Putin: West supports in Syria forces he fights in Mali

Al Manar

The Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday the Western powers are fighting in the African state of Mali the same forces they are supporting in Arab state of Syria against the President Bashar al-Assad.

“The West is supporting some forces in Syria while fighting them in Mali,” he stated in an interview with the state-run “Russia Today” channel.

Putin, moreover, stressed that the Syrian government should have recognized the need for fundamental changes in the appropriate time in order to prevent what happened in the country.

“Radical transformations have been matured in Syria, and the Syrian government had to touch it at that time and take the initiative to make the required changes.”

“If they have done so, what happened wouldn’t have been happened,” Putin said.

During the interview, the Russian leader reiterated that his country is not “a lawyer for the current Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad,” yet “any opposition is acceptable if it behaves within the framework of Law,” he stressed.

Warning of the risks waged by the so-called al-Nusra Front, which fights in Syria alongside the Syrian opposition, and does not hide its link to al-Qaeda terrorist movement, Putin pointed out that the West lacks a clear policy toward the group.

“Al-Nusra Front is a major component of the armed opposition and is blacklisted by the U.S.,” he said, while recalling the military support the group has gained from the west.

Putin also expressed hope that the international initiatives, including the Egyptian, the British and the American-Russian ones, will contribute to the creation of new opportunity for a political solution in Syria.

Touching on the US war on terrorism, the Russian President noted that there is a terrorism axis waging in the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This worries us. The region is close to our borders,” he stated.

However, Putin indicated that the United States “does not seek to avoid civilian casualties in its battle against terrorism,” stressing the need to impose control on drone attacks.

Regarding the world development during last week, Putin said he notices escalating tension in the Middle East, making it clear that the West criticizes Russia and the eastern countries on how they deal with their oppositions, “knowing that it (the West) deals with its opposition in the same way.”

“We don’t want to interfere in relations between Sunnis and Shiites,” he voiced.
As for the Iranian peaceful nuclear program, the Russian leader denied his country has any evidence that the Islamic Republic violates the international law in developing its nuclear program.

Profiting from Congo’s plunder

Making Fortunes from Pillage

by DAVID CRONIN, source

Having lived in Belgium for 18 years, I figured it was time to start learning about the country’s colonial past. Or should I say present?

My research is at an early stage but it has lead to an unavoidable conclusion: the Belgian elite still behaves as if it calls the shots in Congo.

The French-language magazine Marianne recently published the names of 10 men implicated in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese prime minister after its independence. The list — compiled by Lumumba’s family for a legal investigation opened in Brussels two years ago — include Etienne Davignon, a former member of the European Commission and chairman of that “gentlemen’s club” for global capitalism, the Bilderberg Group. Davignon worked for the Belgian foreign ministry at the time of Lumumba’s murder and reportedly drew up a telegram recommending the prime minister’s “removal”.

Now in his 80s, Davignon remains a high-flying corporate lobbyist. His appearance on the Lumumba list prompted me to check if his commercial activities are in any way connected with Congo. The short answer is “yes, they are”.

Davignon’s profile on BusinessWeek states that he has held the posts of director and vice-president with Umicore. This mining company was previously known as Union Minière du Haut Katanga and began extracting Congo’s rich mineral resources in the early twentieth century. It has good political connections. Jean-Luc Dehaene, a long-serving Belgian prime minister, has served on Umicore’s board too.

Patrice Lumumba had the audacity to advocate that “the soil of our country should really benefit its children”. That was in June 1960. Fifty-three years after he made that pledge, the soil of Katanga province is being used for the benefit of Umicore.

There is a strong likelihood that my smartphone – or yours, if you have one – contains material from Congo. Umicore regularly buys cobalt from mines and suppliers in Katanga for batteries, computers, chemicals and cars. Umicore brags that it shares 50% of the global market in materials for lithium-ion batteries (a key power source for electronic equipment) with just one other firm.

Corporate Knights – an insert with The Washington Post that promotes “clean capitalism” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) – has put Umicore in its “100 most sustainable companies” table for 2013.

Only someone with a warped sense of humour could praise firms active in Congo’s mines for being “sustainable”. The International Monetary Fund – not a friend of the downtrodden – has calculated that the value of Congo’s mineral and oil exports come to $4.2 billion in 2009. Yet the Kinshasa government collected just $155 million in tax that year – 4% of the value of those sales.

This is in a country where – as the “Africa progress report” published by Kofi Annan recently notes – some of the world’s worst malnutrition can be found and seven million children are out of school. Congo is at the bottom of the United Nations “human development index”; it has also been plagued by a war, in which the question of who should control Katanga’s mines has played a significant part.

Far from having its reputation damaged by its involvement in Congo, Umicore’s advice is much in demand. The European Commission has appointed Umicore representative Christian Hagelüken to an “expert group” on ensuring access to raw materials for entrepreneurs. A 2010 paper drawn up by that group identified cobalt and tantalum from Congo as being among 14 “critical” minerals, underscoring their importance for the electronic industry. The paper urged that action be taken against “trade distortions” – code for measures designed to use resources for the benefit of a nation’s children (as Lumumba envisaged), rather than for MP3 players.

Needless to say, the “experts” have made all the right noises about “sustainability” and protecting the environment. If we ignore this spin, however, we will see that the determination of Europeans to control Congo has not changed.

When Belgium conceded in the 1950s that it would have to grant independence to Congo, it resolved to retain a grip on Katanga’s mines. It did so by supporting Lumumba’s rival, Moise Tshombe, as the province’s chief. Belgium tried to encourage Katanga’s secession from the rest of Congo.

Davignon’s reported call for the removal of Lumumba bears a chilling similarity to a message conveyed by Dwight D Eisenhower, the American president, to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. In it, Eisenhower pleaded for Lumumba to be “eliminated”.

In 1884, America was the first country to recognise Belgium’s claim to the Congo. This set in train a process which wiped out at least half of the Congolese population by 1920, according to Jan Vansina, an anthropologist who specialises in Central Africa. This could mean that 10 million lives were destroyed during the reign of Leopold II – the Belgian king who colonised the Congo – and the 10 years after his death.

David Van Reybrouck’s recently published history of Congo traces how the agri-food giant Unilever had its origins in the exploitation of Congolese palm oil. Vast fortunes have been amassed for wily businessmen at the expense of the Congolese people. Despite apologising for its role in Lumumba’s murder a decade ago, Belgium has never atoned for the suffering it inflicted on the Congolese. One explanation for why it has never atoned is that some affluent Belgians are doing nicely from the ongoing pillage of Congo’s resources.

Colonial Reoccupation of West Africa?

(File photo)

Colonial Reoccupation of West Africa? French Troops Will Stay in Mali Even After United Nations Forces Arrive. Paris has been re-occupying the West African state since January

by Abayomi Azikiwe, source

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has visited the West African state of Mali where his troops have been fighting since January. France intervened in the central and northern regions of Mali in a purported campaign to remove the presence of several Islamic organizations which have been designated as terrorists by Paris and other imperialist states.

Recently the United Nations Security Council authorized the deployment of approximately 12, 500 peacekeeping troops which will establish bases at various points in these contested areas of Mali. This UN force is also structured to take the place of a 6,000-person regional African force which has been fighting alongside the French troops against three armed Islamist groups in the north.

Although Francois Hollande’s government said in January that the French operation in Mali would be short-lived, the plans have now been revised. France claims that it has drawn down some its troops leaving 4,000 in the country.

According to reports from the French defense ministry at least 1,000 troops will remain in Mali until the end of the year. 250 of these soldiers are specifically slated to be involved in a training mission with the Malian army, while the other 750 are to continue combat operations.

A major area of the fighting has been in Gao where the French Defense Minister Le Drian visited. The official announced that several hundred troops would be transferred from Timbuktu to Gao, leaving only 20 behind in the ancient city which centuries-ago was a center of Islamic scholarship and international trade.

In addition to the presence of French soldiers, a contingent of troops from neighboring Burkina Faso is operating in Timbuktu. These Burkinabe soldiers are part of the West African regional force mobilized by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

According to French Colonel Cyrille Zimmer, the Burkinabe troops are taking over control of military operations in Timbuktu. He said that “We are leaving a small detachment of 20 men who are going to operate with the Burkinabe battalion. This detachment is going to stay in Timbuktu while the Burkinabes are there.” (Associated Press, April 29)

There have also been efforts to draw more western states into the war in Mali. Germany has committed to supplying military trainers through the European Union.

The United States has been involved in Mali for many years with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) supplying training, equipment and monetary resources. However, these efforts have only created instability inside the country.

When the junior military officers seized power in March 2012 from the elected President Amadou Toumani Toure, these soldiers were led by a U.S.-trained colonel, Amadou Sanogo, who had studied in several academies set up by the Pentagon. The Pentagon has been transporting French troops into the battle in Mali and has recently deployed 100 Special Forces in neighboring Niger in addition to establishing a drone station there.

There has also been a call made by Michael Byers, Chair of Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia in Canada, to have Ottawa become more involved in the Malian crisis. Byers in an editorial published in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, attempted to make an argument for the deployment of troops to Mali.

Byers wrote on April 29 that “Canadian soldiers would be highly valued as ‘force-multipliers’ who maximize the impact of other, less well-trained troops. For nearly half a century, Canada filled this niche in every UN peacekeeping mission.”

He continued saying “Although Canada has disengaged from peacekeeping in recent years, that shift was a political decision. When Canada’s military leaders sought to have General Andrew Leslie appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo in 2010, it was the Harper government that intervened and claimed that Canada’s commitments to the NATO mission in Afghanistan precluded his taking part.”

Therefore, the priority of the Harper government was to engage in more direct occupation efforts in Afghanistan as opposed to what would be considered a neutral stance in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nonetheless, the UN forces being placed in Mali could very well be subjected to hostile fire and other military actions by locals.

This peacekeeping mission will have three obvious challenges. It will be operating as a supposed neutral force while at the same time French and Malian troops are continuing their offensive operations against Ansar Dine, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Also there is a growing degree of alienation on the part of the Malian people in relationship to both French troops and Malian soldiers. These soldiers have been accused of committing atrocities against the population where deaths, injuries and illegal detentions have taken place.

Humanitarian Situation Worsens in Mali

As a result of the military coup and the subsequent civil war in the north between Tuareg separatists and later Islamic rebel groups fighting against the national Malian army, large-scale displacements have taken place. The economic impact of the conflict has been devastating to those that have forced to flee as well as people remaining in their towns and villages.

Food prices have skyrocketed which has impacted working people and the poor. In a recent article published in the Guardian newspaper in London, it examines the growing food shortages in Mali where French troops have been the most active against the targeted rebel organizations.

According to the Guardian, “On Thursday (April 25) four international agencies warned that northern Mali will descend to emergency levels of food insecurity in less than two months if conditions do not improve. Recent food crises in the region have left many people weakened and still in a period of recovery.” (April 29)

Even the Guardian acknowledges that the French intervention has worsened conditions for people living in the combat areas. In addition to cutting off supply lines it has created shortages and therefore precipitated hyperinflation.

This same article goes on to point out that “Food distribution has been disrupted by the closure of the Algerian border – an important route for supplies into northern Mali – and the departure of many traders. Aid agencies say herders have been unable to use traditional pastures and water points, while the falling value of livestock has made it harder to buy cereals.”

With the intervention of UN peacekeepers there is still no guarantee that the situation will normalize. If the experiences of other states are of any indication, such as the DRC, Somalia and Sudan, the deployment of UN forces may very well exacerbate tensions as oppose to lessen them.

The situation in Mali requires a political solution that can only be reached between the varying parties, governments and interest groups involved. This issue portends much for the future of Africa and must be seriously addressed by the African Union (AU) at their upcoming summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

With the increasing intervention of U.S., French and other NATO military forces in Africa, the social, political and economic situations in various African states will inevitably worsen. African states and regional organizations must devise a strategy to deal with this escalation of imperialist militarism which has implications for the continent as a whole.

Under darkness in the Somali region of Ethiopia

State Criminality

by GRAHAM PEEBLES, source

No matter how tightly truth is tied down, confined and suffocated, she slowly escapes. Seeping out through cracks and openings large and small, illuminating all, revealing the grime and shame, that cowers in the shadows.

The arid Somali (or Ogaden) region of Ethiopia, home to some 5 million ethnic Somalis has been isolated from the world since 2005, when the government imposed a ban on all international media and most humanitarian groups from operating in the area. Human Rights Watch (HRW), report that the government, “has tried to stem the flow of information from the region. Some foreign journalists who have attempted to conduct independent investigations have been arrested and residents and witnesses have been threatened and detained in order to prevent them from speaking out“. Aid workers with the United Nations (UN), Medecines Sans Frontiers (MSF) and the International Committee of The Red Cross, plus journalists from a range of western papers, including The New York Times have all had staff expelled and/or detained, by the Ethiopian regime, which speaks of democracy yet does act not in accordance with its own liberal constitution and consistently violates international law, with total impunity.

Under the cover of media darkness together with donor country indifference, the Ethiopian government according to a host of human rights organisations, is committing wide-ranging human rights abuses that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Serious accusations based on accounts relayed by refugees and interviews with Ogaden Somalis on the ground, thatgive, one fears, a hint only of the level of state criminality taking place in the troubled, largely ignored region. HRW, make clear the seriousness of the situation, stating that, “tens of thousands of ethnic Somali civilians living in eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State are experiencing serious abuses… Ethiopian troops have forcibly displaced entire rural communities, ordering villagers to leave their homes within a few days or witness their houses being burnt down and possessions destroyed—and risk death.”

The African Rights Monitor (ARM) in their detailed study, conservatively titled ‘Concerns Over the Ogaden Territory’, found, “that the Ethiopian government has systematically and repeatedly arbitrarily detained, tortured and inhumanly degraded the Ogaden people.” Women and children they report, “are raped, sexually assaulted, and killed”. The ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) they found, “systematically attacks the women and children as they are the weakest in a civil society” and are unable to defend themselves. Documenting a series of specific cases of violence, HRW (28/05/2012) report, “an Ethiopian government-backed paramilitary force [the Liyuu Police] summarily executed 10 men during a March 2012 operation”, HRW “interviewed witnesses and relatives of the victims who described witnessing at least 10 summary executions…. The actual number may be higher.” Such accounts as these clearly warrant investigation by independent agencies, and yet they are resolutely ignored. Supporters of the regime know well what is occurring throughout the Ogaden, and yet they remain silent. America – the single biggest donor to the country, with military bases inside Ethiopia from where their deadly drones are launched into Somalia and Yemen – and Britain are close allies – of the Ethiopian government it seems, but not of the Ethiopian people it seems.

A Regime of Abuse

Page after page could be filled with detailed accounts of abuse from refugees who have fled the region, human rights groups and members of the Ogaden diaspora. Atrocities meted out to innocent civilians suspected of supporting the ONLF, which Genocide Watch (GW) find, amount to “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. Beaten to death, hanged from a tree, tied with wire and held over burning chilies, raped, repeatedly and falsely imprisoned; brutal, unjustifiable acts, justified by the government as part of a ‘counter insurgency operation’, against the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), predictably branded terrorists.

Documented reports of human rights violations amounting to state terrorism are dismissed by the EPRDF government, a regime with a notoriously dismal human rights record – who suggest that such accounts are reports of military personnel simply carrying out their duty to safeguard the Ethiopian people by routing out terrorist gangs. A scripted rhetoric of righteousness drafted in Washington after 9/11, translated worldwide distorted and espoused by totalitarian governments East and West, North and South to legitimise methods of control and acts of aggression.

Given the media restrictions, we cannot vouchsafe the governments view, but “if the Ethiopian government doesn’t have anything to hide, why don’t they allow independent investigators and journalists into the region”, Leslie Lefkow, HRW deputy director of Africa, poses the question on the tip of our tongues that cannot be asked too often. There is, she says with understatement, “ a lot of concern about the human rights situation on the Ogaden”. GW are more blunt, claiming unequivocally that Ethiopia is committing genocide in the Somali region, as well as to the “Anuak, Oromo and Omo” ethnic groups (or tribes). And they call on the EPRDF regime to “cease all attacks on the Ogaden Somali” people and “immediately release all prisoners”, urging them to “adhere to it’s own constitution and allow its provinces the legal autonomy they are guaranteed.”

A Captains Story

In 2005, delivery of the Ethiopian government’s violent policy of suppression in the Ogaden shifted from the Military to the newly-formed paramilitary group, the Liyuu Police. Not a recognisable police force at all, as Faysal Mohamoud Abdi Wali a defected 38-year-old former Captain in the Intelligence unit of the Liyuu makes clear, but “an extension of the military”, which operates under a cloak of impunity, lacking all accountability. Faysal Mohammoud served in the Liyuu from its inception eight years ago, when it was called the ‘Liyuu Xayi’ until he defected in 2012. His testimony is of particular interest, especially given the media ban.

The former Liyuu officer from regiment nine “stationed in the Duhun districy”, was interviewd by Swedish journalists, Amnesty International and myself. He related how young men are forced to join the force and arrested should they refuse. Confirming findings by HRW that forced recruitment takes place amongst tribal groups, who are ordered Faysal says tribal elders are ordered “to bring at least 80 fighters for every single tribe. If any of these [recruited fighters] escaped from the Militia they seek and capture [them, the truant is] then forced to kill one of his relatives or kinship”.

He recounts mass killing, in “Hamaro, Sagag, and Dhuhun of Fiq provinces”, where he says “large number of civilians accused of being ONLF sympathizers” where massacred. “These people are mostly killed by hanging from trees and girls are gang-raped and then murdered.” He goes on to say “the youth in Dhuhun, the young men and the young women in Hamaro, the young men slaughtered in Degeh-bur and teens summarily executed [in] Denan and Dakhato”. Extra judicial executions, intimidation and “forceful methods; strangling and rape of females aged 15 – 25,” are used as weapons of terror, “based on the advice we received from the regional president Abdi Mohamud Omar who said ‘indoctrinate the women with the male phallus and the men with guns’. Omar was largely responsible for the creation of the Liyuu, which evolved out of the Ethiopian army, and was embraced by the former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

The Captain states he was an “eye-witness for unaccountable massacres” by Liyuu Police who, after killing villagers “burned the entire village to the ground”. They forcefully remove them [villagers] from the land and slaughter their livestock. In remote villages, they sometimes massacre them all. For example, they forcefully removed many villagers from Gudhis, massacring 125 members from that village and burned the village, in 2007.”

Soldiers are rewarded he says, for killing civilians, for the “good job they have done”. Nomads who have the misfortune to see the Liyuu on operations, are killed, “in order to make sure that their information is not received by the ONLF rebels“. Summary executions, he reports are commonplace, as “in Dakhato in June 2010… {Where] 43 nomads were killed”. Faysal Mohammedd estimates the number of civilians murdered by the Liyuu since 2005 “to be in excess of 30, 000 people”.

Urgent Action Required

The Somali region, poor and desolate, is potentially the richest part of Ethiopia. Natural Gas and oil have been discovered to be lying under the harsh surface and various contracts for exploration have been granted to international companies, (without consultation with local, indigenous people, needless to say). The current round of violence is to many people linked to the discovery of these natural treasures: GW relay how, “immediately after oil and gas were discovered in the Ogaden, Ethiopian government forces evicted large numbers of Ogaden Somalis from their ancestral grazing lands”. According to Faysal Mohamoud the federal government “has strategic economic and land acquisition aim in the Ogaden region, intended to exploit the natural resources of the region.” These are strategic aims that they are seeking to realise through the silencing of the indigenous local people.

Whilst some numbers, dates and locations from these and other accounts may be debated, the weight of claims of human rights violations and state criminality, is, it would appear beyond dispute – to the extent that GW have, “called upon the United Nations Security Council to refer the situation in Ethiopia to the International Criminal Court”. This required measure together with a range of others (including; the immediate release of all so called political prisoners, the correct distribution of all humanitarian aid to the needy, journalists granted open and unrestricted access, and a thorough investigation by independent observers) would be the right and proper course of action in the region. Action that should be undertaken, at the insistence of Ethiopia’s main donors – America, Britain and the European Union and with all due urgency.

French war creates humanitarian crisis in Mali

(File photo)

Press TV

The French-led war in Mali has caused a serious humanitarian crisis and has displaced tens of thousands of people, many of whom reside in refugee camps in neighboring countries in deplorable conditions.

Malian refugees, who have fled to their western neighbor, Mauritania, have said they have no plans to return, Press TV reported.

They said they fear insecurity and reprisals due to the ongoing French-led war on the country. Some 74,000 Malians have taken refuge in Mbera camp in Mauritania alone.

The people of northern Mali say the French war and the ruling junta are blocking the flow of humanitarian assistance to the war-affected areas.

The northern Malians say the blockade of the area by French and Malian troops has undermined the activities of healthcare workers in several refugee camps. Most of the camps have dire shortages of necessities such as food and medicine.

A UN humanitarian official said on February 27 that Mali remains in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

About “200,000 children are not getting any education and haven’t for the last year,” said John Ging, director of operations for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Approximately 170,000 Malians fled to neighboring countries since April last year. There are some 53,000 people in Niger and 74,000 in Mauritania, and another 260,000 are internally displaced in Mali.

France launched a war in Mali on January 11 under the pretext of halting the advance of rebel fighters in the country.

On February 1, Amnesty International said “serious human rights breaches” — including the killing of children – were occurring in the French war in Mali…

The pain of the Ogaden Somali people

Hiding From the Truth

by GRAHAM PEEBLES, source

“Every night, they took all of us girls to [interrogations]. They would separate us and beat us. The second time they took me, they raped me… All three of the men raped me, consecutively”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) report in Collective Punishment

Along with 15 other female students, this innocent 17 year-old Ogaden Somali girl, was held captive for three months in a “dark hole in the ground” and raped 13 times. This is just one of countless accounts of abuse, from within the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, where it is widely reported criminal acts like these are perpetrated by the Ethiopian military and paramilitary forces on a daily basis. Untold atrocities like this; past and present are awaiting investigation, amid what is a much-ignored, little known conflict in the Horn of Africa.

In an attempt to hide the facts from the rest of the world, in 2007 the Ethiopian government banned all international media, and expelled many humanitarian aid groups from the area. It is reputed that any Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) allowed to stay do so on the condition that they sign a waiver document, agreeing not to report human rights violations by the government. Ethiopia, Leslie Lefkow of HRW states, “is one of the most difficult places to work for human rights groups or humanitarian agencies on the African continent”, and the Ogaden (a barren land, littered with military remnants from past conflicts), “is one of the most difficult places to work in Ethiopia.” There are “huge challenges to doing investigations on the ground because the security apparatus of the government is extremely extensive and permeates even the lowest levels, the grass roots, the village levels”, where regime spies and informers operate, reporting anything and anyone suspicious.

Information about life within the region comes from whispering sources on the ground, and from those who have fled the violence, and are now living outside Ethiopia. Many are in refugee camps in Kenya and Yemen, from where they recount stories of horrific abuse. Mohammed, from the Dhadhaab (or Dadaab) camp in Kenya, described to Ogaden Online (OO) 1/12/2012 how he was captured by the Ethiopian military, accused of being a supporter of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and mercilessly tortured. “They hogtied me”, he said, “and then flogged me while pinned down.” Mohamed’s face “was disfigured to the point where he can’t be recognized”. Refugees support Amnesty International’s (AI) findings of “torture and extrajudicial executions of detainees in the region” – women tell of multiple gang rapes, their arms, feet and necks tied with wire, for which they bear the scars, men speak of barbaric torture techniques at the hands of the Ethiopian military and paramilitary – the notorious, semi legal, completely barbaric Liyu Police, who, Laetitia Bader of HRW says, “fit into this context of impunity where security forces can do more or less what they want”.

The ONLF is cast as the enemy of the state, and regarded, as all dissenting troublesome groups are, as terrorists. They in fact won 60% of seats and were democratically elected to the regional parliament in the only inclusive open elections to be held, back in 1992. Civilians suspected, however vaguely of supporting the so-called ‘rebels’, are forcibly re-located from their homes. The evacuated villages and settlements, emptied at gunpoint HRW (CP) record, “become no-go areas” and in a further act of state criminality, “civilians who remain behind risk being shot on sight, tortured, or raped if spotted by soldiers”. Children, refugees report are hanged, villages and settlements razed to the ground and cattle stolen to feed soldiers: HRW record (CP), “water sources and wells have [also] been destroyed”. Systematic, strategic methods of violence and intimidation employed by the Ethiopian regime, that has, Genocide Watch (GW) state, “initiated a genocidal campaign against the Ogaden Somali population”.

Pervasive pernicious control

Spearheading the Governments campaign of terror in the region is the Liyu Police. A force of 10,000-14,000 18-20 year olds, with little or no knowledge of criminal law or human Rights, David Mepham UK Director of HRW told The Guardian 15/01/2013, that “for years we have documented egregious human rights abuses committed by the Liyu police, including the March 2012 extra-judicial execution of 10 men in their custody and the killing of nine other villagers”. Established initially in 2005, to replace a discredited military, the Liyu initiative was the brainchild of a group led by the current regional President, Abdi Mohamoud Omar and was eagerly embraced by the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. His Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime was and remains, at war with the ONLF, who are seeking self-determination for the five million ethnic Somali’s, in line with their constitutional rights under the governments Ethnic Federalism policy.

The EPRDF is a highly controlling repressive regime, which has extended its pervasive reach in the nine districts of the Ogaden, to where, HRW (CP) records, “security committees, which exist at every administrative level [and]… include members of the armed forces, military intelligence, security officials.” The local Ogaden administration “does nothing but carry out Ethiopian dictates and represents the interests of the present, centralised regime,” the Ogaden Women’s Relief Association (OWRA) record in their study, A Place to Call Home. Dictates’ of government brutality and intimidation regimentally carried out by the Ethiopian military apparatus, fully equipped by their principle donor, America, who GW recommend, should “immediately cease all military assistance”.

Terrifying tools of oppression and imprisonment

The current regime operates under the premiership of Hailemariam Desalegn, who, true to his inaugural word, is following in predecessor Meles Zenawi’s shoes – has expanded the EPRDF’s repertoire of violence and control and, in addition to the range of violent measures employed, is imposing additional economic pressures, intimidation and extortion the name of the game. It is widely reported that In the midst of the current dry (or Jilaal) season, new taxes are being levied on water drawn from wells for livestock and domestic use. Sums of up to $150 are reportedly being charged to people living in rural areas, already burdened by an economic and aid embargo, which is causing civilians great hardship.

Additional tax demands are also being made – OO (8/03/2013) carry the story that, “reliable reports…. confirm the imposition of what the locals term an illegal ‘head tax’, imposed on the civilian population as well as on their livestock”. A local elder, whose “family consists of eight children and he and his wife” received an arbitrary charge of “150 Ethiopian Birrs ($8) per individual regardless of age or gender”, a total of 1200 birr ($56) – far beyond his means.

Kidnapping, with subsequent ransom demands, is another applied tool of terror. Family members, abducted and imprisoned, are released upon receipt of ransom payments, made either by relatives inside Ethiopia or those living overseas. Levels of extortion vary, with those in the west paying anything from “$300 to $1,500”; the McGill Report found “in some cases those amounts were contributions to total collected ransoms of more than $10,000”. This criminal practice is widespread: civilians are arrested and imprisoned, without regard to due process, often repeatedly as Ifraah, a 25 year-old Ogaden Somali woman, told the OWRA: “To be released, you have to pay the Ethiopian military from 1,000 ($56) to 2,000 birr ($112). And the price keeps going up. If they suspect that the family has money, they raise the price. Poor people often stay in prison much longer because they can’t raise the ransom. It happened to me twice. The first time I wasn’t yet married. I spent a couple of months in prison and had to pay 500 birr ($28); the second time, I had to pay 1,000.” It’s a business in human suffering, “arrests also benefit the military; it’s a flourishing trade. Innocent people are captured and have to come up with a lot of money to free themselves.” This illegal income, it is widely believed, is being used to supplement the paramilitary soldiers salaries’. “There are women thrown into prison five times, and each time they have to pay to get out. But economic factors are not the only ones. There’s also torture and rape”.

Civilians like Ifraah indiscriminately accused of supporting the ONLF are detained without charge. Leslie Lefkow of HRW makes clear that, “the way the EPRDF targets people, is an enormous problem from a human rights point of view”. HRW have been monitoring the situation in the region for the past five years, and have seen and documented a range of Human Rights abuses, including “arbitrary detaining [of] family members, often for long periods of time, sexual violence against women and girls, sometimes if they are viewed as being members of the ONLF or supporters or simply because they are family members [of ONLF supporters]. There is a kind of ‘guilt by association’ that is used to target the family members”, punishable by “summary executions… where suspected ONLF supporters have been executed in cold blood.”

Incarcerated in what are often makeshift prisons (e.g. deserted school buildings), prisoners held in appalling conditions, are tortured, abused and intimidated. Ina and Halima, two young women from the town of Saga, were, OO 21/01/2011 report, “suspended in the air by their ankles with their legs spread wide, while the soldiers poured water mixed with red chilli powder over them [and] applied [it] in and around the victims’ genitalia, causing severe burns.” In ‘prison’ there are no medical facilities and, Ifraah says, no food: “You get your food from relatives. If you don’t have anyone nearby, your relatives send money to people who live there so they can buy you food”; or inmates share what little they have. Abdullahi, held amongst, others without trial for nine months, related to OWRA how their captors “locked us in an underground room” Young girls are regarded as Liyu property, kidnapped, held captive and repeatedly raped, often falling pregnant in the process. “Little girls”, record OWRA, “13 to 15-year-olds, in prison and suddenly pregnant….at night you hear the girls screaming when soldiers take them from their cells” – their dignity and childhood stolen from them.

Government genocide

The government’s so-called counter-insurgency policy in the Ogaden is, in truth, a form of genocide and is regarded as such by GW. Is it ethnic hatred, fear and loathing of the ‘other’, or simply greed for the regions natural resources – the oil and natural gas that drives the government’s violent, multi-pronged approach? An approach that HRW (CP) makes clear, aims “at cutting off economic resources, weakening the ONLF’s civilian support base, and confining its geographic area of operation”. In pursuing these duplicitous goals, the Ethiopian regime seems to exist on an island of impunity, hidden from the international community; as The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) state, “there is a shocking lack of international attention directed at the situation” and, despite the “substantial documentation of the violations committed…published by human rights NGOs, governments and media outlets”, nothing is being done.

Let us be clear and state, unequivocally the findings of Human Rights groups: that the Ethiopian military and paramilitary is committing wide-ranging Human Rights violations in the Ogaden, which constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. “The situation” should, as GW demand, be “referred by the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court (ICC)”.

Such Human Rights violations are not confined to the Ogaden region. GW consider “Ethiopia to have already reached Stage 7 (of 8), genocide massacres, against many of its peoples, including the Anuak, Ogadeni, Oromo, and Omo tribes”. The EPRDF, unsurprisingly, plead innocent to all such accusations of abuse and state criminality and dismiss allegations of human rights abuse substantiated by reports from international human rights group such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The Ogaden regional president claims, they “peddle lies and propaganda from our enemies”. However, if the Ethiopian government has nothing to hide, why don’t they allow independent investigators and journalists access to the Ogaden region?

The shocking accounts of violence and abuse are endless. The situation is clearly extremely critical and demands the immediate attention of Ethiopia’s main benefactors – America and sister donor nations, the European Union and Britain. To continue to ignore the evidence of state criminality and to blindly support the Ethiopian government in the face of such persecution, is to be complicit in the murder and violent abuse of the innocent people of the Ogaden region.

France will soon repent for backing al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria

(Syria- File photo)

by Yusuf Fernandez, source

In late February, some international agencies reported that hundreds of foreign rebels were fleeing from the Idleb Province in Northwestern Syria through Turkey under the claim that they were planning to join al-Qaeda militants in Mali in order to fight against French troops deployed there.

The reason of this withdrawal is not clear. Some observers said that the real reason behind it was the Syrian army´s offensive against terrorist groups in the province and the disappointment of some militants who have seen that their fight is not popular in Syria, as their recruiters had made them believe before going to Syria.

The irony is that France, which invaded Mali some weeks ago to theorically fight against radical groups in that country, will have to end up fighting against the same groups that the French government has been openly funding. These militants have used French money and training in Syria in order to gain combat experience and they will implement this newly-acquired knowledge against French troops in Mali.

According to observers, France has become the most prominent Western backer of Syria´s armed opposition and is now directly funding terrorist groups around Aleppo and other parts of the Arab country as part of a new attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. Large sums of money have been delivered by French government proxies across the Turkish border to rebel commanders, diplomatic sources have confirmed. The money has been used to buy weapons inside Syria and to fund armed operations against government forces.

On March 14, French FM Laurent Fabius announced that France and the UK would ignore a EU ban on sending weapons to Syria in order to supply terrorist groups fighting there with more arms. The goal remains the same: to overthrow Bashar al Assad´s government. The French newspaper Le Figaro also reported in those days that French military advisers had recently met with rebel groups inside Syria, in an area between Lebanon and Damascus. It is worth pointing out that sending military personnel to a country without the permission of its government amounts to a military invasion.

Despite all this support, the political goal of France in Syria seems to be as far as ever. “Things are not moving. The solution that we had hoped for, and by that I mean the fall of Bashar and the arrival of the (opposition) coalition to power, has not happened”, acknowledged Fabius on January 24. In December 2012, he had claimed that the “end is nearing” for the Syrian president. A senior Lebanese official who visited the France towards the end of last year told the daily Al Safir that “France was surprised by the fact that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, his regime and his army could resist”.

For its part, the Syrian government has condemned this French interference in its internal affairs. “France is acting like a hostile nation”, said National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar to AFP. “It is as if it wants to go back to the time of the occupation,” he added, referring to the French rule in Syria after World War I. Damascus has made it clear that France´s current policies will weaken or even eliminate its political, economic and cultural influence in Syria, maybe forever.

Moreover, France is now getting nervous about the possibility of reprisals from the al-Qaeda-linked groups, similar to those it is funding in Syria, for its intervention in Mali. On March 1, three suspected militants were arrested in southern France for allegedly planning an attack in the deays ahead, the Paris prosecutor said.

Change of foreign policy

The boomerang effect of supporting terrorism in Syria is just one of the disastrous consequences of the change of the French policy towards the Arab and Muslim world, which started when the pro-Israeli and pro-NATO Nicolas Sarkozy became President. Prior to that fact, France had gained a solid reputation due to its Gaullist foreign policy, one of whose pillars was the independence of the country with respect to the United States. In February 2003, French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was universally applauded when he opposed Colin Powell´s pathetic attempts to justify the then-forthcoming invasion of Iraq with blatant lies about the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The new French foreign policy, under influence of Zionist politicians such as Sarkozy himself, Bernard Kouchner or Laurent Fabius and Zionist activists as Bernard Henry-Levy, changed the equation. France began to promote pro-Israeli and neo-colonial policies in Africa and the Middle East, where France adopted an even more radical stance against Syria and Iran than any other Western country.

In Africa, Paris has increased its military presence in recent years. France´s intervention in Mali, with a contingent of 750 troops, has sought to bolster the Malian army against the al-Qaeda rebels, who have controlled the north of the country for about two years. However, the war in Mali is still beginning and, even worse, it is becoming another asymmetric and far-reaching war which could involve France for years, although Paris has repeatedly announced its willingness to evacuate its army from the African country as soon as possible.

Qatar, France´s ally, supported extremists in Mali

On the other hand, Qatar, which just happens to be a major ally of France in the Syrian question, has criticized Paris´s intervention in Mali arguing that the force would not solve the problem. French officials have openly accused Qatar of funding the Mali rebels.

The first accusations of Qatari involvement with Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked groups came in a June 2012 article in French weekly the Canard Enchainé. The publication quoted an unnamed source in French military intelligence saying: “The MNLA (secular Tuareg separatists), al-Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine and MUJAO [movement for unity and Jihad in West Africa] have all received cash from Doha.” “The French government knows perfectly well who is supporting these terrorists. Qatar, for example, continues to send so-called aid and food every day to the airports of Gao and Timbuktu.”
The speculation is that Qatar is keen to increase its influence in Mali in order to develop business ties with this nation, which is believed to have significant oil, gas and uranium resources. Moreover, its presence in Mali “greatly increase the Emirate´s influence in West Africa and the Sahel region”, regional geopolitical expert Mehdi Lazar, who specialises on Qatar, wrote in French weekly news magazine L’Express in December. Qatar would also be trying to destabilize Algeria, one of the Arab countries remaining free from its political influence.

France, for its part, is determined to help the pro-French military junta rule the entire nation and sees Qatari activities in Mali with dismay. The Canard Echainé wrote: “Earlier this year, several notes from the DGSE (the French Intelligence Service) alerted the Elysee Palace on international activities and, dare we say, the emirate of Qatar.”

On 22 January, French news site France24 published an article entitled “Is Qatar fuelling the crisis in north Mali?” which claimed that Doha had taken sides with the Mali insurgents. According to author Segolene Allemandou, Qatari rulers aim to spread extremism in Africa with the help of these rebels. The subtle message was clear: the emirate´s support for terrorism will damage its long-term image in Europe.

Destroying a pluralist Syria

In this context, everyone can understand that Saudi and Qatari support extremists who fight against a multifaith and multicultural Syria and against all the religious groups supporting interfaith cooperation and coexistence, such as mainstream Sunni Muslims, Shiites, Alawites and Christians. After all, in Saudi Arabia only the Wahabi current enjoys full religious freedom. The rest of the faiths are discriminated, persecuted or banned. But some people can find it difficult to understand why the West, including France, is allied with extremist Salafist groups persecuting Christians and destroying churches.

The anwer is that France and other Western governments are actually not interested in democracy or political and religious freedom but in pursuing their own political, strategic and economic interests at any cost. French aggressions in Africa have led to the death of thousands of innocent people and have ruined the lives of millions of others, not to mention its involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. With its current policies towards Syria, Paris only tries to reimpose their neo-colonial yoke on that country. However, after many decades of independence and of enjoying their sovereignty, Syrian people are not willing to become slaves of European goverments or of corrupt, backward, terrorist-friendly and despotic regimes as the Saudi or the Qatari.

By funding and delivering weapons to terrorist groups, the French government, alongside with its allies, is not only violating the international law but it is also destroying the possibility of a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict and leaving its resolution in the hands of the military. In this way, Syria´s friends should take good note of this fact and multiply their military aid to Syria in order to prevent their own interests from being damaged. The Syrian state is strong and its people is indomable, but there is no doubt that Syria will need all kind of support from free people in the world in order to resist this aggression.

“Israel” coerces Africans to sign “voluntary repatriation” forms

The Electronic Intifada

(IRIN) – Testimonies of jailed Eritrean migrants and asylum seekers say Israeli officials at Saharonim prison in the southern Negev desert are coercing them to sign “voluntary repatriation” forms.

In one of the many testimonies collected by a local organization, a 28-year-old Eritrean detainee reported being repeatedly visited by a translator telling her to accept deportation to a third country (Uganda).

“He said we would not be freed from the prison and we can only go to Uganda or Eritrea. I was frustrated and depressed. I do not want to go to Uganda. Today they called me and gave me a handwritten form in Tigrinya which said: `I came from Eritrea to Israel illegally and now I want to go to Uganda voluntarily. To do this I would like the Eritrean embassy to issue me a passport and all the necessary documents.’ They asked me to sign it and wanted to take my picture on video. I refused.”

Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention but does not recognize Eritreans as refugees, although it does not officially deport Eritreans and allows them to stay in Israel under a group defense (temporary group protection).

“Nothing voluntary about it”

Staff at the Hotline for Migrant Workers, who collected the testimonies, say the government is forcibly trying to repatriate Eritreans: “These people have no access to a refugee status determination process, they are detained under the new amendment to the infiltration law that came into effect in June 2012, which allows detention of `infiltrators’ for an unlimited amount of time; now they are told they will never be allowed to leave the prison and their only option is to go back to Uganda/Eritrea. How can this be considered voluntary?” one staff member said.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) representative in Israel, William Tall, said the Ministry of Interior made an attempt to offer relocation to some 23 Eritreans to Uganda but without any result so far.

At the end of February he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz there was nothing voluntary about this process (“UN refugee official slams Israel over Eritrean repatriation,” 25 February 2013).

One Eritrean, Tesfamihret Habtemariam, was reportedly deported from Israel earlier this month and is now in detention at Cairo airport after five years in Israel, and may be returned to Eritrea.

UNHCR advises against repatriating Eritrean nationals because of the likelihood of their being punished on return to their country.

Under an updated “anti-infiltration” law passed in January 2012, all people who cross borders without travel documents recognized by Israel are labeled “infiltrators” and can be detained for up to three years.

The Eritreans being held in detention camps in the south are generally not notified about their right to claim asylum or given the application forms needed to do this, report human rights groups.

Threats

On 18 February, official documents from the Israeli assembly, the Knesset, quote Interior Minister Eli Yishai saying deportations (by definition forced) were not yet taking place.

He said more than 1,000 nationals of northern Sudan and Eritrea had already left voluntarily and said he hoped a lot more would decide to leave.

“And if it won’t be voluntary leave, it will be involuntary — to their country or to a different third country, and there is still no third country to sign an agreement with, but I hope we do find other third countries that we’ll have an agreement with, and we can transfer the infiltrators from here, from the Land of Israel, to their country or to another country, whether it is done willingly or not.”

Last week the Israel’s Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein sent a letter to the director of the Interior Ministry’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority, Amnon Ben Ami, saying that under no circumstances should Eritrean nationals in Israeli custody be sent “to any destination outside Israel’s borders” until he (Weinstein) further clarifies these legal issues.

Corporate greed in Africa: The green green gold of Ethiopia

(File photo-Ethiopia)

by GRAHAM PEEBLES, source 

Ancestral land that for generations has served as home and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in Ethiopia is being leased out, on 99-year renewable contracts at nominal sums to foreign corporations. The land giveaway or agrarian reforms as the government would prefer to present them began in 2008 when the Ethiopian government, under the brutal suppressive Premiership of Meles Zenawi invited foreign countries/corporation to take up highly attractive deals and turn large areas of land over to industrial farming for the export of crops. India, China and Saudi Arabia were all courted and along with wealthy Ethiopians have eagerly grabbed large pieces of land at basement prices; rates vary from $1.10 to $6.05 per hectare (HA), comparable land in India would set you back $600 per ha.

A total of 3,619,509 ha, the Oakland Institute (OI), a US based think tank, estimate has been leased out. Land made available by the forced re-location of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people under the government’s universally condemned Villagization progamme, which aims to forcibly re-locate over 1.5 million people from their homes.

India corporations have taken the lion’s share, acquiring around 600,000 ha concentrated in Gambella and Afar, split between 10 investing companies. The term ‘investing’ implies benefits for Ethiopia, which is misleading; ‘profiteering’, or ‘exploiting’ sits closer to the truth of these land deals, as the OI make clear, “taking over land and natural resources from rural Ethiopians, is resulting in a massive destruction of livelihoods and making millions of locals [farmers and pastoralist communities] dependent on food handouts”. With small scale farmers being evicted from their land, prices of staples such as Teff, used by millions throughout Ethiopia to make Injera (bread), has rocketed in price, according to Ethiotribune 22/5/2012, increasing fourfold since 2008.

Corporate expansionism: small change big profits

In line with its ambitions of diversity and world food dominance – Karuturi Global, the world’s largest grower of roses, leads the Indian charge, leasing 311,700 ha in Gambella. Not satisfied with this, GRAIN (an international NGO, working to support small farmers) report Mr.Karuturi “wants to set up farming operations [throughout Eastern and Southern Africa] on more than 1 million [ha]” – too much never enough in corporate expansionism.

Almost a quarter of Gambella’s 25 million ha has been earmarked by the federal government for agricultural ‘development’. Karuturi, whose profits “rose 55.13% to Rs 1.21 crore [10 million] in the quarter ended June 2012”, took their chunk without even seeing it, paying only $1.10 per ha. For the Indian giant it is, John Vidal in ‘Land Grab Ethiopia (LGE)’ says, “the sale of the century”. ‘Green Gold’ is how Mr. Karuturi in GRAIN (‘Who’s Behind the Land Deals’), describes his 300,000 ha of Ethiopian soil, “for which he pays $46 per ha per year including water and labour and expects at least $660 [per ha] in profit per year”. (Ibid)

In addition to paddy, Indian farmers are being sub-contracted to grow maize, cereals, palm oil and sugarcane amongst others. All of which are destined for export, either to India or Europe, where companies farming in Ethiopia (and other Sub-Saharan African nations), benefit from lower import duties applied to developing countries, notwithstanding the fact that the land is leased to, and the crops produced and sold by, multi million-rupee rich companies.

Another major Indian company leasing land in Gambella is the decidedly green sounding BHO Bioproducts. Following the corporate rhetoric, BHO Chief Operating Officer Sunny Maker told Bloomberg in 2010 that, they have “plans to invest more than $120 million in rice and cotton production”, which, by 2017, should “generate about $135 million a year from sales divided equally between domestic [Indian] and international markets.” He added that the “incredibly rich fertile land”, will all be “cleared within the next three years”. Cleared yes, violently, indiscriminately and totally; villages, people, forests, woodland, all destroyed, burnt, relocated, displaced, desecrated. The governments promise to such prized investors is that the land is handed over stripped of everything and everyone. Dissent is not allowed and dealt with brutally should it occur, as Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of OI makes clear. “The repression of social resistance to land investments is even stipulated in land lease contracts, [it is the] state’s obligation to ‘deliver and hand over the vacant possession of leased land free of impediments’ and to provide free security ‘against any riot, disturbance or any turbulent time.”

The ‘rich fertile land’, lovingly cultivated at the hands of the men and women who have farmed it for generations, is unlikely to be nurtured so carefully by Indian (or indeed Chinese or Saudi Arabian) corporations with their thirsty ‘GM seeds’ (Ibid). For as Oxfam in their detailed report ‘Land and Power’ diplomatically point out, “investors short time scales may tempt them into unsustainable cultivation, undermining agricultural production.”

The devolution of development

Land is a prime cut asset in the commercialisation of everything, everywhere, and the “rich fertile land” in Ethiopia is cheap, even by Sub-Saharan African standards. Along with long-term leases, the government offers a neat bundle of carrots, including tax incentives and unrestricted export clauses, incentives that the OI state “deny African countries economic benefits” from land deals that the Ethiopian regime wraps up neatly in its complete disregard for the human rights of the indigenous people. Government indifference encouraging corporate irresponsibility – and they need little encouragement. Businesses hardly seem to be grabbing the land, so much as accepting it as a gift, parceled up and ready to be torn open.

In exchange for such attractive deals, the Ethiopian government has been extended, the OI reports “a $640 million line of credit… over five years to boost sugar production in the country’s Lower Omo region”. Not a philanthropic gesture, more a sales trap by India’s EXIM (export and import) Bank, who stipulate, “Ethiopia must import 75% of the value of the credit line in the form of Indian goods and services.”

The government-owned sugar plantations in the Lower Omo are themselves attracting a great deal of concern and criticism from human rights groups, who highlight the environmental and human damage being perpetrated. Government acts of violence and abuse, in the various land deal regions, are justified under the overused and misleading title of ‘development’; a term appropriated by the international monetary machine – the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) primarily – misunderstood and distorted by government development agencies, acting in line with foreign affairs policies by promoting national self interest and perverted by the corrupt ideologically-blinkered governments of developing nations.

An undeveloped ideological trinity whose actions have drained the 21^stcentury sacred cow and its stable mate ‘growth’ – dry of any true and relevant meaning. Far from supporting human and or social development the “unfair terms and near give-away prices [of land deals]… are hindering development…. Foreign corporations and the World Bank are pressuring African leaders to give them exemptions from taxes, import and export duties, and local labor laws – not to mention water and mineral rights that could be worth billions”, the OI confirm.

More concerned with sitting at the top table and cultivating the right international allies than with doing their constitutional duty and serving the needs of the people, the Ethiopian government is in danger of giving away, and for peanuts, it’s ‘rich and fertile’ land to overseas companies who have no interest in Ethiopia, it’s environment, its culture and even less in its people.

Increasing hunger

Hunger and poverty stalk the land of both Ethiopia and India. 12 – 15 million people survive on food aid in Ethiopia, which ranks bottom of the World Hunger Index at 76. India, with the highest rate of malnourished children in the world, where 25% (around 270 million) of the world’s hungry live, despite the fact that, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), “the country grows enough food for its people”, it comes in 65^th of the hungriest nations, below Niger and the Sudan – neither of which, to my knowledge, boast 61 billionaires and 200,000 dollar millionaires unlike India. And whereas “most countries have made consistent progress in reducing hunger, India has seen hunger rise over the last decade compared with the late 1990s.”(Ibid) This so-called economic miracle nation refuses to feed it’s own people.

Food insecurity, the WFP makes clear is caused not by lack of produce, but by an unwillingness to share the Earths bounty equitably. The states in India with the greatest numbers suffering from hunger and malnutrition, WFP records “include Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh”; these are the states where the poorest (Adivasi – indigenous and Dalit) people in the country and quite possibly in the World happen to live. The poor are dying of hunger not because India cannot feeed everyone, as the United Nations report on regional cooperation makes crystal clear, “the root cause of hunger across the sub-region and the world today is not a lack of food. It is the economic and social distribution of that food which leaves populations undernourished and hungry.”

Men women and children living in dire poverty starve to death, in India, Ethiopia and throughout the world. They starve and die for want of the food that is rotting in warehouses, food served up to rats or destroyed by the Indian government, because it is cheaper to burn it than to distribute it to those in need. As Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (26/01/13) said, “globally, a third of all food produced is wasted, and… if one could avoid this waste it would be possible to feed all the hungry people [in the world] and have food to spare.” Food to spare!Such is the inhumane ethos that underpins market fundamentalism, that allows men women and children, young and old to starve – simply because the do not have the financial means to feed themselves. Shame on governments Indian and the rest, that allow such inhumane injustice to prevail, as a wise teacher said, “throughout the world there are men, women and little children who have not even the essentials to stay alive; they crowd the cities of many of the poorest countries in the world… My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men”.

The commercialization of the countryside in India and Ethiopia, which is displacing large numbers of small-scale farmers and concentrating crop production in the hands of multi-nationals, is intensifying existing levels of hunger. Substantive agricultural reform and real development would see the army of skilled small scale producers, with generations of local knowledge and love of the land, supported with the needed capital and technology, given access to markets that corporations bring. Such an agrarian revolution, ethically founded, environmentally healthy and socially sustained, would build long-term food security and feed the hungry.

Soft targets easy profits

India as the WFP makes clear, has no domestic need for food produced by the overseas industrial farms that are causing such far-reaching damage, to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people of Ethiopia as well as the natural environment. The movement in Ethiopia mirrors what is taking place to a much greater degree in India. The government has shifted all support away from Indian farmers and is supporting the transfer of land from the rural poor to large companies – wealthy government benefactors, causing the displacement of millions (60 million to date, according to Arundhati Roy) of indigenous people.

Corporations are targeting countries Oxfam 7/02/2013 makes clear, with “poor governance”, that “allow investors to secure land quickly and cheaply…. [They] “Seem to be cherry picking countries with weak rules and regulations”. Needy nations like hungry people make easy targets for multi-national man, whose pockets governments are desperate to nestle inside. The driving force behind such destructive land developments, undertaken by corporations obsessed by an insatiable desire for growth and world leading economic development, is, as Oxfam suggests, profit and profit alone.

Displacement, intimidation and abuse: Land loyalties in Ethiopia

(Ethiopia)

by GRAHAM PEEBLES, source

With the coming of industrial-size farms in Ethiopia, local people, villagers and pastoralists (deemed irrelevant to the Government’s, economically-driven development plans) are being threatened, and intimidated by the military; forcibly displaced and herded into camps, their homes destroyed. Along with vast agricultural complexes, dams are planned and constructed, water supplies re-directed to irrigate crops, forests burnt, natural habitats destroyed. Dissenting voices are brutally silenced – men beaten, children frightened, women raped, so too the land.

Over 80% of the 85 million population of Ethiopia live in rural areas, in settlements and villages, and work in agriculture. Many are small-scale farmers who, according to government figures, farm “eight percent (about 10,000,000 ha) of the national land area”, and traditional pastoralists who have, for generations, lived simple lives, culture, nature and livelihood entwined.

Huge tracts of agricultural land with water supplies are being leased to foreign companies for food export. The Oakland Institute (OI), a US- based policy think-tank and leader in the field, have produced in-depth reports on worldwide land sales stating that, between 2008 and 2011, “3,619,509 hectares (ha) were transferred to domestic investors, state-owned enterprises and foreign companies”. Amounting to a third, if government figures are correct, of the land farmed by Ethiopians themselves, an area the size of a small country, e.g. Holland.

Government Genocide

Land grab (and associated water appropriation), Oxfam states, occurs when “governments, banks or private investors buy up huge plots of land to make equally huge profits”. Since 2008 such speculation has vastly expanded; in 2009 alone the OI recorded that “foreign investors acquired 60 million ha of land [worldwide] – the size of France – through purchases or leases of land for commercial farming,” up from an annual average, pre-2008, of 4 million ha. Three quarters of all land deals take place in sub-Saharan Africa, in some of the most food-insecure, economically vulnerable, politically repressive countries in the world; precisely, some say, because of such advantageous commercial factors.

In Ethiopia, land sales are occurring in six key areas. Oromia and Gambella in the south, Amhara, Beneshangul, Gumuz, the Sidaama zone, or SNNP and the Lower Omo Valley – an area of outstanding natural beauty with acclaimed UNESCO World heritage status. The Ethiopian government’s conduct in Omo and Oromia, Genocide Watch (GW) considers “to have already reached stage 7 [of 8], genocidal massacres”. A statement that shocks us all, and casts shame upon the government and indeed slumbering donor nations, who act not, who speak not, but know well the cruel methods, which violate a plethora of human rights laws, employed by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). A regime whose loyalties, it seems, rest firmly with investors, corporations, multi-nationals and the like, and who cares little for the people living upon the land, or indeed in the cities.

Forced from Home

Conditional within land lease agreements is the requirement that the government will clear the area of ‘encumbrances’, meaning indigenous people – families, children, pastoralists, cattle, wildlife, forests, anything in fact that will interfere with the leveling of the land, building of [foreign] workers’ accommodation, roads and the eventual sowing of crops.

The national three-year Villagisation program, initiated in 1985, aims to move 1.5 million people from their ancestral homes, over four states, into large settlements. The process is well under way, as these 2010 figures from Cultural Survival show, “by February 1987, 5.7 million people (15 percent of the rural population) had been moved into 11,000 new villages. By the end of this year, 10 million rural inhabitants (25 percent of the population) are expected to be villagized in 12 of Ethiopia’s 13 provinces.” Government propaganda justifying the policy states these new village centers will, “facilitate the provision of human social services by concentrating scattered homesteaders into central communities”, and facilitate ‘agrarian socialism’ – hence the leasing of mega chunks of land to multi-national corporations, without the participation of local people, whose land is being taken from them: a totalitarian version of socialism then.

Contrary to federal and international law, which requires the free, informed and prior consent of the people, this mass movement is being carried out without consultation or compensation, no matter the official claims to the contrary. Human Rights Watch (HRW) (28/08/12) reports how “Villagers who have been unwilling to move, or who refuse to mobilise others to do so, have been arrested and mistreated by the soldiers.” Once forcibly emptied, villages are destroyed and cattle killed or confiscated, the OI state, by government troops. Along with pastoralists, who number around 300,000 in Gambella alone, villagers are herded, sometimes literally, always metaphorically at the end of rifle, into Villagisation camps. And these, despite Government promises to, “provide basic resources and infrastructure, the new villages”, HRW found “have inadequate food, agricultural support, and health and education facilities”.

Resistance to moving is met with abuse and violence. HRW’s detailed report “Waiting for Death”, found that in Gambella, where the government plans to ‘relocate’ 225,000 people, “soldiers frequently beat or arrested individuals who questioned the motives of the program or refuse to move to the new villages [Villagisations]. Community leaders and young men are targeted [scores are arrested without due process]. There have also been credible allegations of rape and sexual assault by government soldiers. Fear and intimidation was widespread.” In a disturbing account of life within and without the Villagisation centers, the OI discovered, most disturbingly, that pastoralists (whose lifestyle and nature is to wander) if “encountered [by the military] outside of villages are told to relocate to the villages immediately”. Such restrictions conjure images of prison life rather than a peaceful, communal village, and contradict the government’s message of willing relocation, good community relations, participation and social harmony.

A Culture of Fear

Such abuse is not limited to Gambella – in the Lower Omo region, where huge, state-owned sugar plantations and the massive Gibe III Dam project are being developed, dissenting voices are, the OI report, subjected to “beatings, abuse and general intimidation”, in addition to extra-judicial prison sentencing.

“Fear and intimidation” is endemic, not just in areas associated with land sales, but throughout the country; suppression is common and freedom of expression greatly restricted. The media – TV, radio, press as well as print companies, are state-owned, so too the sole telecommunication company, restricting access to the internet, which is monitored. The judiciary is simply an extension of government, lacking credible independence, the political opposition marginalised and completely ineffective. International media are frowned upon and, in some areas (e.g. Ogaden) completely banned, such are the paranoid actions of the ruling EPRDF, which, it would seem, has much to hide.

Resentment and anger simmers amongst many displaced oppressed villagers. In April 2012 a group of men attacked the Saudi Star compound in Gambella and killed four employees. The men were quickly labeled ‘rebels’ and a military manhunt was instigated. The criminal act should be treated as such and the men brought to justice, however government forces have reacted with unwarranted unjustifiable violence and aggression to innocent civilians, as HRW (28/08/12) reported: “Ethiopian soldiers went house to house… arbitrarily arresting and beating young men and raping female relatives of suspects”. Any excuse, it seems, to unleash state violence, perpetrated by a regime that mistrusts even it’s own people. After the attack on Saudi Star, a company that has leased some 10,000 ha of prime Gambella land, the Ethiopian military accused four Anuak guards on duty at the time, of involvement in the attack and carried out extra- judicial killings (murder) on them all. Local villagers “alleged they were tortured”, and “women and girls raped either in their homes or in detention” (ibid). Illegal acts by the Ethiopian State that by any reasonable reading fits the definition of terrorism stated by the US military as, “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” Terrifying tactics employed by the military in the search for information about ‘the rebels’ – a meaningless term evoking negative stereotypes, used alongside the ‘T’ word (terrorist) to demonise anyone who disagrees with disagreeable government policies and justify all violent measures by the benevolent regime – such is the perverse and dangerous use of language, facilitated by the international mainstream media that has infiltrated our imaginations.

The Myth of Development

The government proclaims land sales are part of a strategic, long-term approach to agriculture reforms and economic development, that foreign investment will fund infrastructure projects, create employment opportunities, help to eradicate hunger and poverty and benefit the community, local and national. The term development is itself an interesting one; distorted, linked and commonly limited almost exclusively to economic targets, meaning growth of GDP, established principally by the World Bank, whose policies and practices in relation to land sales, the OI discovered, “have glossed over critical issues such as human rights, food security and human dignity for local populations”, and its philanthropic sister, the International Monetary Fund; market fundamentalism driving the exported (one size fits all) policies, of both ideologically entrenched organisations, that promote models of development that seek to fulfill corporate interests first middle and last.

Defined in such limited ways, Ethiopia, having somehow achieved impressive GDP growth figures since 2004, (with a dizzy 9.8%, average, similar to that of India) would seem to be in the premiership of development. Inflation, though, sits at 30% and, whilst unemployment in urban areas has dropped to around 20%, over a quarter of young people aged 18-24 remain out of work; high unemployment in urban areas means young women are often forced into commercial sex work or domestic servitude.

Statistics compiled by The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), provide a broader, less GDP-rosy picture of the country. They place Ethiopia 174th (from 187 nations) on the Human development index (HDI), with average life expectancy of 59 years and 40% of people living in poverty (on less than $1.25 a day). The 2012 Global Hunger Index makes Ethiopia the 5th hungriest country in the world (IFPRI), with between 12 and 15 million people a year relying on food aid to keep them alive. What growth there is benefits the rich, privileged minority. There is a growing divide between the 99.9% and the small number of wealthy Ethiopians – who, coincidentally, are mainly members of the ruling party trickle down, gushing up’, concentrating wealth with the wealthy; as the Inter Press Service (IPS) 22/08/12 reports, “development has yet to reach the vast majority of the country’s population. Instead, much of this wealth – and political power – has been retained by the ruling party and, particularly, by the tiny Tigrayan minority community to which [former Prime Minister] Meles belonged.”

“Protect, Respect and Remedy”

Protagonists laying claim to the all-inclusive healing powers of agriculture and agro-industrial projects, contradict, the OI states, “the basic facts and evidence showing growing impoverishment experienced on the ground”. What about the bumper benefits promised, particularly the numerous employment opportunities? It turns out industrialised farming is highly mechanised and offers few jobs; overseas companies are not concerned with providing employment for local people and care little for their well-being, making good bedmates for the ruling party. They bring the workers they need, and are allowed to do so by the Ethiopian government, which places no constraints on their operations.

Such shameful indifference contravenes the letter and spirit of the United Nations (UN) “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework. Endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council on 16th June 2011, the guiding principles outlined, “provide an authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity.” Corporations have a duty under the framework to “prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations… even if they have not contributed to their impacts”i Although not legally enforceable, these principles of decency offer recourse to human rights organisations and community groups, and should be morally binding for multinationals, whose profit-driven activities in Ethiopia, facilitated by a brutal regime that ignores fundamental human rights, are causing intense suffering to hundreds of thousands of indigenous people.

Same world, same war: Asian pivot, African target

by EVAN TAYLOR, source

Barack Obama loves basketball, and the media loves to analyze his maneuvering of U.S. Foreign Policy as if it were a basketball game. The first term was the “Asia Pivot,”—Barack backing down China in the lane, clearing out space for U.S. influence in Vietnam and Thailand and Myanmar. But the White House was actually another running a different play all along, or so the Washington Post now says, a shift to Africa. While Asia got the U.S. rhetoric down low, it was in Africa where the Pentagon was getting its hands bloody, participating in “a string of messy wars,” as the Post’s excellent Pentagon reporter Craig Whitlock put it. And while messy wars in Africa are sadly nothing new, the continent-spanning network of military installations that the U.S. has been building is.

Since 2007, the Pentagon has constructed the beginnings of a massive framework of military and spy bases, as many as twelve airfields stretching from the Indian to Atlantic Oceans. Camp Lemonnier, in tiny Djibouti on the mouth of the Red Sea, is the biggest node in the network, a 500-acre compound housing 3,200 troops, civilians, contractors, as well a large fleet of aircraft and drones. Moving across Africa, other installations used by the U.S. military as of June 2012 are located in the Seychelles archipelago in the Indian Ocean, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania. From these locations, the U.S. operates a fleet of spy aircraft and drones, participates in small-scale military operations, and leads training exercises with numerous African states.

The Pentagon bureaucracy in control of this network—the African Command, or AFRICOM—is itself a relative baby, announced by George W. Bush in February 2007 and officially formed in October 2008. But despite its youth, it is following the historical precedent set by other regional commands and immediately fighting a war in its new domain. For a comparison, the Pentagon created its Pacific Command in 1947 and within three years U.S. troops were fighting on the ground in Korea. Central Command was officially formed in 1983, and within seven years hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were invading Iraq. In 1999, when Central Command expanded its scope to include the formerly Soviet Central Asian Republics, it took only two years for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan. AFRICOM managed to keep the streak alive, providing the manpower, surveillance, and logistical backbone for the 2011 war in Libya. According to NATO’s own numbers, the U.S. led militaries flew over 26,000 sorties during the eight-month campaign, averaging 120 flights a day from February through October, and deployed 8,000 troops in support (as well as an unknown number of special forces and intelligence operatives and trainers on the ground). It was no Korean War, but a start nonetheless for AFRICOM.

Most recently, the Pentagon has also announced that it is planning to build a large drone base in Northwest Africa, most likely in the deserts of Niger. While the Pentagon explains that the new base is related to the conflict in Mali that erupted earlier this year, military officials openly admit that the base will also serve to give Africa Command a more “enduring presence” on the continent. As no government other than the tiny Djibouti will agree to openly host a permanent U.S. base, the Pentagon has been forced to run its new African operations from a headquarters in Germany. Although it is unlikely that a new drone base in the Niger desert will become a dystopian AFRICOM headquarters, the ever-increasing U.S. military footprint makes further efforts to increase control inevitable. As the great Richard Barnet wrote back in 1971, “In the game of international politics, practitioners must be fiercely partisan. The United States is the client, and the task of the manager is to increase her power and influence in the world, whatever the cost.”

Tellingly, a large expansion is being planned for Camp Lemonnier. What started as a 1,500 person Special Forces base in 2002, operated by the “Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa,” has doubled in size since then, and is growing still. In the eyes of the Pentagon, Lemonnier is “an essential regional power projection base,” as General Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM at the time, testified before the House Armed Services Committee in March 2012. Nick Turse, a researcher and editor for the website Tomdispatch, wrote in a July 2012 article that:

Military contracting documents reveal plans for an investment of up to $180 million or more in construction at Camp Lemonnier alone. Chief among the projects will be the laying of 54,500 square meters of taxiways “to support medium-load aircraft” and the construction of a 185,000 square meter Combat Aircraft Loading Area. In addition, plans are in the works to erect modular maintenance structures, hangers, and ammunition storage facilities, all needed for an expanding set of secret wars in Africa.

To truly understand the neo-colonial nature of Djibouti, a French colony until 1977, it has to be compared to its neighbors. The Republic of Djibouti covers just 9,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey. Its neighbor, Eritrea, equally as remote in popular imagination, is five times as large. Somalia and Yemen, the two nearby states being bombed from Camp Lemonnier, both cover over 200,000 square miles, and have coastlines nearly as long as the entire U.S. littoral along the Gulf of Mexico. Ethiopia is twice as big as these, one quarter the size of the contiguous U.S. In population terms, the differences are even starker. Ethiopia, with 86 million people, is the second most populated state in Africa. Djibouti, with fewer than one million people, is 49th. The only states on mainland Africa with less people are Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara. Such a low population means that roughly one out of every three hundred people in the country is an employee of the U.S. military, and not subject to local law.

While Mr. Whitlock and the Washington Post have been doing an excellent job over the past years in tracking the new additions to the U.S. empire of bases in Africa, they have missed the bigger story. The “Asia Pivot” and the “Africa Shift” are not separate but part of the same long-term strategy, an attempt to dominate Zbigniew Brzezinski’s great arc of crisis across the underbelly of Eurasia. The routes running from Asia to Africa and Europe—both over land and sea—must be examined as one great exercise in power projection, with the energy deposits in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea regions located smack-dab in the middle. From this perspective, one can see the orientations of todays, and tomorrows, world; flows of natural resources, manufactured goods, and people crossing the planets greatest potential marketplace. Empires throughout history have always understood this, from Alexander the Great’s Macedonian kingdom to the Mongol Empire, from the Ottomans to the British. Since the 1970′s, attempting to control this massive global corridor through war and military engagements has also been the principal aim of U.S. foreign policy. And while the Post may not understand this (or want to tell the public), the Pentagon certainly does. David Rodriguez, President Obama’s newest nominee to head AFRICOM, responded to Senate questioning on the “Asia Pivot” by highlighting that it increased the importance of U.S. military forces in Africa, stating:

The eastern portion of AFRICOM’s area of responsibility abuts the Indian Ocean, a centrally important component of the global commons, reflecting historic trade ties and encompassing sea lanes of communication that link Africa to the Middle East, Europe, and the rising powers of India and China in the Asia-Pacific region.

Imperialism is a global mindset. There is no single Asia policy, or Africa policy, or Middle East Policy. There is only a global attempt to control the resources and populations of the planet. The “Asia Pivot” and the newly termed “Africa Shift” are but its latest flailing’s.

In a telling sign of the full circle nature that this policy has reached, the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles has now felt a double dipping of U.S. imperialism. Between 1971 and 1973, when Washington and London colluded to establish a military base at Diego Garcia, another island in the Indian Ocean, they forcibly expelled the 1,500 Chagossians inhabitants of the island, as recounted by anthropologist David Vine in his book Island of Shame. The Chagossians were sent 1,200 miles across the ocean in cramped boats to the Seychelles, where they were dumped at the dock on Port Louis. Spread out over the archipelago, the Chagossians have been campaigning for reparations over Diego Garcia ever since.

Now, however, the U.S. military is back, and since 2009 a drone base has been operational on the Seychelles. In a state department cable from September 2009 released by Wikileaks, State Department Charge d’Affaires Virginia Blaser reported that 77 American personnel would be stationed on the islands, and that U.S. drones would conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights over the Horn of Africa. And while these drones were not to be armed at that point, it was noted that “should the desire ever arise, the USG would seek discrete, specific discussions with appropriate GOS officials.”

Besides the usual trouble that military bases bring along with them, there have been two drone crashes at the Seychelles, in December 2011 and April 2012. As such, the Chagossian population of the Seychelles has seen the full scope of modern imperialism, from a British colonial governor executing their dogs with car exhaust to the threat of American military robots crashing down on their heads. They are poignant examples of the “unpeople,” to steal a phrase from George Orwell, who are the passive victims of U.S. militarization, and there are thousands more like them, from Mauritania to Guam.

US opens drone base in Niger to boost Africa presence

Press TV

The US has set up a new drone base in Niger reportedly aimed at fighting al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Africa and helping French troops in their war on Mali.

A report by The New York Times said on Friday that the US deployed a number of Predator drones to Niger, suggesting a shift in Washington’s anti-terrorism efforts towards Africa.

“Consistent with our partners in the region, this decision allows for ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) operations within the region,” a US defense official said on condition of anonymity.

The unarmed Predator drones fly out of a base with a 100-strong contingent of US Air Force personnel in the Nigerien capital, Niamey, the Times said.

On Friday, US President Barack Obama announced that 100 US military personnel were sent to Niger to provide “support for intelligence collection” and to “facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region.”

US officials say that for now the Predator drones are unarmed and serve surveillance purposes only, but may be used to carry out missile strikes in the future if needed.

The new drone base is expected to join a constellation of small airstrips for surveillance missions by drones or turboprop planes on the African continent in coming years.

Predator drones and Reaper drones are known as the weapon of choice of the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen.

Last month, Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, signed a status-of-forces agreement with the US, clearing the way for a more convenient Washington military involvement in the African nation.

Niger is a mostly desert country on the eastern border of Mali, where France has launched a war on January 11 under the pretext of halting the advance of fighters who control the north of the country. The war has left thousands of Malians homeless.

Some political analysts believe that Mali’s abundant natural resources, including gold and uranium reserves, could be one of the reasons behind the French war.

The West’s war against African development continues

(File photo)

RB comment: I don’t agree with the manner some of the ideas were presented in this article but I decided to post it because it contains information about plans the take over Africa.

The African Union, Algeria and Mali

by DAN GLAZEBROOK, source

Africa’s classic depiction in the mainstream media, as a giant basketcase full of endless war, famine and helpless children creates an illusion of a continent utterly dependent on Western handouts. In fact, the precise opposite is true – it is the West that is reliant on African handouts. These handouts come in many and varied forms. They include illicit flows of resources, the profits of which invariably find their way into the West’s banking sector via strings of tax havens (as thoroughly documented in Nicholas Shaxson’s Poisoned Wells). Another is the mechanism of debt-extortion whereby banks lend money to military rulers (often helped to power by Western governments, such as the Congo’s former President Mobutu), who then keep the money for themselves (often in a private account with the lending bank), leaving the country paying exorbitant interest on an exponentially growing debt. Recent research by Leonce Ndikumana and James K Boyce found that up to 80 cents in every borrowed dollar fled the borrower nation in ‘capital flight’ within a year, never having been invested in the country at all; whilst meanwhile $20billion per year is drained from Africa in ‘debt servicing’ on these, essentially fraudulent, ‘loans’.

Another form of handout would be through the looting of minerals. Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo are ravaged by armed militias who steal the country’s resources and sell them at sub-market prices to Western companies, with most of these militias run by neighbouring countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi who are in turn sponsored by the West, as regularly highlighted in UN reports. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are the pitifully low prices paid both for African raw materials and for the labour that mines, grows or picks them, which effectively amount to an African subsidy for Western living standards and corporate profits.

This is the role for which Africa has been ascribed by the masters of the Western capitalist economy: a supplier of cheap resources and cheap labour. And keeping this labour, and these resources, cheap depends primarily on one thing: ensuring that Africa remains underdeveloped and impoverished. If it were to become more prosperous, wages would rise; if it were to become more technologically developed, it would be able to add value to its raw materials through the manufacturing process before exporting them, forcing up the prices paid. Meanwhile, extracting stolen oil and minerals depends on keeping African states weak and divided. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example – whose mines produce tens of billions of mineral resources each year – were only, in one recent financial year, able to collect a paltry $32million in tax revenues from mining due to the proxy war waged against that country by Western-backed militias.

The African Union, established in 2002 was a threat to all of this: a more integrated, more unified African continent would be harder to exploit. Of special concern to Western strategic planners are the financial and military aspects of African unification. On a financial level, plans for an African Central Bank (to issue a single African currency, the gold-backed dinar) would greatly threaten the ability of the US, Britain and France to exploit the continent. Were all African trade to be conducted using the gold-backed dinar, this would mean Western countries would effectively have to pay in gold for African resources, rather than, as currently, paying in sterling, francs or dollars which can be printed virtually out of thin air. The other two proposed AU financial institutions – the African Investment Bank and the African Monetary Fund – could fatally undermine the ability of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund to manipulate the economic policies of African countries through their monopoly of finance. As Jean Paul Pougala has pointed out, the African Monetary Fund, with its planned startup capital of $42billion, “is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only US$25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatisation like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies.”

Along with these potentially threatening financial developments come moves on the military front. The 2004 AU Summit in Sirte, Libya, agreed on a Common African Defence and Security Charter, including an article stipulating that “any attack against an African country is considered as an attack against the Continent as a whole”, mirroring the Charter of NATO itself. This was followed up in 2010 by the creation of an African Standby Force, with a mandate to uphold and implement the Charter. Clearly, if NATO was going to make any attempt to reverse African unity by force, time was running out.

Yet the creation of the African Standby Force represented not only a threat, but also an opportunity. Whilst there was certainly the possibility of the ASF becoming a genuine force for independence, resisting neocolonialism and defending Africa against imperialist aggression, there was also the possibility that, handled in the right way, and under a different leadership, the force could become the opposite – a proxy force for continued neocolonial subjugation under a Western chain of command. The stakes were – and are – clearly very high.

Meanwhile, the West had already been building up its own military preparations for Africa. Its economic decline, coupled with the rise of China, meant that it was increasingly unable to continue to rely on economic blackmail and financial manipulation alone in order to keep the continent subordinated and weak. Comprehending clearly that this meant it would be increasingly forced into military action to maintain its domination, a US white paper published in 2002 by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group recommended “A new and vigorous focus on US military cooperation in sub-Saharan Africa, to include design of a sub-unified command structure which could produce significant dividends in the protection of US investments”. This structure came into existence in 2008, under the name of AFRICOM. The costs – economic, military and political – of direct intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, however – with the costs of the Iraq war alone estimated at over three trillion dollars - meant that AFRICOM was supposed to primarily rely on local troops to do the fighting and dying. AFRICOM was to be the body which coordinated the subordination of African armies under a Western chain of command; which turned, in other words, African armies into Western proxies.

The biggest obstacle to this plan was the African Union itself, which categorically rejected any US military presence on African soil in 2008 – forcing AFRICOM to house its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, a humiliating about turn after President Bush had already publicly announced his intention to set up the HQ in Africa itself. Worse was to come in 2009, when Colonel Gaddafi – the continent’s staunchest advocate of anti-imperialist policies – was elected Chairman of the AU. Under his leadership, Libya had already become the biggest financial donor to the African Union, and he was now proposing a fast-track process of African integration, including a single African army, currency and passport.

His fate is clearly now a matter of public record. After mounting an invasion of his country based on a pack of lies worse than those told about Iraq, NATO reduced Libya to a devastated failed state and facilitated its leader’s torture and execution, thus taking out their number one opponent. For a time, it appeared as though the African Union had been tamed. Three of its members – Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa – had voted in favour of military intervention at the UN Security Council, and its new chairman – Jean Ping – was quick to recognize the new Libyan government imposed by NATO, and todownplay and denigrate his predecessor’s achievements. Indeed, he even forbade the African Union assembly from observing a minute’s silence for Gaddafi after his murder.

However, this did not last. The South Africans, in particular, quickly came to regret their support for the intervention, with both President Zuma and Thabo Mbeki making searing criticisms of NATO in the months that followed. Zuma argued – correctly – that NATO had acted illegally by blocking the ceasefire and negotiations that had been called for by the UN resolution, had been brokered by the AU, and had been agreed to by Gaddafi. Mbeki went much further and argued that the UN Security Council, by ignoring the AU’s proposals, were treating “the peoples of Africa with absolute contempt” and that “the Western powers have enhanced their appetite to intervene on our Continent, including through armed force, to ensure the protection of their interests, regardless of our views as Africans”. A senior diplomat in the South African Foreign Ministry’s Department of International Relations said that “most SADC [Southern African Development Community] states , particularly South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania, Namibia and Zambia which played a key role in the Southern African liberation struggle, were not happy with the way Jean Ping handled the Libyan bombing by NATO jets”. In July 2012, Ping was forced out and replaced – with the support of 37 African states – by Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma: former South African Foreign Minister, Thabo Mbeki’s “right hand woman” – and clearly not a member of Ping’s capitulationist camp. The African Union was once again under the control of forces committed to genuine independence.

However, Gaddafi’s execution had not only taken out a powerful member of the African Union, but also the lynchpin of regional security in the Sahel – Sahara region. Using a careful mixture of force, ideological challenge and negotiation, Gaddafi’s Libya was at the head of a transnational security system that had prevented Salafist militias gaining a foothold, as recognized by US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in 2008: “The Government of Libya has aggressively pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam…Libya cooperates with neighbouring states in the Sahara and Sahel region to stem foreign fighter flows and travel of transnational terrorists. Muammar Gaddafi recently brokered a widely-publicised agreement with Tuareg tribal leaders from Libya, Chad, Niger, Mali and Algeria in which they would abandon separatist aspirations and smuggling (of weapons and transnational extremists) in exchange for development assistance and financial support…our assessment is that the flow of foreign fighters from Libya to Iraq and the reverse flow of veterans to Libya has diminished due to the Government of Libya’s cooperation with other states…”

This “cooperation with other states” refers to the CEN-SAD (Community of Sahel-Saharan States), an organization launched by Gaddafi in 1998 aiming at free trade, free movement of peoples and regional development between its 23 member states, but with a primary focus on peace and security. As well as countering the influence of Salafist militias, the CEN-SAD had played a key role in mediating conflicts between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and within the Mano River region, as well as negotiating a lasting solution to the rebellion in Chad. CEN-SAD was based in Tripoli and Libya was unquestionably the dominant force in the group; indeed CEN-SAD support was primarily behind Gaddafi’s election as Chairman of the AU in 2009.

The very effectiveness of this security system, was a double blow for Western hegemony in Africa: not only did it bring Africa closer to peace and prosperity, but simultaneously undercut a key pretext for Western intervention. The US had established its own ‘Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership’ (TSCTP), but as Muatassim Gaddafi (Libyan National Security Advisor) explained to Hilary Clinton in Washington in 2009, the “Tripoli-based Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) and the North Africa Standby Force obviated TSCTP’s mission”.

As long as Gaddafi was in power and heading up a powerful and effective regional security system, Salafist militias in North Africa could not be used as a ‘threatening menace’ justifying Western invasion and occupation to save the helpless natives. By actually achieving what the West claim to want (but everywhere fail to achieve) – the neutralization of ‘Islamist terrorism’ – Libya had stripped the imperialists of a key pretext for their war against Africa. At the same time, they had prevented the militias from fulfilling their other historical function for the West – as a proxy force to destabilize independent secular states (fully documented in Mark Curtis’ excellent Secret Affairs). The West had supported Salafi death squads in campaigns to destabilize the USSR and Yugoslavia highly successfully, and would do so again against Libya and Syria.

With NATO’s redrawing of Libya as a failed state, this security system has fallen apart. Not only have the Salafi militias been provided with the latest hi-tech military equipment by NATO, they have been given free reign to loot the Libyan government’s armouries, and provided with a safe haven from which to organize attacks across the region. Border security has collapsed, with the apparent connivance of the new Libyan government and its NATO sponsors, as this damning report from global intelligence firm Jamestown Foundation notes: “Al-Wigh was an important strategic base for the Qaddafi regime, being located close to the borders with Niger, Chad and Algeria. Since the rebellion, the base has come under the control of Tubu tribal fighters under the nominal command of the Libyan Army and the direct command of Tubu commander Sharafeddine Barka Azaiy, who complains: “During the revolution, controlling this base was of key strategic importance. We liberated it. Now we feel neglected. We do not have sufficient equipment, cars and weapons to protect the border. Even though we are part of national army, we receive no salary”. The report concludes that “The Libyan GNC [Governing National Council] and its predecessor, the Transitional National Council (TNC), have failed to secure important military facilities in the south and have allowed border security in large parts of the south to effectively become “privatized” in the hands of tribal groups who are also well-known for their traditional smuggling pursuits. In turn, this has jeopardized the security of Libya’s oil infrastructure and the security of its neighbors. As the sale and transport of Libyan arms becomes a mini-industry in the post-Qaddafi era…the vast amounts of cash available to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are capable of opening many doors in an impoverished and underdeveloped region. If the French-led offensive in northern Mali succeeds in displacing the Islamist militants, there seems to be little at the moment to prevent such groups from establishing new bases in the poorly-controlled desert wilderness of southern Libya. So long as there is an absence of central control of security structures in Libya, that nation’s interior will continue to present a security threat to the rest of the nations in the region.”

The most obvious victim of this destabilization has been Mali. That the Salafist takeover of Mali is a direct consequence of NATO’s actions in Libya is not in doubt by any serious analysts. One result of the spread of NATO-backed destabilization to Mali is that Algeria – who lost 200,000 citizens in a deadly civil war with Islamists in the 1990s – is now surrounded by heavily armed Salafist militias on both its Eastern (Libya) and Southern (Mali) borders. Following the destruction of Libya and the toppling of Mubarak, Algeria is now the only state in North Africa still governed by the anti-colonial party that won its independence from European tyranny. This independent spirit is still very much in evidence in Algeria’s attitude towards Africa and Europe. On the African front, Algeria is a strong supporter of the African Union, contributing 15% of its budget, and has $16billion committed to the establishment of the African Monetary Fund, making it the Fund’s largest contributor by far.  In its relations with Europe, however, it has consistently refused to play the subordinate role expected of it. Algeria and Syria were the only countries in the Arab League to vote against NATO bombings of Libya and Syria, and Algeria famously gave refuge to members of Gaddafi’s family fleeing NATO’s onslaught. But for European strategic planners, perhaps more worrying than all of this is that Algeria – along with Iran and Venezuela – is what they call an OPEC ‘hawk’, committed to driving a hard bargain for their natural resources. As an exasperated article in the Financial Times recently explained, “resource nationalism” has taken hold, with the result that “Big Oil has soured on Algeria [and] companies complain of crushing bureaucracy, tough fiscal terms and the bullying behavior of Sonatrach, the state-run energy group, which has a stake in most oil and gas ventures”. It goes on to note that Algeria implemented a “controversial windfall tax” in 2006, and quotes a western oil executive in Algiers as saying that “[oil] companies…have had it with Algeria”. It is instructive to note that the same newspaper had also accused Libya of “resource nationalism” – that most heinous of crimes for readers of the Financial Times, it seems – barely a year before NATO’s invasion. Of course, ‘resource nationalism’ means exactly that – a nation’s resources being used primarily for the benefit and development of the nation itself (rather than foreign companies) – and in that sense Algeria is indeed guilty as charged. Algeria’s oil exports stand at over $70bn per year, and much of this income has been used to invest in massive spending on health and housing, along with a recent $23billion loan and public grants programme to encourage small business. Indeed, high levels of social spending are considered by many to be a key reason why no ‘Arab Spring’ style uprising has taken off in Algeria in recent years.

This tendency to ‘resource nationalism’ was also noted in a recent piece by STRATFOR, the global intelligence firm, who wrote that “foreign participation in Algeria has suffered in large part due to protectionist policies enforced by the highly nationalistic military government”. This was particularly worrying, they argued, as Europe is about to become a whole lot more dependent on Algerian gas as North Sea reserves run out: ”Developing Algeria as a major natural gas exporter is an economic and strategic imperative for EU countries as North Sea production of the commodity enters terminal decline in the next decade. Algeria is already an important energy supplier to the Continent, but Europe will need expanded access to natural gas to offset the decline of its indigenous reserves.” British and Dutch North Sea gas reserves are estimated to run out by the end of the decade, and Norway’s to go into sharp decline from 2015 onwards. With Europe fearful of overdependence on gas from Russia and Asia, Algeria – with reserves of natural gas estimated at 4.5 trillion cubic metres, alongside shale gas reserves of 17 trillion cubic meters – will become essential, the piece argues. But the biggest obstacle to European control of these resources remains the Algerian government – with its “protectionist policies” and “resource nationalism”. Without saying it outright, the piece concludes by suggesting that a destabilized ‘failed state’ Algeria would be far preferable to Algeria under a stable independent “protectionist” government, noting that “the existing involvement of EU energy majors in high-risk countries like Nigeria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq indicates a healthy tolerance for instability and security problems.” In other words, in an age of private security, Big Oil no longer requires stability or state protection for its investments; disaster zones can be tolerated; strong, independent states cannot.

It is, therefore, perceived to be in the strategic interests of Western energy security to see Algeria turned into a failed state, just as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have been. With this in mind, it is clear to see how the apparently contradictory policy of arming the Salafist militias one minute (in Libya) and bombing them the next (in Mali) does in fact make sense. The French bombing mission aims, in its own words, at the “total reconquest” of Mali, which in practice means driving the rebels gradually Northwards through the country – in other words, straight into Algeria.

Thus the wilful destruction of the Libyan-centred Sahel-Sahara security system has had many benefits for those who wish to see Africa remain consigned to its role of underdeveloped provider of cheap raw materials. It has armed, trained, and provided territory to militias bent on the destruction of Algeria, the only major resource-rich North African state committed to genuine African unity and independence. In doing so, it has also persuaded some Africans that – in contrast to their united rejection of AFRICOM not long ago – they do, after all, now need to call on the West for ‘protection’ from these militias. Like a classic mafia protection racket, the West makes its protection ‘necessary’ by unleashing the very forces from which people require protection. Now France is occupying Mali, the US are establishing a new drone base in Niger and David Cameron is talking about his commitment to a new ‘war on terror’ spanning six countries, and likely to last decades.

It is not, however, all good on the imperialist front. Far from it; indeed the West had almost certainly hoped to avoid sending in their own soldiers at all. The initial aim was that Algeria would be sucked in, lured into exactly the same trap that was successfully used against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, an earlier example of Britain and the US sponsoring a violent sectarian insurgency on their enemy’s borders, attempting to drag their  target into a destructive war in response. The USSR’s war in Afghanistan ultimately not only failed but destroyed the country’s economy and morale in the process, and was a key factor behind the gratuitous self-destruction of the Soviet state in 1991. Algeria, however, refused to fall into this trap, and Clinton and Hollande’s good cop-bad cop routine – the former’s ‘pressure for action’ in Algiers last October followed by French attempts at sucking up 2 months later – came to nothing. Meanwhile, rather than sticking to the script, the West’s unpredictable Salafi proxies expanded from their base in Northern Mali not North to Algeria as intended, but South to Bamako, threatening to unseat a Western-allied regime that had only just been installed in a coup less than a year earlier. The French were forced to intervene to drive them North and back towards the state that had been their real target all along. For now, this invasion appears to have a certain level of support amongst those Africans who fear the West’s Salafi proxies more than the West’s own soldiers. Once the occupation starts to drag on, boosting the credibility and numbers of the guerillas, whilst exposing the brutality of the occupiers and their allies, we will see how long that lasts.

Humanitarian crisis unfolding in northern Mali

Press TV 

According to Malians living in the North, French troops and Malian security authorities have increasingly made it impossible for both local and foreign humanitarian organizations access to their area.

They say the blockade by the French has caused the deterioration of the health and humanitarian conditions in several camps. As a result many refugees are suffering from both food and medical shortages.

The Malians’ health and living conditions in the north can only be described as tragic, with many living under poor shelters in the desert heat.
The nearest hospital is in Mopti and can only be accessed using a pay canoe which many say they cannot afford.

Survival in this Mopti camp entirely depends upon those who can dip their nets into the waters for a fish catch, otherwise many have simply given up hope of any humanitarian assistance.

The displaced people in northern Mali say they have not received any assistance because of the restrictions imposed against humanitarian organizations by the French making their conditions to describe the least, unbearable…

US general urges Pentagon to boost its African spying missions by 15-fold

Press TV

A US general nominated to lead American military’s Africa Command has called for a 15-fold surge in US spying missions in Africa amid reports of Pentagon’s plans to further expand its growing military presence in the continent.

Army General David Rodriguez estimated in a written statement submitted to the US Senate Arms Services Committee during his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the American military needs to boost its “intelligence-gathering and spying missions in Africa by nearly 15-fold,” The Washington Post reports Friday.

“I believe additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities are necessary to protect American interests and assist our close allies and partners,” said the four-star general who has previously commanded US-led intervention forces in Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The recent crises in North Africa demonstrate the volatility of the African security environment,” he added.

Rodrigues further emphasized during the hearing that Africa Command requires additional drones, other spying aircraft and more satellite imagery, adding that the US command currently gets only half of its “stated need” for North Africa and just seven percent of its total “requirements” for the entire continent, the report says.

The surging US military involvement in Africa has emerged despite earlier instructions by the Obama administration for the Pentagon to “pivot its forces and reorient its strategy toward fast-growing Asia,” the daily underlines.

The development comes as the American military has intervened over the past two years in internal conflicts in African nations of Somalia, Libya and Mali, as well as central Africa.

This is while the US Air Force is building its fourth assassination and spying drone base in the poor African state of Niger as American Navy warships are expanding their missions along the coastlines of East and West Africa, according to the report.

Despite insistence by US military authorities that they did not have plans to establish bases or move troops to Africa when they created the Africa Command in 2007, the Pentagon has since built a network of “staging bases,” including assassination drone facilities in Ethiopia and the Seychelles, and “a forward operating base for special operations forces in Kenya,” the report notes.

It further adds that the Pentagon has also expanded its military operations and construction at “the only permanent US base on the continent, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which serves as a hub for ‘counterterrorism missions’ in Somalia and Yemen.”

Now, the daily emphasizes, there is a growing pressure to add even more bases in North and West Africa as the US military is set to build an assassination drone base in the West African country of Niger, which borders Mali, Libya and Nigeria, all nations that the Obama administration claims are threatened by an increasing influx of al-Qaeda-linked Muslim militants.

The US Africa Command has been based in Stuttgart, Germany since it was established in 2007. Efforts to move the headquarters to an African country faced hurdles as numerous nations “expressed concern that the Pentagon was seeking to militarize US policy or infringe on their sovereignty,” according to the report.