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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:26 pm

AFRICOM Watch - February 2022
Tunde Osazua 02 Feb 2022

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U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander, U.S. Africa Command meets with Ghanaian military leaders after arriving in Ghana as part of four-day trip to West Africa beginning Sept. 20, 2021. (Credit: Africom.mil)

The U.S. has been waging wars in Africa since the 1950s. The creation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008 is only the logical development of a process of control meant to deny Africans democracy, self-determination and dignity.

Troops trained by AFRICOM have been behind nine coups d’etat on the African continent in the thirteen years of the military command’s existence. All but one of the G5 Sahel countries have experienced a coup in that period, and the military training that the U.S. and France provide to troops in these countries through the various AFRICOM exercises and the French Foreign Legion among other installations, present a serious concern. A 2017 study using data from 189 countries shows that greater numbers of military officers trained by the U.S. Military increase the probability of a military coup, and as Netfa Freeman wrote previously , AFRICOM serves as a “coup incubator” by emboldening a military class on the African continent that the U.S. can’t control.

The reasoning that the military troops often provide for carrying out coups d’etat, including the recent coup in Burkina Faso, often points to the inability of their comprador heads of state to effectively deal with armed opposition groups in their countries. The U.S./E.U./NATO war on Libya, in which AFRICOM played an important role , was pivotal in the enhancement of the military capabilities of these armed opposition groups and their proliferation across the Sahel. Western imperialist countries supported these groups in Libya, and they are now wreaking havoc in different parts of the continent.

As Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara once stated, “without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal.” The officers involved in the recent coup in Burkina Faso, as well as the eight previous coups d’etat in the region, not only lacked patriotic political education, they participated in military training that came with indoctrination about colonization and the role the U.S., French, and European forces have played in Africa. It is almost impossible for these officers to develop or maintain any revolutionary consciousness.

Though there is a rejection of Western domination by the masses in countries like Mali , Burkina Faso , and Senegal , it is incorrect to assume that these coups d’etat are any threat to Western neo-colonialism. A successful challenge to neo-colonialism would go far beyond an effort from military officers that lacks commitment to genuine anti-imperialism. As Kwame Nkrumah one said, “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked to the total liberation of the African continent.” A commitment to participatory democratic processes and self-determination is necessary, along with the understanding that African countries must pursue Pan-African unity to defend themselves from foreign domination.

U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle

Tunde Osuzua (of the AFRICOM Watch Bulletin (AWB) speaks with Lauren Gould, who is Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at Utrecht University and the director of the Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme on new strategies of remote warfare across Africa and the Middle East.

AWB: Would you please describe the concept of “liquid warfare” as it relates to U.S. military operations on the African continent?

Lauren Gould: Aiming to define the ‘new newness’ of interventionist warfare, we look to Western state-led operations as a marked shift away from ‘boots on the ground’ deployments towards light-footprint military interventions, involving a combination of drone strikes and airstrikes, special forces, intelligence operatives, private contractors, and military-to-military (M2M) training teams on the ground. Largely, these military interventions (and their lived realities) remain hidden from Western publics. And if they incidentally appear on our screens, the shadowy mix of alliances and actors involved makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility and underlying power constellations. This elusiveness is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, larger audiences are (effectively) confused into indifference, and, importantly, those at the receiving end of the violence are unable to hold governments to account. War is rendered invisible and normalized.

The ‘newness’ of war can be attributed to three developments. First, the horrors of interventionist ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq invoked a sense of risk aversion and war fatigue, ushering in a ‘post-interventionist’ or ‘pull-back’ era. As a reaction, the U.S. and its coalition partners (but also major powers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia) have combined a resort to ‘precision’ airstrikes with a shift to smaller, clandestine, more focused interventions. Second, the turn to military robotics (and drones in particular) is a key feature of interventionist warfare. What is often implied is that somehow new technologies are the drivers behind new forms of warfare. Third, and equally prominent, is the debate on the networked nature of war. Simply put, the argument goes that because the ‘enemies of the state’ are now operating through shadowy networks and cells, the state has to resort to similar tactics. Elements within the U.S. military and related agencies, legitimated (and ‘legalized’) by the War on Terror, have increasingly adopted more networked forms of organization, which has made possible the integration of drones and new technologies into so-called counternetwars, in which ‘hybrid blends of hierarchies and networks … mount strike operations across shadowy transnational battle spaces’. What is in fact implied is that ‘shadow warfare’ results from the state mimicking its enemies.

War is an alternative system of profit, power and protection. Wars are produced; they are made to happen by a diverse and complicated set of actors who may well be achieving their objectives in the midst of what looks like failure and breakdown. The changing nature of interventionist warfare cannot be attributed to reactive impulses or strategies alone. Rather, ‘war fatigue’, ‘remote technology’ and ‘enemy networks’ provide additional conditions of possibility for the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of war. As with the case of AFRICOM, they offer new opportunities to further what the U.S. Department of Defense articulates as “shaping the international security environment in ways that promote and protect U.S. interests.” Paying tribute to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity vocabulary and Derek Gregory’s notion of ‘everywhere war’, we use the term ‘liquid warfare’ to highlight how conventional ties between war, space and time have become undone. Liquid warfare is about flexible, open-ended, ‘pop-up’ military interventions, supported by remote technology and reliant on local partnerships and private contractors, through which (coalitions of) parties aim to promote and protect interests. Liquid warfare is thus temporally open-ended and eventful, as well as spatially dispersed and mobile.

AWB: What brought about the “newness” of war?

LG: The origins of the temporal reconfiguration of modern war, and particularly U.S. warfare, can be traced back to the 1950’s. The U.S. doctrine of the past 60 years is that of a long and consistent pattern of military expansionism in the service of empire, which some have termed ‘forever’ or ‘permanent’ war. We have to rethink late modern war not merely in terms of time but also in terms of space and territoriality. Whereas wars in the past were conducted in ‘resolutely territorial terms’, we now have to ‘supplement cartographic reason by other, more labile spatialities’ (Gregory, 2011: 239). War has become mobile. The concept of the battlefield in U.S. doctrine is replaced by a multiscalar, multidimensional battlescape. The geocentric concept of war is now opposed to a target-centered one, attached to the bodies of the enemy prey.

Although the War on Terror is often seen as the starting point of this ‘mobile turn’, we can see the military interventionism that ensued from it as a climactic summation of a longer history of ‘globalizing wars’ in which the goal is not to take over territory but to ‘remove the obstacles on the road to a truly global freedom of economic forces’. The power of the state in late modernity rests upon credit ratings, corporate capacity and global market shares, not on the capture of territory. Control over resources is of key importance, but access is arranged through free trade regimes, leasing and contracting, large scale land purchases, forestry permits, and ‘accumulation by conservation’, rather than territorial conquest. In contrast to the direct colonial era of rule, ascendancy over a territory has ‘ceased to be the stake of the global power struggle’. Today’s wars look like ‘the promotion of global free trade by other means’. This has been labeled ‘military neoliberalism’: a useful shorthand for the increasingly military means whereby the state seeks to make the world ‘safe’ for global capital. What we notice for the case of AFRICOM is that the major technique of interventionism is the rejection not just of geopolitical territorial confinement but also of biopolitical notions of controlling the life and death of populations, along with the related responsibilities and costs of order and nation-building. Instead, what is at its core is the notion of ‘shaping’ – pursued by ‘forward presence’ and ‘forward posture’ in military terms.

We here include the above-mentioned temporal and spatial dimensions in the way we define liquid warfare as a form of military interventionism that shuns direct control of territory and populations and its cumbersome order-building and order-maintaining responsibilities, focusing instead on ‘shaping’ the international security environment through remote technology, flexible operations and M2M partnerships. Key to such an understanding of liquid warfare is its inherently indirect and assembled nature. Because of its reliance on remote management, it works through assemblages of heterogeneous and changing ‘partnerships’, which are often full of friction.

AWB: How does AFRICOM fit into liquid warfare?

LG: The hunt for Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA rebel movement that was at war with the Ugandan government for over two decades, features as one of the campaigns justifying U.S. extrastate military engagement in Africa. Other more recent examples are ‘destroying’ Al-Shabaab, ‘countering’ Islamic State and AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), and ‘blunting’ Boko Haram, as well as the open-ended campaign to contain the fallout from the 2011 military intervention that ousted Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya. These operations are coordinated by AFRICOM. In 2008, AFRICOM became the leading organization responsible for U.S. military and security policy towards Africa. According to its mission statement, AFRICOM ‘builds defense capabilities, responds to crisis, and deters and defeats transnational threats in order to advance U.S. national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity’. The 2011 National Military Strategy stresses the importance of establishing partnerships between the U.S. and African governments to help ‘facilitate the African Union’s many security challenges’. In more unguarded moments, however, officials have been more straightforward: Vice-Admiral Robert Moeller, at a conference in 2008, declared that AFRICOM was about preserving ‘the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market’, while citing terrorism, oil disruption and China as major ‘challenges to U.S. interests’.

The U.S. has been fighting wars in Africa since the 1950s – in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Libya and Djibouti, to name but a few countries. In some cases, this has involved overt military operations using U.S. troops, operating from large military bases such as Wheelus Field in Libya (stationing 4600 U.S. personnel) and Kagnew Station in Asmara (home to 5000 U.S. personnel at its peak during the 1960s). U.S. military engagement during the Cold War also involved clandestine military operations and the financing and arming of local forces. Washington’s militarization efforts were accelerated after 9/11, when Africa became the ‘new frontier’ in global counterterrorism operations, and were centralized under AFRICOM in 2008. AFRICOM’s mode of operation represents a change from large deployments of U.S. troops to more flexible and lighter operations. It has neither permanent combat troops assigned to it, nor even any permanent official bases housing U.S. troops in Africa, with the exception of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

Instead, it aims to work through African partners. As Branch explains, ‘AFRICOM is being built through informal base sharing agreements with African states and through the establishment of barebones facilities, so-called “lily-pads” or “cooperative security locations,” which can be converted into functioning U.S. military bases in 24–48 hours’ – something we refer to as ‘pop-up warfare’. Moreover, the focus is on security cooperation, including military-to-military training. According to data supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command, there are 1700 people dedicated to assisting the U.S. military’s African partners, spread out across 20 countries, conducting 96 activities at any given time. AFRICOM claims ‘these activities build strong, enduring partnerships with African nations, regional and international organizations, and other states that are committed to improving security in Africa’. In practice, this means that African troops are doing the actual fighting and dying on the ground while AFRICOM performs most of the support tasks, such as logistics, medical support, surveillance and training.

AWB: Thank you for your time and analysis!

Tunde Osazua is on the Africa Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and Coordinator of BAP’s US Out of Africa Network.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/afric ... ruary-2022

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Death toll continues to mount as pro-democracy protests rock Sudan

Amidst this country-wide civil rebellion, the military junta is speedily moving to reinstate the Islamist regime led by former dictator Omar al Bashir, who was ousted in April 2019

February 01, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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Massive pro-democracy protests were held on January 30 in Sudan. Photo: Dalia Eltahir/ Twitter

On Sunday, January 30, mass demonstrations against the military junta in Sudan saw hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters take to streets in at least 25 cities and towns around the country, for the 16th time since the coup on October 25, 2021.

Protesters have blocked the Sudan-Egypt border and several connecting highways to disrupt trade with the northern neighbor, whose government is known to be supporting the junta. Further a critical bridge on the highway connecting capital Khartoum and Port Sudan on the Red Sea has also been blockaded.

The security forces violently attacked the protesters on Sunday, injuring at least 180 people with the use of live bullets and tear gas canisters which were shot directly at their heads, the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD) said in a statement on Monday.

In central Khartoum, where the junta has banned demonstrations, the security forces opened fire on rallies converging from various neighborhoods towards the presidential palace, which is the seat of coup leader and army chief Abdel Fattal al-Burhan.

27-year-old Mohamed Yousif Ismail died in this attack by security forces after succumbing to chest trauma. “The nature of the injury is yet to be identified. The death toll among civilians has now risen to 79 since the military coup,” the CCSD said.

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The pro-democracy protests in Sudan have been met with violent repression by military forces. So far 79 civilians have been killed since the coup in October. Photo: Twitter

Ismail was a member of the Resistance Committee (RC) in the Wad Nubawi neighborhood in Khartoum’s twin city Omdurman. He was a representative of his committee in the Omdurman coordinating body of the RCs.

The mass resistance against the junta is being spearheaded by a network of RCs that were organized in neighborhoods across Sudan during the course of the December Revolution. Later in the evening on Sunday, hundreds attended Ismail’s funeral service and hailed him as a martyr and vowed to continue the struggle. “[E]ven if you kill the entire Sudanese people, you and your dogs will not rule us,” the RCs of Khartoum’s Al Kalakla Al Gubba neighborhood said in a statement addressing Burhan.

Forces also attacked the mass demonstrations in several other States and arrested the protesters, including in Red Sea, Kassala, Gedaref and Blue Nile. Protesters in several cities barricaded neighborhoods to defend from the attacks by the security forces who invaded residential areas.

A police captain reportedly had his fingers amputated after a stun grenade he was hurling at protesters exploded in his hands.

Blockading trade with Egypt

A major escalation in the resistance has been the blockading of trade routes with Egypt in the three northernmost Sudanese States along the Egyptian border. In River Nile State’s capital city Ad-Damir and in Port Sudan in Red Sea State, critical roads used by trucks to carry goods to and from Egypt have been blocked for trade. An important bridge connecting Port Sudan to capital Khartoum was also blocked by the RCs in Atbara city in the River Nile State.

In the neighboring Northern State, the Sheryan El Shima road to the Egyptian border has been blocked by farmers protesting against further hikes in electricity tariffs since January 9. Though the decision to hike the prices was rescinded on January 12, the farmers and the RCs have continued the blockade demanding a fair share of the State’s revenues from mining and agricultural projects in these regions. They are also calling for disinvestment of military-owned companies from these projects.

“We will fully block the road between the two countries and stop the Sudanese exports to Egypt. Roads will be shut from both River Nile State and the Northern State, including the road linking Port Sudan with Khartoum to the south and with Egypt in the north,” the RCs announced earlier on January 30.

The nature of trade between the two countries is characterized by the export of raw materials including livestock and agricultural products by Sudan in exchange for imported valued-added goods from Egypt. This is perceived to be a reason for the rising prices of basic commodities in Sudan and a shirking market in the country for its native farmers.

Import reliance on Egypt has increased drastically over the last two years, much faster than the rate of increase in Sudan’s exports. Value of imports from Egypt has increased from USD 172.3 million in the first six months of 2020 to USD 419 million in the same period of 2021, while Sudanese exports to Egypt increased from USD 119.5 million to USD 299 million, Al-Monitor reported.

Widespread smuggling, allegedly undertaken with the connivance of the state authorities at the Sudan-Egypt border, is thought to be adding to the economic woes of the Sudanese people. The blockades are targeting not only the Sudanese state, but the Egyptian government for its perceived interference to prop up the military junta which has no domestic legitimacy.

Less than a month after the coup, on November 20, 2021, Egypt’s National Organization for Military Production signed a military industrialization cooperation agreement with Sudan’s Military Industry Corporation (MIC). Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi then assured Sudanese coup leader Burhan of full support in a phone call on January 2.

A week after the highway to Egypt was closed by protesters in Sudan’s Northern State, Sisi said in his subsequent statements that Egypt is not backing the coup in Sudan. However, few believe that to be true.

Military junta racing to revive the former Islamist regime?

Since the coup, the junta has taken several measures to reinstate members of Bashir’s Islamist National Congress Party (NCP) who were purged from state structures after his ouster. With resistance to the junta intensifying, it now appears to be in a race against time to complete this process.

On January 24, amid country-wide demonstrations, the junta reinstated 100 civil servants who were removed from their posts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their ties with the NCP.

They had been dismissed from their posts by the Empowerment Removal Committee (ERC) which was set up under popular pressure to purge elements from the NCP from the post-Bashir joint civil-military transitional government (dissolved since the coup).

On January 29, the Holy Quran Society, whose board was dominated by some of the senior-most members of the NCP and through which Bashir’s regime had “funneled millions of dollars” for Islamic radicalization, was reactivated. Its assets seized by the ERC “including a tv channel, 2 newspapers, real-estates and a gold mine” were returned, according to Nada Ali who is closely following the developments in Sudan.

Amid the protests on Sunday, 225 persons sacked by the ERC were reinstated to their former posts in the Zakat Chamber. Tasked with collecting taxes in accordance with Islamic law for the purpose of wealth distribution, this body was known to be among the most corrupt bodies under the NCP’s regime.

On Monday, the unlawfully obtained assets of senior NCP leader and former vice-president of Sudan under Bashir, Ali Osman Taha, were returned to him. These included two houses and a hundred thousand acres of agricultural land that were confiscated by the ERC. In all these cases, the judiciary has been used as an instrument by the junta to pass favorable judgements.

Protesters refuse negotiations with the military

Under these circumstances, calls by the UN as well as the US and its western and MENA regional allies for the pro-democracy movement to hold negotiations with the military have been met with outrage on the streets.

Turning down the invitation to meet with the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), the RCs of Madani, capital city of El Gezira State, said in a statement last week: “So far, the international community has clearly supported the coup parties, including the European Union and UN entities, including the UNATIMS mission, and they are attempting to set the stage in order to tighten the coup’s military and security grip, whose brute power continues to harvest Sudanese lives.”

Reiterating that the Madani RC abides “by the decision of the revolutionaries that there is no negotiation, no partnership, and no legitimacy,” the statement urged “all the resistance committees to pay attention to the dangers of internal divisions and disagreements caused by such calls”.

Even as the security forces continued their crackdown and arrested around 65 RC members and other lawyers and activists by Tuesday, the coordinating body of RCs in Khartoum announced the ‘Revolution Timetable‘ for February. Country-wide demonstrations and rallies are scheduled on the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of this month.

Barricading neighborhoods, strikes, smaller demonstrations and various forms of civil disobedience will continue between these days under the leadership of the local RCs and unions. In the meantime, the RCs intend to continue the blockade of Sudan-Egypt roads up north till the fall of the military junta.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/02/01/ ... ock-sudan/

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Eritrea and the Tripartite Alliance in the Horn of Africa
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 02 Feb 2022

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Somali President Abdullahi Mohhamed Abdullahi, aka Farmaajo,Eritrean President Isais Afwerki, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali.

The motives behind US aggression towards Ethiopia have not been altogether clear. Is it simply that they lost their long standing puppet government led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front? Competition with China? Or is it the regional Tripartite Agreement between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia , which poses too much independence from US global hegemony? Ethiopia borders both Eritrea and Somalia, and Eritrea has made its Red Sea ports available to Ethiopia since leaders of the two countries negotiated peace in 2018. Together, Eritrea and Somalia share a combined coastline of 2,672 miles in one of the most strategic corners of the world, on the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. I spoke to Eritrean American doctor and activist Simon Tesfamariam, co-founder of the #NoMore Movement to end neocolonialism in Africa.

Ann Garrison: Simon, do you think that separating Ethiopia and Eritrea is the primary motivation behind US aggression towards Ethiopia?

Simon Tesfamariam: Absolutely. Think about what's been going on over this past year. They've been doing their best to separate Eritrea and Ethiopia, to isolate Eritrea, and to break the resistance to imperialism in the region.

Eritrea has long been a bastion of resistance against imperialism. I believe that US policymakers think they can win over Ethiopians and win over the Ethiopian government and pry it away from Eritrea. Same thing with Somalia. These are the old divide-and-rule tactics that were used during the colonial era. That's what they're looking to do in the Horn of Africa again.

AG: Tell us why the US is so hostile to Eritrea.

ST: Well, back in the ‘90s, when Eritrea gained its independence, US policymakers went along with it for a while, thinking that Eritrea would essentially play ball, that it would take part in their neoliberal machinations, that it would do their bidding and, despite its leftist stance, maintain their interests in the region.

It didn't take long for them to realize that Eritrea had a truly self-reliant policy. When the World Bank or the IMF would come to Eritrea and try to design its development programs, Eritrea would say, “No, we have our own programs. Thanks but no thanks. We're going to do this our way.”

That type of mentality was not common in Africa at that time, and for a nation to come in and say, “We want to do it our way”—moving toward self reliance—that was seen as a threat by Washington. And so US policymakers sent in the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front , or TPLF, as an attack dog against the ruling party in Eritrea, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice . And basically, it was a regime change war. They wanted to take over the country and crush its sovereignty, because they felt that Eritrea was too independent of US global hegemony.

In Ethiopia, during the 27 years of TPLF rule, US policymakers had a willing puppet in a client state, and their goal was always to take Eritrea out. Now, despite the failure of decades of US proxy war against Eritrea, they continue to act as though they have no other choice, and they do indeed have no other choice within the logic of empire.

So they're going to continue to try to pry Ethiopia apart from Eritrea. They want to pry the entire region apart from Eritrea. This is an imperial absolute for them, but the strong people-to- people relationship between the Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Somalis at this moment is going to make that impossible.

AG: Okay, as I understand it, Eritrea has taken no IMF or World Bank loans since its independence, and it doesn't get foreign aid from the West. Nevertheless, it's the only country in Africa that’s been able to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals on education and health care. Is that true?

ST: That's correct. And it did that at a time when it was under sanctions, when you couldn't get basic medicines, you couldn't get ambulances, you couldn't get servers for electronic medical record systems. So it was challenged from every corner, but it was still able to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for health and education. I think that’s a story in itself that needs to be told.

Eritrea is also one of the first countries in the world to get rid of USAID . Most people know that Cuba, Russia, and other countries expelled USAID from their borders, but few know that Eritrea did the same in 2005 or 2006. They got rid of USAID to stop all their covert operations to undermine national unity and sovereignty.

Similarly, like you said, they didn't take handouts or IMF or World Bank loans, which they saw as crippling tools of empire. It's not that Eritrea’s opposed to assistance from outside nations, but it didn’t want the strings attached to aid coming from USAID.

Again, Eritrea has a very independent policy, and has always strived for self-reliance. This is why it sees so much hostility from the United States.

AG: What's the potential in the alliance between Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia?

ST: There's huge potential in solidarity across Africa, like what we saw back in the ‘60s with the rise of Pan-Africanism and the anti-colonial liberation movements that brought many African countries together. The alliance of these three countries bordering one another in the Horn of Africa was formalized in the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea , also known as the Tripartite Agreement, and it will now be very difficult for the West to break, hard as they’re trying.

The key thing to understand here is the strong people-to-people relationships going on. Somalis, Eritreans, and Ethiopians are now having discussions online and in the streets, getting together and mobilizing on the streets. You have the people of the Horn of Africa at home, the governments at home, and the diasporas all connected, moving towards this common destiny.

AG: And your own online activism, particularly with the #NoMore Movement, has been so threatening to entrenched power that you've been banned from Twitter, right?

ST: That is correct, unfortunately, so has Horn of Africa Hub, New Africa Institute, and other accounts. My personal and professional accounts have both been shut down, and so have any organizational accounts that I had access to. The same has happened to other people within my circle.

Individual accounts of some #NoMore leaders are still up, but how long before they get taken down?

AG: Okay, and just to make sure that we've got this covered, the #NoMore Movement is a movement to end neocolonialism in Africa, particularly focused on the Horn but with Pan-African goals, right?

ST: Yes, but it keeps expanding. We hope to see it become a global movement with African origins. We’re saying no to tools of exploitation—disinformation, division, and war—to move towards collective prosperity across the world. But we can't forget that #NoMore originated in the Horn of Africa.

AG: Ethiopia and Eritrea were at war for nearly two decades, until Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power and negotiated peace. Since then the two nations and peoples seem very closely bonded, and the diasporas who support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and President Isaias Afwerki rally against US intervention together. Do you think the Ethiopia/Eritrea war, which was really the TPLF/Eritrea war, is over going forward?
ST: US policymakers will make every effort to shatter the peace, but as I said earlier, there are now special relationships growing in the Horn of Africa, and it's not just governments; its entire peoples. The nations, the governments, and the diasporas are all connected at this moment. They feel as though they share a kind of destiny. So if one leader decides to go off and do their own thing, and maybe go in a different direction, the people are going to say #NoMore to that too.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/eritr ... orn-africa

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US approves massive arms sale to Egypt despite deteriorating human rights situation

The USD 2.5 billion arms deal was approved despite calls by rights groups and even some members of Congress for a tougher stance on Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who Donald Trump once called “my favorite dictator”

January 28, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch

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12 Super Hercules C-130 aircrafts and other related equipment worth USD 2.2 billion are part of the arms deal . (Photo: AFP)

The United States approved a massive arms deal worth USD 2.5 billion with Egypt on Wednesday, January 26. The deal includes the sale of 12 Super Hercules C-130 aircraft and other related equipment worth USD 2.2 billion, along with an air defense radar system worth USD 355 million. The deal was cleared despite concerns raised by human rights groups and members of the US Congress about the deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt. Several US politicians and rights groups have repeatedly urged the US government to take a tougher stance on the human rights abuses being perpetrated by the Egyptian government under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

According to reports, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified the US congress about the possible sale on Tuesday. The US state department, in a statement, said, “the proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a major non-NATO ally country that continues to be an important strategic partner in the Middle East. We maintain that our bilateral relationship with Egypt will be stronger, and America’s interests will be better served, through continued US engagement to advance our national security interests, including addressing our human rights concerns.” The US provides Egypt with USD 1.3 billion worth of military aid annually, of which USD 300 million is subject to Egypt fulfilling certain human rights criteria.

Watch | Alaa Abd El-Fattah is not defeated
Previous US administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have waived these restrictions on the military aid to Egypt citing national security interests. Joe Biden, during his campaign, promised to make human rights a priority in his administration when it came to dealing with dictatorial and autocratic regimes. He has also failed to keep this promise, doing only marginally better than his predecessors. His government withheld USD 130 million worth of military aid to Egypt last September subject to improvements in human rights but cleared the USD 170 million out of the earmarked USD 300 million.

Following the approval of the deal this week, a journalist asked the US state department spokesperson, “what is the point of withholding 130 million in foreign military financing when you’re just going to turn around and sell them 2.5 billion in weapons?” The spokesperson had no clear answer.

Recently, gruesome videos have surfaced online showing brutal torture of detainees in a police station in Cairo. Human rights violations have been repeatedly documented since el-Sisi took power in a military coup in 2013. His regime has carried out a systematic campaign of repression of human rights and civil liberties. Thousands of protesters, journalists, human rights defenders, political activists, writers, lawyers and political opponents, including members of the outlawed-Muslim Brotherhood, have been arrested, tortured and persecuted. Many of them face manufactured charges and are undergo ‘show’ trials, most of which end in conviction.

According to estimates by rights groups, more than 60,000 political prisoners are currently being detained in prisons and detention centers around the country. The cases of human rights activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, university student Patrick Zaki, Mada Masr editor Lina Atallah, Palestinian-Egyptian activist Ramy Shaath and US-Egyptian activist Mohammed Soltan have drawn international scrutiny and condemnation.

Most countries, including the US, have turned a blind eye to the abuses taking place in Egypt and have carried on with business as usual.

Six members of the US house of representatives have in a letter to secretary of state Antony Blinken urged the government to reprogram the withheld aid of USD 130 million. The letter says, “we emphasize our expectation that the Administration will reprogram the portion of military aid withheld last year if Egypt fails to comply with the full set of specific human rights benchmarks communicated by the State Department to the Egyptian government. Making clear to Egypt and the world the United States will stand by its commitment to democratic rights and basic freedoms – and adhering to statute – is critical to addressing those very problems.”

Among the various human rights conditions that the US has placed on Egypt for releasing the aid is ending the detention of 16 Egyptian political prisoners. It has also called for closing case 173, a politically motivated case in which 43 foreign and domestic NGO employees were sent to prison and a number of civil society groups were shut down in 2011.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/01/28/ ... situation/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:14 pm

Barack Obama’s Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to “Recolonize” Africa During Early Days of the Cold War
By Gerald Horne - February 7, 2022 4

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Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa: Amazon.co.uk: Stuart Inc, Lyle: 9780905762814: Books[Source: amazon.co.uk]

Over the last decade, the U.S. has been quietly expanding its covert intelligence empire in Africa as part of a growing geopolitical rivalry with China.

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[Source: alibris.com]

A new book published by Susan Williams, entitled White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, reminds us that the likely consequences will be disastrous.

Williams’s book updates an earlier study edited by Philip Agee, Ellen Ray, William Schaap and Louis Wolf, entitled Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa.

She focuses mostly on the ties between Ghana and the Congo roughly between 1957 and the coup in Accra in 1966, and the close relationship between early paramount leaders Kwame Nkrumah and the assassinated Patrice Lumumba; however, she manages to cover other hotspots as well.

The deep CIA penetration of Africa was evident in the Agency’s apparent recruitment of Barack Obama Sr., a protégé of Tom Mboya, an anticommunist, pro-capitalist Luo from Kenya who had served as the African representative of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU), which received covert CIA funding through the AFL-CIO. The U.S. was trying to groom Mboya as a replacement for Kenya’s first Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, who was perceived as more left-wing. (for more details, see Gerald Horne, Mau Mau in Harlem: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009). Obama was brought to the University of Hawaii in an exchange and then studied economics at Harvard, though his career floundered when Mboya was assassinated in 1969.

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Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba. [Source: theafricancourier.de]

Williams notes that the CIA generally specialized in “assassination, overthrowing elected governments, sowing conflict between political groups and bribing politicians, trade unionists and national representatives at the UN,” all clandestine and coercive strategies that were applied in Africa. Other strategies took the form of soft power initiatives; the secret sponsorship and infiltration of educational facilities, artistic endeavors, literature and Africa-focused organizations.” [465]

“Covert action of any sort, said Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee investigation into the abuses of the CIA, was nothing more than ‘a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies’—and worse.” [475]

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Frank Church [Source: historyheroblast.com]

Still, despite the revelations emerging from this senatorial investigation, the author reprimands the “narrow focus” of this body which “largely neglected CIA operations elsewhere in Africa,” beyond Congo. This body’s findings also “were weakened by its reliance on the testimony of CIA officials.” [506]

The industrious author mines archives in Austria, Belgium, Ghana, The Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Britain, the United Nations and, of course, the U.S., outstripping the 1970s’ congressional investigation. [527-528]

Still, she argues accurately that “the files released in 2017-18 under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act contain a wealth of information that is not available elsewhere…but they are heavily redacted.” [420] Nonetheless, President Biden has postponed further releases—for the time being.

Kwame Nkrumah, first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, had studied in the U.S. “between 1935 and 1945,” principally at historically Black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. [15]

There he became acquainted with leaders of the Left, including W.E.B. Du Bois and his spouse, Shirley Graham Du Bois, along with actor-activist Paul Robeson, whom he invited to Accra to serve as a professor by 1962.

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W.E.B. Du Bois, left, celebrating his 95th birthday with Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah in 1963. [Source: bbc.com]

Although the foregoing leaders played a sterling role in forging solidarity, the same cannot be said for all of the hundreds of “American Africans,” to use the descriptor applied to them. Franklin Williams, a former NAACP leader, was U.S. envoy to Ghana in 1966 when Nkrumah was overthrown and he was widely suspected of complicity. [495] Pauli Murray, a justifiable heroine of the anti-Jim Crow movement in the U.S., was considered by a leading scholar of Ghana to be “something more than an unwitting asset” of U.S. imperialism. [190]

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Description automatically generated with medium confidenceFranklin Williams, left, with Sargent Shriver, the driving force and first director of the Peace Corps. [Source: blackpast.org]

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Pauli Murray [Source: wikipedia.org]

The author also points the finger of accusation at Horace Mann Bond, father of yet another civil rights hero: Julian Bond. [58] Intellectuals, e.g., novelist Richard Wright and Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, were apparent unwitting tools of the CIA. [62, 64].

She manages to include Barack Obama, Sr., in this circle of iniquity (though she has him arriving in 1962 on these shores although the president was born in 1961). [206]

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Horace Mann Bond [Source: lincoln.edu]

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Barack Obama, Sr. [Source: thisisafrica.me]

U.S. imperialism was quick to isolate and marginalize those, e.g., Paul Robeson, who were pro-socialist and keenly in favor of true African independence: virtually every sector of opinion not within his orbit was penetrated thoroughly. In the late 1930s he had spearheaded the formation of the Council on African Affairs but, by the mid-1950s, it had been forced into liquidation by government harassment and arising in its stead were the American Committee on Africa, the African American Institute, the American Society of African Culture—and if they are to be held to the same standard that was used to brand so-called “Communist fronts”—these groups could be well considered “CIA fronts” (despite worthwhile work especially by the ACOA).

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Paul Robeson [Source: Britannica.com]

Even the precursors of Black Power had their limitations, e.g., in 1961 when in a still startling episode captured on film, writer Maya Angelou and others entered the United Nations building in Manhattan to engage in a stormy protest against U.S. complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. So far, so militant.

However, they chose to bar Robeson’s closest comrade, Communist Party USA leader Ben Davis, on anti-communist grounds—unmentioned by the author—though it was the latter’s comrades worldwide who were seeking to preserve Congolese sovereignty and Lumumba’s life both, which these New Yorkers—whatever their good intentions—were incapable of achieving. [398-399]

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Author and poet Maya Angelou pictured in 1974.Maya Angelou [Source: msnbc.com]

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[Source: wikipedia.org]

Still, since the author writes definitively that “it has been established that President Eisenhower authorized the assassination of Lumumba,” these protesters’ anger was well-justified. [511]

This Pan-Africanism was bilateral: Amilcar Cabral, founding father of Guinea Bissau who was assassinated in a dastardly fashion in 1973, spoke movingly of the dire plight of African-Americans, especially after the August 1965 revolt in Los Angeles, an anguished cry against police terror. “We are with the blacks of the United States of America,” he declaimed, “we are with them in the streets of Los Angeles and when they are deprived of all possibility of life, we suffer with them.” [500]

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Amilcar Cabral [Source: newframe.com]

Of course, these “American Africans” were bit players compared to the U.S. elite hungry for Ghana’s diamonds and Congo’s uranium, so necessary for atomic bombs. Maurice Tempelsman, long-time consort to Jacqueline B. Kennedy, widow of the slain president, was pivotal here. [90-94]

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Maurice Tempelsman with Jacqueline Kennedy. [Source: amazon.com]

Then there were the labor leaders tied to the AFL-“CIA,” e.g., Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone, whose deviltry continues to boggle the imagination. [76]

Invoking the premier U.S. scholar of Angola, the late John Marcum, who “was supported financially by the CIA,” Williams demonstrates [458] how she often soars beyond the Ghana-Congo tie.

This southwest African nation was instrumental in regional and continental politics when, upon independence in 1975, the regime invited Cuban troops there to vouchsafe sovereignty in the face of a militarized intervention by apartheid South Africa, aided by the CIA. They stayed on until the late 1980s and guaranteed freedom for Namibia by 1990 and South Africa itself by 1994.

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Cuban tank crew in Angola in late 1970s. [Source: jacobinmag.com]

Why was U.S. imperialism so bent on foiling African self-determination? Part of it was gaining a stranglehold on the continent’s vast resources: diamonds, uranium, the gold of South Africa, the oil of Angola, etc. Part of it was guaranteeing cheap labor particularly in industrialized South Africa for U.S. automobile manufacturers and tire plants among others. And part of it was disrupting an African Left that was seen as much too close to Moscow and its allies.

Tragically, we may never know the full extent of the skullduggery to which the CIA resorted in order to accomplish its devilish goals. Robeson’s son suspects his father was subjected to “the MKUltra ‘mind depatterning technique,’” involving drugs—but “records related to MKUltra were destroyed in 1973,” says the author. [486]

We also need to know more about the agency seeking “to trigger amnesia by concussion of the brain.” [442] We need to know more about a number of “suicides,” all with a similar methodology: They all “fell from the balconies of New York high-rises.” [474]

Nevertheless, the author merits our heartfelt thanks for her indefatigable labor that has rescued a history that needs to be better known and will be instrumental in the final defeat of U.S. imperialism on the beleaguered continent.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... -cold-war/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 10, 2022 3:25 pm

SPEECH: (Re)Centring African Epistemologies: An Intellectual Journey, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, 2021.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 09 Feb 2022

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Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Nigerian scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s speech upon acceptance of the African Studies Association’s Distinguished Africanist Award offers an important reminder of the role of racist and sexist hierarchy in the organization of knowledge of Africa.

When the US-based African Studies Association announced the winner of the 2021 “Distinguished Africanist Award,” the recipient, Dr. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, declared that she “wishes to acknowledge that in the thirty-eight years since the [award] was conferred, she is the first African woman to be so recognized.” The Distinguished Africanist Award is given, in part, to those who have “contributed a lifetime of outstanding scholarship in African studies.” And it is telling that out of the 38 awards, nineteen (19) (or 50%) were given to white men, six (6) to white women, ten (10) to African men, two (2) to African American men, and one (1) to an African American woman. These statistics are not only a reflection of the white racial dominance of the western African studies enterprise. Most importantly, they demonstrate who is recognized as the “outstanding” knowledge producers for and of Africa. One could conclude that the most important academic work on the African continent is being done by whites and, further, that African women have nothing to contribute to knowledge production about the African continent.

Of course, for those who know the history of African Studies in the US, the delayed celebration of Professor Oyěwùmí’s extensive and field-changing scholarship is no surprise given the deeply entrenched white supremacy of the discipline. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy shapes all of what and how we know about the African continent. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Professor Oyěwùmí has been able to chart her own brilliant path. She did it with a support system that included her intellectual nurturing at “home” at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), mentorship by Black women from Africa and the African diaspora, and through her transformative relationship to US Black Studies.

In her acceptance speech, Professor Oyěwùmí recounts the history of her journey through the US academy while reiterating the significance of her scholarship. The book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses is central to her intellectual endeavors. First published in 1997, The Invention of Women, centers African epistemology to challenge western narratives of gender. She argues that western gender ideology is based on biological determinism and that such discourses are not universal. She compares these western gender discourses - where the concept of “woman” is central - to Yoruba cultural practices where the concept (and universal subordination) of the “woman” simply does not exist. As Professor Oyěwùmí rightly points out: “My research caused a paradigm shift in the academic study of gender.”



(Re)Centring African Epistemologies: An Intellectual Journey

The Acceptance Speech for the 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí




Mo f ‘ire fún Ọ̀ṣun

Mo f ‘ire fún Ọya

Mo fọ ire fún gbogbo àwọn ìyá

Afìmọ̀ f’obìnrin

Iye wa táa pé nímọ̀

Afìmọ̀ jẹ t’Ọṣun o, Iye wa táa pé nímọ̀

Ǹjẹ́, ẹ jẹ́ ká wólẹ̀ f’obìnrin Obìnrin ló bí wa

Ka wa to dènìyàn

Ẹ jẹ́ ká wólẹ̀ f’obìnrin Obìnrin lọ́ b’Ọ́ba

K’ọ́ba ó tó d’Òrìṣà

Ore Yeye o!




Welcome. I was just paying homage to Orisa Osun, the creator and Mother Deity of knowledge and creation.

Greetings from Yorubaland and New York! Good day everyone, wherever you are in the world.

My name is Oyeronke Oyewumi. I am the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award of the ASA.

I dedicate this award to my late mother, Igbayilola. Indeed, this is a time of honour, as her name suggests.

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The Distinguished Africanist Award was established in 1984. In the thirty-eight years since this award has been conferred, nineteen (50 per cent) have been given to white men, ten to African men, six to white women, two to African-American men, and one to an African-American woman. No African woman has ever been recognised with this award. Thus, I am the first African woman to win this prestigious African Studies prize.

I received the news that I had won the African Studies Association’s Distinguished Africanist Award on September 14, 2021. I am humbled by its immense significance, on discovering myself suddenly in the company of earlier winners such as Akin Mabogunje, Ali Mazrui, Sara Berry, Pearl Robinson and Edmond Keller. This made me realise how impressive is this club into which I have been admitted, and how fortunate I am that my work has been recognised as being as noteworthy as the winners who have come before me. It is clear that, in each generation, very few will receive this honour.

The focus of my research is on gender, hierarchy, and the construction of knowledge. My work exposes gender as a colonial category calling into question the Eurocentric idea that gender categories are natural, universal and inherent in the way in which human communities have organised and thought about themselves. My body of work includes two monographs, three edited books and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

At the centre of my oeuvre is the book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. An extended sociological disquisition on gender, Invention argues that the narrative of gendered corporeality that dominates Western interpretation of the social world is a cultural discourse and cannot be taken for granted in another cultural milieu. The book offers a comparative-historical account of the construction of social categories like gender, both in Western culture and in Yoruba society of southwestern Nigeria. Drawing evidence from family organisation, language, the division of labour, religion and oral traditions, I show that gender was not originally part of the Yoruba conceptual framework for making sense of the social world. The finding that, historically, there were no gendered names, no gendered pronouns, no gender-specific kinship categories or gender-exclusive institutions in Yoruba communities brought to light the existence of a different epistemology. My research caused a paradigm shift in the academic study of gender.

I was born in Jos, Nigeria, into a huge Yoruba family. (‘I have 26 siblings! I am number 8.’ This is how I usually introduce myself to students.) I would be remiss if I did not say that growing up as a Yoruba in an admittedly privileged though immigrant setting in Jos, far away from the legendary Yoruba towns, primed me for my career in academia. Spending my early years in a space that was not Yoruba-dominant attuned me to the fact that there are different ways of being and ingrained in me a profound understanding of the Yoruba saying, ‘Ona kan ko w’oja’ (There is not one road to the market). My early childhood experience in a cosmopolitan city like Jos taught me the importance of appreciating diversity of all kinds, most significantly in religion, culture and ethnicity. I developed in my very early years a deep awareness of the various languages and cultures that surrounded me, and this openness to other ways of being was later to become quite beneficial in my scholarship.

I attended the University of Ibadan, the premier Nigerian University, for my undergraduate degree and benefitted from the scholarship and mentorship of the late Professor Peter Ekeh , who was my teacher. When I was preparing to apply to graduate school in the United States, he gave valuable advice and shared with me his own experience of doing a PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley. As it turned out, I followed in his footsteps to his old department. His path breaking research on the state and the two publics influenced my own research, particularly as I was thinking of how gender is implicated in the operation of publics in the post-colonial state. Today, in appreciation, I invoke his spirit.

My relationship with the ASA started in 1984, when I attended my first annual meeting in Los Angeles. I was beginning my second year in graduate school, having enrolled in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1983. There was a small Center for African Studies at UCB, which provided a focus for the African Studies campus community, but there was not much of a campus-wide African Studies curriculum. Congratulations to my friend, colleague, and a member of my cohort at Berkeley, Martha Saavedra, the current Associate Director of the Berkeley African Studies Center, who received the ASA’s 2021 Outstanding Service Achievement Award. I found that there were few Africans at Berkeley. Over the years, attending the ASA annual meeting became a necessity for me, a rare opportunity to congregate with my fellow Africans. Attending the ASA conference got even better as the numbers of African women increased, transforming the intellectual (and sartorial!) character of the organisation. Every year, I look forward to the sorority of the ‘gele’ [Nigerian head-tie worn by women] squad!

The idea of area studies was new to me, as there was no such thing on offer at the University of Ibadan. It took years for me to start to make sense of American hierarchies of knowledge. A few months into my studies on the storied Berkeley campus, I noticed that I was being asked one recurring question: Why sociology? Why was I enrolled in a sociology department? I would patiently explain my interest and future research plans in Nigeria. Often, I was told that I should actually be enrolled in the anthropology department. I never quite understood the question until a few years later. When I asked why I must study anthropology, several of my peers informed me that sociologists studied their own societies, but anthropologists studied other societies. I said, ‘Voilà, that is why I am a sociologist! I am African, studying African societies.’ But what they were alluding to is the deeply ingrained racial and racist idea that sociology was founded to study modern societies, and Africa was not a part of the modern world. Africa was primitive. From this perspective, then, my presence in one of the top sociology departments in the United States was an anomaly, to say the least. This had implications for my job prospects, most especially after I got my PhD. I was getting schooled in institutionalised racism in the organisation of disciplines and knowledge production, but I did not even know it.

But the (trans)discipline that made a deep impression and impact on me at the early stage of my career, as a student and subsequently, was not anthropology but Black Studies/African American Studies. I discovered race as a social category, and as an important part of my very own identity. Despite the fact that I had enrolled in a Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations course (never called sociology of racial oppression), taught by one of the top scholars, it was my involvement with the emerging interdiscipline of Black Studies that taught me about American society and provided me with practical knowledge that I needed in order to survive graduate school, and indeed life, in ‘God’s own country.’

It was fortuitous that the late Professor Barbara Christian , the pioneering top scholar of Black Feminism in the world, hired me as her teaching assistant. Today, I invoke her spirit! She was an amazing mentor, and in her classes I got more than an education on race; I also learnt much about the emerging academic discourse on feminisms and gender, amongst other things. Intersectionality was already baked into the syllabus. The insights I garnered on race and gender, most especially, made me understand my supposed place in the academy. It supplied me with the linguistic resources and tools with which to understand some of the puzzling things I was experiencing. Intellectually, a deeper understanding of the racialisation of knowledge—the racism and sexism that emanated from it—opened up unimaginable vistas that led to productive thinking. This understanding showed up in my writings, and in fact, the first chapter of my dissertation was titled ‘White Woman’s Burden: African Women in Western Feminist Discourse,’ a piece in which I was able to bring together my ruminations on European colonisation of Africa and racial hierarchy in US institutions of higher education.

In this vein, I acknowledge another mentor: Filomina Steady, Professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. A prolific author, she documented brilliantly many aspects of African women’s lives at home and in the diaspora and taught us how to do meaningful work. I remember the first time I read her classic paper, ‘Research Methodology from an African Perspective.’ I must also recognise my mentor and counsellor, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Professor Emerita of Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence. Her original concept of womanism inserted a necessary African voice early in the discourse and provided a fruitful counterpoint to imperial feminism. An amazing counsellor and an encyclopaedia of knowledge, she dispenses great advice on everything.

With the publication of my book The Invention of Women, in 1997, and its expanding readership, I experienced a qualitative change in my interactions at the ASA annual meeting. Colleagues would approach me expressing their appreciation for the book, telling me how it opened up all sorts of productive questions in their work, and how it positively impacted their prospects for tenure. On more than two occasions, having just been introduced to an African colleague, I was getting ready for a hug but found myself unexpectedly lifted off my feet, as these colleagues exuberantly chanted praises in true oriki mode. These encounters were not gender exclusive. After witnessing a few of these effusive engagements, a friend remarked wryly, ‘‘Ronke goes to the ASA conference to meet her public!’ I am grateful for the many colleagues who engaged with my work and exposed my writings to their students. I sometimes say the book The Invention of Women wrote me! Here, I must mention my former classmate at the University of Ibadan, colleague and friend Jimi Adesina, professor at University of South Africa, formerly at Rhodes University, who introduced and distributed my writings to colleagues, and to a generation of students in South Africa. One of the joys of the sabbatical year I spent in Pretoria was to discover that I had a following of young people.

I have edited three books; a fourth one is due out in 2022. These books represent collaborations with many colleagues. I admire their work and wish to acknowledge both their contributions to African Studies and their support for my own work. I cannot overstate the importance of community in enabling one’s success.

Over the years, I have received many accolades and much appreciation from students. I cannot describe the impact of my work better than two graduate students in African History, who took the time to inform me about the effect of my work on their own academic growth. Interestingly, although these comments arrived seventeen years apart, they were from two graduate students of African History at Yale, who did not know each other. First, Henry Trotter, a white American male student, wrote me a letter in 2004, seven years after the publication of Invention. The missive was hard copy, snail mail, and sent to my departmental address. This was at a time when email was not yet the currency for reaching people. I was impressed that this young man took the time to draft a letter in which he declared: ‘What was so great about reading the book is that ... I asked myself many new questions about the experiences I have had in Africa, the histories I have read, and future research projects I will engage in. You have spurred me to rethink all my primary assumptions. Thus you have re-enlivened my sense of the world and its possibilities. Is there anything greater that an educator can do for a student? ... your point that we Western academics need to step back and re-think our foundational commitments is well taken.’

After the Distinguished Africanist Award was announced in September, another Yale student, this time an African woman, Marius Kothor, wrote: ‘Like so many African scholars, I have been fundamentally transformed by Professor Oyeronke Oyewumi’s scholarship. The Invention of Women, What Gender is Motherhood?, Gender Epistemologies (amongst many others!) are texts that have given so many of us the language and tools to make sense of the ways we are positioned within the world and the confidence to reclaim our epistemologies.’

On this momentous occasion, as I rejoice at this wonderful recognition, I cannot minimise the challenges we as African and Black people face operating in societies and institutions that are systemically racist and sexist. I am excited by the numbers and quality of young people coming into the academy, many of whom display an impressive clarity of vision about how to move forward and claim the future. These young scholars, our future Distinguished Scholars, inspire me with confidence about the future of the sort of scholarship that centres Africa, which is recognised by the award I am so honoured to have received.

Gender issues have moved to the very forefront of life and politics in the United States, what with the emergence of the LGBTQI+ movement and the fight for social justice, individuals choosing pronouns, the fight over who should have access to what bathroom, questions of which category trans people belong to, etc. On 27 October 2021, the United States issued its first US passport with an ‘X’ gender marker, acknowledging the rights of people who do not identify as male or female. All this is evidence that the Western gender paradigm—the Eurocentric model of rigidly defined, biologically determined gender binaries universalised through imperialism—has failed. But not before this bio-logic has contributed to the creation of Masculinist Monsters and violence against women, which is at an all-time high, not to mention the intersectional trauma that ‘terrorfies’ the lives of millions. In contrast, what research shows is that African social categories historically were fluid, non-binary, non-biologically determined (you don’t need to choose your pronoun if you speak a host of African languages), nested in social institutions that were not gendered or gender-exclusive, focusing instead on generational reproduction. The African cosmic family is a paradigmatic example of the fluidity and borderlessness of social institutions. The family is understood to be vast, consisting of many who have passed on, few who are living, and countless who are yet unborn. Imagine if we were guided by such a vision. Would we be so cavalier and destructive of our Mother Earth, who sustains us?

It is time to centre Africa, as the theme of this conference [2021 meeting of the African Studies Association] insists. Africa is a treasure trove not only of Benin bronzes, coltan from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and diamonds from Botswana. The real unmined gems are African concepts, ideas, values, ways of being and systems of knowledge and episteme. Let us stop burying Nobuntu, the mother of humanity. If anything, the lesson of the gender discourse is that we must look to Africa. Thank you.


Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, “(Re)Centring African Epistemologies: An Intellectual Journey ,” (The Acceptance Speech for the 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award), CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 3 (February 2022).

https://www.blackagendareport.com/speec ... ewumi-2021

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Organizing Africans Against the Capitalist System
February 10, 2022
By Ahjamu Umi – Feb 3, 2022

The Current State of Africa and the African diaspora within the U.S. Africa Today

Africa today can be summarized as a continent dominated by foreign interests. There are over a billion people living in Africa today in 54 countries. There are 58 territories connected to Africa counting the islands around the continental land base. Africa today produces about 75% of the cocoa used to make chocolate products. The continent provides a large percentage of the world’s oil for heating purposes and fuel. Most of the diamonds and gold produced today originates from Africa. Columbite tantalite or coltan/cobalt is the mineral ore that once ground down into a powder holds electrical charges which facilitates digital technology. Cellular phones, laptop computers, flat screen televisions, pretty much any device that sends and receives a signal to function cannot exist without this mineral ore and its only found in plentiful supplies in Central/Southern Africa. It’s so valuable that it can sell for almost $600.00 USD dollars per pound. African bauxite, uranium, zinc, flowers, and other raw minerals supply most of what is used on the world market in the production of automobiles, nuclear power capacity, aluminum products, and much, much more. What’s essential to know about all of this is the vast toll extracting these resources is taking on Africa from the standpoint of the tremendous amount of wealth that is leaving Africa without stopping to benefit everyday Africans, the overwhelming physical toll the work takes on our people, and the devastating environmental consequences from this exploitative process.

The result is an Africa that is poor and very unstable because this environment benefits the forces who profit from these conditions. The conflicts that constantly arise in Africa can all be traced to these exploitative industries and the push to ensure imperialism maintains control over these markets. By imperialism we of course mean the industrial capitalist countries led by the U.S., Europe, etc. These entities always downplay the importance of Africa, but the level of resources and people they place in Africa to maintain the current systems of oppression tell us otherwise. The U.S. currently has almost 100 military installations throughout Africa and not one of them is there to build anything for the people. Instead, this military presence exists to quell, and help train African neo-colonialists, to crush resistance to the rampant oppression these industries facilitate.

This military effort costs billions annually to U.S. taxpayers, most of whom have absolutely no idea it exists. If you just look at the Congo, imperialism has fomented instability and absolute chaos in that country nonstop since the 1950s in order to ensure capitalism’s interests are protected. The blatant gangsterism carried out in the process, where literally millions of innocent lives have been brutally lost, is enacted with such confidence by these international thieves that the Hollywood movie industry blatantly produces mainstream motion pictures that display this horrific treatment of African people. Actor Sean Penn starred in a movie called “The Gunman” which tells the tale of a European mining company in Africa (it could be the Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Ghana, anyplace in Africa) that has him assassinate the country’s mining minister (who wants to nationalize the country’s resources) to ensure the European company can continue its theft of resources there. Although a fictional account, this movie pretty much tells the tale about Africa today. And, there are many movies like that one, but again, most people within the U.S. are completely oblivious to their complacent role in supporting this terrorism (including most Africans in the U.S.).

Clearly, one unified socialist Africa is a solution that places African people in the driver’s seat to control those vast resources and use them through socialist development to advance the masses of Africans, in Africa and everywhere throughout the African world. Of course, imperialism has killed and exploited far too many, and built its empire on this model, to simply decide one day to return all of the resources they have stolen to the masses of African people. Kwame Nkrumah recognized this in the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare. That’s why the third organizing entity he proposed after the All-African Committee for Political Coordination (A-ACPC) and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) is the All African People’s Revolutionary Army (A-APRA) which will serve as our collective military arm to drive the imperialists out of Africa. This is precisely the work the A-APRP has been engaged in with it’s A-ACPC work over the last 50 years and that work will continue and intensify. At this stage though, the primary struggle in Africa is one of political education because contrary to popular opinion amongst Africans in the U.S., the education system in Africa is the same neo-colonial, pro-imperialism education that Africans in the U.S. receive. So, our A-ACPC work today consists primarily of building the consciousness of Africans throughout Africa towards our objective of Pan-Africanism. There are plenty of indications that this message is taking strong roots throughout Africa. A question we ponder is how will the African masses in the U.S. respond while this consciousness translates to active struggle to overthrow imperialism in Africa? That is the purpose of this manual. To give some analysis on the role of Africans within the U.S. in developing community defense models to assist in this worldwide Pan-African effort for justice and liberation while also providing a model for other communities to prepare for massive resistance to capitalism on an international basis.

Africans in the U.S. Today

The African population within the U.S. will forever serve as a problem for the imperialists. This is exactly the reason the system works so hard to repress our people. They know that we are the shock troops here for the Pan-African revolution taking place in Africa. They know that they cannot have 50 million Africans running around here uncontrolled while imperialism is savagely exploiting Africa. Often, Africans and other well-meaning people misinterpret this phenomenon. Since education about Africa is so nonexistent, the very real connection of Africans in the U.S. to Africa, is easily dismissed. Most everyone in the U.S. suffers painful ignorance about Africa. So to them, the continent doesn’t seem to have any obvious relevance to their daily lives. Consequently, the conclusion is most often that Africa must not be too important. As a result of this confusion, the clear systematic oppression of Africans in the U.S. is credited to this nebulous concept known as “anti-blackness.” The only anti-blackness is the necessity of capitalism and imperialism to feed itself from robbing Africa blind. The oppression against the African masses in the U.S. results because our people were never intended, despite our concerted efforts to force the issue, to fit into this society. Many of us are too traumatized to accept that to the capitalist system our only purpose here is cheap labor. As a result, the stark reality is the masses of African people in the U.S. are simply in the way in the minds of this power structure and the majority of Europeans and other misinformed nationalities in this country. Abe Lincoln said it when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending chattel slavery in 1863. He said if it were practically feasible, since our primary purpose of slave labor was ending, he would have favored sending us all to Africa. So, when racists tell us “go back to Africa” that’s not just some random aberration from a deranged individual. That’s a reflection of the fabric of this country since colonialists breached these shores. When something is in the way and has no value to you, it becomes easy to discard of that something.

In the U.S. today, the capitalist system needs African mineral resources, but it doesn’t need Africans in the U.S. so its daily operations, from the police to business, politics, faith practices, and social services, are all designed to keep us controlled and under thumb. To watch us while they continue to steal what they need from our mother. Our enemies are smart enough to recognize that the fact we are ignorant about our connection to Africa today in no way ensures this ignorance will exist tomorrow. So, since they remain organized against us, they oppress us ruthlessly to ensure they are not caught off guard when we wake up and realize that wherever we live, our salvation is tied to Africa’s future. This is the daily experience and reality for the African masses throughout the U.S. and this will continue to be reality until Africa is free, unified, and socialist. Until that happens, even if many of us have no collective vision and plan for ourselves, rest assured that our enemies have their vision and plan for us. This is why community defense models are so critical to helping our people get prepared for this fight. Most of our people are ​​confused about all of this. Many of us already believe, or want to believe, we are Americans. The institutions of imperialism have been set up to spread this confusion amongst our people. If we see ourselves as Americans, we will not be inclined to pay attention to what is happening to Africa and we certainly won’t see doing something to stop it as our responsibility. Also, we will continue to see respecting and protecting the U.S. as our responsibility instead of seeing destroying this empire as essential to our freedom. We will believe the propaganda of our enemies that the U.S. is helping Africa with everything its doing. We will also believe that regardless of what traumas this backward country dumps upon us, the absolute only opportunities available to us can only exist within the confines of the U.S. and its exploitative capitalist system. We will believe that anyone who attempts to present an alternative vision, outside the realm of U.S. capitalism, is insane.

The Capitalist Empire

Further, the other more insidious element of U.S. propaganda on Africans in the U.S. is this subtle notion that the U.S. is the best country on Earth. This story advances the lie that the U.S. is the citadel of democracy and that everyone can become rich and prosperous in the U.S. if you just apply enough individual effort. Of course, if you are not successful in this endeavor, which practically everyone is not, then it’s simply because you are flawed and not up to the task. For this backward analysis, the contradiction is never the system. The problem here is that imperialism has told us for centuries that this is the wealthiest country because it worked so hard to become that (all you need to do is join that dedicated workforce and your dreams too will come true). The truth is the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world because it stole free labor and land. It exploited and exploits African resources. The transatlantic slave trade financed the development of the capitalist system. This is ill refutable. The banking and insurance industries only came to fruition from seed money provided by African slave labor, but most Africans, especially those within the U.S. don’t know this.

Most people overall within the U.S. are oblivious to these historical facts. So most of us believe siding with the U.S. means being on the winning side. And everyone wants to be a winner, so many Africans, mostly well-intentioned, but overwhelmingly uninformed, buy into this propaganda that we have a stake in the U.S. For example, the belief that we built the U.S. is really code language for we created this wealth so we are entitled to a piece of it. The reality of how the wealth was gained, as was just stated before, escapes, or isn’t a priority to many of these Africans who have consciously made class decisions to side with the enemies of African people in the hopes doing so will bring them personal financial success. This is important to point out because there are petty bourgeoisie Africans everywhere who adopt this sell out mentality. And, there are even some misdirected Africans within the U.S. who, because of their own dishonest class objectives, choose to paint Africans born outside of the U.S. as Africans who somehow betrayed Africans in the U.S. This analysis, ​​reaped in opportunism and disunity, fails to acknowledge that there are plenty of Africans in the U.S. who sell us out daily. As Malcolm X told us, “there have always been house negroes and field negroes!” This contradiction reflects class struggle among African people, regardless of where we are born and/or living. So, much of the basis of these community defense models is to provide ongoing political education to the masses of Africans in the U.S. while initiating concrete work to demonstrate to them that Africans can be independent. We can work together across colonial borders to solve our problems. We can build communities internationally. And, those communities can connect with our own societies (Africa). And our societies can be productive and beneficial to all our people and the rest of humanity (Pan-Africanism).

A Case for Organizing Africans against the Capitalist System

Africans within the U.S. face a multitude of oppressive forces. Police agencies shoot us down in the streets. And if they aren’t unjustifiably shooting us, they prey on us to provide cheap labor through mass incarceration and to provide revenue for municipal coffers by disproportionately targeting us for anything that can be construed as a violation. We are ruthlessly discriminated against in job seeking, housing, and even the most casual acts of living life. The schools mis-educate our children to believe all they can hope for in life is acceptance by the white supremacist capitalist system and most of our adults, already trained in this dysfunctional model, play significant roles in perpetuating this anti-African propaganda among our people. Most of the religious institutions our people participate in, whether Christian, Islam, etc., promote values that are friendly to capitalism and antagonistic to revolution, socialism, and African self-determination. The core reason for this oppression is the reliance of imperialism on the continued theft of Africa’s vast mineral resources. The results of this level of systemic oppression against the African masses are twofold. One, we continue to mount consistent and sustained resistance wherever we are on earth. That resistance is almost always spontaneous and reactive, but still, it happens everywhere. Secondly, we find ourselves on the bottom of every society we inhabit in the world today.

This is no accident, but the result of the capitalist system’s need to keep us directly under its thumb at all times. Its reliance on our homeland requires it to ensure we never manage to develop the capacity to confront it successfully. Consequently, our people are constantly propagandized against our interests. We are told all over the world, 24/7, in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swahili, and in every other language, that we are cursed by God. We are incapable of leading ourselves. Our families are dysfunctional. And, every problem we have is the direct result of our incompetence. The truth, of course, is the opposite of this. The level of love and support we as a people have been able to provide to ourselves within the wretched state we are forced to endure, is overwhelmingly impressive. All this boils down to the reality that the oppression African people face is a worldwide phenomenon that is powered by the capitalist system, the dominant economic system in the world today. If we understand and accept this, we have to also face the reality that since the problem originated, and is maintained, on an international level, the problem cannot in anyway be addressed on a micro-state basis. In other words, the British, French, and U.S. economies, some of the leading capitalist economies in the world, are built and sustained on exploiting Africa. And, those systems maintain their power through brutal oppression of the African masses, the Africans living in Britain, France, and the U.S., cannot effectively address the problems they face without figuring out how to take down the worldwide capitalist system that oppresses all of us.

We cannot win freedom in Britain alone. France alone. The U.S. alone, etc., because all of those economies are based on exploiting our homeland and our people all over the world. So, any so-called progress Africans within the U.S., for example, can make on an individual basis by advancing through the U.S. capitalist system is always going to be based on perpetuating the oppression of Africans in other parts of the world, particularly Africa. So, as attractive as it may appear to some to have the opportunity to integrate into the capitalist system, since that system is based on our exploitation, this alleged integration can only always be on a token basis since any wholesale acceptance of us into the capitalist system would have to compromise its basis of operation. It’s not possible to permit the people your success is based on to have the opportunity to advance within that system on anything beyond a token level. Just enough to keep providing unrealistic hopes within that community that they too can break through. So, for any African sincerely dedicated to the emancipation of the African masses, the only true solution must be a worldwide effort of African people uniting to overthrow capitalism. The antithesis of the worldwide capitalist system is a worldwide socialist system. The reason for this is capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by private enterprise for the purpose of private profit. Socialism is a system where the means of production are owned by the masses of people for collective good.

Since capitalism is the system that placed us in this situation while maintaining and depending upon us staying in this condition, no solution to our reality could ever be based on capitalist operation. As Kwame Ture was fond of saying, the question is “who will own and control the means of production. The question can only be answered two ways. Either some will own it or everyone will own it.” We select the everyone will own it option. And, we embrace that option from an African cultural perspective of achieving socialist revolution. Nothing against Karl Marx, Vladimar Lenin, etc. We appreciate, respect, and admire their contributions, but our solution can only be contained with our revolutionary African personality and cultural context. Our socialist solution is tied to our historical circumstances. Its tied to Africa’s liberation. Our socialism is connected to one unified socialist Africa e.g. Pan-Africanism. So, for us the question is how we go about achieving the Pan-Africanism we need? Obviously, we are working against the most powerful system in human history. Our collective success is reliant on an unprecedented level of organization among African people everywhere. That requires a collective strategy we must employ to bring about the results we are looking for. Nkrumah, in the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, gave us the blueprint for creating the mechanism for African unity focused on Africa being primary. Since the core of our Pan-Africanist effort will take place in Africa, the other question is how we will employ the masses of African people across the diaspora in this work? This is where the community defense models come into play. The strategy within the HORW provides the basis for this work in Africa and the intention of this manual is to provide a complimentary model for Africans born within the U.S. In other words, the idea here is the community defense model will complement the work for Pan-Africanism in Africa. These combined efforts will strengthen our work all over the world which makes our ability to achieve our objective that much more feasible.

Ahjamu Umi is revolutionary organizer with the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, adviser, and liberation literature author.

https://orinocotribune.com/organizing-a ... st-system/

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Suicide attack in Somalia leaves eight dead

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A total of 15 people were injured in the attack, which targeted a convoy of electoral delegates. | Photo: Yemen News Agency
Published 10 February 2022

The attack took place in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace and the death toll may grow.

An attack at the hands of a terrorist, who blew himself up on the spot, took place this Thursday in front of a police station located near the entrance to the Presidential Palace of Somalia, located in the capital, Mogadishu, and so far it has been settled with eight dead.

According to the report of the health authorities, another fifteen people were injured in the suicide attack that occurred in the area of ​​the El Gaab intersection, near the Presidential Palace, on a day marked in the city by the voting to elect the deputies of the Lower House of the Somali federal Parliament corresponding to Mogadishu.

The terrorist group Al Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack through a local radio station, while pointing out that it was directed against a convoy carrying electoral delegates.


Already last January, the Prime Minister of Somalia, Mohamed Hussein Roble, and the presidents of the country's five federal states reached an agreement to conclude the Lower House elections on February 25.

Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed Farmaajo's term expired in 2021 and elections have been delayed by disagreements, delays in parliamentary elections and growing tensions between the President and the Prime Minister.

The president of Somalia is elected by the 329 members of the Somali Parliament (54 legislators in the Upper House, already chosen, and 275 legislators in the Lower House, not yet defined).


Al Shabab is a group affiliated with the Al Qaeda terrorist network since 2012. It frequently attacks Mogadishu and opposes the elections, supported by the international community.

Somalia has lived in a state of conflict and chaos since Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, leaving the country without an effective government and in the hands of warlords and Islamist militias, such as Al Shabab.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/somalia- ... -0011.html

Google Translator

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Workers attacked and beaten as strike at South African dairy giant Clover enters 12th week

Two workers abducted by goons “were held hostage and beaten in full view of the management inside the factory premises. Managers neither called the police nor the ambulance,” said union leader Mametlwe Sebei.

February 09, 2022 by Pavan Kulkarni

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22 November 2021: Striking workers outside Clover’s plant in Clayville. Photo: New Frame

On Monday, February 7, taxi-driving thugs attacked picketing workers at the Clayville plant of South Africa’s largest dairy employer, Clover, where 5,000 workers have been on strike since November 22.

Three of the injured workers were hospitalized. Two of them had allegedly been locked up inside the plant where they were beaten for hours with the alleged connivance of the management. Four people were arrested for carrying out this attack.

Video clips of the incident show the company’s security and other staff standing around, without intervening, even as the abducted workers were stripped, beaten and whipped with belts.

The General Industrial Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA) and the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), which have been leading the strike, hold Clover’s management responsible.

At around 6 p.m on Monday, three taxis with no number plates came out of the factory’s gate number two and tried to run into the picket outside by around 25-30 workers.

“While the workers were running in all directions, three of them were caught by the goons and forced into a taxi. Other workers went to rescue and managed to pull one off from the vehicle. But he got injured. Comrades took him to a hospital. The other two could not be saved. They were driven into the factory, and the security shut the gates on us,” Prince Ngoato, GIWUSA’s shop steward at the Clayville plant, told Peoples Dispatch.

“The management refused to allow us in. They asked us to wait for the police,” he added. The police, he says, must have gone in by around 6:30 with an ambulance. It was only by around 10 p.m that the workers were escorted out to the hospital.

Accusing the Clayville plant managers of being behind the attack, GIWUSA president Mametlwe Sebei alleged that they got the “gates open to allow the taxis to exit the premises, chase down the striking workers and bring the two workers inside the factory. They were held hostage and beaten in full view of the management inside the factory premises. Managers neither called the police nor the ambulance.” This, he claims, shows the complicity of the management.

Speaking on Clover’s behalf, Steven Velthuysen, Group Manager, Legal and Secretarial, told Peoples Dispatch in an email response: “As has been the case in the past, the facts at our disposal differ materially from that communicated by Unions to the public. We want to reiterate that at no time were any Clover employees involved in this incident. The taxi drivers involved do not work for Clover nor were they under any instruction from us to drive anyone, nor do we pay them.”

He further added, “As we understand, striking workers started throwing stones at Clover trucks at the Clayville branch.” Sebei insists that stones were pelted after the workers were attacked and abducted into the premises, and as a response to it. No stone-pelting had occurred before, he claims.

While Velthuysen claims that “Taxi drivers who transport passengers to and from the area became involved” without any instruction from the management, workers insist that the taxis, which had no number plates, came not from outside, but from inside the premises, grabbed the two workers, and drove them back in, whereupon the gates were shut by the security.

The same was put to Velthuysen in a follow-up mail, asking also why the security guard (seen in green vest in the video below) walks behind the goons who are dragging the already injured worker on the ground, without making a physical intervention.



Two security guards in this video appear to be requesting the goons to stop the beating, but make no physical intervention.

“I can identify one individual who looks like a security guard (but who is not an employee of Clover). I cannot identify any others, but if there are, they are not employees of Clover and may well be security guards from other companies in the vicinity,” Velthuysen said in response.

“Why the security guard did not intervene I cannot comment on as I don’t have any context on the situation at the time – I can only presume that it was a very volatile situation and that he might have been outnumbered and thus fearful at the time,” he added.

Accusing the unions of “distributing misinformation at will,” he reiterated that “the taxis involved are not Clover workers nor are they contracted to us, nor working under our instruction, nor paid by us.”

This attack on striking workers is not the first such incident at Clover, Sebei reminds. In 2020, amidst a strike, when a worker was similarly abducted into the premises and beaten by taxi drivers, the Clover management had deemed it as a clash between taxi drivers and unions. It was not, he insists, explaining that the factory premises are very well guarded, and entry into or exit from it is not possible without the management’s connivance.

He added that “the unions have called for an urgent meeting with the trade union federations and taxi-drivers associations to stamp out this practice. The taxi drivers must…stand in solidarity with the workers, who are their main customers.”

In a joint statement, GIWUSA and FAWU said, “The taxis have been transporting scab labor to the Clayville Clover factory and are parking their taxis, without number plates, on the factory premises. Of late the scab labor has been sleeping at the factory and no longer require transport. It appears that Clover is now hiring the taxi drivers as thugs and hitmen to intimidate and attack Clover strikers.”

“The strike is far from over”

The attack comes around a week after the last meeting of the workers with the management. The management had appeared to be on the retreat, making several concessions including the offer to “reinstate 763 workers it retrenched in November 2021, with full pay for a further eight months,” the unions said in another statement.

“The unions disagree as the company still wants to cut their wages by 20%, thereafter. We will only agree to this if these workers are reinstated on full pay for the duration of the entire two-year collective agreement, with their wages to be reviewed as with all workers at the end of the collective agreement and on the basis of increases,” the statement said.

Clover also issued a new Section 189A (retrenchment) notice to the unions at the City Deep branch where the number of employees “likely to be retrenched” was revised down to nine from the planned 821 mentioned in the notice sent in August 2021.

“GIWUSA and FAWU are pleased to announce that the strike at Clover has forced management to back down on the mass retrenchment of workers at City Deep… (However) it is still the intention of Clover to relocate the City Deep Branch to Atlas Rd, which.. the Unions vehemently oppose,” the statement added.

“The major obstacle to the resolution of the strike is the company’s insistence that the workers and Unions accept the austerity measures which includes, amongst others, the salary reductions and freezes. The unions believe that none of these austerity measures are justified and there are alternatives.”

While the company has cited economic downturn as the reasons for the restructuring, unions have proposed alternative cost cutting measures such as scrapping the “R166 (USD 10.81) million loans it gives to its executive management.” The money should instead be used “to refinance the closing factories and maintain workers’ conditions.”

Unions also proposed that the pay of Clover’s CEO, Johann Vorste, be reduced from the current R40 (USD 2.60) million a year to less than R2 (USD 0.13) million. “The unions believe that Mr Vorster can still earn less than R2 million without falling into the same poverty and hunger that is the lot of our members,” their statement said.

The unions insist that if austerity is necessary, it should be imposed on the management and the shareholders whose “greed” has “manufactured” this crisis “at the expense of workers and farmers who built Clover for over 120 years.”

The unions pointed out that “before the take-over of CloverSA by the Israeli-based MILCO/CBC (in 2019), the company was very profitable. In 2018, headline earnings rose by 224.7%, cash generated by 303.6%, revenue reached R8.3 (USD 0.54) billion; and operating profit was R611 (USD 39.78) million, representing a 94.3% increase as compared to the previous year.”

“This wealth which was created on the sweat, blood and toil of our members was creamed off by parasitic shareholders of Clover who voted for a 210.8% increase in dividend paid to themselves, whilst granting our members a pitiful 7% wage increase,” the joint statement said.

Condemning this “extravagance”, the unions called on shareholders to reimburse this money so that it can be invested to “refinance and recapitalise the closing operations.”

Negotiations between the Clover management and the unions have thus deadlocked. “The strike is far from over, if anything we are rebuilding the picket lines, and broadening our base of support across the organized labor movement and in communities,” the unions said.

“The support from the South African Communist Party and COSATU, which has since joined our War Council, is a major milestone, in our preparation for renewed offensive in the light of the recalcitrance of the Clover Management.”

(The article has been updated to reflect the responses of the management).

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/02/09/ ... 12th-week/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 15, 2022 2:30 pm

Agroecology literacy and knowledge campaign for 700 farmers in Zambia
02/15/2022

International solidarity is another step towards justice

From the editor.International solidarity, mutual aid and support do not depend on borders or distance, and the example of the educational campaign launched by comrades from the Movement of the Landless Peasants of Brazil (MST) and the Socialist Party of Zambia is an example of this. Brazil and Zambia are on different continents, thousands of miles apart, but they have much in common: both countries have a high proportion of peasants, both countries have high levels of poverty, and the population suffers from the inaccessibility of basic social services. All this is the result of the policy of capitalist governments that protect the interests of the rich elite. Therefore, helping the Zambian, Brazilian and all other working people in the world is a step towards creating a new society in the interests of the majority. ROT FRONT supports the Movement of the Landless Peasants in their international struggle for a better future,

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Campaign of the Brazilian Socialists in Zambia

The first phase of the Campaign, which aims to reach 10,000 Zambian peasants, is planned to be completed with 2,000 literates.

On Saturday, November 27, 2021, as part of the first phase of the Fred Membe Agroecology Literacy and Knowledge Campaign, the scheduled Graduation for the first groups took place. It was a sunny day in Mshekela community of Kasenengwa municipality where the official graduation ceremony was taking place.

Groups of mostly women arrived excited, singing in one of the Zambian languages ​​and dancing as they celebrated their journey to this great moment. In addition to the rekindled sense of international solidarity, everyone was united in the confidence and hope for the renewed resistance of the peoples of Africa. In total, the first stage was completed by about 700 peasants from the Eastern Province.

This political event was attended by important representatives of the Zambian authorities. Among them is the chairman of the Socialist Party of Zambia, Fred Membe, who pointed out the enormous challenges involved in continuing this initiative.

“For us, this is a moment of joy and at the same time a moment of sadness. Joy because we are graduating our first students as part of the campaign to eradicate illiteracy. Sadness in the sense that this is just a drop in the ocean and there is still a lot of work ahead. You cannot be illiterate in this century and expect a normal human life. It's sad that our people are still illiterate, can't read prescriptions for drugs, can't even send the simplest e-mail or do anything else," he reflected.

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Zambian women trained under the International Brigade program.

Over 50% of the Zambian population does not speak, read or write English. Despite the fact that there are more than 72 languages ​​in the country, formed primarily from the migrations of the Bantu people, which gave rise to the diversity of peoples that exist today on its territory. However, proficiency in English is necessary so that, among other things, the population can access services and basic rights in the areas of health, education and citizenship.

The campaign, coordinated by the Landless Movement's Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade (MST) and the Socialist Party (SP), aims to teach 2,000 rural and urban workers to read and write in the country's official language, English. Based on the method of speaking, reading, writing words and studying the world around it, it took place in three provinces of the country: Lusaka, Eastern and Western.

MST National Leader Kassia Bechara commented on how symbolic it is that this moment falls on the centenary of Paulo Freire, whose legacy formed the basis for building the Zambian literacy teaching method.

“It is very symbolic that the campaign began and ended with the first classes in the year when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of our teacher Paulo Freire. It would be naive to expect the ruling classes to develop a form of education that would enable the oppressed classes to critically perceive social injustice. This is a truly historic moment: the graduation ceremony of the first 5 classes that have passed the campaign! But we cannot and will not stop there! We must complete all courses without delay and mobilize hundreds more people next year!” she emphasized.

It's always time to learn, it's always time to teach


An agroecology literacy and knowledge campaign, created in 2018 with the participation of many groups from Africa and Brazil, began in late 2019, but the official implementation of the method began in 2020.
For almost two years, 48 ​​classes were organized in Eastern Province alone, with classes held in 11 out of 18 municipalities in the region. These are: Malambo, Chipangali, Luangeni, Nyimba, Chadiza, Chasefu, Wubwi, Chipata, Mkaika, Petauke and Kasenengwa, where the graduation ceremony took place.
Pointing out these aspects, Sera Lungu, Oriental Campaign Coordinator, emphasized:

"The graduation of these five classes symbolizes the imminent end of all the other 48."

She also pointed out the difficulties of expanding the initiative in the region in the next period:

“In 2022, we hope to expand the program in these and other municipalities, which are quite extensive. To achieve this goal, we need to train more and more teachers with the developed teaching method.”

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Table paraphernalia MST. The poster features a portrait of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian philosopher, teacher, and socialist.

It is important to take into account not only the end of training, but to understand the process itself as a whole. Zambia, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, bears the structural consequences of forced European colonization associated with the late liberation processes of the 60s and 70s.
The lack of formal education affects mainly women. According to the Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS), only 10% have completed secondary or tertiary education, which is 7% lower than among men. Overall, 54% of the population lives below the poverty line, and only 46% have access to clean water.
It is necessary to take into account the initiatives of left-wing organizations in other countries and continents in order to learn lessons and perceive the complexities of building a special method for a particular territory, while not losing sight of the differences in realities.

From this point of view, Paula França, MST activist and coordinator of the Internationalist Brigade Samora Machel, recalls that education is one of the areas of struggle in the history of the working class and is inextricably linked to the creation of a new society project that permeates the production and reproduction of rural life with the production of healthy food. .

She stressed: “Based on the lessons learned from the campaigns in Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as more recent campaigns in Venezuela and Bolivia, and even the MST campaigns that took place in parts of Brazil, in 2020 we launched a campaign in Zambia not only to teach people how to speak, read, write and explore the world, but also to change the traditional capitalist system of pesticide-assisted food production into a healthy agro-ecological practice.”

It is important to confront the class oppression and inequality that the capitalist system imposes on people, not only in the field of education, but in all other forms of struggle that take place to resist the power of the ruling class. Such is the case with the discussion of agroecology as part of the Socialist Party's efforts to help improve the lives of the poorest through access to healthy food and income generation.

Agroecology is the way

According to official data from the Ministry of Lands, 90% of the land in Zambia is considered to be traditional lands inhabited by different peoples. At least over 50% of the population lives in rural areas and suffers the most from the structural social ills created by capitalism. Among them is climate change, in which changes in temperature and rainfall can have serious consequences for the livelihoods of this population.

In this sense, a broad discussion among farmers about agroecology as one of the central pillars of the Campaign to End Illiteracy is necessary to transform the production and reproduction of life in these areas.

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Graster Mundi of the coordinating wing of the Socialist Party's agri-environmental front said of the presence of this axis in the campaign:

“As we harmonize the fight against the injustice that capitalism and its local agents inflict on the poor, we are sad to learn that the communities most affected by illiteracy are dominated by peasants who, in our opinion, deserve the most attention in teaching both literacy and agroecology” .
Therefore, the creation of development strategies based on a long-term view of possible scenarios for building an adequate and effective model from people and for people is a way out.
Agronomist and MST activist Priscila Fachina Monnerat described how the Landless Movement has changed their territories through agroecology:

“We have transformed our lives and territories with agroecology, producing plenty of food guarantees our livelihood and allows us to share with other people who have no land to plant and who are starving in this moment of crisis. Unlike capitalism, which sows death, we sow life.”

Priscilla also stated that one of the greatest symbols of life and our great heritage are seeds. And as part of mystica and in recognition of the efforts of every student who attended the event, MST delivered a lot of Brazilian seeds so that Zambians can sow and harvest and spread the initiatives of this beautiful campaign.

Bicycles for Zambia

Also during the graduation ceremony, the National Literacy and Agroecology Campaign Coordinator Fred Membe was given the first bikes to continue working in Zambia's farmlands.

The bikes delivered were purchased as part of the Bicycles for Zambia International Solidarity Campaign, which aims to support literacy and access to schools in the country, an initiative also linked to agroecology education through family farms.

The bicycle is one of the main and most popular modes of transport in Zambia and is essential to the movement of the people around the country. However, those without it often have to walk 15 to 30 km a day to get to school. The Bikes for Zambia campaign is on track to help more than 10,000 Zambian farmers.

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Zikomo kwambiri! Thanks! The feeling of gratitude on both sides that creates this excellent initiative of international solidarity is mutual.

“We will not rest until every person in this country and around the world is free from illiteracy, and we are grateful to MST for the support given to this project, for the sacrifices they make, for the solidarity that is expressed to this Campaign. As we learn, as we gain experience in conducting such literacy campaigns, we will also extend this experience to all of humanity,” Fred Membe concluded.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 26, 2022 3:06 pm

NATO and Africa: A Relationship of Colonial Violence and Structural White Supremacy
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 25, 2022
Djibo Sobukwe

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NATO is the means of continuing colonial aggressions against African countries.

Considering the public media attention and concern about possible expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it is worth reminding people about NATO’s bloody history in Africa. NATO was founded in 1949 after WWII at a time when African countries were still under the yoke of colonialism. In fact most of the original founders of NATO had been Africa’s principal colonizers such as UK, France, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and the USA as lead NATO organizer and dominant partner. The organization was established as a collective defense against the Soviet Union with the requirement (Article 5) that any attack on one was considered an attack on all and therefore requiring a collective response.

Since NATO was founded with the purported purpose of halting possible Soviet aggression and stopping the spread of Communism it would seem to follow that after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 there would no longer be a need for NATO. Since then however, NATO has expanded from the founding twelve to at present thirty member states many of whom are eastern European countries, formerly Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies. Today, NATO has become a huge axel in the wheel of the military industrial complex controlled by US empire for the purpose of full spectrum dominance, driven by the ferocious appetites of corporate capital.

Colonial Africa as NATO Bases

Walter Rodney accurately describes the early foundation of colonial Africa’s relationship with NATO which continues today as he described in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:

“Needless to say, in the 1950’s when most Africans were still colonial subjects, they had absolutely no control over the utilization of their soil for militaristic ends. Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union. There could have easily developed a nuclear war without African peoples having any knowledge of the matter. The colonial powers actually held military conferences in African cities like Dakar and Nairobi in the early 1950’s, inviting the whites of South Africa and Rhodesia and the government of the USA. Time and time again, the evidence points to this cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation. [emphasis added] [1]

Kwame Nkrumah had already warned in his 1967 Challenge of the Congo that there were at least seventeen air bases, nine foreign naval bases, three rocket sites and an atomic testing range operated by NATO in in North Africa, in addition to military missions in about a dozen other African countries, not to mention the exploitation of raw materials for the production of nuclear weapons occurring in the mines of Congo, Angola, South Africa and Rhodesia.[2] Nkrumah called for the urgent need to counter the challenge of NATO in the strategy he outlined in his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare which included the call for a military high command and an All African People’s Revolutionary Army (AAPRA).[3]

The example of Portugal, as one of the original members of NATO is worth exploring. The great freedom fighter of Africa, Amilcar Cabral, called Portugal “a rotten appendage of imperialism” he said, “Portugal is the most underdeveloped country in Western Europe. Portugal would never be able to launch three colonial wars in Africa without the help of NATO, the weapons of NATO, the planes of NATO the bombs- it would be impossible for them.” [4]

Cabral goes on to explain that the only reason Portugal was able to hold on to its colonies in Africa is because it had been a semi-colony of Britain since 1775 and Britain defended Portugal’s interest during the partition of Africa. Furthermore NATO, a creation of the US, uses Portugal and its colonies as part of the larger objective of domination of Africa and the world.[5] Portugal conducted a vicious war against its colonies in Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique much like the US did in Vietnam. In both cases, colonizing powers used the most modern weapons including napalm and cluster bombing campaigns killing thousands, against guerilla armies that refused to bow down. The Portuguese dictator Marcelo Caetano was forced to give up economic interests in Angola to some of the NATO powers in exchange for the NATO armaments and supplies used.[6] Yet, Portugal still lost the war against the heroic anti-colonial forces.

NATO’s Strategy of Neo-colonialism

Imperialism has always used its strategy of divide and rule. To enable the acceptance of the idea of a ‘benevolent’ NATO, the colonial powers knew that they had to convince and recruit a neo-colonial class of indigenous Africans who would do their bidding. This divide played itself out in the national liberation movements between those who were friendly to imperialist forces and those who wanted a real break from colonialism. Nkrumah explains in Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, the wide array of methods employed by neocolonialism, ranging from economic, political, religious, ideological and cultural spheres. To do this, NATO works hand in hand with other mechanisms of imperialism like the CIA[7] which was instrumental in the coup against the Nkrumah government and the murder of Patrice Lumumba .

The settler colony of Azania/South Africa would be another example of a NATO outpost. From the beginning it was obviously on the side of the Western/ NATO powers since it was essentially a colony of Britain and therefore was a NATOsurrogate. In 1955 South Africa and Britain formulated the Simonstown agreements which contained provision for the naval surveillance and defense of the African continent from Cape to Cairo. In spite of a purported arms embargo, NATO countries and Israel also provided South Africa with the necessary technology to develop nuclear weapons.

NATO & AFRICOM

AFRICOM is actually a direct product of NATO via EUCOM, the US European command. EUCOM is a central part of NATO and originally also took responsibility for 42 African states. In 2004 NATO ended a five-year period of expansion; in 2007 the EUCOM commander proposed the creation of AFRICOM. James L. Jones Jr. explains how he came to make the proposal for AFRICOM from his position as commander of EUCOM as well as commander of operational forces of NATO.

The US/NATO role in the destruction of Libya in 2011 is important to highlight because it offers some important lessons. First, US imperialism and its western lackies do not accept any country that decides to be an independent force outside of its sphere of influence. Secondly, it also demonstrates how NATO can work hand in hand with other US/western dominated world structures like the UN. In 2011 the UN (resolution 1973) gave political authorization for a “no fly zone” and blockade of Libya purportedly to “protect” its citizens but which ultimately resulted in the destruction of Africa’s most prosperous country with the highest Human Development Index.

US led NATO forces launched a bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians and caused tens of billions of property and infrastructure damage. This shows that although US-led NATO sometimes uses the UN for political cover, it has no problem illegally overstepping its UN mandate to commit its crimes against humanity and achieve its regime change goals. Even a few countries that abstained from the UN vote like China said they did so as not to offend the reactionary Arab League and the African Union which approved of the resolution. In this case indirect and direct cooperation between NATO, the UN, the AU, and the Arab League (which includes the GCC countries ) shows the expansive and deeply woven web of US and NATO reach.

The book The Illegal War on Libya edited by Cynthia McKinney, includes the chapter titled “NATO’s Libya War, A Nuremberg Level Crime” in which Stephen Ledman writes:

“The US-led NATO war on Libya will be remembered as one of history’s greatest crimes, violating the letter and spirit of international law and America’s Constitution. The Nuremberg Tribunal’s Chief Justice Robert Jackson (a Supreme Court justice) called Nazi war crimes ‘the supreme international crime against peace.’

Here are his November 21, 1945 opening remarks:

‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.’ “

Jackson called aggressive war “the greatest menace of our times.” International law defines crimes against peace as “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.”

All US post-WWII wars fall under this definition. Since then, America [US] has waged direct and proxy premeditated, aggressive wars worldwide. It has killed millions in East and Central Asia, North and other parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, as well as in Central and South America.[8]

Those mentioned here are but a small sampling of NATO/AFRICOM’s bloody works in Africa’s past. NATO continues to operate under guise the of “training” and “humanitarian” peacekeeping assistance. Jihadist terrorist violence on the continent has increased since the founding of AFRICOM and NATO’s destruction of Libya resulting in civilian casualties and instability which the west has used as pretext and justification for the continued need for AFRICOM. As the Black Alliance for Peace’s AFRICOM watch bulletin reported , since the founding of AFRICOM there has also been an increase in coups by AFRICOM trained soldiers.

Consistent with what Nkrumah, Rodney and others warned of in the 1960’s and 1970’s NATO continues today in the form of AFRICOM facilitating wars, instability, and the corporate pillage of Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for example is continuously plundered for its strategic raw materials such as cobalt, tantalum, chromium, coltan, and uranium etc. These minerals are strategically important not only for electronic devices but also for the technologies that drive the military industrial complex. AFRICOM continues to rely on its neocolonial African proxies to fight wars on its behalf in the DRC and throughout Africa to achieve its objectives. With the rise of China, the US/NATO now seek to ensure full spectrum dominance that seeks to shut China or any other country out of the competition to control global capital.

End Notes:

[1] Rodney, Walter How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p189

[2] Nkrumah, Kwame Challenge of the Congo p.xi

[3] Nkrumah, Kwame, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare p56

[4] Cabral, Amilcar, Return to The Source p.82

[5] Ibid p.83

[6] Fogel, D, Africa in Struggle National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution p.230

[7] Nkrumah, Kwame, Neo-Colonialism The Last Stage of Imperialism p.247

[8] McKinney, Cynthia ed., The Illegal War on Libya p. 79

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/02/ ... supremacy/

Looks as though France is positioned to pick up some pieces as US hegemony retreats. A return to imperialist competition.

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France withdraws from Mali, but continues to devastate Africa’s Sahel
February 25, 2022 Vijay Prashad

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French troops board a US Air Force C130 transport plane in Gao, Mali.

On February 17, 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron held a press conference in Paris just ahead of the sixth European Union-African Union summit in Brussels along with Senegal’s President Macky Sall and Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo as well as European Council President Charles Michel. At the conference, Macron announced that the French forces would be withdrawing from Mali. This means that France and its European allies will start to wind down “Barkhane and Takuba anti-jihadist operations in Mali.” The protests in Mali against the presence of the French troops seem to have finally succeeded.

Macron said that France had to withdraw its troops because it would no longer like to “remain militarily engaged alongside de facto authorities whose strategy or hidden objectives we do not share.” A statement appeared on the French government website signed by the European Union (EU) and by the African Union (AU) that made the same point, namely that “the Malian transitional authorities have not honored their commitments.”

The language used by Macron and included in the AU and EU statement shows a lack of transparency about the real reasons behind the withdrawal of troops from Mali. The government of Mali (“de facto” and “transitional”) came to power through two coups d’état in recent years: Colonel Assimi Goïta, leader of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People of Mali, carried out the first coup in August 2020 against the elected government and installed Bah Ndaw, who was a military officer, as the interim president of Mali. Ndaw was then overthrown in a second coup in May 2021, when Goïta took over the position of interim president himself. By June, the European countries insisted that the new military junta hold elections by February 2022. Goïta said that he would honor this timeline. He did not do so, which gave the EU and the AU the excuse to break links with Goïta’s government.

That’s the excuse being used by these regional powers to wind down operations in Mali. Matters become far less clear, however, when it comes to the statements that were made by France in this regard. Macron spoke about Goïta’s “hidden objectives,” but did not elaborate on that accusation. What could these “hidden objectives” be?

Mali’s Troubles

Mali’s troubles do not start and finish with the unrest in northern Mali nor with the military coup. If you were to ask Alpha Oumar Konaré, the president of Mali from 1992 to 2002, he would tell you a different story. When Konaré took over the presidency in Mali in 1992, the people were exhausted by the debt crisis produced by International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies and by military rule. They wanted something more. One of Konaré’s close advisers said during his time in office, “We service our country’s debt on time every month, never missing a penny, and all the time the people are getting poorer and poorer.”

Konaré’s government asked for relief from the IMF so that it could marshal resources toward ensuring the development of the northern part of the country; the insurgency, Konaré argued, would be better confronted by development than by war. The United States government and the IMF disagreed.

From Konaré’s time in office as president to now, Mali’s governments—whether civilian or military—have been unable to craft a policy framework to tackle endemic social and economic crises. It is true that there has been a long-standing rebellion in the north that has brought together the Ifoghas aristocrats among the Tuaregs and the Al Qaeda factions that came out of the Algerian civil war (1991-2002) and the destruction of Libya (2011-2012); none of the many peace agreements have worked largely because there is simply no money in Bamako, the capital of Mali, to promise the kind of development needed to undercut a million frustrations. Less remarked, but equally true, are the devastatingly poor social indicators in the rest of Mali, where hunger and illiteracy appear normal in Bamako’s bidonvilles.

Western intervention in much of Africa has not resulted in beneficial economic assistance in the region. This assistance has come through IMF austerity policies and military aid.

France’s 2013 military intervention into Mali came alongside its construction of a military project across the Sahel belt called G5 Sahel (including Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger) in 2014. The military in each of these countries received aid, and its officers received training. It is no surprise that Goïta, for instance, received training from the U.S. armed forces in Burkina Faso alongside Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, who carried out a coup in Guinea in September 2021; it is no surprise either that Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba of Burkina Faso trained alongside these men and carried out his coup in Burkina Faso in January 2022; and no surprise that in Chad, “General Kaka” (Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno), the son of the former president, was installed as the president by the military in what was effectively a coup in April 2021. Three of the G5 Sahel countries—Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali—are now led by a military government (Niger’s authorities thwarted a coup in March 2021).

All the handwringing about why there are so many coup attempts in Africa these days fails to connect the dots: no agenda out of the IMF-austerity model is permitted by the Western states, which prefer to build up the military forces in the region rather than allow a genuine social democratic process to open in these key African countries.

Discomfort With the Western Interventions

In October 2021, Mali’s current Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga told a Russian news outlet that his government had “proof” that the French are training terrorist groups such as Ansar Dine. According to his interview, France had created an “enclave” in the Kidal region in 2013. “They have militant groups there, which were trained by French officers,” Maïga said. Kidal is in Mali’s north, not far from its borders with Algeria and Niger.

Nothing Maïga said should have raised an eyebrow. France’s former ambassador to Mali, Nicolas Normand, made some similar comments in 2019 when he released his book on the continent, Le grand livre de l’Afrique. Normand told Radio France Internationale that Macron’s government forged ties with the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and with the aristocrats of the Ifoghas region to prevent them from making a rapid advance toward Bamako. France wanted to play the “good armed groups” against the “bad armed groups,” but in the end failed to see that both these groups were terrible for Mali. This approach, combined with the civilian casualties of the French military operations (22 civilians died when France bombed a wedding in Bounti in 2021, for example), turned the people of Mali away from France.

French troops have now begun to leave Mali, but they are not returning to France. They will be deployed to next-door Niger, where they will continue their mission to prevent migration to Europe and to fight off the radicalized victims of IMF austerity (which often come in the form of frustrated young people, some of whom turn to terror). Macron’s eyes are on the French presidential elections, which are expected to take place in April this year, and on the rising tensions in response to Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the people of Mali came to the streets to celebrate the departure of the French. Interestingly, many of the signs thanked the Russians. Perhaps the entry of Russian aid and mercenaries are the “hidden objectives” Macron was referring to?

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... cas-sahel/

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H.R. 6600 Would Impose More Harsh and Illegal US Sanctions, this time on Ethiopia and Eritrea
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 23 Feb 2022

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House Resolution 6600 , the misnamed Ethiopia Stabilization, Peace, and Democracy Act, has moved from the House Foreign Affairs Committee to the House floor. It would impose harsh sanctions not only on Ethiopia but also on its neighbor and close ally Eritrea. The two countries are working together to defend themselves against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, commonly known as the TPLF.

In international law, sovereign nations have the right to work together for mutual defense, as Ethiopia and Eritrea now are. In 2018, Eritrean President Isais Afwerki, Somali President Abdullahi Mohammed Abdullahi, aka Farmaajo, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed signed the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea , which resolved that "the three countries shall build close political, economic, social, cultural and security ties.”

The United States however, charges that Eritrea cannot rightfully join Ethiopia in mutual defense against the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front, which attacked an Ethiopia military base in November 2020, and waged war against Eritrea—sometimes declared and sometimes undeclared— for decades, up until PM Abiy and President Isaias signed a peace treaty in 2018.

The authors of House Resolution 6600, also known as the Malinowski Bill, also allege that the leaders and armed forces of both countries, and the TPLF, are guilty of committing atrocities in the current conflict, but the proposed sanctions would harm only Ethiopia and Eritrea. I spoke to Canadian and international criminal defense attorney John Philpot.

Ann Garrison: These new sanctions against Ethiopia and Eritrea are illegal. Can you explain why?

John Philpot: Well, if passed and implemented, they will be an intervention in the internal politics of a sovereign nation, namely Ethiopia. The entire setup of this bill is to impose conditions on Ethiopia in handling its so-called civil war, which I don't think, by the way, is properly called a civil war, but we can get into that in a minute. They are trying to make Ethiopia accountable to the US and there is absolutely no basis for that in international law.

They even want to collaborate with the social media giants to intervene in Ethiopians’ use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

So, this is the US government deciding how Ethiopia has to handle its internal politics, which violates Ethiopian sovereignty. The United Nations Charter says that every country is equal, and they have the equal right to decide their future.

The US wants to impose not only sanctions on Ethiopia’s trade with other countries, but also third-party sanctions that would punish nations choosing to trade with Ethiopia. They want to control who Ethiopia does business with. And in this bill, they're also talking about Eritrea, because obviously, the evolution of Eritrea, an egalitarian state often called “the Cuba of Africa,” is very important for the entire Horn of Africa region.

AG: The attention, including the euphemistic title of the bill, is all on Ethiopia, because there’s fighting going on within their sovereign territory. But the sanctions would apply to Eritrea as well.

JP: Yes, but the major target here is Ethiopia. I'm questioning whether its properly called a civil war or even an “internal conflict,” because there are external factors, most notably the US imposing its will. I think that the TPLF has been a US proxy force since it attacked the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Force on November 4, 2020.

AG: Well, they're accusing Eritrea of being involved because Eritrea has what might be called a mutual defense pact, which is legal, according to the UN Charter, right?

JP: Any mutual defense pact between two sovereign nations is legal. The US has no legal right to object to it, or to interfere.

AG: Okay. Now can you explain the difference between UN sanctions and US and or EU sanctions, which are commonly known as “unilateral, coercive measures” or more simply, “economic warfare”? What does the UN have the legal right to do?

JP: Chapter Seven of the UN Charter allows the UN Security Council (UNSC) to organize an intervention when it determines there exists

“any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. This intervention can be economic under Article 41 or full intervention under Article 42 . Examples include when one nation has violated another’s sovereignty, aka started a war, by invading, bombing, and/or interfering with its viability as a sovereign nation, including its ability to trade with other sovereign nations. Blocking land or marine transport to a sovereign nation is an act of war.

According to international law, the UNSC could sanction the US, UK, or any other nations for waging war, including economic war, primarily in the form of trade sanctions on other countries. However, the US’s outsized military and economic power and its veto power make that impossible on a practical level.

The UNSC did unfairly impose sanctions on other nations like, for example, the Habyarimana government in Rwanda, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was possible because Russia and China were then so weak; they didn’t feel strong enough to risk resisting despite their veto power on the UNSC.

It is also legal for the UN to agree to impose sanctions on a country when it's violating certain rules, most of all if it violates another nation’s sovereignty by invading—or bombing—its territory, but also if it is deemed to be committing genocide or crimes against humanity within its own borders.

AG: That’s why the allegations of “Tigray genocide” are like a Sword of Damocles hanging over Ethiopia and Eritrea’s head—because the US has used it as an excuse for bombing Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria.

JP: Yes, but those wars were illegal. They were—and in the case of Syria, are—illegal wars waged unilaterally by the US and its allies and proxies. The fact that the UN Security Council can legally organize a multilateral response to stop genocide does not mean that the US can legally take that mission into its own hands.AG: Nobody wants to risk upsetting the big guy in the room, with not only veto power on the UN Security Council but also with the largest military, the largest economy, and even control of the international monetary system and the dollar, the currency that all international trade is transacted in. The U.S. can try to ban any nation in the world from trading in dollars, which is essentially banning it from trade outside its own borders.

JP: Nevertheless, both shooting wars and economic wars waged by the United States are totally illegal and by the way, totally condemned by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2020.

AG: Some people ask what good the UN is since it’s so dominated by the the US, but isn’t the idea and the codification of international law important nevertheless?

JP: Of course, it is, and the US should be reminded what international law is and publicly shamed every time it violates it, as it does every day.

And the US is not so dominant as it once was, not only because of China and Russia’s growing power and influence in the world, but also because they have been standing up to the US and its allies, France and the UK, on the UN Security Council ever since the NATO War on Libya. They refused to censure, sanction, or take military action against the sovereign governments of both Burundi and Syria, and now they are doing the same with regard to Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Many direct interventions by the US have been stymied in recent years since international law and the role of the United Nations have been enhanced in the past decade.

If the world silently acquiesced to US abuses of power, they would be even worse.

The issue of sanctions, unilateral coercive measure, siege warfare by the United States and sometimes with its allies have become a major issue for the anti-war movement in the last few years and will be more and more important in the next years. We may see a day, I hope soon, where the United States must pay reparations for the damages caused by its sanctions. If I burn your house down, I have to pay you damages.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/hr-66 ... nd-eritrea
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:25 pm

Ukraine: Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 28, 2022
Gerald A. Perreira

Since February 18th, thousands of civilians have been evacuated from Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia following Ukraine’s intensified shelling of these territories, which have been under fire since the 2014 US backed coup.

“The White House hysteria is more revealing than ever. The Anglo-Saxons need a war at any cost. Provocation, misinformation and threats are a favourite method of solving their own problems. The American military-political machine is ready to steamroll through people’s lives again.”

– Maria Zakharova, Spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry


In the Caribbean we have a saying, “monkey know what limb to jump on”. Or at least, monkey should know. Usually this is the case with the US Empire and its criminal creature, NATO (North Atlantic Tribes Organization). They pick on countries that cannot stand up to them in terms of military might. But this time, not so. They met their match in the Russian Federation, when Vladimir Putin called their bluff.

US President, Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg and European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, have been talking big over the past months. But it was all bluff. On the other hand, President Vladimir Putin was not bluffing. The Russian people know only too well what it means to have fascists at their door. The then Soviet Union led the fight against Nazi Germany and on February 24th, 2022, Russia was forced to take military action again against Anglo-Saxon fascists at its door, this time, Ukrainian neo-fascist militias, such as the Azov Battalion, and other extreme right-wing elements in the Ukrainian military. Since the 2014 coup in Ukraine, orchestrated by the US and backed by its NATO allies, Russia has withstood provocation after provocation, but the war mongers are restless, in desperate need of a war, and their reckless actions forced Russia into a position where it had no choice but to take action.

The Azov Battalion and the Fascist International

The far-right Azov Battalion, which has its genesis in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Throughout the Cold War and up to today, US imperialism and the intelligence agencies of other Western imperial powers provided financial and other support to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and later to its offshoot, the Azov Battalion. Membership of the various fascist groups in the Ukraine is estimated to be over 600,000. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, which describes itself as ‘centrist’, has been infiltrated at all levels, including the State security apparatus, by these fascist organizations. Moscow is well aware of this and the very real danger it poses, not only to Russia, but to Europe and the world. Already the fascists in Ukraine are saying they will sabotage any peace talks. These fascist groups constitute an international body with branches and supporters in many countries, including Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the US, Brazil, Peru and Venezuela, where they have been at the forefront of the attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Maduro government, infiltrating a number of political formations such as ‘Democratic Action’ and ‘Popular Will’ that are part of what is known as the ‘Unitary Platform’. They even have a presence in countries as far away as Australia and New Zealand. In fact, it the White supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in the 2019 terrorist attack in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was connected to a branch of this international neo-Nazi formation.

Another US Backed Coup

Back in 2014, the US orchestrated a pseudo revolution in the Ukraine, which they called the ‘Revolution of Dignity’. Through violent street protests, they overthrew the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych. Prior to this coup, war-monger, John McCain had visited the Ukraine and addressed large crowds, instigating them against the Moscow-friendly government led by Yanukovych. Neo-Nazis from across Europe and the US journeyed to Ukraine to train and fight alongside the Azov Battalion and other far-right paramilitary formations. All the while, Victoria Nuland, ‘point person’ for the pseudo ‘Revolution of Dignity’ during Obama’s presidency, and now Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration, boasted about spending 5 billion USD on the Ukraine project. Under her guidance, Ukraine was flooded with NGOs, training and social programmes geared at spreading anti-Moscow sentiment. In a leaked telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland and then US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on February 6th, 2014, eleven days prior to the US orchestrated coup, the transcript of which can be found online, Nuland and Pyatt openly discuss who will be in the new Ukraine government. All of this on Russia’s border. Imagine if Russia had done the same in Canada or Mexico.

The United States Fascist Friends

The US and their intelligence agencies have a long track record of recruiting, coopting and working with fascists. Bradley W. Hart, in his well-researched book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States wrote, “General Motors had a German division of its own and manufactured aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe.” In an article in The Guardian (25/09/2004), Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell exposed George Bush Snr’s father, US Senator Prescott Bush’s extensive financial dealings with Nazi Germany. And when Nazi Germany collapsed, the CIA recruited as many Nazi intelligence operatives as they could, settling most of them in South America, in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The US utilized these fascists throughout the years to undermine and destabilize progressive and revolutionary regimes, via the front organizations they created. The US Embassy in Bolivia worked closely with the infamous Klaus Barbie, known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’. Barbie was given the rank of colonel in the Bolivian Army and boasted about leading the team that targeted and tracked down Che Guevara.

Zelensky Facilitates Programme of Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

On February 24th, in a further act of provocation, Kiev escalated their eight year war against the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. These republics declared their autonomy following the 2014 coup, refusing to live under the anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime of Volodymyr Zelensky, who although described as a ‘centrist’ has allowed ethnic Russians in these territories to be targeted and attacked by various neo-fascist militias, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties and deaths. Zelensky stands accused of facilitating a programme of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The people of Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region, where Donetsk and Luhansk are situated, are Russian speaking and want to be a part of the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922, and so Russia and Ukraine were part of the same country once. Zelensky, with the tacit support of his Anglo-Saxon handlers, had no intention of implementing the Minsk Agreement, which contains a blueprint for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the Ukraine situation and is supported by the breakaway territories and Russia. He, along with his Western allies, were intent on only one thing, provoking a conflict with Russia.

In a televised address on February 24th, President Putin announced that in response to an appeal from leaders in the Donbass Republics (Donetsk and Luhansk), he had taken a decision to carry out a special military operation in order to protect the people in these territories “who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.” Thousands of refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk poured across the Russian border. The labelling of this as an ‘invasion’ of Ukraine by Russia is a misnomer. Putin has been very clear that Russia has no interest in occupying Ukraine. However, he is adamant about preventing NATO’s expansion to countries sharing a border with Russia for obvious reasons. How can Russia allow a hostile war machine such as NATO to deploy weapons of mass destruction including ballistic missile on its border? Can we imagine Russia deploying nuclear weapons and missiles in a country that shares a border with the US or in what the US refers to as their “backyard”? This is exactly what sparked the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

NATO – the North Atlantic Tribe’s Lethal War Machine

NATO was formed in 1949, ostensibly as a deterrent to Soviet and Communist expansion into Western Europe. The Soviet Bloc formed the Warsaw Pact as a counter to NATO’s military complex. When the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were dissolved, the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. The Reagan administration promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. Many years later, in an interview in the German newspaper Bild, Gorbachev declared that Moscow had been tricked. He said, “Many people in the West were secretly rubbing their hands and felt something like a flush of victory — including those who had promised that they would will not move one centimeter further east”. As we now know, NATO did move east, right up to Russia’s border, which has brought us to the current conflict. Instead of disbanding, since its alleged reason-for-being no longer existed, NATO morphed into an aggressive and destructive leviathan, armed with the most sophisticated weapons known to humankind. Commanded by the US Empire, NATO now engages in wars worldwide, with the aim of increasing and reinforcing Anglo-Saxon dominance, and is responsible for the wanton destruction of countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and the death of literally millions of civilians. They have expanded as far into Eastern Europe as they can, and are now trying to complete the encirclement of Russia, leaving Russia in a situation where it would not be able to defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty. This is understandably unacceptable to Russia under any circumstance, but especially in the current political environment where the anti-Russian hysteria is being whipped up to levels reminiscent of the Cold War era.

Follow the Money and Resources

It is important to note that US foreign policy shaper, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book titled, The Grand Chessboard wrote, “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two thirds of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination…about 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprise and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three–fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

Renowned Bilderberg Group researcher, Daniel Estulin, points out that human history has “always shown that controlling the heart of Eurasia was the key to controlling the entire known world”.

World War Already Raging

One of many absurd ideas that has taken hold in a world governed by White supremacy is that the world is only at war when Anglo-Saxons launch offensives in Europe. Even now, as every step of this current European dispute is followed around the globe with rapt attention, once again the headlines are screaming about the prospect of World War III.

On the same day as the Russians went to the aid of the Donbas Republics, and finally took action against the neo-fascists embedded in Ukraine, the US bombed Somalia via AFRICOM, and US surrogate, Saudi Arabia, bombed Yemen, killing more women and children. Not to be left out of the action, the racist and criminal entity known as Israel attacked Syria. If you live in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, or Yemen, you know you have been, and continue to be in a protracted world war. And those are just some of the hotspots. We can look back at Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the former Yugoslavia and the list goes on. And all this was and is orchestrated, fueled and perpetuated by Anglo-US and its Anglo-Saxon allies, the very same forces that are provoking Russia. Of the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions across the world from 1945 to 2001, 201 were initiated by the US, accounting for 81% of the total number.

In truth, the entire Global South is in a state of permanent war and holocaust. Those of us who reside in the Global South, in the trenches of this dirty war, know that we have been in a relentless world war for as long as we can remember. The US has built an entire economy dependent on arms sales – a military industrial complex. For this reason, they must continue to manufacture wars and unrest, because weapons of mass destruction, their main export, do not sell well in a world of peaceful co-existence. But it is more complex than just economics. Fact is, the Anglo-Saxon tribes have been at war ever since they first emerged in Europe. They have mastered the art and technology of warfare in a way that no other people ever have. They are the quintessential warlords, despite the fact that they love to attribute this term to non-European leaders, especially Africans. There is no civilization on the face of this earth that has waged war more relentlessly and permanently than the Anglo-Saxon tribes. This is not opinion, it is an indisputable historical fact.

European Tribal Wars

There was the Hundred-Year’s War (1337–1453), a European tribal war primarily between the French and the English, with various other European tribes supporting either side. This war claimed the lives of an estimated 3.5 million people. Then, there was the Thirty Year’s War (1618–1848) involving the majority of European nations. Military historians estimate the death-toll to be at least 8 million. Then there was so-called World War I and World War II, both European wars, in which the colonized were pressed into fighting alongside the various North Atlantic Tribes. Sadly today, too many of us are still defending or fighting on the side of the various North Atlantic Tribes, furthering the aims of the Empire, and in the process, subjugating and destroying our own people.

Russians Know this Enemy

The Russians are experienced when it comes to fighting Western Europe’s most notorious fascists. An accurate reading of history shows us that it was the Soviets who led the defeat of Nazi Germany. It is estimated that they lost more than 26 million citizens. The Soviets did not reveal the true extent of their losses at the time, since they could not afford to expose any weaknesses due to the prevailing anti-Soviet sentiment. Before the dust had settled, the Anglo-Saxon devils, Churchill and Chamberlain, met in secret to figure out a way that they could extend the war in order to destroy the Soviet Union. It is said that they abandoned their plan because they realized that they could not get their soldiers to turn on Soviet soldiers, since they had just fought alongside the Red Army and witnessed their incredible courage and the huge sacrifice they had made to rid Europe of Hitler’s onslaught.

Fast Forward to Ukraine, 2022, and the Information War

If you know this history, then you will know that Vladimir Putin was not bluffing when he warned that any interference from other countries would lead to “consequences you have never seen in history”. Finally, someone stood up to the arrogance and hypocrisy of the global hegemon. And of course, the internet is ablaze with confusion from those who don’t know, those who should know better, and those with a pro-imperialist agenda, who are deliberately spreading disinformation.

The “two sides to every story” narrative is being pushed, along with empty slogans such as “No to all wars and military aggression” and “No to Putin, No to war”. Thanks to the corporate media and the Silicon Valley cheerleaders for US imperialism, in many quarters, Zelensky and the Azov Battalion are being hailed as heroes, while Russian TV is banned. Those who are falling for these false narratives need to do their research or shut up. Such positions on the situation in Ukraine are simply not grounded in concrete reality. They lack rigorous historical analysis and perpetuate a total misunderstanding of the dynamics at work. As I write this article, footage is circulating showing Ukrainian army personnel refusing to allow African students in Ukraine onto the trains and buses evacuating civilians. There are reports of African, Asian and Caribbean citizens facing discrimination and in some cases violent attacks by members of the Ukrainian armed forces who are refusing to allow them to join the queues at the Ukraine/Polish border, and if they do manage to join keep pushing them to the back of the queue.

Many are afraid of calling a spade a spade. Neo-colonial regimes in the Global South dare not challenge the imperial hegemon. They are after all, simply managing their respective countries on behalf of the imperialists and this entails toeing the imperialist line and regurgitating their lies. For example, here in Guyana, both the Government and the official parliamentary opposition have adopted the US-NATO line, despite the fact that many of them know it is a lie. I can’t remember a time when they agreed on anything, but sure enough they agree on this, bullied into taking a position that completely negates the reality. They maybe in ‘office’ but they have no power. Our political formation, Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) may not be in ’office’, but we have more power than all the tongue-tied politicians who occupy a space in our national assembly. Our power lies in our ability to speak the truth. CARCOM too has found it necessary to back the Anglo-Saxon version of events, despite so many in its ranks knowing better. Such is the control exercised and fear of retribution perpetrated by the Empire. Even as I am writing this article people are warning me about the fact that airing the views contained here will have serious consequences. This is the way the hegemon holds the world to ransom.

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Protesters hold a banner reading “Donetsk region with Russia” and a placard reading “South-east against fascism” during a rally in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk on March 1, 2014. (AFP Photo/Alexander Khudoteply) © AFP

The Demise of Anglo-Saxon Global Domination

Those who are trying to equate Putin and Russia with the US and NATO on an equal footing, in terms of level of threat to world peace, either do not know the facts or are engaging in vulgar political opportunism, intellectual dishonesty and crude historical revisionism. Many, including neo-colonial regimes, liberal pundits, neo-Trotskyites, some ivory tower Marxists and social democrats are spreading this disinformation and creating mass confusion. There are multiple battlefronts open to those who are ready to join the global resistance to the US Empire and its NATO allies. One strategic battlefront is the battle of ideas. We must raise our voices wherever we are, thereby challenging the cleverly orchestrated deceptive agenda of the Empire. Theirs was once a dominant narrative, however it is surely crumbling as more and more people wake up to their games and lies. The battle to resist and finally end Anglo-Saxon global domination/White Supremacy has been raging ever since it raised its ugly head. All Empire’s fall and the US Empire and its Western allies are no exception. We are at a very critical historical juncture in the battle to rid ourselves of the Western/Anglo-Saxon scourge on this earth – there is no turning back and it is clear that the ushering in of a new era cannot be stopped. This is why it is very important for us as Africans to be clear about what is actually taking place and understand the history, characteristics, and agendas of the various players. NATO is an illegitimate entity and must be forced to disband.

Argentinian political analyst, Adrian Salbuchi, points out “In recent times…Russia is increasingly acting on Western hegemonic ambitions, notably in Syria and Iran. In November 2011 and February 2012, Russia vetoed two US/UK/French sponsored UN Resolutions against Syria, which if passed, would have had the same devastating effect on Syria as UN Resolution1973 had on Libya…Russia has dispatched credible dissuasive military forces to counteract NATO’s militarization of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.”

Russia in Africa

In addition, Russia, dating back to the days of the Soviet Union and before, has assisted liberation struggles throughout Africa. As far back as 1895, it was Russia that provided Ethiopia with weapons during the first Italian-Ethiopian war. During the Soviet era, they provided assistance, including funding, thousands of scholarships and military training to numerous African liberation movements. This was done at a time when the US and its Western allies were supporting the racist Anglo-Saxon Boers during the Apartheid era. Presently, Russia is assisting Mali in its just struggle to root out heretical, pseudo-Islamic groups causing havoc in the Sahel. These groups, such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, are aided and abetted by the US, Israel and their allies. NATO has used these fake jihadists as foot soldiers in many of its wars to overthrow non-compliant regimes, and is now using them to create mayhem on the continent and justify AFRICOM’s presence throughout Africa. Mali has expelled the French because they finally realized that the French are not serious about assisting them in their war with the various so-called jihadist groups and that their presence in Mali is simply to further France’s economic interests. They have appealed to the Russians for assistance, after witnessing the way in which Russian forces contributed tremendously to the flushing out of the bogus Jihadists in Syria, and Russia has answered Mali’s call. In fact, Vladimir Putin himself, in his capacity as a Soviet military advisor, spent four years (1973-77) in Tanzania training African freedom fighters from various liberation movements.

As Pan-African historian, Walter Rodney pointed out, Slavic Russia did not participate in the trade of captured Africans to build their country. Neither did they colonize countries in Africa or other parts of the Global South. The invasion, destruction and colonization of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean was fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon/West European imperial project and still is.
Third from left Vladimir Putin, beside him is Mozambique freedom fighter, Samora Machel, and beside him is Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe’s current president. Putin spent 4 years (1973-77) in Tanzania training African freedom fighters.

Activism and Organization are the Anchor for Ideas

To all the purists, who remain in observer/commentator positions at their keyboards, let me quote revolutionary Pan-Africanist, Kwame Ture, who warned us over and over again about having these conversations with anyone who is not active, on the ground, in an organization. Why? Because they are out of necessity living in their heads. Activism and organization are the anchor for ideas. I am not negating the downside and contradictions that arise with all superpowers, of course there are many. I was deeply disappointed with both Russia and China’s response or lack of response to the Libyan crisis and the way they allowed the US and NATO to destroy the Libyan Jamahiriya. Libya’s destruction was a huge blow to the Pan-African movement, however, as a revolutionary I cannot allow this grave era on their part to influence my ability to make an accurate analysis of the current situation. If as revolutionaries we allowed disappointments to prevent us from taking principled positions, all resistance would have ceased a long time ago. What I am saying is that if we are genuinely interested in ending White supremacy, to be more specific, Anglo-Saxon global domination and terrorism, then given the challenges facing us, we must recognize that all superpowers are not the same. To see them as all the same is not only simplistic, but is actually completely removed from both the historical and unfolding reality before us. I know for certain that Muammar Qaddafi, regardless of Russia’s misjudgment regarding NATO’s invasion of Libya, would most definitely want us, as revolutionary Pan-Africanists, to stand by Russia and against NATO at this time.

In fact, the destruction of Africa’s most prosperous nation-state, the Libyan Jamahiriya, in 2011 clearly demonstrated that complete non-alignment, although ideologically sound and ideal, is not advisable in the current global political environment. Russia has given oxygen to progressive and revolutionary oriented regimes, helping them to survive the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon bullies. Truth is that without Russia’s timely intervention, Syria would have suffered the same fate as Libya. We live and learn many painful lessons in this struggle. It is only through organization and activism on the ground, wherever we are, that we can effectively resist, and in the process learn about and gain an understanding of the real world. In this way, we advance our struggles. Thankfully, the dynamics are shifting and the Ukrainian crisis has accelerated this shift, because it has shown the weakness of the US Empire and its NATO allies. As Mao Zedong said decades ago, “the US Empire is a paper tiger”.

Hypocrisy and Doublespeak

European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, described Russia’s defense of these republics as a “barbaric” attack on an independent country. According to Stoltenberg, Russia is threatening “the stability in Europe and the whole of the international peace order.” International peace order? Did we miss something?

Von der Leyen said in a recent outburst that Russia and China are seeking to “replace the existing international rules and that they prefer the rule of the strongest to the rule of law, preferring intimidation instead of self-determination”. And “war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength” Ms. Von der Leyen. In a clear act of doublespeak, she attributes the “rule of the strongest” mindset, and a preference for intimidation instead of a respect for self-determination to Russia and China, when in fact, it is her very own EU who backs NATO’s enforcement of such values.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky was left with egg on his face as the saying goes. Having been led down a rabbit hole by the US and their allies, Zelensky found himself asking, is no one going to fight alongside Ukraine? As I write this article, Russia is neutralizing Ukrainian fascists, and the liberation of the independent territories of Donetsk and Luhansk from the Ukrainian neo-fascists, after an eight year war, is well under way.

The ratcheting up of the Ukraine situation by political morons Joe Biden and Boris Johnson has served to strengthen the relationship between Russia and China which can only escalate the already disintegrating Anglo-Saxon Empire. Putin and the Russian Federation have exposed these imperialists as the bullies, hypocrites and criminals they are.

Those of us who are forced to confront the harsh realities of the global political landscape will always be mired in contradictions. Whatever the contradictions we face we must heed Mao Zedong’s now famous guidelines concerning the correct handling of contradictions, that is, recognizing the important difference between primary and secondary contradictions. The primary contradiction here is between Western Anglo-Saxon imperialism and domination of the globe and those nations who refuse to accept their hegemony. The battle to extinguish Anglo-Saxon supremacy and domination of this planet is at fever pitch. The question for each of us is: what side of history will we find ourselves on?

Gerald A. Perreira is a writer, educator, theologian and political activist. He is chairperson of Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) based in Guyana and an executive member of the Caribbean Pan African Network (CPAN). He lived in the Libyan Jamahiriya for many years and was a founding member of the World Mathaba, based in Tripoli, Libya. He can be reached at mojadi94@gmail.com.

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 04, 2022 2:57 pm

For African and Colonized Peoples, to Understand Ukraine: De-center Europe and Focus on Imperialism
Black Alliance For Peace 02 Mar 2022

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African Students Attempting to Enter Poland from Ukraine WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/GETTY

The Black Alliance for Peace emphatically declares that the conflict in the Ukraine emerges from the ceaseless and single-minded drive of the U.S., NATO, and the European Union for global economic and political dominance.

The Black Alliance for Peace Statement on the Situation in Ukraine was originally published on the BAP website .

The Black Alliance for Peace emphatically declares that the conflict in the Ukraine emerges from the ceaseless and single-minded drive of the U.S., NATO, and the European Union for global economic and political dominance. The genesis of the current crisis, as BAP has previously asserted , is in the 2014 US-backed coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected government – and in the determination of the U.S./EU/NATO “axis of domination” to convert Ukraine into a heavily-militarized NATO member nation, lurking on the border of the Russian Federation. NATO’s expansion has been a well-known security concern for Russia since 1999, when Bill Clinton inaugurated the official process of growing NATO’s membership to include former nations of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as the conflict escalates, NATO’s expansion has become an existential threat to African people and all oppressed and colonized people around the world. For peace to arrive in the region and in the world, the expansion of this “axis of domination” must be halted and NATO must be dismantled.

But what is peace? For BAP, peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Peace means the achievement, through popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from militarism and nuclear proliferation, imperialism and unjust war, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Indeed, the resurgence and celebration of Nazism in the Ukraine, as well as in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, represents a global consolidation of white supremacy as part of the project of imperialism. This consolidation also appears through invocations of and appeals to white, “civilized” nations and peoples and the entrenchment of an unabashedly racist pan-European world. Peace also means dismantling a military-industrial complex that is clearly profiting from endless war and intervention and reinvesting bloated “defense” budgets into education, health and child care, housing, and the battle against global warming. We need to dismantle NATO for the same reasons we need to abolish the police: both serve the interests of capital and empire at the expense of the global working classes.

The Black Alliance for Peace is mindful of the loss of life in Ukraine, but also in Somalia, Yemen, and every nation suffering under NATO wars of domination. We offer our unwavering solidarity with the people of these places. As BAP Coordinating Committee member Rafiki Morris argues:

“Our concern for the people of Ukraine must be added to our overarching concern for those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya; coups in Egypt, Honduras, Ukraine, Bolivia, Brazil; subversion in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba; coups across the African continent with soldiers trained by AFRICOM.”

We note, for example, that as the U.S. condemned the military actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, its armed drones bombed Somalia. Moreover, as Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean were abandoned and mistreated in the Ukraine, the 200th deportation flight of the Biden administration sent 129 Haitians to Port-au-Prince, adding to the 21,000 already deported in one year.

To secure the interests of the Russian and Ukrainian people, there must be good faith negotiations between the Russian Federation, representatives of the peoples of Donbas, the Ukrainian state, and the U.S. The EU and the U.S. must end their continuous shipments of arms and other “lethal aid” to Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia must enter into serious discussions with the peoples of the Donbas in order to determine if the Minsk agreement, which was unanimously approved by the United Nations Security Council in 2015, is still applicable. And NATO must be disbanded.

A cloud of confusion has settled on many people, as the lusty calls for war with Russia grow louder and the propagandistic appeals to patriotism, racial nationalism, and the defense of “white civilization” intensify. For BAP, there is no confusion. The conflict in the Ukraine has only exposed the hypocrisy and contradictions of imperialism, war, and militarism – and the demand for peace means to fight against U.S. imperialism and the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination.

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

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The G5 Sahel Group – Clearly Just an Illusion
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 3, 2022
Vladimir Danilov

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The vast Sahel region, stretching across Africa from Senegal to Sudan, has long been the continent’s powder keg. National governments have been able to secure peace here and as a result millions of citizens in Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso and the other Sahel nations have been forced from their homes and flee en masse to Europe’s Mediterranean coast or risk being recruited by militants. The many extremist groups present in the region, each with their own agenda, have been joined by militants from Syria and Iran where terrorist organizations such as DAESH (a prohibited organization in Russia) have suffered significant losses.

Europe, and particularly France – a former colonial power and still a significant influence in the Sahel region, are concerned about the situation there, especially in terms of its impact on migration and terrorism. It is therefore no surprise that when, on February 16 2014, the heads of state of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso and Chad met together in Nouakchott to found the G5 Sahel group (or G5S), France was the real, if unofficial, initiator of the project. The stated goals of the new regional group were to coordinate their work on reducing poverty, developing infrastructure and agriculture and ensuring security. It was intended to supplement and support the existing regional bodies, including the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS). But in reality the main goal of the G5S was the formation of a military alliance, which was officially established at the G5 summit in February 2017. In accordance with an agreement reached during that summit, the following year the members of the group established the G5 Sahel Joint Force, made up of 5,000 soldiers and police with a single command structure, tasked with preventing terrorist attacks. France later conducted two counter-terrorist operations, Serval and Barkhane, in partnership with the Joint Force.

The establishment of the G5S joint force was greeted positively in Europe, particularly in France, which took on the role of main mentor and supporter of the Sahel nations in order to boost the effectiveness of their counter-terrorism alliance. Concerned by the high levels of illegal migration from Africa – a problem experienced by many European countries – France lobbied for the adoption of the EU Sahel Strategy Regional Action Plan 2015–2020. The EU clearly shares France’s concerns: it has provided significant funding – 50 million euros – for the African nations’ “united army,” as well as humanitarian aid, launched the European Union Capacity Building Mission in Niger (EUCAP Sahel Niger), and financed the Coordination Center in partnership with French law-enforcement bodies, as well as investing tens of millions of euros in infrastructure development.

But, besides migration and terrorism, France has other, very direct concerns in its former colonies. It has a number of economic interests there, and is particularly reliant on the region for uranium supplies. The former colonial power has traditionally depended on resources from the Sahel, and Niger supplies a third of its uranium needs – which are significant, since 80% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power. That explains why the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the French multinational nuclear power company Areva were so keen to persuade the French government to launch its Serval operation in Mali in 2013-2014, aimed a protecting France’s multi-million euro investments in the Sahel. But one should not forget that Paris has a number of other significant financial involvements in the region. To name just a few, the Orange Telecom holding has a presence in Niger, Bolloré logistics is involved in developing the rail network in Niger, as is Sitarail in Burkina-Faso and Camrail in Chad, and Veolia’s African subsidiary Société des Eaux du Niger operates a water treatment plant in Niger – all projects of significant economic and geo-strategic significance for France.

Paris’s determination to implement its security policy in the Sahel forms part of its soft power strategy: the French government uses the French media to promote its official position, namely that it is “helping the Sahel nations in their fight against terrorism,” and present the Barkhane operation as a counter-terrorist initiative. Paris considers that this helps to boost France’s “liberal” image within the international community. Thus, as reported by Le Figaro, Emmanuel Macron gained political capital from the presence of French troops in Niamey, capital of Niger, as part of a joint New Year celebration – a clear illustration of the close connection between France’s foreign policy initiatives and the reputation of the French political establishment back at home.

France’s security policy in the Sahel countries has been viewed as an attempt by the former colonial power to demonstrate its influence, and an expression of its quite rational wish to be seen as an important global power, a particularly pressing concern for France given the growing influence of other powers from outside the region, including China and Russia.

France’s leadership – under the banner of the G5S – of its largest military campaign since the Second World War led to an increase in demand for armaments and gave France the opportunity to develop and demonstrate its military hardware.

However, despite Paris’s attempts, at a local level the G5S has proved itself inadequate, largely as a result of its inaction in the face of the terrorist threat to the region. And that failure has been confirmed by various developments, notably the results of the meeting with the heads of state of the G5S countries, organized by Emmanuel Macron and held on February 16 – which two of the intended participants, the leaders of Mali and Burkina Faso, failed to attend.

As the Malian newspaper Malijet Actualite put it, “today the G5 Sahel Group faces a new challenge — the end of the Barkhane military operation in Mali and the reorganization of the French military presence in the Sahel. Another problem is the changes of regime in Mali and Burkina-Faso, as a result of which both countries have now left the G5S. The future, indeed the continued existence, of what remains of the G5S now looks increasingly doubtful.” Following the withdrawal of Mali and Burkina-Faso, which formed the core of the G5S, it is unclear whether the alliance is still viable.

And at the same time, France’s policy in Africa is becoming increasingly unsustainable, especially in the eyes of the countries that used to live under French rule. Therefore, it is not surprising that the openly anti-French sentimes were voiced during the recent demonstrations, that gather thousands of people. Those sentiments were expressed in the burning of French flags, as well as in the destruction of portraits and even cardboard figures of President of the Fifth Republic Emmanuel Macron.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/ ... -illusion/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 05, 2022 3:00 pm

Libya’s eastern-based parliament approves new interim government
The current interim government led by prime minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah has refused to step down and has vowed to fulfill its mandate of conducting elections and only concede power to an “elected authority”

March 04, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch
Libyan new interim government

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Fathi Bashagha was approved as the new interim prime minister by the eastern-based parliament in Tobruk. (Photo: Middle East Online)

A day after the Libyan eastern-based parliament in the city of Tobruk voted to confirm a new government to lead the country in the interim period before national elections can take place, the current interim government on Wednesday, March 2, rejected the parliament’s move. The current interim government has called the move “fraud” and vowed to not relinquish power until a new government is elected through national elections. The development comes just months after Libya failed to hold elections scheduled in December last year as part of the UN-brokered peace process. The fresh political uncertainty threatens to once again push the war-torn country into chaos and infighting after just a few months of relative calm and stability.

The government formed through the peace process was tasked with reforming the country’s institutions and organizing and supervising the presidential and general elections. The elections were ultimately indefinitely postponed due to disagreements between the various rival political and tribal factions over the rules governing the elections and controversy regarding some of the candidates who expressed their intention of standing for elections in the preceding months. These included the son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and rebel Libyan National Army (LNA) general Khalifa Haftar, among others.

Libya’s eastern parliament on Tuesday approved the new government headed by new prime minister Fathi Bashagha, with 35 ministers in the new interim cabinet. According to news reports, a majority of 92 parliamentary members out of a total 101 present in the assembly voted in favor of the new government. Following the confirmation, Bashagha in an interview said that “there will be no use of force, neither by us nor the existing government. Tomorrow the oath will be taken before the House of Representatives and then I will go to Tripoli.” He expressed hope that arrangements will be made to ensure a “normal and smooth” transition.

On Thursday, the UN, which has been at the forefront of the peace negotiations in Libya, expressed concerns regarding news of the parliament vote. The concern was based on reports which said that the vote failed to meet the standards of transparency and procedure, and that there were acts of intimidation before the special parliament session was called to hold the vote. The UN is also reportedly stepping up its efforts to bring about agreement among all the different factions on holding elections as soon as possible.

UN’s special envoy to Libya, Stephanie Williams, will be holding talks with the eastern-based parliament and the rival High Council of State to discuss the matter soon. Several regional and international powers supporting some of the Libyan factions have also urged the country’s leaders to hold elections quickly and bring Libya back on the path of peace and stability after more than a decade of violence and civil war since the 2011 NATO-led intervention overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and plunged the country into chaos and bloodshed.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/03/04/ ... overnment/

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Food Shortages as Lenders ‘Suffocate’ Tunisia
March 3, 2022
By Fadil Aliriza – Feb 27, 2022

In recent weeks, food markets in Tunisia have been rationing flour-based products, while bakeries have started rationing bread or raising the price of the staple baguette from 190 millimes to 250 or even 500 millimes. Bakeries say it’s because there is a shortage of subsidized flour, something the government has denied. Increasing international food prices and the Ukraine crisis are making wheat less affordable (nearly half of Tunisia’s wheat imports came from Ukraine in 2019). But another factor may be the recent inability to quickly pay shipsdocking at Tunisian ports that were carrying wheat and barley. The State’s Grains Office (Office des Céréales), in charge of managing the wheat market and which has a monopoly on importing wheat and barley, acknowledged there was a delay to making payments to six ships at Tunisian ports in December but insisted that the issue was eventually settled and the ships’ cargo was unloaded. Officials from the Grains Office were also quoted as warning that false reports about payment issues “can be exploited by suppliers to increase the prices of imported grains,” calling the issue of food security one of “national security.”

The issue of wheat is certainly one with wider political significance. The government’s sudden raising of bread prices in late 1983 and early 1984, after direct pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to do so, led to mass protests which the army put down with force, killing dozens. In 2019, Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC)—set up to examine past human rights abuses—sent a memo to the IMF and World Bank asking for restitution for their roles in those deadly riots. The memo called on the institutions to compensate victims and cancel Tunisia’s “illegitimate debt.”

That debt is part of the current crisis. The Finance Ministry’s recent budget reports indicate that for at least a year, Tunisia has been paying more in foreign debt repayments than it is receiving in foreign loans. With new loans going to pay old debts, Tunisia appears to be in a debt-trap. In 2016, when Tunisia signed a major loan program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), just over 5 percent of Tunisia’s GDP went to servicing its debt; but with every year of the loan program, that number has increased, jumping to almost 12 percent by 2021. Since that IMF loan ended in 2020, lenders have been increasingly reluctant to lend to Tunisia until it signs a new IMF loan, conditioned on structural reforms that would cut public spending and further privatize the remaining State-owned enterprises (SoEs). In fact, the State’s 2021 budget had initially expected Tunisia to receive 13 billion dinars in external loans to cover the budget; however by the end of November 2021, only 6.7 billion dinars in foreign loans had come into the Treasury. That means that the expected loans never came, according to researcher Maha Ben Gadha, who is also the economic program manager at the North Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Tunis

“We didn’t receive the tranches or credit already promised. This is a strategy to suffocate the country,” Ben Gadha told Meshkal. According to her, Tunisia’s creditors have sent a message: “If you will not implement the structural reforms by the IMF, we will not fund you. You will find yourself in a situation where you will not be able to import wheat, you will not be able to import gas, and you will not be able to import medicine. So if you really need this money—and we know that you need this money—you should first have an agreement with the IMF and later we will come with other donations and other loans to refinance this gap in the balance of payment.”

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People outside a shut bakery that is rationing bread due to shortages in Oueslatia, outside of Kairouan, on February 26, 2022. Photo by Chahd Lina Belhadj.

Credit Crunch

Without an IMF deal, Tunisia is being shut out of the international credit market in a way that Ben Gadha says could lead to more payment issues for vital goods like food. She points to the examples of the boats docked in Tunisian ports that had payment issues

Tunisia’s importers of wheat and other grains “were not able anymore to pay for their imports on credit, and this is why we saw some ships that were blocked at the ports: because they [suppliers] were not paid. This is also why we will, in the future, have more shortages in basic foods and basic stuffs that we are importing. Enterprises that were importing these products don’t have the right to import on credit anymore. Normally, [buyers] can get the product [immediately] and then three months later they can pay. But now, suppliers are imposing [terms] to have the money first and then to deliver the goods,” Ben Gadha told Meshkal.

While the government claimed that the December incident with the shipments of wheat products was eventually worked out, another report appeared in February of a ship with barley for animal feed stuck off the coast of Zarzis because of a delayed payment to the supplier.

“So we have this problem of a short-term credit lock [due to] the Moody’s downgrade,” Ben Gadha said, explaining that the October downgrade by the credit rating agency is part of why Tunisian importers are facing the credit crunch and why suppliers are demanding payment upfront.

In October, Moody’s downgraded Tunisia’s sovereign bonds, making it more expensive for the State to raise funds. At the time, Moody’s pointed to “protracted delays in reforms and reform-dependent funding which would erode FX [foreign currency] reserves through drawdowns for debt service payments, thereby exacerbating balance of payment risks.” In plainer language, Moody’s was suggesting that Tunisia is taking too long to reform its economy according to the conditions set by its creditors like the IMF and the European Union (EU); so to be able to keep making regular repayments on its existing debt, Tunisia has to dig into its foreign currency reserves. Foreign currency reserves are vital to paying for imported goods.

“Tunisia can no longer afford to have loans on the international market. So what are the other possibilities? To go to the IMF, or to go to bilateral lenders, or other multilateral donors,” said Ben Gadha.

But in some cases, bilateral and multilateral lenders and donors are explicit in conditioning their financing on Tunisia signing an IMF deal and implementing the demanded reforms. The EU’s 2020 Covid-19 assistance package of 600 million Euros, for example, was explicitly made “conditional upon a satisfactory track record of implementation of the commitments agreed between the Country [Tunisia] and the International Monetary Fund,” continuing a long history of the EU and IMF working together to shape Tunisia’s economy. The Memorandum of Understanding for the EU’s Covid-19 assistance package also detailed other specific reforms that the EU required of Tunisia and which the IMF has also been demanding, noting for example that to receive the money, Tunisia’s “Government will continue to implement the strategy for the reform of the civil service,” such as capping wages. Other things the Tunisian government will do according to the EU? Issue regulation to further phase out energy subsidies, something that the Tunisian government eventually did in a February 3, 2022 regulation laid out by the Ministry of Industry—almost exactly as stipulated in the EU’s action item 2 in their assistance package, according to researcher Maha Ben Gadha.

With conditions so clear, Tunisian authorities appear to see no alternative to an IMF deal, denying rumors of resorting to the Paris club group of international creditors to manage the country’s debt. Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri, when pushed by a journalist from Mosaique FM, declined to outline a plan-B strategy in case negotiations with the IMF for a new loan don’t work out. The Tunisian Central Bank, for its part, has regularly urged the government to sign a new loan with the IMF, with its latest press release following an executive board meeting expressing “its strong concern about the delay in mobilizing the required external resources to finance the State budget for 2022,” and calling “upon all intervening parties to reach a consensus on the reform program helping to initiate negotiations with the International Monetary Fund on a new program.”

What the IMF Wants

The IMF recently concluded a virtual mission to Tunisia from February 14-22 to discuss an economic reform program. In early January, the anti-corruption group IWatch published a leaked “confidential” Tunisian government document: a 50-page slideshow presentation in French with the file name “IMF Program” and the title page “Reform Program for an Exit to the Crisis.” Days later, Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri confirmed to Mosaique FM that the document was authentic and indeed a proposal for reforms that would meet the requirements of the IMF to secure a new loan program.

That document doesn’t address a comprehensive development strategy for Tunisia: trade is mentioned only indirectly in a graph showing the current account deficit on page seven; agriculture is mentioned only in the context of higher prices on page six, and industrial policy is left at vague mentions of “improving the value proposition” in a few key sectors while building on the neoliberal policies of incentivizing foreign investment and privatization. In contrast, where the document does get specific is in addressing the fiscal situation, something the IMF has repeatedly stressed as being Tunisia’s priority. In fact, the IMF appears to be assured that “the Tunisian government will take measures to improve Tunisia’s fiscal accounts, including through policies to further reduce energy subsidies in a socially conscious way and to contain the civil service wage bill,” according to the IMF website’s Tunisia country “Frequently Asked Question” section, updated April 10, 2020. The leaked document details this fiscal plan with numbers in spending cuts and price increases. This includes cutting energy subsidies and instituting automatic increases for the price of gasoline (estimated at creating an increase of 1.6 billion dinars in public finances).

The IMF insists that it does not impose conditions on its lenders, preferring to frame borrowing governments as having the “primary responsibility for selecting, designing, and implementing policies to make the IMF-supported program successful” according to the IMF website’s “factsheet” on conditionality (updated Feb. 2021). However, the official Tunisian document clearly states on page 41 that this increase in energy prices is a “precondition for the conclusion of an agreement with the IMF.”

In many reports both on Tunisia and other countries, the IMF and the World Bank have argued that energy subsidies disproportionately benefit the rich. However that is a premise based on calculations that don’t consider spending as a percentage of a consumer’s monthly income. While the richest quintile may benefit the most in absolute terms from energy subsidies, that doesn’t mean that as a percentage of their income and monthly spending they are benefiting as much from subsidies as the poorest quintile of the population. A draft study by researchers Chafik Ben Rouine and Jihen Chandoul on IFIs and social protection in Tunisia, soon to be published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that, contrary to the IMF’s claims, subsidies are better at reducing poverty and inequality than targeted cash transfers. Even the World Bank, which has advocated for removing subsidies in favor of targeted cash transfers, found in a 2015 paper that for Tunisia, “raising electricity prices for consumers and removing subsidies for other energy sources would lead to a short-term increase in the poverty rate of 2.5 percentage points. In addition, compensation mechanisms that could be readily implemented (such as universal coverage or building on the existing health cards system) will not bring substantive counterweight to the increased poverty, even if all savings of reforms could be perfectly channeled as cash transfers.”

The leaked Tunisian government’s official program to the IMF also gets specific on freezing salaries (1.1 billion dinars) and recruitment in the public sector (415 million dinars) for 2022. All this focus on cutting the deficit may not have a meaningful positive impact on the debt overall, according to a study by Kristina Rehbein in a paper published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

“All the internal ‘blood-letting’ would not even lead to a sustainable debt level according to the IMF’s own DSA standards, which sets the public debt burden threshold at 70 percent of GDP” notes Rehbein.

The leaked document does not provide specifics on privatization of State-owned enterprises, stating only on page 47 that the objectives include “restructuring public enterprises” and “disengagement of the State from non-strategic activities.” Last February, after a consultation between Tunisian authorities and the IMF, the IMF reported that Tunisian authorities have as their “objective…to divest” the State from the public sector and move towards privatization. Ben Gadha says there are specific plans already in motion to further privatize the remaining publicly-owned enterprises. Initial reforms toward privatization under the government of Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa in 2014 and 2015 obliged the national electricity company STEG to seek loans on the international market in foreign currency, leading to some of the company’s current financial troubles, Ben Gadha noted. Now, Tunisia is planning to meet IMF demands to put these SoEs under a single agency which will manage their portfolios, as initially promised by Tunisia to the IMF to secure the 2016 IMF loan. The affected companies include STEG, STIR which refines petroleum, the Grain Office, the national airline Tunisair, and the National Tobacco Company.

“It depends on the sector because…privatization will not be specifically by opening the capital of some companies. It can be privatizing the sector itself. For example the energy sector is more profitable for foreign investors to be privatized on the level of power production of renewable energy more than in the distribution of electricity,” said Ben Gadha “So what they want to do is to let STEG continue to distribute the electricity to households and companies, but to give the possibility to private investors to [own] renewable energy [production] and to sell their products to STEG in foreign currency.”

Already STEG purchases Tunisian natural gas from foreign companies like the BG group (formerly British Gas) because the Tunisian National Oil Company (ETAP) waived its rights to the resources in what many allege is corruption in the hydrocarbon sector. STIR, the state’s oil refinery, also purchases Tunisian oil at international market rates using foreign currency, Ben Gadha said. There have been attempts to privatize the renewable energy sector and open it up to foreign ownership for years, and STEG purchasing Tunisian-produced renewable energy at international market rates from foreign companies would complete some of those efforts.

“So for some sectors like Tunisair it could be privatized, like the Régie Nationale des Tabacs [National Tobacco Company] it could be privatized, like [Tunisie] Telecom. But for STEG for example, where there is a profitable niche, when they can privatize it, they will do it. But for the non-profitable part—which is the infrastructure, the distribution, the maintenance—they will leave it to the STEG, always under the pressure of foreign [currency] reserve needs to buy the raw material and gas and electricity from the foreign investors and to still be…guaranteed by the State. And here comes the proposal of making this agency to manage the public debt and the shareholding part of the State in public companies. Because they want to manage the debt of these enterprises but they don’t want them to fail…taking the State hostage to always demand credit, to always be in this conditionality,” Ben Gadha explained.

On all these measures, the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) has voiced its opposition, but it is unclear whether it will take concrete measures to stop them. For Ben Gadha, the UGTT has been slow to consolidate its position as it waited to conclude its highly contested annual congress and hold elections this February.

“I think that they are waiting to restructure themselves to have a more powerful negotiation position. They are—at the same time not opposing the president—but also they don’t want to be the only [party] responsible for what will happen in 2022. They know that there is a problem, that there is a crisis, that the IMF is asking for their deal and they are asking for their involvement in this so-called reform program,” Ben Gadha told Meshkal. “They want to have a margin of maneuver to say this is the responsibility of the government, of the president, and not ours. They are in a grey zone now and maybe in few weeks it will be more clear how they will position themselves. They know that they need to accept certain reforms, but they want the responsibility to be shared between different political stakeholders.”

Little Public Debate

While Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri has been regularly giving interviews about the IMF discussions, there has been little public debate about the discussions or the proposed reform program needed to secure a loan.

“Public debate around economic reforms has kind of disappeared from the public sphere since July 25 because, whether you like it or not, the parliament had a space where you can have a debate over the economic policies of a given government,” Mouheb Garoui, cofounder of IWatch, told Meshkal in an interview.

IWatch leaked the government’s official “confidential” reform proposal to the IMF in January. Garoui said they could not know the intention of the leak—whether it was done on purpose or not—and he says opinions are divided with some speculating that the leak was intended to test reactions. However he did say that the government has not targeted IWatch with any legal challenges for publishing the document so far. But despite IWatch making the document public, this has not been enough to produce a broader debate, Garoui said.

“There was no debate over the finance law 2022; there was no debate over the budget, and there was no debate over the economic policies suggested and proposed by the government to the IMF. The public debate is no longer interested in having discussions on policy reforms,” said Garoui. “There is a lack of space, because the parliament as a building was a space for debate. And now, since then, the Presidency is kind of a closed room. You can never have access….IWatch, we don’t have any access to President of the Republic. They don’t have any spokesperson, and their relationship with media is not very good.”

The government has said it will include the UGTT and the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA), the main national chamber of commerce/employers’ union, in discussions about the IMF program. When the previous government under then Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi sent a delegation to Washington in May 2021, the government had claimed the UGTT had been consulted, something that the UGTT denied. But for Garoui, even if the government does fulfill its promise of consulting the UGTT, that’s not enough.

“Saying that there will be discussions with UGTT or UTICA does not make it a public debate for us… Because here we are talking about lifting subsidies on energy, on basic nutritional products that touch each citizen and each taxpayer in this country,” Garoui said.

As for transparency from the IMF side, the former Resident Representative of the IMF in Tunis, Jerome Vacher, declined to speak with Meshkal as he was “not in a position to provide comments on Tunisia,” despite giving an interview to the news agency AFP in January. In that interview, Vacher reiterated previous IMF calls for “deep, structural reform,” and for cutting the public sector wage bill. The IMF’s new Resident Representative, Marc Gerard, did not respond to Meshkal’s request for an interview. An IMF media representative for the region directed Meshkal to attend the biweekly press conference held in Washington D.C. by IMF spokesperson Gerry Rice to pose our questions there. Meshkal registered using the online IMF Press Center system and received an email back on February 9 stating: “once your account has been approved, you will receive a confirmation via email;” however, at the time this article was published, we still had not received a confirmation email.

Alternatives?

Rather than taking out more loans to pay old debts, the Truth and Dignity Commission’s call for a debt cancellation—or even acknowledgement by the two IFIs of their role in past human rights abuses—has so far been ignored. Human rights concerns have continued to plague more recent IFI loans to Tunisia, with a 2018 report by a United Nations independent expert on foreign debt and human rights finding that the 2016-2020 IMF loan program “contains several measures that are likely to have negative impacts on the enjoyment of human rights.” A more recent call for debt cancellation came during the Covid-19 crisis from the Tunisian research institution Observatoire Tunisien De L’Economie, along with other signatories from around the world who noted how spending on debt repayments by Global South countries was coming at the expense of healthcare spending. Another research institution, the Food Sovereignty and Environment Observatory (OSAE) has long bemoaned Tunisia’s dependence on wheat imports, advocating instead for a policy of food sovereignty so Tunisia can feed itself without relying on foreign loans.

For Ben Gadha, whether Tunisia signs a new IMF deal or not, it will still have to meet at least some of the conditions of its creditors on debt management, restructuring, or default. For her, a more pressing step should be to look at the root causes that led to the current crisis and try to address them. President Kais Saied has recently brought up the issue of auditing the debt—a proposal which died in 2013 following political assassinations. For Ben Gadha, that proposal might have some good consequences “in terms of transparency, putting the creditors in front of their responsibilities.” But, she adds: “it’s not something that is really efficient.”

“Better is to stop the bleeding…to look at what are the real causes that put us in this situation of structural dependency and work directly on the reforms that will address these problems. Which means that if there are trade treaties that are harmful for Tunisia, we should renegotiate them. If there are illicit financial flows, we should set controls over the funds, over the transfer of funds abroad from offshore enterprises, auditing the flows of money that are going abroad,” she said. “It could be also to look deeper at the laws that were adopted in the period of 2014-2015 with Mehdi Jomaa that set up the legal basis for the STEG to borrow directly from the financial markets and be in this situation of indebtedness.”

https://orinocotribune.com/food-shortag ... e-tunisia/

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Attack in southern Mali leaves at least 27 soldiers dead

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The Mondoro camp in southern Mali has been the scene of attacks by jihadist groups. | Photo: @Alejandrooccc1
Published March 5, 2022 (3 hours 46 minutes ago)

The Malian Armed Forces indicated that the attack left a total of 33 soldiers wounded and at least seven missing.

At least 27 Malian soldiers died in an attack on a military camp in the south of the African country.

The Malian Armed Forces (FAMA) indicated that dozens of suspected terrorists were neutralized by military personnel in the attack.

The assault on the Mondoro military camp, in southern Mali, also left 33 soldiers injured, 21 of them seriously, while another seven "are missing," according to the military entity.


According to military sources, it is the worst attack against the Malian army in recent months by terrorist forces.

The Mondoro camp, near the border with Burkina Faso, has repeatedly been the scene of attacks by jihadist groups.

Following the seriousness of the latest attack, the Malian Army General Staff called an urgent meeting to assess the situation.

So far the Government has not commented on this attack, that no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for it, although the "modus operandi" of the attackers corresponds to that of the jihadist groups.

Despite the fact that the attack has not been claimed by any terrorist group, Malian security sources attributed responsibility for the assault to groups sympathetic to the self-proclaimed Islamic State (Daesh in Arabic) who have multiplied their attacks with the aim of positioning themselves in the area. after the announced withdrawal of French troops.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/mali-ata ... -0008.html

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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 10, 2022 2:53 pm

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The End of One Party Rule in South Africa: A Profile of South Africa’s Political Parties
By Dingane Xaba, Unicorn Riot March 9, 2022

Durban, South Africa – Since the early 1990s South Africa has undergone the process of deconstructing the racist segregationist legacy of Apartheid. It was at this time that the anti-apartheid movement, broadly represented by Nelson Mandela and his political party in the African National Congress (ANC) began negotiations with the South African government to peacefully end Apartheid. On the other end was the white supremacist National Party (NP) led by F.W. De Klerk and various international capitalists hoping to preserve at least some of their institutional power and economic privileges. Both sides would eventually reach an agreement in 1993, leading to South Africa’s first ever, all-inclusive democratic elections.

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Nelson Mandela pictured in 1992 addressing the Special Committee Against Apartheid in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations (Photo Source: U.N.)

For these efforts Mandela, and by extension, the ANC had gained an almost mythical reputation within large sectors of South Africa’s predominantly Black working class, a status which they have used to dominate every single democratic election since the end to Apartheid nearly 30 years ago. South Africa has thus gone from being an authoritarian one-party state, controlled by the National Party (NP) to being a de-facto one-party state controlled by the ANC.

Despite the ANC’s firm grip on the executive and legislative branches, South Africa has always maintained a wide range of diverse political parties each with their own positions and internal/external conflicts. Nonetheless, since 1994, no party has ever stood a real chance at challenging the ANC in elections.

Yet, years of financial mismanagement, numerous corruption scandals and overall failed promises have weakened and divided the steadily aging ANC. As a result opposition parties are progressively gaining ground. This report briefly profiles the history of ANC, its political competition in South Africa and what the radically new political landscape may mean for the future of the Republic of South Africa.

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The official emblem of the ANC features a traditional shield and spear connected to a wheel. The color black “represents the people of South Africa, while the color green represents the land and gold represents South Africa’s mineral wealth”. (Photo Source: Wikipedia)

The African National Congress

Widely recognized as the oldest National Liberation Party in Africa, the ANC was formed in secret over 110 years ago in 1912 in the Free State provincial capital of Bloemfontein. The party was formed in response to the overtly white supremacist and segregationist government policies overseen by the country’s all white parliament.

The ANC would go on to craft an alliance with other anti-apartheid organizations via the Congress Alliance (CA). The CA included organizations such as the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SAFTU) as well as the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) among others. This alliance would be responsible for crafting a collaborative document which would clearly define their collective grievances and demands. That document would be titled the ‘Freedom Charter’ and would later serve as a major influence on South Africa’s current constitution.

Initially the ANC adhered to a strict policy of only using non-violent protest, designed to bring concessions out of the Apartheid state. These non-violent efforts were met with severe state repression by the South African security services as many ANC and other anti-apartheid activists were systematically jailed, killed or forced on the run. This repression caused the ANC to abandon its strict adherence to non-violence, forming a paramilitary wing, “uMkhonto we Sizwe” (Zulu: “Spear of the nation”) otherwise known as ‘MK’ in 1960.

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The Sharpsville Massacre of 1960 served as the a major reason for the ANC forming MK. This photo was captured 25 years after the massacre at a demonstration commemorating its anniversary in Langa Township, Cape Town (Photo Source: U.N)

The South African state escalated its repression against the ANC by arresting most of its senior leadership in the early 60s including Nelson Mandela, who would wind up imprisoned on Robben Island for over 27 years. Despite these heavy blows, MK would continue low intensity guerilla war against the white supremacist South African government for more than 30 years. In 1984, the ANC would also be pressed into armed conflict with one of its former allies turned bitter rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).

The Inkatha Freedom Party

“Inkatha” is a Zulu word which roughly translates to “grass coil”. The word refers to a sacred royal artifact in the form of a tightly wrapped grass coil which is meant to symbolize “the unity of the Zulu people”. The last known Inkatha was possessed by King Cetshwayo ka Mpande and was reportedly destroyed by British forces during the 19th century Anglo-Zulu War. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is thus primarily influenced and tied to the modern day Zulu monarchy via its founder, and royal head of the Buthelezi clan, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

The IFP was established by Buthelezi in what was then known as the “Bantustan of Kwazulu”. Bantustans were areas designated by the Apartheid state for South Africa’s predominantly Black population. The government gave limited “independence” to local tribal chiefs in these heavily divided and territorially ambiguous areas. In turn, Black people were denied official South African citizenship and required government issued passes if they wished to travel outside the Bantustan.

As such, Kwazulu was designated by the Apartheid state as the official homeland for the Zulu people, the largest single ethnic group in the country. Despite the limited “autonomy” granted to Zulu chiefs, the borders and administration of Kwazulu ultimately fell under the wider “Natal Province” which was exclusively governed by its local, predominantly English-speaking white population.

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Photo on left shows the scattered and isolated boundaries of the former Bantustans. which were provisionally governed by local chiefs yet ultimately under South African government rule. Photo on right shows the former white ruled and administered “Natal” province where the Kwazulu Bantustan was located. After the fall of Apartheid, these names were combined and the province was renamed “Kwazulu-Natal”. (Photo Source: (Britannica/Wikipedia)

Like most founders of the IFP, Buthelezi held deep ties to the ANC as he was an early member of the ANC youth wing (ANCYL) while studying at the University of Fort Hare in 1949. He was later expelled from that university for participating in a student boycott, but claims that he later earned his full bachelors degree (BA) in “history and bantu administration” from the University of Natal at an unspecified date.

In 1970, Kwazulu tribal authorities appointed Buthelezi as the “Chief Executive Officer of Kwazulu” thereby cementing his position as head of the tribal government in Kwazulu. Buthelezi would go on to lead the Kwazulu Bantustan for the next 24 years right up the abolishment of the Bantustan system in 1994.

Due to their shared history and Black nationalist politics, Buthelezi and the ANC initially maintained good relations. However, the relationship began to sour as the ANC grew ever-closer to the Soviet Union and its allied South African Communist Party (SACP).

As the ANC’s war against the state intensified, the Soviets provided increasing amounts of economic assistance and military aid to the ANC. This left a profoundly bad taste in Buthelezi’s mouth as he and his party preferred peaceful negotiations with the Apartheid government in order to re-establish the absolute rule of the royal Zulu monarchy. The IFP thus had no interest in war with the South African state and was especially opposed to the ANC’s egalitarian, communist and secular ideals.

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Buthelezi pictured at a state funeral in 2020. Buthelezi is one of the longest serving politicians in South African history. He only recently resigned from his position as head of the IFP in 2019, a position which he had held for over 44 years. (Photo Source: Flickr)

This ideological tension would eventually lead to the IFP’s official split from the ANC in 1979, a split which would later boil over into open warfare between the two parties between 1984-1992. During this war, the South African Self Defense Force (SADF) was documented supplying IFP militias with military training and weapons to be used against the ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations in Kwazulu in what they coined “Operation Marion.”

Though the IFP-ANC conflict in Kwazulu would eventually end in 1992, the permanent scars left behind in the almost decade-long conflict are still present in the minds and bodies of those who survived.

Unicorn Riot spoke with Phumlan Hlophe, a Zulu resident of the Umlazi township who experienced the IFP-ANC political violence late early 90s:

“I lost school time during 1990 because after Mandela was released there was mass violence. One of my friends died when we were attacked inside the school during school hours where the other students who belonged to the IFP were told not to come to school that day and we [ANC students] went to school without being aware. Then the Zulu Police [IFP] would come in numbers and attack us with tear gas and rubber bullets. We were scattered and whoever could survive, could survive.”

– Phumlan Hlophe, Umlazi Township resident


To this day the IFP maintains a significant political support base in Kwazulu-Natal, especially the rural areas. Though it pales in comparison to ANC support in the urban centers, the IFP remains an important player in the regional politics of Kwazulu-Natal.

The Democratic Alliance

Of all the opposition parties, perhaps none have been more successful so far than the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA traces its roots back to the Progressive Party, a liberal political party established in 1959, which represented the liberal white opposition to Apartheid, in the country’s then all-white parliament.

The modern day DA however was officially founded more recently in the year 2000. The majority of its support base comes from middle/upper class whites typically aged 35 and up who hold broadly liberal, conservative, or “centrist” views.

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The DA has steadily recruited more non-white people within the organization in an effort to diversify it’s predominantly white image

DA politicians frequently put the blame squarely on the ANC for much of the country’s core issues such as high crime, corruption and mass unemployment. This message strongly resonates with their white liberal-conservative base which has always been wary of the ANC’s land redistribution proposals, and racial equality programs.

However, the DA has struggled to shed its privileged white image and connect with younger Black South Africans. It has also been criticized for its known connections with far-right white nationalist organizations. Nonetheless, the DA has experienced modest yet steady growth since 2000, and maintains a particularly strong base of support in the city of Cape Town, the only city where it dominates the local city council.

The DA’s slow and steady growth came to a halt however in the 2019 national elections – for the first time ever, the party lost votes. This is at least partially due to the increased competition it now faces from it’s radical right-wing affiliate-turned-competitor, in the white nationalist Freedom Front Plus (FF+).

The Freedom Front Plus

The plan to pivot South Africa away from Apartheid colonialism into the new era of the “Rainbow Nation” was not universally accepted by all. In response to the what they saw as a betrayal by the National Party, many reactionary white supremacists split off from the NP and began organizing to stop the 1994 elections and continue their war against the ANC.

In preparation for this planned civil war, four high ranking SADF generals would form a right-wing umbrella-party called the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF). One of the four generals was Constand Viljoen, who just prior to 1994, was said to have personally commanded some 50,000 – 60,000 paramilitary soldiers. In the event that the AVF’s goal of stopping the election failed, this paramilitary force would be ready to initiate a renewed civil war against the ANC.

However, the AFV’s disastrous attempt at military intervention in the Bophuthatswana crisis coupled with the success of the 1994 elections contributed to Viljoen’s apparent change of heart as he decided to enter into politics instead, hence founding the Freedom Front (FF).

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Constand Viljoen, pictured in a FF party poster. The Party’s logo and colors closely resemble the Apartheid flag (Photo Source: University of South Africa)

From the very beginning of its existence, the FF knew they had no chance of beating the ANC in truly free and fair elections, so they transitioned away from their previous goal of maintaining the racist Apartheid system towards the creation of a separate “Volkstaat” (people’s state) or a fully independent white ethnostate.

Opinion polls conducted between 1994-1996 revealed that a majority of Afrikaners were opposed to the Volkstaat concept. Nevertheless, the party exceeded political expectations, garnering around 2% of the total vote (424,555 votes out of 19,726,610 total votes cast) which made it the fourth largest political party in the country at the time.

The following decade, however, would see FF’s election numbers steadily decline, eventually forcing it to enter into a merger with the fellow white nationalist Conservative Party and Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging to become the “Freedom Front Plus” (FF+) in 2003.

The FF+ has since expanded its target audience beyond its small extreme right-wing, white-minority base, by now claiming to represent “all minority people” in South Africa, or more specifically members of the mixed-race “Coloured” community who also speak the Afrikaans language.

This policy shift is at least partially responsible for the party’s resurgence as that same year, during the national and provincial elections, it won a record 11 seats in parliament. The new influx of Afrikaner/Coloured voters was mostly made up of those who had previously voted for the Democratic Alliance, in particular, voters from Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province. The Western Cape is the only province in South Africa in which Coloured people are the majority ethnic population. As a result both the DA and FF maintain a significant base there.

In 2019, the FF endorsed “Cape Independence as a policy aim of the party” which seeks the complete independence of the Western Cape along with certain portions of the Eastern/Northern Cape as well as portions of the Free State from the Republic of South Africa.

In 2021, the DA joined the FF in formally endorsing the Cape Independence movement and has even made plans to separate the western Cape’s electricity grid away from the state energy monopoly ESKOM.

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Members of the Cape Independence Party at a 2021 demonstration. The flag’s are derived from the former flag of the Dutch Cape Colony, the first European colony to appear on South African soil in 1652. (Photo Source: Wikipedia)

The Economic Freedom Fighters

On the opposing side of the FF’s far right politics is the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Founded in 2013 by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, the EFF is currently the largest split-off from the ANC and is the second largest opposition party next to the DA.

Julius Malema, was born in 1981 to a single working class mother in the Black township of Seshego in modern-day Limpopo. At the time of his birth, Malema’s hometown was the capital of the former “Bantustan of Lebowa,” an area designated for the Pedi ethnic group (which Malema belongs to). Malema began his political career early when he joined the ANC’s youth league at the young age of 9. Recounting his early days in the ANCYL Malema states that one of his primary responsibilities was to “take down political posters belonging to the National Party.”

At around age 13, Malema was given paramilitary firearms training, a common rite of passage for male youth in the ANC during the days of the underground war. Ultimately, it was not his skills with firearms but rather his talent as a public speaker and charisma that would see him rise through the ranks of the ANCYL, eventually becoming president of the youth league in 2008.

Known for his brash and populist speaking style, Malema has made many friends and enemies alike. One of those friends-turned-enemy is the now deposed and former South African President, Jacob Zuma. An early supporter of Zuma’s populist land/wealth redistribution policies, Malema’s loyalty to Zuma was at one time so great that he publicly stated “We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma”.

However, following Zuma’s ascent to the presidency, Malema’s increasing reputation for confrontation and controversy began to alienate even his own superiors in the ANC. The fallout eventually reached a head in 2012 when Malema was expelled from the party for making comments that according to an internal ANC disciplinary review, “sought to portray the ANC government and its leadership under President Zuma in a negative light in relation to the African agenda.”

The following year in 2013, Malema and his followers would go on to form the EFF, the first ANC splinter party since the end of the Apartheid regime. Unlike most other political parties, the EFF is unique in that it does not limit itself only to electoral politics. It has become well known for its many publicized mass actions in the streets, protesting a wide range of alleged corrupt wealthy businesses and institutions they see as racist.

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In 2021, EFF organized several demonstrations in response to reports of a “whites-only” high school celebration organized by the parents of white children at Cape Town’s Brackenfell High School. (Photo Source: Instagram/@ThisKg)

While the EFF also suffers from internal party conflicts, they have maintained a steady position as South Africa’s third strongest political party only behind the DA and the ANC. This political status is maintained by a well-organized, determined and young support base, particularly students between the ages of 18-35. Nevertheless, some former members of the party say numerous internal issues related to the authority concentrated in Malema’s hands has limited its true potential.

“I love Mr. Malema, but when we when we start calling him and referring to him as commander in chief that does something to him, it does something to us, you know, so we should all be commanders and chiefs to some degree. Of course [we should have] an elect that will say, because we trust you with this responsibility that we all have, then you can represent that because we can’t all the millions of us be there to talk. But you can’t be the commander and the chief.”

Sibusiso Tshabalala, student and former EFF member


Future outlook

As the ANC’s grip on power continues to slide, it is now becoming clear that it isn’t a question of if, but rather when they may cede majority control of South Africa’s national government. The recent 2021 municipal elections showed more evidence of this trend: for the first time ever, the ANC share of the vote dipped below 50%.

As South Africans increasingly look towards more radical parties to solve the nation’s problems. The real question becomes whether or not these wildly different political forces can cooperate well enough to form an effective coalition against the ANC and form a stable government. Though history has shown that the odds of this happening are low, the continued unity of what the late anti-apartheid activist, Bishop Desmond Tutu, once coined the “Rainbow Nation” may still depend on the answer.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/the-end- ... l-parties/

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Protests Continue in Sudan; Resistance Committees Release a key Charter
March 9, 2022
By Pavan Kulkarni – Mar 3, 2022

On February 28, The Khartoum Coordination Of The Resistance Committees Proposed The “Charter For The Establishment Of The People’s Authority”, Setting Forth A Militant Roadmap To Democracy.

The long-awaited “Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority” was proposed by the Khartoum Coordination of Resistance Committees (RCs) in Sudan on Monday, February 28. Mass demonstrations against the military coup were reported from at least 14 cities in Sudan on the same day.

The security forces unleashed a violent crackdown against the protests. Two people were killed, including a 15-year-old, and at least 210 protesters were injured, according to the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD). At least 27 of the injuries were caused by gunshot wounds.

47 people were injured after being directly hit by stun grenades and tear gas canisters, which the forces reportedly fired directly onto the bodies of the protesters. Three were run over by vehicles of the security forces and two were stabbed in the abdomen with knives. Two others have suffered cerebral hemorrhage “as result of severe beatings with batons by” the army, CCSD added.

A majority 146 of these injuries took place in the cities of the Khartoum State – the capital Khartoum city, Khartoum North and Omdurman. Despite heavy repression, multiple rallies starting out from different neighborhoods converged in central Khartoum and reached all the way to the gates of the Presidential Palace before being forced to disperse under heavy fire.

Along with live ammunition, DShK artillery guns were also reportedly used on the protesters here. “There aren’t enough words to describe your courage and steadfastness,” the East Khartoum Resistance Committees Coordination said in a statement addressing the protesters who had made it all the way to the gates of the Presidential Palace, the seat of army chief and coup leader Abdel Fattah al Burhan.

“These security forces, which lacked a moral compass, continued to attack the neighborhoods surrounding the procession areas, intimidating defenseless civilians [and] plundering properties,” it added.

In Omdurman, where the two protesters including 15-year-old Mohab Qassam al-Sid were killed, the security forces reportedly also attacked the “AlArba’een hospital, firing teargas and terrorizing doctors and staff” to hinder the treatment of those injured.

Gunshot wounds were also suffered by at least nine protesters in Medani, the capital city of Al Jazirah State, and nine others in Red Sea State’s capital Port Sudan. Arrests have been made in several parts of the country.

The total number of protesters killed by the security forces since the coup has now reached 85. Of the more than 3,200 protesters injured, over 500 are still undergoing treatment, according to the latest data compiled by Hadreen Organization. 26 have lost their limbs or other organs and seven have been paralyzed.

While casualties inflicted by security forces continue to rise with every mass-demonstration like the one on February 28, the undeterred Resistance Committees (RCs) have announced the schedule for nine more such nationwide ‘March of Millions’ this month, starting on March 3.

Amid the ongoing preparations for the protests, the network of over 5,200 RCs organized in neighborhoods across Sudan will also be holding consultations to deliberate on the charter proposed by the Coordination of RCs in Khartoum State to eventually arrive at a single national charter.

A Militant Roadmap To Democracy
Prepared after months of deliberations among the various RCs in Khartoum State, the charter document puts forth a militant roadmap for the transition from the current military rule to full civilian democracy.

“Declining any calls for direct or indirect negotiations with the putschists,” repeatedly made by the UN and the US and its regional and western allies, the charter reiterated “the continuation of our peaceful resistance” until the overthrow of the military junta.

Following the overthrow, the charter proposes the formation of a new fully civilian transitional government which, among other things, will be tasked with prosecuting the generals who led the coup and the civilians who collaborated with them.

The radical vision presented in this document holds to account not only the military generals who led the coup on October 25, 2021, but also the political parties which shared power with the army from mid-2019 in the transitional government that was later dissolved after the coup.

The charter calls for cancellation of the Constitutional Document of August 2019, on the basis of which this transitional government was formed. The Constitutional Document was a power sharing agreement signed between centrist and right-wing political parties and the military junta.

Formed immediately after Omar al-Bashir was forced out of power in April 2019 following mass demonstrations that started at the end of 2018, culminating in what has come to be known as December Revolution, the junta was composed of Bashir’s inner circle.

“All civil and political forces that accepted and participated in negotiations with” this military junta “are required to provide an objective evaluation of the experience that led to the partnership and a public apology for the mistakes that resulted,” the charter demands.

With few exceptions like the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), most of the sizeable political parties entered into these negotiations and subsequently formed a joint civilian-military transitional government, in which much power and impunity was handed over to the military.

The little power that remained in civilian hands as per the Constitutional Document was further undermined by the Juba peace agreement, whose provisions, it was agreed, will prevail over the Constitutional Document in case of conflict.

Failing to address the socio-economic root causes of the conflict in several regions of the country, the agreement has done little to de-escalate the violence which has only increased since in the war-torn regions.

However, by yielding a share in state power through this agreement, the army won the support of the armed rebel groups. These groups in turn supported the coup to marginalize the very civilian forces which had led the December Revolution and forced the army to enter into negotiations with them.

The Charter calls for “a complete review of the Juba Peace Agreement” to remedy the fact that most of the stakeholders – including the internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the local civil and political forces representing the residents of the war-torn areas – were left out of the negotiations.

One of the most important non-negotiable objectives set in this charter is reforming of the state security sector by dissolving the various militias and forming a single national army that is answerable to a civilian prime minister through the minister of defense.

Withdrawal of Sudanese troops from Yemen, which had been among the original demands of the December Revolution since 2018, is once again reiterated.

The charter also calls for freeing much of the economy from the ownership of the army, which currently extends even to sectors unrelated to defense, including agriculture.

In what is arguably the most radical of all proposals, potentially unsettling not only the Sudanese military but also the global finance capital, the charter calls for a review of “all financial agreements, including investment legislation and regulations, from 30 June 1989.” This is the date when dictator Bashir seized power in a military coup and aggressively intensified neoliberal reforms of the economy over the subsequent decades.

https://orinocotribune.com/protests-con ... y-charter/
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Re: Africa

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 12, 2022 2:01 pm

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Aerial photo of Fort Madama – Niger, November 2014 (Photo: Thomas Goisque).

Coups, insurgency, and imperialism in Africa
Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) by Amy Niang (March 8, 2022 ) | - Posted Mar 10, 2022

Across the Sahel, young people are restless. So are soldiers. The region is in the grip of an unprecedented wave of coups d’état that have followed each other within a short period of time: within a year or so, five coups d’état have successively rocked Mali, Chad, Guinea, and Burkina Faso in widespread unrest that risks destabilizing the entire region again.

Since the mid-1990s, coups had become exceptional events that occurred mainly during moments of perceived chaos, with the aim to disrupt the normal constitutional dispensation in order to restore order. Increasingly however, they occur as a form of political intervention designed to correct regular politics that has fallen into a permanent state of crisis and repression.

This moment is a historical shift but also a harbinger of an uncharted future. Not only are the recent coups not contested, but they are also seen as an opening into a new politics of liberation. They could signal a return to a long period of tumult, equally they could also be an opening for a different kind of politics.

The ongoing instability lays bare the accumulated effects of decades of aggressive neoliberal reforms that have eroded the social fabric, the growing significance of a politicized, young generation of Africans that do not share the same political culture as their elders, and the massive failure of the war against terror in the Sahel that has produced neither security nor stability. It also points to some of the ways in which fierce geopolitical battles are likely to wreak havoc in the African continent as Western hegemonic influences declines in the region.

In this long-read for roape.net, I want to argue that the present dilemma has to be seen as an inflection point in both the democratization and decolonization process in West Africa and Africa more generally.

A democratic impasse
One cannot fully make sense of the recent coups d’état in Africa without a full understanding of concomitant popular uprisings that have been occurring on a regular albeit sporadic manner in different parts of the continent. The common impulse, from Mali to Sudan, from Guinea to Burkina Faso is a desire for change, meaningful change.

The much celebrated constitutional order has been discredited in a context where constitutions are routinely violated, regulating mechanisms are often neutralized, and incumbent presidents consistently violate term-limits. For instance, Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara and Guinea’s Alpha Condé both violated constitutionally locked term-limits to run for presidential elections. As the Nigerian writer Jibrin Ibrahim demonstrates, under the current nominal democracy, elected Presidents have also perpetrated coups of an electoral or constitutional nature. In Tunisia, the government of President Kaïs Saïed has taken a de facto authoritarian turn in July 2021. Through rule by decree, Saïed has tempered the constitutional and judicial structure and therefore neutralized any meaningful checks and balance.

In the 1990s, the demand for democratic opening was externally driven by development aid partners and Bretton Woods and other multilateral agencies. The democratic norm was being push through as African states were also being pressured to cut public expenditure in education, health and other social services. Yet the ongoing demand for democracy is internal in kind, it is a popular demand for a different kind of politics and a different kind of democratic participation and not a ‘performance’ on the basis of the Mo Ibrahim index or similar instruments.

Yet, overwhelming media attention of the military government’s standoff with the ‘international community’ muddies an understanding of very urgent crises that will not be resolved by another round of elections. As long as fundamental problems of economic sovereignty, of the state’s capacity to raise financial resources internally, to provide security and social services to its population are unresolved, rushing to elections will merely enable a change of guards to run the same derelict institutions. The democratic struggle is first and foremost a struggle for a political model that is responsive to people’s demands for basic public goods.

Popular uprisings are also an indictment of the failure of formal civil societies organizations that have either become too institutionalized if they are not entirely coopted by governments. Their ability to fully perform their responsibility as safeguards of people’s rights against state excesses has been hampered by an attachment to the orthodoxy of electoral liberalism. A major shortcoming has been its inability to harness into a cogent political project strident current popular demands for an alternative political order. The greatest insecurity that plagues Sahelian communities is linked to food security, and to limited human development.

It is clear to many careful observers of West African politics that something fundamentally different has been simmering over the past few years. The disconnect between governments and people has become more pronounced in the prolonged context of insecurity since 2012. The coronavirus pandemic has furthermore eroded public trust in governments’ ability to deliver public goods or foster greater democratic opening.

There is a question that lingers in everybody’s mind: has the specter of coups and countercoups returned to African politics? More specifically, is West Africa about to fall back into a vicious pattern of coups and countercoups without any seeming logic or order? The fear of a domino effect is real, and one cannot rule out the possibility of another elected government falling under another coup.

Linking coups and popular protests
The five most recent coups in Africa have been directly or indirectly prompted by popular protests of insurgent magnitude. This is significant.

Between April-August 2020, massive crowds gathered in Bamako and in major Malian cities to denounce endemic misrule, a series of corruption scandals involving specifically the purchase of military equipment amid insecurity across the country. The government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita had also been marred by the accusation of massive fraud in the legislative elections of March 2020. Mali’s security situation had deteriorated drastically since 2015. The country fell into a state of chronic instability with burgeoning violence coming not only from jihadist forces, but also from government-backed militias and self-defense groups. Following months-long popular mobilization led by the M5 RFP coalition–the 5 June Mouvement and the Rally of Patriotic Forces–crowds literally escorted the military to the presidential palace. These are the circumstances that saw the takeover of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) military council.

In Burkina Faso, days of uninterrupted public protest preceded the putsch last year. On 14 November, 2021, the country experienced the most brutal attack on security forces. Fifty-three gendarmes were killed in Inata. The public later learned with dismay that the exhausted gendarmes had been without food and supplies for days and could not withstand the ambush. Inata eventually sealed the fate of the president Roch Kaboré. This wasn’t the first recent coup in Burkina Faso. In 2014, months-long street protests culminated into the resignation of 27 year-reigning Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré fled to Cote d’Ivoire where the Ouattara government offered a safe haven against demands for his extradition to Burkina Faso to face justice in the trial on the murder of Thomas Sankara. The military transition that ensued enabled the organization of relatively free elections for the first time in post-independence Burkina Faso.

Although every coup is different and responds to specific circumstances, the same causes can be said to have produced similar effects in both Burkina and Mali. Further, there are embedded historical inequities within armies themselves that mirror existing and widespread social inequities. Coups today may no longer be anchored in revolutionary nationalist or Pan-Africanist politics but some of them, like in Burkina Faso, articulate certain popular demands for social justice and democratic renewal. In the speeches of Paul-Henri Damiba–the interim president and coup leader– Sankara stands as an avatar of an aborted military-driven radical experiment. Army cadets are also politicized in a way that engraves the role of the military in ongoing struggles to reimagine social contracts across Africa. The fact that officers are fighting an internal battle that is also about repositioning a professional military hints at an enduring backdrop to recurrent coups.

It is important to note that public ‘demand’ for the disciplining authority of the military has often been a trojan horse that allows the military to ‘rise up to their responsibility’ as a now familiar, almost scripted ritual announcement that every new coup makes it a point to deliver.

In both Burkina Faso and Mali, transition military governments have initiated country-wide consultations (‘assises nationales’) to collect a wide-range of views from political formations and civil society on constitutional reform. To what extent the military’s move to act democratic-like is likely to lead to substantive change is a different question altogether. If the strategy is quite unprecedented for a military government, the reason for the shift is to be found in the growing importance of struggle on the ground–from popular forces from below.

In toppling civilian governments and ‘installing’ the military, protestors often aim to trigger a speedy change outside of the ballot box. Needless to say, this also heralds an uncertain future that gives no guarantee of success. Military coups are rarely transformative. Further, the military itself is a institution in its own terms that has its own logic of power accumulation. Obviously, if the military was the solution, neither Burkina Faso nor Mali would have gone through multiple coups. Mali has experienced five coups since independence while Burkina holds a record of seven coups with a total of 47-years ruled under various military governments. At any rate, the gains of popular movements hang on a fragile thread that is constantly threated by the encroaching logic of external internal intervention especially in countries whose natural resources are highly coveted.

In 2019, Algerian and Sudanese decades-long regimes fell through popular pressure. Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Omar al-Bashir were deposed by public pressure. In contrast to Mali and Burkina Faso, Sudan has a robust, deep-rooted tradition of political activism led by well-organized leftist movements, especially student movements. Not only have the Sudanese “resistance committees” been able to force concessions from the military, they proactively forged ahead with a political charter for transition presented on 27 February, 2022. The Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority seeks to reverse decades-long military-led governance and restricted civic participation.

Two dilemmas are apparent in the trends mentioned above. On the one hand, it is nearly impossible to assess the extent to which popular protests express representative, legitimate, and uncoerced grievances. On another, to read military coups from a liberal institutional framework which demarcates the ‘civilian’ and the ‘military’ as distinct spheres of action has time and again proven reductive. Such thinking does not allow us to consider solutions outside of injunctions to restore the normal ‘constitutional order’. Neither does it take into account the specificity of the formation of African military systems within a colonial context and their development in postcolonial states.

Contested regional leadership
The default reaction of the West African bloc ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) to the recent coups has been to distribute sanctions on account of ‘norms’ uncritically enforced in a bureaucratic and uncreative approach. The coup policy of both the African Union’s Lomé Declaration of 1999 and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ADC) is systematic sanctions against unconstitutional changes of government even when these are the outcome of compelling popular protests. However, the continental body has neither been consistent nor impartial in its approach. In Chad for instance, the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) determined that the country was under threat of destabilization from Libya and did not therefore enforce sanctions against the Transitional Military Council. Although the dislocation of Libya has had tremendous consequences in the subsequent destabilization of the Sahel, more specifically Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the AU security assessment is all the more surprising as Chad has been relatively unaffected by the Libyan civil war. However, Chad remains France and the West’s staunchest ally in the Sahel in the fight against terrorism. For many observers, the AU buried its legitimacy in Chad by endorsing both a military coup and a dynastic takeover.

The AU is not the only discredited regional institution. ECOWAS has long been seen as a club of the malleable who speak with one tutored voice. Never before has ECOWAS been so disconnected from its populations. Having turned the other way over a series of constitutional coups which paved the way for military coups for instance in Guinea, ECOWAS has emerged as a discredited entity.

According to the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), the West African bloc violated its own statutory rules in imposing sanctions that fall outside of its normative instruments, most specifically the 2001 ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance. Besides, the region’s economies are already badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic and sanctions imposed on Mali have consequences for other ECOWAS members. For instance, Mali accounts for 20% of Senegal’s trade volume; most export goods destined to Mali transit through the port in Dakar.

Waning Western tutelage
One could almost speak of an anachronism between on the one hand the perception of post-colonial stagnation in which the Sahelian region is believed to be steeped and the way in which ‘partnership’ continues to be discussed as the framework of engagement that structures the Sahel’s relations with the former colonial power France. France specifically appears like a stubborn guest that stays on when the party is over.

At the request of the government of Mali fearful that Jihadists were advancing towards Bamako, France launched Operation Serval which led a swift ‘victory’ in early 2013. The succeeding Operation Barkhane–a 5000 strong force that constitutes the backbone of French counter-terrorist intervention in the Sahel, over the years fell into a predictable pattern. In other words, it became locked into its own narrow logic, merely responding to French understanding of its strategic security interests in the Sahel. Despite France announcing a drawdown of Barkhane, as a result of intense pressure in Mali itself, it categorically opposed Mali’s seeking support from other governments to help it restore stability across the country.

The government of Assimi Goïta – who has been serving as interim president since May last year–has always shown suspicion regarding French ambivalence towards Tuareg’s desire of autonomy. After all, the French army command enforced a de-facto partition of Mali by preventing the national army from access to the Tuareg rebellion stronghold in Kidal and used its hegemony as leverage against the Bamako government. There is another reason for the French to seek to institute a buffer zone in Northern Mali. Kidal is about 300 km from Arlit where French giant ORAN (former AREVA) exploits uranium yellowcake. There are also important uranium reserves to the south of Arlit in addition to strategic minerals, arable land and water. The maintenance of military forces in Northern Mali therefore becomes the condition for continuing to supply its nuclear plants.

Furthermore, the Taoudeni Basin–from Mauritania to Algeria and north Mali–is a much-coveted oil basin as the world moves towards a period of depletion of oil resources. Mali itself has large limestone, salt and gold deposits in addition to oil, iron ore and bauxite minerals that are largely unexploited. Given all this, France puts tremendous pressure on WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union) leaders to apply sanctions on Mali. Further, taking advantage of the rotating presidency of the EU, the French President has been lobbying other EU members for support. On 19 January this year, at his inaugural speech as rotating President, Emmanuel Macron declared in no uncertain terms: “It is in Africa that global upheaval is partially being played out, and a part of the future of this [European] continent and its youth […] and our future”.

France is neither ready nor willing to deal with its former African colonies on equal footing. For a long time, it has relied upon clientelist relations to ensure sustained access to African minerals for an unfair price. The maintenance of compliant regimes was always the condition for unimpeded access and control.

The ongoing geopolitical struggle with Russia in fact comes down to this: the argument about delayed elections and democratic governance in reality masks strategic and security interests that France is keen to protect at any cost. Declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control over Africa’s mineral and natural resources. Whereas the security crisis is real across Mali and the Sahel, the crisis that emerged out of disagreement over the presence of French troops and so-called Russian mercenaries has been engineered. Despite much noise about famed Wagner Group, there is little factual information about its presence or operations in Mali. Even so, there is nothing unusual about states using mercenary units for ‘special operations’. One recalls that France itself developed the Foreign Legion–a traditional pathway for citizenship for individual adventurers hired to serve unorthodox French operations around the world, in Africa in particular.

The ongoing stand-off between the West and Russia over the occupation of Ukraine throws into stark relief the importance of Russia’s growing presence in Africa. Russia supplies weapons and military equipment to 30 African countries. Russia is said to be the largest supplier of weapons to Africa of the past few years.

It would be a mistake to see in the thousands of young Africans occupying the streets of Bamako, Kayes and Ouahigouya or blocking French military convoys anarchic crowds that are neither rooted in a solid political culture nor hold a clear vision of what they are yearning for. It would equally be a mistake to see in the popular protests against French military presence in the Sahel as some kind of reactionary resentment of the subaltern or a revanchist postcolonial fury. Underlying the protesters’ outburst is a widespread pursuit of a sovereignty most imagine to have been lacking in their countries since the time of independence. Young people’s demand for ‘meaningful sovereignty’ is explicitly framed against a postcolonial condition that maintains their countries under neocolonial control. Theirs is a struggle for a second independence.

A foundering war
The Sahel was poised to become the new cauldron of the war on terrorism following the France and NATO-led armed intervention in Libya in 2011 and the latter’s subsequent disintegration. The securitarian logic pursued by Sahelian states and intervention forces had two predictable consequences. Firstly, as armed groups and militias proliferated in response to perceived arbitrary injustice in relation to both the state and jihadist groups, the state could label any peripheral or dissenting group ‘terrorist’ and thus give itself license to kill legitimately. Secondly, the fabric of state-society relations has deteriorated in the process as the fight against terrorism came to trump all other economic and social objectives.

Counterterrorist policies have in the main reinforced the repressive capacities of Sahelian states. As many a report have shown, more civilians have died in the hands of Sahelian states and Operation Barkhane than they have under terrorist violence. Yet, the overwhelming majority of so-called militants in the various insurgent groups operating in the Sahel are Malians and Burkinabè nationals from villages and communities known to their neighbors. They need to be engaged through dialogue and concertation.

Dwindling resources under the accelerating effects of climate change have led to deteriorating standards of living and compounded conflicts amongst communities over access to scarce resources. The Sahel faces frequent droughts and food shortages. Embattled and impoverished populations are leaving villages and those that can afford it have fled further afield into neighboring countries if they are not risking their lives in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Further, at a time when Sahelian states have also become the enforcers of EU border policies, some youth are treated like trespassers and criminals in their own states.

In their unqualified commitment to the fight against ‘terrorism’, it would seem that Sahelian countries have delivered more insecurity than they have delivered jobs and economic security for their populations. Ordinary people are having a hard time understanding why after almost 10 years of intervention, a 13000 soldiers strong UN mission, a 5000 strong Barkhane force, including French-led European Takuba Task Force, and G5Sahel, the security situation has deteriorated rather than it has improved. The G5Sahel is a 2017 French initiative to coordinate the fight against Jihadist among five Sahelian countries–Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. It has been a dismal failure. A UN report explains the joint operation’s slow progress and the absence of tangible security gains as the result of a narrow military outlook, divergent priorities amongst concerned countries and a fraught relation with civilians.

If Afghanistan is anything to go by, military intervention campaigns are rarely transformative enterprises.

Interventions have become ritualized forms of action in which external actors use the cover of ‘peace’ ‘security’ and ‘order’ to justify intervention by itself. It produces discursive tropes that validate militarization as a new-age normative crusade of human rights, democratization and liberation of economic activity. Since the 1990s, states have been reduced to enforcers of Bretton Woods injunctions to liberalize if they are not busy enforcing ‘partner countries’ security policies.

People may not understand the intricacy of decision-making processes that have led to the present fiasco, but they perceive the relative inefficiency of the billions of dollars that have been spent on the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Barkhane Operation–which cost around 1 billion euros per year–and other international forces while Sahelian armies remain underfunded, underequipped, lacking the technological resources to collect reliable intelligence. One recalls that the March 2012 coup and that of August 2020 were both prompted by widespread public dissatisfaction with the blatant inefficacy of the Malian army fighting the Tuareg rebels and Jihadists. The Malian army was then ill-equipped–and they still are–to fight the jihadists. The public perceives that something is fundamentally wrong. What is peacekeeping in a country that is in active conflict? Failing to impose peace, what is MINUSMA exactly doing in Mali?

A historical shift?
We may just be at the cusp of a revolution of a new kind, one that first and foremost opposes different generations whose experience of, and outlook over the postcolonial present barely overlap. The generational shift affects both the political and the military elites.

There is in fact more to the recent coups in Mali and Burkina Faso than meet the eye. It would be absurd to pose the problem in terms of a choice to be made between military regimes vs. liberal democracy. The coups themselves are not the ultimate objective. The military is called upon to break a deadlock, to upend the status quo as neutral arbiters. Some of the protestors in Burkina Faso made that much clear in stating their determination to occupy the streets again should the military government fail to deliver on promises. However, coups potentially provide an opening for a necessary debate on a serious social project, something that has not been a preoccupation of previous governments since the time of the revolutionary Thomas Sankara.

https://mronline.org/2022/03/10/coups-i ... in-africa/

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Diplomatic, Legal Gains of Saharawis Amid Moroccan Arrogance
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 10, 2022
Hana Saada

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Despite a cease-fire in 1991 that put an end to the armed combat and the UN efforts toward self-determination, Western Sahara remains a disputed territory.

The Saharawi people continue their honorable struggle for independence and continue to garner additional support for their just cause, as they celebrated, a couple of weeks ago, the 46th anniversary of the establishment of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), with much determination and enthusiasm to recover their inalienable rights.

Despite the persistent attempts of the Moroccan occupier to obstruct international efforts aimed at the decolonization of the last colony in Africa, the Sahrawi people remained, over the years, committed to their just cause, until the recovery of their inalienable right to self-determination. They opted for the peaceful means, until the flagrant violation by the Moroccan regime of the ceasefire agreement, on November 13, 2020, which forced them to resume their armed struggle.

Western Sahara is a Non-Self-Governing Territory of the UN that lies in the Sahel region bordered by Algeria, the Kingdom of Morocco, and Mauritania. This territory is home to the Sahrawis, a collective name for the indigenous peoples living in and around the region. They speak the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic.

Similarly, many others also speak Spanish as a second language due to the region’s colonial past. Their 50-year dispute broke out when the territory was first occupied by Morocco in November 1975, as thousands of Moroccan civilians, flanked by the Moroccan military, crossed into Western Sahara in defiance of Spain, which ruled the region since 1884, a step denounced by most countries and institutions, including the International Court of Justice which stated, a few days before, that there was no “legal tie of territorial sovereignty between Western Sahara and the Moroccan State”.

Historically, in 1963, the UN Special Committee on Decolonization declared Western Sahara, a Spanish colony since 1884, a ‘non-self-governing territory to be decolonized’ in accordance with UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 1514 (XV). Two years later, the UNGA adopted Resolution 2072 (XX), requesting Spain, as the administering power, to withdraw and decolonize the territory. In subsequent resolutions, the UNGA repeatedly invited Spain to organize a referendum on the self-determination of the Sahrawi people under the auspices of the UN. Responding to this request, the Spanish administration eventually announced to organize a referendum in the first half of 1975. Subsequently, Morocco and Mauritania put a spoke in the wheel by raising claims towards the territory of Western Sahara. The Court found that neither Morocco nor Mauritania could claim any territorial sovereignty over the territory of Western Sahara, and negated the existence of any legal ties.

On November 6, 1975, Morocco launched the so-called ‘Green March’, a march of 350,000 Moroccans, a number four times the size of the Sahrawi population back then, into the territory of Western Sahara.

According to Adala UK, on that day, Morocco organized what it called a “Green March” to officially invade the North of Western Sahara moving 350,000 Moroccan settlers to the territory. This occupation coincided with the termination of the Spanish status as Administrative Power, creating a vacuum that imposed on the UN to assume its responsibility there.

Subsequently, the UN Security Council deplored the holding of the march, calling upon Morocco to immediately withdraw all the demonstrators from the territory of Western Sahara; however, its effort was in vain.

It was obvious that Morocco was violating not only the UN Charter’s principles, such as abstention from “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”, but also the African Union Constitutive Act’s sacred principle of “respect of borders existing on achievement of independence”.

The International Court of Justice’s opinion of 1975 indicated, also, that the native Sahrawi people of Western Sahara are the only sovereign power in Western Sahara. It also considered that it “has not found legal ties of such a nature as it might affect the application of resolution 1514 (XV) in the decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular, of the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory.” (para. 129, 162) (Adala UK).

This status quo did not please the Sahrawi people; in response to the Moroccan occupation, they mobilized for armed struggle under the leadership of the Polisario Front, the successor of the liberation movement of Seguia el-Hamra and Oueded-Dahab of Mohammed Bassiri, created on May 10, 1973. This Frente has been recognized by the UN General Assembly Resolution 34/37 of 1979 as the sole legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people.

Years later, precisely in 1991, the warring parties concluded a ceasefire agreement, culminating in the establishment of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which is assuming its responsibility till nowadays.

Despite a cease-fire in 1991 that put an end to the armed combat, Western Sahara remains a disputed territory. Nowadays, Morocco controls parts of the territory. However, the United Nations refers to Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory and maintains a stance favoring self-determination for its people.

The UN body is attaching great interests to the Sahrawi cause, expressing willingness to find a solution ensuring the self-determination of the Sahrawi people, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the Council. Do note that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed, last November, Staffan de Mistura of Italy as his Personal Envoy for Western Sahara.

The new Personal Envoy succeeds Horst Köhler of Germany, who completed his assignment on May 22, 2019, and to whom the Secretary‑General is grateful for his steadfast and intensive efforts which laid the foundation for a new momentum in the political process on Western Sahara. In January, Mr. Staffan de Mistura, accompanied by a UN delegation, arrived in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Smara, as part of his first tour in the region that included Algerian and Mauritania.

The African Union (AU) remains constantly committed to resolving this conflict, notably through its supreme mechanism. The most recent of the Sahrawi diplomatic victories was the participation of the SADR, represented by its president Brahim Ghali, in the 6th African Union (AU)-European Union (EU) Summit held recently in Brussels, consecrating the SADR as an inescapable reality in spite of the fallacious declarations and the maneuvers of the Moroccan occupier.

For its part, Algeria considers the Western Sahara dossier a question of decolonization between the Polisario Front and the Kingdom of Morocco given that this territory is inscribed on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, pending the implementation of the historic resolution 1514 of the General Assembly, which establishes the right of colonized peoples to self-determination and independence, and Algeria will always remain peace patron at the regional and international levels. Algeria has always reiterated its keenness to continue to support the Sahrawi people to obtain their right to self-determination and independence, considering this position as an international obligation, and Algeria will always assume its role as negotiations’ supervisor.

Despite the fact that the United Nations officially considers Morocco and the Polisario Front as the main parties to the conflict, former UN Secretary-General Mr. Kofi Annan viewed Algeria as a stakeholder in the Western Sahara conflict, stressing its presence in all discussions and negotiations.

After the swearing-in ceremony of the Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, he delivered his first presidential address, in which he reaffirmed Algeria’s steadfast stance on the issue of Western Sahara, considering it an issue of decolonization in the hands of the United Nations and the African Union.

Russian Federation, for its part, supports the direct talks between the parties of the conflicts; Morocco and the Frente Polisario. Noting that the Russian military observers are deployed to the Mission, it always stresses that it is unacceptable to dilute previously agreed parameters and thereby undermining the core principles that could pave the way to a mutually acceptable settlement.

China, Angola, Peru, Indonesia, Equatorial Guinea, in addition to other countries from all the continents of the World, on different occasions, underline the importance of resuming negotiations as soon as possible on the basis of Charter principles and previous Security Council decisions, while calling upon all stakeholders to remain committed to the process and to work for a just and mutually acceptable solution.

South Africa has always voiced its support and honorable positions in defending the liberation of the African continent in international forums, in particular, the issue of the Sahrawi people, noting that Africa will not be free as long as Western Sahara, the last colony in Africa, is occupied.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/ ... arrogance/

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The Saharawi People Resist and Cuba Stands by Them
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 10, 2022
Nuria Barbosa León

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This March, the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic celebrates 46 years since its proclamation of independence. Photo: EFE

Cuba defends Saharawis’ right to independence and sovereignty, recognized, as well, by more than 80 other countries


“Cuba has always supported our people, the historical ties we share are inalterable and will be maintained as long as the Saharawi people exist,” insisted Omar Bulsan, registered under the name Mohamed Salec, who, serves as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the Arab Democratic Republic in Cuba.

In an interview with Granma, he recalled that bilateral ties were established before the 1973 war of national liberation, when Saharawi lands were still under Spanish occupation. Spain subsequently ceded the territory to Morocco and Mauritania, and independence was proclaimed on February 27, 1976

Today the area remains occupied by Morocco, along with the extensive mineral deposits found there, including phosphate, oil, gas, iron, uranium and others. The Saharawis are confined in camps, where they suffer abuse and violations of their human rights, as Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro noted in 1980, when he expressed support for the Saharawi people’s anti-colonial cause:

“I remember the moment when we received the first delegation of Cuban doctors in 1976, who evaluated, on the ground, the assistance needed in the refugee camps in southern Algeria, after the outbreak of a measles epidemic that left 400 children dead,” the diplomat said, highlighting the training of thousands of young Saharawi professionals in Cuba, over the years, and the Cuban medical brigade that has remained to date.

Diplomatic ties were established in the 1980s and the two countries established embassies in the other’s territory, but first exchanges at the political level were conducted between the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba and members of the Polisario Front, the legitimate leading force of the Saharawi people.

“Bilateral relations were forged with mutual support and solidarity at the international level,” Bulsan recalled. The cease-fire established in 1991 forced the Saharawi people into a status quo, a vacuum with neither peace nor war.

Cuba defends in all multilateral forums the Saharawis’ right to independence and sovereignty, recognized, as well, by more than 80 countries.

In order to subjugate this people, genocidal methods are employed, including the assassinations of principal leaders, abductions and torture. In addition, a referendum on independence, organized by the United Nations, was promised, but has been postponed for 29 years. Moreover, the ceasefire agreement was violated on November 13, 2020, and thus the armed struggle resumed. “This time we will not agree to any truce until the occupiers withdraw,” the ambassador stated categorically.

Bulsan reported that a struggle is also underway to win the release of 45 political prisoners, jailed by Moroccan military courts: “A week ago, they assassinated a female merchant, and given these events, we organized a big protest. The speakers at that gathering were abducted. We face a situation of constant aggression and brutality,” he said, noting that when the Polisario Front opened enlistment to once again take up arms, young Saharawis massively stepped forward.

In the liberated region, a government was established, headed by two general secretaries and including 26 ministries. The country is a member of the African Union and maintains diplomatic relations with dozens of nations.

In many of these, International Saharawi Independence Day is celebrated February 27. On this occasion, Cuba also organized activities to strengthen the ties of sisterhood our two peoples share, and build awareness of the Saharawi struggle.

“I want to salute the Communist Party and the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their historic support, despite the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the ambassador stated, referring to the public event held, as well as exhibitions at the Africa House and at the Casa del Alba cultural center dedicated to women, and at the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples.

On behalf of his government and people, Bulsan thanked Party First Secretary and President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez and Cuba for its unwavering support “of our national liberation struggle and the solidarity shown, principally in the covid battle and in the training of our young people.” He condemned the ongoing U.S. blockade of Cuba and demanded its immediate end, in accordance with the United Nations resolution supported overwhelmingly in the General Assembly.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/ ... s-by-them/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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