmed a total of at least 200 deaths since April 22. The “surgical emergency is still operating at half capacity”, while the emergency services for women and childbirth, and the department of internal medicine “are not working”, the CCSD added. It called for “concerted efforts to fully return to work in the hospital.” Reports of violence and looting by armed militias came also from Al-Fasher in the neighboring North Darfur State that day.

Hundreds of thousands displaced since the Juba peace agreement

Across the Darfur region, at least 300,000 people have been killed and over 2.5 million displaced in the course of the civil war which peaked in the 2000s. While the Juba peace agreement was signed in October 2020 between most of the rebel groups and the military, critics maintain that it was merely a power-sharing agreement. Without addressing the questions of land and water, the return of the IDPs to the lands from which they were displaced, and the disarming of the Janjaweed, this agreement has brought no peace to the restive region.

The rebel groups which were offered a share in state-power as a part of this agreement went on to support the military coup a year later in October 2021. Last year alone, another 430,000 were displaced in Darfur, followed by many more tens of thousands, including in El Geneina and Kereinik, in the early months of 2022. While some displaced in the recent surge of violence in West Darfur have begun returning to their homes, anywhere between 85,000 to 115,000 remain displaced, according to the UN.

“Families have lost their food stocks and sources of income (labor wages from working on farms, domestic work or in the market). Prices of basic commodities such as sorghum, sugar, millet, and oil have soared, and people have no cash or disposable income.. Many IDPs have not eaten anything but green mangoes and sorghum for the past five days as all their food stocks were looted or burnt,” the OCHA said on May 2. With no water containers available, “an estimated 90 per cent of the IDPs are drinking water from unprotected sources.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/05/05/ ... ary-junta/

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Out of Africa: Rich continent, poor people
Posted May 05, 2022 by Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Originally published: JOMO on May 2, 2022 (more by JOMO)

KUALA LUMPUR: Capital flight from the global South is immense, with widespread adverse effects. A new book proposes measures to curb, even reverse capital flight from Africa. It also offers pragmatic lessons for many developing countries.

On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa extends pioneering work begun much earlier. The editors–Leonce Ndikumana and James Boyce–estimate Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has lost more than U.S.$2 trillion to capital flight in the last half century!

SSA currently loses U.S.$65 billion annually–more than yearly official development assistance (ODA) inflows. The book’s studies carefully investigate natural resource exploitation–of South African minerals, Ivorian cocoa, and Angolan oil and diamonds.

Such forensic country analyses are crucial to more effectively check capital flight. Outflows since the 1980s from the three countries have been massive: U.S.$103 billion from Angola, U.S.$55 billion from Cote d’Ivoire, and U.S.$329 billion from South Africa in 2018 dollars.

Capital flight has been much more than cumulative external debt. Annual outflows were between 3.3% and 5.3% of national income. Nigeria, South Africa and Angola account for the most capital outflows from SSA, with Cote d’Ivoire seventh.

Resource booms
As governments get more revenue from natural resources, the fiscal ‘social contract’ is eroded. When people pay taxes, they expect state spending to benefit the public. But with more revenue from resources–via state monopolies, royalties and taxes–governments become less accountable to their own citizens.

Gaining and maintaining access to foreign credit has similar effects. Developing country governments then focus on ingratiating themselves with friendly foreign donor governments to get ODA, and on enhancing their credit ratings.

Hence, such regimes have less political need to provide ‘public goods’, including services, let alone accelerate social progress. Thus, erosion of the fiscal ‘social contract’ undermines not only public wellbeing, but also state legitimacy.

To secure power, ruling cliques often rely on ‘clientelism’–patronage or patron-client relations–typically on regional, ethnic, tribal, religious or sectarian lines. Their regimes inevitably provoke dissent–including oppositional ethno-populism and civil unrest, even armed insurgencies.

Unsurprisingly, such regimes believe their choices are limited. Another option is repression–which typically rises as the status quo is threatened. The resulting sense of insecurity spreads from the public to the elite, worsening capital flight.

Exploiting valuable natural resources not only generates export earnings, but also attracts foreign investments. One result is ‘Dutch disease’ as the national currency rises in value–reducing other exports and jobs, inevitably hurting development prospects.

Thus, vast private fortunes have been made and illicitly transferred abroad. Ruling elites and their allies rarely only rely on either state or market to become richer. The book shows how both state and market strengthen private and personal power and influence.

Plundering Africa
The book’s case studies show how resource extraction has been central to capital flight. In all three countries, the efficacy of fiscal policy tools–especially to foster investments for development–has been undermined.

Outflows have increased with economic liberalization, as unrecorded financial outflows–via the current account–grow with freer trade. Thus, trade-related financial transactions enable corruption and capitalflight.

In Côte d’Ivoire–the world’s top cocoa producer–rents initially came from supply chains connecting farmers to consumers. Corrupt partnerships–connecting domestic elites to foreign businesses–have been crucial to such arrangements.

Thus, natural resource primary commodity exports have enabled illicit capital flows. Ivorian cocoa exports have been consistently under-reported–with trade statistics of major importers showing massive under-invoicing by exporters.

Post-colonial political settlements have given a few privileged access to resource rents. With capital flight thus enabled, successive Ivorian regimes have been less obliged to spend more on development or public wellbeing.

Due to the cocoa boom, the post-colonial ‘Ivorian miracle’ ended when prices fell. The bust triggered a political crisis, culminating in civil war. But the crunch also meant the country could no longer service its foreign debt.

In Angola too, natural resources worsened its protracted civil wars. After these ruinous conflicts, oil rents enriched the triumphant nepotistic regime. This enabled the control to gain control of more, even as most Angolans continued to live in destitution.

Angola’s massive oil exports mainly benefited the small elite of cronies around the president. They failed to develop the economy or improve most lives. All this has been enabled by ‘helpful’ professionals who have enriched themselves doing so.

While benefiting its elite and foreign transnationals, Angola’s ‘oil curse’ has blocked balanced and sustainable development of its economy. Despite rapidly depleting its oil reserves, Angola and most Angolans have benefited little.

South Africa–SSA’s second largest economy after Nigeria–seems less reliant on natural resources. Post-apartheid economic liberalization has enabled capital flight as private corporate interests–especially the influential minerals-energy complex–quickly took advantage of the new dispensation.

By under-invoicing their exports, mineral interests have been engaged in massive capital flight and tax evasion. Meanwhile, business cronies have enriched themselves in new ways, e.g., in the state’s electric power sector. Such abuses were exposed by the Gupta family scandal, leading to then President Jacob Zuma’s downfall.

Stemming capital flight
‘State capture’ by politically influential nationals have undermined government regulatory capacities with help from transnational enablers. Ostensible ‘good governance’ reforms have enabled capital flight and tax evasion–by undermining ‘developmental governance’, including prudential regulation.

Institutional environments, mechanisms and enablers facilitate capital flight, tax evasion and wealth accumulation offshore. With often complex, varied and changing facilitation, capital flight has shifted massive wealth abroad for elites.

Transnational financial networks have eased capital outflows–at the expense of productive investments, good jobs and social wellbeing. Capital flight has worsened financing, including budgetary gaps–aggravating related social deprivations.

Wealth creation enhances the economic pie, but distribution depends on who appropriates it. Improved understanding of such varied and ever-changing relations of appropriation is crucial to effectively curb this haemorrhage.

Greater awareness should inspire and inform better measures to check capital flight from the global South. Instead of the Washington Consensus ‘good governance’ mantra, a developmental governance agenda is needed.

Hence, curbing capital flight is crucial for financing sustainable development. Checking capital flight and related abuses–such as trade mis-invoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and public asset acquisition by elites–requires well-coordinated efforts at both national and international levels.

All researchers, policymakers and regulators will gain from the book’s forensic analyses of financial, fiscal and other such abuses. International financial institutions now have little excuse for continuing to enable the capital flight and tax evasion still bleeding the global South.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/05/out-of-africa/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat May 07, 2022 1:49 pm

Mali Accuses French Troops of Attempting To Hide Mass Graves

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Malian official said that the French army is trying to hide mass graves. May. 5, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@DeccanChronicle

Published 5 May 2022

An official of the National Transitional Council of Mali said that French forces are trying to hide mass graves in the country.

Abubakar Sidiki Fomba, a member of the National Transitional Council of Mali, reported that French forces are trying to conceal the mass grave in the country for which they are liable.

"The French military lies fabricates facts," told Fomba to Sputnik. He added that "if there are mass graves, then they [the French military] are responsible for them." The official said that the country's authorities had opened an investigation into possible nuclear waste.

Last month Malian forces allegedly found mass graves in the vicinities of the former French military base in Gossi. Paris said that the bodies were planted there by Russian mercenaries.

Mali and Russia have previously accused France of hiding "the obvious inhuman crimes of the French military with the help of gross and unsubstantiated informational falsification," especially in the face of the recent allegations of the discovery of mass graves near the former French base in the Malian territory.


On Monday, Mali renounced its military cooperation agreement with France. In 2014, Paris created a special task force Takuba to fight terrorism in the Sahel.

Given some disagreements with the African country's transitional government ruling after a military takeover, Paris had to remove its troops from Mali.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mal ... -0017.html

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France Shifting Blame on Russia in Mali as Paris is Losing Influence & Control in Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 6, 2022
Ekaterina Blinova

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A mass grave discovered by Malian soldiers near a vacated French base prompted Paris to accuse a private Russian paramilitary organisation, Wagner Group, of planting corpses there to smear the French Armed Forces. However, Bamako renounced its military cooperation agreement with France on 2 May following the gruesome discovery.

“France is desperate to maintain its influence and control of West Africa on which it depends for its own economy and will do anything to discredit the government of Mali and of course any Russian assistance it is receiving,” says Christopher C. Black, international criminal lawyer with 20 years of experience in war crimes and international relations. “France has prevented the development of the West African nations by controlling their currencies and their governments and has overthrown governments they do not like. We saw that with their arrest of President Gbagbo in Cote D’Ivoire in 2010 and then delivering him to the hands of the ICC which has held him ever since when there is no evidence whatsoever against him.”

Mali announced that it had requested help from Russian private paramilitary organisation Wagner on 25 September, following French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to pull out from the landlocked African country in June 2021. Macron’s change of heart was triggered by Vice President Assimi Goita’s removal of the civilian interim leadership and placing himself in charge of the transitional government in May 2021.

The announced withdrawal of at least half of France’s 5,000-strong contingent marked the end of Paris’ Operation Barkhane in the country. The anti-terror initiative was launched by France in August 2014 in cooperation with Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger (G5 Sahel), which were shattered by the spread of terrorist activities stemming from the collapse of the Muammar Gaddafi government in Libya in 2011.

Bamako’s decision to hire Wagner Group specialists triggered a storm of criticism from France and other EU states, who claimed that Moscow was behind the deal. The Russian Foreign Ministry refuted the claims, explaining that Wagner has nothing to do with the Russian government. For his part, Mali’s Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga said that after France’s “unilateral” decision to withdraw troops from Mali, Bamako had no other options but to seek out alternatives to defend itself.

“The series of coups recently in West Africa (Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso) indicate that French influence is declining as these nations finally are able to break the colonial stranglehold on them,” says Black. “That Russia’s influence is growing in the region is interesting and brings us memories of the Soviet support of liberation movements across Africa in prior years. The continuous allegations against Wagner and Russian mercenaries fit into NATO aggressive propaganda against Russia, and [it] has to be seen in that context.”

The lawyer notes that the West has made similar accusations regarding Libya, which was bombed and destroyed by NATO. He highlights that France and the NATO bloc has long been exercising a selective justice approach.

“Since the French – when they kicked out Gbagbo in Cote D’Ivoire supported Outtuara as the new leader who committed many massacres against the people who supported Gbagbo in 2010, and turned a blind eye to and supported those massacres, one can reasonably assume that the mass grave near their former base contains the victims of their forces, not of Russian mercenaries,” Black points out.

‘It’s Up to Mali to Dig to the Bottom of This’

The discovery of a mass grave outside a military base in Gossi, northern Mali, has exacerbated the already tense relations between Bamako and Paris. The bodies were found two days after French forces left the base.

A preliminary investigation by the Malian military said that the state of the bodies’ decomposition “indicates that this mass grave existed well before the [French] handover” of the facility to the Malian side. Local media alleged that the corpses may have been those of a group of Malian shepherds who had gone missing prior to the French military pull-out from Gossi.

The French military’s record of alleged war crimes in the country adds to the suspicions that the people found in the mass grave could have been kidnapped and killed by the French military.

“Let’s go with the facts,” says Alessandro Bruno, geopolitical analyst and political observer at Lombardi Letter. “The alleged mass grave is located in an area close to one of the main French bases. So that already would be rather incriminating. Apparently, according to local sources, the bodies were in a state of high decomposition, suggesting that whatever happened did not happen at the time of their burial.”

The French military has denied responsibility and claimed that the Wagner Group deliberately brought and dumped the bodies near the Gossi base to smear the French Army. The French released grainy drone footage of unidentified, allegedly Caucasian, men in military gear manipulating bodies near the facility. When asked by the BBC to present a higher-quality video, the French military said it couldn’t do so for “security reasons.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry commented on the allegations, saying that French authorities were trying to “shift the blame” for their sins amid the Malian military’s greater “success in cleansing the republic from the terrorist threat” than French forces had in over nine years of fighting. Moscow called for a thorough investigation into the killings of Malian civilians and urged the French to assist the probe.

“The only people who can conduct an investigation are the Malian authorities, whose country it is,” says Black. “Certainly not the French who are involved and certainly no one from the NATO gang who are bent on discrediting Russia at every opportunity.”

The lawyer expects that the West will overlook the alleged French crimes: previously it has turned a blind eye to the crimes of the USA, Canada, Britain, Belgium in central Africa, East Africa, etc and the Horn of Africa, as well as the conflicts in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia.

“France is the leading military power in the European Union,” says Bruno. “With that kind of ‘prestige’, France is eager to avoid even being reminded of its activities in the Sahel. I think that the press has been very happy to deflect any negative attention from European states’ activities in Africa, in the Sahel, or in the Middle East.”

‘Russia is Always to Blame’

Meanwhile, Russia has been turned into a “scapegoat” which is used by the West to evade responsibility for its misdeeds, the observers say.

“Russia has now become what is referred to as the ‘fall guy’ for any atrocity occurring anywhere in the world,” says Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief and military intelligence officer. “It is always convenient for the Western media and governments to blame Russia without any regard for the actual facts relating to what happened. Note for example the ridiculous reports that the Russian soldiers have been the ‘butchers of Syria’ while in fact, they have saved the country from Islamic atrocities. There will no doubt be more of this.”

Furthermore, “Russia the bogeyman” is the major justification for the continued existence of the Cold War-era NATO bloc, the ongoing arms race, and the huge profits of the Western military-industrial complex, according to Professor Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on International Order and author of 10 books including “Building a Just World Order.”

According to the former UN expert, one should expect more evidence-free allegations and false flag operations against Russia and its private paramilitary organisations in the coming weeks. “Meanwhile we know of many foreign mercenaries and private security companies working for the US and NATO in Ukraine,” says de Zayas.

“There is plenty for investigative journalists to dig their teeth into,” if they want to uncover the level of US, Canada, UK, French overt and covert involvement in the Ukraine crisis, the Ukrainian military atrocities against civilians and Russian prisoners of war (POWs), and the actual fighting, according to the professor.

“To all impartial observers, it appears that France was caught red-handed in the commission of a war crime in Mali,” says Joe Quinn, political commentator and author based in Paris. “Luckily for France, media outlets in the ‘international community’ had already been working hard to portray the Russian military operation in Ukraine as, effectively, one big war crime. It was logical, therefore, to shift the focus on to Russian actions in Ukraine in order to distract from French actions in Mali in order to maintain France’s unwarranted reputation as being a ‘force for good’ in Mali.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/06/108998/

The DRC’s Entry into the East African Community: A Rose with Thorns?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 6, 2022
Edouard Bizimana

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In a world that is becoming increasingly interdependent, it seems that regional integration is a preferred path for addressing many of the challenges of globalization.

This is all the more true because it is currently impossible to live in isolation at the risk of being excluded from the progress that globalization brings. Globalization does not only bring benefits but also challenges that can only be solved in a global context. The integration of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) corresponds to this logic and the speed with which the process of integration of the DRC into this Сommunity would appear to prove that the other members of the Сommunity have understood this well in advance.

The security challenge must be taken seriously to enable the Congolese people to live in peace and thus benefit from the immense wealth that their country and the countries of the region abound. Regional integration must promote peace because no integration, no development can be envisaged without a climate of peace. It should be noted that the existence of joint projects between Burundi, Rwanda and the DRC within the framework of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes States (CEPGL) is an important factor that motivated the support of the three countries for the Congolese initiative.

The integration of the DRC into the East African Community (EAC) makes this geographic space a melting pot of development opportunities not only for the community but for the entire African continent. This will of course depend on the way in which this space manages to impose itself as a model. Geographically, the community space extends from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean with a population of 285 million inhabitants. This makes the area a very important player and market not only for the African continent but also for the entire world.

The opportunities available in the region will not fail to whet the appetites of Western powers that have been interested in the region for centuries. The community will have to take this into account because access to the resources available in the world can cause clashes if there is no clear strategy to promote a win-win cooperation. The conditions in which the Congolese population lives contrast with the abundance of strategic natural resources available in this country.

The DRC constitutes a market of 100 million consumers, in addition to the 185 million consumers in the region before the DRC joined the EAC. The Congolese market will undoubtedly be joined by other consumers from other countries bordering the DRC: Gabon, CAR, Zambia, Angola, and Congo, which are not members of the community. This also means that the challenges that accompany human contact should be taken into account to prevent other members of the community from becoming victims.

The DRC itself has had a very worrying security situation for years that has resulted in thousands of deaths and immeasurable destruction. This prompted the United Nations to send in troops to secure the country, but more than twenty years later insecurity still reigns. The eastern part of the DRC, consisting of South and North Kivu, is plagued by violence caused by a multitude of armed groups. Most of these armed groups come from foreign countries that use Congolese territory as a rear base to attack their home countries. Other armed groups are Congolese who have always wanted to emancipate themselves from the central power in Kinshasa. There are even armed groups that are in the pay of foreign countries and are supported by these countries to facilitate the illegal exploitation of Congolese resources.

The existence of gray areas on Congolese territory, territories where the central administration in Kinshasa is totally absent, means that rebel groups rush in to fill the vacuum left by the central government. As a result, the populations of these areas are victims of all kinds of abuses: massacres, torture, rape, theft, looting, etc. The establishment of a state of emergency in this part of the country, which supports the peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in the Congo (Monusco), has not yet succeeded in eradicating the violence.

The challenge is great and that is why the Heads of State of the Community are taking this aspect seriously, as evidenced by the conclusions of the latest conclave of the five Heads of State which was held in Nairobi on 21 April 2022. Indeed, the Heads of State present at this conclave decided to set up a military intervention force that will be responsible for tracking down and destroying rebel groups that have not laid down their arms. It seems that some heads of state members of the community are not entirely in agreement since they did not travel to participate in the conclave. Some are even publicly accused of supporting one or another rebel group fighting the central government in Kinshasa. The speeches of the Congolese president leave no doubt about this collusion. The alliance between the Congolese and Ugandan governments to fight Ugandan rebels operating in the DRC has not been well received by some neighbors who feel that this alliance could disrupt their plans in the DRC. This climate of suspicion among members of the Community is not conducive to successful regional integration.

Even if the members of the East African Community show a semblance of consensus on the entry of the DRC into the community, it remains possible that each has its own calculations that risk distorting the common march. Peace remains one of the main expectations of the Congolese population, which has long been scarred by the conflicts in this region. If this integration does not bring peace to the region, the population will not be able to benefit from this new framework for regional cooperation. Similarly, the other members of the Community will not be able to benefit from the potential available in the DRC if the security imperative is not met. Another major challenge remains the development of road, rail and lake infrastructures for better connectivity between regions themselves on the one hand, and connectivity between regions and capitals where the major consumer market is located, on the other.

This challenge does not only concern the Congo but also other member countries of the Community. It seems, however, that the problem is more acute in the Congo because of the vastness of the Congolese territory. The roads are almost impassable and this makes it very difficult to transport agricultural products and other resources to the markets or urban centers. As a result, produce rots in the fields when it is needed in the cities. This causes the country to import products at high prices when the same products are available in some parts of the country.

Rice produced in the Equator region rots in the stocks while the capital imports rice from Pakistan or China. Opening up the regions by investing in the construction of transport infrastructure is likely to contribute to better regional integration and strengthen intra-community trade.

Were it not for the pressing security imperative, the integration of the DRC into the Community should have been carried out gradually over a reasonable period of time so that the Congolese population in the East could have been made aware of the merits of this mechanism and thus obtain its full support. After all, it is this part of the DRC that will be the first to benefit from the effects of this integration because it is the closest to the EAC member countries. It is no secret that this population has strong resentments against certain countries of the Community that it accuses of being the source of its misfortunes.

The integration of the DRC risks being perceived by this part of the Congo as a legitimization of the illicit actions initiated by some of the member states and especially of the support given to the rebel groups that sow death in this part of the Congolese territory. If the integration of the DRC into the East African Community is the crucial step for the return of peace, we can only rejoice, but if it does not lead to this objective of peace, the integration risks being a disaster not only for the DRC but also for all the members of the East African Community.

The satisfaction of the vital needs of the populations as well as the opening up of democratic space in the countries of the region are all factors that can contribute to the successful integration of the Great Lakes region. Without this, certain countries risk fighting each other on the Congolese terrain through rebels and this would totally jeopardize the future and the objectives of regional integration.

Finally, it should be noted that the military solution alone will never be sufficient if it is not accompanied by other key elements such as improved economic, political and democratic governance, the availability of basic social services such as education, health, the presence of state authority and the creation of economic opportunities. The satisfaction of these needs will allow the populations of the 7 member countries to feel proud to belong to a community sharing the same destiny.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... th-thorns/

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Terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso leave at least 11 dead

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Burkina Faso often suffers jihadist attacks perpetrated by groups linked to both Al Qaeda and Daesh.. | Photo: Reuters
Published May 6, 2022

The Burkina Faso Armed Forces indicated that a total of seven soldiers and four civilians died in the attacks.

Two suspected jihadist attacks in northern Burkina Faso left at least 11 dead and nine soldiers wounded.

Through a statement, the Burkina Faso Armed Forces indicated that a military patrol was attacked about ten kilometers from Sollé, in the province of Lorum, in the northern region of the African country.

The military pointed out that in the first attack two soldiers and four civilians who collaborated in patrol work died in the attack.

In another attack, five soldiers from the Special Intervention Unit of the National Gendarmerie (USIGN) lost their lives during an anti-jihadist operation in the province of Sanmatenga, located in the Center-North region.


According to the Army, a score of terrorist bodies were accounted for during security operations in the area, mainly achieving the destruction of weapons and ammunition.

Burkina Faso has frequently suffered jihadist attacks since April 2015, perpetrated by groups linked to both Al Qaeda and the self-styled Islamic State (Daesh in Arabic).

Insecurity has caused the number of internally displaced persons in Burkina Faso to rise to more than 1.85 million people, according to government data.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/burkina- ... -0008.html

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Wed May 11, 2022 3:01 pm

South Sudan Declares New Cholera Outbreak

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Flood affected villages, South Sudan, May 9, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @RadioTamazuj

The Health ministry deployed a rapid response team from April 22 to 29 to investigate the causes and support the state-level response.

On Sunday, South Sudan's Health Ministry declared a cholera outbreak after the confirmation of eight cases in Rubkona county in the Unity States. The decision follows tests conducted by the National Public Health Laboratory in Juba, the capital city.

"Public is being urged not to panic but remain calm and observe all the precautionary measures to prevent community transmission and spread in populations with inadequate access to safe drinking water, poor personal hygiene, and inadequate access to improved sanitation facilities," the ministry said, adding that 31 cases including one death have been reported from Rubkona town and Bentiu IDP camp.

The ministry reported a confirmed case of cholera from Bentiu IDP camp on April 14 and the latest is the first cholera case to be reported in South Sudan since the devastating cholera outbreak in 2017, affecting over 28,000 people with 644 deaths.

Health authorities deployed a rapid response team from April 22 to 29 to investigate the causes and support the state-level response. And adequate supplies have also been deployed to support the investigation and treatment of cases in Rubkona county.


The South Sudanese government with support from its partners conducted two rounds of oral cholera vaccination in Rubkona county in January and March, respectively.

The Health Ministry activated a national and a state cholera task force on April 14 to coordinate all response interventions, heighten surveillance in the Internal Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps and at community levels.

The cholera risk is typically high during the rainy season that starts from May to the end of October. For the last couple of years, the country has experienced devastating floods affecting over 1 million people.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Sou ... -0008.html

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CP of Swaziland, CPS on latest anti-communist propaganda offensive
5/9/22 3:08 PM

The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) has in recent days fought off heavy anti-communist propaganda coming from counter-revolutionary forces masquerading as progressive voices.

Abusing the banner of democracy, these forces have been all over the place publishing slanderous stories about the CPS, doing the bidding for the ruling autocracy.

The people of Swaziland in their multitudes have seen through these lies and swiftly rejected the manifestly pro-regime propaganda. The people continue to demand the total eradication of the Mswati autocracy and its replacement with a democratic republic based on people’s power.

The anti-communist propagandists have, yet again, failed to win the people over to their conservative side!

The revolutionary work of the CPS over the years has invoked deep resentment from some of the anti-communist forces as more conscious radical voices have sprung up from all over the country under the “Democracy Now” campaign.

The majority of the people of Swaziland are now decisively waging anti-monarchist struggles, in the process frustrating these counter-revolutionary forces which are desperate to maintain the backward institution of the monarchy and its imperialist handlers.

To attack the name of the CPS, the anti-communists have created false narratives from thin air, accusing CPS activists of rape and threats of rape without offering any evidence, all of which have been proved false.

Rape is a serious scourge in our society. As such, it should never be used as a political football in any manner – and the CPS refuses to engage in this manner. As the CPS has stated many times before, there is simply no excuse for rape and all forms of sexual assault. The CPS condemns rape and all forms of sexual crimes, and gender-based violence. This scourge demands committed efforts from all progressive people to completely root out. No matter who the perpetrators are and what position they hold in life and politics, offenders must be tried in the court of law and receive the requisite sanction.

This anti-communist propaganda offensive against the working-class struggle and the party of the working class will not work. The fighting people of Swaziland have already seen through the Mswati autocracy’s propaganda tactics.

In the end, the people will win. The people shall build socialism!

Issued by the Communist Party of Swaziland

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Swazi ... offensive/

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Notes from Eritrea, Part II
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 11 May 2022

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Dr. Samson Abay Asmerom, pediatrician, and Dr. Eden Tareke, medical research scientist and professor, at the Mendefera Referral Hospital in Eritrea’s Southern Region. Health care is free in Eritrea.

Contributing Editor Ann Garrison contines her reporting from the Horn of Africa.

Upon arriving in Eritrea, I tuned out all the Eritrea haters screaming that it doesn't practice multi-party political democracy. This very limited form of democracy hasn’t saved the West from oligarchy, mass homelessness, mass incarceration, or perpetual war and aggression against peoples of the Global South, including Eritreans, so it’s obviously not the pinnacle of global civilization. If Eritreans or other peoples of the world choose multi-party democracy, fine, but the US/NATO shouldn't be trying to ram it down their throats with sanctions or using it as an excuse to bomb them into submission.

I came to learn about what the Eritrean government is doing to: 1) uplift its population—70% or more of whom are subsistence farmers, 2) maintain its fierce independence from the dominant world powers, and 3) achieve its goal of national self-reliance. I have in no way disguised that I’ve been here as a guest of the Eritrean government, and I would not have come as such if I did not already have a good opinion of its achievements and aspirations. I recommend “Eritrean Journey, Photos and Texts by Robert Papstein ” to anyone reading this.

Eritrea rewrites the African mining script

Most African resource extraction leases are robbery with a cut for the kleptocrats who sign them. It’s not uncommon for a mining company to promise an African nation as little as 5%, then lie about how much ore, oil, or gas they’re actually extracting or find some other way not to leave even 5%. The impoverished people of Chad, for example, have gotten all but nothing for the oil moving through Exxon-Mobil’s Chad Cameroon Pipeline, and their people have received no training or technology that might enable them to build a domestic oil industry.

For decades the Congolese people have been robbed of the immense mineral resources smuggled out of their Eastern provinces by the US-backed armies and militias of Rwanda and Uganda, and this plunder is now being institutionalized with the collaboration of Congolese President Félix Tshisikedi, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni—all infamous kleptocrats.

I know these stories are more than familiar to most Black Agenda Report readers, so instead of citing more, I’ll move on to what Eritrea is doing to start rewriting the script. I had several long conversations about this with Economic Affairs Officer Hagos Ghebrehiwet , Minister of Information Yemene Meskel , and Milena Bereket , the government consultant who helped me schedule meetings and plan trips to see what most interested me in Eritrea. Milena worked on the Social and Environmental Impact Assessment for the Bisha Mining Project, which is now producing gold, silver, copper, and zinc.

They told me that all the mining resources in the country belong to the people and that the government is responsible to develop them on behalf of the people. I later confirmed these principles in the 2006 Eritrean National Mining Corporation Establishment Proclamation published in the Gazette of Eritrean Laws.

Do I believe that this is real, not a cover for the usual kleptocracy? I have no reason to believe that I was talking to kleptocrats or anyone covering for them. These are people who dress modestly, drive modest—even beat-up—cars and work in modest offices. I didn’t see any trappings of lavish lifestyles and in fact, didn’t see any evidence of gross wealth and income inequality in Asmara, the capital, where I spent my time when I was not in the countryside. The Minister of Information tells me that Eritrea’s Gini index of income inequality is 8%—extremely low. I can’t confirm this because the World Bank reports that there’s no data available for Eritrea’s Gini, but what I saw in the streets and the countryside suggests that he’s correct.

The nation shrugged at recent U.S. sanctions imposing foreign asset freezes on military and government officials because, they said, they didn’t have any.

Mining contracts

The mining contracts that my hosts tell me Eritrea demands are more just than any I’ve heard of in Africa. The mining company gets a 60% share while the government gets a 40% share and then collects a 34% capital gains tax. In the potash mine now in development, the government’s share is 50%. Given that Eritrea sits within the mineral-rich Arabian-Nubian Shield , these contracts have the potential to raise great amounts of money that can then be ploughed into the country’s development goals, including health, education, infrastructure and food security. Health care and education are already free and grains are the only agricultural commodity that the country imports.

Revenue from just mining contracts could no doubt build many more of the dams and ponds that are part of the Ministry of Agriculture’s national irrigation plan. The Ministry’s motto is “not one drop of rain should fail to irrigate, and not one drop should erode the soil.”

Mining revenue could also provide many of the Minimum Integrated Household Agricultural Packages that the government is trying to provide to small farm households to help them sustain themselves and produce enough surplus to feed four other families: 1 in-calf dairy heifer or 6 milking sheep or goats, 25 backyard chickens, 2 bee hives, 5 kilograms of vegetable, forage, and cereal seeds, and 20 tree seedlings. Total cost per package: $4000/USD.

I was able to confirm the 60/40% split at the Bisha gold/silver/copper/zinc mine in a January 2012 article in the journal Mining Technology .

However, U.S. resistance to the implementation of the Bisha mining project was not recounted there. My hosts explained that when Nevsun Resources—the Canadian firm that developed and, for some time, operated the Bisha Mining Project—sought financing from a German bank, the U.S. intervened diplomatically to discourage it, and then a Chinese firm stepped in to provide financing instead. Ultimately, Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd, a Chinese-based multinational traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, bought the majority of Nevsun Resources.

COVID-19 stopped, thus far, without mass vaccination

The Minister of Information, who also sits on the national COVID task force, told me that they are not ideologically opposed to mass vaccination, but they've seen no need to institute it so long as their preventive measures—including testing at air borders, quarantine at porous land borders, social distancing, and closure of public facilities for the first six months of the pandemic—continue to be extraordinarily successful. These measures have kept infections to 9,734 cases and deaths to 103, in a population of 3.6 million. That's 28 deaths per million population, compared to, e.g., 3,062 per million in the U.S.

Much of the reason for this success is no doubt that Eritrea's population is somewhere between 70 and 80% rural and there aren't large numbers of people traveling in and out of the country.

Despite its low COVID infection and death rate, the country has been excoriated for not instituting mass COVID vaccination—despite the fact that they've used vaccination, especially childhood vaccination, to achieve extraordinary success in stopping communicable diseases. They were the first African nation to achieve the UN’s Millenium Development Goals regarding health.

Eritrea does not practice the death penalty

Unlike the US, which loves to hate on Eritrea and claims vast moral superiority, Eritrea does not practice the death penalty. According to the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty , the last known state execution there was in 1989. In October 2016, it voted in support of the most recent UN General Assembly resolution on a death penalty moratorium.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/notes-eritrea-part-ii

Why Non-Alignment is Urgent for the Global South
Nontobeko Hlela 11 May 2022

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29 September 1960: From left, at the end of a non-aligned conference, are Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia (Photograph supplied by Getty Images)

"We have been outside looking in for too long to believe the West will give us a seat at their table. We need financial autonomy and development that can withstand the attacks of the major powers."

This article was originally published in New Frame .

South Africa and other countries that have abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly in response to the war in Ukraine face intense international criticism. In South Africa, the domestic criticism has been extraordinarily shrill, and often clearly racialised. It is frequently assumed that abstention means South Africa is in support of the Russian invasion, and this is either owing to corrupt relations between Russian and South African elites or nostalgia for support given to the anti-apartheid struggle by the Soviet Union, or both.

There is seldom any acknowledgment that non-alignment, in this case refusing to be aligned with the United States and its allies or with Russia, can be a principled position, as well as an astute tactical engagement with geopolitical realities. As two founding figures in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Yugoslavia’s then president Josip Broz Tito and India’s then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, said in a joint statement signed on 22 December 1954 that “the policy of non-alignment with blocs … does not represent ‘neutrality’ or ‘neutralism’; neither does it represent passivity as is sometimes alleged. It represents the positive, active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace as the foundation of collective security.”

The Global South houses more than 80% of the world’s people, yet its countries are systematically excluded from any decision-making in the international organisations that make decisions in the name of the “international community”. For decades, countries of the Global South have been advocating for the UN to be reformed so that it moves away from the zero-sum game of the cold war mentality that continues to drive it. Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s then foreign minister, said that in June 1969, Henry Kissinger told him, “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”

Jaja Wachuku, then a Nigerian foreign minister, posed a still urgent question to the UN’s 18th Session on 30 September 1963: “Does this organisation want … the African states to be just vocal members, with no right to express their views on any particular matter in important organs of the United Nations? Are we only going to continue to be veranda boys?” Global South countries are still “veranda boys” watching the adults make the rules and decide on the path that the world must take. They continue to be lectured and chided when they do not do as expected.

It is time for a revitalised NAM. The NAM will only succeed if the leaders of the countries in the Global South put their egos aside, think strategically on the global scale and put their considerable human capital, natural resources and technological ingenuity to better use. The Global South has an ascendant China, the second-biggest economy in the world. It has India, one of the leading countries in medical care and technological innovation. Africa is rich with a growing population and the natural resources that are needed for the mushrooming AI and cleaner energy industries. However, these resources are still extracted for profit to be accumulated in far-off capitals while Africa and much of the Global South remain underdeveloped, with millions still stuck in the desperation of impoverishment.

A renewed NAM has real potential if time is taken to build new institutions and buffers against the economic warfare that the US has been waging against countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, and is now unleashing on Russia. Financial autonomy is critical.

Economic weapons

Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has a bank , and for the 16 nations of the Southern African Development Community there is the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Yet the reserves of the countries joined to these projects are still kept in the US or European capitals. This is the time for leaders within the Global South to wake up and realise that given the type of economic warfare that is currently being let loose on a country like Russia, weaker countries across the Global South have no meaningful autonomy.

This is the time to rethink how we conduct politics, economics and foreign policy when it is clear that the West can decide to decimate entire countries. The economic weapons being built against Russia will be available to be used against other countries that have the temerity not to toe Washington’s line.

Brics has been disappointing in many respects, but it has opened some space for Global South countries – with their many differences in creed, culture, political and economic systems – to find a way of working together. The rejection of intense pressure to bend their collective knee at the UN Security Council is an encouraging example of the Global South rejecting the assumption that they should remain permanent “veranda boys” (and girls).

As the US rapidly escalates its new cold war against Russia and China, and expects other countries to fall in line, there is now an urgent imperative to reject this cold war mentality of wanting to divide the world along old acrimonious lines. The Global South should reject this view and call for the respect of international law by all countries. It makes a mockery of the concepts of human rights and international law when they are only evoked when it is those countries whom the West dislikes or disagrees with who break them.

Only by standing together and speaking with one voice can the countries of the Global South hope to have any influence in international affairs and not continue to be just rubber-stampers of the positions of the West.

The NAM needs to be confident and bold and not seek permission from the West. Its leaders need to understand that they are there to serve their people and protect their interests, and not allow the temptation of being included in the “big boys club” to sway their stance on issues. They need to constantly keep in mind that they have been kept as “veranda boys” for far too long, and unless they truly take their destiny into their hands, they will forever be at the foot of the table, with their people eating only the scraps from the wealth accumulated by the global economy, much of it from the exploitation of the South.

This article was produced by the Morning Star and Globetrotter .

https://www.blackagendareport.com/why-n ... obal-south

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Another leader of South Africa’s shack dwellers movement murdered in Durban

Nokuthula Mabaso – a 40 year old mother of four leading AbM’s eKhenana commune – was gunned down the evening before she was supposed to appear in court to oppose the bail of the local ANC chief’s son, who is accused of murdering another eKhenana leader in March

May 09, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

Another leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), South Africa’s militant shack dwellers’ movement fighting for land rights of the urban poor, was assassinated on Thursday, May 5. Nokuthula Mabaso, a 40 year-old mother of four leading the AbM’s commune at the eKhenana occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, was the third activist of the movement to be killed in less than two months.

Described by the AbM as “a soldier in our movement who ensured that more than a hundred families have land and roof over their heads,” Mabaso was gunned down on the evening before she was supposed to appear in court to oppose the bail of Khaya Ngubane.

Khaya is the son of the local ANC chief, N.S. Ngubane, and is accused by eyewitnesses in the eKhenana commune of assassinating their deputy chairperson, 29-year-old Ayanda Ngila, on March 8. Khaya Ngubane is also accused of attacking and injuring two other members of eKhenana with an axe two days before Ngila’s assassination.

Mabaso was a key witness to Ngila’s murder
Mabaso, a key witness to his murder, “had prepared an affidavit” which “explains that it would not be safe for the community, and especially for witnesses to the axe attack and the murder, if Ngubane was granted bail,” AbM said in a statement.

The affidavit further mentioned that N. S. Ngubane had already threatened the AbM members in the court premises on one of the previous hearings that “there will be bloodshed in eKhenana.”

And bloodshed there was, before she could make it to court. On her way back to her shack from a meeting with her comrades who had planned to go to court the next morning, Mabaso was shot at around 7:30 p.m outside her home, with six bullets – four in her back, one in her chest and one in her stomach.

Police fail to respond till two hours after murder
The police at the Cato Manor station only 500 meters away from where she was shot “confirmed that they heard gunshots, but it took two hours for them to arrive at the scene” despite repeated calls, AbM said in a statement.

Deputy President of the AbM George Bonono, who stays close to eKhenana, went to the police station immediately after he was informed. Enroute, his car was stopped by the police because a headlight was not working.

“They were writing me a ticket even as I kept explaining that it is urgent, that someone has been shot and is dying. I told them we have been calling the police station but we are not getting a response. I asked for assistance. They refused and told me to go to the nearest police station, even though they were not far away from the site of murder,” he told Peoples Dispatch.

At the station, the police refused to accompany him to eKhenana because there were only two of them, he said. “I asked them why every time members of Abahlali are murdered, the police is unwilling to respond. Then I drove on to Mabaso, but she was lying dead there already. There was nothing we could do to save her,” he said.

‘A brave woman who took charge when the leaders were being hounded’
Bonono remembers her as “a brave woman” who did not hesitate in the face of danger. “Every time we file a case or an affidavit against illegal evictions by the municipality, it needs to have names. Those giving names are at risk. Mabaso was the one who would always take the lead and volunteer her name,” he recollected.

“She was a very quiet woman,” he added. “You would never hear her raising her voice. But she was in action everywhere. You would see her with her hands in the mud working on the communal vegetable garden, you would see her in the poultry, you would see her in the kitchen making sure everyone in the commune has something to eat, you would see her in rounding up all the kids and making sure they are taken care of.”

These communal projects like food garden, poultry and the tuck shop, helping to sustain its residents, is what makes AbM’s occupation in eKhenana a commune. “She played a key role in.. turning the occupation into a Commune,” AbM’s statement noted.

Her leadership came to the fore when leaders of the commune were arrested last year. Ayanda Ngila, along with two other leaders of AbM’s eKhenana branch, were arrested in March 2021 and charged with a murder that had occurred elsewhere in the city.

Subsequently, in May, two other activists of the branch, along with Bonono, were arrested and accused of conspiring to murder the witnesses against Ngila and others. The case proved to be fabricated and fell apart in October that year after the witnesses of State confessed in court that they had given false testimonies.

Among the two witnesses was Ntokozo Ngubane – sister of Ngila’s alleged assassin Khaya Ngubane and daughter of N. S. Ngubane who had threatened “bloodshed in eKhenana” before Mabaso’s murder.

After the murder case thus fell apart, Ngila was re-arrested along with two others in January 2022, accused of another murder, and released on bail in the last week of February after the police failed to provide any evidence. In March, a year after his first arrest, he was gunned down while out on bail.

During this period when the leadership of the eKhenana branch were being hounded, the profitably-run communal projects, which were a lifeline to the residents of this commune, began to suffer. “It was Mabaso who at the time took charge and ensured that these projects to sustain the commune survived,” Bonono said. “But every time a leader emerges in our movement, they are arrested with false charges, and even murdered if they do not break,” he added.

Mabaso too was arrested and imprisoned on the charges of assaulting someone. The police eventually dropped the case after it became evident in court that they had no case to make against her. After Ngila’s assassination, Mabaso “was brave in collecting all the information on the various cases that would have led to the arrest of N. S. Ngubane,” AbM said.

“We have no doubt that the local ANC in the area, led by this unscrupulous pastor N.S Ngubane, is behind the assassinations of Ayanda (Ngila) and Nokuthula (Mabaso),” its statement affirmed.

“We have built a Commune in which, according to the principles of Abahlalism, land is not bought and sold and shacks are not rented. The local ANC wants the land in eKhenana to be used for private profit and not for communal purposes. The ANC is threatened by a woman who has led the occupation and continued with the Commune despite the severe repression over the years and when other leaders are in jail, in hiding or have been assassinated,” it added.

Leaders from other branches of AbM, along with the national leaders including Bonono and national president S’bu Zikode, visited eKhenana to pay her respects and proceeded to her family home on May 7. On Sunday, May 8, at the monthly general assembly of AbM held in Durban, the delegates paid tribute to Mabaso and vowed to continue the struggle for land-rights of the urban poor, in the course of which AbM has “lost 23 comrades to assassination” since 2009.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/05/09/ ... in-durban/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri May 13, 2022 2:24 pm

Paris Gets Kicked Out of French Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 11, 2022
Vladimir Danilov

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Mali’s government spokesman Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, who was the country’s prime minister in 2017, announced in a televised address that the African country was tearing up defense agreements with France. Although Paris has called the decision “unjustified”, France is nevertheless continuing to withdraw its military from Mali, following the Malian government’s earlier call for Paris to withdraw troops involved in operations Barkhane and Takuba “without delay” and under the control of the Malian authorities. And earlier, on February 1, a special document from the Malian government instructed French Ambassador Joël Meyer to leave the territory of the African state within 72 hours.

Bamako’s relations with the former metropole were particularly strained after French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said official Paris considered Mali’s new authorities illegitimate and criticized Mali for strengthening ties with Russia. In response, the Malian government downgraded diplomatic relations with Paris and indicated that it was not for France to decide for the Malian people who is legitimate and who is illegitimate, and with whom the Malian authorities should cooperate.

Meanwhile, it is notable that in Mali’s neighboring African state, Burkina Faso, anti-French demonstrations have also intensified. Since the change of government, Russian flags have begun to appear in the streets and locals say that Russia (since Soviet times) has been helping Africa to develop, while France is only trying to siphon off resources and funnel profits into its own coffers.

According to various media reports, the Malian authorities have over a long period recorded a significant deterioration in military cooperation with the former metropole. But the last straw in the cup of patience was the violation of the African republic’s airspace by unmanned drones conducting reconnaissance for the Elysée Palace.

France has also in recent months waged an intense media campaign against the Malian government and Russian presence in the country, based on a gross falsification of the events there, and designed to cover up the evident crimes committed by the French military, according to Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice.

In May, the First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, said that Russia had initiated a UNSC discussion on the situation in Mali in order to raise the issue of the disinformation campaign against Mali and Russia launched by France in connection with the Gossi incident.

As confirmed by the Malian authorities regarding the Gossi incident, the French Barkhane forces handed over their military base in this locality to the Malian army on April 19. On April 20, according to a communiqué from the Malian General Staff, a Malian patrol was dispatched to conduct reconnaissance and discovered the burial site. Later, a Malian Armed Forces commission led by Sector Commander N1, accompanied by a legal adviser, a regimental commander and a chief of staff, arrived in Gossi and confirmed the execution by shooting. The commission confirmed that it has no doubt that it was French soldiers from the contingent of Operation Barkhane who were involved in the killing of Malian civilians found dead near Gossi on April 21, 2022.

However, information about the crimes in Mali was concealed by Paris, as Emmanuel Macron did not need a negative foreign policy background during his election campaign in April this year. Moreover, instead of investigating the events in Gossi, the command of the French armed forces decided to play the recently common for Paris Russophobic propaganda card, trying to shift its war crimes onto the Russian PMC Wagner.

But it is no longer a secret that the French military has been implicated in numerous crimes in various African countries, including Mali. There are regular reports in the African media about the systematic kidnapping and massacre of civilians in former French colonies in Africa, accompanied by recordings of talks in which French “military missionaries” are heard calling the people of Africa animals, demonstrating their chauvinistic and racist views…

The current situation in African countries, especially the so-called “French influence”, clearly shows that it is France that is seen as a destabilizing force in these states and in Africa as a whole. As the French media noted, “Paris’ failures in Africa are the result of extreme French arrogance, a purely neo-colonial mentality and blatantly predatory aims towards African states”. And this is actively confirmed by numerous regional media publications and speeches by African politicians on France’s actions in CAR, Mali, Burkina Faso. Even France Info acknowledges that people in several African countries where Paris has previously boasted of its influence, such as the Central African Republic and Mali, do not trust France and are actively critical of it. Seeing the example of successful cooperation with Moscow in CAR and Mali, more and more people in the Dark Continent states decide to throw off the shackles of modern neo-colonialism.

Realizing that, after the CAR, Mali and Burkina Faso, France might soon lose Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger and even Chad, Paris actively engaged in a Russophobic propaganda campaign, following instructions from Washington in particular. This is why France has now become one of the main initiators and key “prosecutors” of Russia, as part of the International Criminal Court’s work on the so-called “crimes” of the Russian Armed Forces in Borodyanka, Bucha and Mariupol. It is the French media that reprints as tracing paper the Washington-edited text on Russia’s alleged “heinous crimes”. It is France that stigmatizes Russia more than any other country, without trial and with various Russophobic labels.

Meanwhile, while positioning itself as the supposedly “most tolerant, most liberal and most humane” country, France is studiously evading responsibility for the events around its former military base in Gossi. This is in line with the “double standards” of the US and Britain, and is burning old bridges with Africa.

It is therefore not surprising that more and more residents of the Dark Continent states are choosing to throw off the shackles of modern French neo-colonialism and the breakdown of the Mali defense agreement with Paris, which has been in force since 2014, is a clear indication of this.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... ch-africa/

The Sun Never Sets: Why is AFRICOM Expanding in Zambia?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 10, 2022
Jeremy Kuzmarov

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Brigadier General Peter Bailey, right, and U.S. Chargé d’Affaires to Zambia Martin Dale, left, with President Hakainde Hichilema, center.[Source: zm.usembassy.gov]

Because of Zambia’s Copper and to Thwart the Chinese


On April 25, the U.S. government announced that U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) will open an Office of Security Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Zambia.

Brigadier General Peter Bailey, AFRICOM’s Deputy Director for Strategy, Engagement, and Programs, made the announcement in Zambia during a meeting with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema (HH), who took office on August 21, 2021.

According to AFRICOM, the new Office of Security Cooperation will “enhance military-to-military relations [between AFRICOM and Zambian armed forces] and expand areas of cooperation in force management, modernization and professional military education for the Zambian security forces.”

The U.S. government possesses a giant embassy in Lusaka and, since 2014, has invested more than $8 million in assistance for Zambian battalions deployed to a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic (CAR).

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Zambia Atlas: Maps and Online Resources | Infoplease.com | Zambia, Africa map, Map[Source: pinterest.com]

Betrayal of Non-Aligned Policy

Emmanuel Mwamba, Zambia’s former representative to the African Union (AU), had tried to block AFRICOM’s expansion into Zambia, following the precedent of Zambia’s last four presidents (Levy Mwanawasa, Rupiah Banda, Michael Sata and Edgar Lungu).

Mwamba emphasized that, since obtaining its independence from Great Britain in 1964, Zambia has promoted a non-aligned policy and cooperated with all powers, including Russia and China as well as the U.S.

Mwamba further noted that the AU and Southern African Development Community (SADC) have tried to resist the establishment of U.S. and other foreign military bases and security offices in Africa, and have been developing their own standby military forces and security architecture designed to prevent a return to the era of colonialism.

“Copper is the New Oil”

The U.S. interests and motivations underlying the AFRICOM expansion in Zambia are not hard to discern.

As CAM previously reported, Zambia is one of the world’s leading producers of copper, which according to a recent Goldman Sachs report, Copper is the New Oil, is crucial in the transition to a clean energy economy.

Copper is a key electrical conductor and component for solar and wind power plants, electric vehicles and batteries, and energy-efficient buildings.

Hichilema was favored by the U.S. State Department in Zambia’s August 2021 election because of his pledge to boost domestic refining capabilities and loosen regulations and lower taxes on foreign mining companies operating in Zambia to enable a $2 billion expansion of copper production.

One of the big beneficiaries of the new policies is Barrick Gold, a Canadian company which owns the $735 million Lumwana copper mine in Solwezi and is poised to expand its operations.

A major investor in Barrick Gold is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager operating out of Wall Street.

Its founder and CEO, Laurence Fink, was a donor to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry, along with Paul Ryan and other Republican and Democratic Party politicians who supported the expansion of AFRICOM.

BlackRock is also a major investor with J. P. Morgan Chase in First Quantum Minerals , which owns 80% of the Kansanshi mine in Zambia’s Copperbelt, the largest mine in Africa, along with the Sentinel mine in Kalumbila.

BlackRock further invested in Glencore and Vedanta Resources, which own additional Zambian copper mines and, like the others, have checkered records when it comes to workers’ rights and the environment.


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Protest against Vedanta Resources for polluting the Kafue River and looting Zambia’s wealth. BlackRock is a major investor in Vedanta and donor to U.S. politicians like Barack Obama. [Source: theguardian.com]

Protecting the Free Flow of Natural Resources

AFRICOM was established in 2007 with the official purpose of promoting a “stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy.”

Today, AFRICOM sustains ties with 53 African nations and provides a cover for an estimated 9,000 U.S. troops stationed in Africa and at least 27 military bases.

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[Source: thetricontinental.org]

AFRICOM founder Vice Admiral Robert Moeller admitted that one of AFRICOM’s guiding principles was “protecting the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.” That description applies very well in the Zambian case.

Great Game Struggle with Chinese

Tied to the motive of natural resources exploitation underlying AFRICOM’s expansion into Zambia is the growing geopolitical competition with China.

Zambia has been a significant recipient of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and, in 2018, the volume of China-Zambia bilateral trade reached $5 billion in U.S. dollars, with a year-on-year growth of 33.9%.

As of December 2020, more than 600 Chinese companies operated in Zambia, the majority in the Copperbelt. Zambia even boasts two Chinese-built special economic zones and allowed banking in the Chinese renminbi instead of the kwacha, dollar, or euro to facilitate trade with China.

The latter is unacceptable to U.S. policy-makers who have attempted something drastic in response.

The danger of the AFRICOM expansion for Zambians is palpable not only in its function in protecting foreign control of its economy but aso in generating potential political instability.

According to Black Agenda Report, troops trained by AFRICOM have been behind nine coup d’états in Africa since AFRICOM’s formation.

Zambia could be next, particularly if Hichilema reverses his current policies in the mining sector, or if copper prices fluctuate because of some unforeseen event and Zambia’s economy falters more than it already has.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... in-zambia/

Mali’s Military Ejects France but Faces Serious Challenges
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 12, 2022
Vijay Prashad

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French soldiers of the 126th Infantry Regiment and Malian soldiers in Operation Barkhane, 17 March 2016. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Colonel Assimi Goïta, who leads the military junta, said that the agreement with the French “brought neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation” and that the population aspires “to stop the flow of Malian blood”


On May 2, 2022, a statement was made by Mali’s military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga on the country’s national television, where he said that Mali was ending the defense accords it had with France, effectively making the presence of French troops in Mali illegal. The statement was written by the military leadership of the country, which has been in power since May 2021.

Colonel Maïga said that there were three reasons why Mali’s military had taken this dramatic decision. The first was that they were reacting to France’s “unilateral attitude,” reflected in the way France’s military operated in Mali and in the June 2021 decision by French President Emmanuel Macron to withdraw French forces from the country “without consulting Mali.” France’s military forces moved to nearby Niger thereafter and continued to fly French military planes over Malian airspace. These violations of Malian airspace “despite the establishment of a temporary no-fly zone by the Malian military authorities” constituted the second reason for the new declaration, according to the statement. Thirdly, Mali’s military had asked the French in December 2021 to revise the France-Mali Defense Cooperation treaty. Apparently, France’s answer to relatively minor revisions from Mali on April 29 displeased the military, which then issued its statement a few days later.

‘Neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation’

Over the past few years, French forces in Mali have earned a reputation for ruthless use of aerial power that has resulted in countless civilian casualties. A dramatic incident took place on January 3, 2021, in the village of Bounti in the central Mopti region of Mali, not far from Burkina Faso. A French drone strike killed 19 civilians who were part of a wedding party. France’s Defense Minister Florence Parly said, “The French armed forces targeted a terrorist group, which had been formally identified as such.” However, an investigation by the United Nations mission in Mali (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, or MINUSMA) found that the French drone fired at a marriage celebration attended by about 100 people (which might have included five armed persons).

Two months later, on March 5, 2021, in the village of Talataye, east of Bounti, a French airstrike killed three teenage children and injured two others, who were all out hunting birds. The father of the three deceased children—Adamou Ag Hamadou, a shepherd, said that the children had taken their cattle to drink water and then had gone off to hunt birds with their two hunting rifles. “When I arrived at the scene of the airstrike,” Ag Hamadou remembered, “there were other people from this [hunting] camp. From 1 p.m. until 6 p.m., we were able to collect the pieces of their bodies that we buried.”

These are some of the most dramatic incidents. Others litter the debate over the French military intervention in Mali, but few of these stories make it beyond the country’s borders. There are several reasons for the global indifference to these civilian deaths, one of them being that these atrocities perpetrated by Western states during their interventions in Africa do not elicit outrage from the international press, and another is that the French have consistently denied even well-proven incidents of what should be considered war crimes.

For example, on June 8, 2019, French soldiers fired at a car in Razelma, outside Timbuktu, killing three civilians (one of them a young child). The French military made a bizarre statement about the killing. On the one hand, the French said that the killing was “unintentional.” But then, on the other hand, the French authorities said that the car was suspicious because the car did not stop despite warning shots being fired at it. Eyewitnesses said that the driver of the car was helping a family move to Agaghayassane and that they were not linked to any terrorist group. Ahmad Ag Handoune, who is a relative of those killed in this attack and who drove up to the site after the incident, said that the French soldiers “took gasoline and then poured it on the vehicle to set everything on fire so that nothing was identifiable.”

Protests against the French military presence have been taking place for over a year, and it is plausible to say that the May 2021 military coup, which installed the present military leadership of the country to power, was partly due to both the failure of the French intervention in Mali to bring about stability and its excesses. Colonel Assimi Goïta, who leads the military junta, said that the agreement with the French “brought neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation” and that the population aspires “to stop the flow of Malian blood.”

No way forward

On the day that the Malians said that the presence of French troops on their soil was illegal with the ending of the defense accords, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres paid a visit to neighboring Niger. When France’s army withdrew from Mali, they relocated to Niger, whose president, Mohamed Bazoum, tweeted his welcome to these troops. Guterres, standing beside Bazoum, said that terrorism is “not just a regional or African issue, but one that threatens the whole world.”

No one denies the fact that the chaos in the Sahel region of Africa was deepened by the 2011 NATO war against Libya. Mali’s earlier challenges—including a decades-long Tuareg insurgency and conflicts between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers—were now convulsed by the entry of arms and men from Libya and Algeria. Three jihadi groups appeared in the country as if from nowhere—Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Movement for the Unification of Jihad in the African West, and Ansar Dine. They used the older tensions to seize northern Mali in 2012 and declared the state of Azawad. French military intervention followed in January 2013.

Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg leader from Kidal, fought in Libya and Mali. In the early 2000s, Ag Ghali set up the Alliance for Democracy and Change, which advocated for Tuareg rights. “Soft-spoken and reserved,” said a 2007 U.S. Embassy cable about him. “Ag Ghali showed nothing of the cold-blooded warrior persona created by the Malian press.” After a brief stint as a diplomat to Saudi Arabia, Ag Ghali returned to Mali, befriended Amadou Koufa, the leader of the Macina Liberation Front, and drifted into the world of Sahelian jihad. In a famous 2017 audio message, Amadou Koufa said, “The day that France started the war against us, no Fulani or anyone else was practicing jihad.” That kind of warfare was a product of NATO’s war on Libya and the arrival of Al Qaeda, and later ISIS, to seek local franchise with local grievances to nurture their ambitions.

Conflicts in Mali, as the former President Alpha Oumar Konaré said over a decade ago, are inflamed due to the suffocation of the country’s economy. Neither did the country receive any debt relief nor infrastructure support from the West or international organizations. This landlocked state of more than 20 million people imports 70% of its food, the prices for which have skyrocketed in recent weeks, and could further worsen food insecurity in Mali. Part of the instability of the post-NATO war has been the military coups in Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso. Mali faces harsh sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), sanctions that will only deepen the crisis and provoke greater conflict north of Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Anti-French sentiment is not the whole story in Mali. What France and other global leaders need to recognize is that there are many larger questions at the root of the issues Malians face—questions around their livelihood and their dignity, which need to be answered to secure a better future for the country.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... hallenges/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Mon May 16, 2022 2:32 pm

Nigeria: Protests Erupt for Release of Two Accused of Murder

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Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is deeply divided along religious and ethnic lines. May. 15, 2022. | Photo: Africa News

Published 15 May 2022

This Thursday a group of students beat and burned alive their classmate Deborah Samuel, whom they accused of disseminating a blasphemous publication against the prophet Muhammad.

Dozens of people protested this Saturday in different parts of the state of Sokoto (Nigeria) against the arrest of two people who a few days earlier participated in the murder of a young woman for alleged blasphemy, local media report.

RThis Thursday, at the Shehu Shagari College of Education, a group of students beat and burned alive their classmate Deborah Samuel, whom they accused of disseminating a blasphemous publication against the prophet Mohammed.

The protesters, a group of Muslim youths, attacked several churches, as well as properties and businesses belonging to the Igbo ethnic group - a part of which is Christian - and demanded the release of the suspects.

As a result, a Catholic church and a building of the Winning All Evangelical Church were reportedly destroyed.

Following these events, the state governor, Aminu Tambuwal, imposed a 24-hour curfew to curtail the unrest.


"These attacks on innocent and law-abiding Igbo businessmen who have done nothing wrong to justify such a cruel and barbaric attack on them are uncalled for and we condemn them in their entirety," said Goodluck Ibem, general chairman of the South East Coalition of Youth Leaders.

He also warned those involved to stop such actions "immediately." "We want these miscreants to know that no one has a monopoly on violence, that they should stop or they will see us soon," he added, calling on Tambuwal to arrest those responsible for the vandalism.

On his part, Femi Fani-Kayode, Nigeria's former Minister of Aviation, assured that the prime suspect in Samuel's murder, who has fled to his native Niger, "will know no peace for his callous and brutal actions and will pay a terrible price for his brutal and ruthless crime, both in this life and the next."


Such instances of violence is not uncommon in Nigeria, as inter-ethnic violence, religious violence and gender based violence is prevalent thoughout the country.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is deeply divided along religious and ethnic lines. Women rarely make it to top positions of power, and only 7% of nation’s senators are women.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nig ... -0006.html

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“White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa”
Originally published: Counter Fire on May 12, 2022 by Elaine Graham-Leigh (more by Counter Fire) (Posted May 14, 2022)

In White Malice, Susan Williams’s careful research reveals the history of the CIA’s damaging interventions in newly independent African nations, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh.

Barack Obama recounts in his memoir Dreams from my Father reading a book about Africa as a young man. He remembered how he was filled with ‘an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target’ at the way that the dominant images of the book shifted from the independence struggles of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah to ‘famine, disease, the coups and counter-coups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks’ (p.515).

As Williams makes clear though, while Obama may not have known who to blame for this, it is not as mysterious as his memoir implies. The development of various African countries in the last seventy or so years has been determined not, as the racist idea has it, by African unfitness for independence and democracy, but by the covert activity of the CIA. Williams uses the examples of Congo and Ghana to show how profoundly the U.S. has shaped the destiny of these countries for the worse in promotion of U.S. interests.

To the decolonising nations in Africa in the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. could be perceived as a potential supporter. Thus, for example, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, approached the U.S. first for support when the Katanga region seceded from Congo shortly after his election. This faith in the U.S. support for self-determination was, however, not justified. The U.S. may have been happy to see European colonisers losing control of their colonies, but only if this could be to the benefit of U.S. interests. In Congo, for example, supporting the removal of Belgian control was not the same thing as supporting genuine independence. Anyone tempted to believe that the U.S. was committed to the cause of freedom should note that it was one of the handful of countries who abstained in December 1960 on UN resolution 1514, which called for self-determination for all, along with colonial powers like France, Belgium and the UK.

Lumumba was arguably too slow to perceive that U.S. interests in Congo were not going to be benign. He had a well-founded tendency to mistrust Belgians on sight, but unfortunately did not extend this scepticism of white motives to Americans. This resulted, for example, in his use of a translator, at the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, who was actually a CIA agent. U.S. interest in Congo was intense, as it was, as Nkrumah wrote later, the ‘most vital region of Africa strategically, geographically and politically’ (p.34). Congo’s mineral wealth in general made it important to control, but more specifically, it was the source of the richest uranium in the world.

The U.S. went to some lengths to conceal this, maintaining that their uranium came from Canada and, in the Second World War, labelling barrels of uranium being exported from Congo as cobalt. It is plausible, Williams argues, that this practice of talking about cobalt as code for uranium continued after the war, which reveals discussions in the CIA and U.S. government about securing continuing access to the uranium mine in Congo’s Katanga province in the face of Congolese independence. Katanga’s secession from Congo after the election of Lumumba in 1960 is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

Neocolonialism

Congo was therefore at the centre of the U.S. neocolonialisation strategy, in which it wasn’t necessary to maintain an explicitly colonial regime to reap the benefits of being a colonial power. As Nkrumah explained, in this neocolonialist reality, ‘the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (p.363). The U.S. was not the only aspiring practitioner of neocolonialism. Former colonial powers, after all, commonly expected to be able to maintain their interests in their former colonies. For example, the Belgian settlement for Congo expected Belgian companies to be able to go on exploiting Congolese resources as they had always done. The resources that the U.S. put into this were, however, extensive.

Williams traces the remarkable range of CIA activity, commenting that ‘the extent and breadth of CIA activities in Africa … beggars belief’ (p.509). This encompassed significant efforts to extend U.S. soft power by funding and sometimes founding organisations to promote U.S. interests and individuals sympathetic to them. These ranged from charitable foundations to academic organisations and institutes apparently aimed at promoting African and American contacts, such as the African American Institute, founded in 1953. All told, the CIA was apparently funding more than 200 of these fronts.

The U.S. also used more direct methods, such as removing politicians seen as inimical to U.S. interests. The best-known example here is Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was elected in May 1960 and was overthrown by a coup led by Mobutu Sese Seku in September. He was captured by Mobutu’s forces in December and murdered in January 1961, along with two of his ministers, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. The first official line was that they had been murdered by irate villagers after they had escaped from custody. That was obviously untrue, but the U.S. version remained for some time that it was ‘purely an African event’, being carried out by Congolese and Katangan opposition forces with help from Belgian officers (p.365).

A Belgian parliamentary commission in 2000 found that Belgium had a ‘moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s murder, but also that there was considerable U.S. (meaning CIA) involvement, more than had been found by an earlier U.S. investigation. It is also possible that there was some UK involvement, as Daphne Park, an MI6 agent in Congo at the time, later claimed that she had helped to arrange MI6 activity against Lumumba.

The killing of Lumumba
It is clear that the CIA had been investigating ways of killing Lumumba for some time, including raiding the house in which he was sheltering in Stanleyville after Mobutu’s coup, or poisoning him with botulinum, to mimic the effects of diseases common in Congo. The latter was part of the operations of Stanley Gottlieb, a chemical specialist who worked with the CIA on a range of possible technologies for ‘assassination or incapacitation’, as well as even murkier technologies like mind-control drugs (p.506). It was Gottlieb who worked on the various toxins the CIA plotted to use against Castro.

As William Burden, U.S. ambassador to Belgium and the Belgian Congo put it, from the U.S. point of view, the murder of Lumumba was all but inevitable. ‘Lumumba was such a damn nuisance,’ he wrote later, that ‘it was perfectly obvious that the way to get rid of him was through political assassination’ (p.139). In contrast, Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Congo, had identified Mobutu as ‘a future leader who was susceptible to American influence – someone to cultivate and to promote’ (p.132). Burden’s comment on Lumumba makes clear that the murder was not rogue CIA activity but squarely within U.S. official policy for Congo. Indeed, it was at a meeting at which President Eisenhower was present, in August 1960, during which it was finally agreed that ‘Lumumba was a threat to U.S. interests and had to be removed’ (p.235).

A mainstream version of events might have it here that the CIA plots to assassinate Lumumba were forestalled by local Congolese action and that the U.S. therefore bore little responsibility for his actual murder. As Williams sets out here, however, there is evidence for a CIA presence at the location where Lumumba, Mpolo and Okito were killed, in the form of an expense claim for travel there. It therefore appears that there was more direct CIA involvement in the actual event than has often previously been recognised.

CIA activity in Congo did not stop with Lumumba’s murder, but continued against interests perceived to be anti-U.S. or pro-USSR. It is possible that this included the UN, with the CIA implicated in the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary General, when his plane was shot down over Northern Rhodesia in September 1961. If the CIA were involved, this would have been made possible by the reality of extensive U.S. spying on UN activities, including the manufacture of UN cryptography machines by a CIA front company, which provided the CIA with a helpful back door into any data they held.

The overthrow and murder of Lumumba may be the best-known instance of CIA interference in African affairs, but it was not the only one. The CIA were heavily involved in the coup which overthrew Nkrumah’s government in Ghana in 1966. Williams also comments on how many of the leaders of African independence movement died comparatively young, including for example Nkrumah’s minister George Padmore, and Franz Fanon from Algeria. Could Gottlieb’s murky programme, she asks, be implicated in this pattern of early, if apparently natural deaths? It certainly seems possible, in the light of documented plans for manufacturing a ‘natural’ death for Lumumba and Castro.

Neocolonialism and the Cold War
The U.S. concern about regimes like Lumumba’s and Nkrumah’s is often portrayed as being about the Cold War. Natural resources were why the U.S. was interested in Africa, but this was just as much about keeping them out of Russian hands. In this discourse, independent African countries appear as the unfortunate casualties of the great game for world domination, with the USSR at least as much at fault as the U.S., and the Africans haplessly in the middle. Williams’ account shows the possibility of a different analysis.

It is obvious that U.S. would be worried about increasing Russian influence in Africa, but on occasion, the U.S. also seemed happy enough to push leaders it had already decided were a problem closer to the USSR. When Lumumba travelled to the U.S. in the summer of 1960, to try to enlist U.S. help to get Belgian troops out of Congo, for example, he travelled there in a plane supplied by the USSR. This was not a pro-Russian gesture, but simply the result of the U.S. refusal to make one of their planes available to him. It was nevertheless seized on by the U.S. media as evidence that he was a communist and therefore an enemy of the USA. Similarly, when Nkrumah embarked on a nuclear-power programme for Ghana, he first approached Canada to obtain a reactor. He turned to the USSR only after the U.S. had forced Canada to turn him down.

This does not appear to be the behaviour of a power concerned solely to prevent the USSR from gaining more influence in Africa. In fact, it is clear from Williams’ account that the U.S. would have behaved in a similar fashion if there had been no Cold War and no Russian menace at all. The problem from the U.S. point of view was not the USSR, but the threat posed to U.S. interests by movements which weren’t going to be satisfied with neocolonialism but which wanted genuine independence.

Racism and imperialism
Nkrumah’s vision for Africa was of ‘a self-contained and self-development economy’ (p.14); a ‘United States of Africa’ which would stand on its own, without Western aid or Western interference. This was a vision for Africa which rejected the paternalistic parting messages of the European colonial regimes, that, as King Baudouin told the people of Congo in 1960, they had been given a great deal by their colonial masters and had now ‘to show you are worthy of our confidence’ (p.177). Rather, as Malcolm X paraphrased Lumumba, ‘you aren’t giving us anything. Why, can you take back these scars that you put on our bodies? Can you give us back the limbs that you cut off while you were here?’ (p.179).

Ghana’s support for these politics, and solidarity with independence fighters across Africa, was the most worrying aspect of Nkrumah’s rule to the U.S., which concluded in 1960 that it was necessary to ‘discourage, whenever possible, Ghana’s current tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries’ (p.191). The nuclear issue was of particular importance because it was a clear instance of Nkrumah aiming for genuine independence.

The intention was to give Ghana the same electricity generating infrastructure as was being developed in the West, while at the same time resisting Western powers’ use of Africa for nuclear-weapons testing. That was not the role that African countries were supposed to play in a neocolonial world, being rather the suppliers of raw materials for their neocolonial masters. It was not a coincidence that Nkrumah was overthrown shortly before Ghana’s first nuclear-power station came online, enabling the incoming military dictatorship to stop it before it started.

The ideal of pan-African solidarity and genuine economic and political independence from both the U.S. and the old European colonial powers was a profound threat to the U.S. plans for dominance in Africa. The U.S. was therefore prepared to spend significant resources in ensuring that it was thwarted. The ideas of independence fighters like Nkrumah, Lumumba, Franz Fanon, George Padmore, and others were also a danger in a different way to the U.S., for the inspiration that they could give to black liberation struggles in the U.S. itself. Martin Luther King made this link between Ghanian independence and the civil-rights struggle, arguing that Ghanian independence would:

give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and repercussions–not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America … At bottom, both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa are based on the same thing–white supremacy and contempt for life (p.13).

King was in Ghana for the independence celebrations in 1957, along with world leaders, freedom fighters, and others from the civil-rights struggle in the U.S.. They were also joined by the U.S. Vice President, Richard Nixon. Nixon was apparently in his element at the extended political jamboree, shaking hands with everyone, patting heads and ‘smiling, smiling all the time’ (p.13). At one point, he went up to one man, whom he took to be Ghanian, slapped him on the shoulder, and asked him how it felt to be free. ‘“I wouldn’t know, Sir” came the reply. “I’m from Alabama”’ (p.14).

https://mronline.org/2022/05/14/white-m ... of-africa/

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Libya Suffers a Permanent Humanitarian Catastrophe Under the Dictate of US Interests
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 15, 2022
Vladimir Odintsov

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During the era of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan Jamahiriya, the country was openly admired by many countries in the region for the well-being and living conditions of Libyans, perhaps with the exception of the Gulf States. And this was justified, among other things, by the fact that there was free medicine, free education, and financial aid for those wishing to study abroad. Flats were given to young families for free. Some of the medicines in pharmacies were given to elderly people free of charge. Utility bills were ridiculously low.

The average Libyan earned $1,200 a month, an apparent luxury when compared to the rather poorer neighbors: in neighboring Egypt, salaries were around $200; in Tunisia, $300. At the end of the year, everyone in the Jamahiriya received a guaranteed “bonus” from the state on the country’s oil sales abroad of more than a thousand dollars. The country therefore preferred to buy only new foreign cars of a fairly high class, the cost of which for “veterans”, for example, was only about a thousand US dollars.

A country of 6 million people was served by a million Egyptian and Filipino guest workers who cleaned the streets, drove taxis and washed dishes and worked as servants for Libyans. As a result, unemployment in Libya remained at 20 per cent and the Libyans preferred to live on guaranteed subsidies and not work for pennies, actively visiting Western countries with their families for tourism purposes.

However, the recalcitrant Gaddafi regime was a beam in the eye of Washington and its Western allies, with the result that these “color revolution” masterminds began to actively undermine Libyan society, thereby initiating the takeover of Benghazi in 2011 by “dissidents of Gaddafi policies”, multiple demonstrations that rocked the capital and several cities in Libya.

It is now more than eleven years since the UN Security Council resolution on airstrikes against Libya was passed under the pressure of a propaganda campaign by Washington (similar to the “Powell’s vial”). The resolution formally authorized “all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas” from the “bloodthirsty regime of Muammar Gaddafi”, with the exception of the deployment of occupation troops. As a result, bombing by Western “reformers” led to the complete defeat of the Libyan armed forces. They were, incidentally, considered to be among the strongest in the region and for this reason Israel, appointed by the White House as “watchdog”, was particularly interested in their collapse. Then there was the summary execution of the “Leader and Guide of the Revolution” (Gaddafi’s official title) on October 20, 2011. In this massacre across Libya that followed the “protection of civilians”, 70,000 people died!

The current Libya is a pitiful spectacle, the civil war continues unabated, with thousands of people dying in constant fighting.

Even today, the US is trying to keep Libya under its power collar and has long made unceremonious interference in the internal affairs of other states, with the right to change power in “hostile” countries, the basis of its policy, with the UN and the international community remaining silent. This “right” to make plans to change political regimes “in authoritarian countries if they threaten US security” was recently stated by one of the most respected veterans of American politics, former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to the President Henry Kissinger, in an interview with the Financial Times. With this very unfortunate fact, there is no question either from the UN or from International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan about the 2011 extrajudicial massacre of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which was initiated by the West. Gennady Kuzmin, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, in particular, drew attention to this recently at a meeting of the Security Council, but never received an answer… “According to the report, the ICC plans to put an end to the investigation into the events of 2011. So it turns out that, in the opinion of the prosecutor’s office, no one else is to blame for the disaster in Libya but the brutally murdered Muammar Gaddafi? Such an approach is simply astounding in its one-sidedness,” Kuzmin said. According to him, the principle of inevitability of punishment, so often referred to by Western states, ceases to work when it comes to themselves. According to the diplomat, “the hastily concocted case against Gaddafi by former ICC prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo was built on fabrications so clumsy and obvious that it began to fall apart even before the Libyan leader’s assassination”.

Kuzmin stated that the “Gaddafi case” at the ICC was clearly used to justify NATO’s unprovoked military aggression against Libya. “Western countries, in flagrant violation of the provisions of UNSC Resolution 1973, treated the imposition of a no-fly zone as carte blanche to carpet bomb the then sovereign and prosperous Libya. The result is known: civilian deaths, chaos and devastation in the country, and mass stream of refugees. Until today, Libya continues to suffer from the consequences of NATO’s actions in 2011,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, media close to the corridors of power in the US and Britain continue provocative campaigns to stir up controversy in Libyan society by publishing various fake and blatantly false articles on the situation in Libya. And a typical example of this, in particular, is a sleaze in The Times on May 3 about Libyan Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha’s attitude towards Russia. In its usual fake way, the publication published allegedly Libyan Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha’s statement that “Libya wants to stand with Britain against Russian aggression”. However, the Libyan Prime Minister himself, on his verified Twitter page, immediately went on record as saying that he had not said any such words and that the article was false.

As for Libya itself, the “democracy” brought there by the West has only brought terrible suffering to its people, greater even than the consequences of Italian colonialism. The never-ending crisis, the stream of refugees (some of whom die at sea trying to reach Europe), the slave markets, the areas under the control of jihadists imposing Sharia law, the loss of national sovereignty, the splitting of the country into fragments with different governments, etc. All this makes it impossible to maintain an adequate level of social and economic situation throughout Libya. Poverty and destitution provide fertile ground for the most extreme forms of Islam to flourish, providing ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (both banned in the Russian Federation) terrorists with new recruits and neophytes. In fact, Libya has turned into a huge grey zone, where the population leads a miserable existence while the country is used for games by the US and its Western allies, cultivating terrorist groups with the possibility of exporting jihad to other countries in the region.

Given the particular importance of the country’s oil revenues to Libya’s national budget, the US is making every effort to deprive the country of these funds. In 2022, for example, Libya’s projected oil revenues could be around $39 billion. However, the new US-imposed oil revenue-sharing mechanism involves freezing all the money flowing into the Libyan National Oil Company’s accounts in foreign banks, after which only a small portion will be used to pay salaries and social obligations, with US approval. This policy by Washington, as well as its unilateral sanctions on Russia’s foreign assets, is blatant robbery. That said, it must not be forgotten that many Libyan citizens today cannot afford basic stuff.

The deteriorating situation in Libya is also directly linked to US citizen Stephanie Williams, who has been imposed by Washington on the UN Secretary-General as a “special advisor” whose job it is to resolve the Libyan crisis. However, at her behest, the political contradictions between the East and West of the country have only intensified.

As a result, Libya remains a country deprived of true sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the democracy declared by the US is nowhere near there. Interference by the US and the West in Libya’s internal affairs has turned it into a failed state, Russian sociologist Maksim Shugaley said in his Telegram channel.

Under these circumstances, it is very important for Libya today that the warring factions agree among themselves and regain control of the country, returning to the path of development from which Libya has descended since Gaddafi. Otherwise, one of the parties, backed by the West, will establish sole control of the country and deploy a regime of military autocracy, which will not benefit the people of that country, but only the “collective West”, to facilitate profits from Libya’s oil.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... interests/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Wed May 18, 2022 1:57 pm

Notes from Ethiopia, Part 4: The TPLF Destruction of Afar
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 18 May 2022

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Afar IDPs who fled TPLF attack on Abala, Afar Region, Ethiopia, now sheltering with relatives in Semara. Three children here suffer the symptoms of measles, which could fatally sweep through Afar IDP camps and hospitals. (Photo: Ann Garrison, 05.16.2022)
Contributing Editor Ann Garrison continues her reporting from the Horn of Africa. She is once again in Ethiopia.

It's 110 degrees in Ethiopia's desert Afar Region, one of the hottest areas humans inhabit, and I'm thinking about how much damage the U.S. empire does with its proxy wars in even the most remote corners of the planet—like this one—which most Americans have of course never even heard of.

There's a USAID meeting going on in the next room, here at the Hotel Dini in the city of Semara, Afar Region, and this illustrates the typical US modus operandi in Africa. Send in proxy warriors who destroy and cause immeasurable suffering, then send in USAID and the rest of the NGO industrial complex to mop up and foster dependence. The meeting in the next room is about “reforming” health care and building health centers, with particular focus on antenatal and postnatal maternal and infant health.

I asked several participants whether they knew about all the Afar health centers that the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front had destroyed and looted, or the women who’d had to flee the TPLF—some in late stages of pregnancy—or the women and children who’d died in flight or are now living in lDP camps. They said they didn’t know about that, and I’m sure they wouldn’t talk about it if they did. They’ve got a gig sponsored by USAID, Save the Children, Project Hope, and General Electric.

The Afar Pastoralist Development Association , a small local NGO that works with several small, little-known Western NGOs, has no such qualms. On March 15 it published “OVER 300,000 NORTHERN AFAR LIVING UNDER TREES, HERDED BY THE TERRIFYING SOUND OF ARTILLERY, ” including this account of a birth on the road:

Kadiga’s story illustrates this amazing resilience. She is now 32 years old and fled when the first rockets began to shell the town of Aba’ala in December. She and her 5 children, her mother and the neighboring women ran for 3 days into the rural area of Aba’ala where she was till 15 days ago. Fortunately as she says it was daytime and all of a sudden rockets started falling again, this time hitting the temporary house the women had made for themselves – no one was inside but all inside was burnt. They fled with a total of 12 children, she being by then 9 months pregnant. She carried the 2-year-old and struggled to carry water. They ran for some hours and then broke off into a steady walk. On the 4th day of walking, labor pains began but the other women just said there was no hope till they reached to Garbeena and Harsuuma. Kadiga described how awful it was to go with the labor for 2 days till she could take no more. Collapsing under a tree, the baby began to come and a woman she hardly knew said she would handle it. This is how her 6th child, a son, came into the world. Asked what food did you eat, she said they had eked out the small amount of grain they had taken when fleeing Aba’ala but that had finished. Local Afar helped to revive her and she continued on till she reached Harsuuma in Afdeera, a total journey of 9 days. In Harsuuma, government food was distributed, each household getting 1 kilogram of flour and one kilogram of rice.

Valerie Browning, founder of the Afar Pastoralist Development Association, is a legendary Australian nurse, known locally as Malaika, who has lived among the Afar desert pastoralists since the famine of 1973. Speaking to New Zealand journalist Alastair Thompson, Ethiopian journalism professor Menychle Abebe, and I, she described the TPLF’s horrific destruction of Afar communities’ markets, health centers, schools, churches, mosques, and livestock, and said that what they couldn’t steal, they destroyed. She also didn’t hesitate to blame US and Western support for the TPLF for the catastrophe that Afar has been left in, with hundreds of thousands of Afar living in IDP camps or still in the remote desert lands they fled into to escape the TPLF. “If the Western world had not put their hand in at the beginning of the war, we wouldn’t be in this mess today. They interfered from the very beginning, they agreed with the TPLF, they enabled the TPLF.”

Browning also dismissed the current US position that the TPLF is one warring party that should negotiate to reach some sort of shared power arrangement. The people of Tigray Region should have a voice in government, she said, but the TPLF should not return to power after all the damage they have done in their war on Afar and other parts of Ethiopia.

“I think the American position is still that TPLF should be in government and this is not gonna go. The people of TIgray should have a say in the Parliament of Ethiopia, the same as any people in the country, but not the TPLF. No. No no no no no, wait a minute, let’s be fair.”

Health emergency

Dr. Mohammed Yusuf of Dubti General—a free public hospital near Semara—told us that infant malnutrition was a major problem that they were compelled to treat before the war, but that now, with some hundreds of thousands of Afars living in IDP camps, the problem has multiplied way beyond the hospital’s capacity. And of course, he added, emergency treatment for malnutrition may bring a child back to health, but it won’t solve the underlying problem of food insecurity, which is of course hugely exacerbated by war and displacement.

Dubti General Hospital has had to appeal for help—not only to the federal government, but also to the big international aid agencies like Save the Children and—who else?—USAID. The IDPs we interviewed in Afar also told us that the government was doing what it could to feed and otherwise help them, but that the crisis was beyond its capacity.

We visited the hospital’s pediatric wards, which seemed way overcrowded. Dr. Yusuf told us that a possibly pending measles outbreak could sweep through both the pediatric wards and the IDP camps. He said they had sent tests to Addis Ababa and were awaiting results to be certain that is what they’re facing.

During interviews with IDPs conducted on the night before we spoke to the doctor, we met several children who showed all the signs of measles—fever, rashes, sneezing, and severe conjunctivitis.

Most people who contract measles survive, but complications, including even death, are more likely in children under age 5, most especially children who are already undernourished. So Dubti General Hospital, Dubti IDP Camp, and similar facilities could be on the cusp of a catastrophic wave of infection.

Just as we were on our way out through the hospital gates, five SUVs labeled “USAID” drove in and began to unload supplies. The hospital can’t help but seek and accept such assistance under the circumstances. They are in no position to turn away or find fault with any help they can get.

Those of us who are not similarly constrained, however, must do what we can to oppose ongoing US support for the TPLF, whom the Afar people expect to attack them again.

“If TPLF come back again, I don’t know what we will do. I just don’t know.” said Malaika, “They’ve hurt Afar so badly with its livelihood that I really don’t know. The people of Afar need food. They need water supply, clean water supply. They need medical help. They need everything. If the TPLF come back and do even more dangerous destruction again, then Afar will be in an even more shocking condition.”

https://www.blackagendareport.com/notes ... ction-afar

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CP of Swaziland, Royal military’s attack on student union president: CPS calls for mobilisation of youth and students for total freedom
5/18/22 11:34 AM

18 May 2022:- Swaziland’s soldiers on Tuesday 17 May 2022 viciously assaulted the president of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS), Comrade Colani Maseko.

The military and the police also assaulted many other students who had been protesting for scholarships for all, allowances, better learning conditions, and democracy.

The assault of the student union’s president first took place at Kwaluseni campus of the University of Swaziland and later near a river just a few metres from one of Mswati's palaces (Engabezweni) and subsequently dumped at Sigodvweni police station in Matsapha. The royal police at Sigodvweni police station denied him access to medical attention.

The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) condemns this latest attack on students. The regime is desperate to cling to power as it continues to resort to extreme violence in its bid to stop the democracy wave. In its attempts to stop the democracy wave, the regime has primarily focused on working-class youth and students, the most resolute in the “Democracy Now” campaign, abducting and brutalising them.

The CPS calls for consistent mobilisation of the youth for total democracy. The youth must not be hoodwinked into participating in the backward tinkhundla elections. These elections, no matter how many so-called “radicals” partake, are meant to legitimise the ruling absolute monarchy and deepen the autocracy. The CPS calls for the total boycott and disruption of the tinkhundla elections process, to make the country ungovernable by the Mswati autocracy to usher the country to total democracy.

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-Swazi ... l-freedom/

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Mali: Failed Coup D’éTat Thanks to Wagner Group

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Wagner's Russian military avoided a coup d’éTat in Mali. May. 17, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@eTravelAlerts

Published 17 May 2022

Malian authorities report the failure of a coup attempt and the role of the Russian private military company Wagner in dismantling the plot.

According to Monday's announcement by the Government of Mali, a group of local military, foreign mercenaries, and units from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries attempted to stage a coup d'état in the country through a communiqué on May 12.

Several reports surfaced that the attack was thwarted thanks to the forces of Wagner's fighters stationed in the African country. The note also indicates that those involved in the coup have been arrested and will be tried. On condition of anonymity, a military official reported that the number of people arrested had risen to about ten and that efforts are underway to find others involved in the coup.

As the text reads, security measures in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and the country's borders, have been tightened and the situation is now under control. The Government of the Republic of Mali has called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign forces that are sent "without its permission" to the African country.

In turn, the spokesman of the Ministry of Administration and Decentralization of Mali, Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, stressed that a Western state supported this coup d'état without giving further details.


The accusing finger has been pointed at France, which, supported by NATO, deployed forces in 2013 in five African Sahel countries (Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad) under the pretext of fighting terrorism, but in reality seeks, according to public opinion, its own interests in African nations rich in natural resources.

This comes as thousands of people demonstrated on Friday in Bamako to call for the expulsion of the French mission forces and in support of Russian aid, displaying slogans such as "Thank you, Russia and Putin" or "Occupying armies, out of Mali."

The Malian government maintains tensions with France and turns to Russia for defense material. Despite the presence of the French military in five Sahel countries, extremists continue their attacks in these African nations.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mal ... -0024.html

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Workers at Sibanye Stillwater’s gold mines in South Africa have been striking for almost 100 days
A key demand of the workers has been a monthly hike of R1,000 for the lowest paid among them. However, the company is refusing to give a raise of more than R800

May 18, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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Workers of Sibanye Stillwater on strike. Photo: Miningmx

The strike in the gold mines of Sibanye Stillwater in South Africa continues in its third month as the fourth negotiation meeting between the company and the unions failed to find a resolution to the conflict over wages on Tuesday, May 17.

Around 30,000 workers in the company’s gold mines downed tools on March 9 demanding a pay hike of R1,000 for the lowest paid workers, which would raise their salary to R10,000.

Unions are also demanding a 6% wage hike for those categorized as “skilled workers” and a R100 hike for officers in this multinational precious metals company listed in the stock exchanges of Johannesburg and New York.

Sibanye Stillwater’s gold mining operations have come to a halt as workers have been picketing its gold mines everyday since the start of the strike, said Jeff Mphalele, general secretary of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). AMCU represents about half of the workers in Sibanye Stillwater’s gold mines. The other half are members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

While CEO Neal Froneman justified his last year’s R300 million remuneration package, the company has refused to give a hike more than R800 for the lowest paid. The unions refused to compromise and the strike has continued.

“You must understand that it is not just the difference of 200 rands we are fighting for, there is a structural problem with the salaries,” Mphalele told Peoples Dispatch. Those earning below R10,000 do not qualify for most of the housing loans from banks. On the other hand, they also do not qualify for the government’s housing welfare assistance which is meant only for the unemployed.

“So salaries must improve. It is important. We cannot sacrifice that 200 rand. It is not as little as one might think,” he said, adding, “I don’t know why denying the 200 rands is so important for the company. The CEO gave himself 300 million rand. 300 million for just one man! And he is refusing to give just 1,000 Rands to 30,000 people,(which adds up only to 30 million rands).”

Workers are losing pay for every day of the strike. News 24 reported that the “lowest paid have lost more than R20,000 in basic pay, and R37,000 when you include benefits and allowances. If the strike ended tomorrow with no improvement on the offer it will take them more than two years to recoup their losses. If they win, it will be 20 months before they break even.”

According to Mphalele, looking at strike as a loss to the workers regardless of the outcome is based on the assumption that those not on strike are not losing incomes. “But even workers who are not on strike are not meeting their needs for the month on their wages,” he argued, explaining that, strike or not, workers have been losing incomes as prices rise against constant wages.

In the platinum sector, where striking workers demanding R12,500 per month were massacred in Marikana 10 years ago, the monthly wage of the lowest earner is now R13,000, which is R4,000 above the lowest wage in the gold sector.

“Because in the platinum sector, where AMCU has been in majority, we did not make compromises with the companies in negotiations; we pushed on till our demands were met,” Mphalele added.

Wage negotiations are also set to begin in the Sibanye Stillwater’s platinum mines soon. “Our demands are more or less the same as in gold. Should the company fail to meet the demands here, they can expect strike action in platinum mines too,” he said.

Extending solidarity with AMCU and NUM, Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the country’s single largest union, said, “The mining house and its shareholders must come clean and explain to the whole country as to what is the basis for denying workers their justified demand of an R1,000 increase? Particularly, given that in the same sector last year, due to the current commodity boom, as unions in Harmony Gold, Numsa settled on a R1,000 increase for the lowest-paid workers for each year over three years. We signed a historic agreement, which resulted in the lowest-paid worker, (who is currently earning R10,478), that worker will be earning an average of R13,478 by the third year of the agreement.”

NUMSA itself is on strike at ArcelorMittal South Africa (AMSA), the country’s largest steel producer, which was interdicted by a court last week.

Outside of the mining sector, the bulk of South Africa’s unionized workforce are in the public service sector where most of the unions are affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade (COSATU), the labor ally of the ruling ANC.

COSATU has tabled a demand of 10% wage hike at the negotiations which began at the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) earlier this month. However, yielding under the pressure of finance capital, the South African government has committed to reduce public sector wages, putting itself at loggerheads with unions across sectors. Several more labor actions may be witnessed in the coming months.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/05/18/ ... -100-days/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri May 20, 2022 1:21 pm

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Washington to Send Troops to Somalia for ‘Special Military Operation’
May 19, 2022

Caracas, May 18, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)—A statement from the spokesperson for the United States Department of Defense, John Kirby, indicated that President Joe Biden approved the redeployment of troops to Somalia, a decision that reverses the order that Donald Trump took during his term to withdraw 700 soldiers from the African country.

The Horn of Africa, consisting of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, for many geo-strategic experts is a region of contention for Chinese interest in Africa. It also represents a controversial region where US and European interests have incentivized fragmentation and thus have created the conditions for a “humanitarian crisis” that is the perfect excuse for military intervention.

According to Kirby, the objective of the mission is to help local forces defeat the Al-Shabaab insurgency, linked to Al Qaeda, which includes training, advice and delivery of weapons. In the US announcement no mention was made to Somali government approval despite a reference to engagement with “partners in the region” and Sunday’s presidential elections in Somalia.

On Tuesday reelected former president Hassan Mohamud, via Somalia’s official presidency Twitter account, saluted the announcement in a very welcoming tone and called the US a reliable partner in their quest for stability and against terrorism.

The Pentagon justified the decision by saying that Al-Shabaab has increased its strength and currently represents a greater threat. The spokesperson pointed out that the current US assistance, which consists of entering and leaving Somalia as needed, has become “inefficient,” according to an RT report.

Since December 1992 the US army under the banner of Operation Restore Hope, with the complacency of the United Nations have marked the military and political life of the African country with the alleged excuse of “humanitarian intervention” or fight against terrorism, something that has not translated into a real improvement of life conditions for the majority of the Somalis. US military presence has been active in Somalia since 1992, directly or under the African Union, Ethiopian or Kenyan military operations but since 2016 under Obama administration many US strikes have been performed, most of the time taking the lives of innocent people.

According to government officials during this latest announcement, the US president approved the proposal in early May and the deployment of 450 soldiers.

The redeployment of US troops to Somalia stands in stark contrast to Western countries’ outrage over Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, which they have labeled as an invasion and have used as an excuse to expand Russophobia and sanctions in an attempt to diminish the growing role of Russia in the new international order. Some analysts believe that the indignation would be greater if any other country were to decide to send weapons to the Somalis to defend themselves against US military intervention, just as they do with the Ukrainians.

A UK-based NGO with funding from ultra-conservative George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Airwars, reports that since 2002 between 68 and 143 civilian deaths have been reported as a result of direct actions of US forces in Somalia. Between 18-21 of them children.

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In their report the number of airstrikes is not clearly seen, including massive launches of drone strikes since Barack Obama’s presidency, which is pointed out by many local and international news outlets as responsible for countless “collateral damages.”

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However, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (also financed by mainstream corporate so-called philanthropic foundations) reported that, from 2004 until February 2020, at least 202 US drone strikes were confirmed, with a total death toll between 1,197 and 1,410.

https://orinocotribune.com/washington-t ... operation/

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UN, Niger lament Mali’s withdrawal from G5 Sahel force
The decision to abandon the multinational effort may further isolate Bamako on the regional and global stage.

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The G5 Sahel force has been hobbled by a lack of funding and has struggled to reduce high levels of violence in the region [File: Benoit Tessier/Reuters]

Published On 19 May 2022

The United Nations’ top political official for Africa has bemoaned Mali’s decision to withdraw from a multinational military force in West Africa’s Sahel region, calling the move “unfortunate and regrettable”.

Assistant Secretary-General Martha Pobee told a meeting of the UN’s Security Council (UNSC) on Wednesday that this week’s decision by Mali’s military government to leave the G5 Sahel force “is most certainly a step back for the Sahel.”

The force, which includes troops from Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, was formed in 2017 to counter armed groups who have swept across the region in recent years, killing thousands of people and forcing millions to flee their homes.

But it has been hobbled by a lack of funding and has struggled to reduce the violence.

Meanwhile, Mali’s withdrawal further isolates the country – which has been hit with sanctions by West Africa’s regional political bloc, impacting jobs and industry – on both the regional and global stage.



Niger declares Sahel force ‘dead’

Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum said that Mali’s decision, which came after it was not allowed to assume the group’s rotating presidency, meant the Sahel force was now “dead”.


“The isolation of Bamako in West Africa is bad for the whole sub-region,” Bazoum told French newspaper La Croix in an interview published on Wednesday.

But the force’s executive secretary adopted a more measured tone over Mali’s decision.

Eric Tiare echoed Pobee in calling Bamako’s decision “regrettable” but told the UNSC meeting that it had enjoyed some successes in combatting armed groups and helping foster socioeconomic development in the region. Tiare also called on the world body to offer it more support.

France’s envoy to the UN, Nicolas de Riviere, also lamented Mali’s withdrawal from the force, as did other UNSC members.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/1 ... ahel-force

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Is this the end of the French project in Africa’s Sahel?

Mali recently announced that it would no longer be part of the G5 Sahel. From the beginning, it was clear that the formation of the G5 Sahel was encouraged by France, and that the real focus was to be security.

May 19, 2022 by Vijay Prashad

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On May 15, 2022, the military junta in Mali announced that it would no longer be part of the G5 Sahel platform. The G5 Sahel was created in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in 2014, and brought together the governments of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger to collaborate over the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel belt—the region just below the Sahara desert in Africa—and to increase trade among these countries. Behind the scenes, it was clear that the formation of the G5 Sahel was encouraged by the French government, and that, despite all the talk of trade, the real focus of the group was going to be security.

In early 2017, under French pressure, these G5 Sahel countries created the G5 Sahel Joint Force (FC-G5S), a military alliance to combat the security threat posed by the aftermath of the Algerian civil war (1991-2002) and the detritus of NATO’s 2011 war in Libya. The G5 Sahel Joint Force received the backing of the United Nations Security Council to conduct military operations in the region.

Mali’s military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga said on May 15 that his government had sent a letter on April 22 to General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno—President of Chad’s transitional military council and the outgoing president of the G5 Sahel—informing him of Mali’s decision; the lack of movement in holding the conference of the G5 Sahel heads of state, which was supposed to take place in Mali in February, and handing over the rotating presidency of the FC-G5S to the country, forced Mali to take the action of leaving both the FC-G5S and the G5 Sahel platform, Colonel Maïga said on national television.

The departure of Mali was inevitable. The country has been torn apart by austerity policies pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and by conflicts that run along the length of this country of more than 20 million people. Two coups d’état in 2020 and 2021 in Mali were followed up with the promise of elections, which do not seem to be on the horizon. Regional bodies, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), have also imposed tough sanctions against Mali, which has only exacerbated the economic problems already being faced by the Malian people. The G5 Sahel defense ministers last met in November 2021, and the G5 Sahel member countries’ heads of state meeting in February 2022 was postponed. Mali was meant to take over the rotating presidency of G5 Sahel, but the other states who are part of the platform were not keen on this transfer (Chad has continued with the presidency).

Extra-regional power
The statement by Mali’s military blamed the institutional drift in the G5 Sahel on the “maneuvers of an extra-regional state desperately aiming to isolate Mali.” This “extra-regional state” is France, which Mali says has tried to “instrumentalize” the G5 Sahel for French objectives.

The five members of G5 Sahel are all former French colonies, who ejected the French through anti-colonial struggles and attempted to build their own sovereign states. These countries suffered assassinations (such as that of Burkina Faso’s former leader Thomas Sankara in 1987), dealt with IMF austerity programs (such as the measures taken against the government of Mali’s former President Alpha Oumar Konaré from 1996 to 1999), and faced the reassertion of French power (such as when France backed Chad’s Marshall Idriss Déby against Hissène Habré in 1990). After the French-initiated NATO war against Libya in 2011, and the destabilization it wrought, France intervened militarily in Mali through Operation Barkhane, and then—along with the United States military—it intervened across the Sahel as part of the G5 Sahel platform.

Since the reentry of the French military in the region, it has driven an agenda that seems to be more about catering to Europe’s needs than those of the Sahel region. The main argument made for the French (and US) intervention in the Sahel is that they want to partner with the militaries of the region to combat terrorism. It is true that there has been a rise in militancy—some of it rooted in the expansion of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State activities in the Sahel. Conversations with officials in the Sahel states, however, reveal that they do not believe that countering terrorism is the main issue for French pressure on their governments. They believe, although they are wary of going on the record, that the Europeans are worried more about the issue of migration than that of terrorism. Rather than allow migrants—many from West Africa and West Asia—to reach the Libyan coast and make an attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea, they want to build a perimeter in the Sahel to limit the migrant movement beyond that; France has, in other words, moved the southern border of Europe from north of the Mediterranean to south of the Sahara.

Poorest place on earth
“We live in one of the poorest places on earth,” former Malian President Amadou Toumani Touré told me before he died in 2020. About 80 percent of the people of the Sahel live on less than $1.90 a day, and the population growth in this region is expected to rise from 90 million in 2017 to 240 million by 2050. The Sahel belt owes a vast debt to the wealthy bondholders in the North Atlantic states, who are not prepared for debt forgiveness. At the seventh summit of the G5 Sahel in February 2021, the heads of state called for a “deep restructuring of the debt of the G5 Sahel countries.” But the response they received from the IMF was deafening.

Part of the budgetary problem is the demands made on these states by France to increase their military spending against any increase in their spending for humanitarian relief and development. The G5 Sahel countries spend between 17 percent and 30 percent of their budgets on their militaries. Three of the five Sahel countries have increased their military spending astronomically over the past decade, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: Burkina Faso by 238 percent, Mali by 339 percent, and Niger by 288 percent. The arms trade is suffocating these countries. With the potential entry of NATO into the region, this illusionary form of treating the Sahel’s problems as security problems will only persist. Even for the United Nations, the questions of development in the area have become an afterthought to the main focus on war.

Lack of support for the civilian governments to deal with the real problems in the region has led to military coups in three of the five countries: Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali. The military junta in Mali ejected the French military from Mali’s territory on May 2, a week before it left G5 Sahel. Indications of disquiet regarding French policies swirl around the region. Will Mali’s example be followed by any of the other countries who are part of the G5 Sahel group, and will France’s real project in the Sahel—to limit migration of people from the Global South to Europe—eventually collapse with Mali’s exit from the G5 Sahel?

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/05/19/ ... cas-sahel/

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International Court of Justice Ruled that Uganda Must Pay $325 Million in Reparations to the Democratic Republic of Congo—But What About U.S. and UK?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 19, 2022
Jeremy Kuzmarov

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U.S. soldiers training counterparts in Uganda. [Source: africanarguments.org]

In February, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Uganda must pay $325 million in reparations to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for its role in conflicts in Congo’s resource-rich Ituri province from 1998 to 2003.

The amount includes $225 million to be paid for “loss of life and other damages to persons” that included rape, conscription of child soldiers and the displacement of up to 500,000 people.

The ICJ added another $40 million for damage to property and $60 million for damage to natural resources, including the plundering of gold, diamonds, timber and other goods by Ugandan forces or rebels they supported.

The $325 million sum falls well short of the $11 billion that Congo had demanded.

For true justice to be achieved, Uganda’s foreign backers—including especially the U.S.—should also be held liable for significant reparations payments and be indicted criminally.

Ugandan Invasion and Plunder of the Congo

Uganda first invaded the DRC in 1996 with Rwanda in order to replace the DRC’s ailing leader Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko with Laurent Kabila, a former guerrilla fighter and diamond smuggler who would help Uganda and other foreign powers access the country’s rich mineral wealth.

In 1997, gold and gold compounds plundered from the DRC became Uganda’s second largest source of export earnings.[1]

In 1998, after Museveni claimed that Kabila was failing to provide security along Uganda’s border, Ugandan troops invaded the DRC again and helped install a new puppet, Hyppolite Kanambe (aka Joseph Kabila).[2]

The Wall Street Journal had reported that Kabila’s nationalizations “sent a worrying signal … to foreign companies that are eager to do business in this mineral-rich country.”

Between 1999 and 2003, Uganda and its proxy militias controlled Congo’s Ituri region, home to some of the richest gold and diamond deposits on earth, as well as coltan.

During this period, some 50,000 Iturians were killed and half a million displaced while the Ugandans and their allies “looted property, committed murders, and grabbed land,” in the words of journalist Helen C. Epstein. Villagers were raped, and herded into churches and burned alive.[3]

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Ituri Becomes Congo's Latest Flashpoint – Africa Center for Strategic Studies[Source: africacenter.org]

The UN Security Council reported that General James Kazini, the commander of the Ugandan Army, looted timber and conspired with a Ugandan militia leader, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, to seize 200 tons of coffee beans in the Équateur region.

President Museveni’s half-brother, Salim Saleh, and his wife, Jovia Akandwanaho, took charge of the exploitation of diamonds while setting up a private air-transport company to ship illicit natural resources back into Uganda.

In total, Uganda is estimated to have plundered at least $10 billion in Congo’s mineral wealth.

Emma Bonino, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, spoke of “incomprehensible carnage” and accused the invaders (Uganda and Rwanda) of having transformed the entire region into a “slaughterhouse.”[4]

U.S. Complicity in “Africa’s First World War”

From the beginning, the U.S. and Great Britain were key sponsors of the Rwandan-Ugandan invasion of Congo, “Africa’s First World War.”

Ugandan troops received extensive funding through Bill Clinton’s African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), a $10-20 million per year initiative inaugurated in 1996.[5]

With the approval of the Clinton administration, the Pentagon and CIA provided more than $10 million in arms to Uganda as well as Rwanda, including through a CIA-run airline, Mountain, which helped evacuate wounded soldiers, and installed a command and communications center in Kigali and in the coastal areas of Uganda to help support them.

The National Security Agency (NSA) supplied portable encrypted Motorola satellite phones from which Rwandan and Ugandan military commanders could receive advice and intelligence from the U.S. government and CIA-provided satellite imagery of refugee movements, some of it free of charge, through defense contractor Bechtel.[6]

U.S. Special Forces and private contractors, such as Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), provided counterinsurgency training to Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and Ugandan fighters guilty of atrocities against unarmed civilians. A senior U.S. embassy official in Kigali described the program as “killers…training killers.”

The Ugandan fighters were issued American-made uniforms and night-vision goggles. Journalist Wayne Madsen reported on a 1998 visit that he “could hardly avoid encountering uniformed and non-uniformed U.S. military personnel in the… hotels in Kampala and Kigali.”

A few Americans reportedly made incursions into Zaire and some, according to French intelligence sources, participated in massacres of Hutu refugees.

Two Green Berets were reportedly killed. French intelligence claimed that American C-130 gunships machine-gunned refugee camps, though this is difficult to corroborate.[7]

To the Victor Goes the Spoil

As a spoil of victory, Western corporations—such as America Mineral Fields (AMF), headquartered in Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s hometown, and Barrick Gold, on whose Board sat George H.W. Bush and ex-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney—received concessions for mining mineral resources worth more than $157 billion.[8]

AMF CEO Jean-Raymond Boulle had been a guest at Clinton’s first White House inauguration; he promoted a venture digging for diamonds in Arkansas in the 1980s when then-Governor Clinton approved Boulle’s drilling in the Arkansas state park.

The CEO of Boulle’s main investor, Sanford Robertson of Robertson Stephens Investment Management Company, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic Party causes and hosted fundraisers for Clinton.[9]

Another big beneficiary of the U.S.-Rwandan-Ugandan invasion of Congo was the copper giant Phelps Dodge Corporation, which secured ownership of the cobalt-producing Tenke Fungurume mine with the help of the U.S. embassy.[10]

With Friends Like These

Museveni was used as an important proxy to enable the corporate plunder of the Congo. He evolved as a “darling of U.S. diplomats” in the 1990s as a result of his “style of self-reliant government, fiscal discipline and free-market economics,” according to The New York Times.[11]

Between 1998 and 2013, Museveni’s regime received $20.5 billion in U.S. aid. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called him “a beacon in the Central Africa region.”[12]

Back in 1987, fresh from his triumph over socialist Milton Obote in a bloody six-year bush war, Museveni had been greeted with full honors on Capitol Hill and met with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Journalist Helen Epstein wrote that, since the meeting with Reagan, Museveni “has had far more contact with high-level American and British officials than any other living African leader.”

Some company for America’s best and brightest to keep!

Notes:

1.Helen C. Epstein, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2017), 31, 32. ↑
2.John F. Clark, “Museveni’s Adventure in the Congo War: Uganda’s Vietnam?” In The African Stakes of the Congo War, John F. Clark, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 152; Yaa-Lengi M. Ngemi, ‘Joseph Kabila,’ Identity Thief, Impostor and Rwandan Trojan Horse in Congo (New York: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2017). ↑
3.Epstein, Another Fine Mess, 128. ↑
4.See Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2006); Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Toronto: Random House, 2018), 47. ↑
5.James Rupert, “U.S. Troops Teach Peacekeeping to Africans,” The Washington Post, September 26, 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... b1c757919/; Paul Omach, “The African Crisis Response Initiative: Domestic Politics and Convergence of National Interests,” African Affairs 99, no. 394 (Jan. 2000): 73-95, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/723548; The White House. Office of the Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI),” April 1, 1998, https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov ... 20179.html. ↑
6.J.E. Murphy, U.S. Made (Meadville, PA: Christian Faith Publishing, 2015), 135; Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Congo, 1993-1999 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 157. Another private firm, Ronco, consisting largely of former U.S. Special Forces, provided explosives, armored vehicles and transport trucks in contravention of a UN arms embargo. Ronco’s vehicles assisted in moving RPF troops from Uganda into Rwanda and later from Rwanda into Zaire. The Americans covered their tracks by insisting that the contract was for the removal of land mines. ↑
7.Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War, Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67-73; William Hartung and Bridget Moix, Deadly Legacy: U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War (New York: World Policy Institute, 1994); Lynne Duke, “U.S. Military Role in Rwanda Greater Than Disclosed,” The Washington Post, August 16, 1997, A1; Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, 197, 200, 205, 212, 439; Murphy, U.S. Made, 133-135. Madsen reported on a 1998 visit that he “could hardly avoid encountering uniformed and non-uniformed U.S. military personnel in the… hotels in Kampala and Kigali.” An Israeli agent working with U.S. intelligence to assist Kabila’s forces was also reportedly killed. The International Rescue Committee may have helped provide a cover for CIA operations in support of Kabila’s rebels. Kabila himself was advised by Robert Stewart, a Bechtel executive. [NOTE: The sentence beginning “Madsen reported” is already verbatim in the text (p. 8).] ↑
8.Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan “The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Who benefits?” Dollars and Sense, July/August 2001, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stor ... the-congo/; Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo,” Third World Traveler, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afric ... mbers.html; Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, 69-74; Peter Eichstaedt, Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World’s Deadliest Place (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016). [NOTE: The Snow/Barouski article was first published in Z Magazine in 2006.] ↑
9.“Friends in High Places,” Forbes, August 10, 1998, https://www.forbes.com/global/1998/0810 ... b4a2503aac. ↑
10.Justin Podur, America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). ↑
11.James C. McKinley, Jr., “Clinton in Africa: The Region; A New Model for Africa; Good Leaders Above All,” The New York Times, March 25, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/25/worl ... e-all.html
12.Epstein, Another Fine Mess, 134. ↑

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... -s-and-uk/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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